Grigory or Grisha, as he was known, was the heir to the village and he was, apart from his old father, the only man in a family of women – five sisters and his mother. He was presumably the centre of attention and this family atmosphere must have set the tone for his character, because he was to remain the cynosure of all eyes for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he described himself as ‘Fortune’s spoilt child’. He had to stand out and dominate. The household of women made him absolutely relaxed in female company. In manhood, his closest friends were women – and his career depended on his handling of one in particular. This rough household enlivened by the bustle of female petticoats could not last. Most of his sisters soon married respectably into the cousinhood of Smolensk gentry (except for Nadezhda, who died at nineteen). In particular, the marriages of Elena Marfa to Vasily Engelhardt and Maria to Nikolai Samoilov were to produce nieces and nephews who were to play important roles in Potemkin’s life.14
Service to the state was the sole profession of a Russian noble. Born into the military household of an officer who had served with Peter at Poltava, Grisha would have been brought up to understand that his duty and his path to success could be found only in serving the Empire. His father’s exploits were probably the hinterland of the boy’s imagination. The honour of a uniform was everything in Russia, particularly for the provincial gentry. In 1721, Peter the Great had laid down a Table of Ranks to establish the hierarchy within the military, civil and court services. Any man who reached the fourteenth military or the eighth civil rank was automatically raised to hereditary nobility – dvoryanstvo – but Peter also imposed compulsory life service on all noblemen. By the time of Potemkin’s birth, the nobility had whittled down this humiliating obligation, but service remained the path to fortune. Potemkin showed an interest in the priesthood. He was descended from a seventeenth-century archimandrite and his father sent him to an ecclesiastical school in Smolensk. But he was always destined for the colours.15
Right beneath the house, beside the stream, was the well, still named after Catherine today. Legend says Potemkin brought the Empress there to show her his birthplace. It is likely that as a child he himself drew water from it, for the lives of middling gentry were better than those of their well-off serfs but not much. Potemkin was probably farmed out at birth to a serf wet-nurse in the village, but, whether literally or not, this prototype of the ‘Noble Savage’ was raised on the milk of the Russian countryside. He would have been brought up as much by serf women as by his mother and sisters; the music he heard would have been the soulful laments that the serfs sang at night and at festival time. The dances he knew would have been the boisterous and graceful peasant gigs far more than the cotillions danced at the balls of local landowners. He would have known the village soothsayer as well as the priest. He was just as at home beside the warm, smelly hearths of the peasant houses – steamy with kasha, the buckwheat porridge, shchi, the spicy cabbage broth, and kvass, the yellow sour beer they drank alongside vodka and berry wine – as he was in the manor. Tradition tells us the boy lived simply. He played with the priest’s children, grazed horses with them and gathered hay with the serfs.16
Chizhova’s little Orthodox Church of Our Lady stood (and its ruined successor building remains) on the serfs’ side of the village: Potemkin spent much of his time there. The serfs themselves were devout: each, ‘besides the consecrated amulet round his neck from baptism, carries a little figure of his…patron saint, stamped on copper. Soldiers and peasants often take it out of their pockets, spit on it and rub it…then place it opposite to them and, on a sudden, prostrate themselves…’.17 When a peasant entered a house, it was usual for him to demand where ‘the God’ was and then cross himself before the icon.
Potemkin grew up with a peasant’s mixture of piety and superstition: he was baptized at the village church. Many landowners could afford a foreign tutor for their children, preferably French or German – or sometimes an aged Swedish prisoner-of-war, captured in the Great Northern War, like the poor landowning family in Pushkin’s novella, The Captain’s Daughter. But the Potemkins did not even have this. It is said that the local priest, Semen Karzev, and sexton, Timofei Krasnopevzev, taught him alphabet and prayers, which were to spark a lifelong fascination with religion. Grisha learned to sing and to love music, another feature of his adult life: Prince Potemkin was never without his orchestra and a pile of new orchestral scores. There was a legend that, decades later, one of these village sages visited St Petersburg and, hearing that his pupil was now the most important man at Court, called on the Prince, who received him warmly and found him a job as curator of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great.18
The 430 male serfs and their families lived around the church on the other side of the village. Serfs, or ‘souls’ as they were called, were valued according to the number of males. The wealth of a nobleman was measured not in cash or acres but in souls. Out of a population of nineteen million, there were about 50,000 male nobles and 7.8 million serfs. Half of these were manorial peasants, owned by the individual nobles or the imperial family, while the other half were state peasants owned by the state itself. Only noblemen could legally own serfs, yet a mere one per cent of the nobles owned more than a thousand souls. The households of great noblemen, who might own hundreds of thousands of serfs, were to reach a luxurious and picturesque climax in Catherine’s reign when they owned serf orchestras and serf painters of exquisite icons and portraits: Count Sheremetev, the wealthiest serfowner in Russia, owned a serf theatre with a repertoire of forty operas. Prince Yusupov’s ballet was to boast hundreds of serf ballerinas. Count Skavronsky (a kinsman of Catherine I who married one of Potemkin’s nieces) was so obsessed with music that he banned his serfs from speaking: they had to sing in recitative.19 These cases were rare: 82 per cent of nobles were as poor as church mice, owning fewer than a hundred souls. The Potemkins were middling – part of 15 per cent who owned between 101 and 500.20
Chizhova’s serfs were the absolute possessions of Colonel Potemkin. Contemporary French writers used the word ‘esclaves’ – slaves – to describe them. They had much in common with the black slaves of the New World, except that they were the same race as their masters. There was irony in serfdom, for while the serfs in Russia at the time of Potemkin’s birth were chattels at the bottom of the pyramid of society, they were also the basic resource of the state’s and the nobles’ power. They formed the Russian infantry when the state raised an army by forced levées. Landowners despatched the selected unfortunates for a lifetime of service. The serfs paid the taxes that the Russian emperors used to finance their armies. Yet they were also the heart of a nobleman’s wealth. Emperor and nobility competed to control them – and squeeze as much out of them as possible.