Potemkin escorted the Empress when she attended some of the Commission’s sessions. He would have read the Instruction: his vast library later contained every work Catherine used – Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, all thirty-five volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia (in French) and tomes of Voltaire. But he did not take the floor.40 The Commission itself did not succeed in codifying the laws, but instead became a talking shop. It did succeed in collecting useful information for Catherine’s future legislation. The Commission also coined the sobriquet ‘Catherine the Great’, which she refused. Her stay reminded Catherine how much she disliked Moscow so she returned to Petersburg, where she re-convened the Commission in February 1768. The coming of war finally gave her the excuse to end its ponderous deliberations.41
On 22 September 1768 Potemkin was promoted from Kammerjunker to receive the ceremonial key of a Kamerherr – chamberlain42 of the Court. Unusually he was still to remain in the military, where he was promoted to captain of Horse-Guards. Then, two months later, he was removed from the army and attached to the Court full time on Catherine’s specific orders. For once, Potemkin did not want to be at Court at all. On 25 September 1768, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Potemkin saw his chance.
Skip Notes
*1 This did not stop one diplomat claiming he had ‘procured a glass eye in Paris’.
*2 Brother of the Empress Elisabeth’s favourite, he was appointed Hetman of the Ukraine in his early twenties. This meant that he was the governor of the nominally semi-independent Cossack borderlands throughout Elisabeth’s reign. Razumovsky backed Catherine’s coup, then requested that she make the Hetmanate hereditary in his family. She refused, abolished the Hetmanate, replacing it with a College of Little Russia, and made him a field-marshal instead.
5
THE WAR HERO
Attacked and out-numbered by the enemy, he was the hero of the victory…
Field-Marshal Count Peter Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky on General Potemkin during the First Russo–Turkish War
‘Your Majesty, The exceptional devotion of Your Majesty for the common good has made our Motherland dear to us,’ wrote Potemkin to the Empress on 24 May 1769. The chivalry in this first surviving letter is framed to state his personal passion for her as explicitly as possible.
It is the duty of the subject to demand obedience to Your wishes from everyone. For my part, I have carried out my duties just as Your Majesty wishes.
I have recognized the fine deeds that Your Majesty has done for our Motherland, I have tried to understand your laws and be a good citizen. However, your mercy towards my person fills me with zeal for the person of Your Majesty. The only way I can express my gratitude to Your Majesty is to shed my blood for Your glory. This war provides an excellent opportunity for this and I cannot live in idleness.
Allow me now, Merciful Sovereign, to appeal at Your Majesty’s feet and request Your Majesty to send me to Prince Prozorovsky’s corps in the Army at the front in whatever rank Your Majesty wishes but without inscribing me in the list of military service for ever, but just for the duration of the war.
I, Merciful Sovereign, have tried to be qualified for Your service; I am especially inclined to cavalry which, I’m not afraid to say, I know in every detail. As regards the military art, I learned the main rule by heart: the best way to achieve great success is fervent service to the Sovereign and scorn for one’s life…You can see my zeal…You’ll never regret your choice.
Subject slave of Your Imperial Majesty,
Grigory Potemkin.1
The war was indeed the best way for Potemkin to break out of the frustrating routine of the Court and distinguish himself. But it was also to provoke the crises that made the Empress need him. The leaving of Catherine was, paradoxically, to bring him much closer to her.
The First Russo–Turkish War began when Russian Cossacks pursued the rebels of the Confederacy of Bar, a group of Poles opposed to King Stanislas-Augustus and Russian influence in Poland, over the Polish border into the small Tartar town of Balta on what was technically Turkish territory. There the Cossacks massacred Jews and Tartars. France encouraged the Sublime Porte – the Ottoman Government, already threatened by the recent extension of Russian power over Poland – to issue an ultimatum demanding that Russia withdraw from the Commonwealth altogether. The Turks arrested the Russian envoy to Istanbul, Alexei Obreskov, and locked him in the fortress of the Seven Towers, where Suleiman the Magnificent had kept his treasure but which was now a high-class prison, the Turkish Bastille. This was the traditional Ottoman way of declaring war.
Catherine reacted by creating a Council of State, containing her leading advisers, from Panin, Grigory Orlov and Kirill Razumovsky to two Golitsyn cousins and the two Chernyshev brothers, to help co-ordinate the war and act as a policy sounding-board. She also gave Potemkin what he wanted. ‘Our Chamberlain Potemkin must be appointed to the army,’ Catherine ordered her War Minister, Zakhar Chernyshev.2 Potemkin headed straight for the army. Within a few days, as a major-general of the cavalry – the military rank equivalent to Court chamberlain – he was reporting to Major-General Prince Alexander Prozorovsky at the small Polish town of Bar.
The Russian army, nominally 80,000 strong, was ordered to win control of the Dniester river, the strategic waterway that flowed from the Black Sea into southern Poland. Access to, and control of, the Black Sea was Russia’s ultimate objective. By fighting down the Dniester, Russian troops hoped to arrive on those shores. Russian forces were divided into two: Potemkin served in the First Army under General Prince Alexander Golitsyn aiming for the fortress of Khotin. The Second under General Peter Alexandrovich Rumiantsev was ordered to defend the southern borders. If all went well in the first campaign, they would fight their way round the Black Sea coast, down the Pruth to the great Danube. If they could cross the Danube into the Turkish provinces of Bulgaria, they could threaten the Sublime Porte in its own capital, Constantinople.
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The Empress was wildly overconfident. ‘My soldiers are off to fight the Turks as if they were going to a wedding!’, she boasted to Voltaire.3 But war is never a wedding – especially not for Russia’s peasant–soldiers. Potemkin himself, whose sole experience of war was the swagger of the Guards life in Petersburg, arrived in the harsh and chaotic world of the real Russian army.
The life of a Russian conscript was so short that it often ended before he had even reached his camp. When they left home for their lifelong service (Potemkin later reduced it to twenty-five years), their families tragically wished them goodbye with laments and dirges as if they were already dead. The recruits were then marched away in columns, sometimes chained together. They endured a grim, brutal trauma, torn away from their villages and families. A modern historian rightly says this experience had most in common with the trans-Atlantic passage of negro slaves. Many died on thousand-verst marches, or arrived so weak at their destination that they soon perished: the Comte de Langeron, a Frenchman in Russian service later that century, estimated that 50 per cent of these recruits died. He graphically described the sadistic regime of beatings and discipline that was designed to keep these serf–soldiers from rebelling against their serfmaster–officers – though it may have been no worse than the cruelty of the Prussian army or the Royal Navy. Like the negro slaves, the Russian soldiers consoled themselves in their own colourful, sacred and warm culture: they earned only 7 roubles 50 kopecks a year (a premier-major’s salary was 300 roubles), while Potemkin, for example, hardly a rich man, had received 18,000 roubles just for his part in the coup. So they shared everything in the soldiers’ commune – the artel – that became their village, church, family, club, kitchen and bank, all rolled into one.4 They sang their rich repertoire of songs ‘for five or six hours at a stretch without the slightest break’5 (and were later to sing many about Potemkin).