Some time after this fighting advance, Potemkin was struck down by a dangerous fever, which was endemic in the summer months in these Danubian principalities. It was so serious that ‘only his strong constitution allowed him to recover because he would not accept any help from doctors’, wrote Samoilov. Instead, the prone general put himself in the hands of two Zaporogian Cossacks, whom he charged to take care of him and spray him with cooling water. He had always been interested in the exotic peoples of the Empire – hence his position at the Legislative Commission – but this is our first hint of his special friendship with the Cossacks. He studied the culture of his Cossacks and admired their freedom and joie de vivre. They nicknamed him ‘Gritsko Nechosa’, or ‘Grey Wig’, after the peruke he sometimes wore, and invited him to become an honorary Cossack. A few months later, on 15 April 1772, he wrote to their Hetman to ask for admittance into this martial order. Entered into the lists of the Zaporogian Host in May that year, he wrote to the Hetman: ‘I am delighted.’37
Potemkin had recovered by the time the army crossed the Danube and made a thrust towards the key Turkish fortress of Silistria, which commanded a stretch of the Danube. It was here that Potemkin won the undying hostility of Count Simon Romanovich Vorontsov, a young scion of the family that had reached its peak under Peter III. Born in 1744, the cultured Vorontsov, son of a notoriously corrupt provincial governor (nicknamed Big Pocket), nephew of Peter III’s Chancellor, had been arrested during the coup for supporting Peter III, but he later made a name for himself as the first officer in to the Turkish trenches at Kagul. Like all Vorontsovs, this pudding-faced Anglophile had a marked appreciation of his own credentials but was rightly regarded by Catherine and Potemkin as politically unreliable and spent most of his career in honourable exile as Ambassador to London. Now, outside Silistria, he had to face the indignity of having his Grenadiers rescued from 12,000 Turkish cavalry by a reluctant Potemkin.
Six days later, Potemkin was in turn saved by Vorontsov: ‘not only did we cover him, but we chased those Turks into town’, using three batteries of artillery, and killing ‘lots’. Vorontsov, writing in 1796, cited both fights as evidence of his own virtuosity and Potemkin’s incompetence. Both found it intolerable to be saved by the other. The malice was perfectly symmetrical.38
Silistria did not fall, the army reforded the Danube and there ended Rumiantsev’s tepid campaign. The real action that June was the successful invasion of the weakened Khanate of the Crimea – its army was away on the Danube, facing Rumiantsev – by the Second Army, now commanded by Prince Vasily Dolgoruky.
Catherine was learning that glory was not as quick or cheap as she hoped. The bottomless maw of the army demanded more and more recruits. The harvests were bad. Soldiers’ pay was in arrears. Fever ravaged the army while rashes of bubonic plague broke out across the Ottoman Empire. The Russians feared it would spread through the southern armies. It was time to talk peace with the Ottomans before they forgot Chesme and Kagul. Then, in September 1771, terrible news arrived from Moscow.
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The plague descended with ghastly intensity on the old capital. In August, the toll was reaching 400 to 500 deaths a day. It was not long before order in the city evaporated. The nobles fled; officials panicked; the Governor abandoned his post; and Moscow became a surreal charnel house, scattered with rotting cadavers, stinking bonfires of flesh and rumours of miracles, curses and conspiracies. In the abandoned city, the streets were patrolled by desperate crowds of peasants and workers who increasingly placed their hopes in a miracle-working icon.39
The last effective authority, Bishop Ambrosius, ordered the icon to be removed to reduce the risk of infection among the crowds who flocked to invoke its miraculous powers. The mob rioted and tore the Bishop to pieces. This was the same Bishop Ambrosius who had lent Potemkin the money to make the trip to St Petersburg. As Russia suffered the strain of the huge cost of war, the mob took control. There was a real danger that the plague might unleash something even worse – a peasant uprising in the countryside. The death toll kept rising.
Grigory Orlov, restless since Catherine gave him no chance to prove himself, offered to travel to Moscow and sort out the situation. On 21 September 1771, he set off. By the time he arrived, 21,000 people were dying every month. Orlov displayed common sense, competence, energy and humanity. He worked tirelessly. Just showing his cherubic countenance and lofty figure around the city reassured the people. He burned 3,000 old houses where the infection could linger, disinfected 6,000 more, founded orphanages, reopened the public baths closed in the quarantine, and spent over 95,000 roubles distributing food and clothing. His Herculean efforts restored order in this Augean Stable. When he departed on 22 November, deathrates were falling – probably thanks to the cold, but the state was once again in control of Moscow. He reached Petersburg on 4 December to popular acclaim. Catherine built one of her arches in his honour in her Tsarskoe Selo park, which was dotted with monuments to her triumphs. She even struck a commemorative medal. It seemed that the Orlovs, that race of heroes, as Voltaire called them, were secure.40
When the Turkish talks began the next year, Catherine gave Grigory Orlov the enormous responsibility of negotiating peace. Catherine saw him off in a costume she had given him, embroidered and diamond-studded on every seam. The sight of him inspired her again. ‘Count Orlov’, she gushed to Madame Bielke, ‘is the handsomest man of his generation.’41
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As Orlov left St Petersburg, was Potemkin arriving there to help Catherine with her latest crisis? His precise activities during these months are mysterious. But, some time during the truce with Turks, he certainly visited St Petersburg again.
Orlov’s departure for the south precipitated another plot against the Empress which also helped Potemkin. Between thirty and a hundred noncommissioned officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards mutinied. They believed Orlov was travelling to ‘the army to persuade them to swear allegiance to him’ and make himself ‘Prince of Moldavia and Emperor’. Their mission was Catherine’s ever present nightmare: to overthrow her and enthrone her son Paul as emperor. The plot was foiled but, as Paul approached his majority, Catherine was understandably nervous.42 The Swedish diplomat Ribbing wrote to his Court in July that Catherine had withdrawn to an estate in Finland, to decide what measures to take, accompanied by Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshev, Lev Naryshkin – and Potemkin.43 The first names required no explanation – she had trusted them for almost twenty years. But the presence of Potemkin, still only thirty-one, is unexpected. It is his first mention as a close adviser of the Empress. Even if the Swede was mistaken, it still suggests that Potemkin was in Petersburg and already much closer to Catherine than anyone realized.
There are more hints that he was already privately advising her, if not making love to her, much earlier than previously thought. When she summoned him in late 1773, she told him that he was ‘already [author’s italics] very close to our heart’.44 In February 1774, she told him that she regretted not starting their relationship ‘a year and a half ago’45 – in other words, in 1772. It was now she started to fall for him.