In May 1773, Prince Orlov returned to court and resumed his official positions, though Vassilchikov remained favourite – and Potemkin was left, impatiently suspended in limbo.50
—
It must have been a disappointed Potemkin who returned to the war. At least Catherine promoted him to lieutenant-general on 21 April 1773. The old establishment was envious. ‘The promotion of Potemkin is for me a pill I cannot swallow’, wrote Simon Vorontsov to his brother.51 ‘When he was a lieutenant of the Guards, I was already a colonel and he has certainly served less than me…’.52 Vorontsov decided to resign the moment the campaign was over. There is a feeling of exhaustion and reluctance about this frustrating, bad-tempered campaign, even among the veterans of Rumiantsev’s victories. There was another attempt to negotiate, this time in Bucharest. But the moment had passed.
Once again, Rumiantsev’s tired army, now down to just 35,000 men, struck across the Danube at the obstinate fortress of Silistria. Potemkin ‘was the first to open the campaign in the severe winter with his march to the Danube’, reported the Field-Marshal, ‘and the organizing of a series of raids across to the other bank of the river with his reserve corps. When the army approached the Danube crossing and when the enemy in great numbers of people and artillery consolidated on the opposite bank on the Gurabalsky hills to prevent our passage’, Potemkin, continued Rumiantsev, ‘was the first to get across the river on the boats and to land his forces against the enemy’. The new Lieutenant-General captured the Ottoman camp on 7 June. But Potemkin was already marked as a coming man: a fellow general, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, another of that ubiquitous clan, claimed that ‘timid’ Potemkin ‘never kept order’ during the river crossings and was respected by Rumiantsev only because of his ‘connections at Court’. Yet Dologoruky’s memoirs are notoriously untrustworthy. The demanding Rumiantsev – and his fellow officers – admired and liked Potemkin – and valued him highly during this campaign.53
Silistria’s ‘very strong’ garrison made a powerful sortie against Potemkin. On 12 June, not far from Silistria, he repelled another attack, according to Rumiantsev, taking the enemy artillery. Rumiantsev’s forces approached the familiar walls of Silistria. On 18 June, Lieutenant-General Potemkin, ‘in command of the advance corps, overcame all the biggest difficulties and dangers, driving the enemy away from the fortifications before the town’. On 7 July, he defeated a Turkish corps of 7,000 cavalry. Even in the arms of Vassilchikov, indeed especially in his worthy but dull company, Catherine did not forget Potemkin: when she told Voltaire that June about the strike across the Danube, she mentioned Potemkin’s name for the first time. She was missing him.54
As summer turned to autumn, Potemkin supervised the building of batteries of artillery on the island opposite Silistria. The weather was deteriorating; the Turks showed every sign that they were not going to give up Silistria. ‘Tormented by the severity of the weather and the sallies of the enemy’, Potemkin ‘carried out all the necessary actions to bombard the town, causing fear and damage’.55 When the Russians did penetrate the walls, the Turks fought street by street, house by house. Rumiantsev withdrew. The weather was now freezing. Potemkin’s batteries went back to bombarding the fortress.
At this tense and uncomfortable moment, an imperial courier arrived in Rumianstev’s camp with a letter for Potemkin. Dated 4 December, it speaks for itself:
Sir! Lieutenant-General and Chevalier, you are probably so absorbed by gazing at Silistria that you have no time to read letters and though I do not as yet know whether your bombardment was successful, I am sure that every one of your deeds is done out of zeal for me personally and out of service for our beloved Motherland.
But, since on my part I am most anxious to preserve fervent, brave, clever and talented individuals, I beg you to keep out of danger. When you read this letter, you may well ask yourself why I have written it. To this, I reply: I’ve written this letter so that you should have confirmation of my way of thinking about you, because I have always been your most benevolent,
Catherine.56
In the filthy, freezing and dangerous discomfort of his benighted camp beneath Silistria, this letter must have seemed like a communication from Mount Olympus, and that is what it was. It does not read like a passionate love letter written in a hurry. On the contrary, it is an arch, cautious and carefully drafted declaration that says much and yet nothing. It did not invite Potemkin to the capital, but it is obviously a summons, if not what is popularly known as a ‘come-on’. One suspects he already knew Catherine’s ‘way of thinking’ about him – that she was already in love with the man who had loved her for over a decade. They were already corresponding – hence Catherine implied that Potemkin had not bothered to answer all her letters. His moody insouciance in ignoring imperial letters must have made him all the more attractive, given the sycophantic reverence which surrounded Catherine. The excited Potemkin understood this as the long-awaited invitation to Petersburg.
Moreover, Catherine’s fear for Potemkin’s life was not misplaced. Rumiantsev now had to extract his army from its messy operations at Silistria and get it safely across the Danube. Potemkin was given the honour of the most dangerous role in this operation: ‘When the main part recrossed back over the river,’ remembered Rumiantsev, ‘he was the last to do so because he covered our forces on the enemy’s bank.’57 Nonetheless, it would probably be an understatement to say Potemkin was in a hurry to reach the capital.
Potemkin’s critics, such as Simon Vorontsov and Yuri Dolgoruky, mostly writing after his death when it was fashionable to denounce him, claimed he was an incompetent and a coward.58 Yet, as we have seen, Field-Marshals Golitsyn and Rumiantsev acclaimed his exploits well before he rose to power, and other officers wrote to their friends about his daring, right up until Silistria. Rumiantsev’s report described Potemkin as ‘one of those military commanders who extolled the glory…of Russian arms by courage and skill’. What is the truth?
Rumiantsev’s complimentary report to Catherine was written after Potemkin’s rise in 1775 and was therefore bound to exaggerate his achievements – but Rumiantsev was not the sort of man to lie. So Potemkin performed heroically in the Turkish War and made his name.
As soon as the army was in winter quarters, he dashed for St Petersburg. His impatience was noticed, suspected and analysed by the many observers of Court intrigues, who asked one another – ‘Why so hastily?’59
Skip Notes
*1 Rumiantsev’s mother was born in 1699 and lived to be eighty-nine. The grandest lady-in-waiting at Court had known the Duke of Marlborough and Louis XIV, remembered Versailles and the day St Petersburg was founded. She liked to boast until her dying day that she was Peter the Great’s last mistress. The dates certainly fitted: the boy was named Peter after the Tsar. His official father, yet another Russian giant, was a provincial boy who became a Count, a General-en-Chef and one of Peter the Great’s hard men: he was the ruffian sent to pursue Peter’s fugitive son, the Tsarevich Alexei, to Austria and bring him back to be tortured to death by his father.
*2 Catherine, in one of the undated love letters usually placed at the official start of their affair in 1774, tells Potemkin that a nameless courtier, perhaps an Orlov ally, has warned her about her behaviour with him and asked permission to send him back to the army, to which she agrees.