*3 Peter the Great did make his favourite Prince Menshikov, but that was an exception. After 1796, Emperor Paul and his successors began to create princes themselves so promiscuously that they ultimately caused an inflationary glut in the prestige of that title.
6
THE HAPPIEST MAN ALIVE
Thy lovely eyes captivated me yet I trembled to say I loved.
G. A. Potemkin to Catherine II, February/March 1774
This clever fellow is as amusing as the very devil.
Catherine II on G. A. Potemkin
So much changed the moment Grigory Alexandrovich [Potemkin] arrived!
Countess Ekaterina Rumiantseva to Count Peter Rumiantsev, 20 March 1774
Lieutenant-General Grigory Potemkin arrived in St Petersburg some time in January 1774 and strode exuberantly into a Court in turmoil, no doubt expecting to be invited into Catherine’s bed and government. If so, he was to be disappointed.
The general moved into a cottage in the courtyard of his brother-in-law Nikolai Samoilov’s house1 and then went to present himself to the Empress. Did she tell him of the disasters and intrigues that swirled around her? Did she beg him to be patient? Potemkin was so enervated with anticipation that he found patience difficult. Ever since he was a child, he had believed he was destined to command and, ever since he joined the Guards, he had been in love with the Empress. He appeared to be all impulse and passion, yet he had learned to wait a little. He appeared frequently at Court and made Catherine laugh. The courtiers knew that Potemkin was suddenly ascending. One day, he was going upstairs at the Winter Palace when he passed a descending Prince Orlov. ‘Any news?’, Potemkin asked Orlov. ‘No,’ Prince Orlov replied, ‘except that I am on the way down and you’re on the way up.’ But nothing happened – at least not in public. The days passed into weeks. The wait was excruciating for someone of Potemkin’s nature. Catherine was in a complicated and sensitive situation, personally and politically, so she moved slowly and cautiously. Vassilchikov remained her official lover – he still lived in his Palace apartments and he presumably shared her bed. However, Vassilchikov was a disappointing companion for Catherine, who found him corrosively dull. Boredom bred unhappiness, then contempt. ‘His caresses only made me cry,’ she told Potemkin afterwards.2 Potemkin became more and more impatient: she had sent him encouraging letters and summoned him. He had come as fast as he could. He had waited for this moment for twelve devoted years. She knew how clever and capable he was: why not let him help her? She had admitted she had feelings for him as he had for her. Why not throw out Vassilchikov?
Still nothing happened. He confronted her about the meaning of the summons. She replied something like: ‘Calme-toi. I am going to think about what you have said and wait until I tell you my decision.’3 Perhaps she wanted him to master the intricacies of her political situation first, perhaps she was teasing him, hoping that their relationship would grow when the moment was right. No one believed in the benefits of careful preparation like Catherine. Most likely, she simply wanted him to force the issue, for she needed his fearless confidence as much as his brains and love. Potemkin learned fast enough why Catherine needed him now: he would have known much of it already. But when he was briefed by the Empress and his friends, he must have realized she was embroiled in her gravest crisis – politically, militarily, romantically – since the day she came to power. It had started, just a few months earlier, in the land of the Yaik Cossacks.
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On 17 September 1773, a charismatic Don Cossack appeared before an enthused crowd of Cossacks, Kalmyks and Tartars near Yaiksk, the headquarters of the Yaik Cossacks, thousands of versts south-east of Moscow in another world from Petersburg, and declared that he was the Emperor Peter III, who had not been murdered, but was there to lead them against the evil Catherine. He called her ‘the German, the Devil’s daughter’. The soi-disant ‘Emperor’ was really Emelian Pugachev, a lean, swarthy army deserter with a black goatee beard and brown hair. He did not even look like Peter III. But that did not matter because no one in those remote parts would have recognized the real thing: Pugachev, born around 1740 (almost the same age as Potemkin), had fought in the Seven Years War and at the siege of Bender. He had grievances against the Government, had been arrested and had escaped.
He promised all things to all men – he was the ‘sweet-tongued, merciful, soft-hearted Russian Tsar’. He had already displayed the ‘Tsar’s marks’ on his body to convince these simple angry people that he bore the stigmata they expected of their anointed ruler. He promised them ‘lands, waters, woods, dwellings, grasses, rivers, fishes, bread…’, and anything else he could possibly conjure.
This exceedingly generous political manifesto proved irresistible to many of those who listened to him – but especially to the Yaik Cossacks. The Cossacks were martial communities or Hosts of freemen, outcasts, escaped criminals, runaway serfs, religious dissidents, deserters, bandits of mixed Tartar and Slavic blood who had fled to the frontiers to form armed bands on horseback, living by plunder and rapine, and raising horses. Each Host – the Don, the Yaik, the Zaporogian and their Polish and Siberian brothers – developed its own culture, but they were generally organized as primitive frontier democracies who elected a hetman or ataman in times of war.
For centuries, they played the middle ground, allying with Poland, Lithuania or Sweden against Muscovy, with Russia against the Crimean khans or Ottoman sultans. In the eighteenth century, they remained as likely to rob Russians as Turks but were useful to Russia as border guards and light cavalry. However, the tension between the Russian state and the Cossacks was growing. These Cossacks were concerned with their own problems – they were worried that they were going to be incorporated into the regular army with its drilling discipline and that they would have to shave their beards. The Yaik Cossacks particularly were concerned with recent disputes about fishing rights. A mutiny had been harshly suppressed just a year earlier. But there was more: the Russo-Turkish War was now in its fifth full year and its costs in men and money fell especially on the peasantry. These people wanted to believe in their scraggly ‘Peter III’.
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Pugachev ignited this powderkeg. In Russia, the tradition of ‘pretenderism’ was still strong. In the seventeenth-century ‘Time of Troubles’, the ‘False Dmitri’ had even ruled in Moscow. In a vast primitive country where the tsars were all-powerful and all-good and the simple folk believed them to be touched by God, the image of this kind, Christ-like ruler, wandering among the people and then emerging to save them, was a powerful element of Russian folklore.* This was not as odd as it might sound: England had had its share of pretenders, such as Perkin Warbeck, who in 1490 claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the murdered ‘Princes in the Tower’.
Pretenderism became a historical vocation for a certain breed of mavericks, deserters, Old Believers who lived on the frontiers – outsiders who would claim to be a recently dead or overthrown Tsar. The real Tsar in question had to have ruled for a short enough time to maintain the illusion that, if evil nobles and foreigners had not overthrown him, he would have saved the common people. This made Peter III an ideal candidate. By the end of Catherine’s reign, there had been twenty-four ersatz Peters, but none had the success of Pugachev.
There was one other successful impostor: the False Peter III of Montenegro, in today’s Yugoslavia. At the beginning of the war in 1769, when the fleet was trying to raise Balkan Orthodoxy against the Turks, Catherine had Alexei Orlov send an envoy to the remote Balkan land of Montenegro, which was ruled by a sometime healer, possibly an Italian, named ‘Stephen the Small’ who had united the warlike tribes by claiming to be Peter III. The envoy, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky (later the critic of Potemkin’s soldiering), was amazed to discover that this Montenegran ‘Peter III’, a curly-haired thirty-year-old with a high voice, a white silk tunic and a red cap, had ruled since 1766. Dolgoruky exposed the mountebank. But, unable to control Montenegro, he put him back on his throne, wearing the dignity of a Russian officer’s uniform. Small Stephen ruled Montenegro for another five years until his murder. Indeed, he was one of the best rulers Montenegro ever had.4