NOTES
Dates are given in the Old Style Julian Calendar used in Russia which was eleven days earlier than the New Style Gregorian used in the West. In some cases both dates are given.
Money: 1 rouble contained 100 kopecks. Approximately 4 roubles = £1 Sterling = 24 French Livres in the 1780s. At that time, an English gentleman could live on £300 a year, a Russian officer on 1,000 roubles.
Distances and measurements: 1 verst equalled 0.663 miles or 1.06 km. 1 desyatina equalled 2.7 acres.
Names and proper names: I have used the most recognizable form of most names, which means that absolute consistency is impossible in this area – so I apologize in advance to those offended by my decisions. The subject of this book is ‘Potemkin’, even though in Russian the pronunciation is closer to ‘Patiomkin’. I have used the Russian form of names except in cases where the name is already well known in its English form; for example, the Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich is usually called Grand Duke Paul; Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov is Simon Vorontsov; the Empress is Catherine, not Ekaterina. I usually spell Peter and other first names in the English form, instead of Piotr and so on. I have used the Russian feminized form of names such as Dashkova instead of Dashkov. In Polish names, such as Branicki, I have left the name in its more polonized form, pronounced ‘Branitsky’. Thus, in the feminine, I have used the Russian for Skavronskaya but the Polish for Branicka. Once someone is known by a suffix or title, I try to use it, so that A. G. Orlov is Orlov-Chesmensky once he had received this surname.
PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION
For two centuries Catherine the Great and Potemkin were relegated to the somewhat shady, lascivious and romantic alleyways of history, mocked as power-mad, sex-mad or farcically inept. More recently, scholars have rehabilitated them as statesmen, and now again, in the twenty-first century, with their conquests catching the interest of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, they find themselves at the centre of the crossroads where history meets current events.
Without cameras or eye-witnesses, it is impossible for historians to know what really happened behind the doors of bedrooms and cabinet rooms—unless the protagonists wrote frank letters. Catherine and Potemkin wrote thousands of such letters on love and power; we know how they spoke and thought, and the exceptional intensity of their passion. We know more about them than we do about many politicians today—even in the age of Facebook and Wikileaks. ‘Can one love anybody else after having known you?’ wrote Catherine. ‘There’s not a man in the world that equals you…Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What trick have you played to unbalance a mind that was once one of the best in Europe?’ Their outrageously libertine lifestyle and exuberant political triumphs certainly titillated Western critics of Russian success and excess—’This is Potemkin,’ wrote Byron, ‘a great thing in days when homicide and harlotry made great’—while the British newspapers propagated stories of Catherine’s nymphomania and Potemkin’s false villages. But those who really knew Catherine and Potemkin regarded them as utterly singular, brilliant, ambitious and complementary in their talents: ‘No wonder they love each other,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘they’re exactly the same.’ Catherine was probably the greatest female leader of modern times, while the Prince de Ligne thought Potemkin ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met…Genius, genius and more genius.’ Together, they saw themselves as patriotic statesmen serving Russia—crown, nation and state. They were supreme politicians and thoughtful visionaries who trusted and admired each other because they were also personal partners.
Yet they were the ultimate realists, too. Potemkin defined the politician’s art thus: ‘to improve on events.’ And they did more than that. Their mission was to expand the empire into the southern regions of Ukraine they dubbed ‘New Russia’. They annexed swathes of this territory (1774, 1775 and 1791) and Crimea (1783), where they founded Russia’s Black Sea navy, the new naval base Sebastopol, and many new cities including the port of Odessa, as well as advancing into Georgia in the Caucasus (1783). The colossal achievements of Catherine and Potemkin in the south are equivalent to those of Peter of Great in the north. They altered the balance of power in Europe, making Russia a power with new Near Eastern and Mediterranean interests. Their colonization of New Russia and annexation of Crimea changed Russia’s political centre of gravity and her vision of herself as imperial power. It is a perspective that survived the fall of the Romanov dynasty.
After the mayhem of 1917 and the civil war, Lenin and Stalin shrewdly and brutally managed to keep together most of the Romanovs’ empire (losing only Poland, Finland and—temporarily—the Baltics) by creating the façade of a voluntary Soviet Union of fifteen republics. Stalin had little time for Catherine and Potemkin’s louche extravagance, preferring severe, macho role models such as Peter the Great, but he admired them as politicians: ‘the genius of Catherine,’ he said, ‘lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin…to govern the state.’ However, when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Russia lost all the republics including the most important, Ukraine.
When this book was published in 2000, just as that dynamic and ruthless ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, was elected president, I was surprised to find the apparatchiks of his new regime were keen to read and discuss it—even to the extent of organising surreal secret meetings with this English historian to discuss statesmen dead for two hundred years. Putin and his henchmen regarded the fall of the USSR and loss of empire as one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century, and the Kremlin looked to Catherine and Potemkin as unlikely heroes, regarding their achievements in the Caucasus, Crimea and Ukraine as talismanic to Russia’s status as a great power.
Catherine and Potemkin had been long neglected by Soviet history as too decadent, aristocratic and feminine. When I started to research this book in Russian archives in the mid-1990s, some of their papers had not even been studied since the reign of Nicholas II. Now they are once again in fashion, inspirations to a new regime that combines imperial nostalgia with nationalistic ambition: the early twenty-first-century Kremlin fused the gilded majesty of the Romanov Empire with the grim glory of a Stalinist superpower into a peculiar modern hybrid, a new autocracy embellished with supposedly democratic institutions and the trappings of modernity in the Internet age.
The new leaders, often trained in the elite KGB, have no interest in Catherine and Potemkin’s culture, enlightenment and humanity, which have little in common with their intolerant authoritarianism. But they are interested in their autocratic and imperial legacy, particularly in the south. The eighteenth-century couple and the new masters of the Kremlin share a belief in the prestige and discipline of the state; the essential facility of autocracy to govern unruly Russia; a vision of the exceptionalist mission of Russian civilisation; the idea that Russia cannot be a great power without Ukraine and Crimea—and a glorious role in the world, relayed in spectacular television images to the Russian people. Pushkin understood what Potemkin had achieved for Catherine and Russia: ‘The glory of a name dear to his empress and his motherland…touched by the hand of history, he won us the Black Sea.’ Potemkin’s conquests, new cities and fleet are part of what makes this couple important two hundred years after their deaths.
In 2008, President Putin went to war against Georgia to reassert Russian hegemony there. In February 2014, he challenged American and European Union advances into independent Ukraine using unmarked Russian military units, the mysterious ‘green men’, to occupy and successfully annex Crimea—Russia’s first territorial recovery since the disastrous disintegration of the Soviet Union. Crimea had been part of the Russian Federation in Soviet times until Stalin, just before his death, decided to award it to Ukraine on an imperial whim: his successors transferred it in 1954. But it retained its military, imperial and mystical significance to Russia.