This lush peninsula had been the place where Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of Kiev, had converted to Christianity in 988, an event cited by Potemkin in his letter to Catherine urging the immediate annexation of Crimea in 1783. In 2014, Putin declared ‘Crimea is as sacred to Russia as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is to Judaism and Islam.’
After this success, Moscow launched a secret war to undermine independent Ukraine and detach the eastern part of the country: ‘New Russia’ was widely used to describe it, echoing Catherine and Potemkin. This opportunistic war—costing thousands of innocent lives, fought secretly by unmarked Russian army units and publically by nationalistic freebooters—was probably launched to confirm and stimulate the archaic if popular conviction that a Russia that dominates Ukraine is still a great Russia.
In 2015, Russia reasserted its traditional interests in the Middle East, when Putin spectacularly intervened in the vicious and complex Syrian civil war to back a long-term Soviet client regime, the Assad dynasty, with military force, a policy that echoed the path first tentatively followed by Catherine in the Ottoman provinces of Syria (when she backed Arab strongmen against the sultan in Constantinople and even occupied Beirut) and pursued more powerfully by Emperor Nicholas I and then the Soviets during the Cold War. But in a one-man regime, these were the policies of Vladimir Putin and their outcome will ultimately depend on his survival, the way he leaves power and the nature of his successors.
Catherine and Potemkin remain perhaps the most enlightened and humane rulers Russia has ever enjoyed—though the bar is not set particularly high. Brilliant and imaginative, tolerant and magnanimous, passionate and eccentric, extravagant and epicurean, industrious and ambitious, they were very different characters from today’s rulers, the grim children of the Soviet Union. Yet, strangely, in the twenty-first century, they are more relevant—and present—than ever.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
April 2016
PROLOGUE
DEATH ON THE STEPPES
‘Prince of Princes’
Jeremy Bentham on Prince Potemkin
Whose bed – the earth: whose roof – the azure
Whose halls the wilderness round?
Are you not fame and pleasure’s offspring
Oh splendid prince of Crimea?
Have you not from the heights of honors
Been suddenly midst empty steppes downed?
Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall
Shortly before noon on 5 October 1791, the slow cavalcade of carriages, attended by liveried footmen and a squadron of Cossacks in the uniform of the Black Sea Host, stopped halfway down a dirt track on a desolate hillside in the midst of the Bessarabian steppe. It was a strange place for the procession of a great man to rest: there was no tavern in sight, not even a peasant’s hovel. The big sleeping carriage, pulled by eight horses, halted first. The others – there were probably four in all – slowed down and stopped alongside the first on the grass as the footmen and cavalry escort ran to see what was happening. The passengers threw open their carriage doors. When they heard the despair in their master’s voice, they hurried towards his carriage.
‘That’s enough!’ said Prince Potemkin. ‘That’s enough! There is no point in going on now.’ Inside the sleeping carriage, there were three harassed doctors and a slim countess with high cheekbones and auburn hair, all crowded round the Prince. He was sweating and groaning. The doctors summoned the Cossacks to move their massive patient. ‘Take me out of the carriage…’ Potemkin ordered. Everyone jumped when he commanded, and he had commanded virtually everything in Russia for a long time. Cossacks and generals gathered round the open door and slowly, gently began to bear out the stricken giant.
The Countess accompanied him out of the carriage, holding his hand, dabbing his hot brow as tears streamed down her face with its small retroussé nose and full mouth. A couple of Moldavian peasants who tended cattle on the nearby steppe ambled over to watch. His bare feet came first, then his legs and his half-open dressing gown – though this vision in itself was not unusual. Potemkin notoriously greeted empresses and ambassadors in bare feet and open dressing gowns. But now it was different. He still had the leonine Slavic handsomeness, the thick head of hair, once regarded as the finest in the Empire, and the sensual Grecian profile that had won him the nickname ‘Alcibiades’1 as a young man. However, his hair was now flecked with grey and hung over his feverish forehead. He was still gigantic in stature and breadth. Everything about him was exaggerated, colossal and original, but his life of reckless indulgence and relentless ambition had bloated his body and aged his face. Like a Cyclops he had only one eye; the other was blind and damaged, giving him the appearance of a pirate. His chest was broad and hairy. Always a force of nature, he now resembled nothing so much as a magnificent animal reduced to this twitching, shivering pile of flesh.
The apparition on this wild steppe was His Most Serene Highness Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, probably husband of the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, and certainly the love of her life, the best friend of the woman, the co-ruler of her Empire and the partner in her dreams. He was Prince of Taurida, Field-Marshal, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Cossacks, Grand Admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets, President of the College of War, viceroy of the south, and possibly the next King of Poland, or of some other principality of his own making.
The Prince, or Serenissimus, as he was known across the Russian Empire, had ruled with Catherine II for nearly two decades. They had known each other for thirty years and had shared each other’s lives for almost twenty. Beyond that, the Prince defied, and still defies, all categorization. Catherine noticed him as a witty young man and summoned him to be her lover at a time of crisis. When their affair ended, he remained her friend, partner and minister and became her co-Tsar. She always feared, respected and loved him – but their relationship was stormy. She called him her ‘Colossus’, and her ‘tiger’, her ‘idol’, ‘hero’, the ‘greatest eccentric’.2 This was the ‘genius’3 who hugely increased her Empire, created Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, conquered the Crimea, won the Second Turkish War and founded famed cities such as Sebastopol and Odessa. Russia had not possessed an imperial statesman of such success in both dreams and deeds since Peter the Great.
Serenissimus made his own policies – sometimes inspired, sometimes quixotic – and constructed his own world. While his power depended on his partnership with Catherine, he thought and behaved like one of the sovereign powers of Europe. Potemkin dazzled its Cabinets and Courts with his titanic achievements, erudite knowledge and exquisite taste, while simultaneously scandalizing them with his arrogance and debauchery, indolence and luxury. While hating him for his power and inconsistency, even his enemies acclaimed his intelligence and creativity.
Now this barefoot Prince half staggered – and was half carried by his Cossacks – across the grass. This was a remote and spectacular spot, not even on the main road between Jassy, in today’s Rumania, and Kishnev, in today’s Republic of Moldova. In those days, this was the territory of the Ottoman Sultan, conquered by Potemkin. Even today it is hard to find, but in 200 years it has hardly changed.4 The spot where they laid Potemkin was a little plateau beside a steep stone lane whence one could see far in every direction. The countryside to the right was a rolling green valley rising in a multitude of green, bushy mounds into the distance, covered in the now almost vanished high grass of the steppes. To the left, forested hills fell away into the mist. Straight ahead, Potemkin’s entourage would have seen the lane go down and then rise up a higher hill covered in dark trees and thick bushes, disappearing down the valley. Potemkin, who loved to drive his carriage at night through the rain,5 had called a stop in a place of the wildest and most beautiful natural drama.6