Catherine settled the money with her characteristic generosity, buying the Taurida Palace from his heirs for 935,288 roubles plus his art collection, his glass factory, a million roubles of diamonds and some estates. She paid off the debts herself and left the bulk of the fortune to be divided among seven greedy and now very wealthy heirs, a selection of Engelhardts and Samoilovs. In Smila alone, they each received 14,000 male souls, without even counting the Russian lands, yet they were still arguing over the swag a decade later.16 Even two centuries later, in Soviet times, the villagers of Chizhova were digging up the churchyard in the quest for Potemkin's lost treasure.
The Empress ordered that social life in Petersburg should cease. There were no Court receptions, no Little Hermitages. 'The Empress doesn't appear.'17 Some admired her grief: Masson understood that 'it was not the lover she regretted. It was the friend whose genius was assimilated to her own.'18 Stedingk thought Catherine's sensibilite was greater praise of the Prince than any panegyric.19 The capital was draped in a 'veneer of mourning', but much of it concealed jubilance.20
While the lesser nobility and junior officers, whose wives wore his medallion round their necks, mourned a hero, some of the old noble and military establishment celebrated.21 Rostopchin, who thought Zubov 'a twit', was nonetheless 'charmed' that everyone so quickly forgot the 'fall of the Colossus of Rhodes'.22 Grand Duke Paul is supposed to have muttered that the Empire now boasted one less thief - but then Potemkin had kept him from his rightful place for almost twenty years. Zubov, 'without being triumphant', was like a man who could finally breathe 'at the end of a long and hard subordination'.23 However, three of the most talented men in the Empire, two of them supposedly his mortal enemies, regretted him. When Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, natural son of Peter the Great, heard the news, his entourage expected him to celebrate. Instead, he knelt in front of an icon. 'What's so surprising?', he asked his companions. 'The Prince was my rival, even my enemy, but Russia has lost a great man ... immortal for his deeds.'24 Bezborodko admitted he was 'indebted' to 'a very rare and exquisite man'.25 Suvorov was sad, saying Potemkin was 'a great man and a man great, great in mind and height: not like that tall French ambassador in London about whom Lord Chancellor Bacon said that "the garret is badly furnished" ', but he was simultaneously 'the image of all earthly vanity'. Suvorov felt the heroic age was finished: Potemkin had used him as his own King Leonidas of Sparta. He twice went to pray at Potemkin's tomb.26
In Jassy, Engelhardt asked the peasant-soldiers if they preferred Rumiantsev or Potemkin. They acclaimed Rumiantsev's 'frightening but energetic' record, but the Prince 'was our father, lightened our service, supplied us with all we needed; we'll never have a commander like him again. God make his memory live forever.'27 In Petersburg, soldiers wept for him.28 Even malicious Rostopchin admitted that Potemkin's Grenadiers were crying - though he said it was because they had lost 'the privilege of stealing'.29 Bezborodko heard the soldiers mourning Potemkin. When he quizzed them about the deprivations of Ochakov, they usually replied, 'But it was necessary at the time ...' and Potemkin had treated them with humanity.30 But the best tributes are the marching songs about Potemkin which the soldiers sang in the Napoleonic Wars.
Here rests not famed by war alone
A man whose soul was greater still
Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall
The Prince's outrageous personality aroused such emotions in his lifetime and afterwards that it obscured any objective analysis of his achievements and indeed has distorted them grotesquely. His enemies accused him of laziness,
corruption, debauchery, indecision, extravagance, falsification, military incompetence and disinformation on a vast scale. The sybaritism and extravagance are the only ones that are truly justified. Even his enemies always admitted his intelligence, force of personality, spectacular vision, courage, generosity and great achievements. 'It cannot be denied', wrote Catherine's earliest biographer Castera, 'that he had the mind and courage and energy which, with the gradual unfolding of his talents, fitted him for a prime minister.' Ligne believed that, in making Potemkin, Nature had used 'the stuff she would usually have used to create a hundred men.'31
As a conqueror and colonizer, he ranks close to his hero Peter the Great, who founded a city and a fleet on the Baltic as Potemkin created cities and a fleet on the Black Sea. Both died at fifty-two. There the similarities end, for Potemkin was as humane and forgiving as Peter was brutal and vengeful. But the Prince can be understood and therefore appreciated only in the light of his unique, almost equal partnership with Catherine: it was an unparalleled marriage of love and politics. At its simplest, it was a tender love affair and a noble friendship, but that is to ignore its colossal achievements. None of the legendary romances of history quite matches its exuberant political success.
The relationship enabled Potemkin to outstrip any other minister-favourite and to behave like a tsar. He flaunted his imperial status because he had no limits, but this made him all the more resented. He behaved eccentrically because he could. But his problems stem from the unique ambiguity of his situation, for, though he had the power of a co-tsar, he was not one. He suffered, as all favourites do, from the belief that the monarch was controlled by an 'evil counsellor' - hence his first biography was called Prince of Darkness. If he had been a tsar, he would have been judged for his achievements, not his lifestyle: crowned heads could behave as they wished but ersatz emperors are never forgiven for their indulgences. 'The fame of the Empire was increased by his conquests,' says Segur, 'yet the admiration they excited was for her and the hatred they raised was for him.'32
Serenissimus was a dynamic politician but a cautious soldier. He was slowly competent in direct command, but outstanding as supreme strategist and commander-in-chief on land and sea: he was one of the first to co-ordinate amphibious operations on different fronts across a vast theatre. He was blamed for the fact that the Russian army was chaotic and corrupt, faults as true today as they were two centuries ago, but he deserves credit for its achievements too. When Bezborodko33 reached the army in 1791, for example, he was amazed at the order he found there, despite what he had heard. Nor were his adversaries as weak as they became: the Turks several times defeated the Austrians, who were supposedly much more competent than the Russians. Overall, Potemkin has been underestimated by military history: he should be upgraded from the ranks of incompetent commanders to those of the seriously able, though second to contemporary geniuses like
Frederick the Great, Suvorov or Napoleon. As Catherine told Grimm, he delivered only victories. Few generals can boast that. In the tolerance and decency he showed to his men, Potemkin was unique in Russian history, even today in the age of the Chechen War. 'No man up to that time,' wrote Wiegel, 'had put his power to less evil ends.'
Thirty years later, the Comte de Langeron, whose prejudiced accounts of Potemkin did as much damage to his reputation as those of Ligne and Helbig, admitted, 'I judged him with great severity, and my resentment influenced my opinions.' Then he judged him justly:
Of course he had all the faults of courtiers, the vulgarities of parvenus, and the absurdities of favourites but they were all grist to the mill of the extent and force of his genius. He had learnt nothing but divined everything. His mind was as big as his body. He knew how to conceive and execute his wonders, and such a man was necessary to Catherine. Conqueror of the Crimea, subduer of the Tartars, transplanter of the Zaporogians to the Kuban and civilizer [of the Cossacks], founder of Kherson, Nikolaev, Sebastopol, establisher of shipyards in three cities, creator of a fleet, dominator of the Black Sea ... all these marvellous policies should assure him of recognition.