Finally, Sophia, Samoilov's daughter, married Count Bobrinsky's son, so that the blood of Catherine, the Orlovs and the Potemkins was also fused.56 The 1905 Revolution was heralded in Odessa by the mutiny of sailors of the Battleship Prince Potemkin of Taurida. This spawned Eisenstein's film: the very name Potemkin, fostered by tsarist autocracy, thus became the symbol
of Bolshevism.* The Richelieu Steps in Odessa were renamed the 'Potemkin Steps,' so the statue of the French Duke today looks down the steps named after the 'extraordinary man' he so admired.
The Taurida Palace was to be 'the birthplace, the citadel and the burial ground of Russian democracy'.f On 6 January 1918, the Constituent Assembly, the first truly democratic parliament in Russian history until 1991, met, watched by Lenin and a horde of drunk Red Guards, for the first and last time in the Colonnade Hall where Potemkin had fallen to his knees before Catherine. Lenin left, the Red Guards threw out the parliamentarians and the Taurida was locked up.57 Today, the Palace houses the Commonwealth of Independent States, so the residence of the man who brought many of these lands into the Russian Empire is now the home of its disintegration.58 And of course the phrase 'Potemkin Village' entered the language.
Not all the body of Potemkin arrived in Kherson on 23 November 1791. When great men were embalmed their viscera were buried separately. The resting place of the heart was especially significant. Earlier that year, for example, the heart of Mirabeau had been carried through the streets of Paris at his state funeral in a leaden box covered in flowers.59
Potemkin's viscera were said to be buried in the Church of the Ascension at the Golia Monastery in Jassy. There was no apparent sign of it in the church, but through the centuries of the Kingdom of Rumania, Communism and now democracy a few intellectuals knew that it rests in a golden box under the carpet and flagstone before the Hospodar of Moldavia's red-velvet medieval throne. So the brain that had conceived the Kingdom of Dacia lay beneath the portrait of a bearded Moldavian Prince, Basil the Wolf, wearing a gold, white and red kaftan and a bonnet with three feathers.60
Potemkin's family had not forgotten the place of the Prince's death in the hills of Bessarabia, marked by the lance of Cossack Golavaty.61 Samoilov had a small, square Classical pillar built there in 1792, with the date and event engraved on its sides: its design and white stone is so similar to the fountain built at the Nikolaev palace that it must be by the same architect, Starov himself. Later, in the early nineteenth century, Potemkin's heirs erected a pyramid ten metres high in dark stone with steps rising up to it-ф
* Indeed George V was so worried that he banned the film from being shown to the schoolboys of Eton: 'It is not good for the boys to witness mutinies, especially naval mutinies.'
f In 1906 the State Duma, Tsar Nicholas II's reluctant concession to the 1905 Revolution, sat in what had been the Winter Garden. After the February Revolution, it housed for a while both the Provisional Government of Russia and the Petrograd Soviet.
ф The site was lost and presumably destroyed: no one had recorded seeing this spot since the early nineteenth century. Unmarked on maps and unknown even to local academics, it survived only on a 1913 Austrian map, but it seemed unlikely that the monuments could exist today. Yet they are still there on a country lane on a Bessarabian hillside, known only by the local peasants who took the author to 'Potemkin's place', which has survived Russian and Ottoman rule, the Kingdom of Rumania, annexation by Stalin in 1940, German occupation and its return to Rumania, re-inclusion in the Soviet Union and the creation of the independent Republic of Moldova.
When the body reached Kherson, it was not buried, simply laid in an unsealed, specially constructed tomb in a crypt61 in the middle of St Catherine's Church. The Empress ordered a noble marble monument to be designed and erected over the tomb, but by the time she died, five years later, the marble was still not ready. So the Prince, a parvenu who was somehow royal, remained interred but somehow unburied.63 Visitors and locals, including Suvorov, prayed there.
In 1798, Paul heard about these visits and decided to avenge himself on the body: it irritated him all over again that Potemkin was still managing to defy tradition and decency seven years after his death. So he issued a decree on 18 April to Procurator-General Prince Alexander Kurakin: the body was unburied and, 'finding this obscene, His Majesty orders that the body be secretly buried in the crypt in the tomb designed for this and the crypt should be covered up by earth and flattened as if it had never been there'. For a man of Potemkin's stature to be buried without trace was bad enough. The Emperor allegedly ordered Kurakin orally to smash any memorial to Potemkin and to scatter the bones in the nearby Devil's Gorge. Under cover of darkness, the tomb was filled in and covered up, but no one knew whether the officers had obeyed Paul's orders. Had the bones been tossed into the Gorge, buried secretly in a pauper's grave or taken away by Countess Branicka?64 For a long time, no one was sure.65
In another midnight grave opening, on 4 July 1818, the Archbishop of Ekaterinoslav, Iov Potemkin, a cousin of Serenissimus, lifted the church floor, opened the coffin and discovered that the embalmed cadaver was still there after all. So it turned out that, in this as in so much else, the despotic whims of Emperor Paul were fudged by his officers. But they had obeyed him in making it look as if there was nothing there. Iov Potemkin was said to have placed some artefact from the grave in his carriage when he left: was this an act of familial and episcopal grave-robbing? Or was it the urn containing a special part of the body? Was the Prince still there after the Archbishop's tinkering?66
Every nocturnal burrowing sowed more doubts. But that is the trouble with secrecy, darkness and graves. In 1859 yet another official commission decided to open the grave to prove that the Prince was still there: when they opened the tomb, they discovered a large crypt, a wooden coffin inside a lead one and a gold fringe to go round it. Milgov, a local bureaucrat, tidied up the crypt and closed it again.67
Now that everyone was finally sure there was a grave there, it was decided there should be a grandiose gravestone. But no one could recall where exactly the tomb had been, so they did not know where to put it. This sounds like a poor excuse for some more digging by inquisitive busy bodies. In 1873, another commission excavated and found the wooden coffin containing a skull with the triangular hole in the back left by Massot's embalming, and tufts of dark-blonde hair, the remnants of the coiffure that was said to be finest in Russia, as well as three medals, clothes and gold-braid scraps of uniform. They sealed it up again and constructed a fitting gravestone approximately above the tomb.68 Finally, Potemkin, if it was he, was allowed some peace.