PRO FO Secretary of State: State Papers, Foreign, cyphers SP106/67, William Fawkener to Lord Grenville 18 June 1791 and Estimate of Russian Black Sea Fleet by British Ambassador Charles Whitworth 11 January 1787, unpublished. M. S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, pp 144-5. SIRIO 27 (1880): 354-5, CII ukase to GAP placing Black Sea Fleet under his own independent command 13 August 1785.
PSZ 10: 520/1, 24 April 1777.
Michael Jenkins, Arakcheev, Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire, pp 171-203.
RGADA 16.588.1.12. RGADA 16.799.1.141-2 and 95. SBVIM vol 7 p 85. GAP to Maj-Gen and Gov of Azov Chertkov 14 June 1776 and pp 94 to General Meder 27 August 1776. GAP took special care with Armenians - see L. Mellikset-Bekov, From the Materials for the History of the Armenians in the South of Russia p 14, GAP (via Popov) to Kahovsky on settlement of Armenians. Bruess pp 195-7. Druzhinina pp 176, 150-4, 164-5.
CAD/51. Pole Carew Papers, unpublished. On 25 June 1781, Potemkin arranged for thousands of noble and state serfs to be transferred to the new lands, if they wished. 'These lands,' wrote Pole Carew about New Russia, 'are reserved for the transporting of 20,000 peasants of the Crown from the parts of the Empire where they are too numerous.'
ZOOID 8: 212, GAP to CII 10 August 1785. ZOOID 8 contains many of GAP's reports to CII and orders on settlers, e.g. ZOOID 8: 209, 9 July 1776 on settlement of Albanians in Kerch and Yenikale. Raskolniki: GAP cultivated the Old Believers, let them worship as they wished. ZOOID 9 (1875): 284. GAP to Metropolitan Gabriel of St Petersburg. 26 August 1785. See settlement of Raskolniki report of Ekaterinoslav Governor Sinelnikov to GAP, ZOOID 9: p 270. 2 April 1785.
PSZ 22: 280, 14 January 1785. GAP's governors sent officials to recruit women, for example ZOOID 10, August 1784. Kahovsky writing to Popov about a report to GAP, says he has sent an official to Little Russia 'where he found wives for all the bachelors.' It is hard to gauge the success of GAP's female recruiting campaign but in January 1785, we know that 4,425 recruits' women were sent south to join their husbands in their hard frontier lives.
ZOOID 8: 212, GAP to CII 10 August 1785. 'Let me transfer clerks whom the Synod returns for a settlement in this territory,' he requested CII in 1785. 'The clerks will be like military settlers and it will be doubly advantageous as they will be both ploughmen and militia.' Four thousand unemployed priests settled. Also: Bartlett, p 125.
PSZ 20: 14870 and 15006. GAP to M. V. Muromtsev 31 August 1775, SBVIM vol 7 p 54. In a potentially revolutionary move, Potemkin ruled that landowners could not reclaim serfs if they settled in his provinces - more evidence, if any were needed, of his semi-imperial right to do whatever he thought right, even if it broke the rules of noble-dominated Russian society. This did not make him popular with the aristocracy.
RGADA 11.869.114, Prince A. A. Viazemsky to GAP 5 August 1786. See also RGADA 448.4402.374. Initially, 26,000 serfs were moved to Azov and Ekaterinoslav Provinces. Further peasants - probably 24,000 in all - were allowed to put their names down for transfer. Another 26,000 landowners' peasants went. 30,307 state peasants also settled in the north Caucasus, according to a letter from Viazemsky to GAP in 1786.
V. Zuev, 'Travel Notes 1782-3', Istoricheskiy i geographicheskiy mesyazeslov p 144.
SIRIO 27: 275. PSZ 22: 438-40. 16239,13 August 1785. SBVIM vol 7 pp 119- 24. GAP ruled that a nobleman could receive an allotment of land, provided he settled not less than fifteen families for every 1500 desyatins during the first ten years. Catherine gave him unique powers to decide what taxes, if any, they should pay. For example: Druzhinina p 63. RGADA 248.4402.374-5. This shows how GAP and CII worked together in the settlement of the south. On 16 October 1785, GAP suggested that landowners and peasants settling in the south should
not have to pay landtax or polltax. The Senate agreed (same reference P382/3) on 25 November 1785 but CII (p 384) left the details to be decided by GAP.
RGADA 11.946.273 and 275. Mikhail Kantakusin (Prince Cantacuzino) to GAP, 6 February 1787 and 25 January 1787, St Petersburg unpublished. Some of these recruiters were merchants, others were Phanariot princes like Cantacuzino or noblemen like the Due de Crillon.
A. Skalkovsky, Chronological Review of New Russia (1730-1823) part I pp 146- 7-
RGADA 11.946.32. Panaio and Alexiano to GAP 11 December 1784, Sebastopol, unpublished. Count Demetrio Mocenigo sent at least five groups of Greeks and Corsicans, over 1,010 people between August 1782 and July 1783. Druzhinina, Severnoye prichernomoye p 159. See Bruess p 115.
ZOOID 11: 330-1 GAP to Count Ivan Osterman 25 March 1783.
RGADA 11.895.25. GAP to Baron Sutherland ud, 1787, unpublished.
no ZOOID 9 (1875): 265, Sinelnikov to Popov. RGADA 16.962.14. V. M. Kabuzan Narodonaseleniye rossii v XVIII - pervoy polovine XIX veka p 154.
in ZOOID 11: 331, GAP to Gaks, 26 May 1783.
RGADA 11.946.278. Mikhail Kantakusin (Cantacuzino) to GAP 30 May 1785, Mogilev, unpublished. Bartlett p 126.
Edward Crankshaw p 313.
Y. Gessen, Istoriya Evreyskogo naroda v Rossii, and same author Zakon i zhizn как sozdavalis ogranichitelnyye zony о zhitelsteve v Rossi pp 16-18 quoted in Madaringa Russia p 505. This survey of the Jews under CII and GAP owes much to D. Z. Feldman, Svetleyshiy Knyaz GA Potemkin i Rossiyskiye Evrei pp 186- 92; David E. Fishman, Russia's First Modern Jews The Jews of Shklov pp 46-59 and pp 91-3; John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews, Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia iy/2-1825 pp 35-80, particularly on GAP pp 37, 95, 125, and Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, vol 1 pp 23-4.
RGADA 16.696.1.179, Register of Peoples in Ekaterinoslav 30 January 1792. 45,000 Jews gained by Russia in the First Partition: Klier p 19.
GAP came to know his circle of Jewish merchants and rabbis through his Krichev estate in Belorussia and through the court maintained nearby at Shklov by Semyon Zorich, Catherine's former lover. Joshua Zeitlin was the Jew closest to GAP but the other leading Jewish courtier was Natan Nota ben Hayim, known in Russian as Natan Shklover (Nathan of Shklov) or Nota Khaimovich Notkin who like Zeitlin was in contact with the philosophes of the Jewish enlightenment such as Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin. Zeitlin and Notkin helped Potemkin build roads, towns and raise armies and fleets - and it is likely that Zeitlin was behind the Prince's idea to create a Jewish regiment (see Chapter 26.) Notkin, a far less religious Jewish figure than Zeitlin, was the first in the long line of secular Jewish merchant princes who were increasingly Russified and unjewish. Indeed Zeitlin's wealthy son-in-law Abraham Perets, who continued to be patronised by GAP's heirs, became such a society figure in St Petersburg in the early nineteenth century that he converted to Orthodoxy. Even so his close friendship with Alexander I's reforming minister Mikhail Speransky shocked Russian society and damaged the minister - which only goes to show the extraordinary nature of GAP's friendship with rebbe Zeitlin a few years earlier. Other of GAP's favoured Jews included Karl Hablitz, the botanist who served on the Persian expedition, and Nikolai Stiglitz who bought 2,000 souls on ex-Zaporogian land from Prince A. A. Viazemsky at GAP's request. Stiglitz, descended from German Jews, founded a merchant dynasty