'Potemkin's death was as extraordinary as his life.' On 5th October 1791 Potemkin, weeping for the Empress, died on the Bessarabian steppes beside the road, in the arms of his favourite niece, Countess Branicka. Branicka fell into a faint. A Cossack commented, 'Lived on gold; died on grass.'
Potemkin's funeral in Jassy was magnificent - but the destiny of his body was as restless as his life.
'Superb' Frank McLynn, Financial Times
'Magnificent...5 Christopher Hudson, Daily Mail
Prince of Princes The Life of Potemkin
'This splendidly written biography...Not only does it retrieve Potemkin and his eccentric career from historical obscurity, it helps bring to life all of aristocratic, 18th century Russia. Could easily have been double the length so enjoyable is it' AnnЈ Applebaum, Sunday Telegraph
Prince Grigory Potemkin was Catherine the Great's lover, secret husband and partner in ruling the Russian Empire. Catherine called him 'one of the greatest, strangest and wittiest eccentrics' of her epoch - her 'twin soul', 'tiger' and 'darling husband'; her 'hero' and 'master' in politics.
Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement allowing them to share power, leaving Potemkin free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine, her favourites. But they never stopped loving each other.
After five years' new research in archives from St. Petersburg to Odessa, Montefiore brings blazingly to life Potemkin's loving partnership with Catherine and restores him to his rightful place as an outstandingly gifted statesman, and a colossus of the eighteenth century.
' A terrific read...Book of the Year' Antonia Fraser, BBC History Magazine
'Excellent with dazzling mastery of detail and literary flair... Book of the Year...One of the great love-stories of history in a league with Napoleon and Josephine and Antony and Cleopatra' Economist
PHOENIX PRESS NON-FICTION/HISTORY £9.99 IN UK ONLY
Cover: Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky by G.B. Lampi (attrib.) Suvorov Museum, St. Petersburg
Spine: Catherine II by A. Roslin / Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Cover design: Killian Strong
* This continued right up to 1917. When Rasputin's enemies grumbled to Nicholas II about his bathing with his female devotees, the last Tsar retorted that this was a usual habit of the common people.
* The British Cabinet Noir was much feared because it was based in George Ill's Electorate of Hanover, a crossroads allowing it to intercept mail from all over Europe.
* Even Potemkin's valet, Zakhar Constantinov, was a Greek.
* The Prince de Ligne saw a universal rule about women here: 'The flattery made her drunk ... the inconvenience of women on thrones.'
* It was no coincidence that the first and most vicious anti-Potemkin biography, written even before Helbig, Panslavin Fiirst der Finsternis (Panslavin Prince of Darkness) was by a Freemason, J. F. E. Albrecht, probably a Rosicrucian. Mystical Freemasonry was surprisingly fashionable among the parodomaniacs of
[1] Potemkin's Palaces: Taurida, photo by author; Anichkov, author's collection; Ostrovky, author's collection; Bablovo, photo by author; Ekaterinoslav, photo by author; Nikolaev, Nikolaev State History Museum, photo by author; Kherson, Kherson State History Museum, photo by author
[2] 'Here lies Bauer under this stone, Coachman, drive on!'
[3] Writing in 1994, for example, one highly respected Professor of History at Cambridge University evaluates Potemkin's political and military abilities, with the amusing but completely unjustifiable claim that he 'lacked self-confidence anywhere outside the bedroom.'
[4] The date of his birth is, like everything else about him, mysterious because there is much confusion about the age that he went to live in Moscow and that he was put down for the Guards. There is an argument for saying he was born in 1742, the date given by his nephew Samoilov. The dates and military records contradict each other without creating a particularly interesting debate. This date is the most likely.
[5] When Grigory Potemkin, who was to prove even more shocking to Western sensibilities, rose to greatness in St Petersburg, it was felt he required a famous ancestor. A portrait of the foul-tempered, xenophobic and pedantic Ambassador of the era of the Sun King and the Merry Monarch was found, possibly a present from the English Embassy, and placed in Catherine the Great's Hermitage.
[6] Today, there is little on the Potemkin side of the village except Catherine's Well and the hut of two octogenarian peasants who subsist on bees. On the serf's side, there is just the ruins of the church. In Communist times, the villagers say, the commissars kept cattle in 'Potemkin's church' but all the cattle sickened and died. The villagers are still digging for an Aladdin's Cave which they call 'Potemkin's Gold'. But all they have found are the bodies of eighteenth-century women, probably Potemkin's sisters, in the graveyard.
[7] He did endow the round Nikitskaya Church (Little Nikitskaya) and it was rebuilt by his heirs. But he was still planning the big project when he died. Historians who believe he married Catherine II in Moscow point to this church as the venue for the wedding.
[8] The young Emperor, who moved the Court back to Moscow, died in the suburban Palace which today contains the War College archives (RGVIA), where most of Potemkin's papers are stored.
[9] Favourites had developed by the seventeenth century into the minister-favourites such as Olivares in Spain and Richelieu and Mazarin in France, who were not the King's lovers but able politicians chosen to run the increasingly heavy bureaucracies. When Louis XIV chose to rule himself on the death of Mazarin in 1661, the fashion ended. But Russia's female rulers, beginning with Catherine I in 172.5, reinvented it.
f In the Smolensk Local History Museum, there is just such a glass goblet which is said to have belonged to Potemkin. The story goes that when Catherine the Great passed through Smolensk she drank a toast from it.
[10] Potemkin too was described by foreigners as a giant. The best specimens were bound to join the Guards, but the physique of Russian men seems to have been undergoing a blossoming in this period, to judge by the comments of visitors: 'The Russian peasant is a fine, stout, straight, well-looking man,' gushed Lady Craven as she travelled the Empire.
t His strength was no legend - as witnessed by Baroness Dimsdale in 1781 when the Empress Catherine's carriage on the fairground Flying Mountain, an early version of the 'big dipper', flew off its wooden groove: Orlov, 'a remarkably strong man, stood behind the carriage and with his foot guided it in its proper direction'.
[11] This was the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg that so inspired Hitler and Goebbels in 1945 in the Berlin bunker when the death of President Roosevelt was supposed to split the Allies. Frederick exulted that 'The Messalina of the North is dead' and acclaimed Peter Ill's 'truly German heart.'