[31] Indeed, 'travailler pour le roi de Prusse' was a popular euphemism for 'working without salary'.
[31] Stormont would have known that this was the positively imperial sum of two million francs. Louis XIV's minister at the Hague offered the century's most famous bribe to Marlborough in May 1709.
[32] One, who later reigned as Mahmud II, was supposedly the son of that favourite odalisque, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, cousin of the future Empress Josephine.
[33] Even Frederick the Great called him 'a cloud of boredom and distaste.'
[34] 'Long live Great Britain and Rodney. I have just arrived, my dear Harris. Guess who is writing to you and come and see me immediately!'
[35] One token of Harris's favour with Catherine and Potemkin can still be seen in London in the form of a gorgeous bauble. When Harris left, she presented him with a chandelier created in Potemkin's glass factories. Harris's descendant, the 6th Earl of Malmesbury, recently gave this to the Skinner's Company of the City of London where it now hangs in the Outer Hall.
[36] Potemkin the Orthodox revelled in possessing the very place, the ancient town of Khersoneses in the Crimea, where Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, had been baptized in 988, the moment when Christianity reached the land of Rus.
[37] The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabak were still fighting to escape the Moslem control of the Republic of Azerbaijan and join the Republic of Armenia during a vicious war in the early 1990s.
[38] When this author visited Kherson, it was still infested with insects: the bed and ceiling in its main hotel so teemed with mosquitoes that the white of the sheets and the paint were literally blackened.
[39] The centre of the town is still mainly as Potemkin planned it. The fortress has been destroyed: only its two gate forts remain. The huge well, possibly the one Potemkin ordered Colonel Gaks to construct, remains covered by a grid. During the Second World War, Nazis threw executed Russians down it when they retreated. Potemkin's immense Palace survived until 1922. The curving arsenal, the mint, admiralty and above all St Catherine's Church remain. The church, with its sandy-coloured stone, its pillars and its noble Starov dome, was once used as a museum of atheism to display the decaying bodies of those buried in its graveyard, but is once again used as a church. Korsakov the engineer is buried in its churchyard. And the proudest boast of its priest and parishioners is that Potemkin its builder rests there beneath the church floor - see Epilogue.
f The author had heard the legend that the icons were by V.L. Borovikovsky and showed a saintly Potemkin and Catherine. The priest in the church had never heard it. It emerged that the icons from the church were stored in the Kherson Art Museum, where they are attributed to Mikhail Shibanov. Potemkin the dragon- slayer is instantly recognizable.
[40] Still a closed naval city, it is now shared by the Black Sea Fleets of Ukraine and Russia. None of Potemkin's original buildings survived the Anglo-French siege of the Crimean War and the Nazi siege of the Second World War. But there is a monument just above the port - crowded and grey with battleships - that reads: 'Here on 3 (14) June 1783 was founded the city of Sebastopol - the sea fortress of south Russia.'
[41] Dnepropetrovsk was noted in the Soviet era for providing the USSR with its clique of leaders in the 1970s. In 1938, a thirty-two-year-old Communist apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev stepped over the corpses of his liquidated superiors in the midst of Stalin's Great Purge to become chief of propaganda in Dnepropetrovsk. There he gathered together the cronies who were to dominate the Soviet Union in 1964- 80: the 'Dnepropetrovsk Mafia'. Locals today recall that Brezhnev especially enjoyed entertaining in the Potemkin Palace.
[42] Today Deribas is one of Odessa's most elegant boulevards.
[43] In Kherson today, on the site of the first docks stands a hideous concrete Soviet sculpture of a sailing ship. Its inscription of course does not mention Potemkin but it acclaims him nonetheless. 'Here in 1783', it reads, 'was launched the first 66-gun ship-of-the-line of the Black Sea Fleet - "Glory of Catherine".'
[44] These worshipped, according to the old rites of Orthodoxy. They had been excluded from mainstream Russian life for a century, often living in remote Siberian settlements to worship freely. Fascinated by their faith, Potemkin protected and tolerated them.
[45] Who were these 'blackamoors'? Was Potemkin really trying to import black settlers - slaves from Africa? 'Blackamoor' surely meant 'street arabs' or urchins from London's streets, whom today we would call vagrants.
[46] Stavropol's most famous son is Mikhail Gorbachev. Though General Suvorov was responsible for building some of these forts in his Kuban Line and was given credit as their founder in various Soviet histories, it was Potemkin who ordered their construction.
[47] Sheikh Mansour and the nineteenth-century leader against the Russians, Imam Shamyl, an Avar, are the two great heroes of today's Chechen rebels. When the author was in Grozny before the Chechen War in 1994, portraits of Sheikh Mansour's finely featured and heavily bearded visage adorned the offices of the President and ministers. Grozny's airport was named after him during Chechnya's short independence in the 1990s.
f The Kherson State History Museum has prints that show it in its nineteenth-century glory. But it does not stand any more. Plundered for its firewood and hated for its grandeur, it was destroyed during the Civil War.
t 'Potemkin's Palace' still stands in the centre of Dnepropetrovsk. The local museum contains some of the gold-encrusted mirrors, possibly made in his own factories, with which Potemkin planned to decorate the palace. On Potemkin's death, only one storey was finished. The rest was built according to Starov's plans during the 1830s: it became the House of the Nobility. In 1917, it became the House of Rest for Working People. It remains the House of Students. Ruined in the war, it was rebuilt in 1951. The two hothouses of the Winter Garden in Ekaterinoslav crumbled in 1794. Today, Gould's garden, now a Park of Culture, is called 'Potemkin Park' and still has an English air.
[48] This survived long after his death. The author found the place where it had stood: today, locals swim and dive from its seafront. Two storeys of white stone steps that led to the house survive along with Starov's ornate white fountain, dated 1792. A basketball court stands on the palace's foundations. The house was the Ship-Owners Club during the nineteenth century, but it was destroyed in the Revolution: a photograph shows it being dismantled for firewood. Ironically, today Moldavian-style mansions of New Russian millionaires are springing up, like distortions of Potemkin's Palace, around the suburbs of Nikolaev. f Potemkin's two creative planners, Starov and Gould, did well like everyone else who worked with him. He was evidently a very generous employer, as the fortunes of Faleev, Zeitlin, Shemiakin, Garnovsky and many others prove. Ivan Starov was a rich man, dying in 1808.