[70] This resembles Lord Palmerston's attempt to ravish one of Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting at Windsor - except that Catherine was probably as amused as the Queen was not.
[71] The whole floating worm was 252 feet long and almost 17 feet wide, propelled by 120 rowers.
[72] 'There is no doubt', Samuel told Jeremy Bentham, deluding himself winningly, 'that the Emperor as well as everybody else praised the invention.'
[73] The carriage is in the Dnepropetrovsk State Historical Museum.
[74] Potemkin preferred its Greek name, Olviopol.
[75] Potemkin had Catherine's Crimean progress marked by milestones, engraved in Russian and Turkish and placed every ten kilometres. Only three survive: one stands today outside the Khan's Palace in Bakhchisaray. The Giray graveyard also remains intact, if somewhat overgrown.
[76] Herodotus writes that the Amazons, led by their queen Penthesilea, crossed the Black Sea, fought the Scythians and then settled with them not far from the Sea of Azov. So Potemkin would have known that the Crimea was, as it were, the natural habitat of Amazons. When Potemkin took Miranda to the Crimea, they met a German colonel, Schutz, whose wife had 'followed him in campaign dressed as a man and been injured twice - she has a bit of a manly look'. Did Frau Schutz advise on Potemkin's Amazon Regiment? It seems a coincidence that there should be two households of Amazons in one small peninsula.
[77] It turned out to be a Kalmyk boy called Nagu, later captured at the storming of Ochakov, to whom Segur taught French and then managed to unload on a delighted Countess Cobenzl, back in the north, f The exact position of this 'fairy abode' - built on the site of the Tartar hut where Potemkin almost died in late 1783 - is now unknown. But when the author visited Beligorsk, Karasubazaar's present name, he found a verdant spot near a river and orchard that fitted the description of the English visitor Maria Guthrie. The Tartars, deported by Stalin, have returned to the village.
[78] Western monarchs often procured Eastern slave girls, despite their disgust for Oriental slavery. There must have been quite a traffic in these girls, who were either captured in war or bought by ambassadors to the Sublime Porte. Hence Potemkin's offer of a girl to Segur. Frederick the Great's Scottish Jacobite friend Earl Marshal Keith travelled with a Turkish slave girl picked up in the Russo-Turkish Wars, and, as we will see, one of the most cultivated men of the era, King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland, was sent a regular supply, f This translates awkwardly into English but sounds better in German - 'Potemkin der Taurier' - and in French 'le Taurien', the Taurian. Catherine and Grimm discussed how to translate it and the philosophe suggested it should be 'Tauricus' or 'le Taurien'.
[79] But not even this was all show: when Lady Craven visited the Albanians in April 1786, they already wore a 'kind of Roman warrior's dress' and had 'Oriental and Italian poniards' while the Cossacks performed for her just for the fun of it.
f There was indeed a famine in certain areas, notably around Moscow, not in Potemkin's richer southern provinces, after a bad harvest in 1786, which was why Catherine hurried back to the capital. When she arrived in Tula, far from Potemkin's Viceroyalty, the local governor concealed local poverty with false facades but also did not inform her of the rising food prices. When Lev Naryshkin told her the bread prices, she, to her credit, cancelled the ball given for her that night. Both Catherine and Potemkin felt the suffering of ordinary people, when they heard about it, but neither would let a minor famine interfere with the glorious aggrandizement of the Empire nor with the magnificence of their lifestyles. But this was a characteristic of all eighteenth-century governments, however enlightened.
[80] When Hitler invaded Russia on 2.2. June 1941, Stalin almost disappeared, saw nobody and seemed overwhelmed by the scale of responsibility and a temporary loss of nerve. He was apparently suffering some sort of depression. In May 1967, Rabin was 'stammering, nervous, incoherent'. His biographer quotes an eye-witness as observing 'it was almost as if he had lost his nerve, was out of control'.
[81] Withdrawal of the z6 battalions of infantry, zz squadrons of cavalry and 5 Cossack regiments, all cooped up in the Crimea, was not the cowardice of a hysteric, but sound military sense. Potemkin planned to let the Turks land on the peninsula before destroying them in a land battle. (This was precisely what Suvorov did on a smaller scale at Kinburn). Once the danger of a landing was over, they could have been moved, but Catherine rejects the idea for political reasons.
[82] Later, Suvorov became more than famous: he became Prince of Italy, a European star fighting the Revolutionary French in Italy and Switzerland. By 1799, he was the peerless Russian idol and remained so until 1917. Then in 1941, Stalin restored him to the status of national hero and instituted the Order of Suvorov. Soviet historians reinvented him as a people's hero. The result of this cult is that even today Suvorov is given credit for much actually done by Potemkin.
[83] This was just the first of the many occasions when Ligne's criticisms, widely propagated and accepted by history as truth, were factually wrong and based on his Austrian partisanship. His rightly famous accounts of Potemkin at war, which he repeated in his fine letters to Joseph, Segur and the Marquise de Coigny and thus to the whole of Europe, never deliberately lied but they have to be read in the context of his job, which was to spy on his friend, and persuade him to take the heat off his own Emperor. He was also bitterly disappointed not to be given his own command.
[84] History hangs on such petty questions of rank. Count Fyodor Rostopchin, later the Governor of Moscow who burned the city in 1812, claimed in his La Verite sur Vlncendie de Moscow to have seen it: 'I've held this letter in my hands several times.' He regretted that Bonaparte did not join the Russian army.
[85] One wonders what happened to these Jewish Cossacks. Six years later, in 1794, Polish Jews raised a force of 500 light cavalry to fight the Russians. Their colonel Berek (Berko) Joselewicz joined Napoleon's Polish Legion in 1807. Berek won the Legion d'Honneur, but died fighting the Austrians in 1809. Did any of Potemkin's Jewish Cossacks fight for Napoleon? Later in the mid-nineteenth century, the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz formed another Jewish cavalry regiment called the Hussars of Israel among Polish exiles in Istanbul. A Lieutenant Michal Horenstein even designed an elegant grey uniform. During the Crimean War, the Jewish horsemen fought with the remaining Ottoman Cossacks against the Russians outside Sebastopol.
[86] Samuel was so depressed that he wrote a letter to Prime Minister Pitt the Younger which offered to exchange his 'battalion of 900 Russians' in order to supervise a Panopticon 'of British malefactors'.
[87] Ligne's letters give only half the story; Potemkin's archives hold the other half. Ligne's claims that Potemkin was lying about his victories on other fronts were accepted by historians but are actually themselves false. Potemkin's espionage network, revealed by his archives, kept him informed of events across his huge theatre of operations: he received regular reports from the Governor of the Polish fortress Kamenets-Podolsky, General de Witte, who explained how he had managed to get spies into Turkish Khotin in a consignment of butter - though the fact that the sister of Witte's Greek wife was married to the Pasha of Khotin might also have helped.