The Prince de Ligne, who knew all the titans of his time, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, best described Potemkin as 'the most extraordinary man I ever met... dull in the midst of pleasure; unhappy for being too lucky; surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician or like a child of ten years old ... What is the secret of his magic? Genius, genius and still more genius; natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft ... the art of conquering every heart in his good moments, much generosity ... refined taste - and a consummate knowledge of mankind.'23 The Comte de Segur, who knew Napoleon and George Washington, said that 'of all the personalities, the one that struck me the most, and which was the most important for me to know well, was the famous Prince Potemkin. His entire personality was the most original because of an inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, ambition and insouciance. Such a man would have been remarkable by his originality anywhere.' Lewis Littlepage, an American visitor, wrote that the 'astonishing' Serenissimus was more powerful in Russia than Cardinal Wolsey, Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu had ever been in their native kingdoms.24
Alexander Pushkin, who was born eight years after this death on the Bessarabian steppe, was fascinated by Potemkin, interviewed his ageing nieces about him and recorded their stories: the Prince, he often said, 'was touched by the hand of history'. In their flamboyance and quintessential Russianness, the two complemented each other.25 Twenty years later, Lord Byron was still writing about the man he called 'the spoiled child of the night.'26
Russian tradition dictated that the dead man's eyes must be closed and coins placed on them. The orbs of the great should be sealed with gold pieces. Potemkin was 'richer than some kings' but, like many of the very rich, he never carried any money. None of the magnates in his entourage had any either. There must have been an awkward moment of searching pockets, tapping jackets, summoning valets: nothing. So someone called over to the soldiers.
The grizzled Cossack who had observed Potemkin's death throes produced a five-kopeck piece. So the Prince had his eye closed with a humble copper coin. The incongruity of the death passed immediately into legend. Perhaps it was the same old Cossack who now stepped back and muttered: 'Lived on gold; died on grass.'
This bon mot entered the mythology of princesses and common soldiers: few years later, the painter Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun asked a gnarled princess in St Petersburg about Potemkin's death: 'Alas, my darling, this great Prince, who had so many diamonds and such gold, died on the grass!', replied the dowager, as if he had had the bad taste to expire on one of her lawns.27 During the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian army marched singing songs of Potemkin's death 'on the steppe lying on a raincoat'.28 The poet Derzhavin saw the romance in the death of this unbounded man in the natural wilderness, 'like mist upon a crossroads'.29 Two observers at different ends of the Empire - Count Fyodor Rostopchin (famous as the man who, in 1812, burned Moscow) in nearby Jassy, and the Swedish envoy, Count Curt Stedingk, in faraway Petersburg30 - reacted with exactly the same words: 'His death was as extraordinary as his life.'31
The Empress had to be told at once. Sashenka Branicka could have told her - she was already reporting to Catherine on the Prince's health - but she was too distraught. So an adjutant was sent galloping ahead to inform Potemkin's devoted and indefatigable secretary Vasily Popov.
There was one last, almost ritual, moment. As the melancholy convoy began to retrace its footsteps back to Jassy, someone must have wanted to mark the spot where the Prince died so that they could build a monument to recall his glory. There were no rocks. Branches would blow away. It was then that the Ataman (Cossack General) Pavel Golavaty, who had known Potemkin for thirty years, commandeered the Zaporogian lance of one of his horsemen. Before he joined the rearguard of the procession, he rode to the little plateau and plunged the lance into the ground at the very spot.32 A Cossack lance to mark the place of Potemkin was as characteristic as the arrow that Robin Hood was supposed to have used to select his grave.
Meanwhile, Popov received the news and, at once, wrote to the Empress: 'We have been struck a blow! Most Merciful Sovereign, Most Serene Prince Grigory Alexandrovich is no more among the living.'33 Popov despatched the letter with a trusted young officer who was ordered not to rest until he had delivered the terrible news.
Seven days later, at 6 p.m. on 12 October,34 this courier, dressed respectfully in black - and the dust of the road - delivered Popov's letter to the Winter Palace. The Empress fainted away. Her courtiers thought she had suffered a stroke. Her doctors were called to bleed her. 'Tears and desperation' is how Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine's private secretary, described her shock. 'At eight, they let blood, at ten she went to bed.'35 She was in a state of collapse: even her grandchildren were not admitted. 'It was not the lover she regretted,' wrote a Swiss imperial tutor, who understood their relationship. 'It was the friend.'36 She could not sleep. At 2 a.m., she rose again to write to her loyal and fussy confidant, the philosophe Friedrich Melchior Grimm: 'A terrible death-blow has just fallen on my head. At six in the afternoon, a messenger brought the tragic news that my pupil, my friend, almost my idol, Prince Potemkin of Taurida, has died in Moldavia after about a month's illness. You cannot imagine how broken I am.. Л37
In many ways, the Empress never recovered. The golden age of her reign died with him. But so did his reputation: Catherine told Grimm on that tragic sleepless night, scribbling by candlelight in her Winter Palace apartments, that Potemkin's achievements had always confounded the jealous 'babblers'.
But if his enemies could not defeat him in life, they have succeeded in death. He was barely cold before a vicious legend grew up around his outlandish character that was to obscure his achievements for 200 years.
Catherine would be amazed and appalled to discover that today her 'idol' and 'statesman' is best known for a calumny and a film. He is remembered for the historical libel of the 'Potemkin Villages', while he really built cities, and for the film Battleship Potemkin, the story of the mutinous sailors who heralded the revolutions that, long after his death, destroyed the Russia he loved. So the Potemkin legend was created by Russia's national enemies, jealous courtiers and Catherine's unstable successor, Paul I, who avenged himself, not just on the reputation, but even the bones, of his mother's lover. In the nineteenth century, the Romanovs, who presided over a rigid militaristic bureaucracy with its own Victorian primness, fed off the glories of Catherine but were embarrassed by her private life, especially by the role of the 'demi- Tsar' Potemkin.38 Their Soviet successors shared their scruples while expanding their lies. Even the most distinguished Western historians still treat him more as a debauched clown and sexual athlete than historical statesman[3]. All these strands came together to ensure that the Prince has not received his rightful place in history. Catherine the Great, ignorant of the calumnies to come, mourned her friend, lover, soldier, statesman and probably husband for the remaining years of her life.
On 12 January 1792, Vasily Popov, the Prince's factotum, arrived back in St Petersburg with a special mission. He carried Potemkin's most cherished treasures - Catherine's secret letters of love and state. They remained tied up in bundles. Some of them were - and still are - stained by the dying Potemkin's tears as he read, and re-read them, in the knowledge that he would never set eyes on Catherine again.