Part 18

According to the legend, Potiomkin became a sort of panderer to his lady and the gentlemen whom he chose for her survived as long as they remained in his good graces. What really happened was that the Empress chose each new lover for herself and certainly with the hope that he would see her through. But, after a year or two, the unmanageable Potiomkin would suddenly arrive on the scene and turn the rascal out. His appearance would be preceded by threatening letters about what he was going to do. For instance, the big blond Yermalov sat uneasily in his armchair one day because Potiomkin had written her that he was coming to Petersburg to send “that white nigger” away. Potiomkin came and the white nigger went. Catherine turned her attention to dark lovers and chose two of them, Mamonov and Zubov.

Mamonov proved to be one of her few mistakes. He was a normal man who fell in love with one of the ladies of the court of his own age and married her. It was the only time that her Majesty was ever actually deserted by one of her lovers, unless Saltikov may be said to have done so, and it was a shattering experience. She chose another dark man, Plato Zubov, and tried to gain for him the approval of the absentee Potiomkin. The little black boy, she wrote, was learning fast, sent his love to Papa, and so on. But Potiomkin wrote back that he was returning to Petersburg “to have a tooth out,” which had an ominous play on Zubov’s name, which means “tooth.” The conflict over Zubov’s removal brought to an end the relation between Catherine and Potiomkin which had lasted for fifteen years. Potiomkin was not able to send this rival away.

The lovers who followed Potiomkin were Zavadovsky, Zoritch, Korsakov, Lanskoy, Yermalov, Mamonov, and finally Zubov. Except for Lanskoy, who died, and Mamonov, who married, Potiomkin had arbitrarily dismissed all of them or believed that he had so dismissed them. When he could no longer do that he realized that his lady had discarded him for good. He became, as Gregory Orlov had become fifteen years before, an exile from the warm nest that had sheltered him for so long, and, like Gregory Orlov, he could not survive his banishment.

Potiomkin had a fascinating personality. He was not likable but he seized the imagination and captured the attention. Legend has pictured him as a great Russian brute who drank heavily and swore outrageously. Doubtlessly he swore, as every Russian swears as naturally as he breathes. But he was not a drunkard and he was not a brute. He was a frightened, timid hare, with a certain creative genius which came through here and there without ever developing very far in any direction. He could be a real poet on occasion, although he is known as the author of only one song, and also a real general on occasion, although he trembled at the sound of guns. The most contradictory things have been said about him because the most contradictory things were true about him.

He had the tall, well-built figure which Catherine required of her lovers but otherwise his appearance was not prepossessing. He had lost an eye and it is characteristic of Potiomkin’s reticence that nobody knew when or how the accident had happened. Potiomkin himself never spoke of it but his feelings on the subject may be imagined from the fact that when a one-eyed man was sent to him one day with a message, Potiomkin struck him down. Various stories are told about the loss of his eye. Alexei Orlov is said to have put it out in a struggle over a game of billiards. Another story told is that Potiomkin himself destroyed it because it had a blemish, probably a squint. It is doubtful whether Catherine herself knew the true cause of the accident. In writing about Potiomkin, she passed over his handicap as if it did not exist. And yet she made one indirect reference in her memoirs. In speaking of the ignorance of the Russian court, she remarked that even an ordinarily intelligent person at this court was like a one-eyed man among the blind. Another peculiarity of Potiomkin’s which she passed over in silence was a nervous jerking of his face, a kind of facial _tic_ which she had once detested in Count Shuvalov. One trait, however, she did refer to sometimes in a jesting tone and that was the way he constantly gnawed his finger-nails. The rest of his peculiarities she passed over in silence.

Potiomkin was cynical, morose, and silent; a wistful, tortured creature who was obliged to make people afraid of him in order to conceal his timidity toward others. They called him “Cyclops” and his imposing figure did not belie the reference to the one-eyed giant. Perhaps the original Cyclops also was as sensitive and fearful at the core as was the awe-inspiring Potiomkin. Legend has made a great deal of the middle syllable of his name, “tiom,” which means dark, and has served to accentuate the romantic picture of Potiomkin as a villain and a hero.

Like Razumovsky who had been the favorite and the reputed husband of Empress Elisabeth, Potiomkin was a Southerner, a Ukrainian. The men of his family had followed either a military or a cloistered life. His father was an obscure captain and an uncle, who had risen to the rank of colonel, retired from the army to enter a monastery. Gregory Potiomkin reversed his uncle’s course. He first became a monk or almost became one, having spent several years in preparation travelling from one monastery to the other. He was well versed in the theology of the Greek Church and was extremely superstitious. His orthodoxy was another aspect of her lover which Catherine, who prided herself on being a free-thinker, did not like to expose. During the first year that she lived with him, they made a pilgrimage through the old Russian cloisters together. It happened that Prince Henry of Prussia was due to pay a visit to Catherine during these months, but she wrote asking him to postpone his visit until the following year. Usually she liked to have foreign guests accompany her on her travels, but this time she did not wish to combine the Protestant prince and the Greek theologian in one religious pilgrimage.

Up to the age of thirty-five, when he became the favorite of the Empress, Potiomkin seems to have had no love affairs and no idea of marriage. He was deeply attached to his sister, whom, with her five daughters, Catherine kept about the court. With one of his nieces, Countess Branicky, Potiomkin was especially intimate. After he left the Empress, this niece accompanied him everywhere. It was as if, like Catherine, he was morbidly afraid of being left alone, and Sashinka Branicky was obliged to be always with him. One of the scandals about General Potiomkin was that, instead of galloping over the battlefield on a war horse like General Suvarov, he usually appeared driving along in a kibitka with Sashinka at his side. In this state, nevertheless, he managed to cover a great deal of ground, for few Russians travelled farther or more swiftly than did General Potiomkin. And always his devoted niece was near at hand. How Sashinka found time to marry and have children, as she did, is hard to explain. It has been said that her relations with her uncle were not above reproach. If it was true that a physical intimacy existed, there would have been nothing shocking in the circumstances to the Russian Empress who had once contemplated marriage with her Uncle George of Holstein and spoke in later life almost regretfully of the unfulfilled engagement.

Potiomkin had been one of the original conspirators who had helped to make Catherine the Empress. He had ridden to Peterhof in her train on that white night in 1762 when she seized the Czar and imprisoned him. He had been one of the guardsmen left in charge of the ex-Czar at Ropsha, and he had been present at Peter’s death. Alexei Orlov’s letter absolves him from all responsibility for the murder. The worst that can be said of him in this connection is that with many others, who were likewise not blamed, he also was present. The Empress did not forget him during the next ten years, for she furthered his career by sending him with a letter to General Razumovsky, who employed him in the Turkish wars. His picture lay dormant in her mind through all this time until it began to take on an increased vividness by comparison with the actual presence of a Vassilchikov whose caresses made her weep. The stories of Potiomkin’s wooing give him credit for an amount of initiative which he did not have. In Catherine’s confession, addressed to Potiomkin, she says that she deliberately recalled him to Petersburg, whereas the current story tells how Potiomkin schemed to be sent to the Little Mother with a painting and a message and how when he got there he impetuously wooed her. The second story is the one which the Empress would have much preferred to have us believe had her own statements of what took place not weakened its credibility.

“Then came a certain hero,” she wrote. “This hero was, through his services and his enduring tenderness, so wonderful that as soon as people heard of his arrival they began to say that he ought to remain here. They did not know of course that we had summoned him secretly by a letter, but with the secret intention after his arrival not to proceed quite blindly but to investigate whether that inclination existed of which Bruce had spoken and which many had long suspected; that is, the kind of inclination which I wished that he should have.”

It is not difficult to picture the impulsive Catherine sitting down to her writing-table one fine morning to pen the letter which brought Potiomkin to Petersburg as fast as a kibitka could carry him. The image of the dark, morose man, biting his nails and glowering at the world, which had slept so long at the bottom of the pool, had at last risen to the surface and now floated there with a sharp commanding vividness. Potiomkin’s time had come. The Empress sat down and addressed to the hero whose image summoned her the letter which was to be the making of his fortune. He came to Petersburg and for two years he remained in close attendance on the Empress. He played his part in the Hermitage gatherings in his own peculiar way. He was a ventriloquist and could imitate to perfection the voices of various animals. He could reproduce with uncanny accuracy the voice of Catherine herself uttering some characteristic remark. This trick hugely delighted the Empress who had also a gift for mimicry. In return, she would caterwaul a duet with the Princess Dashkov who, like the Empress, was unable to carry a tune.

[Illustration: CATHERINE THE GREAT

_Painted by Ericsen for Baron Dimsdale_]

Potiomkin was a semi-Tartar in his habits. Slovenly and indolent, he would lie on his couch for days clad only in a khalat. In the same informal habit he would visit the Empress, to the horror of the Europeans and the astonishment even of the Russians. Potiomkin fancied himself in this informal costume, over and beyond the fact that the lazy undress suited the inertia of his temperament. The loose khalat was not unlike the monastic robe which he had once planned to wear and which now and then, when things went wrong between himself and his imperial mistress, he thought of putting on again. He was friendly with all priests, with whom he spent much time, not, it appears, so much in theological discussion, though he is said to have excelled in this, as in card-playing and betting. His devotion to the Church is seen in the way that he could stand motionless and decorous all day while mass was being said. He was not physically too lazy for this effort although otherwise so indolent that the formalities of Russian court life were too arduous for him.

[Illustration: CATHERINE THE GREAT

_From a painting by Roslin_]

Many vindictive outré portraits of Catherine’s lover have been drawn for posterity. Most of them were produced by French writers who could not understand a man who, notwithstanding all the riches that his mistress placed at his disposal, preferred to live as a Byzantine when he might have lived as a Parisian. To the sophisticated French who left most of the written accounts of Russia in the eighteenth century, Potiomkin was scarcely a Russian; he was almost an Asiatic. The big one-eyed man who sprawled on a couch all day in a bright dressing-gown, playing with a handful of unset jewels or listening to Plutarch’s Lives which some one read aloud, was a strange creature who had deliberately turned his back on the civilization of Louis XV and France and who yearned only to revive the ancient glories of Alexander the Great and Constantinople.

The mere name of Alexander was an inspiration to Catherine and Potiomkin: it had been the name of Potiomkin’s father and became the name of Catherine’s grandson. It symbolized the magnificent dream which united them. Together they would go to Constantinople. One day Potiomkin burst forth, as he sprawled on his couch and listened to Plutarch’s Lives, “If anyone should come today and tell me that I should never go thither, I would shoot myself through the head.” In a similar mood, though less violent, the satirical Empress threatened, in case the Swedes bombarded her out of Petersburg, to set up her capital in Constantinople. If she did not revive the Byzantine Empire, she hoped that Monsieur Alexander, her grandson, would one day revive it in her stead. United in their feverish dream, the Empress and her lover drove in perfect unison toward their common hope. Together they would one day enter Constantinople. For many years they passionately believed it; and when they no longer believed it, they died.

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Potiomkin, a true son of Ukrainia, was a troubadour. He composed a song to his lady which became a popular lyric. “As soon as I beheld thee, I thought of thee alone; thy lovely eyes captivated me, yet I trembled to say I loved. To thee, love subjects every heart, and enchains them with the same garlands. But, ah heaven, what a torment to love one to whom I dare not declare it! One who can never be mine. Cruel gods, why have you given her such charms? Or, why did you exalt her so high? Why did you destine me to love her and her alone, her whose sacred name will never pass my lips, whose charming image will never quit my heart.”

Catherine’s churlish lover was not poor in fancy. He could offer tributes to his lady showing an imagination of no mean order. As he composed lyrics in her honor, he could also compose pageants and other exhibitions of great beauty and impressiveness. The famous journey to the Crimea was a magnificent processional. Potiomkin’s arrangement of this trip was the work of a poet and a dramatist as well as that of a politician and a general. It employed all his talents at once. His contrivance of effects along the way has been misunderstood. Hence the legend of the “Potiomkin villages,” which according to his detractors were mere painted façades overlooking the Volga and filled with peasants and cattle who had travelled on foot many hundreds of versts in order to complete the picture. That history should have blamed instead of praising Potiomkin for his artistry shows how little his mission in life and his share in Catherine’s grandiose schemes have been understood. Both of them believed that the road to Constantinople would one day be lined with prosperous villages and that the temporary settlements thrown up at so much expense along the route would at no great distance in the future become permanent establishments. No one was deceived by the demonstration of prosperity, unless perhaps it was Potiomkin himself, who half-way believed in the spectacular growth of population induced suddenly by his own imagination aided by Catherine’s rubles. Prince de Ligne, who accompanied the Empress on her Crimean journey, tried to correct the story at the outset. “They have already spread a ridiculous report,” he wrote to France, “that villages of cardboard have been distributed along our route at intervals of a hundred leagues, that paintings of vessels and cannons and cavalry without horses are displayed.” The Prince persisted in his efforts to send out to Europe a true description of the Crimean journey; but he fared as all honest and unpicturesque journalists are destined to fare. People preferred to believe in Potiomkin’s cardboard villages and in the perfidy of their contriver who employed in their construction millions of the Empress’s own rubles in order to deceive the Empress. The story is still told to show to what nefarious depths Potiomkin was willing to descend. What it really shows is that he was a daring artist who designed and executed grandiose effects.

The Empress’s whole Crimean trip was a theatrical enterprise with Potiomkin as author, producer, and actor. It followed soon after the birth of her two grandsons whom she at first planned to take with her though she abandoned the idea before the start was made. The purpose of the journey was ostensibly to inspect the work of General Potiomkin as administrator in the South. Its actual intention was political, to reconnoitre the way to the Orient while hostilities between the Russians and the Turks were in abeyance. No one understood this kind of political game better than Potiomkin and his mistress. Ostentation was the breath of their nostrils and for once they had their fill of it. The Empress and her entourage proceeded down the Dnieper in a fleet of twenty boats, each of which was named for some tributary of the stream. Catherine’s own vessel was called the Dnieper and was fitted out with mirrors and Turkish rugs, while a smooth green carpet covered the deck like a meadow. Behind the gorgeous Dnieper floated the Bog, the vessel in which Potiomkin travelled. Beneath a silken canopy, he lounged among Turkish draperies, while Sashinka Branicky attended him. Behind Potiomkin’s Bog came the other eighteen vessels filled with ladies and gentlemen, musicians and dancers, cooks and lackeys, who strolled the decks and counted the peasants along the shores. The whole social life of the palace was transported to the Empress’s fleet; receptions and balls and concerts followed each other as smoothly and uninterruptedly as the bends of the flowing river followed each other southward. The fleet had halcyon weather.

Most of the boats proceeded to Cherson, passing successfully the rapids which the Russian peasants were afraid to navigate. One of the aims of the trip was to quiet this popular fear by demonstrating a safe passage. The laurels remain with Potiomkin for the Empress left the fleet and proceeded by carriage along the last stretch of the journey. The royal guest who rode in the carriage with her, the son of Maria Theresa and the future Emperor of Austria, did not fancy perhaps the idea of threading the Dnieper rapids. It seems unlikely that the Empress herself avoided the adventure or feared the danger after she had sailed so blithely and triumphantly into the hazards of inoculation.

At the end of the journey, the excitement was intense. All the world had crowded into Cherson to see the Empress and her Prince. A room for the night cost a thousand rubles and an egg for breakfast cost a florin. Potiomkin was beside himself with joy. He ordered the gates of the city to be moved several versts farther out and told the Empress this had to be because the throng of visitors had decided to remain as a permanent addition to the population. He believed it himself and the Empress believed it with him. It was May and their dream was at fever heat. Looking out over the harbor of Cherson toward Constantinople they could believe anything.

They believed that the Empress of Russia was going to drive the Turks out of Europe and the rest of Europe was going to thank her for her services. In a kibitka they drove to the mouth of the Bog and the Empress looked across the narrow water at Turkish land beyond and lusted after it. The next day three new Russian ships were launched in the harbor. Upon the blue expanse of water they floated down gently and safely from their staples. A great triumphal arch had been reared, on which was inscribed, in clear beautiful Greek lettering: “Here lies the way to Constantinople.” The whole performance was dramatic and picturesque to the last degree but not exactly diplomatic. The agents of the French government in Constantinople, whose business it was to manœuvre there against the designs of Russia, must have thought that Catherine and Potiomkin were mad. And so they were, a little, but their madness was a great driving force with which mere rational diplomacy would have to reckon seriously.

There was method in the madness of the pair. The Empress employed the same Machiavellian technique in the acquisition of the Crimea that she had already used in Courland and in Poland. Her predatory art was chiefly a matter of simple bribery, a method of bargaining in which no monarch has ever excelled her. The credit, or the blame, for Russia’s acquisition of the Crimea usually goes to Potiomkin. He was at least the flawless negotiator of his lady’s bargain. The Khan was slowly forced into a corner from which he could only escape by running straight into the arms of the Empress. This was where he found himself in April, 1783, just five years after Catherine’s visit to Cherson, while Potiomkin took possession of his peninsula in the name of Russia. The Khan, fleeing the wrath of the Turks, went to Petersburg to live on the pension of a hundred thousand rubles which the Little Mother of all the Russias had generously given him. Catherine had at last won possession of the ancient land of Tauris where Iphigenia, snatched away from her father’s house, once lived and reigned as a priestess among barbarians.

Was it not something like this which had happened to the little Fike of Stettin when she became Catherine of Russia and the priestess of a foreign temple? Catherine and Potiomkin restored the ancient name of Tauris to the peninsula and revived the Greek names of the towns and seaports, hoping to call back the Greeks who had abandoned their homes to the Tartars. To Potiomkin himself the Empress gave the title, Prince of Tauris; and henceforth he swept magnificently through her correspondence as the Taurian. Every mention of his name was invested with the glamour of his heroic exploits.

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