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GREGORY POTEMKIN had fought in Catherine’s first war against Turkey, from 1769 to 1774, which had pushed Russia’s border to the Black Sea. He understood that the acquisition of new territory was not enough; the new possessions also had to be protected and developed. The most lasting part of his life work took place in these southern regions, where he took the dreams and plans he had shared with Catherine and turned them into reality.
Catherine had given him power—power subject only to her own—in many areas. Potemkin then proved what he could do as an organizer, administrator, and builder. Whether it was a matter of government, diplomacy, a military campaign, the planning of a trip, or simply a theatrical performance, concert, or parade, it was Gregory who ruled, managed, negotiated, produced, and directed. The primary focus of his work was in the south, where the sum of his accomplishments during the thirteen years that separated the first and second Turkish wars was extraordinary.
Potemkin ruled southern Russia like an emperor, although he always did so in the name of the empress in St. Petersburg. His most visible and permanent achievements were the cities and towns he built. Kherson, on the lower Dnieper River, was the first. Conceived as a port and a place to build warships, he began in 1778 with docks and a shipyard. Twenty miles upriver from the Black Sea, Kherson’s access to it lay through the Dneiper estuary called the Liman. The Russians controlled the eastern bank, where a narrow sand spit named Kinburn extended into the water; the Turks controlled the western bank with their massive fortress at Ochakov. Despite this formidable obstacle, Potemkin decided to build. Thousands of workers were brought to Kherson, and the first warship keels were laid down in 1779. In 1780, he launched a sixty-four-gun ship of the line and five frigates. When Kyril Razumovsky visited Kherson in 1782, he found stone buildings, a fortress, barracks housing ten thousand soldiers, and many Greek merchant ships anchored in the harbor. In 1783, after Catherine had annexed the Crimea, Potemkin began constructing a second naval base on the peninsula’s south shore. Called Sebastopol, it lay on a deep, protected bay that offered anchorage for scores of ships.
In 1786, Potemkin designed and began to build a new capital for this southern empire. The site he chose was on a bend in the Dnieper at a point where the river was almost a mile wide. He named it Ekaterinoslav (Catherine’s Glory). He planned a cathedral, a university, law courts, a musical conservatory, public parks and gardens, and twelve factories for making silks and wool. In 1789, he founded Nikolaev, another seaport and shipyard twenty miles upriver from Kherson. And once the Turkish war was over, Potemkin chose the site and made plans to build the city that is now Odessa; he died before this work began.
As he was transforming the southern provinces, Potemkin was also reforming the army and taking control of Russia’s foreign affairs. In February 1784, Catherine promoted him to the presidency of the College of War, with the rank of field marshal. He immediately introduced practical reforms: Russian soldiers were to wear the simplest, most comfortable uniforms, with loose tunics, wide breeches, boots that did not pinch, and easy-fitting helmets. He ordered soldiers to stop cutting, curling, and powdering their hair. “Is that a solider’s business?” he asked. “They have no personal valets.” A year later, he took control of the staff of the Black Sea Fleet. In his hands, thereafter, he had complete authority over everything relating to Russia’s relationship with Turkey, except the ultimate decision of war or peace.
As Russian influence extended over eastern and central Europe, the efforts of other states to win Russia’s friendship and support intensified. Britain had tried to rent Russian soldiers to assist in defeating her American colonies, and Catherine had rejected this request. In the spring of 1778, Britain suffered a heavier blow when France, eager to avenge the loss of colonial possessions to England in the Seven Years’ War, recognized the independence of the rebellious American colonies. By June, England and France were at war again. London sent a new ambassador to St. Petersburg. He was James Harris, later Sir James Harris, later still Earl of Malmesbury. Born in 1746, the son of a distinguished Greek scholar, Harris was only thirty-two, but his thatch of thick, prematurely white hair gave him a reassuring air of maturity. Already, he had served as British head of mission in Madrid and as minister in Berlin, where he had negotiated successfully with Frederick II. Now he was assigned to bring Russia into an offensive-defensive alliance with Great Britain. In St. Petersburg, Harris met Panin and Catherine; both were friendly but diplomatically noncommittal. Panin, in fact, was strongly opposed to an English alliance, and Catherine had no desire to involve Russia in a British war with France and her ally Spain. Harris was instructed to push ahead with a new request for Russian assistance in the struggle against “His Majesty’s misguided subjects in America.” To smooth this path, Harris was authorized to give formal assurance that England had no objection to Russian expansion along the Black Sea.
Harris had been negotiating with Panin, but, in August 1779, eighteen months after his arrival in St Petersburg, the ambassador concluded that Panin’s stature at court had become so diminished that little could be hoped for from him. On arriving, Harris had been wary of Potemkin, but he transferred his approach to the prince, whom he described as “such a mixture of wit, levity, learning, and humor, as I never met in the same man.” In July 1789, Potemkin arranged an informal meeting between Harris and the empress after an evening card game. As Harris reported their conversation:
She had the strongest desire to help us; she had withheld it from reluctance to plunging her empire into fresh troubles and probably ending her reign in a state of war.… She had the highest opinion of our national strength and spirit, and did not doubt that we should overmatch the French and Spaniards. Her Imperial Majesty then discoursed on the American war, lamented at our not having been able to stop it at the beginning, and hinted at the possibility of restoring peace by our renouncing our struggle with our colonies. I asked her, if they belonged to her, and a foreign power was to propose peace on such terms, whether she would accept it. “I would rather lose my head,” she said with great vehemence.
Harris realized that Catherine was conflicted: she admired England, but she was not sorry to see the British government distracted by its new war with France. An over-powerful England was not in the interests of the Russian empire; the empress feared that England might alter its policy and oppose Russia’s continued expansion along the Black Sea. Harris did not report this to London, but he also realized that if Catherine ever led Russia into war again, it would not be against France. It would be against the Turks.
Emperor Joseph II of Austria was nurturing his own ambitions regarding the Turks. Eager to repair the damage and humiliation inflicted on his country and his mother by Frederick II’s seizure of Silesia, his goal was the acquisition of Turkish territories in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean. In an alliance of Austria and Russia, he saw the means of achieving this. In pursuit of this goal, the emperor asked to pay a personal visit to Catherine at Mogilev, a Russian town near the Austrian frontier. Catherine, understanding that in any future war with Turkey, Austria would be a far more useful ally than Prussia, instructed Potemkin to make the arrangements.
In May 1789, the two monarchs met in Mogilev. Catherine was pleased to be receiving this particular guest. Although he was traveling incognito as Count Falkenstein, Joseph was the co-ruler, with his mother, of the possessions of the ancient house of Hapsburg, and he was also the Holy Roman Emperor. His effort to come to Russia was unprecedented among foreign sovereigns; none had ever visited in Russia’s history. At Catherine’s request, the emperor accompanied her from Mogilev back to St. Petersburg, where he remained for three weeks, spending five days at Tsarskoe Selo. Because he was traveling incognito with no retinue of courtiers and attendants, and because he preferred to sleep at ordinary inns, a palace annex was transformed into an inn and servants were costumed accordingly. Catherine’s English-Hanoverian gardener, John Busch, whose first language was German, assumed the role of innkeeper. By the time Joseph left, a regular correspondence and the foundations of a military alliance had been agreed to between the emperor and the empress. The subject of their discussions was the dismemberment and partition of the European territories of the Ottoman Empire. Catherine’s vision was of the restoration of a Greek empire under her grandson Constantine, with Constantinople as its capital. Joseph coveted the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans, along with as much as possible in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean.
Joseph’s visit to Mogilev and St. Petersburg occurred in May and June 1780. In November of that year, his mother, Empress Maria Theresa, died at sixty-three, and thirty-nine-year-old Joseph became the sole ruler of Austria and the Hapsburg empire. In May 1781, Joseph signed a treaty with Catherine pledging Austria’s aid to Russia in the event of war with Turkey. The signing of this treaty marked the end of Nikita Panin’s influence on Russian foreign policy. Always an advocate of alliance with Prussia against Austria, he declared that “he could not soil his hand” by putting his name on such a treaty, and he asked permission to retire to the country. In September 1781, the aging counselor who, nineteen years before, had helped put Catherine on the throne, was dismissed.
Potemkin stepped forward in Panin’s place. The British ambassador, James Harris, still struggling to arrange a Russian alliance with England, persuaded King George III to write a warm personal letter to Catherine, but even this failed to persuade her. When Harris pressed him, Potemkin explained, “You have chosen an unlucky moment. The favorite [Lanskoy] lies dangerously ill; the cause of his illness and the uncertainty of recovery have so entirely unhinged the empress that she is incapable of employing her thoughts on any subject, and all ideas of ambition, of glory, of dignity, are absorbed in this one passion. Exhausted, she avoids everything involving activity or exertion.”
Lanskoy worsened. Harris himself developed influenza and jaundice; then Potemkin fell ill for three weeks. When this tide of illness began to ebb, Potemkin told Harris that the empress still remained partial to England. Catherine herself told Harris, “The interest I take in everything that concerns your country has made me resolve in my mind every kind of means by which I could assist you. I would do everything to serve you except involve myself in a war. I would be answerable to my subjects, my successor and perhaps to all Europe for the consequences of such a conduct.” Her position regarding an English alliance remained unchanged.
England did not give up. In October 1780, Lord Stormont at the Foreign Office instructed Harris to go back to Catherine and offer “some object worthy of her notice, a cession of territory of a nature to increase her commerce and naval strength that would persuade the empress to conclude an alliance with the king, assisting us against France and Spain, and our revolted colonies.” Harris replied, “Prince Potemkin, though he did not directly say so, clearly gave me to understand that the only cession which would induce the empress to become our ally was that of Minorca.” This island in the western Mediterranean with a fortified harbor and naval base, Port Mahon, was a treasured British possession. Harris asked for an interview with Catherine. Potemkin, arranging it, advised him, “Flatter her as much as you can. You cannot use too much unction, but flatter her for what she ought to be, not for what she is.”
When he saw the empress, Harris said: “You can demand of us whatever you like. We could not refuse anything to Your Imperial Majesty if we only knew what could please you.” Catherine remained determined not to become involved in England’s war with France, Spain, and America. The dialogue then returned to Harris and Potemkin, both still hopeful that something could be salvaged
“What can you cede to us?” Potemkin asked Harris.
“We have extensive possessions in America, in the East Indies, and on the Sugar Islands [in the Carribean],” Harris replied.
Potemkin shook his head. “You would ruin us if you gave us distant colonies. Our ships can scarce get out of the Baltic. How would you have them cross the Atlantic? If you give us anything, give us something nearer home.… If you would cede Minorca, I promise you, I believe I could lead the empress any lengths.”
Harris reported to London: “I told him … that I believed the cession he required to be impossible.”
Potemkin had replied: “So much the worse. It would insure us to you forever.”
Despite the magnitude of the gift requested and the pain that would be involved in giving it, the British government went ahead and prepared a draft of the terms of alliance that Britain wanted: “The empress of Russia shall effectuate the restoration of peace between Great Britain, France, and Spain.… It shall be an express condition that the French immediately evacuate Rhode Island and every other part of His Majesty’s colonies in North America. No agreement whatever shall be made with respect to His Majesty’s rebellious subjects.”
Catherine still would not agree. She remained convinced that the alliance treaty was an attempt to draw her and her subjects into a European war. When Potemkin went back to her, she told him: “La mariée est trop belle; on veut me tromper” (“The bride is too beautiful; they wish to deceive me”). She emphasized her friendly feelings toward England but otherwise rejected the entire proposition. By the end of 1781, the issue was moot. In December of that year, the British army in North America surrendered when Lord Cornwallis handed his sword to George Washington at Yorktown. In March 1782, the Lord North government fell and was replaced by a Whig ministry. The idea of a Russian alliance was dropped.
Catherine had another reason for rejecting a treaty with England: her rapprochement with Austria had led to a formal alliance. On the strength of this alliance, she and Potemkin were preparing for the annexation of the Crimea, which both considered far more important than the acquisition of Minorca. It was Potemkin who had proposed and managed this peaceful annexation. The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi, which ended the first Turkish war in 1774, had established the independence of the Crimea, but the khanate still remained a nominal vassal state of the Ottoman sultan. Potemkin worried that geographically the peninsula split Russia’s Black Sea possessions, and he explained to Catherine the difficulty of guarding her southern frontier while the Crimea remained outside her empire. “The acquisition of the Crimea can make us neither stronger nor richer, but it will ensure our peace,” he said. In July 1783, Catherine announced the annexation of the Crimean peninsula into the Russian empire. Potemkin managed this acquisition without a war or a battle, although it came at a long-term personal cost: in the Crimea, he acquired a severe case of malaria that never entirely left him during the rest of his life.