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THE PEACE BETWEEN Russia and Turkey signed in 1774 was precarious. The Turks had never been reconciled to loss of territory in the south and the opening of the Black Sea to Russian merchant vessels. Once Potemkin began building a Black Sea Fleet, Turkish concern mounted. Then Catherine annexed the Crimea. She had made her triumphant personal tour of the south, accompanied by the Austrian emperor, culminating in her inspection of the new naval base at Sebastopol, filled with warships only a two-day sail from Constantinople. This seemed a deliberate provocation. The sultan declared war.
This sudden move caught Russia by surprise. Catherine and Potemkin were both aware of Turkey’s permanent hostility, but both had expected her triumphant journey to the south to intimidate the Turks, not provoke them; certainly, they had not thought it would precipitate an immediate war. For the Turks, however, there was a price to pay for the advantage of striking first: the Turkish declaration of war triggered Russia’s secret treaty with Austria, obliging Joseph II to come to Catherine’s aid. Two weeks after the Turkish declaration, the emperor told Catherine that he would honor their treaty, and in February 1788, Austria declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey’s objectives in the new war were simple: to regain the Crimea and eliminate the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Catherine’s objectives were more layered. Her ultimate purpose was still to drive the Turks from Europe and seize Constantinople, but her immediate effort was directed at the mighty fortress of Ochakov, which controlled the estuary of the Dnieper River. Once this strategic strong point, garrisoned by twenty thousand men, had fallen, Catherine and Potemkin intended their armies to advance westward along the north shore of the Black Sea and occupy the land between the Bug and the Dniester rivers. At that point, they would weigh the prospects for a march on Constantinople.
It was clear that Potemkin would be in supreme command of the Russian war effort. All the necessary reins of power were in his hands. He had been viceroy and commander in chief of the armed forces in the southern provinces for a decade. He had created the cities and the fleet. Moreover, he was president of the War College and was familiar with the military resources available, the disposition of forces, and the administrative and political details involved. He became commander in chief by merit, and even the most senior Russian general, Peter Rumyantsev, agreed to serve under him. Suvorov, the most successful Russian battlefield commander of the age, already was under Potemkin’s command.
Potemkin and Suvorov were both eccentrics. In pure military genius, Suvorov surpassed Potemkin. The prince was a resourceful soldier, but he was cautious and distracted by political affairs. He excelled as a statesman, an administrator, and a military strategist, but he lacked Suvorov’s aptitude for quick, intuitive battlefield decisions. They complemented each other. Potemkin provided Suvorov with the strategy, the troops, and the supplies; Suvorov provided Potemkin and Russia with the victories. Potemkin always insisted that the highest rewards be given to Suvorov, demanding, for example, that he be given the Order of St. Andrew before other, more senior generals.
The Turks began the war with an assault on the Russian fort on Kinburn, the spit of land on the eastern bank of the Dnieper estuary across from Ochakov. Two attempted landings at Kinburn were beaten off by Suvorov, whose battlefield preference was the use of cold steel. “The bullet is a fool, the bayonet a brave lad” was his philosophy. Employing these tactics, the Russians charged the Turks as they disembarked from their boats and slaughtered most of them while their feet were still wet. This Russian victory was offset, however, by the wounding of Suvorov in the battle, and by a subsequent gale, which caught the Russian fleet sailing from Sebastopol; one large ship went down and others were damaged. Dismayed by this harm to his beloved ships, Potemkin spoke of evacuating the Crimea and resigning all his commands. Catherine’s response was indignation. “You are impatient like a five-year-old child, while the affairs of which you are now in charge require an imperturbable patience,” she wrote to him. “You belong to the state and you belong to me. My friend, neither time nor distance, nor anyone in the world will change my thoughts of you and about you.” To which she added her guess (correct, as it turned out) that the storm had damaged the Turkish fleet equally. Potemkin apologized, blaming his loss of nerve on his sensitivity, his headaches, and his hemorrhoids.
When winter ice formed on the Dnieper, both sides suspended campaigning, and it was not until the following May that Potemkin had fifty thousand men positioned before Ochakov. Even then, he seemed not to be in a hurry. Assuming that the fortress must eventually fall, and fearing the losses that would accompany an all-out attempt to storm the ramparts, he deliberately held back an assault and waited for a voluntary surrender. Personally, he was not a coward; during the long siege, he continually exposed himself to danger. Convinced that he was protected by God, he would appear in the line of fire wearing his parade uniform, making himself a prime target. His self-confidence was reinforced when a cannonball killed an officer standing just behind him. To his men, he said, “Children, I forbid you to get up for me and wantonly expose yourselves to Turkish bullets.” Suvorov disagreed with this strategy of caution; he believed in the sudden, decisive blow, accepting whatever losses he must. When Potemkin restrained him from storming Ochakov, saying, “Relying on God’s help, I will try to get it cheaply,” Suvorov replied, “You cannot capture a fortress merely by looking at it.” They continued to admire each other. When Suvorov was wounded, Potemkin wrote, “My dear friend, you alone mean more to me than ten thousand others.” Suvorov replied, “May the Prince Gregory Alexandrovich live long! He is an honest man, he is a good man, he is a great man, and I would be happy to die for him!”
The siege continued; an unpleasant feature was the Turkish practice of beheading Russian prisoners and mounting the heads on stakes along the ramparts. Finally, in December 1788, the second winter of the siege, when the army was suffering from the cold, Potemkin yielded. Promising his men that they could sack the city once the fortress was taken, he organized his assault force into six columns of five thousand men each and sent them forward at four o’clock in the morning on December 6. The assault lasted only four hours and was one of the bloodiest battles in Russian military history; it is said that twenty thousand Russians and thirty thousand Turks died that morning. But with the taking of Ochakov, the path to the Dniester and the Danube lay open.
During the following year, 1789, the whole course of the Dneister fell to the Russian army. The fortress towns of Ackkerman and Bender capitulated without a fight—and Bender alone had a garrison of twenty thousand men. That same year, Belgrade and Bucharest were taken by the Austrians. In February 1790, however, Catherine’s friend and ally Emperor Joseph II died of tuberculosis. Joseph was childless, and he was succeeded by his brother, Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who became Emperor Leopold II. Leopold had little interest in continuing Austria’s war with Turkey. In June 1790, he and the sultan agreed on an armistice, and in August, they concluded a peace, leaving Catherine to fight alone. Despite Austria’s withdrawal, the Russian army reached the lower Danube, capturing one town after another until they reached Izmail, one of the most formidable fortresses in Europe. This massive bastion of towers and ramparts, defended by thirty-five thousand men and 265 cannon, was surrounded by thirty thousand Russians with six hundred cannon. By late November 1790 no progress had been made, and the three Russian generals commanding the army were preparing to withdraw. Worried, Potemkin sent for Suvorov, giving him the freedom to launch an assault or abandon the siege, as he thought best. “Hurry up, my dear friend,” he wrote. “My only hope is in God and your valor. There are too many generals there equal in rank and the result is a kind of indecisive parliament.” Suvorov arrived on December 2, resited the Russian artillery, began a punishing bombardment, and informed Potemkin that he would begin the assault within five days. He called on the Turks to surrender, warning, “If Izmail resists, no one will be spared.” The Turkish commander spurned the demand. The Russian assault began at dawn. The Turks fought on the ramparts, at the gates, and in every street and house. They were overwhelmed by the fury of the Russian attack. Then, as he had promised the army before the assault, Suvorov unleashed his men for three days of looting.
During the years 1788–90, Russia was fighting two wars, in the north as well as the south. In June 1788, Gustavus III, king of Sweden, seeing an opportunity to recover the lands lost to Peter the Great in the early century, succumbed to the temptation offered by the concentration of the Russian army in the south. His objectives were to retake Finland and strip away Russia’s Baltic provinces; if he failed to do this, he melodramatically promised to follow the path of Queen Christina a century before, renounce the throne, convert to Catholicism, and move to Rome. On July 1, 1788, Catherine received his ultimatum, which went beyond demanding the return of all former Swedish territories on the Baltic. He now also insisted that the empress accept Swedish mediation in the Russo-Turkish war and restore to Turkey the Crimea and all other Ottoman territory won since 1768. A final insult in this provocative document referred to the “aid” he had given Russia by not attacking the empress during her first Turkish war and during the Pugachev rebellion. In Stockholm, Gustavus boasted that he would soon be breakfasting in Peterhof, and then go on to St. Peterburg, where he would tear down a statue of Peter the Great and replace it with one of himself. Catherine categorized the ultimatum as “this insane note,” which she had received from “Sir John Falstaff.” To Potemkin, she described the king as donning “breastplate, thigh pieces, armlets and a helmet with an enormous number of plumes.… What have I done that God should choose to chastise me with such a feeble instrument as the king of Sweden?”
In July 1789, Gustavus invaded Finland and sent his fleet up the Gulf of Finland; his army failed on land and his navy was only partially successful at sea. In the end, the war was inconclusive, the more so for Sweden, because Catherine, fully engaged against Turkey, had only to maintain the status quo in the Baltic in order to succeed. In the summer of 1790, Gustavus asked for peace. The Swedish-Russian peace agreement of August 3 left all frontiers exactly where they had been before the king had posted his “insane note.” Catherine was relieved. Writing to Potemkin, who was still fighting the Turks, she said, “We have pulled one paw out of the mud [in the Baltic]. As soon as we pull out the other [in the south], we’ll sing alleluia.”
• • •
The second war with Turkey proved a rich source of colorful stories to add to the legend of Gregory Potemkin. One was the tale of the subterranean headquarters he had constructed for himself while his army was besieging Ochakov. It told of an enormous underground hall of marble, rows of pillars made of lapis lazuli, enormous chandeliers, myriads of candles, huge mirrors, and platoons of lackeys in powdered wigs and gold brocade waiting to serve. It is not much easier to believe the report that Potemkin was keeping an entire theater company and a symphony orchestra of one hundred musicians to provide inspiration or distraction. There are also extravagant accounts of the love affairs Potemkin supposedly conducted while in the Ochakov camp. It was said that he kept a harem of beautiful women, including both Princess Catherine Dolgoruky, whose husband was serving under his command, and the beautiful Prascovia Potemkina, wife of his kinsman Paul Potemkin.
The most remarkable phenomenon at Ochakov, however, was Potemkin himself. The Prince de Ligne, the Austrian field marshal who had joined Catherine and Potemkin on the Crimean journey, was at Russian headquarters to urge Potemkin to storm the fortress in order to draw Turkish troops away from the Austrian campaign in the Balkans. Despite Potemkin’s protracted refusal to attack, Ligne was overwhelmingly impressed by the man before him. To his friend Philippe de Ségur in St. Petersburg, he wrote:
I here behold a Commander in Chief who looks idle and is always busy; who has no other desk than his knees, no other comb than his fingers; constantly reclined on his couch, yet sleeping neither in night nor in daytime. A cannon shot, to which he himself is not exposed, disturbs him with the idea that it costs the life of some of his soldiers. Trembling for others, brave himself, alarmed at the approach of danger, frolicsome when it surrounds him, dull in the midst of pleasure, surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician, not revengeful, asking pardon for a pain he has inflicted, quickly repairing an injustice, thinking he loves God when he fears the Devil; waving one hand to the females that please him, and with the other making the sign of the cross; receiving numberless presents from his sovereign and distributing them immediately to others; preferring prodigality in giving, to regularity in paying; prodigiously rich and not worth a farthing; easily prejudiced in favor of or against anything; talking divinity to his generals and tactics to his bishops; never reading, but pumping everyone with whom he converses; uncommonly affable or extremely savage, the most attractive or most repulsive of manners; concealing under the appearance of harshness, the greatest benevolence of heart, like a child, wanting to have everything, or, like a great man, knowing how to do without; gnawing his fingers, or apples, or turnips; scolding or laughing; engaged in wantonness or in prayers, summoning twenty aides de camp and saying nothing to any of them, not caring for cold, though he appears unable to exist without furs; always in his shirt without pants, or in rich regimentals; barefoot or in slippers; almost bent double when he is at home, and tall, erect, proud, handsome, noble, majestic when he shows himself to his army like Agamemnon in the midst of the monarchs of Greece. What then is his magic? Genius, natural abilities, an excellent memory, artifice without craft, the art of conquering every heart; much generosity, graciousness, and justice in his rewards; and a consummate knowledge of mankind.
There is another story related to this Russian war with Turkey—this one is true—which centers on a figure few connect with Catherine of Russia or Gregory Potemkin. This figure is John Paul Jones, whom Americans know as the father of the United States Navy.
Jones began as nobody and he died alone, rejected, and, once again, nobody. In the interim, however, he achieved the fame he desperately craved. He was born John Paul—Jones was added later—an obscure, impoverished gardener’s son on the bank of Solway Firth in Scotland. At thirteen, he went to sea as an unpaid cabin boy aboard a merchant vessel bound for Barbados and Virginia. In 1766, at nineteen, he joined an African slave ship as third mate and remained in the slave trade for four years. At twenty-three, he became master of a merchant vessel on which his seamanship was unchallenged but men were wary of his prickly temper. He was slight and wiry, five feet five inches tall, with hazel eyes, a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and a strong cleft chin. He dressed neatly, more like a naval officer than a merchant captain, and always wore a sword. This blade was used in the West Indies to run through the ringleader of a group of mutineers in his crew. Uncertain whether the law would applaud him for suppression of mutiny or try him for murder, he changed his name from John Paul to John Jones and sailed on the next ship leaving the harbor.
In the summer of 1775, Jones was in Philadelphia seeking a place in the infant navy of the rebellious American colonies; he became the first naval first lieutenant commissioned by the Continental Congress. A year later, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he sailed for Europe, hoping to find a frigate to command. The French government, spurred by news of British general John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, was moving toward full recognition of America’s independence, and Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, became Jones’s patron. With Franklin’s help, Jones took command of a French East Indiaman, a travel-worn merchant ship of nine hundred tons. Jones armed her with thirty cannon and named her Bonhomme Richard, after Franklin’s famous work Poor Richard’s Almanack.
On August 14, 1779, Jones sailed on the voyage that made him famous. Off the North Sea Yorkshire coast, he encountered a forty-four-ship Baltic convoy laden with naval stores for England, under escort by a fast, maneuverable, fifty-gun British frigate, HMSSerapis, commanded by a veteran Royal Navy captain. Jones attacked. The battle, beginning at 6:30 p.m., continued for four hours under a harvest moon. The two ships, locked together yardarm to yardarm by American grappling hooks, pounded each other with shot. At one point amid the carnage, the British captain called across his deck to Jones, “Has your ship struck her colors?” He was referring to the signal of surrender. Someone heard—or perhaps a writer sitting at his desk later imagined—Jones call back, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The battle continued until, with Bonhomme Richard sinking and Serapis on fire, the British captain suddenly struck. Jones transferred his wounded and the rest of his crew to his captured prize, put out the fire, and returned to France. In Paris, he was a hero. At Versailles, Louis XVI made him a chevalier of the Military Order of Merit and presented him with a gold-hilted sword. His celebrity and self-confidence attracted women and he had a succession of affairs, one of which apparently resulted in a small, unexpected son.
Jones never gave up wanting to become an American admiral, but no American naval officer was promoted to that rank until the American Civil War. He returned to Paris, and in December 1787, Thomas Jefferson, who had succeeded Franklin as American minister to France, told him that the Russian minister in Paris wished to know whether Jones would be interested in a high command in the Russian navy: command of the Black Sea Fleet with an admiral’s rank. Jones grasped the offer: if not an American admiral, perhaps a Russian admiral.
The new admiral arrived in St. Petersburg on May 4, and Catherine wrote to Grimm, “Paul Jones has just arrived here; he has entered my service. I saw him today. I think he will suit our purpose admirably.” Jones’s view of her was equally optimistic: “I was entirely captivated and put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage. I demanded but one favor: that she would never condemn me without hearing me.” He traveled south and met Potemkin at Ekaterinoslav. Assuming that he was to take supreme command of the Black Sea Fleet, he passed through Kherson to the Liman estuary. There, to his dismay, he found himself in the company of three other rear admirals, including the prince of Nassau-Siegen, none of whom was willing to concede superiority in rank to Jones. Potemkin refused to intervene.
The theater of operations was the Liman estuary, thirty miles long, nowhere more than eight miles wide, and nowhere more than eighteen feet deep; large warships, whose movements were subject to the direction of the wind, found it difficult to maneuver without running aground. Jones was given command of the squadron of larger ships that included one ship of the line and eight frigates. If his enemy, the Turks, decided to enter these narrow, congested waters in force, they could bring as many as eighteen ships of the line and forty frigates, along with numerous oar-propelled galleys, rowed by slaves chained to their seats. The Russians also had a flotilla of twenty-five oar-propelled, shallow-draft galleys, but their commander, the prince of Nassau-Siegen, was independent of Jones, and took orders only from Potemkin. A battle with the Turks on June 5 was inconclusive, and afterward Russian commanders argued about tactics and credit for their success in forcing the Turks to withdraw. Potemkin sided with Nassau-Siegen. “It is to you alone that I attribute victory,” he wrote. To Catherine, Potemkin wrote, “Nassau was the real hero and to him belongs the victory.” The battle resumed ten days later, and Jones found himself in difficulty—not with the Turks, but with the Russians. He did not speak Russian, and there was no agreed-on method of signaling between his ships; the admiral had to have himself rowed in a small boat so that he could shout instructions to his captains; even these had to be given through an interpreter. Nevertheless, he won; the Turkish flagship ran aground and was destroyed. Nassau-Siegen took the credit. “Our victory is complete,” he wrote to his wife. “My flotilla did it. Oh what a poor man is Paul Jones! I am master of the Liman. Poor Paul Jones! No place for him on this great day!” Throughout his life, Jones had displayed an intense desire to have his merit recognized. He wrote to Potemkin, “I hope to be subjected to no more humiliation and to find myself soon in the situation that was promised me when I was invited to enter Her Imperial Majesty’s Navy.” Instead, Potemkin relieved Jones of command, explaining to the empress that “nobody wished to serve under him.” By the end of October, Jones was back in St. Petersburg, where he was received by Catherine and told to wait for an assignment with the Baltic Fleet.
He waited through the winter, passing time with his friend the French ambassador, Philippe de Ségur. During the first week of April 1789, the capital was startled by a report that Rear Admiral Jones had attempted to rape a ten-year-old girl, the daughter of a German immigrant woman who had a dairy business. The police had been told that the girl was peddling butter when Jones’s manservant told her that his master wanted to purchase some and led her to Jones’s apartment. There, the girl said, she found her customer, whom she had never seen before, dressed in a white uniform wearing a gold star and a red ribbon. He bought some butter, locked the door, knocked her down, dragged her into his bedroom, and assaulted her. She ran home and told her mother, who went to the police. Ségur defended his friend, both at the time and later in his memoirs. He said that the young girl had called on Jones to ask whether he had any linen to mend. He said no. “She then indulged in some indecent gestures,” Ségur quotes Jones as saying. “I advised her not to enter on so vile a career, gave her some money and dismissed her.” As soon as she left his front door, the girl ripped her dress, screamed “Rape!” and threw herself into the arms of her mother, who, conveniently, was standing nearby.
Two weeks later, Jones wrote to Potemkin that he had learned that the mother had admitted that a gentleman with decorations had given her money to tell a damaging story about the American. She confessed that her daughter was twelve, not ten, and had been seduced by Jones’s manservant three months before she visited the admiral. Further, Jones said that immediately after the alleged rape, rather than rushing home to her mother, the girl had continued peddling butter. “The charge against me is an unworthy imposture,” Jones continued to Potemkin. “Shall it be said that in Russia, a wretched woman who abandoned her husband, stole away her daughter, lives in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched, lecherous life, has found credit enough on a simple complaint unsupported by any proof to affect the honor of a general officer of reputation who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire? I love women, I confess, and the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force is horrible to me. I cannot even contemplate gratifying my passions without their consent, and I give you my word as a soldier and an honest man, that if the girl in question has not passed through hands other than mine, she is still a virgin.”
There was, however, a third version. Before talking to Ségur or writing Potemkin, Jones had informed the chief of police: “The accusation against me is false. It was invented by the mother of a depraved girl who came to my house several times and with whom I have often badine,* always giving her money, but whose virginity I have positively not taken. I thought her to be several years older than Your Excellency says she is and each time she came to my house she lent herself very willingly to do all that a man would want of her. The last time passed off like the rest and she went out appearing content and calm, and having been in no way abused. If one has checked on her being deflowered, I declare that I am not the author of it, and I shall easily prove the falseness of this assertion.” This letter was supported by affidavits from three witnesses who swore that they saw the girl leave Jones’s apartment quietly without blood, bruises, torn clothing, or tears.
In any case, if not a crime, this encounter between a restless, lonely, middle-aged man and an underage girl was tawdry. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but Jones was ostracized by St. Petersburg society. Ségur believed that Jones had been duped and that the prince of Nassau-Siegen was responsible. “Paul Jones is no more guilty than I,” the ambassador declared, “and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation through the accusation of a woman whose husband certifies that she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.” Criminal charges against Jones were dropped, but the offer of a command in the Baltic Fleet also evaporated. (This command went to Nassau-Siegen, who promptly lost a naval battle to Sweden.) In lieu of outright dismissal, Catherine granted Jones a two-year leave of absence. On June 26, she gave him her hand to kiss in a public farewell and nodded a cool “Bon voyage.”
What remained of his life was brief and anticlimactic. Never again did he command a ship, much less a fleet. Still in his early forties, he lived alone in Paris during the first years of the French Revolution; neither Gouverneur Morris, the American minister, nor Lafayette found time to see him. He died on July 18, 1792, two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, of nephritis and bronchial pneumonia. After his death, Gouverneur Morris refused to allot public funds for a funeral or to save Jones from a pauper’s grave. Instead, the French National Assembly, which remembered him as a hero, paid for what little was done.
A century passed. In 1899, the American ambassador to France, Horace Porter, used his own money to search for Jones’s body. It was found in a lead coffin, under a pavement, in an obscure cemetery outside Paris. When Theodore Roosevelt was president and creating a great American navy became one of his passions, he sent four American armored cruisers to Cherbourg to carry Jones back across the Atlantic to his adopted country. In 1913, 121 years after his death, the body of John Paul Jones, proclaimed to be the father of the United States Navy, was placed in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of the U.S. Naval Academy chapel. Since then, every midshipman has been taught Jones’s words, whether they were exactly his words or not: “I have not yet begun to fight.”
By the summer of 1791, the Russian army had forced the Turks to the peace table. In the treaty concluded at Jassy in Moldavia in December 1791, Catherine’s greatest goals were not achieved: the Turks kept Constantinople, and the crescent remained atop the Haigia Sophia; there was no Greek empire for Grand Duke Constantine. Still, Catherine gained much. The Turks formally ceded the Crimea, the mouth of the Dnieper with Ochakov, and the territory between the Bug and the Dniester rivers, making the Dniester Russia’s western frontier. Formal acquisition by treaty of the naval base at Sebastopol and Turkish acceptance of the fleet based there provided Russia with a permanent naval presence on the Black Sea. The subsequent development of the commercial port of Odessa provided an outlet for the export of large quantities of Russian wheat.
The second Turkish war had been Potemkin’s war; he had borne responsibility for strategy, command, and logistics. Catherine had sustained him. She was the more stable, avoiding his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism, his doubts, fears, and occasional despair. Neither could have achieved victory without the other. When military operations were over, Potemkin turned the negotiations at Jassy over to others and headed back to St. Petersburg, where Catherine was preparing a conqueror’s welcome. Even as he traveled north, however, Potemkin was worried. For the first time in seventeen years, Catherine had acquired a new favorite of whom he vehemently disapproved: a handsome young man named Platon Zubov. Poorly educated, he was vain and greedy for wealth, estates, honors, and titles, not only for himself but also for his father and his three brothers; all soon became counts. The most prominent men of the court and the empire began lining up to humble themselves at his morning levee. When the doors to his reception room opened, they were likely to reveal Zubov stretched out in a lounge chair before his mirror, having his hair dressed and powdered. He could be wearing a silk colored frock coat sewn with jewels, white satin trousers, and green ankle-length boots. Conspicuously ignoring the ministers, generals, courtiers, foreigners, and petitioners who stood motionless and silent before him, he paid attention only to his pet monkey. When, with a gesture, the master cued the creature’s performance, it leaped across the furniture, hung from the chandeliers, and finally jumped onto a visitor’s shoulder to pull off his wig or muss his hair. When Zubov laughed, everyone laughed.
Potemkin knew that he and Zubov would now be competing for the empress’s confidence. So far, he had remained foremost; Catherine consulted him on everything; she told him that if war were to break out in Poland, he was to take supreme command of the Russian army. Nevertheless, he was uneasy. “Zub” means “tooth” in Russian. As his carriage rolled north to the capital, Potemkin repeatedly reminded himself, “I must pull out the tooth.”
Arriving in St. Petersburg on February 28, 1791, Potemkin quickly demonstrated that his character had not changed. When Kyril Razumovsky called to tell him that he was giving a ball in Potemkin’s honor, Potemkin met his visitor wearing a tattered dressing gown and nothing underneath. Razumovsky good-naturedly retaliated a few days later by publicly receiving the prince wearing a nightgown with a nightcap on his head. Potemkin laughed and embraced his host.
He turned to the problem of Zubov, which, he believed, had to be solved as much to shield Catherine as for his own reasons. He saw that he could no longer use his political power as he had done with Yermolov; if this young man were to be displaced, it must be done more subtly. The best approach, he concluded, would be to re-create the aura of their old romance. Surprisingly, he partially succeeded. In a letter to Grimm on May 21, Catherine spoke of Potemkin with the same enthusiasm that she had years before.
When one looks at the Prince-Marshal Potemkin, one must say that his victories, his successes, beautify him. He has returned to us from the army as handsome as the day, as gay as a lark, as brilliant as a star, more witty than ever, no longer biting his nails, giving feasts every day, and behaving as a host with a polish and courtesy by which everybody is enchanted.
Potemkin’s success was incomplete, however. It was obvious that Catherine wanted her relationship with Zubov to continue. The competition between the two men became a standoff: Potemkin openly displayed his contempt for Zubov, who, in return, smiled and bided his time. Meanwhile, when Potemkin’s bills came due, Catherine paid them, instructing the treasury that it was to treat Prince Potemkin’s expenses as if they were her own.
Potemkin tried to distract himself by giving and attending receptions, dinners, and balls. The evening that surpassed anything ever seen in Russia occurred on April 28, 1791, at Potemkin’s Tauride Palace. Three thousand guests had been invited; all were present when the empress arrived. The prince was at the door, wearing a scarlet tailcoat with solid gold buttons, each button encasing a large solitaire diamond. Once the empress was seated, twenty-four couples, including Catherine’s two grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, entered to dance a quadrille. Afterward, the host led his guest through the rooms of the palace. In one, poets were reciting verse; in another, a choir was singing; in still another, a French comedy was being performed.
At the end of the evening, following a ball and an extravagant supper, Catherine and Potemkin withdrew alone to the winter garden to walk between the fountains and marble statues. When they spoke, he mentioned Zubov; she did not reply. Catherine stayed until two in the morning, later than she had ever remained at a party. Escorted to the door by Potemkin, she stopped to thank him. They said goodbye. Overwhelmed, he threw himself at her feet; when he looked up, both were in tears. After she left, Potemkin stood quietly for a few minutes, then walked alone to his room.
At five o’clock in the morning on July 24, 1791, Potemkin left Tsarskoe Selo for the last time. He was already tired, and the journey to the south further exhausted him. He was still deeply unhappy about Zubov, and, as if Catherine did not realize how much she was wounding him, she continued to fill her letters with talk of her young lover: “The child sends his greetings.… The child thinks that you are more intelligent … and far more amusing and pleasant than all those who surround you.” Years later, when both Potemkin and Catherine were dead, “the child” revealed his true feelings about his rival: “I could not remove him from my path, and it was essential to remove him because the empress always met his wishes halfway and simply feared him as though he were an exacting husband. She loved only me, but she often pointed to Potemkin as an example for me to follow. It is his fault that I am not twice as rich as I am.”
Sunk in melancholy, Potemkin began by traveling slowly—the jolting of the carriage was painful—then, suddenly, he demanded speed. Hurtling down dusty roads and through towns and villages, he reached Jassy only eight days after leaving the Neva. The journey drained his declining strength; on arriving, he wrote to Catherine that he felt the the touch of the hand of death. His illness showed symptoms of the malaria that had infected him in the Crimea in 1783. Traveling south, he refused to take quinine and other medicines prescribed by the three doctors accompanying him; like Catherine, he was convinced that the best way to recover from illness was to let the body itself solve the problem. Instead of dieting, as the doctors recommended, he ate huge meals and drank heavily. To ward off pain, he wrapped his head in wet towels. When he reached Jassy, his staff sent for his niece, Sashenka Branitsky, hoping that she could persuade him to be reasonable and accept treatment. She hurried from Poland. In the middle of September, he had an attack of fever and shivered uncontrollably for twelve hours. He wrote to Catherine, “Please send me a Chinese dressing gown. I badly need one.” The Russian ambassador in Vienna, Andrei Razumovsky, wrote suggesting that he send “the first pianist and one of the best composers in Germany” to soothe him. The offer was made and the composer accepted, but Potemkin did not have time to respond and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not make the journey.
Oppressed by the humid air of Jassy, he twice drove out seeking country air, only to give up and come back. In St. Petersburg, Catherine waited for messages and letters and asked Countess Branitsky to write to her every day. On Potemkin’s behalf, Catherine reversed her position on doctors and medicines. “Take that which in the doctors’ estimation will give you relief; and having taken it, I beg you also to save yourself from food and drink that opposes the medicine.” With this support, Sashenka and the doctors finally persuaded the sick man to take medicine. For a few days he seemed better. Then, shivering and sleeplessness returned. Saying that he was “burning up,” he demanded more wet towels, drank cold liquids, and had bottles of eau de cologne poured over his head. He asked that all windows be opened and, when that failed to cool him, insisted on being carried into the garden. Every day, he asked repeatedly whether any messages had come from the empress; when a new letter arrived, he wept and read it, then reread it and kissed it repeatedly. When state documents were brought and read to him, he could barely scribble his signature at the bottom. It was clear that he was dying; Potemkin himself realized this. He refused to take quinine. “I’m not going to recover. I have been ill for a long time … God’s will be done. Pray for my soul and do not forget me when I am gone. I never wished anybody any harm. To make people happy has always been my desire. I am not a bad man and not the evil genius of our mother, the Empress Catherine, as has been said.” He asked for the Last Sacrament, and once it had been given, he relaxed. A courier from Moscow brought another letter from Catherine, a fur coat, and the silk dressing gown he had asked for. He cried. He said to Sashenka, “Tell me frankly, do you think I shall recover?” She assured him that he would. He took her hands and caressed them. “Good hands,” he said. “They have often soothed me.”
Gradually, the passionate, ambitious man, still only fifty-two, became calm; those around him watched him dying in serenity. He begged everyone to forgive him for any pain he might have caused them. They must promise to convey to the empress his humblest gratitude for everything she had done for him. When a new message arrived from her he wept. He agreed to try quinine but could not hold it down. He began to faint; he was conscious only half the time; he felt that he was suffocating. He wrote to Catherine, “Matushka, oh how sick I am!” He asked to be moved from Jassy to Nikolaev; its cooler air might do him good. On the day he started out on the journey, he dictated a note to Catherine: “Your most gracious Majesty. I have no more strength to endure my torments. My only remaining salvation is to leave this town and I have ordered myself be taken to Nikolaev. I do not know what is to become of me.”
At eight on the morning of October 4, he was carried to his carriage. He went a few miles and said that he could not breathe. The carriage stopped. Carried into a house, he fell asleep. After three hours’ rest, he talked cheerfully until midnight. He tried to sleep again but could not. At daybreak, he asked that the journey resume. The procession had gone only seven miles when he ordered it to stop. “This will be enough,” he said. “There is no point in going on. Take me out of the carriage and put me down. I want to die in the field.” A Persian carpet was unrolled on the grass. Potemkin was placed on it and covered with the silk gown Catherine had sent him. Everyone searched for a gold coin to close his eye in the Orthodox fashion, but no gold coin was found. An escorting Cossack offered a copper five-kopeck piece and with this his eye was covered. At midday on Sunday, October 5, 1791, he died. A message went to the empress: “His Serene Highness the prince is no longer on this earth.”
At five in the evening on October 12, a courier bringing the news reached the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Catherine collapsed. “Now I have no one left on whom I can rely,” she cried. “How can anybody replace Potemkin? Everything will be different now. He was a true nobleman.” The days passed and her secretary could only report: “Tears and despair … tears … more tears.”