A Bokharian of Siberia
A Bokharian of Siberia
It was the Cossacks of the Jaik, cruelly repressed after their insurrection in 1766, who were to provide the rebel serfs with a leader in the person of Emilian Pugatchev, a raskolnik who had escaped from prison to Siberia. Passing himself off as Peter III, who had been rescued from the hands of the executioner, he raised the banner of the Holsteins and declared his intention of marching on St. Petersburg to punish his wife and place his son on the throne. With a following of but three hundred men he laid siege to the little fortress of Jaik. All the troops that were sent against him passed over to his side. He caused all the officers to be hanged, and put to death all the nobles in the towns through which he passed, capturing by means of such terrorisation several small fortresses on the steppes. By his intimates who knew the secret of his origin, he was treated in private as a simple Cossack, but thepopulations were deceived and received him with the ringing of bells. Certain Polish confederates who were captives in these regions organised for him a body of artillery. For nearly a year he kept Kazan and Orenburg in a state of terror, defeating all the generals that were sent against him. Peasants began to rise against the nobles, Tatars and other tribes against the Russians, until the bitterest of social wars was unchained in the whole Volga basin. Moscow with its one hundred thousand serfs was thrown into agitation; among the lower classes there was talk of liberty and extermination of the masters. Catherine II charged Alexander Bibikov to check the progress of sedition.
Bibikov was aghast, on arriving at Kazan, to see the extent of the demoralisation. He set about reassuring the nobles and soothing the lower classes, but in letters to his wife he wrote: “Conditions are frightful, I fear all will go ill!” Without great confidence in his own troops he decided to attack the impostor, whom he recognised as merely an instrument in the hands of the Cossacks. He defeated Pugatchev twice, once at Tatistchev and once at Kargula, dispersing his army and seizing his cannon. Bibikov died in the full flush of victory, but his lieutenants, Michelson, Collongues, and Galitzin, continued to pursue the vanquished pretender. Hunted to the lower Volga, Pugatchev suddenly ascended the river and pillaged and burned Kazan, but was afterwards defeated on the Kazanka. Descending the river he entered Saransk, Samara, and Tsaritsin, and though hotly pursued by his enemies took time to establish there new municipalities. Meanwhile the populations on the route to Moscow were awaiting his coming, and to meet this expectation innumerable Peter III’s and Pugatchevs arose, who at the head of furious bands went about assassinating proprietors and burning châteaux. It was high time that Pugatchev should be brought to justice. Tracked down between the Volga and the Jaik by Michelson and the indefatigable Suvarov, he was taken to Moscow, where the people were given the spectacle of his execution.
[1775A.D.]
These troubles had been a warning to Catherine II, and she still bore them in mind when she destroyed the Zaparogian Republic in 1775. The valiant tribes of the Dnieper, expulsed under Peter the Great and recalled under Anna Ivanovna, no longer recognised their former territory of Ukraine. Southern Russia, freed from the incursions of the Tatars, was rapidly being colonised; cities were springing up on all sides and the vast herb-covered steppes were becoming transformed into cultivated fields. The Zaparogians were highly displeased at the transformation, and wished to have their lands restored to them in their former condition. They protected thehaïdamakswho were constantly harassing the colonists, until Potemkin, the actual creator of “new” Russia, wearied of such uncomfortable neighbours, occupied on the empress’ order thesitchaand destroyed it. The malcontents fled for refuge to the lands of the sultan; the rest were organised into the Cossacks of the Black Sea, and in 1792 the island of Phanagoria and the southern shore of the sea of Azov were assigned to them as residence. Such was the end of the great Cossack uprising which is heard of to-day only in the songs of thekobzars.d
During the reign of Catherine favouritism attained a very wide development. In herMemoirsgwe meet with the following characteristic passage which is not devoid of interest: “I was endowed by nature with great sensitiveness, and an exterior which if not beautiful was, nevertheless, attractive;I pleased from the first moment and did not require to employ for this purpose artifice or embellishments. By nature my soul was of such a sociable character that always when anyone had spent a quarter of an hour with me, he felt perfectly at ease and could converse with me as if he had known me for a long time. By my natural indulgence I inspired confidence in those that had to do with me; because everyone was aware that nothing was pleasanter to me than to act benevolently and with the strictest honesty. I may venture to say (if I may be allowed thus to speak of myself) that I was like a knight of liberty and lawfulness; I had rather the soul of a man than that of a woman; but there was nothing repellent in this, for to the intellect and character of a man was united in me the charm of a most amiable woman. I trust I may be pardoned these words and expressions of my self-love: I use them counting them as true, and not desiring to screen myself by any false modesty.
“I have said that I pleased; consequently half of the temptation that arises is already included in that fact itself; the other half in such cases naturally follows from the very essence of human nature, because to be subjected to temptation and to yield to it are very near to each other. Although the very highest principles of morality may be impressed on the mind, yet they soon become involved, and feelings appear which lead one immeasurably further than one thinks. For my part even until now I do not know how they can be averted. People perhaps may say that there is one means—flight; but there are cases, positions, circumstances where flight is impossible; in fact where can one flee to, where seek a refuge, where turn aside amidst a court that makes a talk over the smallest action? And thus if you cannot flee, then in my opinion there is nothing more difficult than to shun that which is essentially pleasing to you. Believe me, all that may be said to you against this is hypocrisy and founded on a want of knowledge of the human heart. A man is not master over his own heart; he cannot at his will squeeze it in his fist and then set it free again.”
Both contemporaries and posterity have not without foundation harshly judged favouritism under Catherine. One-sidedness and harshness of judgment in this respect have however deprived both contemporaries and immediate posterity of the possibility of dispassionately estimating the personality of the empress in general. Taking into consideration Catherine’s unusual capacities, the circumstances in which she was placed, and her temperament, it is impossible not to acknowledge that in accusing her we must not lose sight of the age in general and of the morals at the court in particular. Favouritism was no new apparition under Catherine. Almost the same state of things had arisen during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. A particularly unpleasant impression, however, is made by frequent changes of favourites. One after another in turn there were “in favour”: Gregory Orlov, Vasiltchikov, Potemkin, Zavadovski, Zoritch, Korsakov, Lanskoi, Ermolov, Mamonov and Zubov. Both Russians and foreigners have harshly censured Catherine for the rapidity of these changes, which were unexpected and sometimes without any visible cause. On the other hand, even writers who are unfavourable to Catherine have praised her for the fact that not one of the favourites banished from the court was ever persecuted or punished, while history presents a multitude of examples of cruelty and extreme arbitrariness on the part of crowned women in parallel cases.
It must be acknowledged, however, that favouritism, given the unbounded cupidity of Catherine’s favourites and of their relations, friends, and acquaintances, cost the treasury and the nation very dear.h
Under the influence of new favourites and other confidants, the second half of Catherine’s reign assumed an essentially different character as regards her actuating motives, although in the outward course of events a certain resemblance to the first half was preserved. When Catherine began to reign she had in mind a policy of peaceful splendour, advised also by Panin; she would willingly have secured the sovereignty of Poland by pacific means. It was only the force of circumstances which drew her into an undesired war.
Now her ambition assumed a different direction; we behold her recklessly bent on high-handed conquests, taking the initiative and deliberately making plans to bring about new wars. And, as this has often proved the case when government is vested in a woman, the change was caused by the most intimate personal circumstances. It would be out of place here to relate in detail the paltriness of all the court intrigues. It will suffice to recall the fact that Catherine, weary of the brutal tyranny of Gregory Orlov, tried to shake off his yoke and only succeeded with difficulty in wrenching herself free. She sent him at the time of the plague to Moscow, much against his will, and his numerous enemies hardly concealed their hope that he might never return. The empress endeavoured to keep him at a distance when he returned, but he struggled to remain master of the field and to stand his ground, although he saw himself supplanted in her personal favour by an insignificant young officer of the guards called Vasiltchikov.
When Catherine began after a time to feel ashamed of the insignificance of this young man, the much discussed General Gregory Alexandrovitch Potemkin, known to the empress in the days of her quarrels with her husband, knew how to take advantage of this favourable moment to force himself almost by violence into the long coveted position of her acknowledged and honoured favourite. The Orlovs tried for some time to wrest from him his sway over Catherine and over Russia, but they were obliged finally to give way, and retired to the ancient capital of the empire—which had remained the national capital, the capital of ancient Muscovy and the refuge of all who had reasons for avoiding the court.
There is much in this strife that is characteristic of time and place. When Gregory Orlov was forced to start on his dangerous journey to Moscow, many hoped, as already pointed out, that he would never return. When he reappeared safe and sound and in excellent health, and it was feared that he might regain his lost position in the favour of the empress, many a shrewd man was unable to conceal his vexation. The distinguished German doctor, Tode, to whom may be ascribed practically all the expedient measures taken in Moscow against the plague, remained not only unrewarded, but was unable for a long time to obtain compensation for the loss of his wardrobe. When he finally expressed his astonishment thereat, one of the senators is said to have solved the riddle with the dry remark: “Well, why did you bring the count back alive?” Then when Gregory Orlov got married in Moscow it was quite seriously proposed in the senate that the marriage should be dissolved as sinful, and that the fallen favourite and his wife should be shut up in penitential monasteries because they had married within the prohibited degrees. The empress, who had bestowed upon her former friend the title of prince as a consolation and a farewell, was angered by this decree and caused it to be revoked. However, in spite of the protection afforded him, Gregory Orlov came to a tragic end a few years later (1783). He died insane—as traditionwill have it, a violent death, one of the mysterious occurrences that will never be cleared up.
But the empress Catherine, generally so acute, was singularly deceived concerning Potemkin, the Prince of Darkness, as he was afterwards called from a play on his name. He was the son of an insignificant nobleman of Smolensk, a retired major, and bore a name till then unknown in Russian history; a man of doubtful capabilities, ignorant, and in fact distinguished by nothing but a boundless and unscrupulous egotism, by an immense craving for coarse, extravagant pleasures, and by the nefarious energy with which he pursued his selfish desires. The first condition for his enjoyment of life was the power to exercise a boundless autocracy and to be able to tread under foot not only those who bowed before him but also those who attempted to resist him.
The empress, however, as a woman and conscious of her unauthorised position, feeling the need of energetic support, saw in the man, whose almost gigantic frame seemed to betoken a titanic nature, something really extraordinary, and believed him destined to accomplish great deeds. Thus Potemkin retained his ascendancy even after he had withdrawn from her most intimate favours under the pretence of long-continued ill-health, and had thrust forward all sorts of handsome insignificant young men who were one after the other loaded with riches. Potemkin understood how to increase the distrust which the empress felt for her son, and to keep it constantly awake. He made her believe that she was continually surrounded by dangers; that he was the only one who would protect her, and more especially that he was the only one who would wish to do so under all circumstances. On the other hand he flattered her vanity still more than her ambition by plans on an adventurously large scale, by fantastic pictures of fame and greatness which he suggested to her imagination. Thus, he pointed to the conquest of Constantinople, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, the foundation of a Greek empire on the Bosporus, not as triumphs which one might hope to see realised in the future but as deeds which might and should be accomplished within the next few years.
The general idea was not originated by Potemkin. Field-Marshal Munich had already pointed out to the empress that Constantinople was the necessary goal of Russian aspirations. But formerly an object so remote in time and place aroused but little interest. Now everything seemed to have advanced within grasp; the empress was to wear the crown of the new Greek empire during her lifetime; now the idea aroused in her the wildest enthusiasm. The very fact that no cautious statesman would consider these plans only made Potemkin appear all the greater in her eyes; his assurance raised him far above the everyday mediocrity of the others.
The eldest grandson of the empress received the name of Alexander, the second the no less significant name of Constantine. The former was in due time to inherit the Greek crown from his grandmother. They took care in a manner which bordered on exaggeration to make prophesies, or to announce to the whole world the vast schemes with which they deluded themselves. The young prince was not christened according to the Russo-Greek but the somewhat different oriental-Greek ritual, as it was practised in the churches of his future empire. They tried to procure a Greek nurse for him, but as that did not succeed they at least chose one called Helen. Greek playfellows were found for him, and he learned modern Greek as if it were his mother tongue.
The fascination which Potemkin exercised over Catherine may be attributedto her feeling of insecurity, to the support Potemkin promised her, and to the vast prospects he opened out for her ambition. There is one thing calculated to astonish us and that is that neither the empress nor Potemkin was able to realise how insufficient was the actual might of Russia at that time to carry out these gigantic schemes. It was scarcely surprising that Potemkin should be unable to judge of this, for he was an ignorant man, who was wanting in the most elementary political foresight and was besides no thinker. But how came it that Catherine should be so deceived, who had studied earnestly and had by that time accumulated a varied experience? How could it escape her that the comparatively limited financial resources of the empire, more especially, would prove quite inadequate, particularly as they were anything but well husbanded? They gave themselves up light-heartedly to the magic of the banknote press and thus brought down untold calamities upon Russia, as has been the case also in other countries. But this calamity did not stand alone; it is in fact not to be regarded as an independent manifestation, but rather as one of a whole series of necessary consequences of a premature effort of Russia to lay claim to a world-power of such magnitude and importance, before her might was fully established at home or had attained sufficient maturity.
General Suvarov(1729-1800)
General Suvarov
(1729-1800)
The fact that the forces of the empire must from that time be almost entirely devoted to the support of a foreign policy; that little, if anything, could be done for the development of culture and industry (and that only as a matter of secondary importance), that no consideration could be given to the most necessary reforms—none of these circumstances worked Russia such visible and tangible harm as the flooding of the country with unconsolidated paper money doomed in advance to depreciation; as matters stood, this was probably a greater evil. When Russia entered upon the grasping policy of Potemkin she began to lay out her future in advance, so to speak, and that on a scale utterly out of proportion to the actual gain which might be or which was in fact attained. The evils which resulted have continued to work themselves out down to the present day. As in this way the germs of a future power were constantly being sacrificed in order to conjure up power in the present by overdrawing the resources in hand, the real advancement of the empire was paralysed, and even the actual might in which they gloried remained partly a sham which certainly did not correspond with the reality. When later it became necessary for Russia to participate in the momentous struggles which involved the destiny of Europe, her power was not matured, concentrated, or husbanded at the decisive moment—as for instance the power of Prussia by Frederick William I; her future prospects were encumbered by a heavy burden and by manifold obligations, the inner development was behind the times, and her financial position was shaken. It becamenecessary continually to make fresh, feverish efforts, which always over-reached the possibilities of the present and which hindered the inner development afresh, involved the future deeper and deeper, and exhausted its resources.i
It may be deemed necessary in this place to explain what were the duties expected from and the distinguished honours paid to the favourites of Catherine. When her majesty had made choice of a new favourite, she created him her general aide-de-camp, in order that he might accompany her wherever she went, without incurring public censure. From that period the favourite occupied in the palace an apartment under that of his royal mistress, with which it communicated by a private staircase. The first day of his installation he received a present of 100,000 rubles, and every month he found 12,000 placed on his dressing-table. The marshal of the court was ordered to provide him a table of twenty-four covers, and to defray all his household expenses. The favourite was required to attend the empress wherever she went, and was not permitted to leave the palace without asking her consent. He was forbidden to converse familiarly with other women; and if he went to dine with any of his friends, the absence of the mistress of the house was always required.
Whenever the empress cast her eyes on one of her subjects, with the design of raising him to the post of favourite, he was invited to dinner by some one of her female confidants, on whom she called as if it were by chance. There she would draw the new candidate into discourse, and judge how far he was worthy of her destined favour. When the opinion she had formed was favourable, a significant look apprised the confidant, who, in her turn, made it known to the object of her royal mistress’ pleasure. The next day he was examined as to the state of his health by the court physician, and as to some other particulars by Mademoiselle Protasov, one of the empress’ ladies, after which he accompanied her majesty to the Hermitage, and took possession of the apartment that had been prepared for his reception. These formalities began upon the choice of Potemkin, and were thenceforth constantly observed.
When a favourite had lost the art of pleasing, there was also a particular manner of dismissing him. He received orders to travel, and from that moment all access to her majesty was denied him; but he was sure of finding at the place of his retirement such splendid rewards as were worthy of the munificent pride of Catherine. It was a very remarkable feature in her character that none of her favourites incurred her hatred or vengeance, though several of them offended her, and their quitting office did not always depend on herself.
[1775-1780A.D.]
Potemkin’s rule commenced at the very time in which the Peace of Kutchuk-Kainardji was concluded (July, 1774). The disputes with Poland and the rebellion of Pugatchev were no sooner ended than he immediately violated every condition of that treaty, well knowing that the empress would approve of everything he might do. Dowlet Gerai, who was elected khan by the now independent Tatars, still remained much more favourably disposed to the Turks than to the Russians: the latter, therefore, by means of money and intrigues, raised up a pretender against him; and then, under pretenceof an armed mediation, a Russian army occupied a part of the Crimea, and seemed disposed to make the khan a prisoner, and to seize the whole province. Dowlet Gerai took refuge with the Turks in April, 1775, and Sahim Gerai, who was a mere creature of Russia, was elected in his stead, to the great satisfaction of the Russians, who foresaw that the majority of the Tatars would oppose the new khan, and thus furnish them with another pretext for a renewal of hostilities. A war with the Porte appeared unavoidable, and Romanzov received commands to collect a considerable army on the Dnieper, whilst Repnin in Constantinople was endeavouring to deceive the sultan, and Potemkin betrayed the unfortunate Sahim Gerai.
By this time Potemkin had ceased to be the personal favourite of the empress; but he himself recommended his successors in that post to her notice. Potemkin was indispensable to Catherine in consequence of those colossal undertakings which procured her the name of Great; and because the fear with which he inspired all her enemies secured to her the possession of the throne, which she withheld from her son Paul. Zavadovski had become the occupant of the apartments of the royal palace in November, 1776, and been created a major-general; as soon, however, as he fell under Potemkin’s suspicion, the latter authoritatively insisted upon his dismissal. Zavadovski had turned against his patron, and was an eager favourer of the Orlovs and Field-Marshal Romanzov. For this reason Potemkin succeeded in obtaining leave of absence for the favourite in July, 1777, in order to provide during his temporary retirement a substitute who should eventually displace him. Potemkin had long before selected a Major Zoritch for his adjutant, who was politically insignificant, but very attractive in his hussar uniform, with a view to present him to the empress. Zavadovski had no sooner left the palace than he carried his design into effect, and the empress made Zoritch a colonel adjutant-general and her companion. At the expiration of nine months, he too fell under Potemkin’s displeasure, and was obliged to retire, for the empress was completely under the control of her minister. Next came Korsakov, a handsome sergeant in the guards, who was suddenly raised to the rank of aide-de-camp general. He too was indignant at Potemkin’s unbounded pride and avarice, but attempted in vain to open the eyes of the empress; he was obliged to yield to the influence of the indispensable tyrant after he had enjoyed the favour of the empress for fifteen months.
The circumstances of the year 1778 were peculiarly favourable to the accomplishment of Potemkin’s plans of conquest, for war had broken out in the spring between France and England, and both powers were so fully occupied in the west that they had no leisure to attend to the concerns of the east. Potemkin, therefore, sent an army, commanded by Suvarov, against the Kuban and Bedjiak Tatars, whilst other Russians penetrated into the Crimea and were guilty of the most cruel devastations. This led to the seizure of some Russian ships in the straits of the Dardanelles on the part of the sultan, who was, however, unable to commence a war without the aid and co-operation of France. But that power, unwilling to break with Russia, insisted on mediating, and the sultan was forced to acquiesce. The result was that the Russian ships were restored, and the sultan formally recognised Sahim Gerai as the rightful ruler of the Crimea.
Catherine was so pleased with the conduct of France on this occasion that she embraced with alacrity the plan of the armed neutrality, which was devised by the French minister Vergennes; and in 1780 she put herself at the head of that league which was joined by almost all the powers of Europe except Great Britain. It was formed for the purpose of resisting the rightasserted by the English navy to make prize of an enemy’s goods, or of goods shipped for an enemy’s port, wherever found, and even though covered by a neutral flag. The leading principle of the league was that free ships make free goods. Great Britain would not admit this; but at that time she did no more than expostulate with her good friend and ally the empress of Russia. It was not until the reign of Paul that she waged war for the maintenance of the opposite principle, which she later repudiated during the Crimean War.
From this time forward, as we have seen, Potemkin, Voltaire, and a host of flatterers amused the empress with dreams of the restoration of a Byzantine empire, and the erection of a new capital on the Black Sea. Sahim Gerai prized the slavish title of a lieutenant-colonel in the guards of a foreign empress more than that of prince of a nation to which the Russian czars for many years had been vassals, and he renounced the national costume of his people in order to glitter in a Russian uniform and wear the decorations of the order of St. Anne. Potemkin contrived every month to alienate him more and more from his people, till at last this miserable man was induced to lay down his khanate, from which he derived a revenue of three or four millions of rubles, in order, as he thought, to revel peacefully in the enjoyment of some hundred thousand rubles, which Potemkin was to pay him as the newly appointed Russian governor-general of Tauris, as the country was now to be called. Potemkin was too much accustomed to receive and not to give, and to contract debts without thinking of paying them, to give himself much concern about the payment of the promised salary, although the empress was led to believe that the yearly sum always charged to her was in reality regularly paid to the khan.
[1783A.D.]
The shamelessness of the Russian government on this occasion fully equalled the audacity of their manifestoes respecting the partition of Poland, or that of the state-papers of a Genz and a Talleyrand. In the Russian manifestoes published in April, 1783, it was made as clear as the sun to the Tatars that the empress and Potemkin were really proposing to confer upon them the most signal benefits. It was stated that the Tatars, as Russian subjects, were in future to be delivered from all the evils of their internal disputes, and by the incorporation of the Crimea, the Kuban, and the eastern Nogaians an end was to be put to those oppressions from which they had hitherto suffered from the Turks and the Russians alternately. What the correspondence was between these promises and the subsequent reality may be learned from all the works of travellers who visited these districts, and gave accounts of the Crimea and the Tatars a generation or two later. That numerous, free, and rich race of people, clothed in silks and of noble appearance, had then dwindled into a crowd of starving beggars; their magnificent tented cities had become gipsy encampments, and their houses and palaces exhibited mere masses of ruin and decay.
These manifestoes, indeed, as is usually the case, were not intended for those to whom they were addressed, but merely to conceal in a cloud of words, from the eyes of those at a distance, the cruelties and bloodshed with which they were accompanied. The Tatars made an effort to defend their liberties, and their magnates made no secret of their dissatisfaction; Potemkin, therefore, had recourse to one of those heroic means which usually find defenders enough when they are applied for the support of the true faith and of autocratic government, and are only reviled and execrated in the hands of a Danton and a Robespierre. He proposed by a single massacre summarily to annihilate the malcontents, and to awe the rest into submission by thedread of a similar fate. Posorovski received express orders to make himself master of the malcontents, their families, and adherents, and put them all to the sword; he, however, possessed moral courage enough to decline the business of an executioner. Potemkin’s cousin was not so scrupulous. According to the accounts, whose unanimous testimony we are obliged to follow, even when it appears to us incredible, Paul Potemkin caused above thirty thousand Tatars, of every age and sex, to be massacred in cold blood, and in this way procured for his cousin the easily won title of the Taurian, and the place of grand-admiral of the Black Sea and governor-general of the new province of Tauris.
The massacre in Tauris took place in April, 1783, and the Turks were unable to render any assistance to the Tatars without foreign support. Among the European powers, however, England was at that time fully occupied with the disturbances which in the following year brought Pitt to the helm of affairs; France was glad to see an end to the American war; Joseph II was bound by the Treaty of Tsarskoi Selo; Frederick II hoped to become master of Thorn and Dantzic, if Russia was well-disposed towards him; and Gustavus III of Sweden was the only monarch who could have rendered any aid. In the very same year, however, Gustavus suffered himself to be induced to go to Friedrichsham, where he sold himself to the empress; nothing, therefore, was now left to the Turks but to yield to their destiny. The sultan did what had been done by the king of Poland a few years before; by his consent he changed that into a righteous and legal possession which, being seized in the midst of peace, was previously a robbery. The whole territory of the Tatars, the Crimea, the island of Taman, and a great part of the Kuban were ceded to Russia, and a treaty of commerce was forced upon the Turks, by virtue of which the Russian consuls in the various ports of Turkey were erected into a power wholly independent of the government of the country. This treaty of commerce had been drawn up by Panin before he had been obliged to yield to the superior influence of Potemkin and withdraw from public affairs; and it was now concluded on the 10th of June, 1783. By virtue of this treaty the Turks were obliged to submit the decision of all mixed civil cases in which a Russian and a Turk were the respective parties, not to the local tribunals, nor to the higher authorities, nor to a court of arbitration, but to the Russian consul; and in all pecuniary transactions the claims of a Russian against a Turk were urged with much greater strictness than in those cases in which the Turk was the claimant and the Russian the debtor.
In the eyes of the world, which regards only externals, Potemkin was now a great and admired statesman; and so absolute was his sway over the empress herself, that she not only tolerated his insolence, his total neglect of all pecuniary obligations, his tyranny over all classes, and his imperial expenditure and magnificence, but allowed him to help himself to an unlimited extent out of the coffers of the state. Potemkin on the one hand did homage to the empress as if she were a goddess, and on the other he suffered himself to treat her with the most insolent familiarity and rudeness. He would even saunter from his own apartments into hers in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his stockings hanging down and his legs bare. He went so far as to extort from those who enjoyed the empress’ favour a part of the money which they received from her, and yet he allowed poor Sahim Gerai to starve. He never paid him the assigned pension of 100,000 rubles which was yearly debited to the empress’ account, and even the displeasure of Catherine could not induce him to bestow upon this Russianprotégéthe simplest means of life.
The founding of a new Russo-Grecian capital, with which Potemkin now busied himself, was a magnificent piece of flattery for the empress, but for which she was unhappily obliged to pay too dear. Catherine indulged with Voltaire in those visionary schemes of a utopian Greece, of a civilisation of which she and not the people was to be the source, of an enlightenment, industry, and trade to be carried into these conquered deserts by ukases and courtiers; Potemkin acted according to this fancy. He first erected a city with buildings of every description, and then sought for inhabitants, or forcibly drove them for a time from all quarters, when he wished to make a court-spectacle of this theatrical city and to enchant the empress. It was of no consequence to him that his city fell to pieces and its inhabitants disappeared as soon as he turned away his eyes. The new city was called Kherson, a name long since obscured by that of Odessa; the empress granted 18,000,000 rubles, most of which, however, Potemkin diverted to his own private use. The situation was badly chosen, and yet this shadow of a capital was for a length of time charmed into existence by innumerable arts of fraud and open violence; and the deserts of which it was to be the metropolis were erected into a province, to which Potemkin gave the name of Catherine’s Glory (Slava Ekatharina). Another province, somewhat farther to the north, near the celebrated falls of the Kaidak, was also honoured with the name of the empress, and called Iekatarinoslav.
The general to whom Potemkin at this time assigned the congenial task of havoc and destruction in the country of the Nogaian Tatars and in Kuban was Suvarov, a man who from that period till the end of the century had the misfortune to be continually employed as the instrument of a murderous military despotism. In Poland he executed three times those orders of annihilation which were issued from St. Petersburg. He destroyed the Turks and sacrificed the Russians by thousands at the will of Potemkin. He subsequently shared Paul’s hatred against the French and every thought of civil freedom, and performed the same kind of heroic deeds for that madman’s pleasure as he had previously done at the bidding of Potemkin. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest generals of modern times, but wholly destitute of humanity, for he sacrificed thousands without hesitation in order to secure a victory or storm a fortress, when either was calculated to produce a splendid effect though but for the moment. He not only flattered the empress, but even the common soldiers and their superstitions. Though he was a man of various knowledge, and had made himself master of all the arts of life as practised in the highest society, he assumed at court the character of a sort of court-fool, and acted often as if he were mad, merely in order to carry out some surprising piece of flattery. In the company of the common soldiers he affected the manners of the semi-barbarous Russian, lived as they did themselves, submitted to every privation which they might be called upon to endure, and knelt and prayed before every wayside image, often when the roads were deep with mud.
[1785A.D.]
At the time when a high-flown sentimentality was the fashion in Germany, and the empress was past fifty, she indulged in a fit of romantic love for the insipid and spiritless Lanskoi. This turn in her affections was veryagreeable to Potemkin, for Lanskoi neither took up the cause of the destitute khan, nor yielded to the allurements of the king of Prussia, the emperor Joseph II, or the English, when they were desirous of engaging him in affairs of state. Potemkin freely permitted the empress to indulge her visionary love for the wonderfully handsome and youthful face which captivated her affections, and did not grudge her, among the many gross and degrading scenes of her life, the enjoyment of one romantic passion, after the manner of Werther and Siegwart, from the year 1780 till July, 1784. Catherine’s love for Lanskoi had been romantic in his life, and her sorrow at his death was not less extravagant; but notwithstanding all this ideality, she had been also careful to show him substantial proofs of her affection at the cost of the country. She bestowed upon him not only all possible titles, orders, and decorations—diamonds, plate, and collections of every kind, but he left behind him in cash a property of 7,000,000 rubles.
The fantastic mourning for Lanskoi was no sooner evaporated than the empress allowed Potemkin, who presented candidates for every office, to supply her with a substitute for her departed lover. In order to exclude all other pretenders, Potemkin on every such occasion was prepared to fill the vacancy; and with this view he had for some time made Lieutenant Iermolov one of his adjutants. In 1785 this man became the declared favourite of the empress, and soon ventured to pursue a course which Lanskoi would never have thought of. He directed Catherine’s attention to the tyranny of Potemkin, and gave her some hints respecting his behaviour towards Sahim Gerai. The empress expressed her displeasure without naming the person who had made her acquainted with the unhappy fate of the khan; Potemkin, however easily guessed that no man in the empire would dare to speak ill of him to the empress except Iermolov. He therefore threateningly replied, “That must have been said by the White Moor,” as he was accustomed to call Iermolov on account of his fair countenance and flat nose.
Catherine did not hesitate severely to reproach Potemkin for his harsh and unjust conduct towards the khan, and she even wavered for some months between her favourite and this son of the Titans, whom she regarded as her protector and the creator of her glory and her greatness. At the end of June, 1786, a fresh scene occurred, by which the empress was compelled to declare either for the one or the other. Iermolov had made a new attempt to alienate the empress from Potemkin; the latter, therefore, haughtily insisted that either Iermolov or he must retire from her service; Catherine felt herself constrained to adhere to Potemkin, and Iermolov went upon his travels. During the course of the year he had been loaded with riches, and on his departure he was furnished with 100,000 rubles and imperial recommendations to the Russian ambassadors at all the European courts. On the day after his departure Momonov, another adjutant of Potemkin, occupied his place.
[1787A.D.]
About this period Potemkin repeatedly travelled from St. Petersburg to Tauris and back with all the expedition of a courier, whilst he was engaged in the building of Kherson, in order to prepare a splendid triumph for the empress. The neglected Sahim Gerai hastened thither to meet him and make him acquainted with the urgency of his wants; but Potemkin, instead of rendering him any assistance, banished him to Kaluga, where he fell into a state of the deepest poverty. He then conceived that he might find some relief from his fellow believers, and fled to Turkey, but the sultan caused himto be arrested as a traitor and renegade at Khotin, to be conveyed to Rhodes, and there despatched by the bow-string (1787). The plan contemplated by Potemkin and the empress was to raise the grand duke Constantine, second grandson of the empress, to the dignity of emperor of Byzantium, at the expense of the Turks, and at the same time to incorporate the kingdom of Poland with Russia. The new city of Kherson was no sooner ready for this grand theatrical representation than the empress was to travel thither to receive the homage of her new subjects, and to deceive the world by an ostentatious display of magnificence and pomp.
Joseph II was invited to meet the empress in Kherson, in order to consult with her upon a partition of the Turkish Empire; but Constantine himself was in the first instance left at home. The luxury and extravagance exhibited by Potemkin during the empress’ journey and the fêtes prepared for her reception and entertainment at Kherson were worthy of the heaven-storming characters of the pair. They remind us of the extravagance of the Abassides and the descendants of Timur, with this difference—that civilisation and the arts were strangers to the people of the caliphs and of the Great Mogul. Never perhaps was there seen in monarchical Europe, where such things are not rare, such a gross abuse of the wealth and well-being of the people, and such insult cast on public opinion by a contemptible comedy, as on the occasion of this imperial progress.
It began in January, 1787, and was continued night and day. To facilitate the journey by night, Potemkin had caused great piles of wood to be erected at every fifty perches, which were kindled at nightfall, and imparted to the whole district almost the brightness of day. On the sixth day the cortège reached Smolensk, and fourteen days afterwards Kiev, where the degraded Polish magnates, who made a trade of their nation, their honour, and their friendship, were assembled to offer their homage to the empress and join in the revelry of her court. Potemkin himself had gone forward in advance in order to arrange the side-scenes of the theatre which he erected from St. Petersburg to Kherson. Deserts were peopled for the occasion; and palaces were raised in the trackless wild. The nakedness of the plains was disguised by villages built for the purpose of a day, and enlivened by fireworks. Chains of mountains were illuminated. Fine roads were opened by the army. Howling wildernesses were transformed into blooming gardens; and immense flocks and herds were driven to the sides of the road in order to delight the eyes of the empress in her hasty transit. The rocks in the Dnieper were sprung, that the empress might descend the stream as conveniently as she had travelled thither in the chamber of her sledge. At the beginning of May the whole party embarked on the river in fifteen splendid galleys at Krementshuk, and on the following day Stanislaus of Poland presented himself at Kaniev, in order, as it were, by his insipid and pitiful character to serve as a foil to the monarchial splendour of a woman. He accepted an alms of 100,000 rubles for the expenses of his journey, was very graciously received by Potemkin, treated with coldness and indifference by the empress, and as if his royal Polish income was simply a Russian pension he begged for an augmentation. He was not ashamed to acknowledge to all the courts whose ambassadors accompanied the empress that he regarded his kingdom as a Russian province, for he besought the empress to grant the succession to his nephew and to his nation the free navigation of the Dnieper. As is customary in such cases, there was no lack of promises; but none of his petitions were really granted, for it was impossible either to value or respect him, and in his situation he was incapable of inspiring fear.
MEETING OF CATHERINE II OF RUSSIA AND JOSEPH II OF AUSTRIA(Painted forThe Historians’ History of the Worldby Thure de Thulstrup)
MEETING OF CATHERINE II OF RUSSIA AND JOSEPH II OF AUSTRIA
(Painted forThe Historians’ History of the Worldby Thure de Thulstrup)
The emperor Joseph, who had anticipated the arrival of his ally in Kherson, travelled to meet her as far as Kaidak, and returned with her. He soon perceived that she was shamefully deluded by the appearance of prosperity, civilisation, and population, and that soon as she had passed through all was again to become empty and deserted. Like the villages, flocks, and men by the wayside, the new buildings in which the distinguished travellers passed their nights and the houses and shops in Kherson all vanished again when they had served their temporary purpose. It will not be regarded as incredible that 7,000,000 rubles were expended on the journey, when it is known that the throne itself, which was erected for the empress in what was called the admiralty at Kherson, cost 14,000. Catherine made a magnificent entry into the new city, passing under a triumphal arch, on which was inscribed in the Greek tongue, “The way to Byzantium.”
After the meeting at Kherson the two imperial allies prepared to direct their forces against the whole extent of the Turkish frontier, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. Care was taken, however, to furnish an excuse for the participation of Austria, by inciting the Turks to make the first attack; for only in such a case was Austria bound to furnish auxiliaries to the Russians. To this end Bulgakov, Catherine’s ambassador at Constantinople, was ordered by every means to excite commotions among the Greeks, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and Slavonians, as well as in Egypt and in Asia Minor. The Turks, justly incensed at these intrigues, insisted upon a distinct declaration of their views on the part of the Russians; and when they received for answer only the usual diplomatic subterfuge that the ambassador must wait for instructions from St. Petersburg, they immediately declared war, sent Bulgakov to the state prison of the Seven Towers, and nothing but the threatening interference of the English minister could have prevented them from inflicting summary vengeance upon him, to show their righteous displeasure at the conduct of his government. Catherine and Joseph had now gained their wishes. The Turks were the first to declare war, and a pretence was thus afforded to the Russians to call upon the Austrians for that aid which they were bound by treaty to render in case of an attack on the part of the Turks.
Catherine published a manifesto, in which after a long enumeration of the pretended wrongs ascribed to the Porte, she added that, provoked by a conduct, in itself so offensive, she had, very unwillingly, been obliged to have recourse to arms, as the only means left her for the support of those rights which she had acquired at the price of so much blood, and to avenge her wounded dignity, suffering from the violence that had been used towards her minister at Constantinople; that entirely innocent of all the calamities inevitably engendered by war, she relied with confidence, not only on the Almighty protection and the assistance of her allies, but on the prayers of the Christian world, for triumph in a cause so just as that which she was obliged to defend. This manifesto was soon followed up by a second, which declared that the Porte had arrogantly presumed to insist on a categorical answer to its absurd demands; and that the empress, forced to repel the aggression of the enemy of the Christian name, armed herself with confidence, under the protection of that just God who had so long and so powerfully shielded the Russian Empire.
Had Potemkin been as great a general as he was capable of devising magnificent plans and playing the Russian tyrant, great things would have been accomplished in 1787, for all the preparations for the war had been made longbeforehand. Field-Marshal Romanzov was to share the command of the army with Potemkin; that is to say, he was to do all the work, and the other was to engross all the merit. Romanzov declined this thankless office, and Potemkin stood alone at the head of the army; but he did not succeed in deceiving posterity, for no one has ever ascribed to him what was effected by the officers under his command—by Repnin, Paul Potemkin, Suvarov, Kamenskoi, Galitzin, and Kutusov, all of whom became more or less renowned in later wars. Potemkin found in Suvarov precisely such an instrument as he needed: for to that general the will of the empress or her favourite was in all cases a law paramount to all moral obligations, or any feelings of humanity. He was sent to Kinburn, the chief object of the campaign being apparently the siege of Otchakov, by the main body under Potemkin, whilst other divisions were despatched to observe the movements of the Tatars in the Kuban.