sure that no last testament would affect his claim to the throne. Until her final hours, many people at court believed that Catherine intended to disinherit Paul. A manifesto announcing this decision and proclaiming her grandson as her successor was expected on January 1, 1797. Whether she left such a will that was then destroyed by Paul, no one knows. More likely, she was still undecided when she died.
The schism between mother and son stretched beyond the grave. When finally, in 1796, he reached the throne, Paul immediately restored primogeniture as the basis of succession to the crown. Thereafter, until the fall of the monarchy and the Romanov dynasty in 1917, the eldest son of the deceased sovereign—or, lacking a son, the eldest male closest in the direct family line—would succeed. Never again would an heir have to go through what Paul had been through. And never again would Russia be ruled by a woman.
66
Potemkin: Builder and Diplomat
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
