Potemkin Catherine The Great's Imperial Partner

Chapter 1 THE PROVINCIAL BOY I would rather hear that you had been killed than that you had brought shame on yourself. 'When I grow up,' the young Potemkin is said to have boasted, 'I shall be either a statesman or an archbishop.' His schoolfriends probably mocked his dreams, for he was born into the ranks of respectable provincial gentry without the benefits of either name or fortune. His godfather, who understood him better, liked to mutter that the boy would either 'rise to great honour or lose his head'. The only way to rise swiftly to such eminence in the Russia of that time was through the favour of the monarch and by the time he had reached the age of twenty-two this obscure provincial had contrived to meet two reigning empresses. Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin was born on 30 September 1739* in the small village of Chizhova, not far from the old fortress city of Holy Smolensk. The Potemkins owned the modest estate and its 430 male serfs. The family were far from rich, but they were hardly poor either. However, they made up for their middling status by behaviour that was strange even by the standards of the wilder borderlands of the Russian Empire. They were a numerous clan of Polish descent and, like all nobility, they had concocted a dubious genealogy. The more minor the nobility, the more grandiose this tended to be, so the Potemkins claimed they were descended from Telesin, the prince of an Italian tribe which threatened Rome in about 100 bc, and from Istok, a Dalmatian prince of the eleventh century ad. After centuries of unexplained obscurity, these royal ItalianDalmatians reappeared around Smolensk 14 potemkin and catherine bearing the distinctly unLatinate name 'Potemkin' or the polonized 'Potempski'. The family proved adept at navigating the choppy seas between the tsars of Muscovy and the kings of Poland, receiving estates around Smolensk from both. The family patriarch was Hans-Tarasy (supposedly a version of Telesin) Potemkin, who had two sons, Ivan and Illarion, from whom the two branches of the family were descended. Grigory came from Illarion's junior line. Both sides boasted middle-ranking officers and courtiers. From the time of Potemkin's great-grandfather, the family exclusively served Muscovy, which was gradually recovering these traditional Kievan lands from the Commonwealth of PolandLithuania. The Potemkins became pillars of the intermarried cousinhood of Smolensk nobility, which possessed its own unique Polish identity. While Russian nobility was called the dvoryanstvo, the Smolensk nobles still called themselves szlachta, like their brethren in Poland. Smolensk today appears deeply embedded in Russia, but when Potemkin was born it was still on the borderlands. The Russian Empire in 1739 already stretched eastwards from Smolensk across Siberia to the Chinese border, and from the Baltic in the north towards the foothills of the Caucasus in the south but it had not yet grasped its golden prize, the Black Sea. Smolensk had been conquered by Peter the Great's father, Tsar Alexei, as recently as 1654 and before then it had been part of Poland. The local nobility remained culturally Polish, so Tsar Alexei con- firmed their privileges, permitted the Smolensk Regiment to elect its officers (though they were not allowed to keep their Polish links) and decreed that the next generation had to marry Russian, not Polish, girls. Potemkin's father may have worn the baggy pantaloons and long tunic of the Polish nobleman and spoken some Polish at home, though he would have worn the more Germanic uniform of the Russian army officer outside. So Potemkin was brought up in a semi-Polish environment and inherited much closer liMontefiore, Simon Sebag is the author of 'Potemkin Catherine The Great's Imperial Partner', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400077175 and ISBN 1400077176.