Prince Potemkin has never consented to be painted,” Catherine told Grimm, “and if there exists any portrait or silhouette of him, it is against his wish.”1 During Potemkin’s stay in the capital, Catherine twisted his arm, convincing him to sit a second time for Italian-born, Austrian-trained portraitist Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder. Sensitive about his bad, half-closed eye, Potemkin again insisted on a three-quarter face pose. For Potemkin’s first half-length portrait seven years earlier, Lampi contrasted his subject’s armor and smooth features. This time, Lampi depicted Potemkin in his white Grand Admiral’s uniform with the Black Sea for the background.
“Goodbye my friend, I kiss you,” Catherine wrote as Potemkin left Tsarskoe Seloe for Jassy on July 24.2 After concluding a peace treaty with the Turks, he was anxious to supervise construction of additional battleships along with his new palace in Nikolaev. But by August, Potemkin’s health began to fail. Plague had broken out in Constantinople, and the epidemic swept quickly across the south. In mid-August, Grand Duke Paul’s brother-in-law, one of Potemkin’s officers, died. Catherine traveled to Pavlovsk to comfort Maria Feodorovna, unaware that Potemkin had collapsed after the funeral.
Around this time, France’s royal family was arrested at Varennes while trying to flee the country. France’s queen Marie Antoinette was the youngest child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. Her brother, Leopold II, now appealed to other royal houses for support. With the August Declaration of Pillnitz, Austria and Prussia vowed to stop the French Revolution if Russia or England also intervened, a proviso that was very unlikely. While publicly deploring the situation in France, Catherine was not about to intervene militarily when Russia’s interests were not directly threatened. When Louis swore an oath of loyalty to France’s new constitution, Catherine dashed off a letter to Grimm: “. . . These are really unworthy acts of cowardice; one could say they had neither faith nor law, nor probity. I am terribly angry; I stamped my foot reading these . . . these . . . these . . . horrors.”3
Louis XVI went on trial for treason in early December. “The scoundrels in Paris have no principles,” Catherine angrily wrote the Prince de Ligne. “They have overturned Christianity, law and morality. . . . All that one can reproach Louis XVI for is his excessive goodness and lack of firmness. He is accused of having wanted to subvert that constitution which everybody agreed was worthless. But who are his accusers? The very men who overturned that same constitution and the monarchy, the abominable instigators of that so-called republic which will make the word ‘liberty’ forever detestable, because with that word on their lips, these rebels commit every crime.”4
With anti-monarchial sentiment growing in France, Russia’s Orthodox Church assumed new importance in Catherine’s fight against what she called “this irreligious, immoral, anarchical, evil and diabolical plague, the enemy of throne and altar.”5 As a public display of her faith, Catherine personally presented lavish gifts to the Church. Among the most spectacular were liturgical sets for the 15th-century Dormition Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin, St. Sergius Monastery of the Trinity northeast of Moscow, and the newly consecrated Holy Trinity Cathedral in St. Petersburg’s Alexander Nevsky Monastery.
Peter the Great had made 13th-century warrior prince Alexander Nevsky patron saint of Russia’s new capital, transferring his remains from Vladimir to St. Petersburg. To hold Alexander Nevsky’s relics, Empress Elizabeth commissioned a massive silver sarcophagus decorated with symbols of his military victories, including the Neva Battle against Sweden. Catherine moved this impressive shrine to Ivan Starov’s neoclassical cathedral. Now, she hired Norwegian-born goldsmith Iver Windfeldt Buch to design a liturgical set for the cathedral to honor Potemkin’s military victories. For the chalice, Catherine selected cameos from her own collection and gave her goldsmith gems and diamonds from the state treasury.
Catherine approved Buch’s highly symbolic design. Three of the four stones adorning the bowl were made of bloodstone, symbolic of Jesus’s sacrifice. The fourth stone was the oldest—a 13th-century grayish chalcedony cameo of Archangel Michael, a popular figure in medieval Russia. Four carved cameos adorned the base: Saints Justa and Rufina in blue glass paste, Annunciation in green nephrite, Madonna and Child in carnelian, and a pagan subject in white chalcedony. Bush framed each stone with an oval circle of diamonds and diamond-studded floral sprays; matte gold acanthus leaves and diamond rosettes separated the cameos and intaglios. Stalks of wheat and bunches of grapes (references to the communion bread and wine) adorned the stem. Around the lip was a Cyrillic inscription from the Old Church Slavonic text of Matthew: “Drink of it all of you! This is My Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins!”6
For maximum political impact, Catherine presented Buch’s stunning liturgical set on Saint Alexander Nevsky’s annual feast day. But by late August 1791, with Potemkin ailing, the gift took on a more personal meaning. After delivering the chalice (along with a paten, asterisk, two plates, spoon, and spear) to the altar, Catherine prayed for Potemkin’s recovery. Meanwhile, 1,000 miles away, Potemkin composed a liturgical canon. “Incessantly my anxious soul gazes at the abyss of my iniquities and longs for help, yet does not achieve it,” he wrote. “Extend to me, you Immaculate Virgin, your hand, which held my Savior, and let not my soul perish forever.”7
Potemkin couldn’t shake his fever and headaches, and after a week and a half at Gusha he returned to Jassy. He’d suffered fevers for years, possibly malarial. Decades of compulsive work and gluttony had finally caught up with him. On September 27, Potemkin could no longer write himself, and dictated a note to his confidant Vasily Popov: “Beloved matushka, my not seeing you makes it even harder for me to live.” Catherine sent Potemkin a fur coat and reply: “I’m so extremely worried about your illness. . . . I beg God to hurry and give you back your strength and health. Farewell my friend. . . .”8 Potemkin reportedly sobbed as he read her letters.9
On September 30, his fifty-second birthday, Potemkin woke up struggling to breathe—possibly the result of bronchial pneumonia. On October 4, he scribbled a note to Catherine: “. . . I’ve no more strength to endure my torments. My only remaining salvation is to abandon this town, and I have ordered myself conveyed to Nikolaev. I don’t know what’s to become of me.”10 Potemkin left Jassy the next afternoon for Nikolaev, accompanied by Cossacks, doctors, and his niece Alexandra. After overnighting, the party continued the next morning. On a remote hillside in the Bessarabian steppe some forty miles from Jassy, Potemkin stopped his six-seat carriage. “That’s enough now, there is no point in going any further,” he said. “Take me out of the carriage, I want to die in the field.”11 Wearing a silk dressing gown from Catherine, he was laid on a Persian rug spread on the grass. He died that morning with Catherine’s tear-stained letters in his pocket.
It took a week for Catherine to receive word. At half past two in the morning, she poured her sorrow out in a letter to Grimm: “A terrible crushing blow struck me yesterday,” she began. “. . . You can have no idea of how afflicted I am: he joined to an excellent heart a rare understanding and an extraordinary breath of spirit; his views were always great and magnanimous. . . . But his most rare quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which distinguished him completely from the rest of humankind, and which meant that we understood one another perfectly and could let those who understood less rattle away to their hearts’ content. I regard Prince Potemkin as a very great man, who did not fulfil half of what was within his grasp.”12
After being bled by her doctors, Catherine locked herself in her room, refusing to see anyone. According to her secretary, the next days were filled with “tears and despair.”13 Throughout their volatile twenty-year relationship, Catherine and Potemkin remained devoted to each another. Though she needed Potemkin in the south, Catherine missed him terribly, often begging him to return. The practical reality of governing without her indispensable right-hand man began to sink in. “Prince Potemkin did me a cruel turn by dying! Every burden now falls upon me,” she wrote Grimm. “Be so good as to pray for me.”14
For months after Potemkin’s death, Catherine avoided public appearances. “. . . I am still profoundly afflicted by it,” she wrote Grimm. “To replace him is impossible, because someone would have to be born as he was, and the end of this century announces no geniuses. . . . As for me, be assured that I will be unchanging and that, preaching perseverance to others, it will not be I who varies.”15
Alexander Bezborodko took Potemkin’s place at the peace talks. By year-end, the talented negotiator sealed the highly advantageous Treaty of Jassy. After four and a half years of war, Catherine won a large area on the Black Sea. Vasily Popov arrived in St. Petersburg to present Potemkin’s papers and letters to Catherine, who locked them away and hid the key. At the end of January, Catherine received the ratified peace treaty from Potemkin’s decorated nephew, Alexander Samoilov. After dismissing everyone from the room, Catherine wept with the war hero.16