Catherine had another reason for rejecting a treaty with England: her rapprochement with Austria had led to a formal alliance. On the strength of this alliance, she and Potemkin were preparing for the annexation of the Crimea, which both considered far more important than the acquisition of Minorca. It was Potemkin who had proposed and managed this peaceful annexation. The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi, which ended the first Turkish war in 1774, had established the independence of the Crimea, but the khanate still remained a nominal vassal state of the Ottoman sultan. Potemkin worried that geographically the peninsula split Russia’s Black Sea possessions, and he explained to Catherine the difficulty of guarding her southern frontier while the Crimea remained outside her empire. “The acquisition of the Crimea can make us neither stronger nor richer, but it will ensure our peace,” he said. In July 1783, Catherine announced the annexation of the Crimean peninsula into the Russian empire. Potemkin managed this acquisition without a war or a battle, although it came at a long-term personal cost: in the Crimea, he acquired a severe case of malaria that never entirely left him during the rest of his life.
Crimean Journey and “Potemkin Villages”
OVER TIME, the story of Catherine the Great’s journey down the Dnieper River to the Crimea in the spring of 1787 has passed from history into legend. It has been described as the most remarkable journey ever made by a reigning monarch and as Gregory Potemkin’s greatest public triumph. It has also been disparaged as a gigantic hoax: the prosperous villages shown to the empress were said to have been made of painted cardboard; the happy villagers were declared to be costumed serfs, marched from place to place, appearing and reappearing, waving and cheering as Catherine passed by. These accusations became the basis of the myth of “Potemkin villages,” the settlements Potemkin supposedly fabricated along the Dnieper in order to deceive Catherine and her guests about the actual state of her southern territories. In time, the expression “Potemkin village” came to mean a sham, or something fraudulent, erected or spoken to conceal an unpleasant truth. As such, it became a cliché; now, it is part of the language. In evaluating the allegation, two facts should be considered. The first is that those who mocked and condemned were not present on the journey. The other is that the results of Potemkin’s work were personally observed by many eyewitnesses, including three sharp-eyed and sophisticated foreigners: the Austrian emperor, Joseph II; the French ambassador, the Comte de Ségur; and the Austrian field marshal Prince Charles de Ligne. Over two centuries, no one has produced any evidence that what these three said and wrote about their journey was untrue.
For nine years Potemkin had worked to transform the newly acquired areas of southern Russia into a prosperous part of Catherine’s empire. Proud of what he had achieved, he had been urging the empress to come and see what he had done. Finally, she agreed to come in the spring and summer of 1787, the year of her silver jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her accession to the throne. The planning and preparation of Catherine’s Crimean journey began. It was to be the longest journey of her life and the most spectacular public spectacle of her reign. For more than six months and over four thousand miles, she traveled by land and water, by sledge, river galley, and carriage. In doing this, she confirmed the future of this vast region. From the year of her journey until the German invasion in 1941, and then the independence of Ukraine in 1991, these lands never passed from Russian hands.
The Crimean Peninsula, which Potemkin most wanted the empress to see, had a history embracing many peoples and cultures. In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Greeks had established colonies along the Crimean coast. Then called the Taurus, it was the site where Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is said to have served as a priestess in the Temple of Diana. Three hundred years later, these Greek colonies became part of the Roman Empire; later, the Crimea was conquered and occupied by the Mongols. When Catherine annexed the peninsula in 1783, she instructed Potemkin to build roads, cities, and ports, enrich and broaden agriculture, and integrate the Muslim population into her empire without destroying their religion or culture. Potemkin then built cities, created parks, and planted vineyards and botanical gardens. He brought in cattle, silkworms, mulberries, and melon seeds. He began building warships, and at Kherson, Nikolaev, and on the Bay of Sebastopol he constructed naval bases for the new Russian Black Sea Fleet.
