Empire: World History - 76. The Empress & The General

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

With her reign in peril in three separate arenas, Catherine begins to turn her attention to a young soldier, Grigory Potemkin. What follows is one of the great partnerships (and love affairs) of history. Together, they consolidate her rule then rapidly expand; seizing vast parts of modern Ukraine, annexing Crimea, building Kherson and Sevastopol, and taking the Russian Empire to its apogee. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Simon Sebag Montefiore for the final time as they tell the tale of the Russian Empire’s finest moment. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mptopopuuk.com. And welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. And we still have with us. Yes, we've locked the doors. We've barred the windows.

Simon Seameng Montefiore. is still very much our hostage today. And we left you on an absolute cliff edge last time. We're talking about Catherine the Great. And Catherine's reign, which had started so promisingly, she'd managed to get together disparate parts of Russia, get them to be on her side, to love her even, to change their lives for the better.

And she faces the first test, which could end everything. And this is, we sort of took you to Pukachev's rebellion. So her son Paul doesn't think his mother or a woman should be reigning. There are lots of other people who are of the same mind, but what would a woman know? Ovaries, no, they don't mix with power. That's terribly combustible. So there's a whole momentum that is building up against Catherine. And what happens next, Simon Seabag-150s?

Well, there's also the war against the Ottomans, against the Turks that is now in stalemate. So she's got a huge war, a peasant rebellion, a son that wants to throw her out, all sorts of enemies at her court. And her lover, her old lover all of, is estranged. They're a bit tired of each other and their relationship is on the rocks. What can she do? She begins to think about somebody who's been in love with her since he helped to seize power in 1762. And you may remember from Tuesday that riding on the back of the carriage when she seized power

was a young guardsman of 22, Gregori Potemkin. Fantastic hair, better hair than me, she says. Yeah, she was always jealous of his hair. He had wonderful hair. I know that feeling. You must say that feeling too, Tzu. Hair is completely irrelevant to us, isn't it, William? But he had the most beautiful head of hair.

She said she was jealous of it. And he was six foot three. He was a scholar of many languages, a scholar of the Bible. And he was a young soldier. I mean, very young. It joined at 11. I mean, that's like a baby. All children were signed up for their guards regiments, very young in the system.

But he was a boy. had grown up in Smolensk province with five sisters. You write in your book that he spent his time drinking, gambling and lovemaking. Yes. And also fell into debt as a result of surprise, surprise. He loved women. He'd had a fight possibly with the all-offs about Catherine the Great, and he'd possibly been hit with a billiard cube, which made him lose his eye. And he was known as Cyclops by his enemies, wouldn't he? The young man who'd originally been known as Alcibiades for his cleverness and beauty after the Athenian statesman was now known as Cyclops. But whenever he saw Catherine the Great in the corridors of the Winter Palace for the last

10 years, he would fall to his knees, grab our hand and say, I'm passionately in love with you, which could be annoying, of course, but Catherine was charmed. Yeah, and can I just, can I just say, I mean, did it have anything to do with? You know what. You know where. I have to say, I'm going to bring in Calib at this point. Our wonderful producer has written in the notes. Just a moment. You and I both read the same stuff, and we both circle the same phrase. His Elephantine sexual equipment. Simon Seabbeg Montefiore, explain yourself. What is the primary source for this, Seabag?

I mean, what is this? There are sources that talked about his famous manhood. So you're right to challenge it. Let's just say he was extremely well known for his legendary virility. Yeah, it was well known in the guards. It was talked about in the guards, and that's how we know about it. But she'd always rejected him because she had all of, And he was also intellectually extremely masterful.

So she'd always hesitated whether to have him because he was going to be a problem. You know, he was going to be a political challenge. He wasn't going to be someone who wanted to just get rich. Were they all loves as bright as Potemkin or were they bright at all? No, none of them was bright as Potemkin. And Pottenkin was just an extraordinary character. And people later said, you know, the reason why they fell in love is because they're exactly alike. And they appreciated that.

And they often said, we're twin souls. We're exactly the same. Do you have some love letters between them, don't you? Well, what I thought I'd do is just tell you how he came to come back. So he'd gone off to make his name in this war, which was such a big problem for Catherine. And when he was there, she thought about all of this, and she decided to write him a letter. And he was besieging a town called Silistria, Silistria, which is in the Danube, near the Danube. And she sent him this letter. So just imagine you're receiving this letter. You're a young man of 33, a young general. Overseeing the artillery of the danes. Overseeing the cavalry of the artillery. And you get this letter. Dear General Pettenkin, you are probably staring at Solistria with no time to read letters. Since I'm keen to preserve brave, talented and clever individuals, I beg you to take care of yourself and remain in safety. Then she goes on, when you read this, you may well ask yourself, why I

have written it. And so you may confirm with this confirmation of my way of thinking about you and that I will always remain your most benevolent, Catherine. Aw. Yeah, so what do you think he does when you get to this letter in Bulgaria or Romania or wherever he is? He says, look, mates, look, she fancies me and she's the most powerful woman in the world. Woo-hoo! I'm well on the way. He saddled his horse and he gallops for St. Petersburg. gets permission to leave and he heads for St. Petersburg. He arrives in St Petersburg.

Which presumably is no small journey. It's a thousand miles. He didn't sign. He arrives there and pretty much immediately they become lovers. They find that they are amazingly well suited. And this is the sort of letter that she sends him. Talking about love.

I woke at 5 a.m. today thinking about you. I have given strict rules to the whole of my body, she writes to him, to the last hair to stop showing you the slightest sign of love. Oh, Monsieur Pattenkin, what a trick you've played to unbalance a mind previously thought to be one of the best in Europe. What a disgrace. Catherine II, the victim of this crazy passion. One more proof of your supreme power over me. Well, mad letter, go to where my hero dwells. That's lovely. How much older is she, She's 10 years older than him. So she's 43 in her prime, and he's 33 in his prime in a way. So it's a

great meeting, and they're both mature, and she immediately puts them on the council. She soon appoints him to be Minister of War. He negotiates the peace with the Turks, the Treaty of Kujak, Kankara, which gives Russia huge gains in South Ukraine and makes the carnate of Tartary of Crimea independent of the Ottomans so that it's now vulnerable. Is this the treaty she says is the happiest day of her life or something? There's one letter she writes, right? And she's so relieved that it's all gone through. And Potemkin takes over all these things.

Remember, he's like an untrained general. And crucially, one of her great ambitions is to retake Constantinople for the Orthodox. Yes. And it gives her the right to protect the Christians of the East. This is a crucial thing in the next century. Yes, and this is something that Potemkin actually kind of invents. It's called the Greek project, William, which is exactly what you're talking about. And the Greek project is a project that he comes up with and puts into this treaty because he writes some of it.

And it is, gives them their dream is to take Constantinople and put a Russian prince on the throne of it. There's so much that follows in the 19th century, isn't there, which comes from this, which may never have happened but for Potemkin adding this. Yes, and the Crimean War, for example. You have Russia stuffing the monasteries in Jerusalem full of Orthodox monks. Athos becomes a major imperial Russian training centre. You go today to the Russian monastery in Athos, there's room for about 4,000 monks or 5,000 monks who are ready to go for the Holy Land and wage war on behalf of Orthodoxy.

This is a big deal. So she's head over heels with him, and he is, I mean, in your words, Russia's greatest ever minister, which is, you know, quite the accolade. Greatest Ramanov minister of the 300 and whatever it is, 24 years that they ruled. She is head over heels in love with him, but do the Russian people love him? What do they think of him? Well, the Russian people don't matter. But remember, this is an autocracy, ruled by an aristocracy. Many of the Russian people themselves are 90% peasants and most of those are serfs.

So what really matters is the aristocracy. And the aristocracy, some of them are very jealous of Potemkin. Many of them regard him as a total upstart. But many people also recognize that he is remarked. And the Olofs, for example, are very jealous because they lose political power. But they also recognise that he's a very talented person. See, Bag, there's some debate, isn't there, about whether they're actually secretly married or not? I mean, I'm almost certain, as much as you can be, that they are secretly married. And there are many love letters. Here's one that says, my dear soul, Cher Epush, darling husband.

Darling husband, come up and snuggle with me, if you please. And she says, and here she says to him. Grishenko, she calls him. She calls him many nicknames like Lion of the Jungle, Tiger, Cossack. And she often calls him Golden Cock Fescent. Oh. Does that have the same connotation in Russian? No, leave it. Leave it. And she calls him Golden Cockroll. And I'm not going to say any more than that. No, that's fine. But it goes back to your earlier question. Yes. No, thank you. I think asked and answered now with that. But doesn't Oloff then get a little bit sort of jealous and jittery about this? Does he not?

about Oloff, but she doesn't get rid of, this is her genius, is that she doesn't get rid of all of, she doesn't dismiss all of, all of remains on the council, all of remains a very, very senior person, and she piles him high with souls and estates. Sure, but he also tries to win her back with the all-off diamond. I mean, we've talked about this, you know, we're obsessed with diamonds. This is the all-off diamond, of course, yes. Did you not for that? I didn't put the two together. Oh, bless your little heart. So from what I know, from what I know, And you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that, you know, he so much wants to win her back. Maybe he wants a bit more of the glory that he had before and the power and the court.

But he presents her with something that she had always wanted, which was this egg-shaped, extraordinary, clear, beautiful diamond, the Orlov diamond. Which they think is the great mogul diamond that is seen by Tavenier in Orangzeb's crown jewels. And it's bigger than the Koe Nort. Don't pretend you knew this story now. I'd rather than say, more. But actually, the truth of the matter is that they actually, first of all, he's buying it with money that she's given him. Don't forget that. Oh my God, he's a typical bad boyfriend.

Can't borrow a fibre. I'm going to get you some flowers in the petrol station. And also she gives him amazing presents too. And she piles him higher. It's a lot of present giving here. But the point is, Potemkin is now in control. They secretly marry. And you can see that in their letter.

she now starts to call him darling husband in their letters. And also, he does something which is unique in the whole story of the whole dynasty, which is he basically has access to the treasury like a ruler. So he basically becomes Kozhar now. Right. Is there any other character like him in Romanov history? There's no other character like him in the whole history of Russian power. And she writes to another love letter, for you, I'd do the impossible.

I'd even be your humble maid or lowly servant, she says. Groshenka, it's impossible for me to change towards you. Can one love anybody after having loved you? So the point is that they have this amazing relationship, but now they begin to negotiate an incredibly difficult thing in a marriage, which is he doesn't want to sit at home with Catherine. She has no family. She needs support of someone day. And she says, I can't exist without love for a single hour, she says. But he wants to go out and conquer the empire and rule Russia with her. and also he's a wild liberty, and womanizer. So they begin to negotiate an extraordinary thing.

All the way through? No, no, not at the beginning. No, not at the beginning at all. But as their sort of relationship begins to burn each other up, they begin to argue, because he's frustrated, stuck there like a sort of Poppinjay at court. And he's ultimately a guardsman. He's ultimately a great Russian imperialist,

if that's possible, given what we know today. So what basically they do is, to cut a strong story sort, is they negotiate an extraordinary open marriage where they rule together. He's indispensable. He's basically like her husband and cosar, but they each can have young lovers. And that works extremely well. And in the most bizarre way. Is this explicit or only implicit?

It's implicit. So one of the amazing things that I discovered when I was researching it's in their papers is it's a very, very weird arrangement. But basically, she has these young lovers in their 20s, these young men. he has his nieces and all sorts of young lovers, young female lovers, in their 20s and teens. And so what they do is they get them to call them mum and dad. That's what he is. So for example, her young, here's this is Alexander Lanskoy.

It was the family she craved. She wanted Lanskoy and others to call her and Potemkin parents. So to Potemkin, she usually referred to Lanskoy as the child. While Lanskai was expected to call her Matushka, Mum, and him, Batushka, Dad. That is odd. And she was always missing Potemkin when he was away. Here she writes, you can't imagine how dull it is without you, Batushka.

Come immediately. So they're always kind of looking because he's so entertaining. And one of the ways he seduced her was at her sort of dining society once. They were playing cards before they were lovers. And she said, what are you thinking about Potemkin? And he says, and he answered in a light German accent. He said, I don't know what you're talking about. and everyone went absolutely silent

because he was imitating the Empress. So everyone went silent and looked at him and this could be and then she just started to laugh and everyone else laughed too. See, Peter the Great wouldn't have laughed, would he? No. He'd have been in the torture chamber at this point. He would have punched him, gouged him.

The point is they now embark on their great project. They defeat the Pukachov rebellion and Pugachov is executed. They make peace with the Ottomans as we talked about and now he's appointed Governor General of Novorosia, a new governate, a new province called New Russia, which may be familiar with you today. And

he goes to New Russia and he starts to build a new port in the new territories there and he builds Kyrsson. On the front line today, yeah. And he builds Kerson. He found a whole lot of cities in this new territory. Odessa. Odessa. Yadatarinoslav, which is now called

Denepro, huge city. Maripal, where the Azov works was, which was destroyed by the Russians. Sometimes they were on the place of Tata villages. So, for example, Actyar was a Tartar village with a natural harbor, that became Sebastopol, and that's where he built his 18th century neoclassical city, which became Russia's great naval base, played a huge part in the Crimean War, and Mucha and World War II, etc, etc. But what he did was he had to populate these cities. And so he did this massive immigration system where he encouraged all sorts of people. Greek Orthodox coming in. Greeks went to Maripov, became a Greek city, thousands of Jews. Potemkin was the most philosemitic Russian statesmen all time. He loved Jews. He traveled all the time with his own rabbi, rabbi's Joshua Zyclin.

That's amazing. And he loved Jews. And in fact, Zyclin said to him, we don't want to be called Jids, Yids. We want to be called Yvesre, Hebrews. And so to this day, the Jewish community in Russian is called Ivre, Hebrew, rather than Jidi, which was the very rude name of them. So he was extraordinary. So he brought in, obviously, he brought in Ukrainians.

He brought in Cossacks. He was the Graham Hetman of the Black Sea Cossacks. He brought in Ukrainians and Russians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians, Spanish. And he settled them in all these towns. And Sebastopol, in Sebastopol, he founds a new thing, the Russian Black Sea Fleet. So he does exactly what Peter the Great did in the North, Temkin does in the south, and he found these cities.

which are now sacred to Russian ultra-nationalism. And are the population still that mixed Cossack Tatar population you were describing earlier, or do they start to settle it with serfs from the north? Many Tartas stayed, but many also left for the Ottoman Empire, and the Gere family left for the Ottoman Empire, for example, the ruling Gere family. What's interesting was he did it bloodlessly just as Putin did with his little green men. So in 1783, it's a great opportunity. Potemkin does it very cleverly because there's amazing opportunity for Russia to do this,

because the great powers are busy elsewhere. What are they doing in 1783? America. It's the American War of Independence. Britain is very busy. It's just faced Yorktown. And France is also bankrupting itself, fighting for the Americans. But Potemkin sort of clearing all of this space and all of these names that you've mentioned

that could be in news bulletins even today. it's not easy to found a civilization and build, and it's even harder when you don't have access to water. So it's like timber coming from Chernobyl at one point. And tell me about the Potemkin village, because I always heard that he tried to make it look a lot better than it was by doing these sort of facades of greatness and beauty, but they were pretty hollow and two-dimensional, and there wasn't much to them. The Potemkin village is a Potemkin village. It's a great libel, really, because it was spread by Zarevich Paul, who hated Potentken, and said he was going to kill Pertengen when he succeeded to the throne. He spread the rumour that these were false villages.

And the British press, again, spread the rumour and the German press, who were very, very alarmed by Russian expansionism, surprise, surprise, spread the rumours that these towns weren't built and they were built. In fact, they were built. And in 1787, Potemkin arranged this massive state visit where Catherine met up with their new ally, Joseph II, the Habsburg Emperor, And they met in the Crimea and they viewed this fleet and there was a complete fleet there, all built by Potemkin. And Joseph II didn't think that there were any Potemkin villages. The only people who thought it was of Tengen was Paul, who wasn't on this trip. But it was on this trip that Potemkin sort of invented the modern state visit.

Because what they did have was lots of local, you know, they had Cossack dancers and tartar dancers and sort of folk scenes and things. exactly the sort of thing that's bored statesman to tears ever since, you know, in state visits. And he basically invented that spectacle, which we now think of, you know, every time, you know, every camp of King Charles III or the prime minister goes somewhere, they're sort of, they have to sit through these kind of, you know, these events. That's what happened. See, back, two questions. First of all, we established last time that Putin has read your book and knows this history through you. do you ever worry that the stuff you've written has inspired him to do some of the stuff he's doing now?

Are you responsible for this? Well, first of all, I mean, Potemkin and Kaepin would have hated Putin. I mean, they were aristocratic children of the Enlightenment who really, you know, who would have been appalled by the way he conducted himself, the way that he rules, the corruption, the vulgarity, the ultra-nationalism. And they were imperialists, but they weren't nationalists in the way that we see today. So that's the first thing to say. But secondly, Putin has apparently always been obsessed with getting the Crimea back, because Crimea contains the sort of sacred city of Sebastopol, home with the Russian fleet, all built by Batemkin.

When he came to power in 1999, I just finished writing Kathamund the Great of Batemkin. And so I immediately was contacted by people from the Kremlin. And I remember at this time Putin was regarded as a sort of incredible liberal reform, a wonderful person. Tony Blair going to stay with the horses. Yeah, Tony Blair said he was a decent person. George W. Bush said he looked into his soul and seen a decent person, all of these things. So I got this message saying, like, we've read the book, but he doesn't read English. So while it's being translated into Russia, it was bought by Russian publisher,

could you write as a short essay on how he took Crimea and South Ukraine and how he built the fleet and Sebastopol? How extraordinary. Which I did, and I gave it to them. And then when it was in Russian, they way back and said, it's been read by a certain personage. This is from the minister of, actually the deputy minister of culture. And he came to me and he said, it's been really appreciated. And we've been agonizing about who to use as a basis for this new presidency. But we feel we can't do Kevin the Great because, you know, she's a woman.

Would Potemkin do? And so they were very interested in Potemkin. And then he said, you know, it's been read. The book's been read by this certain personage. and he would like to give you a present. So I wonder what the hell that was going to be. All off diamond. I would definitely make a bid for that, Seabberg.

For a historian, the answer was the goal of diamond because he said, we're about to open the Stalin archive. Would you like to be the first to sit in it? Yeah. And so I worked in it for a year with, you know, in my own room, with kind of everyone helping me, bring me all these papers from Stalin. Unimaginable situation today. A dream.

But then when I published the book, Putin hated it. Why? Because it's not very nice. about Stalin. And he seems like such a reasonable man. I experienced the rule rays of Zoroast favour. I also experienced the cold wind of the tundra, and I was banned. So then I fell from favour with Putin.

Can I just ask one other question about him fascinated by this story? I've never heard you tell this story before. When you said, you know, you wrote it up and you gave it to his people, I mean, is this sort of like sitting on a park bench passing over an envelope, or do they come to your house? Like in a car, in an Uber. How does it work? I had two meetings with them.

One was at Clarages in England. Right. And one was in Metropole Hotel by the Kremlin in Russia. And I had many meetings with Gregoriev, who was the deputy minister of culture at the time, who told me all these things, and who was a publisher as well as being deputy minister and who published the book in Russia. So I really benefited from it because I had access to this starless of. But I later, when I came to Roe Young Stalin, I was.

told I had no privileges and no one remembered me in the archive. It was like that Soviet thing. Oh, God. What happened to them? Well, they were all fine because they just obeyed orders. You know, when I had the Tsar's favour, I was given Zah's treatment. And when I lost the Zars favor, they literally said to me, even though I'd spent a year in their company every day, they literally said to me, we don't remember that. I said, well, and you get, I had my own special room. I was with you every day. And they said, no. And did they at any time try and pressure you, you know, when they were give you access to say, look, we'd like you to say this, that and the other. But what's interesting is one of the reasons why I knew that Putin was, there's a Freud

I knew that Putin was going to invade was he started writing these histories and started quoting Peter the Great and Potemkin and talking about them and Catherine the Great. And I realized that, of course, these were lands that have been taken. And I sort of re, you know, I returned to the original conversations I'd had 22 years earlier. And of course, Chieson, Potemkin is buried in Hirson because it was his first city in the cathedral, in St. Catherine's Cathedral. And so Catherine was planning, I think, to bring him to Petersburg. But he was buried there because he died near there. And so his body was still there.

And so when they took Hirson, the Russians took Hirsson recently last year, when they retreated from Hirson, they stole the body of Prince Potemkin. Do you know where it is now? No, but the local head of government said, you know, we took the body of the sacred, you call them not the illustrious prince, but the sacred prince. And so you can see he's become a sort of nationalist banner. So they took the bones, which I'd visited, because when I was writing Catherine of Pettenkin, I was advised by the great expert, the great scholar of Catherine's scholarship, Professor Isabel de Madriaga, who was a bit like Catherine the Great.

I realized she really did think of herself as Catherine the Great, Because when I went to his tomb, she said, would you lay some red flowers there for me? So anyway, they stole the body. And what I think they will do is one day, they will just open, they will create a tomb for him in Moscow. Where people can pay reverence. With the names of all these towns, like Sebastian, Crimea,

Maripa, Odessa, Hearson, that they claim. So in these years, between 1774, 1783, and then another war against the Ottomans, And in 1787, after this great state visit, the Ottomans attacked Russia to try and get back their lost territories. And instead, Potemkin took command and they lost more land. So by 1791, they had lost what is now South Ukraine and the Crimea. And Potemkin had built all these new cities and founded all these new cities and founded this fleet, which were real. His enemies said he didn't build them.

But the buildings are there and the cities are there. and the fleet was there. So it was very interesting. He brought in foreigners. He had Scotsmen, Spaniards, all sorts of Germans, all sorts of fascinating kind of renegades were commanding his fleet and his soldiers. He stormed the city of Ochoakov, and he employed General Savorov, one of the most legendary Russian generals, who also is always quoted by Putin. So essentially, Catherine and Potemkin, by the time Potemkin died, they had secured all of South Ukraine, Crimea, they'd built Sebastopol, they'd built a fleet, and Russia was a southern and near-eastern power. Well, it's a good point to take a break. Join us after the break. We continue with Simon Seabag Montefiore,

Russia growing successfully muscular, muscularly. What does the rest of Europe think about this? Join us after the break and find out. Welcome back. Simon, just before the break, you were telling us about Potemkin and why, you know, he is such a role model for Putin because of this very successful expert expansionism. What was Europe looking at at the time and thinking and doing at the time in response to this? Catherine and Potemkin were able to get away with this because all of Europe was busy fighting the American War of Independence. In one point, Potemkin actually offered George the third, offered the British, a Russian army to suppress the American rebels. I didn't know that. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Which of course.

course would have changed history because of course the British were using lots of Hessian and German mercenaries. So the British would have a Russian army. Quite a thought, isn't it? But anyway, that obviously didn't happen. And in fact, Russia took the opportunity to grab all these Ottoman and Tatar territories. And then the British tried to stop it in the 1791 of Chakoff crisis, where Pitt the Younger and Prussia tried to stop Russia. And they failed to do so. Is this the first time that you find the British, because obviously in the 19th century, this becomes a huge issue that Russia has seen to be about to engulf the Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe, the Crimean War. Is this where this begins? This is where it begins, the Archaakov, the Archaakov crisis,

and this is where it begins. And Catherine Pattenkin were on the edge of a European war against Prussia and against Britain, but they got away with it. But at the height of all this, Potemkin is galloping across the steps when he falls ill with the fever. That lovely opening scene in your book with him coming out of this enormous sleeping carriage. I love this. Yes, he's lived, he's lived this amazing life. He's always compared to Sardinopoulos. You know, he lives like, literally like a, he lives a sultanic life, travels with a moving palace and a moving English garden that he builds every night for himself. Brilliant. He sleeps with five of his nieces, which very shocking. An English garden means a beautifully arranged one or a sort of William Kent

natural garden that sort of... It's a very natural-looking garden. He had serfs carrying his garden with him, and they planted him everywhere he stopped. Yeah. And of course, they all had British gardens, which they hired from British Dukes. So, I mean, Catherine the Great's garden,

I remember, was called Mr. Bush, appropriately. And I think he was the Duke of Northumberland's or the Duke of Devonshire's gardener that they hired at a vast salary, as you do. And he was obsessed with jewels. he sat around playing with diamonds all day. So he lived this amazing life. And when he was besieging cities,

he built an underground palace. And he sat around with lots of his girlfriends around, who were all... And his nieces. Well, there was nieces. But his nieces, it was more than his nieces. I mean, his eldest niece, Sashenko, Brunitska, became Catherine the Great's best friend.

And she's with him at the end when he's dying. She's with him at the end. And he catches the fever. He's achieved these amazing things. He's somewhere in Romania. at this point. When I was researching the book, I thought it was in Romania that he died, but I discovered that it wasn't. I thought it was near Yash in Romania. But when I got there, I found out his guts were there in that church. But actually he died in Moldova. So I moved over

to Moldova and found the spot. You have a picture, don't you, in the book of the death announcement? Yes, because there's a memorial still there. When he died, he said, give me Catherine's letter, give me the Empress's letters. And he had all her letters wrapped up with him all the time in a bow and he got all her letters and he read them out he had them read to him by his niece and he sobbed as he knew he was dying on the steps and an old cossack watched and as he died the old cossack just shook his head and he said lived on gold died on grass wow and cavern the great had a had a small stroke when she heard that he died and she said there'll never be another potemkin and they'll they'll like will never come again but she went on with her young lover who was 20

she was 60 and he was called Platon Zubov, who was completely talentless Popper J, and who led her to do very crude and stupid things actually and wrong things. I mean, for example, she finished the partition of Poland, but instead of keeping Poland with its independence, she just swallowed all the rest of it, brutally, because Pottenkin had wanted to be king of Poland and had planned to be king of Poland and to keep Poland as an Russian ally, but under himself and under his own family. So the empire ended at the time of the French Revolution, Catherine became extremely conservative. Because obviously she was worried that the same thing would happen.

She was worried that there'd be a revolution with her. She was disgusted by the revolution. By the way, one of the people that, I said that Potemkin hired lots of foreign people to populate his cities. And actually, you know, one of the people he tried to hire was a young Corsican French officer called Napoleon Bonaparte. Really? He was also negotiated.

He was obsessed with music and he wrote music, Potemkin. And he always traveled as well as an English garden. and he also traveled with an orchestra. And one of the people he was trying to hire was a composer in Vienna called Mozart. No. So Napoleon and Mozart could have ended up in the... Neither of those hires came off.

Right. But anyway, the point was that, you know, he'd achieved a massive amount in his life. Seabag, two areas that we need to look at, very important. The Caucasus, in other words, what is now Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and northern Persia. This is leading on to where we'll be headed

later in this series in the Great Game. If you go today to Tehran, there are these enormous Khadjar images of large Persian armies and large Georgian armies taking on the Russians. And the Russians are seen as these rather demonic figures in the canvases. Is this during Potemkin's era?

Yes, this is really important. So the Iranians have basically controlled much of the Caucasus for a long time. And at various moments, they even co-opted Georgian kings to come and command their armies and fighting their armies. And there were times when their commanders in chief were Georgian kings. And their Harims were filled with blonde Georgian girls. And thousands of enslaved Georgians, you know, filled the unhoused, the mansions and palaces of the

Safavid and Khadjar. Fat Ali Shah famously had a hundred legal wives. Yes. So what happened was that as well as fighting the Ottomans, the Russians were now fighting the Persians. And at the end of, at the end of her reign, Catherine had a war with Persia. But just to go a little bit earlier, in 1783, the same year, his anus mirabilis, if you like, Potemkin not only annexed Crimea, but also signed a protection treaty with King Hercules II of Georgia and Solomon the second of Georgia. And this was the treaty of Georgiask, which was the first time that Russia had sort of claimed the Georgian kingdoms. But later on in her rule, under the useless Zubov brothers, that's her lover. Platon Zubov and his brother Valerian,

an aggressive new Shah came to power. And this is the Shah that you know about William, Agar Muhammad Shah. With his basket survivals. Who was the eunuch Shah. He was castrated. He was the only eunuch to found a dynasty, which is quite a hard thing to do if you think about it.

And he did that because his nephew succeeded. But he was a wizened, tiny little high-voiced man who had been in prison after being castrated as a boy. And when he came out of prison, he led the Khadjar to conquer Iran and to restore Iranian power. And one of the things he did was invade the Caucasus and take it back from the Russians.

And Catherine was already occupied, worried about fighting in Europe and the French Revolution and Poland. So she abandoned the Georgian king, Solomon II and Hercules II. And Agamahem Shah invaded Tbilisi, destroyed Tbilisi, and took back another of those great caches. of slaves. He enslaved over 100,000 people, mass-raped women, burnt Tbilisi, and took back 100,000 enslaved Georgians to toil in the Harims and the farms of Iran. And he was the one who, when he took a city, he ordered people to gouge out the eyeballs. And when he took one city, he piled up 80,000 pairs of eyeballs. Disgusting detail, yeah. And there are travelers' descriptions from the generation that follows this of hundreds of blind people wandering around the bazaars of

that part of the world. You'd travel and you just see blind people everywhere begging by the side of the road alive but unable to support themselves. Yes. And he was the one, he was also the one who put the molten crown on Shah Rock of Khorasan, the grandson, I think, of Nadia Shah. So anyway, the point was that Catherine finished up with this storming of Poland. Poland. Poland was inspired by the French Revolution and had rebelled and had been partitioned between the three great powers of Eastern Europe, Russia, Prussia and Austria. But in the 1790s, her old lover, Stanislav Poniatowski, tried to launch a French revolution in Poland, the Polish Revolution to expel Russian power. She crushed that brutally. She invaded Poland. She massacred thousands of

people in the suburb of Prague outside Warsaw. And she annexed the rest of. Poland, and Poland then vanished. I mean, the personal betrayal of someone who's an ex-lover who's been given this sort of of King of Poland status. I mean, did she ever talk about, write about, or has anyone recorded what she felt about that betrayal? Yes, I mean, she was extremely irritated and infuriated by Stanislav Konyatowski, and saddened by him.

And she had met him again on their trip to the south with Potemkin. He'd come and pay tribute to her in 1787 and he'd met her. And they'd spend a little bit of time together, very sadly, because they were both old now and they kind of had a sad, awkward meeting and she was now empress and he was now her sort of tributary. While when they'd met, she was a young married princess and he was somebody's secretary. So it was an extraordinary meeting. But yes, he did portray Russian power and tried to save Poland. Potemkin also had a different vision for Poland. But the Zubov brothers were very, very crude and they were kind of running things. Catherine was over six in her 60s now, breathless.

enormously fat, unwell, and in thrall, she said rather disgustingly, she famously said, you know, with little blacky, she called him, noir, because he was very dark, Platon, Zubel. She said, like, with him, I'm like a fly in summer, she said, I'm so happy with him. Because he was 40 years younger, and she called him Le Noura, because he was very dark. And she just let, she promoted him to all Potemkin's positions, Governor General of New Russia. She was trying to recreate a Potemkin for herself. and he just wasn't the same thing at all. And so we come to the end of Catherine the Great

with some really kind of unpalatable, imperialistic cruelties, which were unlike the rest of her career actually. Sebag, if you were a Ukrainian historian, if you were Sejeproski or someone, what would you be saying about Catherine the Great that she's a terrible, set a terrible template of imperialism, or how do they look on her? Yes, they would look upon her

as one of the most voracious Russian nationalists imperialists and that she had vastly expanded the empire. As I explained, there's a difference between northern and southern Ukraine because the southern Ukraine has been Islamic territory, not Ukrainian at this point. It now became partly Ukrainian and later became totally Ukrainian. So when you go to Crimea, there are no Orthodox churches before the 18th century or? No, none. Would you describe it as a golden age for Russia? It was absolutely a golden age for Russia, but for the provinces, you know, Georgia, Georgia was betrayed by Catherine the Great, Poland was destroyed by Catherine the Great, Ukraine was conquered by Catherine the Great, the Crimean Tartarus was annexed by Catherine the Great. So, you know, as always with the Russian Empire, and this is why empire is interesting, the Russian Empire was a voracious expander. She added 200,000 square miles to the empire. She destroyed the independent kingdom of Poland and the independent carnate of Crimea. She was a voracious Russian imperialist. She was also an astonishingly talented, often decent,

often generous, often humane statewoman. She was a reformer. She was an extremely generous person to her friends and lovers. She was always being ill-treated by her young lovers who always always had affairs. And when she caught them, she was heartbroken and, you know, until she fell in love again. Her reputation as a nymphomaniac or liberty is very unfair. I would say that she she was a serial monogamist, rather than any of that. I'd say Empress Elizabetha, her predecessor, but one, was much more of what you'd expect, people expect a Catherine the Great.

Okay. So it's just the end of her, it sounds as if she sort of loses who she is a little bit, and she's letting sort of inferior people like the Zoo-Ovs do things which are cruel and unnecessary, and perhaps the younger Catherine may not have done. I mean, is that fair to say? I think that's correct. What happens, how does she die, where is she,

and what is her legacy in Russia? She's in her bathroom, shall we say, when she suffers a stroke. And it's November 1796. Do you mean in her bathroom euphemistically like Elvis? Yes. And she is found on the floor there. And she's so fat that they can't move her.

So she has to lie there for some time. And she's gradually, then they managed to move her. But she's there lying undiscovered for several hours, isn't it? Yes, and she lies there breathing heavily, obviously dying. And her son, Paul, comes to take control. And she dies on 17th November, 1796. And Paul immediately orders that Petemkin's bones be thrown out of his tomb. He uses the Tarida Palace as a stables.

He denounces his mother and gets the body of his father and buries them together. he makes the Oloffs march in the funeral of the man that they'd killed. So he has a joint funeral for Catherine II. But he doesn't kill the Oloves. He doesn't kill them and he doesn't kill the Zubovs either, even though he hated them too. He then does exactly what Peter III had done, his father, which is to offend everybody in a record time, to have a completely inconsistent foreign policy,

to go to war at one point against Britain, to send an expedition to take India from the British. What date is this? This is about 1800, 1801, which had set off with Cossacks to take India. But the point is that Russia is now pivoting. It's interested in expanding into the Balkans into Europe. It's going to annex the Caucasus, which is the Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia today. But it's taken Siberia and has reached the Pacific.

And now it's doing... What about the burying straits? Because at one point they actually go into what's now... California and through Alaska? Well, Peter the Great was the one who'd commissioned Bering to go to the Bering Strait and to find the Bering Strait, which he did. And they had then colonized Alaska, and they'd gone all the way down the coast of California to Fort Ross, which is right near San Francisco.

That's extraordinary. There are still Orthodox cathedrals, aren't there? Still standing in California, which are built by the Russians at this point? I don't know about that, but they kept Alaska. until 1865, until just after the American Civil War, when Alexander II sold it, sold it for $15 million. But you did say that Paul was making the same mistakes. Paul made very much the same mistakes.

He behaved, frankly, idiotically. He offended everybody. He had aristocrats frashed in public. He made everyone dress up in German uniforms, not the Potemican uniforms, which were much easier to wear. He switched sides, made friends of Napoleon, almost went to, you know, fought Napoleon, made friends of Napoleon. He made friends of England, fought against England.

And finally, he threatened his own children who were called Alexander and Constantine. You notice they had Greek names, and they had Greek names because they were planning to conquer a Greek empire. This was Catherine the Great of Potemkin had arranged their names so that they would have a Constantine was designated to rule Constantinople. And that was an imminent plan. That was not some distant dream. That was an imminent plan. The actual conquest of Constantinople came closest in 1877, but that's another story for a later discussion. But for Paul, we're still talking about Paul. Paul in the end threatened his own children,

and this was a fatal error because they began to plot against him, fearing that he would arrest them. Just as Peter the third, his father, had threatened to arrest Catherine, and that had led to his coup. but before the coup, he sent a Culsac army to take India. And the point here is, William, for your great game, is this is really the beginning of the, this is the real beginning of the great game, because now they take the Caucasus,

and now they begin to look into Central Asia. Now, it's often claimed by people who write about the British advance to Afghanistan and, you know, which you've written about so eloquently, that this was all the kind of, that these were Russian, British advances into Afghanistan, on was sort of out of claims of a fantastical Russian threat. But actually, the threat was very real.

And no one who studies Russian history would make those arguments. In fact, they now, in the 19th century, systematically advanced through Central Asia, annexing some of the carnates, founding cities, advancing, sending more troops, sending those kind of the equivalent of Connolly and Barnaby and all these kind of adventurers. Vickovich. And yeah, all these people. in there and then annexing them so that by the 1860s they have basically reached Afghanistan and they'd reached China in fact you know that they'd taken Central Asia completely and so the next thing was Afghanistan and after Afghanistan as you know well was Tibet and and India you know and the Punjab and Pakistan and Pakistan so the

British were not being paranoid and those vice-rose who we all regard as madman for saying they should go into Afghanistan, we're actually facing a real threat that wasn't imaginary. But that's another story. Which we'll be doing next week. But that pivot begins now. And let me just finish by saying, in 1801, the coup, which may have had British help and encouragement against Paul, was the cruelest coup d'état of a failed Russian warlord and emperor of all of them.

He was so hated, Paul, by the time he was overthrown, that his own children, signed on to the coup. And his son, Alexander I first, was downstairs. They crept into his impregnable castle that he'd built to be coup-proof. To be coup-proof. Not so much. They burst into his room. They'd all been drinking champagne beforehand.

And they included, they were led by the Zubov brothers, who we met earlier. They burst into his room. He hid behind a tapestry. And they famously saw his hair. famously saw his hairy feet, and they pulled him out. And in the resulting chaos, he was smashed in the head with a giant, um, snuffbox, a giant gold snuffbox that smashed out his eye. They then jumped on him and sat on him and strangled him. And after they'd strangled him, they went crazy and stomped his head with their boots until it was almost mush. Then they went downstairs.

But the interesting thing was, the coup was led by his own chief minister. General von der Palin. And they then went downstairs to tell Alexander I. Alexander I had agreed that his father could be overthrown, but not killed. But of course, this system, the Russian system to this day, and it applies to the Kremlin now too, is a system where it's very hard to leave power and live. And so when he said, Alexander said, what happened? What happened to my father?

They looked at him and they just said, Your Majesty. And he burst into tears because he realized that he was. his father was dead and he was the emperor. We are opening next week with Alexander and Napoleon, so it's a very good place to leave it. Thank you so much in so many ways. We really want to do a name check of all of your fabulous books. So I will start with the most recent. The History of the World, it's a brilliant book where all of these characters and so many

more are going to be introduced to you. I've got in my hands here the Romanovs, which I would recommend to anyone as a wonderful starting point. And then the deeper dive is Potemkin. Catherine and Potemkin. Which is a monster of a book with close primary sources and years and years of work. A marvellous monster. A marvellous monster.

It has been an absolute delight to have you. Thank you very much. Extraordinary, Seabag. And literally I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise. We were talking about Putin reading your book and being summoned by a certain personage. I mean, just what? How many get to tell stories like that? Thanks for having me.

This has been a lot of fun. That is it from this week's Empire. So it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.