From this time forward, as we have seen, Potemkin, Voltaire, and a host of flatterers amused the empress with dreams of the restoration of a Byzantine empire, and the erection of a new capital on the Black Sea. Sahim Gerai prized the slavish title of a lieutenant-colonel in the guards of a foreign empress more than that of prince of a nation to which the Russian czars for many years had been vassals, and he renounced the national costume of his people in order to glitter in a Russian uniform and wear the decorations of the order of St. Anne. Potemkin contrived every month to alienate him more and more from his people, till at last this miserable man was induced to lay down his khanate, from which he derived a revenue of three or four millions of rubles, in order, as he thought, to revel peacefully in the enjoyment of some hundred thousand rubles, which Potemkin was to pay him as the newly appointed Russian governor-general of Tauris, as the country was now to be called. Potemkin was too much accustomed to receive and not to give, and to contract debts without thinking of paying them, to give himself much concern about the payment of the promised salary, although the empress was led to believe that the yearly sum always charged to her was in reality regularly paid to the khan.
[1783 A.D.]
The shamelessness of the Russian government on this occasion fully equalled the audacity of their manifestoes respecting the partition of Poland, or that of the state-papers of a Genz and a Talleyrand. In the Russian manifestoes published in April, 1783, it was made as clear as the sun to the Tatars that the empress and Potemkin were really proposing to confer upon them the most signal benefits. It was stated that the Tatars, as Russian subjects, were in future to be delivered from all the evils of their internal disputes, and by the incorporation of the Crimea, the Kuban, and the eastern Nogaians an end was to be put to those oppressions from which they had hitherto suffered from the Turks and the Russians alternately. What the correspondence was between these promises and the subsequent reality may be learned from all the works of travellers who visited these districts, and gave accounts of the Crimea and the Tatars a generation or two later. That numerous, free, and rich race of people, clothed in silks and of noble appearance, had then dwindled into a crowd of starving beggars; their magnificent tented cities had become gipsy encampments, and their houses and palaces exhibited mere masses of ruin and decay.
These manifestoes, indeed, as is usually the case, were not intended for those to whom they were addressed, but merely to conceal in a cloud of words, from the eyes of those at a distance, the cruelties and bloodshed with which they were accompanied. The Tatars made an effort to defend their liberties, and their magnates made no secret of their dissatisfaction; Potemkin, therefore, had recourse to one of those heroic means which usually find defenders enough when they are applied for the support of the true faith and of autocratic government, and are only reviled and execrated in the hands of a Danton and a Robespierre. He proposed by a single massacre summarily to annihilate the malcontents, and to awe the rest into submission by the dread of a similar fate. Posorovski received express orders to make himself master of the malcontents, their families, and adherents, and put them all to the sword; he, however, possessed moral courage enough to decline the business of an executioner. Potemkin’s cousin was not so scrupulous. According to the accounts, whose unanimous testimony we are obliged to follow, even when it appears to us incredible, Paul Potemkin caused above thirty thousand Tatars, of every age and sex, to be massacred in cold blood, and in this way procured for his cousin the easily won title of the Taurian, and the place of grand-admiral of the Black Sea and governor-general of the new province of Tauris.
The massacre in Tauris took place in April, 1783, and the Turks were unable to render any assistance to the Tatars without foreign support. Among the European powers, however, England was at that time fully occupied with the disturbances which in the following year brought Pitt to the helm of affairs; France was glad to see an end to the American war; Joseph II was bound by the Treaty of Tsarskoi Selo; Frederick II hoped to become master of Thorn and Dantzic, if Russia was well-disposed towards him; and Gustavus III of Sweden was the only monarch who could have rendered any aid. In the very same year, however, Gustavus suffered himself to be induced to go to Friedrichsham, where he sold himself to the empress; nothing, therefore, was now left to the Turks but to yield to their destiny. The sultan did what had been done by the king of Poland a few years before; by his consent he changed that into a righteous and legal possession which, being seized in the midst of peace, was previously a robbery. The whole territory of the Tatars, the Crimea, the island of Taman, and a great part of the Kuban were ceded to Russia, and a treaty of commerce was forced upon the Turks, by virtue of which the Russian consuls in the various ports of Turkey were erected into a power wholly independent of the government of the country. This treaty of commerce had been drawn up by Panin before he had been obliged to yield to the superior influence of Potemkin and withdraw from public affairs; and it was now concluded on the 10th of June, 1783. By virtue of this treaty the Turks were obliged to submit the decision of all mixed civil cases in which a Russian and a Turk were the respective parties, not to the local tribunals, nor to the higher authorities, nor to a court of arbitration, but to the Russian consul; and in all pecuniary transactions the claims of a Russian against a Turk were urged with much greater strictness than in those cases in which the Turk was the claimant and the Russian the debtor.
In the eyes of the world, which regards only externals, Potemkin was now a great and admired statesman; and so absolute was his sway over the empress herself, that she not only tolerated his insolence, his total neglect of all pecuniary obligations, his tyranny over all classes, and his imperial expenditure and magnificence, but allowed him to help himself to an unlimited extent out of the coffers of the state. Potemkin on the one hand did homage to the empress as if she were a goddess, and on the other he suffered himself to treat her with the most insolent familiarity and rudeness. He would even saunter from his own apartments into hers in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his stockings hanging down and his legs bare. He went so far as to extort from those who enjoyed the empress’ favour a part of the money which they received from her, and yet he allowed poor Sahim Gerai to starve. He never paid him the assigned pension of 100,000 rubles which was yearly debited to the empress’ account, and even the displeasure of Catherine could not induce him to bestow upon this Russian protégé the simplest means of life.
The founding of a new Russo-Grecian capital, with which Potemkin now busied himself, was a magnificent piece of flattery for the empress, but for which she was unhappily obliged to pay too dear. Catherine indulged with Voltaire in those visionary schemes of a utopian Greece, of a civilisation of which she and not the people was to be the source, of an enlightenment, industry, and trade to be carried into these conquered deserts by ukases and courtiers; Potemkin acted according to this fancy. He first erected a city with buildings of every description, and then sought for inhabitants, or forcibly drove them for a time from all quarters, when he wished to make a court-spectacle of this theatrical city and to enchant the empress. It was of no consequence to him that his city fell to pieces and its inhabitants disappeared as soon as he turned away his eyes. The new city was called Kherson, a name long since obscured by that of Odessa; the empress granted 18,000,000 rubles, most of which, however, Potemkin diverted to his own private use. The situation was badly chosen, and yet this shadow of a capital was for a length of time charmed into existence by innumerable arts of fraud and open violence; and the deserts of which it was to be the metropolis were erected into a province, to which Potemkin gave the name of Catherine’s Glory (Slava Ekatharina). Another province, somewhat farther to the north, near the celebrated falls of the Kaidak, was also honoured with the name of the empress, and called Iekatarinoslav.
GENERAL SUVAROV
The general to whom Potemkin at this time assigned the congenial task of havoc and destruction in the country of the Nogaian Tatars and in Kuban was Suvarov, a man who from that period till the end of the century had the misfortune to be continually employed as the instrument of a murderous military despotism. In Poland he executed three times those orders of annihilation which were issued from St. Petersburg. He destroyed the Turks and sacrificed the Russians by thousands at the will of Potemkin. He subsequently shared Paul’s hatred against the French and every thought of civil freedom, and performed the same kind of heroic deeds for that madman’s pleasure as he had previously done at the bidding of Potemkin. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest generals of modern times, but wholly destitute of humanity, for he sacrificed thousands without hesitation in order to secure a victory or storm a fortress, when either was calculated to produce a splendid effect though but for the moment. He not only flattered the empress, but even the common soldiers and their superstitions. Though he was a man of various knowledge, and had made himself master of all the arts of life as practised in the highest society, he assumed at court the character of a sort of court-fool, and acted often as if he were mad, merely in order to carry out some surprising piece of flattery. In the company of the common soldiers he affected the manners of the semi-barbarous Russian, lived as they did themselves, submitted to every privation which they might be called upon to endure, and knelt and prayed before every wayside image, often when the roads were deep with mud.