Society
Tony the Great has his own scheming Potemkin
Published 30 October 2000
History repeats itself, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote. And a recent biography of an 18th-century Russian general bears this out.
Simon Sebag Montefiore's widely praised Prince of Princes: the life of Potemkin charts the fortunes of the political and military genius who was Catherine the Great's lover and the power behind her throne. It is a tale that contains breathtaking parallels with the Downing Street "love affair" between Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson.
Montefiore describes Grigory Potemkin as a brilliant but "serpentine" eminence grise, a political schemer who filled the inner circle around the Empress with an equal mixture of loathing and admiration, suspicion and envy.
The envy was based on Potemkin's unique access to Catherine. Yes, the lusty Empress was in thrall to the dashing, one-eyed general; they remained close even when, in their later years, she had a string of toyboys and he a scalp belt of young beauties. But she was also dependent on him for his political acumen, his insight into the workings of Europe and his tireless dedication to the "project" that they shared - restoring the empire to the glory it had enjoyed under Peter the Great.
To the end of her days, Catherine was unfailingly grateful to Potemkin, too, for his role in the conspiracy that put her on the throne. The young Potemkin had been part of the army plot to replace the rightful heir, the unpopular Grand Duke Pyotr Fyodorovich, with his bright and attractive PR gift of a wife.
Her courtiers' contempt for the scheming Prince of Darkness (Lord Byron called him "the spoilt child of the night") seemed to do nothing but strengthen Catherine's loyalty to her man: "It's Prince Potemkin to whom I owe everything; so you must embrace him," she told her ministers.
With his boss's devotion so public and unwavering, Potemkin's position remained unassailable. The ministers could hiss their loathing and brief others about his machinations, but they knew that Catherine's gratitude and dependency insured Potemkin's fate. In the end, it was his own gargantuan ambition that made Potemkin's name mud.
In the spring of 1787, Potemkin, Catherine and her young lover Aleksandr Mamonov, accompanied by a group of Russian and foreign dignitaries, seven imperial galleys of Potemkin's fleet, served by 3,000 oarsmen, a crew and guards, embarked on a grand tour down the Dnieper river. For weeks, they sailed past what had previously been a cheerless, deserted riverside, and found instead an endless spectacle of brightly painted new houses, decorative churches and English-style gardens - not to mention squadrons of Cossacks, in full regalia, who manoeuvred over the plains.
The imperial junket across southern Russia was Potemkin's brainchild: what better symbol of the new Russia than these thriving communities, with their spic-and-span homes and ambitious architecture, that had sprung out of the poorest and most desolate outpost of the Empress's dominion?
It was an extraordinary feat. But it soon proved Potemkin's undoing: the Saxon envoy Georg von Helbeig (who was not on the journey) claimed the settlements were composed of mere facades, painted screen on pasteboard, that were moved along the river and seen by the Empress and her party four or five times during the course of their journey - Helbeig's libel gave us the term "Potemkin village", meaning a sham - and poor old Potemkin's enemies saw to it that his reputation never recovered.
Mandelson can take comfort in the knowledge that his Dome, then, is truly a historic monument. With its fraud allegations, falsified spreadsheet figures and fudged attendance estimates, it is our very own Potemkin village - although, to be fair to the libelled one-eyed general, perhaps we should call it something else . . . Peter's Village, perhaps?
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