A PLEASANT JOURNEY WITH A MORAL

In the spring of 1787 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, “Her Gracious Majesty” and the “Mother of the Fatherland,” decided to make a personal inspection of the newly-annexed territories of southern Ukraine and the Crimea, which were called Novorossiia (New Russia.) Catherine’s close confidants — governor of New Russia Grigorii Potemkin, Nikita Panin, Oleksandr Bezborodko, and Aleksei Khrapovitsky — clearly understood that the journey was primarily a political action, not a pleasure trip.

However, “Her Majesty,” with the complete agreement of her favorites, tried to impart the character of a court amusement, a kind of court “picnic” of almost nationwide meaning, to her trip to Ukraine. French diplomat count Segure, who accompanied the tsarina, later recalled that in the hundreds of huge carriages in Catherine’s cortege and at the post stations en route, her courtiers and foreign diplomats, and generally everyone whom the tsarina regarded as crucial to the journey — “all these people went on entertaining themselves absolutely the same way as they did in Tsarskoe Selo or the Hermitage: they told jokes about Voltaire, Diderot, and other French freethinkers, had refined conversations on history, literature, farming, and mythology, and devised charades for one another...”

We are interested not only in the aristocratic “discussion clubs” but the real situation in Ukraine at the time. A few years earlier, in 1783, Catherine had introduced serfdom on the territory of former Hetman Ukraine, which soon spread to all the Ukrainian territories annexed to the empire. Former free Cossacks and peasants, who had already long forgotten what the burden of serfdom slavery represented, found themselves stripped of their rights and sold like dumb beasts, like cattle. These same years were a period marked by the intensive and destructive process of “gathering to the empire” and “Russifying” the Ukrainian Cossack officers (and the Ukrainian noble class) and turning them into the Russian nobility.

Catherine’s favorites, especially Potemkin, were fully aware of what the empress “wished to see” during the journey. That is why Grigorii Potemkin (also known as “His Serene Highness Prince of Tavriia;” “darling Grishenka;” and in the Zaporozhian Sich in whose destruction he had “played a role” — Hrytsko Nechos) did everything possible to delight Her Majesty’s eye with vistas of rich, prosperous Ukrainian villages, peasants content with life, who greeted the empress with flowers, bread and salt, and holding icons in their hands. Catherine, who was sailing along the Dnipro to Kherson, seldom went ashore and gazed at the “prosperity” of her subjects only from a distance. Meanwhile, Potemkin had spent huge sums on painting ordinary village houses and building a facade of new ones, creating all the conditions necessary to satisfy the tsarina.

The topic of “Potemkin’s villages” — a word combination that came into wide use after 1787 — is trenchant, deep, and inexhaustible. I will not dwell on it here. I only want to mention that such “villages” are built in those places and in those times where a despotic power, suppressing people with brute force and/or on the strength of a lie, seeks to place this people in its own invented and constructed reality in which it schizophrenically believes.

There was a definite political component to Catherine’s visit. First of all, the tsarina wanted to inspect New Russia, the territory that had been granted to the ever-helpful Potemkin. Second, in view of the military conflict with Turkey, Catherine decided to impart the character of a political demonstration to her journey and prove that she was not at all afraid but even ready for war and, if necessary, would help speed it up.

The itinerary was not chosen by chance either: Kyiv; Kaniv, where the tsarina had an unimportant meeting with King Stanislaw Poniatowski of Poland, who was rapidly losing power and influence; Kherson, the most important center of the newly created imperial fleet; Bakhchisarai, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate; and Sevastopil whose strategic importance Catherine was beginning to understand.

Catherine derived plenty of impressions from the wealth and productive potential of the land “newly-found” by the Russian imperial state, rapid growth and development of new towns and fortresses that were quickly appearing in this steppe land, the strength of the army concentrated there, the battle capacity of the fleet that was being feverishly created, and the beauty and wealth of the recently annexed Crimea.

As for the people, long ago they had become an immaterial abstraction for the tsarina. When she was young, she drafted merciful laws that stated in particular: “One should avoid cases that lead to people being enslaved, unless there is a crucial need for this, and not for one’s own well-being but for the state’s benefit; however, this happens very seldom.”

There is, however, every reason to think that the following words were closer to the “mother-tsarina’s” heart: one must avoid anything that would “confirm in the Little Russians the depraved opinion, according to which they regard themselves as a different people from the local (i.e., the Great Russian) one.” In this the empress was very consistent: everything that recalled the former independence of Hetman Ukraine was persecuted and ruthlessly eradicated.

The empress’s journey was a clear example of combining business with pleasure. Catherine invited her “intimate friend” and political partner Austrian Emperor Joseph II, whose help in the “expansionist” great-power projects she appreciated deeply, to accompany her. In their conversations on a variety of topics, the Russian and Austrian monarchs did not forget about politics even for a minute. The alarming questions of France’s unruly and troublesome state, the arrogant policy of Prussia’s King Friedrich-Wilhelm II, who actively meddled in other countries’ domestic affairs and, most importantly, in the future of Turkey whose demise was predicted in the next five or ten years — all these were actively discussed in the gallantly hypocritical manner typical of the 18th century.

When the tsarina talked to her personal secretary Khrapovitsky, she was more confidential and frank, complaining about the European governments that were “provoking and equipping the sultan by all means.” She declared sharply: “But we ourselves can launch a war against the Turks on the grounds of conflicts with them in matters concerning the Caucasus and the Danubian Principalities.” When she was in the circle of foreign diplomats, Catherine joked ambiguously about the journey she was undertaking, “which is a serious threat to Europe’s order and stability,” because the Western monarchs are convinced that “Emperor Joseph and I intend to capture all of Turkey, Persia, and perhaps even India and Japan. “What do you think,” the empress asked Khrapovitsky,” perhaps it is really so?” No comments on this episode, one of many brushstrokes to Catherine’s image, are necessary.

The arrival of the Russian court with its brilliant “escort” in Bakhchisarai was an impressive political display of the triumphant might of the state headed by Catherine. All these people were sincerely and deeply convinced of the inviolability and naturalness of the existing order of things: wealthy nobles — and serfs. The government should not be poor; this is the way it was, is, and ever shall be. Catherine II was very satisfied with the journey, having visited Kyiv, Kaniv, and Kherson and returned to St. Petersburg.

But this is an “external” fact lying on the surface. The general conclusion of this story may be more interesting for us. Even the best “Potemkin’s villages” — an indispensable attribute of despotism and self-will — decline and scatter, appearing unattractively naked before an astounded audience.