He did solve security problems by transporting peoples - some of the Nogai Hordes were resettled in the Urals, Taman and north Crimea, and then moved again. Their sin was being unreliable and too close to the turbulent Caucasus. These migrations must have been sad processions, for which Potemkin bears responsibility, just as contemporary British ministers, for example, bear the shame of the slave trade.
Overall, Potemkin cared enormously and did as much as an administrator in that century could do. Later, possibly during the building of his last city Nikolaev, there is a melancholic note to Faleev about the conditions of his ordinary people: 'You have to tell me the truth. I can't just know but you should be ashamed to conceal the truth from me. I employed people to work, promising them to pay them salaries; but it was turned into hard labour. Unluckily, my name is everywhere, so that they could begin to think I am a tyrant.. Л9
The Prince planned to turn the Crimea and the south into the orchard of the Empire. 'This is an unbelievably good and fertile place,' he told Catherine. The Prince was evidently an early Green: at least, he instinctively understood what is now called ecology. To plant a tree to him was to help build the future of his lands, so he frequently ordered his men to 'plant paradise trees' or 'chestnuts'. On 5 August 1785, Potemkin printed an address to the nobles in the Crimea in which he autocratically required them to plant and create prosperity: 'I consider tillage the first source of riches.' It was a reliable business because the army always needed provisions and it was a service to the state. But if the land was not sown, 'it shames its owner and reproaches him with laziness'.10
He practised what he preached. 'Wishing to promote the settling of Perekop steppe and set an example', Potemkin himself took over forests and 6,000 desaytin 'for picking of canes'.11 He continually ordered the directors of Crimean Agriculture, Professors Livanov and Prokopovich (who studied in England, along with students sent by Potemkin), and the botanist Hablitz, to travel the peninsula improving anything they could suggest. Apart from ordering Korsakov to build salt bridges to make the collection of salt more efficient, he sent engineers to seek bituminous coal along the Donetz and Lugansk rivers. The Taurida region even had a resident mining expert.12
The Prince was obsessed with using his estates and those he gave to others as trading posts between south and north. 'The boats that carry the supplies from the estates and factories of Prince Potemkin [from Belorussia] for the navy in Kherson are filled on their return with salt ...', a French diplomat explained to Paris. With his acquisition of the empty steppes of the Crimean Khanate and the Zaporogian Sech, Potemkin intended to use grants of land to encourage trade and manufacturing, especially among foreigners like the Benthams. In this too he favoured Anglo-Saxons. 'The Russians are unfit for commerce,' Potemkin later told a British envoy, 'and he was always of the opinion that the foreign trade of the empire should be carried on entirely' by Englishmen.13
Potemkin ordered that no land should be given out without his command. There were many ways to settle these vast lands: first, he granted massive estates to magnates, officials (like his secretary Popov and his ally Bezborodko, who was delighted with his 'almost royal' estate), foreign friends (like the Prince de Ligne), Cossack cronies and renegade Tartars - and he gave himself 73,000 desyatins on the mainland, 13,000 on the peninsula.14 If landowners did well, Serenissimus lifted taxes on them, as he did for three students of English agriculture 'for their great progresses'.15 If they wasted their gift, Potemkin was tempted to take it away from them. Many foreigners, from Genoese noblemen to English peeresses, bombarded the Prince with schemes and demands for land - but they got them only if they had an entrepreneurial plan.
'I have, my Prince, a great desire to become a proprietor of some estates here,' the seductive and pushy Countess of Craven wrote to him from the Crimea. This daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, with her curly Medusan head of hair, was already a favourite beauty of the London scandal-sheets, not unlike the Duchesses of Kingston and Devonshire, but this talented and independent woman was also a courageous traveller and an early best-selling travel-writer. After an exceedingly short marriage with the peer whose name she shamelessly used, she had been caught in flagrante with a French duke, an envoy to London, but she was also notoriously 'democratic' in her tastes, supposedly even having working-class lovers. Then she went travelling with a young lover while writing colourful letters to her suitor, the Margrave of Anspach, brother-in-law of Frederick the Great. These were later published as her Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. She ended her geographical, amorous and literary voyage in 1791 by marrying the Margrave, with whom Potemkin was also in correspondence, thereby joining the ranks of imperial petty-royalty.16
Elisabeth Craven met the Prince in Petersburg and travelled to the Crimea with his blessing. She saw the opportunities there. 'I would make a colony of honest and industrious people of my country,' she suggested. 'I'd be very happy to see my own land flower ... I tell you frankly, my Prince, I'd like to have two estates in different places of Taurida.' She appealed to his well- known romanticism, calling this her 'beautiful dream'. Her Ladyship suspiciously begged him 'not to share this with [Harris's successor as British envoy to Russia] Mr Fitzherbert nor my compatriots', presumably because she did not wish it to reach the London newspapers. In case Potemkin was not sufficiently tempted by her offer, Her Ladyship ensured that he knew exactly who she was, signing each letter, 'Elisabeth Craven, Peeress of England, nee Lady Elisabeth Berkeley.' Potemkin's reply is unknown, but she never settled her family in the Crimea. Perhaps the Prince, who was no longer the neophyte charmed by Semple, thought this 'Peeress of England' protested too much.17
The Prince dreamed of filling his lands with prospering plantations and industrious factories: this time he wanted not soldiers but experts on agriculture. Catherine quoted Potemkin to her German friend Dr Zimmerman: 'In Taurida, the principal matter must ... be the cultivation of the land and nurture of silkworms and consequently mulberry plantations. Cloth could be made here ... cheese-making would also be very desirable ... gardens, above all botanical gardens ... we need sensible and knowledgeable people.'18
When the Spanish officer Antonio d'Estandas requested land to found china factories not far from Simferopol, the Prince at once ordered his governor to provide 'as much land as necessary' but 'with the obligation that the factory is established without delay'.19 He stressed agriculture, orchards and flocks of sheep instead of herds of cattle,20 believing the Crimea was ideal for wool and sheepbreeding. 'Making wool better with simple and correct methods,' he boasted to Catherine, 'we'll beat every country in Europe with our cloth. I ordered males from everywhere where they have the best sheep and I'm waiting for them next summer.'21
The Prince fostered various industries himself - particularly wine and silk. He behaved as a mixture of autocrat, banker, entrepreneur and customer. When he decided to manufacture silk, as he was already successfully doing in Astrakhan, he made an agreement with the Italian Count of Parma to produce it on a large estate. The Prince provided twenty families of peasants from his Russian estates, promising to add another twenty after five years, and lent the Count 4,000 roubles as seed money. To encourage the industry, he then bought all the silk produced locally at an inflated price.22 As for