Potemkin's success, Maria Guthrie found the 'zealous' Count still producing fine silk at the turn of the century.23
The Prince wanted to make Ekaterinoslav the marketing centre for the silk from his Crimean mulberry plantations. A silk-stockings factory was built at a cost of 340,000 roubles and he soon sent the Empress a pair of stockings so fine that they could be preserved in the shell of a nut. 'When, my Merciful Mother,' the Prince wrote, 'you visit the dominions over which I preside, you will see your path covered with silk.'24
As for wine, the Prince planted 30,000 vines of Tokay wine, imported from Hungary with Joseph's permission, in four places across the peninsula. He had been planting orchards and vineyards for years in Astrakhan, whence he brought his French viticulturist Joseph Banq to Soudak, the lush Crimean seaside village, beneath a ruined Genoese fortress, which became his wine centre. It is a tribute to Potemkin's activity that he had the gardener in place buying estates by September 1783, weeks after annexing the Khanate. Banq's sorry letters, scattered among the Potemkin archives, are bad-tempered, poorly written and often stained, as if he was writing them while watering his vines. They demonstrate the difficulties of putting Potemkin's schemes into reality. Poor Banq bitterly missed his wife - 'without my family, I cannot stay at Soudak if His Highness offered me all the world'. In any case, the work was impossible without twenty workers - not soldiers! But the workers were rude to Banq and he had to complain to the Prince again. When the vines flourished, he proudly sent Serenissimus 150 bottles of his red Soudak wine.25
Banq's job was to expand the vineyards, to plant fruit orchards and raisin plantations and, as a profitable sideline, to 'build a factory of vodka as in France'. His salary in this five-year mission was 2,000 roubles a year (much more than the average Russian officer's) plus an apartment, firewood, a pair of horses and forty litre barrels of wine.26 On arrival, the Frenchman grumbled that the gardens bought for him were 'not worth anything ... it hasn't been cultivated for three years ... it's a waste of time to make wine this year'.27 Finally Potemkin sacked the unfortunate, who may have been caught stealing, because he begged for forgiveness while feeling 'the most horrible despair'. His fate is unknown, but another Frenchman replaced him.28 'The wine of Soudak', declared the French envoy, Comte de Segur, in a report to Versailles, 'is very agreeable' - Maria Guthrie concurred at the turn of the century.29
Even in the middle of the Second Russo-Turkish War in 1789, as he advanced into Ottoman territory, the Prince found time to order Faleev 'to plough the best fertile ground and prepare enough string beans for sowing next summer. I shall send you the seeds from Jassy. I am going to arrange a school of husbandry here .. .'.3° The planter and builder never rested and never ceased to enjoy creating.
Potemkin's empire within an empire was not confined to New Russia: he also ran the military frontiers of the Caucasus and the Kuban, which were almost permanently at war throughout the 1780s as the Chechens and other mountain peoples resisted the Russian advance. The Russian solution was to maintain a line of forts across the Caucasus, manned by military outposts of hardy Cossack settlers. As soon as he came to power in the 1770s, Potemkin reconsidered the defence plans for the Caucasus. He decided to advance the border defences from the old Tsaritsyn Line to the new Azov-Mozdok Line.
The Prince already thought beyond mere guns and towers. The Line, he wrote, 'gives the opportunity to set up vineyards, silk and cotton plantations, to increase stock-breeding, stud-farms, orchards and grain production, joins Azov with Astrakhan Province, and in time of war ... restrains their pressure on our lands'.31 The new Line was started in the summer of 1777 with the construction of a series of forts at Ekaterinograd, Georgievsk and Stavropol. The Kabardian, Cherkess and Nogai tribesmen rebelled and were suppressed. In 1780, Potemkin moved the first civilian settlers, often state peasants from the interior, into the towns that were to grow into major provincial centres.[46] When the fortifications were nearly complete in late 1782, the Empress decreed that Potemkin should have 'sole supervision' of assignment of land there.32 The Prince moved Cossacks up to the Line from their settlements on the Volga. When he created the fortress of Vladikafkaz in 1784, he gave it a name that threw down a gauntlet to the tribesmen of the hills: 'Master of the Caucasus'.
The Georgievsk Treaty of 1783 with King Hercules advanced the Russian borders, leap-frogging over the Caucasus to Tiflis. By this time, Potemkin's projects and territories were so vast that he recommended to the Empress that she form a separate viceroyalty for the Caucasus, containing the Caucasus, Astrakhan and Saratov provinces - under his ultimate control of course. The Prince's dynamic cousin Pavel Potemkin was appointed viceroy: after creating the Georgian Military Road over the mountains to Tiflis, he settled state and church peasants to people his new towns. In 1786 alone, 30,307 settlers were available from inside Russia for the Prince to assign to the Caucasus (and to Ekaterinoslav). Pavel Sergeievich was a true Potemkin: he raised Ekaterinograd to be his viceregal capital, holding court there in a splendid palace.33
Russian advances into the Caucasus provoked an Islamic rebellion among the Chechens, Avars and other tribes: in 1785, a mysterious leader in a green cloak using the name Sheikh Mansour - 'Victor' - emerged from the mountains, preaching the ideals of the Nazshbandi brotherhood of mystical Sufism and declaring a Ghazavat - holy war - against the Russians. No one will ever know who he really was: he was probably a Chechen shepherd named Ushurma, born around 1748, but some said he was an Italian notary's son from Monteferrat named Giovanni Battista Boetti, who ran away to become a Dominican missionary, converted to Islam, studied the Koran in the medressahs of Bokhara and ended as a Moslem warrior. Some Russians did not believe he existed at alclass="underline" he was just a symbol wrapped in a green cloak.[47] He and his warriors, precursors of the Murids, who, under Shamyl defied Russia in the nineteenth century, managed to eliminate one column of 600 Russian troops, but he was defeated more frequently than he was victorious. Nevertheless, he led his coalition of mountain tribesmen with a daring flair that made him a legend.
The war against Sheikh Mansour was directly run by Pavel Potemkin from Ekaterinograd. But Potemkin's archives show that the Prince ultimately oversaw this perennial war, which kept the Caucasus and Kuban corps in constant action. Before the Russo-Turkish War broke out again in 1787, a defeated Mansour fled to raise the Cherkess in Ottoman territory. When the war began, he was ready to fight again.34 The Russians never permanently suppressed these guerrilla fighters, spending much of the next century fighting the so-called Murid Wars. At the time of writing, this war is still going on.
The Prince also built his own palaces across the south, fit for a viceroy if not a tsar. He had 'the large house' at Kremenchuk, visited by Lady Craven and Francisco de Miranda;35 a vast palace at Khersont with two wings, each with two storeys and a central portico of four storeys, which was the centrepiece of the new city. Then there was the glory of his 'Athens', the monumental Ekaterinoslav^ Palace, designed by Ivan Starov with two wings that extended 120 metres from the portico with six columns reached by two stone staircases: Potemkin's gardener William Gould followed Starov with his hundreds of workers. In Ekaterinoslav, he built an English Garden and two hothouses around the Potemkin Palace to match all its 'practicality and loveliness', as the gardener told the Prince.36