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Oddly, Potemkin did not build for himself on a particularly grand scale in the Crimea, but Starov did build him a now vanished pink marble palace at Karasubazaar.37 His last palace was in Nikolaev.[48] Built when Potemkin was almost becoming an Ottoman sultan, he ordered a Moldavian-Turkish style from local architects - a dome with four towers, like a mosque. Its high, sunny but cool and breezy position above the meeting of the two rivers was scenic. Since it was on the banks of the Ingul river, it had two storeys at the front rising to a third - but one at the back. In his last months, the Prince ordered Starov to add a banya and fountain 'like mine at Tsarskoe Selo'.38 It was Starov's last work for his master, f
The Prince himself always believed that the south was his life's work. In his last days in Petersburg in June 1791, he subjected the British envoy William Fawkener, who never got a word in edgeways, to an exuberant soliloquy that showed he never lost his enthusiasm. Potemkin displayed all the excitement, energy, imagination and arrogance that made him a great imperial statesman. He had to head to the south to continue his great projects, he said, 'the success of all which depended solely on him ...'. There was the fleet he had built almost with his own hands, and 'the population of his Government has increased since his appointment from above 80,000 to above 400,000 fighting men and the whole might amount to nearly a million.. Л39
Before the lies had overpowered the truth, the French Ambassador, Segur, who sent Versailles a report on Potemkin's gargantuan achievements, enthused that 'when he took possession of his immense viceroyalty, there were only 204,000 inhabitants and under his administration the population in merely three years had grown to 800,000. This growth is composed of Greek colonists, Germans, Poles, invalids, retired soldiers and sailors.'
Potemkin increased the estimated population of the Crimea from 52,000 males in 1782 to 130,000 by 1795. In the rest of New Russia during the same period, the male population increased from 339,000 in the same period to 554,000, which meant that Potemkin almost managed to double the population of the Viceroyalty from 391,000 to 684,000 in just over a decade. Another reputable historian estimates that the male population rose from 724,678 in 1787 to 819,731 in 1793. Whatever the true figures, this was an awesome achievement. 'Until the invention of steamships and railroads in the nineteenth century opened up ... distant regions such as the American Middle
West ... to commercial farming, this Russian expansion', writes a modern historian, 'remained unparalleled in scale, scope and rapidity.'40
He founded literally hundreds of settlements - 'one Frenchman', recorded Segur, 'told me every year he found new villages established and flourishing in places that had formerly been deserts'41 - and several big ones. Most still flourish today: Kherson, 355,000 inhabitants; Nikolaev, 1.2 million; Ekaterinoslav (now Dniepropetrovsk), 600,000; Sebastopol, 375,000; Simferopol, 358,000; Stravropol, 350,000; Vladikafkaz (capital of North Ossetia), 300,000; and Odessa, 1.1 million. Most still contain shipyards and naval bases.
The construction of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, as well as an oar-propelled flotilla, in less than ten years, was an equally astounding achievement that was to have far-reaching consequences down to the Crimean War and beyond. The effects of the Fleet and of harnessing the immense agricultural power of the steppes resounded and resounds into this century. Russia became a Near Eastern power for the first time. 'The truly enormous achievement', writes a modern historian, 'made Russia ... the arbiter of eastern Europe and allowed Russian might to outstrip Austrian and eclipse Ottoman power.'42 But Potemkin's love of the south was never just about raw power: there was much romance in it. Sometimes he turned his hand to poetry. As he wrote for the Empress about the foundation of Ekaterinoslav:
Scattered stones of ancient ruins Will answer your divine inspiration In pleasant, brilliant ways They'll create a New Athens.43
ANGLOMANIA: THE BENTHAMS IN RUSSIA AND THE EMPEROR OF GARDENS
My love affair is at an end ... I must certainly quit Petersburg ... So it is lucky that an offer of Prince Potemkin offers me a good opportunity...
Samuel Bentham to his brother, Jeremy Bentham
On ii December 1783, Prince Potemkin summoned to his apartments in Petersburg a young Englishman named Samuel Bentham, whose love affair and now broken heart had been followed by all society like a running soap opera, and offered him a glorious new career. This offer led, not only to the most adventurous life in war and peace ever enjoyed by an Englishman in Russia, but also to a farce in which an ill-sorted company of Welsh and Geordie artisans were settled on a Belorussian estate which they were to develop into Potemkin's own industrial empire. The experiences of Samuel Bentham, soon to be joined on Potemkin's estate by his philosopher brother Jeremy, reveal not just Serenissimus' boundless dynamism but the way he used his own estates as the arsenal and marketplace of the state, with no boundary between his own money and that of the Empire.
Samuel Bentham was the youngest of seven children - Jeremy was the eldest - and they were the only two who survived. Their father Jeremiah was a well-connected lawyer whose patron was the future Whig Prime Minister, the original but devious Earl of Shelburne, nicknamed the 'Jesuit of Berkeley Square' by his many enemies. They were a touchingly close family, writing to each other constantly, worrying about Samuel's escapades in Russia. The brothers shared a brilliant intelligence, a driving energy and an outstanding inventiveness, but personally they were opposites: Jeremy, now almost forty, was a shy, scholarly judicialist. Samuel was loquacious, sociable, irritable and amorous. Trained as an engineer but uninhibited by the profession, he was an inventive polymath and entrepreneur. In some ways he shared Potemkin's restless ebullience - he was 'always running from a good scheme to a better ... life passes away and nothing is completed'.1 In 1780, while Jeremy worked on his judicial reforms in London, Samuel, aged twenty-three, departed on a voyage that took him to the Black Sea coast (where he observed the burgeoning Kherson) and thence to St Petersburg, where he called on Potemkin. He hoped to make his fortune, while Jeremy wanted him to propose his legal ideas to the Empress.2 Serenissimus monitored young Bentham's progress. The Englishman realized that the Prince was the man who could put his ideas into practice. Potemkin wanted his help with the Dnieper rapids and his estates and made a vague offer to him soon after meeting him.3 But Samuel wanted to travel so, in 1781, the Prince despatched him on a trip to Siberia to analyse its industries, providing him with a couple of soldiers as guards. On his return, the Prince gave his papers on Mines, Fabricks and Salt-Works4 to the Empress.
Potemkin was looking for talented engineers, shipbuilders, entrepreneurs and Englishmen: Samuel was all of these things. Writing to his brother Jeremy from Irkutsk in Siberia, Samuel boasted about his new contact - 'the man in power'.5 It was obvious to the excited traveller that he and this anonymous potentate were made for each other:
This man's business is to greater amount than any other's I have heard of in the Empire. His position at Court is also the best on which account, as well as that of his riches, Governors of course bow down to him. His chief affairs lie about the Black Sea. He there farms the duties on some articles, builds ships for the Crown, supplies the army and the Crown in general with all necessaries, has fabricks of various kinds and is clearing the waterfalls of the Dnieper at his own private expense. He was very anxious to have assistance in his undertakings before I left St Petersburg.6