This troika of marriages sparked rows with the Empress about the medals and money bestowed on his family - '600,000 roubles, money, the Order of St Catherine for the future Grande Generale [Alexandra] and the portrait [of the Empress] for the Princess Golitsyn [Varvara]'. Potemkin expected his nieces to be endowed by the state - were they not Catherine's extended family? He got his way after weeks of rows. He certainly believed in caring for his own.
Paul left Tsarskoe Selo harbouring a visceral hatred for Serenissimus. Yet, like a monarch more than a minister, Potemkin tried to preserve a balance among the Court factions and foreign powers. In November, he talked to Harris about restoring Panin to a degree of power, presumably to balance him against the rising Bezborodko.17 One of his best features - and one lacking in many politicians, even democratic ones - was the absence of vindictiveness. Perhaps he simply did not want to see Panin humiliated any more. In any case, Potemkin's triumph had broken Panin: he fell ill in October.
Similarly, by early 1782, the confused Cobenzl was telling Joseph that Potemkin was leaning back towards Prussia. Both Cobenzl and Harris concluded their reports by confessing that they were unable to fathom the motives for Potemkin's manoeuvres, but the Prince, while favouring Austria, continued to steer a middle passage between these two German monarchies for the rest of his life.18
In Vienna, Paul appalled his hosts, particularly after Joseph confided the secret of the Austrian alliance. The Habsburg saw that the 'feebleness and pusillanimity of the Grand Duke joined to falseness' were unlikely to make this angry snub-nosed paranoid into a successful autocrat. Paul spent six weeks in Austria, where he lectured Joseph about his loathing for Potemkin. When he arrived in the Habsburg lands in Italy, he ranted to Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph's brother, about his mother's Court and denounced the Greek Project and the Austrian alliance. Catherine's plans 'for aggrandizing herself at the expense of the Turks and refounding the empire of Constantinople' were 'useless'. Austria had obviously bribed that traitor Potemkin. When he came to the throne, Paul would arrest him and clap him in prison!19 The Habsburg brothers were surely relieved when the Comte du Nord departed for Paris.
The Prince could insure himself against Paul only by changing the succession or by establishing a base outside Russia. He therefore pursued a different plan to discredit Paul once and for all - and possibly later remove him from the succession, leaving the throne to his son Alexander. When Potemkin heard that Paul's suite included Prince Alexander Kurakin, another Prussophile enemy and Panin's nephew, he asked the Austrians, via Cobenzl, to let him see the Cabinet Noir intercepts of Paul's post. The Austrian secret services passed on to Potemkin what they gleaned from Paul's contacts with Panin. The Prince was sure that he would catch Kurakin spying for the Prussians and therefore taint Tsarevich Paul.20
Nikita Panin, ill as he was, knew that Kurakin's post would be opened, so he arranged for Paul to keep in contact with his supporters at home via a third party, Pavel Bibikov, son of the general. The letter that was opened in early 1782 from Bibikov to Kurakin was a bombshell that, more than the
Saldern Plot, ensured Paul's exclusion from power for the rest of Catherine's life. Bibikov described Catherine's rule as 'the horrible situation in the Motherland' and criticized Potemkin, 'Cyclops par excellence' and 'le borgne', for ruining the army. 'If he breaks his neck', everything would return to its 'natural order'.
Catherine was alarmed and angry. Bibikov was immediately arrested. Catherine personally wrote out the questions for his interrogation by Sheshkovsky. Bibikov's excuse was that he was just unhappy at his regiment being stationed in the south. Catherine sent the results to the Prince, while ordering Bibikov tried in the Senate's Secret Expedition. The trial in camera found him guilty of treason and, under military law, of defaming his commander, Potemkin, and sentenced him to death.
The Prince's decency came into play. Even though Paul's circle had actually discussed breaking his neck, Potemkin asked Catherine for mercy on 15 April 1782: 'Even if virtue produces jealousy, it's nothing still compared to all the good it grants to those who serve it ... You have probably pardoned him already ... He'll probably overcome his dissolute inclinations and become a worthy subject of Your Majesty and I will add this grace to your other favours to me.' Admitting he was terrified of Potemkin's vengeance, Bibikov wept under interrogation. He offered to apologize publicly.
'He shouldn't be afraid of my vengeance,' Potemkin wrote to Catherine, 'in so far as, among the abilities granted to me by God, that inclination is missing. I don't even want the triumph of a public apology ... He'll never find any example of my vengeance, to anybody, in my entire life.'21 This was true - but, more than that, it displayed the statesman's measured moderation: he never pushed things too far and therefore never provoked an unwanted reaction.
Bibikov and Kurakin, recalled from Paul's suite in Paris, were exiled to the south. When the Heir returned to Petersburg at the end of the journey, his influence was broken, his allies scattered. Even his mother disdained her tiresome, unbalanced son and his wife as 'Die schwere Bagage' - the heavy luggage.22 'Prince Potemkin is happier', Cobenzl told Joseph, 'than I've ever seen him.'23
The secret Austrian treaty was soon tested - in the Crimea, the key to the Black Sea, the last Tartar stronghold and the nub of Potemkin's policy of southern expansionism. In May, the Prince headed beyond to Moscow 'for a short trip', visiting some estates. While he was on the road, the Turks again backed a Crimean rebellion against Catherine's puppet Khan, Shagin Giray, who was driven out once more, along with the Russian resident. The Khanate dissolved into anarchy.
The Empress sent a courier after the Prince. 'My dear friend, come back as soon as possible,' she wrote on 3 June 1782, adding wearily that they would have to honour their promise to reinstate the Khan - even though it was the third time they had done so. She told Potemkin the news that the British Admiral Rodney had defeated Admiral Joseph de Grasse's French fleet at the Battle of the Saints in the Caribbean on 1/12 April, which slightly alleviated Britain's plight as America won its freedom. In the Crimea, she realized that her policy of propping up Shagin Giray was obsolete but the delicate question of what to do depended on the Powers of Europe - and Potemkin. 'We could decide it all in half an hour together,' she told her consort, 'but now I don't know where to find you. I ask you to hurry with your arrival because nothing scares me more than to miss something or be wrong.' Never was their partnership, and his equality, more clearly stated.24
The Prince saw the Crimean tumult as a historic opportunity, because Britain and France remained distracted by war. He galloped back and almost bounded into town. He immediately sent this playfully Puckish letter to Sir James Harris in French, scrawled in his scratchy hand: 'Vive la Grande Bretagne et Rodney; je viens d'arriver, mon cher Harris; devinez qui vous ecrit and venez me voir tout de suite.'[34]
Harris rushed through Tsarskoe Selo at midnight to visit 'this extraordinary man who', he told the new Foreign Secretary, his close friend Charles James Fox, 'every day affords me new matter of amazement'. Sir James found Potemkin in a state of almost febrile ebullience. Serenissimus insisted on talking throughout the night, even though he had just finished 'a journey of 3000 versts, which he had performed in 16 days, during which period he had slept only three times and, besides visiting several estates and every church he came near, he had been exposed to all the delays and tedious ceremonies of the military and civil honours which the Empress had ordered should be bestowed on him ... yet he does not bear the smallest appearance of fatigue ... and on our separation, I was certainly the more exhausted of the two'.25 The reunited Prince and Empress resolved to reinstate Shagin Giray as Crimean khan but also to invoke the Austrian treaty in case it led to war with the Sublime Porte. Joseph replied so enthusiastically to 'my Empress, my friend, my ally, my heroine',26 that, while Potemkin organized the Russian military response to the Crimean crisis, Catherine took the opportunity to turn their Greek Project from a chimera into a policy. On 10 September 1782, Catherine proposed the Project to Joseph, who was shocked by its impracticality yet impressed by its vision. First, Catherine wanted to reestablish 'the ancient Greek monarchy on the ruins ... of the barbarian government that rules there now' for 'the younger of my grandsons, Grand Duke Constantine'. Then she wanted to create the Kingdom of Dacia, the Roman province that covered today's Rumania, 'a state independent of the three monarchies ... under a Sovereign of Christian religion ... and a person of loyalty on which the two Imperial Courts can rely ...'. Cobenzl's letters make clear Dacia was specifically understood to be Potemkin's kingdom.