'I don't describe the beauties of the Crimea because it would take too much time ...', the Prince told his Empress in June 1783, as he annexed the peninsula and celebrated its charms, strategic potential and Classical history.53 It is impossible not to share in Potemkin's feverish and exuberant fiesta of creation in that magical place with which he had fallen in love. Even today, it is easy to see why: as one passes through the Perekop Straits, past the salt lakes, which were the Khan's major source of income, the northern Crimea appears flat, arid, monotonous. But an hour to the south and it changes completely into a lush garden of Eden that most resembles the vineyards of southern Italy or Spain. Hills of greenery and vines rise to the battlements of medieval Genoese fortresses overlooking white cliffs and azure bays. Potemkin, who adored gardens, began to plant trees, celebrating the birth of the Grand Duke's children by laying out avenues of bay trees and olive groves. He imagined the Empress visiting his 'paradise'. The Romanovs in the next century and the twentieth-century Politburo apparatchiks were to make the Crimea their elite holiday resort, but Potemkin, to his credit, always wanted it to be far more than that.54
His first moves were to protect the Moslem Tartars from the brutish philistinism of his own soldiery: again and again, he ordered his generals to 'treat the inhabitants kindly and not to offend them. The chiefs of... regiments must set an example.'55 He put special observers with regiments to keep an eye on their behaviour - or, as he put it, 'for the villages' protection' - and report to him 'all forbidden actions', and placed the Taurian region under Crimean murzas, especially the renegade Iakub Aga, who had become Yakov Izmailovich Rudzevich.56 As he told Catherine, he gave money to maintain mosques and muftis. Indeed, when he travelled through the Crimea with Francisco de Miranda, he always met the local mufti and made a donation to his mosque.57 Potemkin gave the Tartar murzas Russian nobility and the right to own land.58 Typically, he formed a Tartar Crimean army, a little one for display.59 It was traditional Russian imperialism to co-opt the Moslem hierarchies, but Potemkin's sensitive care for them is unusual in a Russian soldier of any epoch.
The Tartars were not farmers and never developed the land: 'This peninsula may become even better if we get rid of the Tartars by making them leave ... God knows, they are not worth this soil and the Kuban is a suitable place for them.' Potemkin shared the instincts of Russian imperialists to uproot people like chess pieces - but, he did not move them. In fact, he often favoured them and went to great lengths to make them stay. But thousands of the Tartars left anyway: their attitude was neatly put in the back-handed compliment of a Crimean mufti to Miranda: he remembered Potemkin taking the Crimea as 'a woman remembers the man who deflowers her'.60
Potemkin decided that the Crimean capital should be built on the Tartar town of Ak-mechet in the dry, flat middle of the peninsula: he called it Simferopol, still the capital today,61 and still the same flat, carefully laid- out, dull city created by Potemkin.61 The massive scale of Potemkin's plans extended from Kherson to Sebastopol, from Balaklava, Theodosia, Kerch,
Yenikale and back to Kherson again. In all these places, new cities were founded or existing fortresses expanded into towns. But Colonel Korsakov was equal to all this. 'Matushka,' Potemkin raved to Catherine , 'we've never had an engineer like Korsakov before ... This man has to be looked after.'63 Within five years, Sebastopol and its fleet were ready to be inspected by the two Caesars of the east.
In 1784, Potemkin decided to build a sumptuous capital for this southern Empire - a veritable new Athens - on the site of a small Zaporogian village called Palavitsa. He wished to call it 'Ekaterinoslav'. Incapable of doing anything by halves, he fell in love with the name because it meant 'Catherine's Glory' and he wanted to use it everywhere. (Indeed he also used it to rename his entire Viceroyalty.) 'Most Merciful Sovereign,' wrote the Prince, 'where, if not in the land devoted to your glory, should there be a city with magnificent buildings? That is why I undertook the development of projects that would suit the high name of this city.' Potemkin envisaged a neo-Classical metropolis: its law courts were to resemble 'ancient basilikas', its marketplace a huge semi-circle 'like the Propylaeum, or threshold of Athens'. The governor- general's house would be in 'Greek and Roman style'.64
Catherine, whose visions of Classicism and altruism were the same as his, approved his plans.65 Serenissimus considered possible designs for over a year. Finally, in 1786, the French architect Claude Giroir produced his design for a central square and a grid of streets at right angles to the Dnieper, but Potemkin's architect Starov perfected the final plans. In January 1787, the Prince proudly displayed them to Francisco de Miranda, who was impressed with their 'Roman grandeur and architectural taste'. Potemkin wanted to employ 16,000 workmen for nine or ten years. Miranda wondered if it would ever be completed.66
Nothing in his career provoked such mockery as Ekaterinoslav. The building of a town here was necessary to develop the empty Zaporogian steppes, but the sin was its grandeur. Even the anti-Potemkin lies are interesting because of the light they shed on the extent to which Potemkin's enemies would go to blacken his name. Most histories claim Potemkin founded Ekaterinoslav in an unhealthy place and almost immediately had to move it, due to his own incompetence. It is true that in 1778, six years earlier, he had allowed a provincial governor to found a settlement for Armenians and Greeks, the Crimean refugees, on the River Kilchen, using the name 'Ekaterinoslav'. Now he simply took the name for his 'famous city', but he did not move the original one, which already had Greek, Armenian and Catholic quarters with three churches67 and almost 3,000 inhabitants. He simply renamed it Novomoskovsk.68
His enemies said the Prince planned to build a cathedral in the middle of this heretofore empty steppe larger than St Peter's in Rome, like the African dictator of a penniless state building the biggest cathedral in the world in the middle of the jungle. Ever since, historians, even Potemkin's only modern biographer George Soloveytchik, have repeated this embarrassing ambition as a sign of the Prince's overweening delusions of grandeur.69 However, Potemkin may have mentioned St Peter's but he never actually proposed building it: in his letter to Catherine, he wrote, 'I imagine here an excellent cathedral, a kind of imitation of St Paul's-outside-the-walls-of-Rome, devoted to the Transfiguration of God, as a sign of the transformation of this land by your care, from a barren steppe to an ample garden, and from the wilderness of animals to a home, welcoming people from all lands.'70 San Paolo-fuori- le-mura was admittedly an ambitious undertaking, but not quite as absurd as St Peter's. It is unlikely Catherine would ever have signed off on a copy of St Peter's nor assigned the huge tranches of two and three million roubles to the development of the south if Potemkin's ideas were so ludicrous. Somehow, St Peter's was substituted.
The only part of the city that existed from the beginning was the University of Ekaterinoslav, with its own musical conservatoire.7I He immediately moved the Greek gymnasium, founded on his Ozerki estate as part of the Greek Project, to his New Athens, saying he had saved enough to rebuild the school there.72 The conservatoire was closest to his lyrical heart. 'It's the first time', sneered Cobenzl to Joseph in November 1786, 'someone has decided to establish a corps de musique in a town before it's even been built.'73 Potemkin hired Giuseppe Sarti, his personal composer-conductor, as the first head of the conservatoire. It was not just Sarti: the Prince really was hiring musical staff in Italy before a city was constructed. 'Enclosed, I have the honour of presenting you, Monseigneur, the bill of 2800 Roubles for the order of Your Highness,' wrote a certain Castelli from Milan on 21 March 1787, 'to Monsieur Joseph Canta who has passed them to the four Professors of Music ... They plan to leave for Russia on the 26th .. Л74 The destiny of the four Milanese professors is unknown.