In 1786, he ordered local Governor Ivan Sinelnikov to enrol two painters, Neretin and Bukharov, as professors of art at the university, with salaries of 150 roubles. Even in the midst of the war in January 1791, he ordered Ekaterinoslav's Governor to employ a Frenchman named de Guienne as 'historian at the Academy' on a salary of 500 roubles. As Potemkin told Sinelnikov, the public schools had to be improved to provide the university with good students. Overall, 300,000 roubles was assigned to the educational establishments alone.75 This was derided. Yet it is hard to fault Potemkin's priorities when he paid as much attention to teachers as to battleships.
All this was undoubtedly eccentric, but an ability to turn his ideas into reality was at the heart of Potemkin's genius. Much that seemed ridiculous after his death seemed possible during his life: the scale on which he created not just cities but the Black Sea Fleet sounded unlikely but he alone made it happen. So the university and city could have been built - but only in his lifetime. His vision was a noble one, far wider than just the conservatoire-.
it was to be an international Orthodox college where Potemkin believed 'young people' from Poland, Greece, Wallachia and Moldavia could study.76 As ever with the Prince, his choice of students was closely connected to his aims for the Empire and for himself. He was always trying to train better sailors for his ships. In 1787, after Catherine's visit, he united all the naval academies in the region and Petersburg and moved them to Ekaterinoslav. This was to be the academy of the Greek Project, the school for Potemkin's kingdoms.77
The work did not begin until mid-1787, then was delayed by the war so that little of it was built. But not as little as everyone thinks. In 1790, Starov arrived in the south, and laid new plans for the whole city, especially its cathedral and the Prince's Palace, all approved by Potemkin, on 15 February 1790. The professors' residences and the administrative buildings for the university were finished. By 1792, there were 546 state buildings and just 2,500 inhabitants.78 Its Governor, Vasily Kahovsky, reported to the Empress after the Prince's death that the town was laid out and continuing. Without its master, would it continue?79 By 1815, a travelling official reported that it was 'more like some Dutch colony than a provincial administrative centre'.80 Yet something of his Athens remains.
Ekaterinoslav never became a southern Petersburg; its university was never the Oxford of the steppes. The gap between hope and reality made this Potemkin's biggest failure and it has been used to discredit much else that was done well. Yet none of the historians of the last two centuries had visited Ekaterinoslav, which, like Sebastopol, was a closed city in Soviet times. When one looks more closely at the city, now called Dniepropetrovsk, it becomes clear its position was admirably chosen on the high and green bank of a bend of the Dnieper, where the great river is almost a mile wide. Potemkin's main Catherine Street became the modern Karl Marx Prospekt, still called 'the longest, widest, most elegant avenue in all the Russians' by locals. (William Hastie, the Scottish architect, expanded on this grid in his 1816 city plan.)81
In the middle of the city stands an eighteenth-century church, now newly alive with Orthodox worshippers. Its name - Church of the Transformation - is the one Potemkin suggested in 1784. It is a grand and imposing edifice, completely in proportion to the size of its city. It has a high spire, Classical pillars and golden cupola, based on Starov's original plans. Begun in 1788 during the war, completed long after Potemkin's death, in 1837, there stands the Prince's noble cathedral in the midst of the city that was supposed never to have been built.82 Not far from the church is a hideous yellow triumphal arch of Soviet design that leads to Potemkin Park, which still contains the massive Potemkin Palace.83 It was to be another eighty years after Potemkin's death before musical conservatoires were opened in St Petersburg and Moscow. But Ekaterinoslav was to flourish most under Soviet planning when it became a toiling industrial centre - as Potemkin had wanted.[41]
Potemkin's cities advanced as he gained territory. The last cities he sponsored were made possible by the conquests of the Second Turkish War - Nikolaev, by the fall of the fortress of Ochakov, and Odessa, by the push round the Black Sea.
On 27 August 1789, the Prince scrawled out the order to found Nikolaev, named after St Nikolai, the saint of seafarers on whose day Potemkin finally stormed Ochakov. Built on a high, cool and breezy spot where the Ingul river meets the Bug about twenty miles upriver from Kherson and fifty from the Black Sea, Nikolaev was the best planned and most successful of his cities (except Odessa).
It was built by Faleev on Potemkin's precise orders, sweeping in vision, precise in detail. In a twenty-one point memorandum, he ordered Faleev to build a monastery, move naval headquarters from Kherson to Nikolaev, construct a military school for 300, fund a church from the income of local taverns, recast the broken bell of the Mejigorsky Convent, adding copper to it, cultivate the land 'according to the English method as practised by three British-educated assistants of Professor Livanov', build hospitals and resthomes for invalids, create a free port, cover all fountains with marble, build a Turkish bath and an admiralty - and then establish a town council and a police force.
Faleev amazingly was able to parry these thrusts of energy one by one. He answered Potemkin's specific orders, 'Your Highness ordered me to' and then reported that virtually all had been done - and more, from settling Old Believer priests to sowing kitchen gardens. Shipyards were built first. Peasants, soldiers and Turkish prisoners built the city: 2,500 were working there during 1789. Faleev evidently worked them too hard because Serenissimus ordered their protection and daily rations of hot wine. There is a contemporary print in the Nikolaev Museum showing the soldiers and Turkish prisoners-of-war working on foot, supervised by mounted Russian officers. Another shows oxen dragging logs to build the city.
By October, Faleev could tell the Prince that the landing stage was finished and that the earthmoving by the conscripts and Turks would be finished within a month. There were already nine stone and five wooden barracks. In 1791, the main shipyards were moved from Kherson to Nikolaev.84 Here we see how Potemkin worked. There is no trace of the layabout, nor of the clown who performed for Westerners, nor of the grandiose autocrat who paid no attention to detail. Potemkin pushed Faleev. 'Work quickly,' he wrote about one battleship he needed and 'Strain all your forces.' Next, he thanked him for the watermelons he had sent but added, 'You cannot imagine how my honour and the future of Nikolaev shipyard depends on this ship.'85 The first frigate from his new city was launched before his death - and his own palace was almost complete.
Four years later, the visiting Maria Guthrie acclaimed its 10,000 inhabitants, 'remarkably long, broad, straight streets' and 'handsome public buildings'. The city's position even today is ideaclass="underline" it is well laid out and planned, though few of Potemkin's buildings survive. Its shipyards still work where they were built by him 200 years ago.86