4. Eden in the Tauride Palace: Potemkin’s Last Project

Abstract

Semen Bobrov’s long poem in which the conquest of Crimea is interpreted not as a stage in the “Greek Project” but as the symbolic apotheosis of Russian expansion in the south was only published after Catherine II’s death. The late empress would hardly have approved of this kind of revision of her cherished plans. Until her last days the empress remained convinced both of their feasibility and of their benefit for Russia (see Ragsdale 1988). At the same time her notion of how long it might take to realize them fluctuated, depending on changes in the political situation. One of these changes occurred during 1789. On January 26, after having ordered that triumphal gates be built for Potemkin in Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine commanded that they be inscribed with the line from Petrov’s ode “On the Taking of Khotin”: “You will descend to the Temple of Sophia amid applause.” While giving these instructions, the empress commented that “He [Potemkin] will be in Tsargrad [i.e., Constantinople] this year” (Khrapovitskii 1874, 245). However, on October 10 of the same year she made quite a different prediction: “On the Greeks: they can be revived. Constantine is a good boy; in thirty years he will go from Sevastopol’ to Eden in the Tauride Palace: