But the bones of Potemkin, a famous military commander and statesman, gave the Kremlin more resonance. Mr. Montefiore, who has chronicled Potemkin and Catherine’s “excessive bohemian lifestyle and illustrious political victories,” noted the special place in history the pair hold for Putin and others. extremism, as they attempted to create “the gilded majesty of the Romanov empire with the grim glory of a Stalinist superpower turned into a distinctive modern hybrid. “
Russian rulers did not always view Potemkin and Catherine’s legacy with admiration – a fact underscored by the story of what happened to Potemkin’s remains over the centuries.
When Potemkin died in 1791, the grieving queen ordered a grand funeral and took his body to Kherson, where it was displayed and discovered in a specially built tomb in a cellar. grave, wrote Mr. Montefiore.
By the time Catherine died in 1796, it had become a pilgrimage site, prompting her son and successor, Paul I, who ruled Russia until his assassination in 1801. I ordered that Potemkin be buried in an unmarked grave. that he directed a local official to smash and scatter Potemkin’s bones in the nearby Devil’s Canyon.
For years, it was unclear whether the orders were carried out.
It was not until 1818 that a search of the catacombs was established that the remains were still there. In 1859 and again in 1873, the tomb was opened again to confirm that the remains were indeed those of the great prince. A triangular hole in the skull, left there as part of the embalming process, determined that they were.
At the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, the catacombs at Saint Catherine were reopened and, as Mr. Montefiore noted in his book, there were yellowed photographs of revolutionaries storing their remains.
In 1930, a young writer visited St. Catherine’s, which the Communists renamed the Kherson Anti-Religious Museum.
