Prince of Princes

Richard Pearson

Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore is biography in the grand tradition. It tells the tale of a larger-than-life character who led a great and important life and uses that life to illustrate and explain an crucial slice of history. The story is riveting, the main character a hero, and the author a gifted storyteller with an impressive command of his subject.
— Washington Post Book World

Wall Street Journal

...a colorful biography...Mr. Montefiore captures the genius of two extraordinary Enlightment figures -- and of the age as well.

Library Journal

Modern Russian historians from Martin Malia to Gregory Freeze barely mention the subject of this massive biography, which illuminates the history of the European revolutionary era. In Volume 10 of The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution, the Durants pull into focus the wonderfully woven story of Prince Potemkin, Catherine the Great's secret husband and confidant. The palace intrigue is now magnified by this well-documented work by journalist Montefiore (the Sunday Times, the New York Times), who studied history at Cambridge. Montefiore's job as biographer is to aggrandize his subject, and so Potemkin here assumes nearly mythical stature in 18th-century history. His enemies and detractors, mainly other European statesmen, propounded preposterous stories of fake villages in the Crimea and other events that diminished Potemkin's accomplishments. Montefiore has restored him to a prominent place in Russian history, showing that his accomplishments were greater, in Russian terms, than those of any other Russian save Peter the Great: "Potemkin was unique in combining the creative ideas of an entrepreneur with the force of a soldier and the foresight of a statesman." Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A life of Prince Potemkin that starts out as an artful pot-boiler, then turns into a possessing diplomatic history of Potemkin's role in Russia's last great push for empire. So often caricatured as an arrogant and indolent debauchee, Potemkin gets his record set straight: recklessly indulgent, yes, but a force of nature, relentlessly ambitious, inspired and quixotic, the guiding figure of Catherine II's rule. From the moment Potemkin first takes the Empress's notice to his death on the Bessarabian steppe, Montefiore dogs his heels, building the case for Potemkin as an equal of Peter the Great: expanding the empire, building the Black Sea Fleet, taking the Crimea and establishing the likes of Sebastopol and Odessa. In particular, he demonstrates how Potemkin and Catherine's evolving relationship, from lovers to what amounts to co-rulers, was an alliance remarkable for both its intimacy and statecraft. After Potemkin left Catherine's bed for good, he devised an imperial menage a trois, supplying the Empresses with suitable lovers but always remaining the real man of the household, a perfect arrangement for the two willful, dominating personalities. Potemkin's "scientific longing for knowledge, mercantile enthusiasm, and purely imperial aggrandizement" shines through, as do his abilities as a soldier and a military tactician. Montefiore keeps readers' interest piqued with a fascination of minutiae, for instance a terrific day-in-the-life chapter of the subject when he was in his 40s, or his development of a silk industry on his Crimean mulberry plantations, or a thorough debunking of the "Potemkin Village" malarky, how he might have lost his eye, how he most certainly took his nieces asmistresses. That he ruled "like an emperor" from the River Bug to the Caspian, from the Caucasus almost to Kiev, is evidence enough of his mark on history. A landmark biography. Montefiore goes a long way toward rescuing Potemkin from his promiscuous action-figure reputation by justifiably rubbing a fair share of Catherine's greatness off onto, in Jeremy Bentham's words, the Prince of Princes.