Potemkin’s historic connection to the city didn’t interest him as much as it interested us. “I’m grateful to Potemkin for building this church,” he said carefully. They took them outside, to a van that was waiting. Six of them came down the stairs and took the bones. “Then soldiers came in and asked to open the crypt. “Russian vehicles surrounded the church,” he said. Father Vitaly-who spoke in Ukrainian, the language of Kherson’s modern rulers, not in Russian, the language of Potemkin-described the day of the theft. Potemkin’s bones once rested in a wooden coffin on a stone platform at the center of the dark, claustrophobic room. The shelling sounded far away to us, except when it didn’t.Īt the cathedral, a young priest rolled back a rug in the nave and opened a trapdoor. Three people were killed in this attack, and three people wounded, including an elderly woman. The streets outside were empty the city has been depopulated by the invasion, by the counterinvasion, and by ongoing, erratic fire from Russian soldiers, known to the Ukrainians as “Rashists” or “orcs.” On one of the days we visited, a missile hit a supermarket parking lot. The worshippers were mainly elderly, with a few younger people, even children, mixed in.
We arrived during a short break between services. On a cloudy Sunday this past March, we visited the cathedral, which sits just a few streets away from the Dnipro River-now the front line-to try to understand why the Russian army, in the chaotic final days of its occupation of Kherson, had paused to rob a grave. The bones were kept in a crypt beneath the cathedral nave. Catherine’s Cathedral, in Kherson, built by Potemkin himself. His skull and at least several other bones-which ones, exactly, is a mystery-were eventually brought to St. It was then that the Russians did something particularly strange: They kidnapped the bones of Grigory Potemkin. By October, this new Potemkin village was collapsing, and the resurgent Ukrainian army was approaching the outskirts of Kherson. Even as the occupiers held a ludicrous referendum, designed to show that Ukrainians had chosen Russia, the Russian army was quietly preparing to flee. Partisans fought back inside the city, with car bombs and sabotage. In September, Putin held a ceremony in the Kremlin declaring Kherson and other occupied territories to be part of Russia. Russian soldiers kidnapped the mayor, tortured city employees, murdered civilians, and stole children. In a bid to restore Potemkin’s cities to Russian suzerainty, Russia occupied Kherson in early March of 2022, at the outset of a campaign to annihilate both Ukraine and the idea of Ukraine. The tale also evokes something we recognize to be true, not just of imperial Russia but of Putin’s Russia, where mind-boggling efforts are made to please the leader-efforts that these days include telling him he is winning a war that he is most definitely not winning. These villages probably never existed, but the story has endured for a reason: The sycophantic courtier, creating false images for the empress, is a figure we know from other times and other places. The story goes that Potemkin built fake villages along her route, populated with fake villagers exuding fake prosperity. In 1787, Catherine paid a six-month visit to Crimea and the land then known as New Russia. The rest of the world remembers Potemkin differently, for something that we would now call a disinformation campaign.
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