For the first 6 years of his administration, Novorossei Potemkin remained in the northern capital and ruled the country from St. Petersburg. In these 6 years, he completely destroyed the Zaporozhye siege, which was disturbing peaceful settlers with all its robberies, called up new settlers - Greeks, participants in the Turkish war of Rosby, reorganized local regiments, introduced a poll tax, built new churches in Taganrog, founded new cities - Kherson, Ekaterinoslav.
In 1780, Potemkin himself came to the south and began with great ardor the colonization and organization of Novorossia. He intensively attracted new colonists to the country, called upon Russian fugitives, promised them all kinds of relief and benefits, invited Greeks and Armenians from Crimea, Corsicans from Corsica. State-owned fertile lands were distributed to all of them.
Potemkin cared not only about populating the region, but about enriching it and developing its economy. He ordered seed from overseas, arranged gardens and orchards, cotton plantations and vineyards, planted mulberry trees and bred silkworms. In one of the letters to the empress, sending her an expensive silk cloth, Potemkin wrote: "You ordered the worms to work for people... To bring Akhtuba to you on your dress. If my prayer is heard, then God will extend your life until later times, and You, merciful mother, having blessed the countries that are subordinate to me, will see the path paved with silks,"
Cities were intensively built in Novorossiya. For the formation of Kherson, 3 regiments of soldiers and 500 cavalry were called in servile carpenters were discharged from Russia. A whole city, a city and ports grew up in a little place.
“2 years after its founding, foreign ships were already coming here, people were coming from all sides and getting rich, foreigners opened commercial houses.” Damn it should have become the second Petersburg.
In 1782, Novorossno was visited by the President of the Academy of Sciences, the former Little Russia hetman gr. K. G. Razumovsky. In one of his letters to Kovalinsky, he described his travels like this; “On the voyage I had planned to Kherson, I felt a special pleasure, because not exactly on this journey there was no anxiety, but my vision was constantly occupied with a secret surprise, since on that very terrible emptiness of the steppe, where in the wrong time the scattered huts of no significance could hardly be found here and there, called winter dwellers from the former Cossacks, in this void, especially along the Kherson route, starting from Kremenchug itself, I found contented villages 20, 25 and no further than 30 versts away, mostly with abundant water.
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barracks, about 10 thousand military personnel in the military service, on the other hand. Add to this a beautiful island with quarantine buildings, Greek merchant ships and canals for you to navigate. Imagine everything, and then you won’t be surprised when I tell you that to this day I can’t get out of my bewilderment about how soon I’ll be returned to Moscow, where the winter hut just recently turned up. Not to mention the fact that this city, of course, is rapidly flourishing in wealth and commerce, as much as can be seen from its obvious beginnings. Kherson seemed so pleasant to me that I took a place in it to build a house, just in case I might someday be a fellow citizen there.
"I will tell you that this city was not the only one that occupied my attention. The new and very recently also founded cities of Nikopol, New Kontakion, the well-built Ekaterinoslavl. In addition, we must add the Nenasytitsa rapids, cleared and made convenient for navigation, with the rapids carried out and carried out with them with incredible success channel, are equally worthy of all attention and human reason.”
Russia's move south to the Black Sea could not but alarm the Turks. One could have foreseen that Tursha would take up arms to stop this growth of Rosby and put a limit on him. In anticipation of a future war, Potemkin was in a hurry to arm himself.
Having received 18 million rubles from the treasury for this purpose, he began military preparations for the region: guns were poured into Kherson and Kremenchug, and construction was carried out in Kherson and Taganrog.