Catherine II of Russia

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Catherine II of Russia, called the Great (Russian: Екатерина II Великая or Yekaterina II Velikaya, 2 May 1729 — 6 November [O.S. 17 November] 1796), born Sophie Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst) — sometimes referred to as an epitome of the "enlightened despot" — reigned as Empress of Russia for more than three decades, from June 281762 until her death.

Early life

A German princess with a very remote Russian ancestry, and cousin to Gustav III of Sweden and Charles XIII of Sweden, Sophie Augusta Fredericka (nicknamed Figchen) was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) to Christian Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, who was also a Prussian general governing the city in the name of the king of Prussia. In accordance with the custom then prevailing in German nobility, she was educated chiefly by a French governess and tutors.

The choice of Sophie as wife of the future tsar — Peter of Holstein-Gottorp — was the result of not a little diplomatic management in which Count Lestocq and Frederick the Great took an active part, their object being to strengthen the friendship between Prussia and Russia, to weaken the influence of Austria and to ruin the chancellor Bestuzhev, on whom Tsarina Elizabeth relied, and who was a known partisan of the Austrian alliance.

The diplomatic intrigue failed, largely through the flighty intervention of Figchen's mother, Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein, a clever but very injudicious woman. Catherine's mother, by accounts, was emotionally cold and physically abusive, as well as a social climber who loved gossip and court intrigues. Johanna aspired to become famous through her daughter being future Empress of Russia, but her pushy, arrogant behaviour infuriated the Empress, who eventually banned her from the country. Luckily Elizabeth took a strong liking to the daughter, and the marriage finally took place in 1744. The Empress knew the family well because Princess Johanna's brother Karl had gone to Russia to marry Elizabeth years earlier, but died of smallpox before the wedding took place.

Sophie had spared no effort to ingratiate herself not only with the Empress but with her husband and the Russian people. She applied herself to learning the Russian language with such zeal that she rose at night and walked about her bedroom barefoot repeating her lessons. The result was a severe attack of pneumonia in March 1744. When she wrote her memoirs she represented herself as having made up her mind when she came to Russia to do whatever had to be done, and to profess to believe whatever she was required to believe, in order to be qualified to wear the crown. The consistency of her character throughout life makes it highly probable that even at the age of fifteen she was mature enough to adopt this worldly-wise line of conduct.

Her father, who was a very devout Lutheran, was strongly opposed to his daughter's conversion. Despite his instructions, on 28 June 1744 she was received into the Russian Orthodox Church and was renamed Catherine Alexeyevna (Yekaterina or Ekaterina). On the following day she was formally betrothed, and was married to the Grand Duke Peter on 21 April 1745 at St. Petersburg. The newlyweds settled in the palace of Oranienbaum, which would remain the residence of the "young court" for 16 years.

Coup d'etat

The marriage was unsuccessful - it may not have been consummated for twelve years due to Peter III's impotence and mental immaturity. While Peter took a mistress, Catherine carried on liaisons with Sergei Saltykov and Stanislaw Poniatowski. She became friends with Ekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova, the sister of her husband's mistress, who introduced Catherine to several powerful political groups that opposed her husband. Catherine was well read and kept up-to-date on current events in Russia and the rest of Europe. She corresponded with many of the great minds of her era, including Voltaire and Diderot.

After the death of Elizabeth in 1762, Peter succeeded to the throne as Peter III of Russia and moved into the new Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. However, his eccentricities and policies, including an unusual fondness for Prussian ruler Frederick the Great, whose capital the Russian army occupied as a result of the Seven Years' War, alienated the same groups that Catherine had cultivated. Compounding matters, he insisted upon intervening in a war between Holstein and Denmark over the province of Schleswig. Peter's insistence on supporting his native Holstein in an unpopular war ruined much support he had in the nobility.

In July, her husband committed the grave error of retiring with his Holstein-born courtiers and relatives to Oranienbaum, leaving his wife at St. Petersburg. On July 13 and 14, the revolt of the Leib Guard removed him from the throne and proclaimed Catherine their empress. The result was a bloodless coup; Ekaterina Dashkova, confidante of Catherine, remarked that Peter seemed rather glad to be rid of the throne and requested only a quiet estate and a ready supply of tobacco and burgundy in which to rest his sorrows.

Six months after his ascension to the throne, on July 17, 1762, Peter III was killed at Ropsha by Aleksey Orlov (younger brother to Gregory Orlov, then court favorite and a participant in the coup) in what was supposed to have been an accidental killing, the result of Alexei's overindulgence in vodka. During the Soviet period, it was assumed proven that Catherine ordered the murder, as she also disposed of other potential claimants to the throne — Ivan VI and Princess Tarakanova — at about the same time. Now, some historians tend to doubt her involvement because of the long-running tensions between Alexey Orlov and Catherine.

Foreign affairs

During her reign, Catherine extended the borders of the Russian Empire southward and westward to absorb New Russia, Crimea, Right-Bank Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Courland at the expense of two powers — the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. All told, she added some 200,000 miles² (518,000 km²) to Russian territory, and she further shaped the Russian destiny to a greater extent than almost anyone before or since, with the possible exceptions of Lenin, Stalin, and Peter the Great.

Catherine's foreign minister, Nikita Panin, exercised considerable influence from the beginning of her reign. Though a shrewd statesman, Panin dedicated much effort and millions of rubles to the creation of a "Northern Accord" among Russia, Prussia, Poland, and Sweden, to counter the power of the Bourbon-Habsburg League. When it became apparent that his plan could not succeed, Panin fell out of favor and in 1781 was dismissed.

Russo-Turkish Wars

Catherine made Russia the dominant power in south-eastern Europe after her first Russo-Turkish War against the Ottoman Empire (1768-1774), which saw some of the greatest defeats in Turkish history, including the Battle of Chesma and the Battle of Kagul. The victories allowed Russia to obtain access to the Black Sea and to incorporate vast steppes of what is now South Ukraine, where the new cities of Odessa, Nikolayev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kherson were founded.

Catherine annexed Crimea in 1783, a mere nine years after it had gained independence from the Ottoman Empire as a result of her first war with it. The Ottomans started a second Russo-Turkish War (1787-1792) during Catherine's reign. This war proved catastrophic for them and ended with the Treaty of Jassy, which legitimized the Russian claim to Crimea.

Relations with Western Europe

In the European political theater, Catherine was ever conscious of her legacy and longed to be perceived as an enlightened sovereign. She pioneered for Russia the role that England was later to play with aplomb throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, that of international mediator in disputes that could, or did, lead to war. Accordingly, she acted as mediator in the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-1779) between Prussia and Austria. In 1780, she set up a group designed to defend neutral shipping against Great Britain during the American Revolution, and she refused to intervene in the revolution on the side of the British when asked.

From 1788 to 1790, Russia was engaged in a war with Sweden, instigated by Catherine's cousin, the Swedish King Gustav III. Expecting to simply overtake the Russian armies still engaged in war against the Ottoman Turks and hoping to strike Saint Petersburg directly, the Swedes ultimately faced mounting human and territorial losses when opposed by Russia's Baltic Fleet. After Denmark declared war on Sweden in 1789, things looked bleak for the Swedes. After the Battle of Svensksund, a treaty was signed August 14, 1790, returning all conquered territories to their respective nations, and peace reigned for twenty years.

Partitions of Poland

In 1763 Catherine placed Stanisław Poniatowski, a former lover, on the Polish throne. Although the idea came from the Prussian king, Catherine took a leading role in the partitions of Poland in the 1790s, afraid that the May Constitution of Poland might lead to a resurgence of power in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the growing democratic movements inside the commonwealth might become a threat to the European monarchies.

After the French Revolution, Catherine rejected many of the principles of the Enlightenment that she had once paid at least lip service to. In order to stop reforms of the May Constitution and not allow modernization of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth she provided support to a Polish anti-reform group known as the Targowica Confederation. After defeating Polish loyalist forces in the War in Defense of the Constitution and in Kosciuszko Uprising, Russia divided all of the Commonwealth territory with Prussia and Austria.

Arts and culture

Main article: Russian Enlightenment

Catherine subscribed to the Enlightenment and considered herself a "philosopher on the throne." She was well aware of her image abroad, and ever desired to be perceived by Europe as a civilized and enlightened monarch, despite the fact that in Russia she often played the part of the tyrant. Even as she proclaimed her love for the ideals of liberty and freedom, she did more to tie the Russian Serf to his land and his lord than any sovereign since Boris Godunov.

Catherine was known as a patron of the arts, literature and education. The Hermitage Museum, which now occupies the whole of the old Winter palace, was begun as Catherine's personal collection. At the instigation of her factotum, Ivan Betskoi, she wrote a manual for the education of young children, drawing from the ideas of John Locke, and founded the famous Smolny Institute for noble young ladies. This school was to become one of the best of its kind in Europe, and even went so far as to admit young girls born to wealthy merchants alongside the daughters of the nobility. She wrote comedies, fiction and memoirs, while cultivating Voltaire, Diderot and D'Alembert, all French encyclopedists who later cemented her reputation in their writings. The leading economists of her day, such as Arthur Young and Jacques Necker, were foreign members of the Free Economic Society, established on her suggestion in St. Petersburg. She was able to lure the scientists Leonhard Euler and Peter Simon Pallas from Berlin to the Russian capital.

Subtle as she was forceful, she enlisted to her cause one of the great minds of the age, Voltaire, with whom she corresponded for fifteen years, from her accession to his death. He lauded her with epithets, calling her "The Star of the North" and "Semiramis of Russia," making reference to the legendary Queen of Babylon. Though she never met him face-to-face, she mourned him bitterly when he died, acquired his collection of books from his heirs, and placed them in the Imperial Public Library.

Within a few months of her accession, having heard that the publication of the famous French Encyclopedie was in danger of being stopped by the French government on account of its irreligious spirit, she proposed to Diderot that he should complete his great work in Russia under her protection. Four years later she endeavoured to embody in a legislative form the principles of enlightenment which she had imbibed from the study of the French philosophers. A Grand Commission, which might be called a consultative parliament, composed of 652 members of all classes — officials, nobles, burghers and peasants and of various nationalities — was called together at Moscow to consider the needs of the empire and the means of satisfying them. The Instructions for the Guidance of the Assembly were prepared by the empress herself and were, as she frankly admitted, the result of pillaging the philosophers of the West, especially Montesquieu and Beccaria. As many of the democratic principles frightened her more moderate and experienced advisers, she wisely refrained from immediately putting them into execution. After holding more than 200 sittings the so-called Commission was dissolved without getting beyond the realm of theory.

Her patronage furthered the evolution of the arts in Russia more than any sovereign of that nation before or since. Under her reign, the classical and European influences which inspired the "Age of Imitation" were imported and studied. Gavrila Derzhavin, Denis Fonvizin and Ippolit Bogdanovich laid the groundwork for the great writers of the nineteenth century, especially the immortal Pushkin. Catherine was a great patron of Russian opera, see Catherine II and opera for details. However, her reign was also marked by the omnipresent censorship and state control of publications. When Radishchev published his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1790, warning of uprisings because of the deplorable social conditions of the peasants held as serfs, Catherine exiled him to Siberia.

Personal life

Catherine, throughout her long reign, took many lovers, often elevating them to high positions for as long as they held her interest, and then pensioning them off with large estates and gifts of serfs. After her affair with Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin, he selected a candidate that had both the physical beauty as well as the mental faculties to hold Catherine's interest. Some of these men loved her back, as she was considered quite beautiful by the standards of the day, and was ever generous with her lovers, even after the affair was ended. The last of her lovers, Prince Zubov, 40 years her junior, was the most capricious and extravagant of them all.

She was a harsh mother to her son Paul, who she hinted was fathered by her first lover, Sergei Saltykov, but who physically resembled her husband, Peter. (Her illegitimate son by Grigori Orlov was a half-witted invalid, named Alexis Bobrinski, whom she sequestered from the court.) It seems highly probable that she intended to exclude Paul from the succession, and to leave the crown to her eldest grandson Alexander, afterwards the emperor Alexander I. Her harshness to Paul was probably as much due to political distrust as to what she saw of his character. Whatever else Catherine may have been she was emphatically a sovereign and a politician who was at last resort guided by interests of state. Keeping Paul in a state of semi-captivity in Gatchina and Pavlovsk, she resolved not to allow her authority to be disputed or shared by her son.

Catherine suffered a stroke while taking a bath on November 5 1796, and subsequently died at 10:15 the following evening without having regained consciousness. She was buried at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. Palace intrigue generated several urban myths about the circumstances of her death that put her in rather unfavorable light. Because of their sexual nature, they survived the test of time and are still widely known even today.

Trivia

• The Russian slang word for money babki (old women), refers to the picture of Catherine II printed on pre-Revolution 100 rubles bills [link].
• German chancellor Angela Merkel has a picture of Catherine II in her office, stating she was a 'strong woman'.

• One of Serbia's most famed rock/New Wave bands "Ekatarina Velika" (Catherine the Great) 1982-1994, was named after her.
• As a matrilineal descendant of Anne de Foix and ultimately a matrilineal relative of Queen Victoria, she with her sons are members of mitochondrial haplogroup H. Because she did not have surviving daughters, her transmission of that mitochondria ended in her own children.
• She commissioned the famous "Bronze Horseman" statue, which stands in St. Petersburg on the banks of the Neva, and had the boulder upon which it stands imported from several leagues away. She had it inscribed with a Latin phrase "Petro Primo Catharina Secunda MDCCLXXXII" meaning "Catherine the Second to Peter the First, 1782" in order to lend herself legitmacy by connecting herself with the "Founder of Modern Russia." This statue later inspired Pushkin's famous poem.

List of great Catharinians

Aleksey Orlov | Grigory Potemkin | Alexander Bezborodko | Nikita Panin | Nicholas Repnin | Alexander Suvorov | Peter Rumyantsev | Fyodor Ushakov | Gavrila Derzhavin | Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova | Mikhailo Shcherbatov | Ivan Betskoy | Dmitry Levitsky

Bibliography

• The Memoirs of Catherine the Great by Markus Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom (translators). N.Y.: Modern Library, 2005 (hardcover, ISBN 0679642994); 2006 (paperback, ISBN 0812969871)
• Cronin, Vincent. Catherine, Empress of All the Russias. London: Collins, 1978 (hardcover, ISBN 0002161192); 1996 (paperback, ISBN 1860460917)
• Madariaga, Isabel de. Catherine the Great: A Short History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990 (hardcover, ISBN 0300048459); 2002 (paperback, ISBN 0300097220)
• Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Potemkin: Catherine the Great's Imperial Partner. N.Y.: Vintage, 2005 (paperback, ISBN 1400077176)
• Rounding, Virginia. Catherine the Great: Love, Sex and Power. L.: Hutchinson, 2006 (ISBN 0091799929)
• *[Reviewed] by Charlotte Hobson in [The Spectator], April 15, 2006
• *[Reviewed] by Catriona Kelly in [The Guardian], April 1, 2006
• *[Reviewed] by Simon Sebag Montefiore in [The Telegraph], April 17, 2006
• Smith, Douglas, ed. and trans. Love and Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 2004 (hardcover, ISBN 0875803245); 2005 (paperback ISBN 0875806074)
• Troyat, Henri. Catherine the Great. N.Y.: Dorset Press, 1991 (hardcover, ISBN 0880296887); L.: Orion, 2000 (paperback, ISBN 1842120298)
• Troyat, Henri. Terrible Tsarinas. N.Y.: Algora, 2001 (ISBN 1892941546)

External links