German princess
Sophia Augusta Frederica, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, future Russian Empress Catherine II, was born in 1729. Anhalt-Zerbst, like most other German principalities, itself signified nothing on the political map of the globe – and was virtually wholly dependent on its mighty neighbor – Prussia. But such little kingdoms were at that time a true incubator of brides for the courts of Europe. On the one hand, the rank of their rulers permitted their daughters to be deemed appropriate spouses for European monarchs. On the other hand, such alliances imposed few obligations: the importance of these principalities was too insignificant, so it was possible to look for husbands and wives for numerous princes and princesses there without getting involved, or almost without getting drawn into complex political coalitions.
Sofia, presumably from the very beginning, was an extraordinarily ambitious and strong-willed girl. In addition, she was highly educated, read a lot and was interested in philosophical literature, which was extremely rare for a rural German princess. At the same time, she grew up in a very impoverished family by royal standards, and marriage to the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich, was a fantastic chance for her. Of all, for a European Lutheran young girl, joining the vast political arena of a gigantic, untamed, unintelligible nation should have been a bold gesture. But, evidently, she had no doubt – on the contrary, this was what she was trying for. It should be taken in mind that she moved to Russia at just 14 years old, and got married at 16.
At Elizabeth’s court
Empress Elizaveta Petrovna liked luxury, grandeur, balls with dressing up of a vast number of guests, and so on. So, finding oneself at her court, Sofia Augusta Frederica – now Ekaterina Alekseevna – found herself in settings that were as distant as conceivable from the atmosphere in which she was grown up. The poor Lutheran Zerbst on the fringes of Europe was the polar antithesis of the large, beautiful courtyard of her husband’s aunt, the All-Russian monarch. In her notes, Catherine subsequently stated – and this, most likely, can be accepted – that, as soon as she arrived in St. Petersburg, she made it a rule to first of all satisfy her husband, then the empress, and then the people. Apparently, in respect to Elizabeth, she initially succeeded.
Very little is known about the degree of connection between Catherine and Peter at the beginning of their marriage. The only source is the notes of Catherine herself, in which she asserts that there was no marriage tie between them. Allegedly, when Elizabeth questioned her why there was no heir, she answered that there was no reason why there could be one. It also contains evidence that Pavel Petrovich, who was born barely 10 years after the wedding, was in reality the son of Catherine’s lover Count Saltykov, who, so that he would not blab it out, was banished to Sweden and later to Hamburg. However, these notes are clearly prejudiced and written retrospectively, after the palace revolution staged by Catherine and the death of Peter III. Of course, it was vital for her to defend herself and clear herself of allegations of murder, so one should not trust her memoirs too much. Opponents of this interpretation additionally point to Paul’s significant visual likeness to Peter III and to the fact that Paul himself firmly thought the latter to be his father and lifted his memory to cult. Neither advocates of Saltykov’s paternity nor opponents have more significant grounds, hence the reality remains uncertain.
Whatever the emotional relationship between Peter and Catherine, throughout the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna they constituted a single political power, which for a long time was viewed as resistance to the governing empress. This was notably visible during the Seven Years’ War . In 1756, Elizabeth quickly shifted her pro-English attitude to a pro-French one and declared war on England’s ally, Prussia. At the same time, the Court of the Grand Dukes, Peter and Catherine, or the Small Court, took a decidedly pro-Prussian posture. Peter, who also spent his youth in the German territories as Karl Peter Ulrich, the son of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, loved the Prussian king Frederick II and the military order he constructed; for him, Prussia was a paradigm of an ideal, well administered state. Catherine had good cordial connections with the English ambassador. She also gained assistance from Count Alexei Bestuzhev, who was then Chancellor of the Russian Empire, and when Elizabeth fell critically ill, she wrote to the army commander-in-chief Apraksin at the front with instructions not to launch active offensive activities against Prussia. Such an act was, in reality, nothing more than high treason.
As soon as the empress recovered, an amazing scandal developed. Bestuzhev and Apraksin were detained; Catherine Elizabeth was planning to send her back to Zerbst. But a lengthy discussion took place, as a consequence of which she somehow managed to excuse herself. This was totally astonishing, considering the severity of the charges (it is now also known – most likely, Elizabeth did not know this – that Catherine also got money from the English embassy). How their conversation went place is unknown, but it is pretty evident that Catherine’s incredible talent to captivate people was displayed here. There was not a single person who left memoirs about her who did not write about how charming she was, how she understood how to win her over (a mirror of this Catherine’s mythology may be found in the presence in “The Captain’s Daughter” of a lady whose eyes and smile had “charm” unexplainable”). During the pivotal talk with Elizabeth, Catherine obviously exploited this talent to its maximum.
Married to the Emperor
It is uncertain when a fundamental dispute arose between the Grand Duke and his wife, but at the beginning of his reign it was already a condition of profound and irreparable hostility. Catherine was practically isolated from decision-making and from the emperor himself. There were new individuals about Peter, he maintained a mistress – in itself this was not such a major event (Catherine had previously also had connections with the same Saltykov, and with the future ruler of Poland Poniatowski), but Peter did it entirely openly and even angrily.
Peter III lasted on the throne for barely six months, yet during this time he managed to launch several changes, which, reportedly , he thought of while still being the heir. It is interesting that most of his main transformations – the granting of freedom to the nobility, the secularization of monastic lands, which eliminated the economic independence of the Russian Church, and others – Catherine confirmed or continued in the future, that is, they probably planned them together, even before the final disagreement. Even the terrible peace with the practically defeated Prussia – reached on Prussian conditions and erasing the triumphs of the Russian army of the preceding several years – dictated only by the personal sympathies of the Russian emperor for the Prussian king, was subsequently achieved by Catherine. Although, when she first came to power, it was precisely this world that Peter was blamed for – Lomonosov, in an ode in honor of Catherine’s ascension to the throne, wrote: “Has any of those born into the world ever heard / So that a triumphant people / Surrendered into the hands of the vanquished? / Oh shame, oh weird turn of words!”
The difference was this: unlike Catherine, her husband cared nothing about how his subjects regarded him. In particular, being initially a Lutheran – although as the heir to the Russian throne he was necessarily baptized – Peter continually exhibited scorn for the Orthodox Church, lack of interest in the endlessly long service, and acted provocatively. And his wife, on the contrary, in every conceivable manner highlighted her religiosity, Orthodoxy and Russianness in general – and she liked to do this both before coming to power and after, till her death. She particularly did not speak German , spoke and wrote flawlessly in Russian , demonstratively enjoyed traditional games (round dances, burners and all that), and invested money in collecting monuments of Russian history and folklore. In addition, Catherine recalled the importance of the guards in palace coups and created a unique bond with them: she surrounded herself with officers, donned the uniform of a guards regiment, and so on. Her tumultuous affair with the guards commander Grigory Orlov was also of enormous consequence.
In June 1762, after six months of his failed rule, Peter III was taken from the throne – with the brilliant wording “by the will of all classes, and especially the guards.” A week after his abdication, he died suddenly—almost definitely assassinated. A message has been preserved from Alexei Orlov, the brother of Catherine’s favorite Gregory, in which he asks the Empress for pardon, apologizes and claims that he does not know how this occurred. There are several points of view on these events: was it an order or an accident; Recently, an opinion has evolved that the note is phony. One way or another, it is impossible to deny that the persons who were formally meant to defend Peter III understood that the empress would not be against such an event.
Reorganize everything
Like other Russian rulers who find themselves in power, Catherine had ambitions for a thorough reconstruction of the country. She felt herself the heir of Peter I, and viewed the rest of her predecessors sarcastically. She had ambitions for a grandiose enlightened golden era, and she disseminated this notion to the West, corresponding with prominent thinkers and publicists – Voltaire, Grimm and Zimmermann.
Having an extraordinarily high opinion of herself and her ability, Catherine was going to bring the task of Peter the Great to the finish. According to the court poet Alexander Sumarokov, “Peter gave us existence, Catherine – the soul”: Peter created the Russian elite – the nobles, dressed them, shaved them, accustomed them to European manners and etiquette; Catherine decided to raise a new breed of people from them – endowed with a soul, capable of feeling correctly. To achieve this, she took up theater , journals and, of course, education: she constructed a new cadet school, overhauled the university, and launched the Smolny Institute. Smolny became her favorite brainchild : a closed educational institution in which girls spent many years, without going home and only occasionally seeing their parents, was supposed to completely re-educate them in the spirit of the new era – so that they would then raise their own children in the same way.
The core of the changes was to be the assembling of the Legislative Commission in 1767 from members of all classes. This group was designed to establish new full law (before this, the empire technically existed pursuant to the Council Code of 1649). However, very immediately Catherine knew that nothing would come of it: the deputies were mostly involved in praising her, all debates did not lead to any outcomes. After the commencement of war with Turkey, the panel was dissolved under the excuse that among the participants there were many commanders who should have gone to the front. To what degree this was actually a military need, and to what extent Catherine’s great unhappiness in the performance of the deputies was merely reflected, is impossible to determine. However, in any event, the cause for the disintegration was not fights with some type of anti-serfdom opposition, which Soviet historians wrote about.
Catherine herself thought at least about limiting serfdom. There was a notion to proclaim all infants free, and several more suggestions. As Vasily Klyuchevsky stated, until Peter III released the Manifesto on the freedom of the nobility, which eliminated obligatory service, forbade physical punishment for the higher classes, and so on, everyone in Russia was slaves. On February 18, 1762, this manifesto was issued, and – again according to Klyuchevsky – on February 19, logically, a decree on the end of serfdom should have followed. He followed on February 19, only 99 years later, in 1861 . All this time, all Russian kings, with the exception of Paul, believed serfdom to be bad, but never began to free the peasants. It was terrifying to rip apart the cornerstone of the state system. In addition, no one understood what to do with the large mass of peasants, even from a bureaucratic point of view: the census, taxes, courts, recruiting – the landowners were responsible for all this, there were too few officials, the state infrastructure was weak. Catherine, evidently, had neither political, nor administrative, nor financial resources for her transformation. At the same time, during the work of the Legislative Commission, she requested the Free Economic Society the duty of finding out what is better – when peasants are hired to work the land or when they are serfs – and all three first awards were earned by advocates of the free peasantry. That is, the empress’s status is without debate.
Pugachev’s insurrection and the development of bureaucracy
When one of the defenders of serfdom, the court poet and official Alexander Sumarokov, wrote to Catherine about love and peace between the landowning nobles and their peasants, she made a note in the margin about how often gentlemen were “slaughtered from their own.” In reality, the country was in the midst of a low-intensity civil war: every year, peasants killed dozens of landowners. And this war concluded in the Pugachev rebellion. Despite the fact that the Pugachev rebellion was a Cossack revolt, not a peasant one (and one of the reasons for its terrible defeat was the lack of mutual understanding between the Cossack elite who led this rebellion and the peasant masses), the rebels simply did not perceive the nobles as people, as their own. If you read the list of people slain during the Pugachev era, your hair will stand on end. Entire families with tiny children were slain; the objective was to wipe away the nobility.
Sooner or later, this insurrection was bound to loss, yet for three solid years the empire could not cope with it. The Pugachevism revealed Catherine the terrible situation of the Russian bureaucracy: there was no order, no control, no information. The public administration system did not operate. This led her to think up a new, more realistic, methodical and ambitious reform agenda. It became evident that the entire rearrangement of everything in the globe, intended in the 1760s , was unattainable. The reform of the bureaucracy came first.
Catherine began to reconstruct the bureaucratic structure with the reform of state self-government: the formation of governorships, provinces, districts, the description of the roles of governors general, city officials, and so on – with the development of a harmonic and consistent system. Before this, in some areas there were provinces, and in others there were provinces, the boundaries were not defined, the area of responsibility of the governors was not set out. The system formed by Catherine lasted until 1917, and in some way remains to this day.
Another reform of the second part of Catherine’s reign was the Charter issued to the nobility, on noble rights and privileges. First of all, she reaffirmed the clauses of the Manifesto on the independence of the nobility of Peter III and declared that the land belongs to the aristocracy forever (plans for the reform of serfdom, presumably, were already totally buried by Catherine). However, in addition to this, the charter governed the system of class self-government: noble assemblies were created – representation at the local level, the powers of noble courts were specified, and so on. Another Charter – to cities – presented the organization of city self-government and listed the rights of inhabitants. A letter to state peasants was also prepared.
The Greek project and the Slavic world
Throughout much of Catherine’s rule, the southern orientation (relatively speaking, Turkish) was essential for her. Personal rivalry with Peter I had a certain role in this. It was continuously emphasized: if in such an inconvenient region as St. Petersburg, Peter accomplished such exceptional accomplishment, how much may be done in the rich, fertile southern plains. At first, Catherine had no ambitions for aggressive development, but in 1768, the Ottoman Empire unleashed the first Russian-Turkish War when the Zaporozhye Cossacks raided many Turkish cities – Catherine apologized, but this did not help.
During this battle, which progressed rather effectively for Russia, what was eventually termed the Greek idea took shape . It was planned to acquire authority over a substantial part of the Christian areas of the Ottoman Empire, form a network of vassal republics between it and Russia, and even reestablish the Byzantine Empire with its center in Constantinople. Violent agitation was carried out in Greece in order to precipitate an insurrection and declare independence under the sponsorship of Russia. The Morea expedition of Alexei Orlov was organized (the Morea in the Middle Ages was the name of the Greek Peloponnese peninsula). In 1770, he sailed from St. Petersburg, reached the Mediterranean Sea through the Atlantic Ocean, destroyed the Turkish navy in the Battle of Chesme, and even conquered numerous islands in the Aegean Sea to the Russian Empire.
During the first Russian-Turkish War, the Greek idea could not be fulfilled – but Catherine planned its completion in the future, even if not during her lifetime. Her second grandson was called Constantine and they hired him a Greek nurse who was intended to teach him Greek: it was envisaged that he would become the emperor of the future restored Byzantine Empire. Part of the scheme was also the conquering of the Ottoman Crimea and its annexation to Russia . Under the conditions of peace, a technically autonomous state was founded there, but in 1783 Grigory Potemkin, the spirit and core of the Greek project, who had already ceased to be Catherine’s favorite, but kept his power, conquered the peninsula peacefully and without any fighting. This became the reason for the second Russian-Turkish War, although Crimea stayed with Russia.
The failure of the Greek project and the annexation of the regions of Catholic Poland to Russia contributed to the fact that, in addition to the notion of a union of Orthodox states, the idea of a unified Slavic globe developed. Catherine herself had a much colder attitude towards this notion; its major mover was the Polonophilia of the same Prince Potemkin, who felt that the Russian-Polish union would form the basis of the Slavic world, with Russia as the older brother and Poland as the younger.
It is notable that Catherine became perhaps the most aggressive expansionist in Russian imperial history: the capture of Poland, Crimea, and the absorption of enormous areas in the south. Even at the outset of her reign, she considered that Russia already had so many lands and did not need anything more, but the logic of foreign policy dragged her into a radical expansionist scheme, which her son and grandchildren would be doubtful about.
Favoritism
In the 18th century, the presence of favorites among the reigning person was regarded totally natural. Peter I, Paul had favorites, and subsequently they talked about Speransky and Arakcheev as favorites of Alexander I. Of course, no close link was intended. In an absolutist monarchy, this was a regular weapon of personnel management, allowing the king to abruptly elevate a person whom he believed capable and trusted. For male monarchs, the words “favorite” and “favorite” signified radically different things. In the case of empresses, of whom there were many in Russia in the 18th century, both conceptions were often blended in one individual. However, for example, Potemkin remained Catherine’s favorite in a political sense until his death, although there was no romantic interaction between them for the last 15 years. Others, such as Vasilchikov, Zorich, Dmitriev-Mamonov, on the contrary, did not play any role in administering the state.
Rumors of Catherine’s wild promiscuity are undoubtedly overblown, and yet she had at least a dozen official favorites. Of course, she replaced them repeatedly, and in the later years of her reign, when they were all much younger than her, it looked pretty repulsive. In addition, her final boyfriend, Platon Zubov, became an influential political figure, without being distinguished by any great state qualities – unlike Potemkin and Orlov, who were favorites at the beginning of her reign – and this created reasonable dissatisfaction among the courtiers.
Few of Catherine’s favorites had an active political role. And definitely none of them were her co-ruler – not even Potemkin, with whom they may have secretly wedded. If you carefully study their correspondence , the nature of the chain of command leaves no dispute. Catherine controlled the kingdom alone and strongly claimed that the only proper form of administration in Russia was autocracy. Orlov, Potemkin, Zubov fulfilled exactly the political function that she herself allocated to them.
Relationship with the heir
Pavel was born in 1754, 10 years after the wedding of Catherine and Peter. His connection with Catherine was dramatic, particularly since after delivering birth she essentially did not see him. Empress Elizabeth snatched Paul from his mother and did not let her to raise him. When he was 7 years old, Elizabeth died and full duty for raising the heir shifted to Catherine herself: she made programs, recruited instructors for him and trained them. But trust and closeness were no longer formed between them.
As Pavel got older, Catherine became increasingly wary of him. In addition, mother and son have been competitors for a long time. Her personal claims to the throne were not obvious: who was she, a regent or an empress? Moreover, Paul and his entourage had before their eyes the example of Austria, where Empress Mother Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II reigned jointly. It is probable that they may have anticipated Catherine to do something similar, but she herself had no such notions. Pavel himself knew well his father’s destiny, thus he had a neurotic fear for his life. Later, new causes for anxiety were added: as Catherine maintained the Elizabethan tradition and took Paul’s children into her care, people began to allege at court that she meant to disinherit her son and leave the crown to her grandson, Alexander. It is uncertain whether this was even partly accurate, but such reports increased friction.
Having become emperor after the death of Catherine, Paul immediately gravely reburied Peter III, and compelled his alleged assassin, the old Alexei Orlov, to accompany the corpse with his head exposed. He ordered the body of the detested Potemkin to be pulled out of the grave and tossed out of the coffin – he was reburied someplace in an unknown spot in Kherson. After the final palace coup in the history of Russia and the assassination of Paul, his son Alexander I inherited the throne – and pledged that under him everything would be “like under grandmother.”