Of the three celebrated 'Philosophic Despots' of the eighteenth century Catherine the Great could boast of the most astonishing career.
Catherine the Great was thirty-three years old when she ascended the Russian throne. She had acquired considerable education and experience. Born a princess in the petty German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, the future empress of Russia grew up in modest but cultured surroundings. The court in Anhalt-Zerbst, like many other European courts in the eighteenth century, was strongly influenced by French culture, and Catherine started reading French books in childhood. In 1744, at the age of fifteen, she came to Russia to marry Peter of Holstein-Gottorp and prepare herself to be the wife of a Russian sovereign.
The years from 1744 to 1762 were hard on Catherine. Peter proved to be a miserable husband, while the German princess's position at the imperial court Could be fairly described as isolated and even precarious. To add to Catherine's difficulties, her mother was discovered to be Frederick the Great's agent and had to leave Russia. Yet the future empress accomplished much more than merely surviving at court. In addition to becoming Orthodox in order to marry Peter, she proceeded to learn Russian language and literature well and to obtain some knowledge of her new country. Simultaneously she turned to the writings of the
interest in the Enlightenment was to constitute an important aspect of her reign. The young princess adapted herself skillfully to the new environment, made friends, and won a measure of affection and popularity in court circles. While simulating innocence and submissiveness, she participated in political intrigues and plots, carefully covering up her tracks, however, until she led the successful coup in mid-summer 1762, which brought deposition and death to her husband and made her Empress Catherine II.
Catherine the Great's personality and character impressed many of her contemporaries as well as later commentators. A woman quite out of the ordinary, the empress possessed high intelligence, a natural ability to administer and govern, a remarkable practical sense, energy to spare, and an iron will. Along with her determination went courage and optimism: Catherine believed that she could prevail over all obstacles, and more often than not events proved her right. Self-control, skill in discussion and propaganda, and a clever handling of men and circumstances to serve her ends were additional assets of that unusual monarch. The empress herself asserted that it was ambition that sustained her. The historian can agree, provided that ambition is understood broadly, that is, not merely as a desire to snatch the crown, or attain glory by success in war, or gain the admiration of the
Yet, together with her formidable virtues, Catherine the Great had certain weaknesses. Indeed the two were intrinsically combined. Determination easily became ruthlessness, ambition fed vanity just as vanity fed ambition, skill in propaganda would not stop short of asserting lies. Above all, the empress was a supreme egoist. As with most true egoists, she had few beliefs or standards of value outside of herself and her own overpowering wishes. Even Catherine II's admirers sometimes noticed that she lacked something, call it charity, mercy, or human sympathy, and, incidentally, that she looked her best in masculine attire. It was also observed that the sovereign took up every issue with the same unflagging drive and earnestness, be it Pugachev's rebellion or correspondence with Voltaire, the partitions of Poland or her latest article for a periodical. Restless ambition served as the only common denominator in her many activities, and, apparently, the only thing that mattered. Similarly, in spite of Catherine's enormous display of enlightened views and sentiments and of her adherence to the principles of the Age of Reason, it remains extremely difficult to tell what the empress actually believed, or whether she believed anything. In fact, the true relationship of Catherine the Great to the Enlightenment
constitutes one of the most controversial subjects in the historiography of her reign.
Catherine the Great's notorious love affairs also reflected her peculiar personality: grasping, restless, determined, and somehow, in spite of all passion and sentimentality, essentially cold and unable to establish a happy private life. It has been asserted that her first lover was forced on Catherine, so that she would have a son and Russia an heir, and that Paul resulted from that liaison rather than from the marriage to Peter. In any case, Catherine soon took matters into her own hands. The empress had twenty-one known lovers, the last after she had turned sixty. The favorites included Gregory Orlov, an officer of the guards who proved instrumental in elevating Catherine the Great to the throne and whose brother may have killed Peter III; Stanislaw Poniatowski, a Polish nobleman whom the empress made King of Poland; and, most important, Gregory Potemkin. Potemkin came to occupy a unique position both in the Russian government, to the extent that he can be considered the foremost statesman of the reign, and in the empress's private life. Some specialists believe he married her; he certainly continued to be influential with her after the rise of other favorites. One description of the unusual menage says: 'From 1776 to 1789 her favorites succeeded one another almost every year, and they were confirmed in their position, as a court poet would be, by Potemkin himself, who, after he had lost the empress's heart, remained for thirteen years the manager of her male harem.'
Catherine II had to behave carefully during her first years on the throne. Brought to power by a palace revolution and without a legal title to the crown, the empress had the enthusiastic support of guardsmen such as the Orlov brothers, but otherwise little backing. Elder statesmen looked at her with some suspicion. There persisted the possibility that another turn of fortune would make her son Paul sovereign and demote Catherine to the position of regent or even eliminate her altogether. A different danger struck in July 1764, when a young officer, Basil Mirovich, tried to liberate Ivan VI from his confinement in the Schlusselburg fortress. The attempt failed, and in the course of it Ivan VI - who, apparently, because of isolation since early childhood, had never grown up mentally and emotionally but remained virtually subhuman - was killed by his guards, who carried out emergency instructions of long standing. The depressing impact of the incident on Russian society was heightened by the execution of Mirovich, an event all the more striking because Elizabeth had avoided executions. Catherine also ran into a certain amount of trouble when, in
1763-64, she completed the long process of divesting the Church of its huge real estate by secularizing Church lands. This reform, which we shall discuss briefly in a later chapter, evoked a violent protest on the part of Metropolitan Arsenii of Rostov, who did not stop short of excommunicating those connected with the new policy. Fortunately for the empress, other hierarchs failed to support Metropolitan Arsenii, and, after two trials, the empress had him defrocked and imprisoned for life.
Gradually Catherine II consolidated her position. She distributed honors and rewards on a large scale, in particular state lands with peasants, who thus became serfs. She traveled widely all over Russia, reviving Peter the Great's practice, both to learn more about the country and to win popularity. She selected her advisers carefully and well. Time itself worked for the empress: with the passage of years memories of the coup of 1762 faded, and the very fact that Catherine II continued to occupy the throne gave the reign a certain legitimacy. In late 1766 she felt ready to introduce into Russia important changes based on the precepts of the Enlightenment, and for that purpose she called the Legislative Commission.
The aim of the Commission was to codify laws, a task last accomplished in 1649, before the Westernization of the country. Moreover, Catherine the Great believed that the work of the Commission would go a long way toward rationalizing and modernizing Russian law and life. Although the empress had certainly no desire to grant her subjects a constitution, and although her propaganda greatly exaggerated the radical nature of her intentions, the
