Rumyantsev crossed the Danube with fifty-five thousand men. On June 9, fifty miles south of the river, a night bayonet attack by eight thousand Russians on forty thousand Turks broke the Turkish lines and led to a crushing Russian victory at Kozludzhi. The grand vizier, fearing that nothing could stop the Russians from reaching Constantinople, sued for peace. Rumyantsev opened direct negotiations in the field, and he and the grand vizier agreed to terms. On July 10, 1774, in an obscure Bulgarian village, the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi was signed. Rumyantsev immediately sent his son to St. Petersburg with the news, and on July 23, Catherine hurried out of a concert to receive it.
The treaty brought Russia greater gains than she had dared to hope for. Catherine traded her conquests on the Danube for more important acquisitions on the Black Sea coast. The Balkan provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia were restored to Turkey. In exchange, Catherine gained the transfer to Russia of Azov, Taganrog, and Kerch, which provided unfettered access to the Black Sea. Farther west, she acquired the southern delta of the Dnieper River, and the mouth of the river itself, giving her empire another vital outlet to the Black Sea. Although the west bank of the river’s broad estuary still retained the massive Turkish fortress at Ochakov, the Russians now had a fort and port at Kinburn on the east bank, and the estuary was large enough to permit Russian commercial navigation and the unhindered construction of Russian warships. The peace terms also included the ending of the sultan’s political sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, where a Tatar khanate under Turkish protection had existed for centuries. The Crimean Tatars were now declared to be independent of Turkey. Everyone realized that the independence of the Crimea was unlikely to last; indeed, nine years later, Catherine was to annex the peninsula outright.
Russian gains were not purely territorial. The treaty opened the Black Sea to Russian commerce by guaranteeing complete freedom of navigation. The treaty also included the right of Russian merchant ships to unlimited transit through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean. Turkey was also to pay to Russia a war indemnity of four and a half million rubles. Persecution of Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia was to cease, and Orthodox believers in Constantinople were to be able to worship at a church of their own. On a grander scale, the war had tipped the balance of power in the region in Russia’s favor; Europe was now aware that predominance in the Black Sea had passed to Russia. In Catherine’s mind, these were achievements to match those of her predecessor, Peter the Great, who, on the faraway Baltic, had first opened a Russian pathway to the world.
55
Doctors, Smallpox, and Plague
THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE considered themselves a national family. The tsar, or emperor, was the Little Father,
In 1763, the second year of her reign, Catherine founded Russia’s first College of Medicine to train Russian doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries. Until a sufficient number of Russian doctors became available, she attempted to recruit western European physicians by offering generous salaries and pensions. In the same year, to discourage infanticide among unmarried and impoverished mothers, she established with her own funds a foundling hospital with an attached lying-in hospital in Moscow. The anonymity of the mother was assured by a system of baskets, pulleys, and bells. When a bell was rung in the street, a basket was lowered from an upper story, the unwanted baby put in, and the basket raised. All children, legitimate or illegitimate, from any class, were accepted, cared for, and educated, with precautions to ensure that when they left, they were, or remained, free. The hospital was five stories high and had two hundred beds. Dormitories were large and airy. Each child had his or her own bed, with a clean gown, clean sheets, and a small bedside table holding a jug of water, a glass tumbler, and a bell to summon assistance. An English visitor wished “that the same attention to cleanliness was given in English hospitals.” The hospital served as a model for similar foundling institutions in St. Petersburg and other places. The empress attacked another problem by creating a hospital for venereal disease, where both women and men were treated. In 1775, Catherine decreed that the capital of every province must have a general hospital, and that every county in the province must have a physician, a surgeon, two surgical assistants, two apprentices, and an apothecary. Since twenty to thirty thousand people lived in some counties, this coverage was thin, but before there had been nothing.
Personally, Catherine did not care for doctors. She was subject to illness; indeed, when she was a grand duchess, her health had frequently worried Empress Elizabeth. Once she reached the throne, Catherine’s ailments had political significance. She felt the burden of absolute power: reports had to be studied, advisers consulted, decisions made. She tried to keep herself healthy through adequate rest, dietary restraint, fresh air, and outdoor walks; nevertheless, she often complained privately of headaches and back pains. In 1768 she wrote to Nikita Panin: “I am quite sick, my back hurts worse than I ever felt since birth. Last night I had some fever from the pain, and I do not know what to attribute it to. I swallow and do everything they [the doctors] wish.” Again to Panin: “It has been four years since the pain in my head has left me. Yesterday I ate nothing the whole day.”
Although she believed that she was healthier because she ignored physicians, she eventually agreed to keep a personal doctor at court. She chose a young Scotsman, Dr. John Rogerson, of Edinburgh University. Still convinced that she had no need of him, she made him the butt of jokes about modern medicine and liked describing him to others as the kind of medical charlatan found in Moliere. “You couldn’t cure a flea bite,” she would say to him. Rogerson would laugh and continue to urge her to take the pill he was offering. When he succeeded, he would pat the empress on the back and say jovially, “Well done, ma’am! Well done!”
There was no joking, however, when Catherine confronted one of the most serious diseases afflicting her contemporary world: smallpox. Here, the imperial family had no greater protection than the poorest peasant. The boy emperor Peter II had died of the disease at fifteen. Empress Elizabeth’s Holstein fiance, Catherine’s uncle, had been carried off on the eve of their marriage. Nor could Catherine forget the suffering and disfigurement of her husband, the future Peter III. She considered herself fortunate in having reached adulthood without contracting the pox, but she knew that this reprieve might not last.
The devastating smallpox experience being inflicted on the Hapsburgs frightened Catherine. In May 1767, Empress Maria Theresa and her daughter-in-law, Maria Josepha, the wife of her son and heir, Joseph II, both contracted smallpox. Five days later, Maria Josepha died; Maria Theresa recovered but was scarred. Her widower son, Joseph II, refused to marry again and had no surviving children. The following October, Maria Theresa’s daughter, also named Maria Josepha, died of smallpox; two other Hapsburg daughters had the disease but survived, with prominent scars. This succession of tragedies convinced Maria Theresa to have her three youngest children inoculated.
Aware of these personal and dynastic tragedies, Catherine worried about the threat of smallpox to Paul as much as to herself. She knew that the court was never free of talk about the grand duke’s uncertain chance of succession, because he had not yet faced and defeated the disease. She and Panin worried constantly about the boy’s possible exposure. They sought to isolate Paul from crowds and from anyone who was or might be afflicted. Paul chafed at the restrictions put on him. At twelve, he was asked whether he would attend a masquerade. He replied,
You know I am a child and cannot be supposed to be a judge whether I ought to go there or not, but I will wager that I do not go. Mr. Panin will tell me that there is a great monster called Smallpox, walking up and down the ballroom. This same monster has very good foreknowledge of my movements for he is generally to be found in precisely those places where I have the most inclination to go.
