By taking this course, Catherine hoped to make clear that she would not forgive but would measure punishments in proportion to crimes. In this case, she decided, drunken men, venting mostly personal grievances, did not deserve decapitation. Soon enough, jealousy of the Orlovs, and an attempted restoration of Ivan VI, would threaten her with something more challenging than inebriated talk.
46
The Government and the Church
HAVING RECOGNIZED and rewarded those who had helped put her on the throne, Catherine turned next to the two powerful institutions, both pillars of the state, that had given her essential support. Both the army and the church wanted immediate reversal of specific actions by Peter III. With the army, this was easily done. To cement the favor of the officers and men, exhausted by seven years of war and smarting from the humiliation of the dishonorable peace with Prussia, she canceled the new alliance with Frederick II. She also assured the Prussians that she had no intention of fighting them or anyone else. She abruptly halted and withdrew from the barely begun war with Denmark. Russian army commanders in Prussia and central Europe were given a simple order: Come home! Rewarding the church was more complicated. Her first step was a temporary suspension of Peter’s hastily decreed confiscation of church lands and wealth. The church hailed her as a deliverer.
These early steps left unresolved other critical problems pressing on the empire. The Seven Years’ War had bankrupted the treasury; Russian soldiers in Prussia had not been paid for eight months. No credit was available from abroad. There was a calamitous rise in the price of grain. Corruption and extortion had spread through all levels of government. In Catherine’s words: “In the treasury there were seventeen millions of rubles’ worth in unpaid bonds; almost all branches of commerce were monopolized by private individuals; a loan of two millions attempted in Holland by the Empress Elizabeth had met without success; we enjoyed no confidence or credit abroad.”
Those who hoped that the overthrow of Catherine’s husband and his pro-Prussian policies would bring about a reinstatement of the Austrian alliance were disappointed. In the first days of her reign, she had encouraged these partisans by issuing a manifesto referring to “an ignominious peace” with the “age old enemy,” meaning Prussia. When the foreign ambassadors were invited to her first official reception, the Prussian ambassador—Baron Bernhard von Goltz, Peter III’s former confidant—begged to be excused, saying that he “had no suitable costume.” But continued hostility with Prussia was not Catherine’s intention. During her first week on the throne, couriers were riding to European capitals with assurances that the new empress wished to live in peace with all foreign powers. Her letter to the Russian ambassador in Berlin said, “Concerning the peace lately concluded with His Majesty, the King of Prussia, we command you to convey to His Majesty our solemn intention of upholding the same so long as His Majesty gives us no cause to break it.” Her one condition was the immediate, unobstructed return of all Russian soldiers in the war zone. They were to fight neither for nor against Prussia, and neither for nor against Austria; they were simply to return home. Only four days after the reception that Goltz had failed to attend, he was back at court, playing cards with Catherine.
Confronted by this array of problems, Catherine sometimes seemed to shrink before the immensity of the task. The French ambassador heard her say, not with pride, but wistfully, “Mine is such a vast and limitless empire.” She began her reign with no experience in administering an empire or a large bureaucracy, but she was eager to learn and prepared to teach herself. When it was proposed that, following custom during the reigns of Elizabeth and Peter III, the burdensome task of reading all diplomatic dispatches and ministerial reports be spared the sovereign and only extracts provided, Catherine refused. She wished to know every detail of the problems Russia faced and every ingredient in the decisions she needed to make. “Full reports will be brought to me every morning,” she declared.
She was equally forceful in dealing with the Senate. Since the time of Peter the Great, the Senate had administered the laws of the empire, making certain that the decrees handed down by the autocrat were carried out. Having no power to make law, the Senate’s role was to administer the state on the basis of existing laws, no matter how useless or out-of-date. During the coup, Catherine had associated herself closely with this body; it was through the Senate that her first orders were issued to Russian troops abroad, and it was to the care of the Senate that she confided her son, Paul, when she rode off at the head of the Guards to Peterhof. Once she was on the throne, the meetings of the Senate were moved to the Summer Palace to make it easier for her to attend. On her fourth day as empress, she was present at a session of the Senate which began with reports that the treasury was empty and that the price of grain had doubled. Catherine replied that her imperial allowance, amounting to one- thirteenth of the national income, should be used by the government. “Belonging herself to the nation,” she said, she considered that everything she possessed belonged to the nation. In the future, she continued, there would be no distinction between the national and her personal interests. To deal with the grain shortage, she ordered a prohibition on the export of grain; within two months, the price came down. She abolished many of the private monopolies held by great noble families such as the Shuvalovs, who controlled and made a profit on all the salt and tobacco sold in Russia.
At these meetings, she quickly discovered that in the Senate there were heavy layers of ignorance. One morning, when the senators were discussing a distant part of the empire, it became apparent that none of them had any idea where this territory lay. Catherine suggested looking at a map. There was no map. Without hesitation, she summoned a messenger, took five rubles from her purse, and sent him to the Academy of Sciences, which had published an atlas of Russia. When the messenger returned, the territory was identified and the empress made a gift of the atlas to the Senate. Hoping to improve their performance, she wrote, on June 6, 1763, to the senators as a body: “I cannot say that you are lacking in patriotic concern for my welfare and the general welfare, but I am sorry to say that things are not moving towards their appointed end as successfully as one would wish.” The cause of this delay, she said, was the existence of “internal disagreements and enmity, leading to the formation of parties seeking to hurt each other, and to behavior unworthy of sensible, respectable people desirous of doing good.”
Her agent in the Senate was the procurator general, an office established by Peter the Great to be the link between the autocrat and the Senate—“the eye of the sovereign,” he called it—and to provide supervision over the Senate. Specifically, this official’s task was to set and keep track of the Senate’s agenda, report to the monarch, and receive and pass along his or her commands. Catherine’s newly appointed procurator general, A. A. Vyazemsky, received her analysis:
In the Senate, you will find two parties.… Each of these parties will now try to get you on their side. On the one, you will find honest people, if of limited intelligence. On the other, I think more long-range plans are harbored.… The Senate has been established for the carrying out of laws prescribed to it. But it has often issued laws itself, granted ranks, honors, money and lands, in one word … almost everything. Having once exceeded its limits, the Senate now finds it difficult to adapt itself to the new order within which it should confine itself.
More important than this admonitory advice to Vyazemsky regarding the behavior of the Senate was Catherine’s message to the new procurator general, setting out the relationship she expected to have with him personally:
You must know with whom you have to deal.… You will find that I have no other view than the greatest welfare and glory of the fatherland, and I wish for nothing but the happiness of my subjects.… I am very fond of the truth, and you may tell me the truth fearlessly, and argue with me without any danger if it leads to good results in affairs. I hear that you are regarded as an honest man by all.… I hope to show you by experience that people with such qualities do well at court. And I may add that I require no flattery from you, but only honest behavior and firmness in affairs.
Vyazemsky justified Catherine’s expectations and remained the “eye of the sovereign” for twenty-eight years, until his retirement in 1792.
