Catherine the Great

Father Platon followed Catherine to St Petersburg at the beginning of August 1763. On Sunday 10 August, the empress travelled to the Trinity hermitage, where she had received representatives of the deposed Peter III on the day after her coup, to hear him preach at the consecration of the Baroque cathedral, begun seven years earlier to a design by Trezzini and completed under the supervision of the ubiquitous Rastrelli.¹⁰⁹ Given rooms in Elizabeth’s temporary wooden palace, Platon was to deliver more than thirty sermons to Catherine and her Court over the next two years. In addition to his annual salary of 1000 roubles, he received a further 300 for subsistence, and was supplied not only with firewood and candles, but also with beer, more than a litre of vodka each week and a bottle of Rhine wine every day. Although Panin worried that this ‘clear-headed’ monk might be corrupted by his new surroundings, he remained alert to the dangers of ambition and extravagance. Several of his Lenten sermons touched on the temptations faced by hedonistic courtiers, and on 10 October 1764 he ‘spoke with considerable vehemence against those who ruin themselves by squandering their wealth on frivolous and unnecessary things and, consequently, are unable to be of any help to the poor’. ‘Father Platon was in a bad mood today,’ Catherine remarked afterwards, ‘but he spoke extremely well.’¹¹⁰ Always impressed by the young monk’s eloquence, she had been moved to tears by his sermon on the tsarevich’s tenth birthday on 20 September. Many in the congregation also wept at the end, when ‘the preacher spoke of her Majesty’s patience in bearing her labours for the use and safety of the fatherland, on the success of his Highness in the sciences which he was taught, and the resultant hope for Russia’.¹¹¹ Catherine had herself attended Paul’s first lesson with Platon on 29 August 1763, the Feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist. Two years later, she stood at her son’s side as he faced a carefully rehearsed oral examination on matters of basic dogma in the presence of a large number of courtiers. ‘Her Majesty deigned to listen with the greatest attention,’ Poroshin recorded. ‘The examination lasted for three quarters of an hour. After it was completed, Reverend Father Platon addressed her Majesty in a brief speech. The Sovereign lady deigned to thank him for teaching the Grand Duke, about whom she said: “I thought he would be shy, but not all; he answered very well.”’¹¹²

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Since religious ritual remained central to the life of every eighteenth-century monarchy, one of the paradoxical effects of Russia’s cultural Westernisation was to reinforce its role at the Court of St Petersburg. For many of Catherine’s courtiers, there was nothing offensive about that. ‘If I am not much mistaken,’ remarked the prescient William Richardson, ‘there are among them a greater number who affect indifference or disbelief in religious matters, than who really disbelieve. Perhaps, in times of sickness, disgrace, and low-spirits, they have more faith in St Nicholas, than in Voltaire.’¹¹³

It was different for Catherine herself: her cast of mind was wholly secular, and one reason why Father Platon felt the need to emphasise the difference between (true) spiritual enlightenment and (mere) secular learning was that he knew he was swimming against the prevailing intellectual tide.¹¹⁴ The empress had lionised Voltaire since reading him in the 1740s and made attempts to cultivate him as soon as she came to the throne. As she insisted from the start, they both had much to gain from the correspondence that began in the autumn of 1763 and continued until Voltaire’s death fifteen years later. While her association with him promised to enhance his status as a writer, ‘Our lady of St Petersburg’, as Voltaire later christened her, realised in turn that his approval could only enhance her reputation in Enlightened circles in Europe.¹¹⁵ If her letters gave her the chance to show off—‘Her conversation is brilliant’, Macartney remarked in 1766, ‘perhaps too brilliant for she loves to shine’—then they also gave her the chance to model her prose on one of the greatest stylists of her age. Frederick the Great declared that he liked ‘to maintain correspondences with superior minds, with people who are completely cerebral, as if they had no bodies; this is the human elite’.¹¹⁶ Catherine took a similar view, self-consciously representing herself as a writer with much to learn. She struck the same tone in her correspondence with Jean d’Alembert, the joint editor of the Encyclopedie, whom she attempted in vain to lure to Russia. ‘I have long owed a letter to Monsieur d’Alembert,’ the empress wrote to Mme Geoffrin, ‘and I beg you Madame to tell him that I shall shortly send him a notebook…I hope he will be pleased even though it is from the pen of a novice.’¹¹⁷

Realising the philosophes’ difficulties with the French censorship, Catherine tried to help them (and embarrass Louis XV) by offering to print the final volumes of the Encyclopedie in Riga even before her coronation. That invitation was refused, but it was impossible for its second impoverished editor, Denis Diderot, to turn down the empress’s subsequent offer to purchase his library for 15,000 livres and pay him to look after it for her. The completion of the deal apparently sent him into a state of stupor. Catherine was just as pleased. ‘I would never have believed that the purchase of a library would bring me so many compliments,’ she wrote disarmingly to Voltaire. ‘Everyone is paying me them for buying Monsieur Diderot’s. But admit, you to whom humanity owes a debt for the help you have given to innocence and virtue in the persons of the Calas family, that it would have been cruel and unjust to separate a scholar from his books.’¹¹⁸

Catherine realised very early on in their correspondence that it would be ‘very difficult’ to reduce Voltaire’s sparkling shafts of wisdom to a practical programme of reform. Philosophes who disagreed among themselves never offered a blueprint for government.¹¹⁹ Nevertheless, the Enlightenment was an important influence on Catherine’s legislation right from the start. Motivated primarily by the need for money, her secularisation of the monasteries was greeted with acclaim by philosophes who condemned the contemplative life as useless. Celibate monks and nuns were an obvious liability in a world which believed, quite wrongly, that the population had declined since classical times. Sharing the widespread perception that Russia was under-populated, Catherine sent the colonists recruited by the College of Guardianship to a huge new province of New Russia, stretching from the Polish border in the west to the Don Cossack territory in the east. Appointing Count Peter Rumyantsev as its Governor General in November 1764, the empress gave him characteristically explicit instructions in the sort of rational administration she expected:

First of all, you must proceed to learn about the province that has been entrusted to you in all of its conditions and confines, and, for this purpose, you are to obtain a reliable map of sufficient detail to indicate the location of regiments, towns, settlements, villages, outlying farms, seasonal work camps, monasteries, hermitages, manufactures, and any and all places of human habitation, as well as rivers, lakes, marshes, woods, farmland, steppes, roads, and the location of [all]… borders.¹²⁰

It was almost certainly the empress who initiated the essay competition set up by the Free Economic Society in November 1766 in the manner of the earlier one sponsored by the Academy of Dijon, which had prompted Rousseau’s first Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. The topic she set was squarely linked to the Enlightened utility she had claimed as her watchword in a letter to Voltaire: ‘What is most useful for society—that the peasant should own land or only moveable property, and how far should his rights over the one or the other extend?’ It was the first public discussion in Russia of the question of serfdom. Of the 164 anonymous entries to the competition, only seven were in Russian. One was in Dutch, another in Swedish; the great majority were in German. Of the twenty French entries, one was by the philosophe Le Mercier de la Riviere, who made an unsuccessful visit to Russia, and another by Voltaire himself, under the motto ‘si populus dives, rex dives’ (if the people are rich, the king is rich). Voltaire also revealed to Catherine that he was the author of one of three essays submitted in Latin, under the motto ‘ex tellure omnia’ (everything from the land). Emancipation was the talk of the French salons. But it was all in vain. When the result of the competition was announced in April 1768, the prize-winning entry, duly published in Russian translation, was by the Frenchman Bearde de l’Abbaye, who was critical of serfdom, but advocated only a very gradual liberation of the serfs.¹²¹

As the choice of Bearde’s essay signalled, Catherine was gradually beginning to realise the difficulties raised by her early reforms. When she first encouraged Eisen to contemplate a property-owning peasantry, she can hardly have grasped the extent to which Russia’s imperial expansion had been underwritten by the exploitation of unfree labour since the time of Peter the Great. Her other initiatives were scarcely less ambitious ventures, whose impact could only be judged over the long term. Many of their immediate results were questionable. More than four-fifths of the children admitted to the Moscow Foundling Home in 1764 were dead within a year, and in 1767 the mortality rate reached almost 99 per cent.¹²² Not surprisingly, Catherine lost confidence in the more extravagant of Betskoy’s schemes, leaving herself open to the charge that she failed to complete what she had