Catherine the Great

Geographical Description. At any rate, the empress found little to please her during her stay in Bishop Feofan (Charnutsky)’s palace. Perched high on a cliff above the Volga, the town’s situation was striking enough, and made the more attractive by the sunshine which had finally broken through. However, in an unconscious anticipation of the abbe Chappe d’Auteroche, Catherine declared Nizhny to be ‘abominably built’.⁴² Vladimir Orlov agreed: though the cathedral seemed in many ways the finest they had yet seen, there was ‘almost nothing worthy of remark’ in a town whose merchants seemed ‘very meagre’ in view of their advantageous position at the crossroads of Russian trade.⁴³ Not content with decreeing the reconstruction of its principal public buildings, Catherine immediately set about founding a new trading company to boost the local economy.⁴⁴ News of the impending bankruptcy of the British timber merchant William Gomm seemed to confirm all her suspicions about privileged manufacturers. Demanding ‘precise accounts’ of his various activities, which ranged from tobacco to iron, she was inclined to ‘conclude that all these are sustained out of state money’.⁴⁵ One of the few bright spots in the visit was when Orlov introduced her to a local inventor, Ivan Kulibin, the protege of an Old Believer merchant who delighted her with a microscope and telescope. She would see him again in St Petersburg when he had perfected his clock in the form of a mechanical golden egg.⁴⁶

As her galley weighed anchor on 23 May, Catherine was leaving the longest settled Russian lands for the intersection of the Orthodox and Islamic worlds. She had given her first audience to a Tatar delegation at Kostroma.⁴⁷ Now she was entering an area where a brutal missionary campaign, sponsored by Church and state in the early 1740s, had culminated in the forcible mass baptism of some 400,000 Finno-Ugric people: Mordvins, Chuvash and Maris. The driving force behind the attack on ‘the vile Mordvin faith’ had been none other than Catherine’s trusty Archbishop Dimitry, who claimed to have barely escaped with his life when a group of Mordvins attacked his convoy in protest against the razing of a sacred burial ground. This incident led to reprisals by Russian troops and mass flight into the forest on the part of the native population. In the following decade, hundreds of mosques were destroyed, particularly in areas where they might ‘seduce’ converts to revert to their former ways.⁴⁸ Though Orthodox missionary work had continued in a more emollient key under Catherine, who scarcely troubled to conceal her distaste for Elizabeth’s methods, violence was still a living memory in the Volga region in 1767. So it is perhaps no coincidence that no converts were presented to the empress at Kozmodemyansk or Cheboksary (‘superior to Nizhny Novgorod in every way’), or that she sailed straight past Svyazhsk, where the government office in charge of the conversions had been closed in 1764.⁴⁹ A reminder of the deviant potential of popular Orthodoxy came at Kozmodemyansk, where a merchant presented her with an icon of the Holy Trinity with three faces and four eyes. She sent it to the Holy Synod, anxious lest ‘senseless icon-painters’ succumb to the temptation ‘to add several further arms and legs’ in the manner of Chinese paintings. Appalled by ‘such a ridiculous and unworthy image’, the Synod swiftly decreed that no more icons should be painted without the express permission of its own specialist artists. That was ‘all very well,’ Catherine retorted, but ‘scarcely possible in an empire of Russia’s dimensions’ since ‘it could give rise to a lot of pestering’. She required only that ‘all bishops be instructed that in future no such indecent images should be permitted in their dioceses’.⁵⁰

Had there been any doubt about the friendliness of the reception she could expect in Tatar territory, it was dispelled when the empress arrived at Kazan on the evening of 26 May. ‘All along the way my welcome has been equally affectionate,’ she told Adam Olsufyev, ‘only here it seems a degree higher owing to the rarity of their seeing me.’⁵¹ Overlooking the point where the Volga carves out a majestic 90-degree turn to the south, Kazan is one of the most attractively situated towns in Russia. The decorations in honour of Catherine’s visit were no less impressive. She told Panin that the triumphal arches there were better than any she had so far seen. One of them had been designed by Julius von Canitz, director of the town’s high schools, founded at the instigation of Ivan Shuvalov to feed suitably qualified noble and non-noble entrants to Moscow University in 1758 (the poet Derzhavin was the most famous pupil). Struggling against unsympathetic neighbours, who littered the road to the schools with dung, Canitz increased the roll to a peak of 125 between his appointment in 1765 and 1773. But Vladimir Orlov found the institution ‘in a very bad condition’ in 1767, ‘with 12 teachers and only 40 pupils’ whose speeches in German, French, Russian and Latin were ‘very imperfect’. Catherine did not visit the school, but she encouraged the provincial governor to revive the amateur theatricals that Canitz had instituted there as a way of fostering the ‘pleasant address and the savoir vivre essential in polite society’.⁵²

‘Pleasant address’ seemed a distant enough prospect at Kazan where the cancellation of Canitz’s plays was a symptom of feuding between the governor and local nobles. Such tensions were only to be expected in a provincial society that had only recently begun to break away from patriarchal ways of life, in which the greater part of the nobility, living en famille on small estates in circumstances not much different from their own peasants, had been unaccustomed to socialising.⁵³ Arguments among the Russian elite nevertheless helped to cast a more flattering light on the Tatars. The Orlovs were by no means the last Russians to be impressed by the simplicity of the Muslim service they witnessed at a mosque where the attentive humility of the worshippers contrasted sharply with the disrespectful behaviour of many Orthodox in church.⁵⁴ Catherine herself watched with pleasure at a ball on 31 May as ‘the Mordvins, Chuvash, Cheremis, Votiaks and Tatars…all danced according to their custom to the sound of Tatar music and songs’. But it was impossible not to be unnerved by the kaleidoscopic variety she encountered in Kazan. In the course of the week she spent there, the empress saw the Tatar children at the seminary, finally received a delegation of recently baptised converts, greeted the son of the Kazakh khan and was presented to a party of Siberian merchants who had travelled almost 500 miles to petition her.⁵⁵ Such experiences impressed upon her as never before the complexity of her multinational empire. Daunted by the challenge facing the Legislative Commission, she sat down to write her promised letter to Voltaire:

These laws about which people talk so much are, in the final analysis, not yet made. And who can answer for their benefits? In truth, it is posterity, and not us, who will have to decide that question. Imagine, I beg you, that they must serve for Asia as well as Europe, and what a difference in climate, peoples, customs, and even ideas! Here I am in Asia; I wanted to see it with my own eyes. There are twenty people of various kinds in this town, who in no way resemble one another. And yet we have to make a coat that will fit them all. It may well be possible to discover general principles, but the details? And what details! I might say that there is almost a whole world to be created, united, preserved. I may never finish it!⁵⁶

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Although Catherine’s original intention had been to sail all the way to Astrakhan, the Geographical Description allowed for a shorter cruise ending further north, at Dmitrevsk. In the event, to speed her return to Moscow, the empress travelled only as far as Simbirsk, almost 700 miles downstream from Tver and ‘one hour eleven minutes and twenty seconds ahead of St Petersburg time’.⁵⁷ Here she stayed on an estate belonging to Ivan Orlov. The beauty of the Volga lands was breathtaking. ‘These people are spoiled by God,’ she wrote to Panin, whose brother Peter owned an estate not far away. ‘Everything you can imagine is here in plenty and I do not know what else they could need: everything is available and everything is cheap.’⁵⁸ Having taken seven weeks to reach her destination, she raced back to Moscow in seven days, travelling by night and sleeping through the heat of the steppe, pausing only to change horses. Hundreds of subjects who lined the roadside to pay homage were passed by in a blur. When she reached the Golovin Palace at 7 p.m. on Thursday 14 June, she needed two days’ rest to recover from the journey.⁵⁹

Though the Court was immediately plunged into mourning—first for Prince Frederick of Prussia and then for Joseph II’s unhappy second wife, Josepha, who had fallen victim to smallpox in May—there was nothing gloomy about the empress’s mood.⁶⁰ While Vasily Maikov celebrated her return with verses hymning the usefulness of her enlightened voyage, the deputies converged on Moscow in readiness for the opening of the Legislative Commission. Once Catherine had put the finishing touches to the protocols, she took the opportunity to relax.⁶¹ Although she had to review the cavalry on exercise in the Petrovsky woods and there were the usual festivities in honour of her accession day and Paul’s name day on 28 and 29 June, she preferred the less formal entertainments to be found on the various imperial estates dotted around the old capital. As soon as she returned from the Volga, she inspected her new apartments and stables at Kolomenskoye. ‘There is no need for any sort of rich decorations inside,’ she had insisted the previous December, after six months of close involvement with