Catherine the Great

stood at odds with her increasingly belligerent stance on the Polish question). Singling out the empress’s humanitarian Instruction for special praise, Platon portrayed the new cathedral as a monument to Russia’s greatness and the empress’s personal glory.¹⁰⁵ Timofey Ivanov drove home the point with a commemorative medal, designed on the basis of Rinaldi’s model, which quoted from the gospel of St Matthew (22: 21): ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’¹⁰⁶

No less anxious to pander to the empress’s obsession with posterity was the Parisian sculptor Etienne- Maurice Falconet, a friend of Diderot and Prince Dimitry Golitsyn who had recommended him to Catherine as the ideal candidate for the statue of Peter the Great she had determined to commission as early as 1764. Falconet arrived in St Petersburg at the end of October 1766, working from a studio on the site of Elizabeth’s temporary wooden palace. ‘Diderot,’ he exclaimed just three months later, ‘you can’t imagine how this unusual woman can elevate one’s merits and talents.’¹⁰⁷ In June 1768 he told her of a drawing ‘that I shall show to no one until Your Majesty has seen it: Catherine the Second gives laws to her Empire. She deigns to lower her sceptre to propose to her subjects a means of rendering them happier. If this simple idea is not convenient, I know nothing better nor more glorious.’¹⁰⁸ Catherine agreed that it was a noble idea, ‘much better’ than his earlier plan to depict her with ‘tottering Russia’, a reference to the coup of 1762 that was judged ‘injurious to Peter III and to Russia’: ‘You will tell me when it is time for me to come to see the statue and the drawing.’¹⁰⁹ Knowing that she had never previously authorised a statue of herself, Falconet wondered why there should be a problem when it was proposed to strike medallions to commemorate the new law code. Only her own ‘delicatesse’ stood in its way, Catherine replied, ‘but perhaps the beauty of your drawing will make me forget my previous resolutions’.¹¹⁰

Apparently it did not. Though the empress sat for at least two busts and two medallions by Falconet’s attractive young pupil Marie-Anne Collot,¹¹¹ his own statue was never done, perhaps because Catherine had grown anxious about the progress of the Legislative Commission. Its sessions in the long Winter Palace gallery overlooking the river still seemed active enough, as Lord Cathcart discovered during a break in the proceedings on 18 August:

The room seemed so full, and the different groups so busy in conversation, that it was impossible to look down upon the assembly without thinking of a beehive. The empress’s throne fills one end of the room, the other end and both sides have benches as in the House of Commons; on the left side of the throne is a table of State. At the upper end there was a chair for the Marshal of the commission, and on one side two other chairs, one for the director who minutes the proceedings, and the other for the procureur-general who is there as commissioner for the empress and who has a right to interpose in her name, in case the standing orders should be attached.¹¹²

Catherine, however, worried that all this activity seemed to be leading nowhere. In turning to discuss justice and judicial procedure when they reconvened in St Petersburg, the deputies had become lost in a morass of shapeless detail. Only a desperate attempt to revise their procedures had focused their attentions on a draft law on the rights of the nobility at the beginning of July, and even then, no decisions were reached.¹¹³

The fundamental problem facing the Commission was the unbridgeable gap between Catherine’s expectations and the preoccupations of most deputies. Having written in one of her earliest notebooks that ‘The thing that is most subject to drawbacks is the making of a new law’, she was well aware of the restraining power of custom.¹¹⁴ Her Instruction followed Montesquieu in stressing the need to prepare people’s minds for new legislation—scarcely the philosophy of an intemperate despot. On the other hand, having once embarked on a project, the empress was always impatient for swift results. She had boasted to Voltaire during the Christmas recess that the Russian people were ‘an excellent ground in which a good seed will quickly grow’.¹¹⁵ But this turned out to be wishful thinking. She had misjudged both the amount of preparatory work required to ensure the smooth running of the Commission and the inherent conservatism of the deputies. ‘The number of ignorant noblemen,’ she later admitted, ‘was immeasurably larger than I could ever have supposed.’¹¹⁶ Living in the company of sophisticated friends, Catherine had presumed that their views were widely shared. Many of them took some part in the Commission: Panin as the author of the submission by the Moscow nobility, Grigory Orlov as a noble deputy for St Petersburg, Andrey Shuvalov as director of the journals recording the proceedings. The young Count Semen Vorontsov read Beccaria just before the Commission convened. But while such men reflected the interests of Russia’s educated, Western-oriented elite, the overwhelming majority of the deputies had little interest in either philosophy or national politics. Their interests were selfish and parochial.¹¹⁷

We can only guess what might have transpired had the Legislative Commission been allowed to run its course. Its proceedings generated a vast reservoir of information, much of which helped to inform Catherine’s subsequent legislation, and its sub-commissions continued to work until around 1774. The gold and silver tabernacle donated by the empress to the Dormition Cathedral on the Commission’s tenth anniversary depicted Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments as a reminder of her status as lawgiver.¹¹⁸ A skeletal secretariat was still employed at the end of her reign. By then, however, the whole project was little more than a memory. All through the empress’s time in Moscow, the international situation had been increasingly destabilised by her support for a group of Orthodox fanatics in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, a perverted stand in favour of religious toleration which resulted in civil war. When Cossack troops were sent to suppress it in June 1768, they crossed the border into the Ottoman Empire, sacking the little frontier town of Balta and massacring its Jews. In retaliation, the Turks declared war in October by imprisoning the Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Since most deputies were required for military service, Catherine announced the suspension of the Legislative Commission on 18 December. The 203rd and final plenary session was held on 12 January 1769. Now all Europe had another extraordinary prospect to occupy its attention. ‘An unsuccessful foreign war tends to impair the authority of all despots,’ warned William Richardson, ‘and this is the first foreign war she has ever waged.’ ¹¹⁹

CHAPTER EIGHT Imperial Ambitions 1768–1772

Catherine’s readiness to provoke a conflict in defence of Orthodoxy occasioned widespread surprise. ‘Where bigotry baffles reason, and where fanaticism supplies courage,’ Sir George Macartney remarked in 1766, the result was bound to be uncertain: ‘A religious war, however justly undertaken, is always of the most odious nature, and of all wars of the most doubtful success.’¹ However, if the empress’s cause proved unexpected, then there had never been any doubt of her seething ambition. Having entered the Seven Years’ War in 1756 as the junior partner in the anti-Prussian coalition, Russia had emerged by 1763 as ‘the arbiter of eastern Europe’.² Victories over Frederick the Great at Gross-Jagersdorf and Kunersdorf, not long after he had himself routed the French at Rossbach, had raised memories of the glorious era of Peter the Great. No ambassador accredited to St Petersburg in the early years of her reign could fail to sense Russia’s growing self- confidence. ‘This Court rises hourly higher and higher in her pride,’ Macartney reported in 1765, ‘and dazzled by her present prosperity looks with less deference upon other powers and with more admiration on herself.’³

Now Catherine was keen to translate isolated military triumphs into lasting diplomatic prestige. As Joseph II discovered during his visit to Russia in 1780, she was closely involved in day-to-day diplomacy. ‘Among the conversations in which our guest engaged me hourly,’ reported the empress’s secretary, Alexander Bezborodko, ‘he asked me about Her Imperial Majesty’s way of managing business, and was amazed when in answer to his question I said that all the dispatches from our ministry, whether they be sent to our ambassadors or to [foreign] courts, have been approved in draft by the Sovereign herself, so that not a single paper goes out that has not been presented to Her Majesty in the original: he thought that relations or letters were put up to her only in abbreviated form, and only those directly worthy of her attention.’⁴ Yet for all her hard work, there was a limit to what Catherine could do. Russia’s finances were as badly dented by the war as any other power’s, her soldiers