remained unpaid, and the empress’s position on the throne, though never seriously threatened, even by Mirovich, was sufficiently uncertain to deter any grandiose foreign adventure.
Poland, over which Russia had effectively established a protectorate since 1717, seemed to offer the greatest prospect of gain at the lowest level of risk. In September 1763, the death of King Augustus III (who was also the Elector of Saxony) opened up what Princess Dashkova later described as ‘a vast field for political intrigue’.5 Following the convictions of a lifetime, Chancellor Bestuzhev tried to persuade Catherine to support another Saxon candidate for the Polish throne, acceptable to Austria and France. His failure marked the end of a long career and a decisive moment in Russian foreign policy. Instead the empress decided to support the election of a native Pole—and she knew just who she wanted. Soon after her coup, Catherine had promised Stanislaw Poniatowski that she would make him king, just as Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had once imagined. According to Dashkova, whose husband died while serving with the Russian troops sent to put pressure on the Poles, Grigory Orlov and Zakhar Chernyshev were appalled by the idea. Neither relished the prospect of a revival of the empress’s relationship with her former lover. They need not have worried. When it came to international power politics, Catherine always set personal feelings aside. Now it was up to Nikita Panin, who took charge of Russian foreign policy at the end of October 1763, to realise her manipulative intent.6
It was far from easy for Panin to hold the balance of forces at Court. Behind the scenes, Zakhar Chernyshev was already so eager to annexe Polish territory that on 6 October he outlined a plan, probably hatched earlier in the spring, to redraw the border along a line similar to the one eventually agreed in the first partition of 1772.7 When the news leaked out, Catherine promptly denied any expansionist ambitions. Claiming that she ruled on the basis of ‘justice, equity and humanity’, a sanctimonious manifesto of December 1763 declared:
If ever malice and falsehood could invent a rumour absolutely untrue, it is certainly that which people have dared to spread about, that we allegedly decided to press for the election of a Diet simply in order that with its help and connivance, we might facilitate the means of invading certain provinces of the King of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to dismember them and then to appropriate them for ourselves and our Empire. The beginning of our reign alone is enough to destroy at its root this sort of fiction and deprive it of all likelihood and foundation. We hold that the prosperity of a people does not consist in foreign conquests. We are firmly convinced that a ruler is only greater when he directs the springs of government towards the welfare and happiness of his people.8
It was true that Russia had little to gain from conquering a state whose overwhelmingly Catholic population, Jewish minority, unruly noble elite, and direct borders with Prussia and Austria would all have been liabilities to St Petersburg (as indeed they proved in the era of the partitions). But that did not mean that Catherine had no ulterior motives in Poland. In fact, Augustus’s demise provided her with a perfect opportunity to extend her indirect control over a vital buffer state by installing a pliant ruler and keeping his government weak.9
She knew that her rivals had similar ambitions. ‘Don’t laugh at me because I leapt from my chair when I heard of the death of the king of Poland,’ she warned Panin: ‘the king of Prussia jumped up from his table.’10 Fortunately for her, Frederick was even more preoccupied by internal reconstruction than she was and decided that his best option was to collaborate with Russia to frustrate his Austrian rivals. Like the Prussians, the French were stymied by their disastrous performance in the Seven Years’ War and without their support the Habsburgs were powerless to intervene. Given this relatively free hand, Catherine was able to engineer Stanislaw’s election in August 1764.11 To Panin, she could hardly restrain her delight:
Nikita Ivanovich! I congratulate you on the king we have made. This event greatly increases my trust in you, since I see how faultless all your measures were. I didn’t want to miss showing you how pleased I am. My back aches so badly that I cannot hold a pen for long, so would you kindly, having explained the reason, take my place on this occasion and write to Count Keyserling and to Prince Repnin, expressing my pleasure at their work and zeal, through which they have obtained no small glory both for themselves and for us. And order a letter to the new King to be prepared for my signature, in reply to his. Either I have rheumatism in my back or I am dying. I fear that it may be a stone, only after a bath it felt better for the first time, so perhaps it is only a chill.12
There was a price to pay for Frederick’s collaboration, and it came in the form of a defensive alliance with Prussia, concluded in March 1764. In the unstable balance of power bequeathed by the Seven Years’ War, Catherine would have preferred to keep her distance from both Austria and Prussia who were now her main rivals to fill the vacuum created by the decline of French influence in eastern Europe. However, since Austria and Prussia were themselves implacable enemies, competing for the domination of the smaller German states, it was utopian to suppose that Russia could stay neutral for long.13 Since the Austrians remained allied to the French, who continued to resent Russian policies against their traditional satellites, Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, an Austrian alliance for Catherine was impossible. Frederick, who made it a principle of Prussian policy ‘to seek an alliance with those of one’s neighbours capable of delivering the most dangerous blows’, was swift to see the opportunity presented by Catherine’s ambitions in Poland.14 Outwitting her inexperienced ambassador in Berlin, he inveigled the empress into an alliance by pretending that he might otherwise strike a wholly improbable deal with the Turks.15
Making a virtue from necessity, Panin envisaged the Prussian alliance as the first building block in a new ‘Northern System’ designed to protect Russia’s hegemony in the Baltic. He described what he meant to Ivan Chernyshev, who set out for London as ambassador in 1768:
By the Northern System we have in mind and mean the largest and closest possible union of northern powers in a direct focal point for our common interest, in order to oppose to the Bourbon and Austrian Houses a firm counter-weight among European Courts, and a northern peace completely free from their influence, which has led so often to harmful effects.16
This was easier said than done. Frederick had no interest in an alliance with Britain and was anxious not to be drawn into Russian machinations in Sweden. Willing enough to support such machinations as a way of embarrassing the French, the British saw no reason to support Catherine’s ambitions in Poland or the Ottoman Empire. Though the empress renewed the Anglo-Russian trade treaty of 1734 in 1766, on terms favourable to Russia, Macartney failed to conclude a diplomatic alliance because Catherine insisted on unilateral British assistance in the event of war with the Turks. ‘This Court has listened to me with the most provoking phlegm and the most stoical indifference,’ the ambassador was forced to admit. ‘The result of the whole is a flat refusal.’17 In the end, the only tangible evidence of a wider Northern System was the defensive alliance concluded between Russia and Denmark—still a significant naval presence in the Baltic—at the end of February 1765. This scarcely counted as a close union of northern powers. And even if it had, there remained an obvious defect in Panin’s Northern System, which left the southern and south-western parts of Russia’s extensive borders exposed to precisely the sort of incident that sparked off the Russo-Turkish War in 1768.
Though he remained at Catherine’s side until 1781, Panin’s authority was never the same again. Against his advice, she decided to direct the war through a newly created council, which bore all the marks of her deft approach to government. Though the council was a purely advisory body, the empress left its members in no doubt that they were complicit in any decisions that might emerge from their deliberations:
I intend to carry out all the measures proposed with great firmness, since I take them to be measures which you, moved by zeal, fervour and devotion to me and to your country, have unanimously advised me to take in this important matter: hence, if any one still has any doubts, let him say so without loss of time.18
Not content with risking her empire in war with the Turks, Catherine risked her own life in October 1768 by electing to be inoculated against smallpox. As an advocate of fresh air and a wholesome diet, the empress generally maintained a healthy disrespect for doctors—‘charlatans’, as she described them on the death of the French king, ‘who always do you more harm than good, witness Louis XV, who had ten of them around him and is dead all the
