have infringed my statutes.52
Such tones were always reserved for officials who should have known better. Even so, a degree of tetchiness was understandable as the empress became impatient with the protracted preparations for battle. Although war had been declared in the autumn, it was not until the following spring that campaigning could begin. While more than 50,000 troops were being recruited, Catherine spent the winter of 1768–9 reading herself into a world as far removed from Panin’s Northern System as it was possible to imagine. Since there was no prospect of drawing the Italian states into her conflict with the Turks—Naples, she discovered, danced ‘to the sound of the French flute, and this flute is not in harmony with the voice of Russia’—she concentrated on trying to support the Corsican revolt against France. Boswell’s account of his travels on the island, provided for her by Lord Cathcart, enhanced her admiration for the revolt’s leader, General Pasquale Paoli.53 Judging from the letter she wrote to Ivan Chernyshev on 14 December, Paoli’s buccaneering spirit proved more infectious than the smallpox:
And now the sleeping cat has been awakened; and now the cat is going to chase the mice; and now you will see what you will see; and now they’re going to talk about us; and no one will expect all the racket we’re going to make; and now the Turks are going to be defeated; and now the French will everywhere be treated as the Corsicans treat them; and now that’s quite enough verbiage. Adieu, Monsieur!54
Meanwhile, spontaneous revolts among the Balkan Slavs seemed to offer the prospect of coordinated resistance against the Turks, and especially in Montenegro, where an Italian bandit calling himself Stephen the Little had publicly declared that he was Peter III, giving Catherine an added incentive to intervene. She employed an Italian aristocrat in a vain attempt to draw the Order of the Knights of Malta into her struggle against the infidel. ‘Above all,’ as Franco Venturi has shown, ‘she created a net of agents and listening posts in Italy and thus set in motion a type of diplomacy quite different from the traditional one.’55
Most of this was as much the stuff of fantasy as the ancient prophecy, unexpectedly given renewed credence by Russian designs on Constantinople, that the downfall of the Ottoman Empire would be brought about by a race of blond men.56 Yet for Catherine the deeds of war were bound to remain a thing of the mind. Unlike the male monarchs of her age, who regularly led their troops into battle, she could experience war only vicariously. For much of the time, she was forced to play a waiting game, not without its stresses for a sovereign accustomed to rapid progress in all her activities. Both her mood and her health fluctuated sharply with the news from the front. Victories were greeted with unrestrained joy, reverses with undisguised irritation. During the anxious intervals in between, her entourage did their best to keep her relaxed and amused.
At the beginning of April 1769, Vladimir Orlov reintroduced her to Ivan Kulibin, the inventor from Nizhny Novgorod whose clock in the form of a mechanical toy egg struck the hour with Easter tunes and opened to reveal a scene of the Resurrection, played out by miniature figures done in gold and silver. Catherine rewarded him with 1000 roubles.57 God seemed firmly on her side when campaigning opened just before her fortieth birthday. General A. M. Golitsyn was her commander-in-chief, appointed as a compromise between two more distinguished candidates: General Peter Panin (favoured by his brother, Nikita) and General Peter Rumyantsev (supported by Grigory Orlov against the Panins).58 When news of his first victory at Khotin, the main Turkish fort on the Dniester, reached Tsarskoye Selo on the afternoon of 30 April, Catherine called her courtiers into the dining room to deliver the glad tidings herself. ‘The Turkish camp is taken,’ she informed Saltykov next day, ‘along with a great number of trophies and prisoners. Our losses were almost nil, since the enemy cannon fired over our heads.’ That morning, the Court travelled to St Petersburg for a thanksgiving service at the Kazan Church where she made sure Paul was present. A jubilant crowd lined the streets to join the celebrations.59 Soon there were more. By 10 May, Catherine was delighted to report that Golitsyn had defeated another 30,000-strong Turkish army.60
Confident of his further progress, she relaxed at Gatchina, where Rinaldi’s building work was advancing apace, and where she and Grigory Orlov strolled through the park to see the pheasants in the menagerie after Lev Naryshkin had played the violin for them in the new wooden apartments on 15 May. Eight days later, Zakhar Chernyshev and Praskovya Bruce joined the three of them at the dacha at Bronnaya, where they sat up all night playing cards to watch the long-awaited transit of Venus through a telescope set up by Paul’s science tutor, Professor Aepinus (the Russian Academy of Sciences played a central part in the world-wide observations of the event).61 Military matters loomed larger at the beginning of June, when Grigory, acting in his capacity as Master of the Ordinance, took Catherine on a tour of the Liteyny cannon foundry in St Petersburg attended by all her artillery generals. Not that the common people were forgotten. At the accession day celebrations in the Dutch Hall at Monplaisir, the empress made a patriotic gesture by proposing a new toast ‘to all her subjects’ after the usual toasts to herself and the heir to the throne.62
The summer brought more disconcerting news. Catherine’s early boasts were made to seem embarrassing when adroit manoeuvring by the Ottomans forced Golitsyn to retreat across the Dniester, abandoning his earlier gains. Yet no sooner had she given orders to sack him on 13 August than he embarrassed her again by retaking Khotin in September. That was a more pardonable offence. ‘The tsarina is drunk with joy,’ reported the appalled French ambassador. ‘Her health, which had been crushed by the reverses, is visibly restored.’63 Until then, the atmosphere had indeed been tense in St Petersburg, where rumours of conspiracies and mysterious disappearances circulated in the sort of ‘confidential whispers’ that Richardson attributed to a people ‘prohibited from speaking or writing about politics’:
The Empress tells them, that as her maternal care for her dear people keeps her sleepless by night, and busy by day—and I really believe that her nights are as sleepless as her days are busy—they have no occasion to give themselves any further trouble about public affairs, than to act implicitly as she directs…Happy king of England! who may go about with as much security after a defeat, as after a victory; who has no occasion for a board of spies against his own subjects; and may allow his people to speak, write, and think as they please.64
Richardson’s timing could hardly have been less felicitous. Far from spurning public opinion, Catherine was even keener to nurture it in the aftermath of the abortive Legislative Commission. Now that it was clear that the ideas she had borrowed from Montesquieu and Beccaria were unrecognisable to the majority of Russian nobles, she tried another tack. Posing as ‘Granny’ (
Although it remains a mystery why Catherine chose to encourage public discussion of the defects of Russian society at the start of her war with the Turks, her turn to journalism was entirely of a piece with the first of five aims she had once jotted down under the heading ‘Maxims of Administration’: ‘One must refine the nation one is to govern.’68 Conscious of the benefits of her own reading, she paid 5000 roubles a year to support a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books, founded in November 1768 under the aegis of her secretary Grigory Kozitsky, a graduate of the Kiev Spiritual Academy who had studied in Leipzig. Kozitsky translated her Instruction into Latin and Ovid’s
