Catherine the Great

known. Not for nothing did Alexander II’s foreign minister Prince Gorchakov christen the society and its publications a ‘patriotic enterprise’.⁷³ Catherine was at the heart of the venture. When its patron, the future tsar Alexander III, conferred imperial status on the society in 1873, he expressed pleasure that its work had been directed mainly to the preservation of documents concerning her ‘praiseworthy actions, tending to the well-being of Russia’.⁷⁴ Together with monthly historical journals such as Russian Archive, whose founder-editor worked from an office dominated by a portrait of the empress, the society published a voluminous series of sources that ultimately permitted a new generation of scholars to give the empress a new lease of life.⁷⁵

Historical fiction reached an even wider readership. A year after he retired as a senior official at the Ministry of Education, G. P. Danilevsky wrote his first novella, Catherine the Great on the Dnieper. Twenty years later, it was followed by another, Potemkin on the Danube. By that time, the author was deputy editor-in-chief of the government newspaper, whose staff was dragooned into publishing a trilogy of more substantial novels about Catherine’s reign. Mirovich and Princess Tarakanova were both based on authentic sources. So was the last and longest of the novels, which continued the theme of rebellion by discussing Pugachev.⁷⁶ In 1890, the last year of Danilevsky’s life, he set St Petersburg society alight by delivering a lecture claiming, plausibly enough, that Catherine had married Potemkin.⁷⁷ Works such as these helped to lift Catherine’s public profile higher by the centenary of her death than at any time since the reign of Alexander I. According to an American tourist, her picture greeted the visitor ‘everywhere, in every variety of costume and position’. Indeed, the honours were divided with Peter the Great, for both were ubiquitous ‘in effigy or picture or memorial or legend or belongings’. ‘They made Russia what it is’, he went on, ‘but their remembrance is not so fragrant as Washington or Lincoln’.⁷⁸

On 24 November 1873, Alexander II inaugurated M. O. Mikeshin’s majestic monument to Catherine in the square outside the St Petersburg Public Library. The tsar had followed every step of its development as the budget almost doubled from the original estimate in 1865 to a total cost of 456,896 roubles.⁷⁹ At a meeting in his presence on the following day, Academician Grot, who edited Catherine’s correspondence with Grimm for the Imperial Russian Historical Society, claimed that it was now possible to see the empress in a new perspective:

A whole century separates us from that glorious era; passions have cooled; the time has come for the unbiased judgement of history, that unhypocritical judgement which, by means of factual enrichment, is reconstructing the attractive, majestic image of Catherine II more clearly and more brightly as each day passes.⁸⁰

In similar fashion, the great Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky argued at the centenary of her death in 1896 that ‘posterity’s accounts’ had by then been settled. The empress, he said, had become ‘merely a subject for study’ who could be safely consigned to the ‘remoteness of history’ now that she no longer served as either scapegoat or inspiration.⁸¹

Grot and Klyuchevsky were both mistaken. Unfortunately for those who sought to sanitise Catherine’s image, it proved impossible to focus solely on her glorious achievements. On the contrary, a campaign designed primarily to drape Catherine in the Russian flag served rather to enliven interest in her personality. Biographers, in particular, found it hard to detach her patriotic ‘virtues’ from her chequered morals. The liberal journalist Vasily Bilbasov managed to complete only the first part of a projected twelve-volume work before running into trouble with the censors. They objected to his quotations from Catherine’s memoirs, to a reference to her illegitimate son, Aleksey Bobrinsky, and to his discussion of the vexed question of Tsar Paul’s paternity. The book was published thanks to the intervention of Alexander III, who insisted on raising the price to a prohibitive five roubles, but the censors had the last laugh when the tsar discovered that Bilbasov was the same ‘swine’ who edited the liberal newspaper The Voice.⁸² Bilbasov’s second volume had to be published in Berlin. Russians nevertheless found ways of reading it, and the demand for titillating information about Catherine never abated.

In 1897, the teenage poet Alexander Blok declared that Catherine was his favourite heroine in history on a visit to Bad Neuheim during which, by a delicious coincidence, he lost his virginity to a woman more than twice his age, described by his biographer as ‘his type: big, spontaneous, and talented rather than intellectual’.⁸³ Though it was only after the revolution of 1905 that salacious stories of the empress’s ‘intimate life’ could be published in Russia, Catherine’s admirers found their own way of celebrating her memory.⁸⁴ Thanks to the patronage of Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhaylovich, a circle of antiquarians including the snuffbox connoisseur S. N. Kaznakov, and Grigory Orlov’s biographer, Alexander Golombiyevsky, staged an exhibition of imperial portraits at the Tauride Palace in spring 1905. Between February and May, undeterred by revolutionary unrest, some 45,000 visitors marvelled at forty-four paintings of Catherine, displayed alongside thirty- five of Peter the Great and Alexander I in the palace she had built for Potemkin. (Shortly afterwards the great colonnade where he had entertained her in April 1791 became the outer hall of Russia’s first national representative assembly, the State Duma.)⁸⁵ The exhibition’s guiding force was Sergey Dyaghilev, whose collaborators in the predominantly homosexual ‘World of Art’ group experienced their own scandalous frisson by gathering in 1906 to examine what they believed to be a wax model of Potemkin’s phallus, allegedly commissioned by Catherine ‘for the edification of diminished successors’, and smuggled out of the Hermitage by a curator at the behest of his son, the erotic artist Konstantin Somov.

One reason why the empress continued to have such a profound resonance at the beginning of the twentieth century was the presence at the Court of St Petersburg, throughout the reigns of the last two tsars, of a woman who deliberately modelled herself on Catherine the Great. This was the grand duchess Maria Pavlovna, wife of Alexander III’s brother, Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, born Princess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Gossips claimed that this ‘debauched German’ led a ‘dissolute life’ by holding ‘small orgies’ at her residence along the embankment from the Winter Palace. A scandal at the Cubat Freres restaurant in 1889 prompted rumours that she would be forced to emigrate.⁸⁶ Shortly afterwards, the customarily humourless Alexander III joked at a fisheries trade fair that a stand featuring semi-naked peasant women dressed as mermaids might inspire Maria Pavlovna’s next costumed ball.⁸⁷ Recalling Catherine’s own mistreatment under Elizabeth and Peter III, friends of the grand duchess attributed such sniping to envy of her intelligence and beauty.⁸⁸ To her critics, however, she personified the reasons why Catherine’s reign symbolised not the golden age of the Romanov dynasty, but rather, to quote Richard Wortman, its ‘reprehensible past’ in which the empress herself, ‘possessed by ambition, flagrant in her inconstancy and indifference to the family, seemed threatening to the very notion of nineteenth-century legitimacy’.⁸⁹ The British ambassador Sir George Buchanan outlined the more attractive characteristics that raised echoes of Catherine the Great:

A grande dame in the best sense of that term, but without any pretensions as regards the strict observation of Court etiquette, the Grand Duchess was admirably fitted to play the part of the hostess and to do the honours of the Court. With great conversational gifts, she was not only herself full of verve and entrain, but possessed the art of inspiring them in others. Her entertainments, no matter what form they took, were never dull, and no one was ever bored. At her dinners and receptions one met many of the younger members of the Imperial family and the elite of Russian society, more especially the ‘smart set’, as well as a sprinkling of the official and artistic worlds.⁹⁰

While an uninterrupted male line of succession in Prussia permitted successive Hohenzollerns to draw inspiration from the heroic image of Frederick the Great—as, indeed, did Bismarck, Hitler and Goebbels—no nineteenth-century Romanov tsar could comfortably model himself on Catherine. Major General Sir John Hanbury Williams thought he could still detect in 1914 the shadows of that ‘halo of mystery’ attaching to the days when Catherine addressed letters to his ancestor Sir Charles ‘as “Madame” and he to her as “Monsieur”’. But the more historians emphasised Catherine’s contribution to Russia’s great power status, the less likely her latest successor seemed to be able to sustain it. One need only recall Hanbury Williams’ doleful comment after an interview with the tsar at his Mogilev headquarters in October 1915: ‘Catherine was a wonderful ruler of Russia, but these are not the days of Catherine.’⁹¹

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