Catherine the Great

‘True glory cannot be sought,’ General Suvorov reminded Admiral Ribas in November 1790, ‘it comes from the sacrifice that one makes to the utility of the public good.’⁹² Catherine was aware of the tension. Regularly reaffirming her commitment to the common good, she was nevertheless obsessed with her own posthumous reputation. It would have delighted her to know that, after her death, Academician Peter Pallas re- christened one of the steppe grasses he had discovered ‘Catharinaea sublimis’.⁹³ ‘She loves glory and is assiduous in her pursuit of it,’ Prince Shcherbatov wrote in 1786–7.⁹⁴ Those were years in which she embarked on a major renovation of the road from St Petersburg to Moscow, recommended to her by Diderot in 1773 as a good way of securing immortality. This, indeed, was one subject on which Catherine was particularly anxious to assure the approbation of the philosophes.⁹⁵ She offered her own self-assessment to Grimm in 1778:

Here lies Catherine the Second, born at Stettin on 21 April 1729. She came to Russia in 1744 to marry Peter III. At the age of fourteen, she conceived the triple ambition of pleasing her husband, Elizabeth and the nation. She overlooked nothing to achieve this. In eighteen years of boredom and solitude she read many books. Once she had reached the throne of Russia, she wanted only good and sought to procure happiness, freedom and property for her subjects. She forgave with ease and hated no one; indulgent, happy to be alive, cheerful by nature, with a republican soul and a good heart, she had friends; work was easy for her, company and the arts pleased her.⁹⁶

That was not how contemporary critics saw her. Shcherbatov complained in a treatise written only for the eyes of his family that ‘true friendship never resided in her heart, and she is ready to betray her best friend and servant in order to please her lover’. According to him, the empress’s obsessive quest for immortality had left her vulnerable to a series of cunning flatterers—Betskoy, Yelagin, Vyazemsky and Bezborodko prominent among them. Too many of her projects, founded ostensibly ‘for the good of the nation’ were in fact ‘simply symbols of her love of glory, for if she really had the nation’s interest at heart, she would, after founding them, have also paid attention to their progress’. This was the voice of a scholarly aristocrat who had once enjoyed Catherine’s patronage as an historian but now found himself permanently excluded from her inner circle. Although she had always tried to balance one adviser against another, never allowing anyone to think that his ideas had no prospect of being accepted, this proved an increasingly difficult balance to hold. To those outside her charmed circle, Potemkin had come to epitomise the corrupting influence of favouritism in the last decade of her reign: ‘love of power, ostentation, pandering to all his desires, gluttony and hence luxury at table, flattery, avarice, rapaciousness, and it may be said, all the other vices known in the world, with which he himself is full and with which he fills his supporters, and so on throughout the empire’. ⁹⁷

In April 1790, the chief of the St Petersburg police entered Catherine’s inner sanctum to present her with Denis, a four-year-old boy of unknown origin found wandering the streets. Since no one had yet answered advertisements for his parents, the empress adopted him at the Court’s expense and placed him in the care of a courtier living close by the Hermitage.⁹⁸ She was capable of demonstrative acts of kindness to those who had no right to expect them. Yet she was certainly no saint. Despite her idealised view of the Russian people as a whole, she took a dim view of many of the individuals she met on her travels, reserving some of her cattiest remarks for the earnest merchants’ wives who served her at table. Though her legislation allowed for a limited degree of social mobility, her policy was always to encourage her subjects to seek satisfaction in the station into which they had been born. As befitted a believer in a rigid social hierarchy, she relaxed only in the privacy of a narrow circle of aristocratic friends which remained remarkably constant throughout her fifty-two years in Russia (Ivan Betskoy, one of her first contacts at Elizabeth’s Court, died at the age of ninety-three in August 1795). Having begun her reign as a usurper, she sought a degree of legitimacy by portraying many of her early edicts as an attempt to complete the work of Peter the Great. But she was never a slavish imitator.⁹⁹ On the contrary, having sought throughout to exceed the achievements of her glorious predecessor, she ended her life surrounded by images of her own triumphs on the European stage: paintings commemorating the battle of Chesme by the English artist Richard Paton were originally hung in the Hermitage but significantly moved in 1779 to the throne room at Peter’s own summer residence, Peterhof.¹⁰⁰ Catherine had presided over the greatest expansion of Russian territory since the mid-sixteenth century and seen her empire’s economy grow in proportion. She had shown at least as great a commitment to the power of ideas as Peter I. But since she had ultimately been unable to trust the Enlightenment’s fundamental belief in self-development, a reign which began by fostering a degree of intellectual independence ended by enveloping some of Russia’s most interesting writers in clouds of suspicion. Catherine had not succeeded in her aim of establishing a firm rule of law, and the rational bureaucratic institutions she had worked so hard to establish never emasculated the informal patronage networks by which Russia has long been governed. Although she had offered her subjects the example of a tolerant and trusting ruler, her gentle methods have rarely been adopted by her successors. For them, the empress’s conduct has most often been an anti-model, not least because it has served as a subtle form of ammunition for their critics for most of the two centuries since her death.

ABBREVIATIONS

AKV: Arkhiv kniaz’ia Vorontsova, ed. P. I. Bartenev, 40 vols. (M, 1870–95).

Beer and Fiedler: A. Beer and J. Ritter von Fiedler, eds, Joseph II. und Graf Ludwig Cobenzl: Ihr Briefwechsel, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1901).

Benois, Tsarskoe selo: Aleksandr Benua, Tsarskoe Selo v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny (SPb, 1910).

Bentham: The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2 (London, 1968), ed. T. L. S. Sprigge; vol. 3 (London, 1971), ed. I. R. Christie; vol. 4 (London, 1981), ed. A. T. Milne.

Bessarabova: N. V. Bessarabova, Puteshestviia Ekateriny II po Rossii (M, 2005).

Best: Voltaire, Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. Theodore Besterman, The Complete Works of Voltaire, vols. 85–135 (Banbury and Oxford, 1968–77).

Bezborodko: ‘Pis’ma A. A. Bezborodka k grafu Petru Aleksandrovichu Rumiantsevu’, Starina i novizna, 3 (1900), 160–370.

Bil’basov: V. A. Bil’basov, Istoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi, 2 vols. (Berlin, n.d.).

British Art Treasures: British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage, eds. B. Allen and L. Dukelskaya (New Haven, CT, 1996).

C.: Catherine II

CASS: Canadian American Slavic Studies

ChIOIDR: Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitete.

Corberon: Un diplomate francais a la cour de Catherine II 1775–1780: Journal intime du chevalier de Corberon, charge d’affaires de France en Russie, ed. L.-H. Labande, 2 vols. (Paris, 1901).

Correspondance: Correspondance de Catherine Alexeievna, Grande- Duchesse de Russie, et de Sir Charles H. Williams, Ambassadeur d’Angleterre, 1756 et 1757, ed. S. Goriainow (M, 1909).

Coxe: William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, 2 vols. (London, 1784).

Cross: Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, 1997).

Despatches: The Despatches and Correspondence of John, Second Earl of Buckinghamshire, Ambassador to the Court of Catherine II. Of Russia 1762–1765, ed. A. d’A. Collyer, 2 vols. (London, 1900–01).