Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  The routine established in these early days set the pattern for the remainder of the journey. While ashore, Catherine divided her time in the manner anticipated by the Geographical Description in a programme guided by the young president of the Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Orlov. Part of it was devoted to inspections of the sorts of prosperous economic enterprise that she wanted to promote in Russia (the head of the College of Manufactures, Dimitry Volkov, was another of her companions on board the Tver). A fortnight before leaving Moscow, she had secretly decreed that small, unregistered workshops there should no longer be persecuted by the authorities. Matching her instinctive preference for free labour, this policy was also influenced by Catherine’s reading of the Cameralist economist Jacob Bielfeld, who believed that large, privileged manufactories were better suited to the provinces than to a capital city. ‘The excessive aggrandizement of a capital which is made at the expense of provincial towns, can never be a sign of a state’s prosperity,’ Bielfeld insisted, in a passage that played directly into the empress’s prejudices against Moscow.24 Now she planned to inspect some of Russia’s largest textile manufactories in the Volga region. Despite this preoccupation with the modern economy, however, by far the greater part of her journey was taken up by visits to monasteries and churches where she could conveniently associate herself with medieval princely glories. Here the clergy could show off their miracle-working icons to a sceptical empress while the populace presented her with the traditional symbols of Russian hospitality: bread and salt (usually delivered on silverware made expressly for the occasion), and fish (preferably still live and wriggling).

  While under sail, Catherine’s priorities were different again. One of the books that she had set aside for the journey was Bélisaire, a political novel by the philosophe Jean-François Marmontel, which had been banned in France as openly deist. On 7 May, stuck at anchor in a howling headwind, she found time to thank the author. ‘I was enchanted to read it and I wasn’t the only one: it is a book that deserves to be translated into every language.’ As good as her word, she and her companions whiled away the delay by completing the Russian version begun in Tver. It was dedicated to Archbishop Gavriil, whose virtues, listed in the inscription by Voltaire’s friend Count Andrey Shuvalov, were said to include ‘gentleness, humility, moderation [and] enlightened devotion’.25 The empress herself translated the chapter on monarchy which projected the image of a just and tolerant ruler that she hoped to propagate by distributing the book throughout the empire (it was published in the following year).26 The weather defeated even the maps in the Geographical Description. ‘I know not where to date my letter from,’ she complained, ‘since I am on a vessel in the middle of the Volga in some rather nasty weather that many ladies would call a frightful storm.’27 ‘Yesterday was the first boring day,’ she confessed to Moscow’s Governor General next morning, ‘but we are all healthy, and although there are close on two thousand people in my entourage, only five are in hospital, and they are not seriously ill. And although troops have been sent to replace the sick soldiers, those on my galley don’t want to leave and say that they are well.’28

  A flotilla of small craft decked with multicoloured flags came out to greet her at Yaroslavl on 9 May. The town ‘could hardly be better situated’, she boasted, ‘it is very pleasing to everyone’. Not quite: Vladimir Orlov found the place ‘very badly built, almost all of peasant huts, the streets are narrow and paved with planks’. He was more impressed by a visit to Ivan Zatrapezny’s silk works, which had not only supplied many of the hangings in the imperial palaces, but also exported more than 65,000 yards of cloth to England in the previous year. Having taken coffee and dessert with the proprietor’s family, Catherine was briefly shown some of their wares before sailing over to Savva Yakovlev’s equally thriving enterprise on the opposite side of the river. Orlov, who returned two days later for a more detailed demonstration, learned that 3000 people worked for Zatrapezny in winter, and since there were ‘incomparably more at the Sobakina factory’, he could count on a combined winter workforce of up to 10,000. Most of them were serfs belonging to Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, elected to the Legislative Commission in March as the noble deputy for Yaroslavl. Shcherbatov, the most ardent defender of Russia’s ancient aristocracy against the pretensions of the service nobility promoted since the time of Peter the Great, was no less critical of lethargic merchants, but since his serfs would otherwise have remained idle in winter, he released them to the enterprising Zatrapezny in exchange for capital to invest in his own weaving sheds, which in turn supplied semi-finished cloth to the larger manufactories.29

  Having inspected four such enterprises in and around Yaroslavl, interspersed with visits to local monasteries, Catherine chose to relax as she might have done in St Petersburg. After lunch with the ambassadors, she played cards with them in her apartments and sat down to dinner at a table ‘laid with fitting magnificence and decorated with pyramids of flaming crystal bottles, covered with white wax, which looked very handsome’.30 After such a banquet, Catherine was pleased to report to Panin, ‘the diplomatic corps is apparently very happy and will travel to Kostroma, where the nobles are making great preparations for my arrival tomorrow’. The Yaroslavl nobility had already made a good impression when they were presented to her in the archbishop’s refectory, built by Patriarch Filaret in 1634 on the model of the Kremlin’s Palace of Facets: ‘It was all very seemly,’ the empress reported. Meanwhile, she asked for more government papers to be sent to her: ‘I live idly in the extreme.’31

  For all her professed inactivity, Catherine looked tired on her first morning in Kostroma. Although the obligatory triumphal arch had been built at the entrance to the cathedral, the town could provide no accommodation fit for an empress and she had been obliged to sleep on her galley.32 Lunch helped to revive her, and so did reports on the five local textile works, whose rival owners, she was pleased to learn, lived in the sort of harmony she desired for all her subjects. No effort was spared to make Muscovite comparisons explicit, though the aim was always to show that Catherine had surpassed rather than merely imitated past triumphs. Bibikov struck a suitably flattering note by comparing her with Tsar Mikhail Fëdorovich, the founder of the Romanov dynasty who had travelled from the nearby Ipatyevsky monastery to accept the crown in 1613: ‘What joy this town experienced in the presence of that Sovereign, and what joy it must feel now, when you take incomparably greater care of our well-being!’33 For Catherine’s visit to the monastery on 15 May, the ‘tsar’s place’ built for Mikhail—an intricately carved canopy almost thirty feet tall which had been stored away since the fire of 1649—was restored to the Trinity Cathedral and carved with her monogram as a memento for posterity.34

  Next day, she sailed on to an estate belonging to the family of Bibikov’s wife, Anastasia Kozlovskaya. Despite their modest means, the Kozlovskys had not only found the wherewithal for a new quayside, but also built the obligatory triumphal gate opposite the empress’s mooring, topped by a crown and with several obelisks to one side. Their investment was rewarded by an invitation to dine on the Tver. And there was more to come. On Ascension Day, 17 May, Catherine was greeted by cheering crowds of neighbouring nobles, merchants and clergy as she followed the procession of the cross up a path flanked by prostrate peasants. During the service, Bibikov himself read from the Gospel at her request. At lunch, Catherine was served by the daughters of the family and her hosts proposed a toast on their knees. She, in turn, enrolled Bibikov’s seven-year-old son as a junior court official. There could hardly have been a more telling ritual celebration of the mutual bonds between a sovereign and her subjects. Although there was never any question of a formal contract between Catherine and the Russian people, she was fully aware of the implicit bargain represented by the cruise. ‘Settlements are very frequent,’ she told her son, ‘and people are all glad to see me, but I know the proverb “one hand washes the other” and so I behave in the same way towards them.’35

  No amount of
festivity could disguise the harsh realities of Russian provincial society. The Yaroslavl merchants seemed so restive that, on her return to Moscow, Catherine sent a Guards officer to restore order and replaced the provincial governor.36 The brothers of the Fëdorov monastery at Gorodets irritated her even more. Suspicious of monks as an obstacle to Enlightenment, she had seen more than enough of them by the time she arrived there on 19 May to distinguish a well-run establishment from a disorderly one. As the Synod knew, theft and corruption were familiar problems, sometimes involving hundreds of thousands of roubles.37 Here, however, the empress encountered troubles of a different order. She could hardly have been welcomed more generously by the crowd who flocked to the quayside: Vladimir Orlov overheard one of the pious women who strewed shawls and silk scarves in her path refer to her as ‘a little apple’, another as ‘a little ray of sunshine’ and a third as ‘our benefactress’.38 Yet Catherine felt no warmth for the monks as they consecrated their new stone church. Behind its impressive façade, rebuilt from local funds after a fire in 1765, the monastery left much to be desired. Although it enjoyed a proud reputation as the place where St Alexander Nevsky had died in 1263, Abbot Zosima was too old and too ignorant even to say the liturgy properly and, as Catherine discovered, his disrespectful brothers ‘swore loudly while telling him how to do it’. She left them a derisory donation.39

  Worse still, the local clergy told her they were losing their flock (and with it their income) to the schism, which had put down tenacious roots deep in the forests around Nizhny Novgorod since Patriarch Nikon first split the Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. In their turn, the Old Believers, who had been outlawed by Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich for resisting Nikon’s reforms to the liturgy, complained to Yelagin that Orthodox priests treated them ‘like Muslims’ and refused to christen their babies. Faced with such open discord, Catherine realised that there would be no easy route to the ‘tranquillity between citizens which prudence is everywhere trying to establish’. Since it was impossible to trust the local bishop—a ‘weak’ man who surrounded himself with ‘equally weak simpletons’ rather than seek out ‘clean-living clergy, enlightened by learning, and meek of morals’—she secretly urged Archbishop Dimitry to reform the diocese on the models of Novgorod and Tver.40 Insisting on civilised clerical behaviour in the months after the cruise, she urged punishment for priests who extorted money from the Old Believers by violence. Yet the problem was at least in part one of her own making. While her own relatively generous legislation had alarmed the Synod by stimulating a rise in schismatic numbers in the mid-1760s—the official figure of 10,697 reported by the diocese of Nizhny Novgorod in 1765 was surely an underestimate—none of the older, repressive edicts had been repealed. As a result, aggressive clergy were able to exploit precisely the sort of confused legal position that the Legislative Commission was intended to correct, exposing the limits of Catherine’s much-vaunted commitment to religious toleration. Although she continued to condemn the degradation of the Old Believers in the combined causes of humanity and civil tranquillity, she had no intention of undermining the privileged status of the Orthodox Church. As a perceptive Times correspondent noted a century later, it was to remain a feature of ‘the peculiar relations between Church and State’ in Russia that ‘the Government vigilantly protects the Church from attack, and at the same time prevents her from attacking her enemies’.41

  Perhaps it was her experiences at Gorodets that led Catherine to be more critical of Nizhny Novgorod than of the other places she had visited. Perhaps it simply failed to live up to the extravagant billing in the Geographical Description. At any rate, the empress found little to please her during her stay in Bishop Feofan (Charnutsky)’s palace. Perched high on a cliff above the Volga, the town’s situation was striking enough, and made the more attractive by the sunshine which had finally broken through. However, in an unconscious anticipation of the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, Catherine declared Nizhny to be ‘abominably built’.42 Vladimir Orlov agreed: though the cathedral seemed in many ways the finest they had yet seen, there was ‘almost nothing worthy of remark’ in a town whose merchants seemed ‘very meagre’ in view of their advantageous position at the crossroads of Russian trade.43 Not content with decreeing the reconstruction of its principal public buildings, Catherine immediately set about founding a new trading company to boost the local economy.44 News of the impending bankruptcy of the British timber merchant William Gomm seemed to confirm all her suspicions about privileged manufacturers. Demanding ‘precise accounts’ of his various activities, which ranged from tobacco to iron, she was inclined to ‘conclude that all these are sustained out of state money’.45 One of the few bright spots in the visit was when Orlov introduced her to a local inventor, Ivan Kulibin, the protégé of an Old Believer merchant who delighted her with a microscope and telescope. She would see him again in St Petersburg when he had perfected his clock in the form of a mechanical golden egg.46

  As her galley weighed anchor on 23 May, Catherine was leaving the longest settled Russian lands for the intersection of the Orthodox and Islamic worlds. She had given her first audience to a Tatar delegation at Kostroma.47 Now she was entering an area where a brutal missionary campaign, sponsored by Church and state in the early 1740s, had culminated in the forcible mass baptism of some 400,000 Finno-Ugric people: Mordvins, Chuvash and Maris. The driving force behind the attack on ‘the vile Mordvin faith’ had been none other than Catherine’s trusty Archbishop Dimitry, who claimed to have barely escaped with his life when a group of Mordvins attacked his convoy in protest against the razing of a sacred burial ground. This incident led to reprisals by Russian troops and mass flight into the forest on the part of the native population. In the following decade, hundreds of mosques were destroyed, particularly in areas where they might ‘seduce’ converts to revert to their former ways.48 Though Orthodox missionary work had continued in a more emollient key under Catherine, who scarcely troubled to conceal her distaste for Elizabeth’s methods, violence was still a living memory in the Volga region in 1767. So it is perhaps no coincidence that no converts were presented to the empress at Kozmodemyansk or Cheboksary (‘superior to Nizhny Novgorod in every way’), or that she sailed straight past Svyazhsk, where the government office in charge of the conversions had been closed in 1764.49 A reminder of the deviant potential of popular Orthodoxy came at Kozmodemyansk, where a merchant presented her with an icon of the Holy Trinity with three faces and four eyes. She sent it to the Holy Synod, anxious lest ‘senseless icon-painters’ succumb to the temptation ‘to add several further arms and legs’ in the manner of Chinese paintings. Appalled by ‘such a ridiculous and unworthy image’, the Synod swiftly decreed that no more icons should be painted without the express permission of its own specialist artists. That was ‘all very well,’ Catherine retorted, but ‘scarcely possible in an empire of Russia’s dimensions’ since ‘it could give rise to a lot of pestering’. She required only that ‘all bishops be instructed that in future no such indecent images should be permitted in their dioceses’.50

  Had there been any doubt about the friendliness of the reception she could expect in Tatar territory, it was dispelled when the empress arrived at Kazan on the evening of 26 May. ‘All along the way my welcome has been equally affectionate,’ she told Adam Olsufyev, ‘only here it seems a degree higher owing to the rarity of their seeing me.’51 Overlooking the point where the Volga carves out a majestic 90-degree turn to the south, Kazan is one of the most attractively situated towns in Russia. The decorations in honour of Catherine’s visit were no less impressive. She told Panin that the triumphal arches there were better than any she had so far seen. One of them had been designed by Julius von Canitz, director of the town’s high schools, founded at the instigation of Ivan Shuvalov to feed suitably qualified noble and non-noble entrants to Moscow University in 1758 (the poet Derzhavin was the most famous pupil). Struggling against unsympathetic neighbours, who littered the road to the schools with dung,
Canitz increased the roll to a peak of 125 between his appointment in 1765 and 1773. But Vladimir Orlov found the institution ‘in a very bad condition’ in 1767, ‘with 12 teachers and only 40 pupils’ whose speeches in German, French, Russian and Latin were ‘very imperfect’. Catherine did not visit the school, but she encouraged the provincial governor to revive the amateur theatricals that Canitz had instituted there as a way of fostering the ‘pleasant address and the savoir vivre essential in polite society’.52

  ‘Pleasant address’ seemed a distant enough prospect at Kazan where the cancellation of Canitz’s plays was a symptom of feuding between the governor and local nobles. Such tensions were only to be expected in a provincial society that had only recently begun to break away from patriarchal ways of life, in which the greater part of the nobility, living en famille on small estates in circumstances not much different from their own peasants, had been unaccustomed to socialising.53 Arguments among the Russian elite nevertheless helped to cast a more flattering light on the Tatars. The Orlovs were by no means the last Russians to be impressed by the simplicity of the Muslim service they witnessed at a mosque where the attentive humility of the worshippers contrasted sharply with the disrespectful behaviour of many Orthodox in church.54 Catherine herself watched with pleasure at a ball on 31 May as ‘the Mordvins, Chuvash, Cheremis, Votiaks and Tatars…all danced according to their custom to the sound of Tatar music and songs’. But it was impossible not to be unnerved by the kaleidoscopic variety she encountered in Kazan. In the course of the week she spent there, the empress saw the Tatar children at the seminary, finally received a delegation of recently baptised converts, greeted the son of the Kazakh khan and was presented to a party of Siberian merchants who had travelled almost 500 miles to petition her.55 Such experiences impressed upon her as never before the complexity of her multinational empire. Daunted by the challenge facing the Legislative Commission, she sat down to write her promised letter to Voltaire: