Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  The fate of the empress’s Instruction in the new century seemed to confirm the point. At first, the signs seemed optimistic. Appointing her former favourite, Peter Zavadovsky, to chair a new commission to codify the laws in 1801, the tsar considered it ‘almost superfluous to note…that the suppositions in the Nakaz by my Most Kind Grandmother, the Empress Catherine II…may cast great light on the commission’s work. You know this better than anyone else.’48 For some, such as the poet Derzhavin, the treatise had always remained an object of veneration. While the Russian transcript had been sent to the Senate in 1777, the French original had been placed in a bronze casket at the Kunstkammer, where it was exhibited to foreign visitors and taken to meetings of the Academy of Sciences. The casket and its priceless contents remained on the table at the Academy at its centenary celebrations in 1826.49 Neither did Catherine’s treatise lack practical application. Predictably ignored in the reign of Tsar Paul, it was quoted in at least forty-one court cases under Alexander I.50 Turning to the Nakaz in the context of the proposed codification of the laws, the liberal Alexander Turgenev remarked that though it may only have been a work of theory, it had done more to educate and enlighten the conscience of Russian judges than twenty reprints of the Muscovite law codes. For all this enthusiasm, however, few people seem to have read the Nakaz. By 1817, the fiftieth anniversary of the Legislative Commission, Nikolay Turgenev was urging another of his brothers to read Bibikov’s memoirs to discover that the empress’s efforts were ‘not so risible as people generally think’. In the following year, 1421 copies of the empress’s treatise were pulped at 4 roubles 5 kopecks per pood.51

  However promising an official revival of Catherine’s principles may have seemed in 1801, the opportunity had evaporated almost as soon as it emerged. Although his grandmother’s name appeared in a number of edicts promulgated by Alexander I between his accession and his coronation, it subsequently disappeared from view. In practice, his early reference to Catherine’s ‘heart and soul’ was no more than a rhetorical disavowal of his father’s arbitrariness. Early in the new reign, Dashkova was disturbed to learn that ‘for all the disagreement among the people surrounding the emperor, they were unanimous in disparaging the reign of Catherine II and instilling in the young monarch the idea that a woman could never govern an empire.’52 To attempt to turn the clock back would have been hard enough even had the tsar had no aspirations of his own. But his determination to take an ethical approach to both foreign and domestic affairs was in itself sufficient to question Catherine’s morals, as Karamzin doubtless realised when criticising the personal ‘foibles’ that made him ‘blush for mankind’ in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, written in 1810–11.53 Mikhail Speransky, the tsar’s leading minister between 1808 and 1812, was a genuine constitutionalist with little time for Catherine’s style of absolutism. Dismissing her gurus Montesquieu and Blackstone as ‘superficial minds’, Speransky was scathing about her attempts simultaneously ‘to enjoy all the benefits of despotism with all the honour of philosophical conceptions’: ‘Comparing her instructions and various economical and juridical institutions with the unlimited power and accountability of the administrators, one might say that our laws were written in Athens or England, and our mode of government borrowed from Turkey.’54

  The empress’s fascination with the French Enlightenment seemed equally suspect to a generation which had been taught by French émigré propaganda and the dictates of international politics to regard the philosophes as perfidious mentors. ‘Posterity judges, and will judge, Catherine with all human prejudice,’ wrote Countess Golovina. ‘The new philosophy, by which she was unfortunately influenced, and which was the mainspring of her failings, covered as with a thick veil her great and fine qualities.’55 The Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 understandably made such anxieties more urgent. Ascribing ‘all our mistakes’ to ‘the French alone’, Ivan Muravëv-Apostol blamed the philosophes for the decline of French morals from the time of Louis XIV. It was then, he declared, that ‘the light of true enlightenment begins to fade; talents are employed as a weapon of depravity, and that most dangerous of sophists, the false-sage of Ferney [Voltaire], strains every nerve of his extraordinary mind over the course of half a century to strew with flowers the cup of hemlock he prepared to poison future generations’. The poet Konstantin Batyushkov could only watch in horror as the fall of Moscow set the seal on a catalogue of French treachery: ‘And this nation of monsters dared to speak of freedom, of philosophy, of humanity! And we were so blind that we imitated them like apes! How well they have repaid us!’56 Once Alexander had made his own glory by defeating Napoleon, any lingering need to cling to his grandmother’s skirts was finally removed. Celebrating the tsar’s ‘subjugation of Paris’ in 1814, when he rode down the Champs Elysées at the head of his troops on a magnificent white charger, Derzhavin was led to wonder whether even ‘Peter and Catherine were as great as you’.57

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  Nicholas I, who succeeded his brother in 1825, was certainly not the man to restore Catherine’s reputation. Born in the year of her death, nineteen years younger than Alexander, he had no personal memory of his grandmother. So notorious did Nicholas’s hostility to her memory become that in 1885 a set of miniature portraits of the tsars was identified as his on the grounds that only Catherine’s and his own were missing. Devoted, like his father, to the martial image of Peter the Great, and exuding the same uncompromising masculinity, Nicholas did little to hide his contempt for Catherine’s legacy. Even before her beloved Russian Academy was absorbed into the Academy of Sciences in 1841, the Chesme Palace was converted into a dilapidated home for invalids, while the palace at Tsaritsyno became a barracks, the ultimate symbol of the Nicolaevan regime.

  It cannot have been an unmitigated pleasure for Nicholas to be reminded in 1826 that Catherine’s armies, ‘less numerous and less well trained than now’, nevertheless achieved ‘great feats, worthy of Greece and Rome’.58 Neither can the tsar’s hypersensitive ear have failed to detect the reproachful overtones emitted by a chronicler of the Cadet Corps who proclaimed Catherine’s ‘glorious’ reign as ‘unforgettable’, and went on to praise Count Anhalt, the director of the Corps between 1786 and 1794, for an Enlightened regime whose values could scarcely have been further removed from Nicholas’s militarism.59 Even under Nicholas, Catherine’s name continued to be raised in defence of intellectual independence. Nikolay Polevoy reminded readers of his Moscow Telegraph how well she had understood the loss to her reign ‘had poetry, art and sciences not added their voices and their glory to the thunder of military victories and the dazzle of courtly magnificence’.60 In a memorandum of 1833 ‘On the silence of the Russian press’, Prince Peter Vyazemsky stressed that an unmuzzled European press had been Catherine’s ‘brave and faithful servant’.61 And the Decembrist Alexander Kornilovich mused from his confinement in the Peter-Paul fortress that ‘Catherine loved Russian literature, and Derzhavin, Dmitriev and Karamzin appeared. They could be found now, if only they were sought out.’62

  In the light of the Russian elite’s experiences under Tsar Paul, Catherine’s generosity towards her subordinates seemed even more deserving of praise. Anecdotes about the empress published in the first three decades of the nineteenth century portrayed a ruler who was equally well disposed towards each of her subjects, generous in her mercy, just in her punishments, tolerant of human weaknesses and severe only towards herself.63 Catherine, in other words, had been an autocrat, but not a despot. Sumarokov claimed that not a single instance of ‘cruelty, vengeance, the intensification of punishments or menacing autocracy’ was to be found in the whole of her reign. For all her superhuman energy—following Perekusikhina he suggested that the empress had been blessed with ‘miraculous quantities of static electricity’—Catherine was a model of self-control whose heart never dominated her head. ‘He who can govern himself in this way is worthy to rule the universe.’64 Remembering how the empress had protected him from intrigue, Prince Dolg
orukov observed that ‘with such a tsaritsa’ every subject could ‘labour with pleasure’ and relax in the knowledge that he was trusted. Under Catherine, ‘fools were not frightening and scoundrels were not dangerous’.65 Such a tolerant monarch could not only forgive her servants their every misdemeanour, but would also respect loyal ministers even when she did not admire them. Repeated in anecdote after anecdote, this point was driven home by Pushkin in his History of Pugachëv. Catherine, he reminded the notoriously mistrustful Nicholas I, ‘knew how to overcome her prejudices’.66

  Faced with the possibility that his grandmother might become an icon to inspire his critics, Nicholas instinctively tried to prevent them from learning too much about her. He may have allowed Pushkin access to the archives on the Pugachëv rebellion, but he had no intention of permitting the publication of potentially damaging testimony from Catherine’s time. Apart from the empress’s own memoirs, Khrapovitsky’s diary was pre-eminent. ‘No single book,’ judged his friend Ivan Dmitriev, ‘could give a better understanding of Catherine’s mind, character and life.’67 Like Dmitriev, Alexander Turgenev recognised that Catherine’s secretary, having ‘recorded ipsissima verba everything that he saw and heard’, offered an unparalleled guide to her ‘inner life’ and the morals of her Court.68 Yet such titillating detail was anathema to the tsar. When Pavel Svinin, who had already published fragments of the diary, proposed a complete annotated edition in 1833, the president of the main censorship committee responded on the tsar’s behalf that it was ‘politically speaking premature’ to publish a text which revealed ‘a certain weakening in governmental power, some incongruity in the relationships and behaviour of people close to the Court, and vacillation in the authorities of state’.69 Turgenev was soon to experience a similar frustration when he sought to publish ‘all the gossip’ about Catherine’s Court that he had unearthed in the French diplomatic archives. Nicholas personally retorted that such sources were ‘offensive to Russia and of no historical importance’.70 Catherine’s own memoirs, which implied that all the nineteenth-century Romanovs were descended from Sergey Saltykov, were so incendiary that they remained unpublished in Russia until 1907.

  Yet the harder the censors tried to restrict the available information, the more Russians yearned to taste the forbidden fruit. And it was by no means impossible for the well-connected to do so. Catherine’s own memoirs circulated in copies from the manuscript version cherished by Turgenev as ‘the apple of his eye’. The copy that Pushkin lent to the grand duchess Yelena Pavlovna sent her ‘out of her mind’.71 Natalia Zagryazhskaya, the favourite daughter of the Ukrainian hetman Kirill Razumovsky, was a further source of titillating information. Marked down by Catherine herself as ‘an adventuress’ in 1787, Natalia rapidly gained the reputation of one who was exciting but dangerous to know. Pushkin was introduced to her in 1830 on his engagement to her great-niece, and became captivated, like other members of his circle, by this living link with a recent but disappearing past. In the absence of authoritative written sources, it became all the more important to record her anecdotes for posterity. They supplied most of the information for Pushkin’s ‘Table-Talk’, compiled in 1835–6.72

  To the untutored eye, paeans of praise to the late empress might seem no more than saccharine effusions. However, the Catherine myth is better regarded as a series of pointed attempts to reshape the pattern of autocracy. The code was transparent enough. To her idolaters, Catherine’s name stood for liberty of expression, moderation in government, and respectful treatment of loyal subordinates. To her immediate successors, however, she came to personify unnatural female rule, unethical territorial expansion, and an unnerving flirtation with juridical reform and intellectual speculation. As a result, once the first flush of enthusiasm for a revival of Catherine’s ideals had evaporated early in the reign of Alexander I, her devotees made little progress in the first half of the nineteenth century in their attempt to convert their private fascination for the empress into the public adoration they thought she deserved. It was only in the 1860s, once Herzen had published in London the memoirs that Nicholas I had suppressed, that some of the tsarist regime’s most intelligent supporters appreciated that by disowning Catherine and all that she stood for, they had inadvertently handed their radical opponents a powerful weapon. The last four decades of the nineteenth century therefore witnessed a concerted attempt to claw back the empress for the establishment.

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  As the secretary of the Russian Historical Society later confirmed, the ‘fundamental idea’ underlying its establishment in 1866 was the assumption that the past would seem the ‘more attractive’ the better it became 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, Potëmkin 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 Pugachëv.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 Potëmkin.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.