The war with Turkey was the first serious test of Catherine’s government, for the Ottoman Empire was still a formidable opponent and the Russians would have to cross vast expanses of southern steppe even to engage the enemy. In the end, the Russian army proved itself capable of the task, slowly but systematically advancing into Crimea and the Balkan Peninsula. The Russian navy sailed from St. Petersburg around Europe under the command of Aleksei Orlov and the British Admiral John Elphinstone, destroying the Turkish fleet in the harbor of Chesme in 1770. In spite of the distraction of the Polish conflict, Catherine’s forces made their way into Bulgaria and forced the Ottomans to make peace on her terms at the small village of Kuchuk Kainardzha in 1774.
The treaty came just two years after a seemingly permanent settlement of the Polish situation. With Russia fighting two wars at once, Frederick the Great of Prussia saw his chance and proposed to Catherine that they both solve the problem by taking Polish territory. Austria would have to be conciliated as well, and the result would be a smaller Poland that would be less threatening, should reform succeed. Catherine agreed to this proposal after some hesitation, for she still hoped to maintain influence over the whole of Poland, but eventually she gave in. The result was the partition treaty of 1772, which gave large and valuable districts to Austria and Prussia. Catherine took a large but thinly populated slice of eastern Belorussia that provided better Russian river communications with Riga. A byproduct of the new border was the inclusion of Jews in the Russian state for the first time. For Catherine the outcome was a qualified success, as Poniatowski remained king and made modest reforms that strengthened the state and Polish prosperity while ultimately remaining subservient to Russian interests.
Two years later Catherine was ecstatic with joy to learn of the peace with the Ottomans, for it came at a difficult moment. The victory itself was reason enough to celebrate, for it brought great prestige and power to Russia and to its empress, but there was more. Russia received huge territories in the south all the way to the Black Sea coast and Crimea ceased to be a Turkish dependency, instead becoming nominally independent under Russian control. Russia’s ministers and Catherine herself had been aware for decades of the economic potential of the area both as a site for new commercial ports and for agricultural settlement. The treaty not only gave the area to Russia, but also granted the right to commerce in the Black Sea and to build a navy there. Russia’s position on the southern border had changed radically: there were no more Tatar slave raids and a vast territory was ready for development. The legislation for the new lands, to be called Novorossia, or “New Russia,” was carefully worked out to encourage settlement but discourage the spread of serf agriculture. The new lands were to be a settler colony with flourishing cities and ports, not just an extension of the backward agriculture of the serf estates of Central Russia. Catherine had not read her Enlightenment writers for nothing.
Her right arm in transforming the new lands was to be her new lover, general Grigorii Potemkin, whose instant rise to favor took place in the first months of 1774. Potemkin was the only one of Catherine’s many lovers who was her mental and political equal. If less intellectual, he was well enough educated to understand her and had the political skills to work with her. It was a great partnership and lasted long after the passion had cooled, until Potemkin’s death in October 1791.
For the time being both the empress and her favorite faced daunting challenges. Ever since Catherine’s coup of 1762, there had been symptoms of discontent. The first had been the Mirovich affair. The former baby Tsar Ivan VI of 1740–1741 had grown up, and Elizabeth had confined him in the fortress of Schlüsselburg in the hope that he might some day enter a monastery, and if not, he would be politically harmless. Peter III had confirmed her decisions, including the secret order to kill him if an attempt to free him was made, and Catherine confirmed these orders as well, though the codicil with the order to kill bore only Panin’s signature. In July 1764, a restless and probably somewhat unstable Ukrainian guards officer named Vasilii Mirovich made a mad attempt to free Ivan and proclaim him emperor, and the soldiers guarding the ex-tsar carried out their standing orders. Mirovich’s execution put an end to the affair, but it was not a good sign. Over the years there were a series of incidents, all involving small numbers of officers and nobles who spoke of replacing Catherine, but they were quickly exiled and their talk came to nothing. The background to these incidents, however, was the worrisome issue of the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Paul. Paul was nineteen in 1773, and thus in principle old enough to reign, but his mother had no intention of giving up power. Part of her reason was her increasing disappointment with her son and his association with the Panin party at court, whose cautious foreign policy had not provided the expected dividends. Catherine proclaimed her son an adult and began marriage negotiations, but kept the throne. This step terminated Panin’s role as the heir’s tutor, and the count gradually withdrew from the court in disfavor.
The new star, Potemkin, came at just the right time, for Russia was now in the grips of the greatest popular upheaval it would experience before the twentieth century. The source of the uprising lay in the Cossack frontier of the southeast, as it had so often before. This time it did not begin on the Don but on the Iaik, the smaller river flowing from the Ural Mountains into the Caspian Sea to east of the Volga. In these decades the Russian government was trying to establish greater control over the Cossacks, restricting their privileges and particularly their custom of electing their officers. Recent measures to this end seemed successful, until Emelian Pugachev appeared in the settlements near the provincial capital of Orenburg early in 1773. He had served in the wars, deserted, and had various adventures when he arrived and told the people that he was actually Catherine’s husband Peter III. He had come to restore justice to the Cossacks and protect the Old Belief. The Cossacks believed, or professed to believe him and he quickly assembled a band of several thousand men, reinforced by the neighboring Bashkirs and Tatars as well as the peasants attached to the Urals iron works. They laid siege to Orenburg and other larger forts without success, but they overran the lesser stations and massacred all who refused to join them. A huge area, most of the Urals and the Volga basin, was now in rebel hands. The reaction was swift. An army came from Moscow to suppress the revolt, and by the end of the year it was largely successful, though Pugachev himself had eluded the army. Then the next year he made a comeback and even managed to seize the important town of Kazan’ for a few days. This was the high point of the rebellion, for Russian regular troops reached the town after a desperate forced march and crushed the rebel army. Pugachev now turned south toward the Don, and to reach it he passed through areas of serf agriculture. Here the region exploded; the serfs with rebel help exterminated the local nobility, including women and children. Unfortunately for Pugachev, the Don Cossacks did not move, and he recrossed the Volga, escaping to his base among the Bashkirs. There the troops finally caught up with the rebels and crushed them. Some of the Bashkirs remained loyal to Pugachev to the end, but the Cossacks eventually betrayed him. The revolt was over, and in 1775 Pugachev was executed in Moscow. Peace had finally come, at home and abroad.
Figure 6. Bashkirs, from Atkinson, Picturesque View.
Catherine’s reading not only gave her a series of ideas about justice and administration but also about economic development and social status. The Enlightenment writers believed that society required a civilized population to flourish, and that came from education and culture. The new empress came to the throne at a propitious time, for the efforts of the Cadet Corps, the Academy, and Moscow University were beginning to show results. The generation that came to maturity with Catherine was the first to have absorbed European culture in full, and the first to include many men and even women who had also been abroad long enough to begin to understand European society.
Catherine was determined to speed this process along. Though by birth and culture she was German, for most of her reign she was at the
center of Russian culture, unlike any monarch after her and more so than even Peter himself. She was not merely a reader, but an active participant in Europe’s cultural life. She corresponded with Voltaire from 1763 until his death in 1778. She also had correspondents among the French Encyclopedists, Denis Diderot, and Jean d’Alembert, as well as the German Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Grimm was a sort of literary journalist reporting from Paris, and after a visit to St. Petersburg in 1773–74 he was Catherine’s chief correspondent and epistolary confidant until her death. Catherine did not merely correspond with the great men of the Enlightenment. When she heard of Diderot’s financial problems she bought his library, granted him the use of it for life and paid him a salary as her librarian.
Catherine’s cultural projects were numerous. Behind the scenes she was the instigator of the Free Economic Society, a group of noblemen moved by reading Enlightenment literature to form a society for the discussion of economic (especially agricultural) topics. This was an association independent of state institutions although it enjoyed the favor of the empress. The society sponsored an essay contest on the issue of peasant land ownership that inevitably raised the issue of serfdom, and it awarded a prize to a Frenchman’s essay that unambiguously stated that prosperity could only flow from the full property of the peasant in his land. By implication serfdom could not create prosperity. The essay was published in Russian and French for all to read. She continued to support the university, the academies, and the schools with money and encouragement. The first Russian girls’ school, the Smol’nyi Institute in St. Petersburg for young noblewomen was planned by Empress Elizabeth and came into being in 1764, and the empress reorganized and expanded the Cadet Corps. These were elite schools, but with the 1775 provincial reform came a system of schools in the provinces, which was expanded again in 1786 by a decree establishing secondary schools in all provincial capitals and a network of primary schools. Progress was slow, but by 1800 there were already over 300 schools, twice the number in existence in 1786. Later Russian secondary schools had their origin in these laws.
Even the church had its role in the process of enlightenment. At Catherine’s accession most of the bishops were still Ukrainians with a strong, almost Catholic, sense of the importance of the clergy. Empress Elizabeth had begun the process of replacing them with Russians, and under Catherine a whole new generation came into power in the church. Catherine also put into law the secularization of monastic lands formulated under Elizabeth in opposition to the views of the older Ukrainian bishops. The new generation, like Platon Levshin, Metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 to 1812, had been educated on Lutheran religious scholarship and with a strong orientation toward preaching. Their goal was to bring the truths of Orthodox Christianity to the people rather than cultivating an ideal asceticism. This emphasis coincided with Catherine’s, for she saw religion as the foundation of good citizenship, which was another Enlightenment precept.
Figure 7. Catherine the Great with the Goddess Athena. Engraving by Francis Bartolozzi after Michele Benedetti. From a painting by Alexander Roslin.
Catherine’s court kept up the theaters founded by her predecessors, and those theaters remained at the center of the performing arts in Russia. She eased Araya into retirement and replaced him with a series of distinguished musicians starting with the Venetian Baldassare Galuppi. Sumarokov continued to direct the stage and provide plays, and Catherine and the court usually attended one of the theaters several times a week. In 1768 she founded a society for the translation of foreign books, which sponsored a whole series of important translations, learned works, and works of entertainment for the Russian public. She also published her own magazine, Vsiakaia vsiachina (All Sorts of Things), in 1769. The idea was to imitate Addison and Steele’s Spectator, something Sumarokov had tried a few years earlier with mixed success. The journal, like its prototype, was to combine entertainment with edification without heavy-handed moralizing – a type of publication wildly popular in Catherine’s native Germany and other parts of Europe. Catherine kept her role secret, though it was widely known in St. Petersburg.
The most lively response to her journal came from Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), who launched a series of journals of his own, establishing the first important private publishing enterprise in Russia. Better written and bolder than the empress’s journal, Novikov’s publications acquired considerable popularity but not enough to provide much of an income, and he soon turned to publishing books for Moscow University, which assured him an indirect subsidy from the state. In Moscow, Novikov also increasingly joined in with the Freemasons, a group with a wide network and considerable impact on Russian culture at the time. The Masons were not just a social club, but a movement of ideas with defined, if nebulous, aims. Most of them had been reading the European mystical literature that was increasingly popular in the later eighteenth century, and they saw themselves as committed to self-improvement, contemplation of God and his works, and most of all, active philanthropy and the encouragement of progress in the world. Unfortunately for them, the Masons aroused all sorts of suspicions. Conservative churchmen saw them as the propagators of an alternative and pernicious religion, while many enlightened nobles took them for obscurantists. Catherine herself saw them in this way and wrote several short comedies satirizing them. The Masons were also an international society with ties to foreign dynasties in Prussia and Sweden that were unfriendly to Russia, and most serious of all, the Masons had recruited the heir, Tsarevich Paul, as a patron. This last element made them deeply suspect in the mind of Catherine, for Paul was unhappy with his marginal role in court and government and increasingly hostile to his mother as the years passed.
In spite of setbacks, Catherine did not give up sponsoring Russian literature, and in 1782–1783 she appointed her old friend Princess Dashkova to head both the Academy of Sciences and the new Academy of Letters. Dashkova, who had met Benjamin Franklin in Paris, was the first woman member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. From these positions Dashkova was able to publish another series of literary journals and other publications and organize a committee to produce the first Russian dictionary. A decree of 1783 explicitly authorized private printing and publication, subject to censorship of the chiefs of police in the capitals.
The main problem for private publishers was not censorship or the attitude of the state but the lack of a broad audience. Only the gentry and a small body of teachers and scholars had the education to be interested in books and journals, and many of the gentry either lived on remote estates or in provincial towns and preferred French literature to Russian. The writers were less affected by this situation than the publishers, for most of the important writers were noblemen employed in state service of one sort or another, and were not therefore dependent on the sales of their work for their income. Many nobles even looked down on Novikov for trying to live from the profits of literature. State service, however, involved writers in the court factions and in a complex relationship to the empress herself.
Thus the two most important writers of the time, the playwright Denis Fonvizin (1744–1792) and the poet Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) were both enmeshed in a network of personal and political loyalties at the court. Fonvizin spent his early career as a client of count Panin, which meant that toward the end of his life he was part of the patronage network centered on Paul, the heir to the throne. This affiliation made him unpopular with Catherine, but it was she who ordered the first performance of his best play, The Adolescent, at the court theater in 1782. Nevertheless the final resignation of Panin from all offices in 1781 contributed to Fonvizin’s failure to get authorization for a journal in later years.
Fonvizin and Novikov were both graduates of Moscow University, while the poet Derzhavin came from a provincial gentry family and had only finished the Gymnasium in Kazan’. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he never properly learned French, his only foreign language being the German he learned in Kazan’. His early career was in the arm
y, and he played a minor and somewhat inglorious role in fighting Pugachev’s rebels. At that time he came to the attention of Potemkin, and remained the favorite’s client as he pursued a career in civil administration, both in St. Petersburg and the provinces, living long enough to briefly occupy the post of minister of justice under Alexander I. Derzhavin’s poetry made him famous in the 1780s, as he produced odes in honor of Catherine and her victories as well as satires of courtiers and their foibles, following the model of Horace and European classicism. Like Fonvizin, he had a command of language that allowed his work to survive for Russian readers in spite of the eclipse of the eighteenth century genres that he employed.
In Russian literature, drama, poetry, and prose, a public independent of the court was just barely coming into existence at the end of Catherine’s reign. Other art forms remained closely tied to the patronage of court and nobility. The court musical theater and orchestra was largely the preserve of imported musicians, and the centrality of the court in cultural life meant that the nobility heard an extensive range of European music. Native traditions remained in church music, a particular specialty of Ukrainians associated with the choirs in the imperial chapels. The most successful of these Ukrainians was Dmitrii Bortnyanskii (1751–1825), Russia’s first composer, who was equally comfortable with European concerti and Russian choral singing. None of the musicians were noblemen, a fact that hampered their acceptance as serious artists. A similar situation obtained in the visual arts, where the Academy of Art dominated the scene. Catherine reorganized the Academy to give it more autonomy and better financing while retaining its mainly French instructors, and she secured for the artists a more privileged social status to fit their profession. The Russian students were all of non-noble and sometimes even serf origin, who were intended to go on to provide art for the palaces of the empress and the nobility as well as the church. The Academy also provided stipends for the students to spend time in Paris and Rome, enormously broadening the training and experience of its students. In retrospect its worst defect, other than its very “official” character, was its precise copying of European models that accorded ill with Russian possibilities and traditions. As in the European art academies, the most prestigious genre was historical painting in the style of classicism. Attempts to depict Russian history in this style found praise at the time but produced pictures that to later taste were wooden at best and often comic. Ancient Russians appeared in fantastic armor more reminiscent of the Romans than medieval Russia. More attractive to later taste were the portrait painters, who ironically had little or no ties to the Academy. The first to gain a name was Ivan Argunov (1727–1802), a serf of the extremely wealthy Sheremetev family. His successors included Fyodor Rokotov, a serf of the Repnins, and two Ukrainians, Dmitrii Levitskii (Argunov’s pupil), and Vladimir Borovikovskii, the only nobleman among them. Their charming portraits of noble men and women as well as of Catherine herself filled Russian palaces and country houses and were comparable in quality to many of the French and English portraits of the time, if less inventive than the latter.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 16