Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  At the heart of this cynical appeal to Poland’s neighbors to cooperate in joint aggrandizement was the territorial prize Frederick wanted for himself. East Prussia was physically separated from the rest of his Hohenzollern possessions. For years, Frederick had hoped to remedy this flaw by acquiring the Polish Baltic coastal territories that split his country. In the autumn of 1770, Frederick’s diplomatic scheming was assisted by the presence of his younger brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, who was making a state visit to St. Petersburg. A short man with an inexpressive demeanor, he had come to the Russian capital reluctantly at the request of his brother to promote Frederick’s plan for dividing up Poland. Henry was as little interested in ceremonial pomp as his brother, but his eye was as sharp and his perceptions as keen. Catherine plied him with banquets, concerts, and balls. Henry moved uncomfortably in the luxury of Catherine’s court; he was punctual and meticulous, but he did not enjoy himself. Nor did his stolid demeanor and curt Prussian bow please many in the Russian court. But with Catherine, a fellow German, he got on well.

  By December, the prince and the empress were seriously discussing Frederick’s proposal for the partition of Poland. Would Catherine agree to lower her demands for territorial cessions by a defeated Turkey in exchange for permanent territorial gains in Poland? Catherine pondered the question; savoring her military and naval victories, she was reluctant to compromise. After all, Russia was the only power actually at war with Turkey; it was she who was fighting and had defeated the Turks. Further, having invested so much effort and money in Polish affairs, she would have preferred, through Stanislaus, to make all Poland a permanent Russian satellite. As she considered her situation, however, she became more amenable. She realized that neither her ally Prussia nor an increasingly hostile Austria was likely to allow her to make sweeping Balkan acquisitions at Turkey’s expense. In the back of her mind, she feared that Austria and France might enter the war as Turkey’s allies; for months now, both Austria and France had been sending help in the form of money and military advisers to the confederates in Poland. Further, she realized that the deep permanent hatred between Orthodox and Catholic Poles was probably going to make Poland an endless military and financial drain. Finally, she knew that for many Russians, including leaders and believers of the Orthodox Church, bringing the Orthodox population of Poland under Russian protection would be enthusiastically welcomed, and that this would be sufficient to quiet those who had wanted more.

  In January 1771, while Prince Henry was edging his way through the Russian Christmas and New Year, Austrian troops suddenly crossed the Carpathians and occupied an area in southern Poland. This news reached the empress and Prince Henry at a concert at the Winter Palace. Henry, hearing the news, shook his head and observed, “It seems that in Poland one only has to stoop and help oneself.” Catherine picked up his lead and replied, “Why shouldn’t we both take our share?” Henry reported this exchange to Frederick with the comment, “Although this was only a chance pleasantry, it is certain that it was not said for nothing and I do not doubt that it will be very possible for you to profit by this occasion.”

  In March, soon after his brother returned to Berlin, Frederick wrote to Catherine suggesting that, in view of Austria’s aggression, perhaps it would be appropriate if Prussia and Russia simply followed her example and took what they wanted. In mid-May the Prussian minister in St. Petersburg reported to Berlin that the empress had consented to a partition of Poland.

  A year of negotiation passed before agreement on partition could be reached with Austria. During this year the diplomatic focus was on Maria Theresa. Already alarmed by Russian victories in the Balkans and objecting particularly to any suggestion that the Turks should be replaced on the Danube by the Russians, the Austrian empress committed herself in July 1771 to a secret treaty with Turkey to come to the assistance of this ancient Muslim enemy of the Hapsburgs. Secrets have short lives, however, and when Frederick and Catherine learned of it, they ignored Austria and, on February 17, 1772, signed an agreement to partition Poland. Meanwhile, Maria Theresa’s son and co-ruler, Emperor Joseph II, was struggling to persuade his mother that it was in Austria’s interest to join Frederick and Catherine. This was an excruciating moment for the Austrian empress. She hated and despised these two monarchs; Frederick was a Protestant who had stolen Silesia; Catherine was a usurper who had taken lovers. Maria Theresa was a devout Catholic, and she shuddered at the idea of assisting in despoiling a neighboring Catholic state.

  It took time to overcome these scruples, and her son worked hard to set her decision in a larger context than personal feelings. The Austrian empress faced a choice: either she maintained her recently signed treaty with Turkey and had to go to war with Russia with no help from any other European power, or she abandoned the Turks and joined Prussia and Russia in helping herself to another, larger slice of Poland. In the end, Maria Theresa abandoned the Turks. On August 5, 1772, Emperor Joseph II, on his mother’s behalf, added his signature to the agreement to partition Poland.

  The three partitioning powers sent troops into their newly claimed territories and then demanded that a Polish Diet be called to ratify their aggression. In the summer of 1773, Stanislaus obediently summoned a Diet. Many Polish noblemen and Catholic churchmen refused to attend; some who came were arrested; others accepted bribes and remained silent. The rump Diet then transformed itself into a confederation that did not require a majority decision. In this way, on September 30, 1773, Poland signed the partition treaty formally ceding the land it had already lost.

  In what came to be called the First Partition of Poland, the crumbling state lost almost a third of its territory and more than a third of its population. Russia’s share was the largest in territory, 36,000 square miles, comprising all of eastern Poland as far as the Dnieper River and the whole course of the river Dvina flowing north toward the Baltic. This area, known as White Russia (now a part of the independent nation of Belorussia) had a population of 1,800,000 people, primarily of Russian stock with Russian identity, traditions, and religion. Prussia’s slice of Poland was the smallest, both in area and population: 13,000 square miles, with 600,000 people, predominantly German and Protestant. Frederick was satisfied, at least at that moment. By acquiring the Baltic enclaves of West Prussia and Polish Pomerania, he achieved his goal of uniting his kingdom geographically, stitching the separated province of East Prussia onto Brandenburg, Silesia, and other Prussian territories in Germany. Austria took a substantial piece of southern Poland: 27,000 square miles, including the greater part of Galicia. Maria Theresa acquired the largest number of new subjects: 2,700,000 Poles, overwhelmingly Catholic. A few Poles resisted this aggression, but against the strength of three major powers, they had little success. England, France, Spain, Sweden, and the pope condemned the partition, but no European state was prepared to go to war on behalf of Poland.

  Catherine’s intervention in Poland was successful. She had returned Russia’s frontier to the great trade route of the Dnieper. Two million Orthodox believers could profess their faith unhindered. But she still had important objectives in her war with Turkey. The fact that Russia’s western frontier had been brought back to the Dnieper did not mean the opening of that great water route to the Black Sea, because the Turks still controlled the estuary where the river flowed into the sea. Catherine meant to free this river mouth. The war with Turkey continued.

  The year 1771 had produced a disappointment on the battlefields. On the Danube, Russian generals had been unable to follow up their victories of 1770. Even though General Vasily Dolgoruky had stormed into the Crimea and overrun the peninsula, this had not inclined the sultan to make peace. Three years of stalemate and frustration followed. Not until the end of 1773 did Russian prospects brighten. In December, Sultan Mustapha III died and was succeeded by his brother, Abdul Hamid. The new sultan, recognizing the unprofitability as well as the danger of continuing the war, decided to end it. Catherine prompted him with a new offensive on the Danube. In
June 1774, Rumyantsev crossed the Danube with fifty-five thousand men. On June 9, fifty miles south of the river, a night bayonet attack by eight thousand Russians on forty thousand Turks broke the Turkish lines and led to a crushing Russian victory at Kozludzhi. The grand vizier, fearing that nothing could stop the Russians from reaching Constantinople, sued for peace. Rumyantsev opened direct negotiations in the field, and he and the grand vizier agreed to terms. On July 10, 1774, in an obscure Bulgarian village, the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi was signed. Rumyantsev immediately sent his son to St. Petersburg with the news, and on July 23, Catherine hurried out of a concert to receive it.

  The treaty brought Russia greater gains than she had dared to hope for. Catherine traded her conquests on the Danube for more important acquisitions on the Black Sea coast. The Balkan provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia were restored to Turkey. In exchange, Catherine gained the transfer to Russia of Azov, Taganrog, and Kerch, which provided unfettered access to the Black Sea. Farther west, she acquired the southern delta of the Dnieper River, and the mouth of the river itself, giving her empire another vital outlet to the Black Sea. Although the west bank of the river’s broad estuary still retained the massive Turkish fortress at Ochakov, the Russians now had a fort and port at Kinburn on the east bank, and the estuary was large enough to permit Russian commercial navigation and the unhindered construction of Russian warships. The peace terms also included the ending of the sultan’s political sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, where a Tatar khanate under Turkish protection had existed for centuries. The Crimean Tatars were now declared to be independent of Turkey. Everyone realized that the independence of the Crimea was unlikely to last; indeed, nine years later, Catherine was to annex the peninsula outright.

  Russian gains were not purely territorial. The treaty opened the Black Sea to Russian commerce by guaranteeing complete freedom of navigation. The treaty also included the right of Russian merchant ships to unlimited transit through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean. Turkey was also to pay to Russia a war indemnity of four and a half million rubles. Persecution of Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia was to cease, and Orthodox believers in Constantinople were to be able to worship at a church of their own. On a grander scale, the war had tipped the balance of power in the region in Russia’s favor; Europe was now aware that predominance in the Black Sea had passed to Russia. In Catherine’s mind, these were achievements to match those of her predecessor, Peter the Great, who, on the faraway Baltic, had first opened a Russian pathway to the world.

  55

  Doctors, Smallpox, and Plague

  THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE considered themselves a national family. The tsar, or emperor, was the Little Father, Batushka. His wife, the tsaritsa, or an unmarried soverign empress such as Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, or Catherine II, was the Little Mother, Matushka. Catherine liked thinking of herself this way and took seriously the responsibility of maternal care for her people. If she could not give them a new legal code, she could at least address the problem of their health. “If you go to a village and ask a peasant how many children he has,” she said,” he will say ten, twelve, and sometimes even twenty. If you ask how many of them are alive, he will say, one, two, three, rarely four. This mortality should be fought against.”

  In 1763, the second year of her reign, Catherine founded Russia’s first College of Medicine to train Russian doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries. Until a sufficient number of Russian doctors became available, she attempted to recruit western European physicians by offering generous salaries and pensions. In the same year, to discourage infanticide among unmarried and impoverished mothers, she established with her own funds a foundling hospital with an attached lying-in hospital in Moscow. The anonymity of the mother was assured by a system of baskets, pulleys, and bells. When a bell was rung in the street, a basket was lowered from an upper story, the unwanted baby put in, and the basket raised. All children, legitimate or illegitimate, from any class, were accepted, cared for, and educated, with precautions to ensure that when they left, they were, or remained, free. The hospital was five stories high and had two hundred beds. Dormitories were large and airy. Each child had his or her own bed, with a clean gown, clean sheets, and a small bedside table holding a jug of water, a glass tumbler, and a bell to summon assistance. An English visitor wished “that the same attention to cleanliness was given in English hospitals.” The hospital served as a model for similar foundling institutions in St. Petersburg and other places. The empress attacked another problem by creating a hospital for venereal disease, where both women and men were treated. In 1775, Catherine decreed that the capital of every province must have a general hospital, and that every county in the province must have a physician, a surgeon, two surgical assistants, two apprentices, and an apothecary. Since twenty to thirty thousand people lived in some counties, this coverage was thin, but before there had been nothing.

  Personally, Catherine did not care for doctors. She was subject to illness; indeed, when she was a grand duchess, her health had frequently worried Empress Elizabeth. Once she reached the throne, Catherine’s ailments had political significance. She felt the burden of absolute power: reports had to be studied, advisers consulted, decisions made. She tried to keep herself healthy through adequate rest, dietary restraint, fresh air, and outdoor walks; nevertheless, she often complained privately of headaches and back pains. In 1768 she wrote to Nikita Panin: “I am quite sick, my back hurts worse than I ever felt since birth. Last night I had some fever from the pain, and I do not know what to attribute it to. I swallow and do everything they [the doctors] wish.” Again to Panin: “It has been four years since the pain in my head has left me. Yesterday I ate nothing the whole day.”

  Although she believed that she was healthier because she ignored physicians, she eventually agreed to keep a personal doctor at court. She chose a young Scotsman, Dr. John Rogerson, of Edinburgh University. Still convinced that she had no need of him, she made him the butt of jokes about modern medicine and liked describing him to others as the kind of medical charlatan found in Molière. “You couldn’t cure a flea bite,” she would say to him. Rogerson would laugh and continue to urge her to take the pill he was offering. When he succeeded, he would pat the empress on the back and say jovially, “Well done, ma’am! Well done!”

  There was no joking, however, when Catherine confronted one of the most serious diseases afflicting her contemporary world: smallpox. Here, the imperial family had no greater protection than the poorest peasant. The boy emperor Peter II had died of the disease at fifteen. Empress Elizabeth’s Holstein fiancé, Catherine’s uncle, had been carried off on the eve of their marriage. Nor could Catherine forget the suffering and disfigurement of her husband, the future Peter III. She considered herself fortunate in having reached adulthood without contracting the pox, but she knew that this reprieve might not last.

  The devastating smallpox experience being inflicted on the Hapsburgs frightened Catherine. In May 1767, Empress Maria Theresa and her daughter-in-law, Maria Josepha, the wife of her son and heir, Joseph II, both contracted smallpox. Five days later, Maria Josepha died; Maria Theresa recovered but was scarred. Her widower son, Joseph II, refused to marry again and had no surviving children. The following October, Maria Theresa’s daughter, also named Maria Josepha, died of smallpox; two other Hapsburg daughters had the disease but survived, with prominent scars. This succession of tragedies convinced Maria Theresa to have her three youngest children inoculated.

  Aware of these personal and dynastic tragedies, Catherine worried about the threat of smallpox to Paul as much as to herself. She knew that the court was never free of talk about the grand duke’s uncertain chance of succession, because he had not yet faced and defeated the disease. She and Panin worried constantly about the boy’s possible exposure. They sought to isolate Paul from crowds and from anyone who was or might be afflicted. Paul chafed at the restrictions put on him. At twelve, he was asked whether he would attend a masquer
ade. He replied,