Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  We can only guess what might have transpired had the Legislative Commission been allowed to run its course. Its proceedings generated a vast reservoir of information, much of which helped to inform Catherine’s subsequent legislation, and its sub-commissions continued to work until around 1774. The gold and silver tabernacle donated by the empress to the Dormition Cathedral on the Commission’s tenth anniversary depicted Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments as a reminder of her status as lawgiver.118 A skeletal secretariat was still employed at the end of her reign. By then, however, the whole project was little more than a memory. All through the empress’s time in Moscow, the international situation had been increasingly destabilised by her support for a group of Orthodox fanatics in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, a perverted stand in favour of religious toleration which resulted in civil war. When Cossack troops were sent to suppress it in June 1768, they crossed the border into the Ottoman Empire, sacking the little frontier town of Balta and massacring its Jews. In retaliation, the Turks declared war in October by imprisoning the Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Since most deputies were required for military service, Catherine announced the suspension of the Legislative Commission on 18 December. The 203rd and final plenary session was held on 12 January 1769. Now all Europe had another extraordinary prospect to occupy its attention. ‘An unsuccessful foreign war tends to impair the authority of all despots,’ warned William Richardson, ‘and this is the first foreign war she has ever waged.’ 119

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Imperial Ambitions

  1768–1772

  Catherine’s readiness to provoke a conflict in defence of Orthodoxy occasioned widespread surprise. ‘Where bigotry baffles reason, and where fanaticism supplies courage,’ Sir George Macartney remarked in 1766, the result was bound to be uncertain: ‘A religious war, however justly undertaken, is always of the most odious nature, and of all wars of the most doubtful success.’1 However, if the empress’s cause proved unexpected, then there had never been any doubt of her seething ambition. Having entered the Seven Years’ War in 1756 as the junior partner in the anti-Prussian coalition, Russia had emerged by 1763 as ‘the arbiter of eastern Europe’.2 Victories over Frederick the Great at Gross-Jägersdorf and Kunersdorf, not long after he had himself routed the French at Rossbach, had raised memories of the glorious era of Peter the Great. No ambassador accredited to St Petersburg in the early years of her reign could fail to sense Russia’s growing self-confidence. ‘This Court rises hourly higher and higher in her pride,’ Macartney reported in 1765, ‘and dazzled by her present prosperity looks with less deference upon other powers and with more admiration on herself.’3

  Now Catherine was keen to translate isolated military triumphs into lasting diplomatic prestige. As Joseph II discovered during his visit to Russia in 1780, she was closely involved in day-to-day diplomacy. ‘Among the conversations in which our guest engaged me hourly,’ reported the empress’s secretary, Alexander Bezborodko, ‘he asked me about Her Imperial Majesty’s way of managing business, and was amazed when in answer to his question I said that all the dispatches from our ministry, whether they be sent to our ambassadors or to [foreign] courts, have been approved in draft by the Sovereign herself, so that not a single paper goes out that has not been presented to Her Majesty in the original: he thought that relations or letters were put up to her only in abbreviated form, and only those directly worthy of her attention.’4 Yet for all her hard work, there was a limit to what Catherine could do. Russia’s finances were as badly dented by the war as any other power’s, her soldiers remained unpaid, and the empress’s position on the throne, though never seriously threatened, even by Mirovich, was sufficiently uncertain to deter any grandiose foreign adventure.

  Poland, over which Russia had effectively established a protectorate since 1717, seemed to offer the greatest prospect of gain at the lowest level of risk. In September 1763, the death of King Augustus III (who was also the Elector of Saxony) opened up what Princess Dashkova later described as ‘a vast field for political intrigue’.5 Following the convictions of a lifetime, Chancellor Bestuzhev tried to persuade Catherine to support another Saxon candidate for the Polish throne, acceptable to Austria and France. His failure marked the end of a long career and a decisive moment in Russian foreign policy. Instead the empress decided to support the election of a native Pole—and she knew just who she wanted. Soon after her coup, Catherine had promised Stanislaw Poniatowski that she would make him king, just as Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had once imagined. According to Dashkova, whose husband died while serving with the Russian troops sent to put pressure on the Poles, Grigory Orlov and Zakhar Chernyshëv were appalled by the idea. Neither relished the prospect of a revival of the empress’s relationship with her former lover. They need not have worried. When it came to international power politics, Catherine always set personal feelings aside. Now it was up to Nikita Panin, who took charge of Russian foreign policy at the end of October 1763, to realise her manipulative intent.6

  It was far from easy for Panin to hold the balance of forces at Court. Behind the scenes, Zakhar Chernyshëv was already so eager to annexe Polish territory that on 6 October he outlined a plan, probably hatched earlier in the spring, to redraw the border along a line similar to the one eventually agreed in the first partition of 1772.7 When the news leaked out, Catherine promptly denied any expansionist ambitions. Claiming that she ruled on the basis of ‘justice, equity and humanity’, a sanctimonious manifesto of December 1763 declared:

  If ever malice and falsehood could invent a rumour absolutely untrue, it is certainly that which people have dared to spread about, that we allegedly decided to press for the election of a Diet simply in order that with its help and connivance, we might facilitate the means of invading certain provinces of the King of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to dismember them and then to appropriate them for ourselves and our Empire. The beginning of our reign alone is enough to destroy at its root this sort of fiction and deprive it of all likelihood and foundation. We hold that the prosperity of a people does not consist in foreign conquests. We are firmly convinced that a ruler is only greater when he directs the springs of government towards the welfare and happiness of his people.8

  It was true that Russia had little to gain from conquering a state whose overwhelmingly Catholic population, Jewish minority, unruly noble elite, and direct borders with Prussia and Austria would all have been liabilities to St Petersburg (as indeed they proved in the era of the partitions). But that did not mean that Catherine had no ulterior motives in Poland. In fact, Augustus’s demise provided her with a perfect opportunity to extend her indirect control over a vital buffer state by installing a pliant ruler and keeping his government weak.9

  She knew that her rivals had similar ambitions. ‘Don’t laugh at me because I leapt from my chair when I heard of the death of the king of Poland,’ she warned Panin: ‘the king of Prussia jumped up from his table.’10 Fortunately for her, Frederick was even more preoccupied by internal reconstruction than she was and decided that his best option was to collaborate with Russia to frustrate his Austrian rivals. Like the Prussians, the French were stymied by their disastrous performance in the Seven Years’ War and without their support the Habsburgs were powerless to intervene. Given this relatively free hand, Catherine was able to engineer Stanislaw’s election in August 1764.11 To Panin, she could hardly restrain her delight:

  Nikita Ivanovich! I congratulate you on the king we have made. This event greatly increases my trust in you, since I see how faultless all your measures were. I didn’t want to miss showing you how pleased I am. My back aches so badly that I cannot hold a pen for long, so would you kindly, having explained the reason, take my place on this occasion and write to Count Keyserling and to Prince Repnin, expressing my pleasure at their work and zeal, through which they have obtained no small glory both for themselves and for us. And order a letter to the new King to be prepared for my signature, in reply to h
is. Either I have rheumatism in my back or I am dying. I fear that it may be a stone, only after a bath it felt better for the first time, so perhaps it is only a chill.12

  There was a price to pay for Frederick’s collaboration, and it came in the form of a defensive alliance with Prussia, concluded in March 1764. In the unstable balance of power bequeathed by the Seven Years’ War, Catherine would have preferred to keep her distance from both Austria and Prussia who were now her main rivals to fill the vacuum created by the decline of French influence in eastern Europe. However, since Austria and Prussia were themselves implacable enemies, competing for the domination of the smaller German states, it was utopian to suppose that Russia could stay neutral for long.13 Since the Austrians remained allied to the French, who continued to resent Russian policies against their traditional satellites, Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, an Austrian alliance for Catherine was impossible. Frederick, who made it a principle of Prussian policy ‘to seek an alliance with those of one’s neighbours capable of delivering the most dangerous blows’, was swift to see the opportunity presented by Catherine’s ambitions in Poland.14 Outwitting her inexperienced ambassador in Berlin, he inveigled the empress into an alliance by pretending that he might otherwise strike a wholly improbable deal with the Turks.15

  Making a virtue from necessity, Panin envisaged the Prussian alliance as the first building block in a new ‘Northern System’ designed to protect Russia’s hegemony in the Baltic. He described what he meant to Ivan Chernyshëv, who set out for London as ambassador in 1768:

  By the Northern System we have in mind and mean the largest and closest possible union of northern powers in a direct focal point for our common interest, in order to oppose to the Bourbon and Austrian Houses a firm counter-weight among European Courts, and a northern peace completely free from their influence, which has led so often to harmful effects.16

  This was easier said than done. Frederick had no interest in an alliance with Britain and was anxious not to be drawn into Russian machinations in Sweden. Willing enough to support such machinations as a way of embarrassing the French, the British saw no reason to support Catherine’s ambitions in Poland or the Ottoman Empire. Though the empress renewed the Anglo-Russian trade treaty of 1734 in 1766, on terms favourable to Russia, Macartney failed to conclude a diplomatic alliance because Catherine insisted on unilateral British assistance in the event of war with the Turks. ‘This Court has listened to me with the most provoking phlegm and the most stoical indifference,’ the ambassador was forced to admit. ‘The result of the whole is a flat refusal.’17 In the end, the only tangible evidence of a wider Northern System was the defensive alliance concluded between Russia and Denmark—still a significant naval presence in the Baltic—at the end of February 1765. This scarcely counted as a close union of northern powers. And even if it had, there remained an obvious defect in Panin’s Northern System, which left the southern and south-western parts of Russia’s extensive borders exposed to precisely the sort of incident that sparked off the Russo-Turkish War in 1768.

  Though he remained at Catherine’s side until 1781, Panin’s authority was never the same again. Against his advice, she decided to direct the war through a newly created council, which bore all the marks of her deft approach to government. Though the council was a purely advisory body, the empress left its members in no doubt that they were complicit in any decisions that might emerge from their deliberations:

  I intend to carry out all the measures proposed with great firmness, since I take them to be measures which you, moved by zeal, fervour and devotion to me and to your country, have unanimously advised me to take in this important matter: hence, if any one still has any doubts, let him say so without loss of time.18

  * * *

  Not content with risking her empire in war with the Turks, Catherine risked her own life in October 1768 by electing to be inoculated against smallpox. As an advocate of fresh air and a wholesome diet, the empress generally maintained a healthy disrespect for doctors—‘charlatans’, as she described them on the death of the French king, ‘who always do you more harm than good, witness Louis XV, who had ten of them around him and is dead all the same’.19 Still, faced with two evils, as she emphasised to Frederick the Great, ‘every reasonable man’ would choose the lesser, ‘all other things being equal’.20 So, rather than relapse into more indecisive shuttling between suburban palaces—her pattern, as we have seen, throughout the summer of 1768—Catherine determined to submit herself to a controversial treatment. Inoculation had been banned by the Sorbonne as an interference with the workings of Providence and was opposed even in some Enlightened circles on the grounds that it might lead to infection. Provided all went well, she could claim to have acted both rationally and courageously.21

  The doctor chosen to perform the operation was the fifty-six-year-old Thomas Dimsdale, whose celebrated treatise on the subject had been published in 1767.22 When he arrived in St Petersburg at the end of August, Dimsdale found himself ‘upon as free and easy a footing in the imperial palace as he could be in the house of any nobleman in England’.23 Despite his execrable French and Catherine’s minimal English, doctor and patient established an immediate rapport (their interpreter, on days when he was not paralysed by gout, was Alexander Cherkasov, who had studied informally at Cambridge in the early 1740s and now headed the Medical College). Understandably nervous about exposing a foreign sovereign to risk, and sharing the widespread belief that diseases varied according to climate and geography, Dimsdale hesitated to operate until he was sure that his treatment would be as effective in Russia as it had been at home. Catherine gave him the confidence to continue, even when tests on impoverished local youths proved equivocal. Adding sauce to an already titillating story, a Scottish merchant in St Petersburg reported that the doctor, whose presence in Russia was an open secret, had ‘free access’ every morning to the empress’s bedroom, where Grigory Orlov often sat on the bedspread beside them.24 Grigory, however, was away on a hunting expedition when Catherine finally summoned Dimsdale to the Winter Palace in the dead of night on 12 October. Apart from Cherkasov, only two others were present at the inoculation: Panin, the treatment’s leading advocate, and Caspar von Saldern, the fixer from Holstein who had attached himself to Paul’s household in the 1760s.

  Complaining of low mood, Catherine retreated to Tsarskoye Selo on the following day. At first she was able to live relatively normally, chatting and playing cards in the afternoon, taking regular walks outside and even a drive to inspect the new road to Gatchina.25 As she retired to her apartments over the course of the next few days, Panin let it be known that she continued to work, and that her only reported symptom, other than ‘a very favourable eruption of small pox, very few in number’, was a mild fever.26 She also complained of persistent giddiness, ‘in a manner according to her like drunkenness’, and of mild constipation, which Dimsdale treated with his trusty bedtime laxative made from calomel, crabs’ claws and tartar emetic, either crushed into pills or mixed with syrup or jelly. To keep her temperature down, he prescribed the occasional glass of cold water and a stroll in the unheated Great Hall. Having noticed the first marks on her arm on the evening of 19 October, he spent the whole of the following day on watch in her apartments. Catherine woke at seven, having ‘sweated considerably in the night’. ‘The inflammation of the arms was spread considerably & a number of small pustules were discoverable around the incision.’ Only one spot had appeared on her forehead, offering no serious threat to her complexion, and two more on her hand or wrist. ‘Her complaints were of stiffness under the arms, particularly the left, of some pain in her back and legs and a sort of general weariness, but not sleepy as yesterday. Upon the whole Her Majesty was very brisk and cheerful the whole afternoon.’27 Now the danger was past, she began a period of active convalescence, informing Saltykov in Moscow on 27 October that she had not only remained on her feet throughout, but experienced only the sort of minor discomfort that was to be expected. ‘I t
ell you this happy outcome so that you can counter any erroneous rumours.’28 After another drive and a walk in the fresh air, she felt sufficiently confident to reassure Falconet, who had written to her in mock reproach for defying the Sorbonne, that she had no intention of succumbing to the disease: ‘They often decide in favour of absurdities, which in my opinion should have discredited them long ago; after all, the human species are no longer goslings.’29

  Following Catherine’s return to St Petersburg on 1 November, Paul, who might have been inoculated earlier had he not been recovering from chickenpox, was treated next evening after a formal Te Deum in the palace chapel led by Archbishop Gavriil.30 More than a hundred nobles soon followed suit. ‘Starting with me and my son,’ Catherine boasted to Ivan Chernyshëv a fortnight later, ‘there is not an aristocratic household that does not contain some of the inoculated—and many complain that they had smallpox naturally and so cannot follow the fashion.’ Grigory Orlov and Kirill Razumovsky were among the ‘countless others’ who had ‘passed through Mr Dimsdale’s hands’, including even ‘beauties’ such as Princess Shcherbatova and Princess Trubetskaya. ‘See what setting an example can do! Three months ago, no one wanted to hear of it, and yet now they look on it as salvation.’31

  Once Paul’s survival seemed assured, the next great feast in the Orthodox calendar—the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Temple on 21 November—marked a natural opportunity for a formal service of thanksgiving in the Winter Palace chapel. ‘On the inside of a rail which extended across the room,’ William Richardson recorded, ‘and close by the pillar which was next to the altar, on the south side, stood the Empress and her son; and also on the inside of the rail, and on each side of the altar, was a choir of musicians. All the rest who witnessed, or took part in the solemnity, excepting the priests, stood on the outside of the rail.’32 This service, commemorated annually at Court until 1795 and perpetuated by the Senate in February 1769 in churches across the empire, was the first of a barrage of measures designed to propagate the image of a selfless and knowledgeable empress conferring benefits on her people. Bells rang out day and night from every church in the capital for the next two days, with fireworks across the city at midnight.33 No one was more relieved than Dimsdale. ‘I shall never forget the care you gave me,’ Catherine later wrote to him, ‘and the anxiety you experienced in the time following my inoculation and that of my son.’34 On her name day, 24 November, she invested her doctor as a baron of the Russian empire and rewarded him with £10,000—an outlandish sum, supplemented by an annual pension of £500 for life.35 Alexander Markov, the boy who had supplied the necessary infected matter, was ennobled under the unflattering soubriquet ‘ospenny’ (‘Lord Smallpox’). The Court theatre staged an allegorical ballet, Prejudice Overcome, in which the Genius of Science (played by the ballet master Angiolini), Minerva (representing Catherine), and Ruthenia (Russia), conquered Superstition and Ignorance with the assistance of Alcind (Paul) and released the common people from their grasp.36 The commemorative medal, struck in 1772, when inoculations were still being administered in a variety of Russian hospitals, drove home the empress’s fundamental message: ‘She herself set an example.’37