by Simon Dixon
The Empress tells them, that as her maternal care for her dear people keeps her sleepless by night, and busy by day—and I really believe that her nights are as sleepless as her days are busy—they have no occasion to give themselves any further trouble about public affairs, than to act implicitly as she directs…Happy king of England! who may go about with as much security after a defeat, as after a victory; who has no occasion for a board of spies against his own subjects; and may allow his people to speak, write, and think as they please.64
Richardson’s timing could hardly have been less felicitous. Far from spurning public opinion, Catherine was even keener to nurture it in the aftermath of the abortive Legislative Commission. Now that it was clear that the ideas she had borrowed from Montesquieu and Beccaria were unrecognisable to the majority of Russian nobles, she tried another tack. Posing as ‘Granny’ (Babushka), the benign editorial persona of a new journal, All Sorts, at the beginning of 1769, Catherine tried to coax her subjects to improve their manners by mocking their bad habits in light-hearted journalism in the tradition of Addison and Steele’s Spectator. Much of their material was indeed paraphrased in Catherine’s journal, which openly acknowledged its debt to its progenitor: ‘There is not a little salt in the English Spectator, and All Sorts resembles it, so why should it not contain something useful for society?’65 Although she was still a woman in a hurry—‘We have no doubts regarding the speedy correction of morals and expect an immediate extirpation of all vices’, Granny confidently declared—Catherine permitted a degree of playful banter between her own journal and others in the same vein published by Nikolay Novikov, a former minute-taker at the Legislative Commission who was as keen as she was to disperse the clouds of prejudice and injustice.66 His journal The Drone mocked corrupt judges who had unaccountably failed to read Beccaria On Crimes and Punishments and understood as little of their own duties as they did of the Syrian and Khaldean languages: ‘O enlightenment, heavenly gift, lift the veil of ignorance and cruelty swiftly for the defence of humanity!’67
Although it remains a mystery why Catherine chose to encourage public discussion of the defects of Russian society at the start of her war with the Turks, her turn to journalism was entirely of a piece with the first of five aims she had once jotted down under the heading ‘Maxims of Administration’: ‘One must refine the nation one is to govern.’68 Conscious of the benefits of her own reading, she paid 5000 roubles a year to support a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books, founded in November 1768 under the aegis of her secretary Grigory Kozitsky, a graduate of the Kiev Spiritual Academy who had studied in Leipzig. Kozitsky translated her Instruction into Latin and Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Russian before committing suicide in December 1775. (‘He was in bed with his wife,’ Jeremy Bentham learned later, ‘who finding herself wet in the morning spoke to her husband, and receiving no answer, drew aside the Cloaths and found him with a penknife in his hand, dead, with upwards of 30 wounds about him.’)69 The Society’s life lasted longer. More than forty titles were in print by 1772, and by the time its work was transferred to the newly created Russian Academy in 1783, 112 translations had been published with a further 129 still in progress. Many of the first works to appear were extracts from the Encyclopédie which reflected the empress’s current interest in Greece and the Mediterranean. Boswell’s Corsica came out in 1773. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels may well have reflected her personal tastes (Catherine read English literature in French and German translation). Corneille and Voltaire were also on the list.70
Though she confessed to Voltaire in March 1771 that she was ‘too busy fighting’ to contemplate a widespread implementation of her Instruction, such a burst of intellectual activity helped to create an atmosphere in which the empress might reasonably think that her treatise had not been in vain. That autumn, Novikov published a number of positive European responses to it in his journal The Painter.71 Archbishop Platon had offered more explicit reassurance in his New Year sermon, given in her presence at the Winter Palace. ‘Our age is the age of enlightenment,’ he proclaimed in his most fulsome acknowledgement of the achievements of secular reform, going on to praise impartial judges for bringing clarity to Russian legislation, in words which echoed Catherine’s own, and to praise her for stressing the need for moderate punishments. The aim was to destroy vice itself, rather than the unhappy criminal. ‘Never, indeed, has a government incorporated so abundantly the spirit of guardianship and philanthropy.’72 On her forty-second birthday in April, the empress began a memoir designed to highlight the uncivilised features of Elizabeth’s Court. So it came as a shock when she discovered in May that her own servants were still being dragged off to the palace candle factory to be flogged, just as they had been when she first arrived in Russia. Since this was an ‘evil custom’ that she had banned at the beginning of her reign, she expressed outrage that it had been revived. Henceforth, no liveried servant was to be beaten on any account. ‘If some of them commit a major crime such as theft, then they should be stripped of their livery and sent to the criminal courts. Attempts should be made to correct drunks, defaulters and the disobedient by: 1) gentleness, and if that doesn’t work: 2) detention. 3) The punishment should be 48 hours on bread and water.’73
Evidently the empress was unable to rely on books alone in her quest for polite refinement. Many Russian nobles were illiterate and, as Novikov discovered, it was impossible to make a profit from the small number of sophisticated men who subscribed to his journals (many of which were eventually recirculated as hair-curlers). Though it sold better than any other Russian journal in the eighteenth century, The Drone petered out like the others as print runs slipped. They would scarcely have survived at all without support from Catherine and her Court. Novikov was swift to return the compliment, as part of a new compact between writer and ruler in Russia. When the empress turned to her beloved theatre as the best way of promoting civilised noble values in 1772, Novikov declared O these times!, the first, best-known and most successful of the five comedies she wrote that year, worthy of comparison with Molière. The play was modelled on Die Betschwester by C. F. Gellert, transposing its plot into a denunciation of superstitious bigotry that must have made uncomfortable viewing for some of her more conspicuously pious courtiers.74
It was precisely because she was so keen to eradicate it that Catherine was so prickly in response to condescending foreign verdicts on Russian backwardness. Even so sympathetic a foreigner as Lord Cathcart, who praised the empress for her ‘quickness of thought and discernment, an attention to business and a desire to fill her throne with dignity and with utility even to the lowest of her subjects’, followed a widespread tendency to dismiss ‘the Russians in general’ as ‘men of no education or principles of any sort, though not without quickness of parts’.75 Travelling to Russia in 1769, the Lutheran pastor and political thinker Johann Gottfried Herder regarded the Russians’ desire to imitate as ‘nothing but the healthy disposition of a developing nation—a tendency in the right direction’. But he was equally sure that ‘the great work of “civilizing a nation to perfection”’ was ‘yet to be accomplished’ because the Russians had bungled the adoption of everything they had taken from Western Europe, from the art of navigation to French manners.76 Anxious to counter that her subjects showed ‘great natural aptitude’ for reasoned behaviour, Catherine attributed their earlier failings to faulty methods on the part of her predecessors. ‘I would willingly blame the government for acting clumsily. When this nation is better known in Europe, people will take back many errors and prejudices about Russia.’77
No one seemed more prejudiced than Le Mercier de la Rivière, whose visit to St Petersburg, arranged by Diderot in 1768, failed also because he believed that it was the ruler’s task to implement immutable geometric laws (a strategy totally at variance with Catherine’s flexible cast of mind). She was still complaining in 1774 of the philosophe ‘who supposed, six years ago, that we walked on four paws, and wh
o very politely gave himself the trouble of coming from Martinique to stand us up on our hind feet’.78 When the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche’s A Journey into Siberia (1768) ridiculed her subjects as impoverished alcoholics, superstitious slaves, and lascivious mixed-bathers, Catherine countered with an indignant Antidote, published in French in 1770 (almost certainly in St Petersburg, though the title page said Amsterdam) and translated into English two years later. Acknowledging that parents were tempted to marry their sons off too young in order to acquire a working daughter-in-law, the empress insisted that the practice survived only in isolated provinces where her bishops were striving to restrict it. When the common people drank in Russia, they fell into no ‘greater excess during the carnival than those of any other nation, where Lent is strictly observed’. Of course Russian peasants were credulous, but they were surely not alone in maintaining absurd beliefs. ‘For many centuries,’ Catherine reminded the abbé, French queens ‘could not be brought to bed without an astrologer being placed in the wardrobe to foretell the good or ill fortune of the new-born child’. In sum, she concluded in the spirit of Enlightened universalism, since Russia was ‘inhabited by men’, people would ‘prove the same there as in every other part of the globe’.79
* * *
After a characteristically hesitant start, her armed forces were certainly proving equal to anything the enemy could throw at them. Reviewing the navy at Kronstadt in July 1769, she had treated Admiral Spiridov and his officers to a glass of champagne. But once the fleet had set sail, its fate was out of her hands.80 By mid-October, Spiridov had been obliged to put into Hull, seeking treatment for 800 sick sailors. Catherine was undeterred. It was hard to keep anything in perspective when your principal correspondent was Voltaire. ‘I believe that my fleet is at Gibraltar, if it has not already passed through the Straits,’ wrote an excited empress in mid-December. ‘By now you will have news of it sooner than I. May God protect Mustapha!’ Reporting the fleet’s arrival at Port-Mahon ‘in very good order’ at the beginning of the New Year, Voltaire renewed his encouragement:
I cannot refrain from telling Your Majesty once more that your project is the greatest and most astonishing that was ever conceived: Hannibal’s scarcely came close to it. I very much hope that yours will be more successful than his. Indeed, how will the Turks be able to resist you? They pass for the worst sailors in Europe, and they currently have very few ships.81
So far did it threaten the prevailing maritime balance of power that the appearance of three squadrons of Russian ships in the eastern Mediterranean has been plausibly ranked as ‘one of the most spectacular events of the eighteenth century’.82 Their commander-in-chief was equally extraordinary. While he convalesced from his gallstones, Aleksey Orlov had been swaggering round Tuscany with servants dressed in gold-trimmed livery and two eunuchs taken from a seraglio. Inspirational as a leader of men, he had almost certainly never previously been to sea. So he wisely flew his flag on the 66-gun Three Bishops, commanded by Admiral Samuel Greig of Inverkeithing, who had entered Russian service in 1764. It was Greig who masterminded the victory over the 11,000-man Turkish navy on 24–25 June. A total of 523 Russian lives were lost in a two-hour engagement on the first day, when Fëdor Orlov was one of few survivors rescued from the sinking Saint Evstafy. The following night, it was a different story as Greig destroyed the enemy, holed up in Chesme harbour, with a bomb-ship and four fire-ships. In a characteristically extravagant gesture, Orlov later blew up one of his own ships to give artists an accurate impression of the devastation he had inflicted.83 ‘Almost a hundred vessels of every kind have been reduced to ashes,’ Catherine boasted to Voltaire. ‘I dare not say how many Muslims perished: it may be as many as twenty thousand.’84 Trumpeting news of her triumphs to Europe was one of her greatest contributions to the war effort. Another was inspiring her commanders. On discovering that Orlov had lost a signet ring with her portrait on it at Chesme, she sent another to spur him on: ‘Having lost that ring, you won the battle and destroyed the enemy fleet. On receipt of this new one, you will capture their fortresses.’85
That was exactly what General Rumyantsev was doing, in a scarcely less spectacular series of victories in Moldavia and Wallachia that had a far greater impact on the outcome of the war. In July 1770, he led a 25,000-strong army to victory over 150,000 enemy soldiers at the River Larga, emphasising in his reports to the empress the leading roles played by Lieutenant General Potëmkin and by General Bauer, a military engineer who had been close to her through his friendship with Grigory Orlov since entering Russian service the year before.86 Their troops received simple silver medals inscribed with the date of the battle and a bust of the empress. By mid December 18,000 such medals, minted in St Petersburg in October, had already been delivered to Jassy, and when these proved too few to meet the demand, she authorised 1157 more in the spring of 1772.87 All her armies’ victories were celebrated with an elaborate Te Deum at the Kazan Church in St Petersburg.88 Yet for Catherine there was always a measure of relief amidst the triumphalism. Tidings of Rumyantsev’s next victory at the River Kagul, which reached Tsarskoye Selo on the evening of 1 August, unleashed a migraine that prevented her from writing for three days.89
When she had recovered, she composed an ironic letter to Voltaire, reassuring him that there was as yet no prospect of a truce:
I agree with you that peace is a fine thing: so long as it existed, I thought it the nec plus ultra of happiness. Now that I have been at war for almost two years, I see that one can get used to anything. War, it is true, does have some fine moments. The one great fault I find with it is that [in war] one does not love one’s neighbour as oneself. I used to think it dishonourable to do people harm; however I console myself somewhat today by saying to Mustapha [like Molière]: ‘Georges [Dandin], you wished it on yourself!’ And after that reflection, I am at ease, almost as before.90
In fact, that same month, Catherine, while planning for the following summer’s campaign, permitted Rumyantsev to enter into peace negotiations with the Turks provided that they released her imprisoned ambassador at Constantinople (a condition they refused). What she was not prepared to accept was the repeated offers of mediation made by Austria and Prussia at the instigation of Frederick the Great, who was desperate to prevent Russia from making further unilateral conquests.91
Catherine’s determination to hold out for maximal gain made it impossible for Prince Henry of Prussia, sent to St Petersburg by Frederick in October 1770, to persuade Russia to settle for peace.92 It was the first time Catherine had seen him since their youthful dalliance at the Court of Berlin. Small in stature and cold in manner, the king’s notoriously ugly younger brother made a poor impression on courtiers who mocked the toupee perched precariously above his unnaturally high forehead. The empress, by contrast, made a great show of warming to him, declaring Henry ‘cheerful, honest and humane’ and reassuring Frau Johanna Bielke, a friend of her mother’s in Hamburg, that ‘no visit from a prince could be more agreeable to me than his’. At any rate, as she observed sarcastically to Voltaire, shortly after Henry’s departure in January 1771, ‘he seemed to enjoy himself here more than the abbé Chappe, who raced along the post-road in an entirely enclosed sleigh, from which he saw everything in Russia.’93
Competitive to the core, Catherine had good reason to impress her Prussian rivals. ‘You know how patriotic I am,’ she reminded Field Marshal Saltykov, who had defeated Frederick at Kunersdorf: ‘I wish our nation to shine in all the military and civil virtues and that we should surpass all other nations in every genre.’ So she spared no expense to ensure that her guest returned to Potsdam convinced that the Russians were ‘sufficiently polite to know how to beat their enemies’.94 She sent three yachts to meet him at Reval, where she personally arranged for a suitable wine cellar and Court chef to be on hand at the Yekaterintal Palace.95 Soon after arriving in St Petersburg, Henry attended the thanksgiving prayers for the fall of Bender. Later he was shown captured Turkish standards at
the Peter-Paul fortress, where Peter the Great’s ‘little boat’ was on display as a symbol of Russian naval power.96 Determined to demonstrate that she could outdo even such a virile predecessor, Catherine also took Henry to see the ‘thunder-rock’, a block of Karelian granite weighing some 3 million pounds on which Falconet planned to mount his statue of Tsar Peter. This massive boulder, so-called because peasants believed that the crack at one corner had been caused by a bolt of lightning, had taken far longer than Henry himself to reach the Russian capital. Selected for the purpose just before the outbreak of war, it began its overland journey from Count Bruce’s estate at Konnaya in November 1769, using machinery designed by a Greek engineer. ‘Daringly performed’ was the inscription on the medal struck to commemorate Catherine’s visit to see the rock on 20 January 1770, when it was being rolled along at the rate of approximately a mile per month. For the final part of its journey, it was floated down the Neva on a purpose-built raft, reaching St Petersburg on the eighth anniversary of Catherine’s coronation. A few days later, Prince Henry saw it manoeuvred into position at the centre of Senate Square, where it still stands today. Acknowledged across Europe as a stunning feat of engineering, this operation was duly claimed by Catherine’s panegyrists as superior to the building of the Egyptian pyramids and the creation of the Colossus of Rhodes.97
