Although interested in her reputation abroad, Elisabeth was notoriously lazy about conducting domestic political business. She never signed into law the most important political initiative of her reign, a much-needed revision of Russia's legal code of 1649. Containing such interesting features as denying special treatment to nobles, it had been prepared in 1755 by the capable and versatile Peter Shuvalov, who would soon turn his talents to war finance and military engineering. Why Elisabeth refused to sign it will remain unknown, the most charitable explanation being that it retained capital punishment, a practice she consistently opposed. She was Europe's first eighteenth-century ruler who never permitted public executions, well before such enlightened policies became fashionable.20
Elisabeth's lengthy reign was generally prosperous both for herself and her subjects. Its first fifteen years saw no foreign wars, Russia's longest such respite in two centuries, and the population rose from 15.6 million in 1723 to 23.3 million in the census begun at Elisabeth's death. Foreign trade also increased dramatically: by the mid-1740s the average number of ships, primarily English, trading in Russia's new capital had more than doubled from Anna's reign. Elisabeth's personal prosperity increased after 1744 through income from new silver mines in the Urals that were managed for her private use; significant amounts of gold were also produced there after 1748. Thus she could afford elaborate displays of conspicuous consumption at court while proclaiming measures of tax relief in 1753 and 1754.21
During her reign, Russia began replacing imported leadership in military and cultural affairs. In the early 1740s most Russian generals were still foreigners, but Anna's cadet school was now producing high-quality Russian officers. Elisabeth's brief military intervention in western Europe in 1748 was a failure, but after 1757 native officers performed far better during the long, difficult war against Frederick the Great. However, Russian naval officers never matched its infantry commanders. Culturally, the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg remained a foreign enclave, but Russia's first European-style university was founded at Moscow. Russian music progressed: in 1753 the brother of Elisabeth's vocally talented lover Alexis Razumovsky formed a forty-man orchestra that played in her capital, while the empress ordered an opera to be composed and sung in Russian. A French director trained the first generation of Russian painters in her Academy of Fine Arts, created in 1757 under the patronage of Elisabeth's next important lover. Something similar happened with architecture, in which by 1760 young Russians had begun to compete with famous foreigners.22
Elisabeth's private life could not have been more different from that of her sixteenth-century unmarried English namesake. Instead of a pretense of virginity, the empress preferred a simulation of marriage to Razumovsky, who soon became known in Russia as the Nocturnal Emperor. No dashing noble courtier, he was the son of a Ukrainian peasant and had attracted Elisabeth's attention through his exceptional singing voice. The enormous social gulf between them resembles that between Elisabeth's own parents, with the sexes reversed. Although proud of his honorary title as count of the Holy Roman Empire (1744), Razumovsky never displayed any interest in Russian political questions. In a reversal of the conventional double standard, he had no known mistresses, but she had several brief affairs. The last half of Elisabeth's reign saw a prolonged liaison with Ivan Shuvalov, a man eighteen years younger than herself who also became a major political adviser. Like a queen-consort dealing with her husband's most important mistress, Razumovsky remained on good terms with his young successor and maintained an apartment immediately adjoining Elisabeth's throughout her reign.
Tsarina Elisabeth displayed a bewildering variety of moods about gender codes. She rode astride horses, even wearing a man's hat, but forbade other women from doing so. She also enjoyed dressing as a man, appearing as a French musketeer or Dutch sailor at court masquerades where she required both sexes to cross-dress. At the same time, she acquired prodigious numbers of dresses, changing them at least once a day while threatening beatings and exile to Siberia for any woman who deliberately imitated her hairstyle or her dress. She was also so terrified of mice that she hired a man to supervise thirty giant castrated cats in order to keep her palaces free of them.
The last part of Elisabeth's reign is dominated by her military alliance with her female colleague Maria Theresa. Rarely has Europe seen two major female sovereigns so close in age (Elisabeth was eight years older) whose reigns coincided for twenty years. The Russian empress and the Habsburg heiress overcame their early mutual wariness to remain close diplomatic allies after 1748, even though their religious traditions were different and their states had not been traditional allies. Although their political portraits reflected completely different domestic situations (Maria Theresa was frequently portrayed amidst her numerous children, while Elisabeth was never painted together with her nephew and heir), the similarities between these women seem important. Both refused to put vanquished political enemies to death in the 1740s. Both constructed huge residential palaces which still delight tourists today, and both did so while engaged in an enormously expensive war against Prussia. Both even expressed a desire to fight the famous soldier-king Frederick II in person. As we have seen, Maria Theresa blamed her inability to do so during the early 1740s on her continual pregnancies. A dozen years later, Russia's pleasure-loving, childless tsarina, now well into middle age and overweight, similarly contemplated commanding her army in person and told her attendants, “My father [Peter I] went; do you believe that I am stupider than he?” They reportedly replied, “He was a man; you are not.”23
Elisabeth and her chancellor understood clearly the relationship between diplomacy and warfare, that only through large-scale successful military intervention in European dynastic wars could the Russian Empire become a major player in European power politics. When the next major conflict erupted in 1756, Russia jumped in with a large army. Austro-Russian collaboration raised occasional difficulties. Shuvalov exhibited his versatility by creating a conical long-range howitzer, but only after Frederick II captured some of them and exhibited them at Berlin in 1758 did Shuvalov compose a letter to Maria Theresa, in excellent French, explaining how to make them. The two female sovereigns came very close to destroying the famous soldier-king and his no-longer invincible armies, as Maria Theresa's troops raided Berlin, while Elisabeth's even occupied it for three days. In March 1760 their last treaty contained a secret clause proposing “mutually and in most solemn fashion” a somewhat premature division of Frederick II's possessions: the Austrian heiress reclaimed all of Silesia, while the Russian empress remained in possession of those parts of the kingdom of Prussia that are “presently conquered by the armies of Her Imperial Majesty of all Russia.” Their common enemy escaped humiliation only through Elisabeth's death. No other prolonged military alliance between two major women rulers has been recorded in the annals of European war and diplomacy.24
Russian occupation of eastern Prussia lasted three years before Elisabeth's Prussophile nephew immediately returned it to Frederick II, demanding nothing in exchange. Old Fritz admitted in private that the bears had behaved themselves quite well, and the extent of Prussian collaboration with the occupying forces so annoyed him that he never visited the region again. The Russian National Library preserves eulogies of Elisabeth printed at Königsberg in 1760 and 1761, and the empress used her private silver hoard to make high-quality coins bearing her image for use in Prussia. Now a forgotten Russian exclave, the oblast of Kaliningrad still contains a Stalin-era statue of Elisabeth dressed in her Guards uniform.25
Catherine II: Greatness and Female Rule
The volume and variety of information both by and about Europe's only female ruler generally known as the Great are simply overwhelming. In the first years of her reign, hyperbole was confined to such phrases as “the most praiseworthy, most powerful Empress and lady Catherine, autocrat of all the Russias, our God-sent most gracious Mother of the Country.” But official adulation soon escalated; in subsequent decades she wa
s routinely called simply the Great. A recent French series profiling great statesmen points out that both Voltaire and the Prince de Ligne used the masculine form le Grand to describe her. Catherine herself apparently preferred to have it both ways: on the exterior was a charming, gracious woman, while inside were the mental habits of a man—and, one might add, more disciplined energy than all but a very few men or women have possessed.26
Her coup d'état of 1762 could only have happened in a state already long accustomed to seeing women seize power in this manner. Her political perils before acquiring the throne recall those of Elizabeth Tudor in England or Isabel la Católica in Castile, but Catherine II's acquisition of sovereign power was far more remarkable than theirs because of the total absence of any hereditary claim. Hers was not Europe's longest period of female rule—Catherine II was nearly a decade older than these illustrious predecessors when she seized power—but it undeniably ranks among the most transformational. She became Russia's second major Westernizer, Peter's political heir, whose task and glory were to fulfill his dream. Her most enduring monument, Étienne-Maurice Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great, which inspired Aleksandr Pushkin's “The Bronze Horseman,” still occupies a central location in her capital city. Its dual inscriptions, four simple Russian and Latin words, proclaim it a gift to Peter the First from Catherine the Second. If Peter's biological daughter transformed her father's simple log house into a pilgrimage shrine, his German-born admirer totally eclipsed her when it came to commemorations.
The sheer number of written public documents surviving from Catherine's reign necessarily makes any brief summary unsatisfactory. Perhaps only Louis XIV or Philip II ever read and annotated more papers. As she remarked in an epitaph she wrote for herself in 1788, “Work was easy for her.” Catherine composed almost 10,000 letters, in both French and Russian (with occasional phrases in German), and signed about 14,500 decrees, by far the largest totals for any prerevolutionary Russian ruler. She also wrote incessantly about an amazing variety of subjects, ranging from the nascent study of comparative languages to numerous plays, educational manuals for her grandchildren, and a great deal of Russian history; she even began the first translation of the Iliad into Russian. Before the Revolution of 1917, many of her most essential state papers were published by the Russian Historical Society, and twelve volumes of her personal works also appeared between 1901 and 1907. But because the Soviet regime long ignored her, both series remain incomplete. In particular, the preparatory drafts and memoranda that preceded Catherine's major decisions remain widely scattered and hard to assemble. A senior Russian archivist calculated in 1996 that updating these source publications will require “more than one generation of historians.”27
Since 1917 more biographies of Catherine II have appeared in west European languages, especially English, than in Russian. The title Great is more often attached to her on foreign titles, whereas a thousand-page-long Russian anthology from 2006 discusses Catherine II pro et contra. Nevertheless, most Russian scholars agree that the most important recent study of her reign was published in England by Isabel de Madariaga, the daughter of an exiled Spanish statesman. Catherine would have enjoyed the flurry of commemorative conferences for the bicentennial of her death in 1996. In Russia, an enormous gathering at her capital (once again named St. Petersburg) presented no fewer than 128 papers, subsequently published only in Russian summaries later that year. Meanwhile, other commemorations were held at her coronation site (Moscow), her German birthplace (Stettin), the seat of her father's tiny patrimony (Zerbst), the home of both her mother and her husband (Holstein), and elsewhere in Germany (Mainz). Another international commemoration in Paris coincided with the opening at Amsterdam of a major exposition of treasures from her reign in the Hermitage Museum.28
Even if coups d'état by women were becoming a Russian tradition, Catherine's displayed unusual daring. Voicing his habitual misogyny, Frederick II subsequently claimed that “neither the honor nor the crime of this revolution can be justly credited to the empress,” but it is undeniable that her audacity reached levels never imagined by her recent female predecessors: at her coup, Catherine named herself a colonel of the guards and led them on horseback, dressed in one of their traditional uniforms. She took great pride in commemorating this feat with a very large canvas, one that still hangs in the largest room of the palace where she received her husband's surrender (see fig. 14).
Why did it succeed? In only six months her husband, Peter III, had first alienated public opinion by abandoning conquered Prussian territory with no visible advantages. He then alienated the elite Russian guards by making them wear Prussian-style uniforms and terrified the Orthodox church by secularizing many of its properties. At the same time, he made two popular changes, freeing the Russian nobility from Peter I's obligation to serve the state either militarily or bureaucratically for twenty-five years and abolishing the much-feared secret police, thereby greatly reducing the risks to plotters. Peter III also affected an eighteenth-century aristocratic nonchalance about his wife's pregnancy by another man. But it was a serious mistake because the father, Grigory Orlov, was a popular Guards officer with four well-placed brothers. After Catherine gave birth to her second son, the Orlovs and their friends provided the muscle for her coup. Frederick II heard about their plot and tried to warn his great admirer Peter III, but, as Old Fritz put it, the tsar abdicated “like a child being sent to bed"—and conveniently died a few days later while under the supervision of one of Orlov's brothers. Because she had absolutely no hereditary claim to govern, several plotters believed Catherine would become regent for her eight-year-old son. After rewarding the Guards and reassuring the church, the new empress skillfully finessed this option. She refused to ratify her husband's shameful peace with Prussia and created commissions to study the problem of abolishing the service requirement for nobles and the fate of church lands.29
Many political questions were sorted out during the next two years. Grigory Orlov was put in charge of the artillery; like Elisabeth's Nocturnal Emperor, he took no official part in Russia's government. Very few high-ranking officials who had served Peter III were dismissed; some were transferred, but none was exiled. Peter III had recalled Anna's former chief minister, Biron, now seventy-three years old, after twenty years in Siberia, and Catherine II restored him as Duke of Courland, a title he had held since 1737. An important piece of old business was resolved in 1764 when Nameless Prisoner Number One, the former baby Tsar Ivan VI, was killed by his guards during a botched attempt to liberate him. The conspirator was executed, the first such public event in over twenty years, while Ivan's actual killers received secret but tiny rewards. Meanwhile, Catherine began tidying up Russia's finances and modernizing its administration. She increased the number of officials, doubled their salaries, and appointed an incorruptible chief investigator who prosecuted bribery vigorously.
After using them as pretexts for overthrowing him, Catherine began implementing her husband's changes in both foreign policy and church affairs. Abroad, she signed a treaty with Frederick II in 1764 that became the cornerstone of her foreign policy for sixteen years. Prussian support helped Catherine to seat one of her former lovers, Stanislas Poniatowski, on the Polish throne after it became vacant in 1763 (Biron became one of his vassals). Besides abandoning Elisabeth's alliance with Maria Theresa for her husband's Prussian alliance, Catherine quietly accepted two of Peter III's major changes in domestic affairs. She confirmed his highly popular abolition of the service requirement for nobles and resumed his controversial policy of transferring church peasants to state control. She ruthlessly silenced an arrogant and eloquent prelate who also supported the claims of Ivan VI. After ordering his arrest at a synod, the new empress attended his interrogation and deprived him of his offices. When he remained obstinate, she ordered him defrocked and shut in an Estonian fortress, where his guards spoke no Russian and knew him only as Andrew the Liar.30 Catherine did reverse one of Peter III's reforms: within a few
months she quietly reinstated the secret police, while attempting to eliminate their use of torture.
Catherine II believed that “true talent is usually modest and hidden away somewhere on the periphery” and that “true valor … never strives for recognition, never displays greed, and never advertises itself.”31 She searched diligently for these qualities. Once she had located reliable collaborators for sensitive positions, the empress tended to keep them in office indefinitely. Even her love life settled down after a period of promiscuity in the 1750s, one which continues to perplex her biographers over the paternity of the crown prince, Grand Duke Paul. Orlov was undoubtedly the father of the boy born in 1762 and raised as Alexander Bobrinskoy, and he remained Catherine II's lover for twelve years, the longest tenure of any holder of this particular position. Some key civilian officials served for at least thirty years; A. A. Vyazemsky, her incorruptible prosecutor, remained in this capacity until his death in 1792, while Stepan Sheskovsky, the reliable head of her secret police, also held his position for thirty years. So did a third important official. Her husband had named George Browne, an eccentric Irish Catholic soldier with a distinguished record in the Seven Years’ War, to command the army for his proposed invasion of Denmark. Instead, Catherine named him governor of her two Baltic provinces with German nobility, Estonia and Livonia, and kept him in office until he died in 1792 at the age of ninety-four.32 South of him, old Biron, who died in his Italianate palace built during Anna's reign at the age of eighty-two, and his son Peter ruled Courland as reliable Russian clients until it was surrendered to Catherine at the third Polish partition in 1795.
Catherine II's early political program culminated with the convening of Russia's unprecedented legislative convention of 1767, which accomplished little beyond increasing her stature outside Russia. Reforms were sidetracked in 1768 by a war declared by Turkey, which Catherine excitedly claimed had “aroused the sleeping cat and … now they [in Europe] will talk about us.”33 It lasted six years, produced some remarkable victories, provoked Emelyan Pugachev's rebellion, and ended with minor but strategic territorial acquisitions in the south. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire also gained large amounts of territory in the west through the first partition of Poland, about which Catherine boasted even less than Maria Theresa. During the later years of her reign, when Russian armies seemed invincible, imperial aggrandizement through both military and diplomatic aggressions became increasingly naked. Russian hegemony in Moldavia and Georgia encountered little opposition, but Russian usurpation of the supposedly autonomous Crimea provoked a second major Turkish war in 1788–91, accompanied by a largely naval war with Sweden in 1789–90. Huge territorial acquisitions followed the abolition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth after the partitions of 1793 and 1795.
The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 Page 24
