Catherine the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  Catherine the Great was born Princess Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, on the 2nd of May 1729, in the Ducal Castle of Stettin in Prussian Pomerania. Her family had little money. Her rise was bankrolled by her mother Joanna's wealthy noble relations. She would die on the 17th of November 1796 as Empress of Russia, a woman who had ruled from 1762 to 1796.

  A French governess and tutors shaped her childhood, which she found dull. She once wrote to her correspondent Baron Grimm, "I see nothing of interest in it". Yet this German princess, fluent in French and trained to master a sword, took a throne by overthrowing her own husband. How did a girl groomed only to marry a powerful ruler come to rule herself? What did she build, what did she conquer, and who paid the price for her golden age?

• 2. The Coup At Ropsha

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  On the night of the 8th of July 1762, Catherine learned that one of her co-conspirators had been arrested by her estranged husband. The coup they had planned would have to happen at once. The next day she left the palace for the Izmailovsky Regiment and asked the soldiers to protect her from her husband. She then went to the Semenovsky Barracks, where the clergy waited to ordain her as the sole occupant of the Russian throne.

  Peter III had become emperor only six months earlier, after the death of Empress Elizabeth on the 5th of January 1762. His admiration for the Prussian king Frederick II had alienated the very groups Catherine had cultivated. He had halted Russian operations against Prussia, even as Russian troops had occupied Berlin in 1761. His support for Frederick eroded much of his backing among the nobility.

  Catherine had her husband arrested and forced him to sign a document of abdication. On the 17th of July 1762, eight days after the coup, Peter III died at Ropsha. He died possibly at the hands of Alexei Orlov, younger brother to Catherine's court favourite Grigory Orlov. The official cause, after an autopsy, was a severe attack of haemorrhoidal colic and an apoplexy stroke. Whether he was assassinated remains unknown.

  Other rivals were dealt with coldly. Ivan VI, confined at Schlusselburg from the age of six months and thought insane, was killed during a failed attempt to free him. Catherine, like Elizabeth before her, had given strict instructions that he was to be killed in the event of any such attempt. Historians still debate whether she ruled as a usurper, tolerable only during the minority of her son, Grand Duke Paul.

• 3. An Empire By Conquest

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  By some 200,000 square miles Catherine extended the borders of the Russian Empire, absorbing New Russia, Crimea, the North Caucasus, right-bank Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Courland. These gains came mainly at the expense of two powers, the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Her foreign minister Nikita Panin, in office from 1763 to 1781, tried to build a "Northern Accord" linking Russia, Prussia, Poland, and Sweden against the Bourbon-Habsburg League.

  The Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774 made Russia the dominant power in the Balkans. Russian forces inflicted heavy defeats on the Ottomans at the Battle of Chesma, fought from the 5th to the 7th of July 1770, and the Battle of Kagul on the 21st of July 1770. The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, signed on the 21st of July 1774, handed Russia territory at Azov, Kerch, Yenikale, and Kinburn, made Crimea a Russian protectorate, and named Russia protector of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.

  Crimea itself was annexed in 1783, after the disappointing rule of Sahin Giray, the Crimean Tatar leader Catherine had installed. A triumphal procession through the Crimea in 1787 helped provoke the next Russo-Turkish War of 1787 to 1792, which ended with the Treaty of Jassy. Access to the Black Sea let her government found new cities in southern Ukraine, among them Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson, and Yekaterinoslav, a name meaning "the Glory of Catherine".

  In the Caucasus the kingdom of Georgia, long a Persian subject, became a Russian protectorate in 1783 when King Erekle II signed the Treaty of Georgievsk. When Agha Mohammad Khan invaded Georgia again in 1795, Catherine launched a new war against Persia in 1796. Against the expectation that the seasoned Ivan Gudovich would lead, she followed her lover Prince Zubov's advice and gave command to his youthful brother, Count Valerian Zubov. His troops stormed the fortress of Derbent on the 21st of May 1796 and overran Baku, Shemakha, and Ganja. When Catherine died that November, her successor Paul I ordered the troops to retreat.

• 4. Erasing Poland

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  In 1764 Catherine placed her former lover Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski on the Polish throne. The idea of partitioning Poland came from Frederick II of Prussia, but Catherine took a leading role in carrying it out. In 1768 she became protector of the political rights of dissidents and peasants in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. That provoked an anti-Russian uprising, the Confederation of Bar, which lasted from 1768 to 1772 and was supported by France.

  The May Constitution of Poland of 1791 alarmed her. Fearing it might revive the Commonwealth's power and that democratic movements might threaten the European monarchies, Catherine abandoned a planned intervention in France and turned to Poland instead. She backed a pro-Russian conservative group, the Confederation of Targowica. Abandoned by their Prussian allies, the Polish forces defending the constitution were defeated.

  In 1793 the deputies of the Grodno Sejm, the last Sejm of the Commonwealth, agreed to Russian demands in the presence of Russian forces. The Second Partition left only one-third of the 1772 population still in Poland. When the Kosciuszko Uprising began in 1794, its ragtag insurgent armies won early successes but fell before the Russian Empire's superior forces. On the 24th of October 1795 the three partitioning powers signed a treaty erasing any independent Polish state from the map, with Alexander Bezborodko advising Catherine on the work.

• 5. The Enlightened Despot

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  Voltaire called her "The Star of the North" and the "Semiramis of Russia". Catherine corresponded with him for fifteen years, from her accession to his death in 1778, though she never met him face to face. She mourned him bitterly, acquired his books from his heirs, and placed them in the National Library of Russia. She worked with Diderot, d'Alembert, and other French encyclopedists, and offered Diderot the chance to finish the French Encyclopedie in Russia under her protection.

  In 1766 she tried to write Enlightenment principles into law. She summoned a Grand Commission at Moscow of 652 members drawn from officials, nobles, burghers, and peasants, and from various nationalities. For their guidance she prepared the "Instructions", admitting she had pillaged Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria. After more than two hundred sittings, the commission dissolved without moving beyond theory.

  The Hermitage tells the same story of appetite. She ordered its construction in 1770 to hold her growing collection, and by 1790 it held 38,000 books, 10,000 gems, and 10,000 drawings. In May 1770 she planted the first English landscape garden at Tsarskoye Selo. Writing to Voltaire in 1772, she confessed, "Anglomania is the master of my plantomania". She shared Europe's craze for Chinese things, building a Chinese Palace at Oranienbaum between 1762 and 1766 and hiring the Scottish architect Charles Cameron for a Chinese Village at Tsarskoye Selo in 1779.

  Not every writer enjoyed her protection. Alexander Radishchev published his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1790, warning of uprisings because of the deplorable conditions of the serfs. Catherine judged it carried the poison of the French Revolution. She had the book burned and the author exiled to Siberia.

• 6. The Weight Of Serfdom

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  Between 1754 and 1762 a census recorded that Catherine herself owned 500,000 serfs, while a further 2.8 million belonged to the Russian state. Serfs were bound to the land, and their children were born into serfdom to work the same soil their parents had. They were not exactly slaves. Some accumulated enough wealth to buy their freedom, helped by how weak and confused the understanding of law was in the provinces where most serfs lived.

  Under Catherine a landowner gained the power to sentence his serfs to hard labour in Siberia, a punishment normally reserved for convicted criminals. The one thing a noble could not do was kill them, for the life of a serf belonged to the state. She let serfs file complaints against a noble who failed his obligations, but in exchange they could no longer appeal directly to her. She did not want to be bothered by the peasantry.

  Resentment had many roots, including crop failure, the stricter rule nobles imposed from around 1767, and a major epidemic in 1771. It boiled over in Pugachev's Rebellion of 1774, drawing in Cossacks, nomads, peoples of the Volga, and peasants. Pugachev spread stories of himself acting as a real emperor should, helping the common people and praying for them. Many serfs followed him because they felt disconnected from Catherine and her policies empowering the nobles.

  The rebellion failed, and it pushed Catherine away from the idea of freeing the serfs. She had already confirmed the Manifesto on Freedom of the Nobility, issued under Peter III, which freed Russian nobles from compulsory military or state service. In 1785 she went further with the Charter to the Nobility, increasing the power of the landed oligarchs.

• 7. Reforms And Reach

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  Catherine had herself inoculated against smallpox by the English doctor Thomas Dimsdale, a controversial method at the time. She wanted inoculation spread across her empire, writing that her aim was "to save from death the multitude of my subjects". By 1800 roughly 2 million inoculations had been given in the Russian Empire, almost 6 percent of the population. She had launched the Moscow Foundling Home and a lying-in hospital in 1764, and opened Paul's Hospital in 1763.

  The Smolny Institute, founded in 1764, was the first state-financed higher education institution for women in Europe. At first it admitted only girls of the noble elite, the Smolyanki, who acquired French, music, and dancing along with complete awe of the monarch. Discipline was strict. Running and games were forbidden, and the building was kept particularly cold because warmth was thought harmful to the developing body. By the end of her reign an estimated 62,000 pupils were being educated in some 549 state institutions.

  Money reform demanded the same centralising hand. In 1768 the Assignation Bank was tasked with issuing the first government paper money, opening in Saint Petersburg and Moscow in 1769. The notes were needed because heavy military spending had drained silver from the treasury. The Fundamental Law of the 7th of November 1775 reorganised state finance by function, and by 1781 the government had its first approximation of a state budget.

  Religion she handled by region and by faith. She nationalised the Church lands to help pay for her wars and largely emptied the monasteries. After the "Toleration of All Faiths" Edict of 1773, Muslims were permitted to build mosques and make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and she created the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly to regulate Muslim regions. Her Russia even gave the Jesuits asylum after their suppression across most of Europe in 1773.