Catherine the Great

Empress of Russia (r. 1762-1796)

• Born: May 2, 1729
• Birthplace: Stettin, Pomerania, Prussia (now Szczecin, Poland)
• Died: November 17, 1796
• Place of death: Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin), near St. Petersburg, Russia

One of the early enlightened monarchs, Catherine attempted to create a uniform Russian government with a modern Westernized code of laws that represented all levels of Russian society with the exception of the serfs. In the forty-four years of her reign, she sculpted Russia into one of the great world powers of the time and laid the foundation for what would become modern Russia.

Early Life

Catherine the Great was born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, in Stettin, a seaport in Pomerania. Her parents, Prince Christian August and Princess Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, were minor members of the German aristocracy. As a result of her strained relationship with her mother, Sophie developed into an independent young woman. Russian monarchs held the prerogative of choosing their successors, and her cousin, Duke Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp, had been summoned to Russia by the childless Empress Elizabeth as the heir to the throne. It only remained to find him a wife, and, after several months of searching, Elizabeth decided on Sophie: Both the fourteen-year-old princess and her mother were invited to Russia in January, 1744.

Elizabeth was pleased with her choice, and Peter fell in love with the princess. On June 28, 1744, Sophie converted to Russian Orthodoxy and was given the name Catherine, and on the following day the couple were publicly engaged. However, from the time he arrived in Russia, Peter, whose health was never good, had a series of illnesses that left him permanently scarred and most probably sterile. Their marriage, which occurred on August 21, 1745, was not consummated immediately and probably was not consummated at all.

Married to a man who displayed a mania for Prussian militarism and who would rather play with toy soldiers and conduct military parades than be with her, Catherine was left to develop her own interests. She began to read, a pastime almost unheard of in the Russian court, and mastered the technique of riding astride horses, an activity in which she took great pleasure, often going for long rides. Neither interest could overcome the lack of an heir, which, as the empress pointed out to her on more than one occasion, was Catherine’s only reason for being. Starved for affection and aware that her position depended on producing a child, she took a lover, Sergei Saltykov. Twice she became pregnant and miscarried, but on September 20, 1754, Catherine gave birth to a male child, Paul Petrovich, who was probably the son of Saltykov.

The empress took control of the child from the moment he was delivered, and Catherine was once again left alone. Totally barred from any involvement in the political life of the court, she consoled herself with reading the works of such writers as Voltaire, Tacitus, and Montesquieu. Saltykov was replaced in her affections first by Count Stanisław August Poniatowski and then, in 1761, by Grigori Grigoryevich Orlov, with whom she fell in love. During this time, her husband’s behavior became more and more eccentric. Russia was at war with Prussia, yet Peter made no secret of his pro-Prussian sentiments, even going so far as to supply Frederick II with information concerning Russian troop movements.

Elizabeth died in December, 1761, leaving Catherine’s husband, Peter III, as the new emperor. Catherine was six months pregnant with Orlov’s child at the time, a son who was born in April, 1762, although no one really noticed. Peter III immediately ended the war with Prussia and then allied himself with the Prussians to make war on Denmark, declaring himself more than willing to serve Frederick II. Adding to this insult to Russian patriotism, Peter outraged the church by reviling Russian Orthodox ritual and by ordering the secularizing of church estates and the serfs bound to those estates. Most important to his final overthrow, he offended the elite guards, dressing them in uniforms that were completely Prussian in appearance and constantly taunting the men.

In June, 1762, Catherine, with the support of the powerful Orlov family and the guards, acted. In a bloodless coup, she seized the Crown in St. Petersburg and published a manifesto claiming the throne. Dressed in a guard’s uniform and astride her stallion, Brilliant, she led her troops against her deposed husband in his stronghold at Peterhoff. He offered his abdication, and, with its acceptance, Catherine became empress of Russia.

Life’s Work

Catherine began her reign by declaring that she had acted only because it was the will of the people. Aware that she had come to the throne by the might of the powerful Orlov family and with the backing of the guards, she realized that she must avoid antagonizing the nobility or the church. As a result, her manifesto justifying her seizure of the throne claimed that it had been necessary in order to establish the correct form of government, an autocracy acting in accord with Russian Orthodoxy, national custom, and the sentiment of the Russian people. Although her words offered welcome relief from the brief reign of Peter III, her actions were not unilaterally accepted—after all, she was German by birth and had no blood claim to the throne, even if she was ultimately claiming it for her son. To complicate matters, Peter III died, in all probability murdered at the behest of the Orlovs, and in 1764, Ivan VI, himself deposed by Elizabeth, was killed in his prison cell during an abortive rescue attempt. Catherine was forced to deal with the doubts of many who thought she had murdered the legitimate claimants to the throne to gain it for herself.

At the time she took the throne, Catherine still retained much of her early beauty. She had a clear, very white complexion, which was set off by her brown hair and dark eyebrows. Her eyes were hazel, and in a certain light they appeared bright blue. She had a long neck and a proud carriage, and in her youth she was noted for her shapely figure. As she aged, she grew increasingly heavy: When she collapsed immediately before her death, it took several men to carry her to her bed.

Despite her rather tenuous hold on the throne, the new empress rapidly took charge of her empire. She ended the hated war against Denmark and quickly went to work trying to reform Russia into the nation that Peter the Great had envisioned. An advocate of economic growth and expansion and an opponent of trade restrictions, she abolished most state monopolies and authorized grain exports. Under her reign, Russia had some of the most liberal tariff policies in Europe. Determined to improve agriculture, in 1765 she established the Free Economic Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Husbandry.

Faced with the chaos of the Russian legal system, Catherine was determined to create an effective centralized government. She set to work codifying the laws of Russia, and in 1766, she published a work in which she drew freely from writers such as Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, and Denis Diderot. In it, she confirmed that autocracy was the best form of government to fill the needs of Russia, yet she also developed the idea that the government was responsible for meeting the needs of the people. All subjects, except the serfs, were entitled to equal treatment under the law, and all had the right to petition the sovereign. The standard use of torture in conjunction with legal proceedings and the common use of capital punishment were shunned—the only exception being in the case of a threat to national security.

Not content with this venture alone, Catherine set to work on a series of legal codes to cover nearly all aspects of the Russian social order. In 1782, she published a work that gave minute instructions for the administration of the urban population. This was followed in the same year by two charters that delineated the rights and obligations of the various levels of society. Despite these laws, she did not deal with the one level of society that by the end of the century made up 90 percent of the population—the peasantry. Russian serfs were bound to the nobles, who had complete control over them. The wealth of a noble was based on how many serfs, or souls, he owned, not on how much land he controlled. Catherine maintained her position through the support of the nobility. To create any law that interfered with the nobles’ rights over their serfs would alienate the nobility and without any question would lead to her being deposed in favor of her son. For this reason, while she remained acutely aware of the serfs’ plight, she did nothing to change their status as property and refused them the basic right to petition the monarch, a right held by all her other subjects.

Two major problems that plagued her reign were wars and the frequent threat of impostors making claims on her throne. In 1768, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia over the question of Russian troops in Poland, and the war continued until the Ottomans surrendered in 1774. Russian territory was greatly increased in the settlement, but in 1787 the Ottoman Empire again declared war on Russia, a conflict that lasted until 1791. In 1782-1783, the Crimea was under siege but was subdued and incorporated into Russia in 1784. In 1788, while Russia was at war with the Turks, war with Sweden erupted and lasted until 1790. In 1793, Catherine annexed part of Poland, and in 1794 a full-scale rebellion erupted in that country but was finally crushed by Russian troops, leaving the area firmly in Russian control.

From the beginning of her reign, rumors abounded that Peter III was not dead, and at intervals impostors came forward to claim the Crown. Some of these amassed considerable followings, especially in the case of Pugachev’s Revolt (1773-1774), but all were quickly eliminated. Most of the impostors spent the rest of their lives in banishment in Siberia. Catherine was always aware of the fragility of her hold on the throne, and she reacted with fear to the news of the French Revolution, taking stern measures to ensure that no such events could occur in Russia. In 1793, she broke all relations with France, including the importation of any French goods, and, despite her earlier support of publishers, in 1796 she imposed rigid book censorship and limited the number of presses to those completely under government control. Any hint of republican thinking was immediately investigated, and anyone even remotely suspect was quickly banished.

At the height of this fear of French republicanism, and having outlived nearly all of her friends and advisers, Catherine suffered a stroke in November, 1796, and died at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Her relationship with her son had always been strained, and there were rumors that she intended to remove him as her heir in favor of his son Alexander. If she left a testament to this effect it was never found, although forgeries of such a document continued to appear. The new emperor, Paul I, had his murdered father’s body exhumed, and, after crowning the remains with his own hands, he had the bodies of his parents buried together at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Significance

Under Catherine the Great, Russia was changed from a chaotic, badly managed nation to one of the major forces in Europe. Laws were codified and a powerful centralized government was formed. As a result of numerous wars, the nation’s territory was greatly increased. There was also a great increase in national wealth.

Despite her failure to deal with the question of the serfs, Catherine can be viewed as one of the first enlightened monarchs, attempting to create a moral society and eliminating corruption in government. She introduced smallpox inoculation to Russia in 1768, and in 1786 she published a statute setting up general education in the twenty-six provincial capitals. In a highly illiterate nation, this was a radical step. She encouraged advancement in agriculture and made every effort to improve the lives of the Russian people.

Bibliography

Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gives a largely unbiased portrait of a complex and powerful woman. Alexander considers all aspects of Catherine’s life and manages to deal honestly with the reality of her legendary love life. Excellent bibliography.

Bergamini, John D. The Tragic Dynasty: A History of the Romanovs. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969. A generally detailed look at the life of Catherine, although greater emphasis is given to her sexual appetites and her relationship with her two famous lovers than to the political aspects of her reign.

Cowles, Virginia. The Romanovs. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Cowles deals with Catherine’s love of opulence and the scandals of her life, emphasizing her love of grandeur and her numerous lovers.

De Madariaga, Isabel. Catherine the Great: A Short History. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. This is not a conventional biography but a summary of De Madariaga’s scholarship on Catherine the Great. The book focuses on Catherine’s work as empress, including her involvement in administrative reform, foreign policy, and bringing the intellectual ideas of the Enlightenment to Russia.

Erickson, Carolly. Great Catherine: The Life of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. New York: Crown, 1994. Comprehensive popular biography. Erickson describes Catherine’s complex personality and her reign as empress.

Grey, Ian. The Romanovs: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Catherine is depicted as a ruthless sovereign who plotted her way to the throne even before the death of Empress Elizabeth.

MacKenzie, David, and Michael W. Curran. A History of Russia and the Soviet Union. Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1978. Includes several detailed chapters on Catherine that place her life in historical perspective. Excellent bibliography of historical texts on the period.

Troyat, Henri. Catherine the Great. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Meridian, 1994. Originally published in 1980, this is a reprint of a popular biography of Catherine.