Catherine II (Russia) (1729–1796; Ruled 1762–1796)

CATHERINE II (RUSSIA) (1729–1796; ruled 1762–1796)

CATHERINE II (RUSSIA) (1729–1796; ruled 1762–1796), empress of Russia. Catherine II, known as Catherine the Great, was born Princess Sophie in Stettin, Anhalt-Zerbst, a remote and poor German principality on the Baltic Sea. She was betrothed to the heir to the Russian throne, the future Peter III, in 1744. Upon her arrival in St. Petersburg, she converted to Russian Orthodoxy and was given the Russian name of Catherine Alekseevna, after Catherine I, Russia's first female crowned head and the mother of the reigning empress Elizabeth, Peter's aunt. Catherine remained in Russia for the rest of her life, and her stay can be divided into three unequal periods: as wife of the heir apparent (1745–1761), as consort to the emperor (six months in 1762), and as monarch (1762–1796).

WIFE AND CONSORT

By all available accounts—a mixture of personal court gossip, self-serving memoirs, and diplomatic reports—Catherine's marriage to Peter was an emotional disaster, and perhaps unconsummated. Catherine's own narrative of these years (her vaunted memoirs, which remained unpublished until the mid-nineteenth century) described Peter as childish, tempestuous, unloving, and enamored of only three things: his mistress, his toy soldiers, and Prussia. Catherine spent these years relatively excluded from court, but she nevertheless gathered around herself a coterie of admirers and her early lovers, as well as significant figures in the guards' regiments, many of whom found Peter's behavior and his Prussophilia disturbing.

By the time Peter ascended the throne in 1762, he and Catherine were estranged, and by some accounts she was already preparing to replace him as monarch. Her moment came barely six months into his reign, in late June 1762, when several officers of the elite regiments swore allegiance to her, followed immediately by thousands of "cheering" troops. Confronted by this fait accompli, Peter is said to have surrendered meekly, requesting merely that he be allowed to keep his dog (agreed), his toys (agreed), and his mistress (denied). Whether by design or inadvertenly, Peter was assassinated within days, thus bringing his bride to the throne as an unacknowledged regicide.

IDEOLOGY AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Once on the throne, Catherine aggressively represented herself as the quintessence of enlightened monarchy, the true heir of Peter the Great. This affinity was reproduced in countless ceremonies and visual images, most famously in Étienne-Maurice Falconet's statue the Bronze Horseman, unveiled in 1782 with the inscription "Petro Primo—Catherina Secunda" ('To Peter the First from Catherine the Second'). Her highly public correspondences with Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and other leading lumières conveyed the message that Catherine and, through her, Russian statecraft, embodied the highest virtues of reason and order. Perhaps the clearest expression of these views came in her legislative writings, both the major laws and the famous Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, written in 1767. This latter text combined an explicit reconfirmation of absolutism with a categorical Europeanness (in the declaration that "Russia is a European state") and displayed a preoccupation with laws, citizenship, and human happiness that strongly suggested a desire to make Russia into a more orderly, law-driven polity. Historians remain divided whether quasi-liberal sentiments motivated these expressions or, conversely, whether they constituted an interventionist instinct for "a well-ordered police state."

The Legislative Commission was a remarkable semipublic forum that brought representatives of all legally constituted social groups—save the serfs, who were deemed to be represented by landlords—and several ethnic minorities. Although it produced precious little actual legislation and never came close to generating a draft for a new fundamental law, the so-called Great Commission did enable a wide-ranging series of discussions on fundamental issues such as serfdom, social identity, trade, and education. Local deputies came to the sessions armed with instructions from their constituents, and recent research has shown that considerable consultation took place in drafting those instructions. Equally noteworthy, but less frequently acknowledged, is the Commission's afterlife, which extended until the end of Catherine's reign in the form of "particular" or private commissions that continued to discuss issues, albeit more privately and on a less grandiose level. Although these private commissions fell well short of an embryonic civil society, they did allow for an officially sanctioned and ongoing deliberation of law and policy outside of the narrow confines of state institutions.

DOMESTIC POLICY AND LEGISLATION

In the wake of the dangerous Pugachev revolt of 1773–1775 Catherine initiated a decade-long blizzard of important new legislation (sometimes dubbed "legislomania"), collectively designed to strengthen civil and moral order. The first of these statutes, the Provincial Reform of 1775, significantly increased the size of formal provincial government by creating thirty-five provinces with civil administrations that were considerably larger than previously and with a much broader set of responsibilities. The provincial reform gave local nobility every opportunity to take control of these new bodies, while making certain that the key figures, the governor and military governor, would be centrally appointed and chosen from among loyal and high-ranking individuals.

Major statutes on urban welfare and police (1782), public education (1782), private publishing (1783), and the Charters to the Nobility and to the Towns (both in 1785) soon ensued. These last two documents sought to codify the corporate status of the empress's subjects (something under ten percent of the total population) who were neither peasants nor legally inscribed ethnic minorities. A similar charter was drafted for the peasants but never enacted. In addition, the state began a major initiative to populate the area north of the Black Sea known as New Russia (Novorossiia) and to develop the agricultural potential of this black-earth temperate zone. This policy encouraged immigration, both from other regions of the empire and from abroad, especially from impoverished German states. These policies enabled Russia to expand its already substantial export of raw materials, including grain, furs, and, by some accounts, large quantities of silver. The Russian economy grew correspondingly, equaling some of the highest rates of expansion in preindustrial Europe.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Bracketed by the end of the Seven Years' War at the beginning and the French Revolutionary wars at the end, Catherine's foreign policy was dominated by more immediate neighbors, the Ottoman Empire and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. The victory over the Ottomans that ended the protracted war of 1768–1774 led to the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, which afforded Russia considerable access to the Black Sea, Crimea, and the Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Walachia. It also strengthened Russia's protectorate over Orthodox Christians in Ottoman territory. Russia's merchant fleet could now sail unimpeded through the Bosporus into the open waters of the Mediterranean. As a result, Russia's Black Sea trade burgeoned, leading to the establishment of the port city of Odessa in 1794. As before, however, its warships were denied access to the Bosporus, notwithstanding the rapid growth of Russia's Black Sea fleet.

With the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the issues were different. Having achieved access to the Baltic and the North Sea earlier in the eighteenth century, Russia, along with Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy, had been deeply involved in Polish politics, having bought off numerous Polish magnates and placed more than one king on the Polish throne. By the early 1770s the Commonwealth's parliament, or Sejm, had lost any semblance of independence, and its principle of liberum veto, originally intended to protect the interests of poorer or remote regions, instead paralyzed the Sejm. The three neighboring states therefore partially partitioned Poland in 1772. The integration of the eastern lands of the Commonwealth (mainly modern Ukraine and Belarus) into the Russian empire proved to be a mixed blessing. Substantive political reform in Poland, leading to the Constitution of 3 May 1791, prompted the second partition by Prussia and Russia in 1793, and Tadeusz Kościuszko's nationalist rebellion of 1794 was crushed by a brutal assault from the Russian army. Soon followed the third partition (1795), by which the three powers eliminated the Polish-Lithuanian state altogether. Henceforth Polish identity defined itself largely in contradistinction to Russian. The partition of Poland also brought a large Jewish population into the Russian empire.

A NOTE ON CATHERINE'S SEXUALITY

Long consigned to prurient anecdotes, Catherine's sexual reputation and the contemporary responses to it have recently attracted serious scholarly attention. As far as is known, she had perhaps twelve lovers between 1752 and her death. One of the earliest, Sergei Saltykov, was almost certainly the biological father of her son, the future Paul I, and two others (Grigorii Orlov and Stanisław August Poniatowski) fathered two additional children, a boy and a girl, never publicly acknowledged. Although most of these men came from distinguished families and had noteworthy political careers (Poniatowski, for example, was elected king of Poland in 1764), none appears to have used his status to affect state policy, with the single and very noteworthy exception of Grigorii Potemkin, with whom Catherine was deeply in love in the mid-1770s and whom, an increasing number of specialists believe, she secretly wed in 1774. Whether true or not, the massive correspondence between the two overflows with affection and mutual respect, even after Potemkin ceased to be the empress's paramour.

Although private liaisons were commonplace for Europe's crowned heads, Catherine's experiences hold particular interest for what they reveal about the implicit strictures of female rule in Russia. Like her predecessors, Catherine was obliged to rule unmarried, to be officially chaste irrespective of the realities of her private life. She could maintain open liaisons, even give birth if need be, but unlike male rulers, she could not remarry or be allowed a consort for fear, one assumes, of polluting the imaginary male line. Such tacit limitations meant that the sexuality of a female ruler would be unavoidably political in ways that a male ruler's would likely never be.

See also Black Sea Steppe ; Elizabeth (Russia) ; Enlightened Despotism ; Enlightenment ; Imperial Expansion, Russia ; Paul I (Russia) ; Poland, Partitions of ; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795 ; Pugachev Revolt (1773–1775) ; Queens and Empresses ; Russia ; Russian Literature and Language ; Russo-Ottoman Wars .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Anthony, Katherine, trans. The Memoirs of Catherine the Great. New York and London, 1927.

Griffiths, David, and George E. Munro, eds. and trans. Catherine II's Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns. Bakersfield, Calif., 1990.

Secondary Sources

Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York, 1989.

de Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. London, 1981.

Dixon, Simon. Catherine the Great. Harlow, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Griffiths, David M. "The Rise and Fall of the Northern System: Court Politics and Foreign Policy in the First Part of Catherine II's Reign." Canadian Slavic Studies 4, no. 3 (1970): 547–569.

LeDonne, John P. Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796. Princeton, 1984.

Ransel, David L. The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party. New Haven, 1975.

Gary Marker