Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

He heard rumors that the brother of Gregory Orlov, his mother’s favorite, was suspected of being responsible for his father’s death. Thereafter, the sight of the Orlov brothers at court, and the knowledge of his mother’s relationship with Gregory Orlov, tormented him. At the same time, he was constructing an idealized image of Peter, modeling himself on Peter and imitating Peter’s traits and behavior. Aware that Peter had been passionately fond of everything connected with the army, Paul began playing with soldiers, first toys, then real soldiers, as Peter had done. Again following Peter’s lead, he turned to admire the greatest soldier of the age, Frederick of Prussia.

When she seized the throne, Catherine had proclaimed Paul to be her heir. Conceivably, when he reached his majority, she might also have enthroned him as co-ruler with significant responsibilities, as Maria Theresa had done with her son Joseph. In Vienna, Paul had seen the results of this other mother giving her son opportunities to learn by assisting her in ruling. There was never a chance that Catherine would do this. She saw her son as a rival, not a helpmate, and she gave Paul no role in the government of Russia.

As years of frustration warped Paul’s character, his eccentricities became more pronounced. Already, he was melancholy and pessimistic; now he began to appear unbalanced. His behavior sometimes worried even his loyal wife. “There is no one who does not every day remark the disorder of his faculties,” Maria said. Ironically, Paul’s shaky reputation and strange behavior reinforced Catherine’s hold on the throne; everyone desired the reins of government to remain in her strong hands as long as possible. When she felt her own strength declining, and she worried about the future of Russia, she never spoke of the reign of her son. It was Alexander of whom she spoke as her heir.

The schism between mother and son stretched beyond the grave. When finally, in 1796, he reached the throne, Paul immediately restored primogeniture as the basis of succession to the crown. Thereafter, until the fall of the monarchy and the Romanov dynasty in 1917, the eldest son of the deceased sovereign—or, lacking a son, the eldest male closest in the direct family line—would succeed. Never again would an heir have to go through what Paul had been through. And never again would Russia be ruled by a woman.

Potemkin ruled southern Russia like an emperor, although he always did so in the name of the empress in St. Petersburg. His most visible and permanent achievements were the cities and towns he built. Kherson, on the lower Dnieper River, was the first. Conceived as a port and a place to build warships, he began in 1778 with docks and a shipyard.

In 1783, after Catherine had annexed the Crimea, Potemkin began constructing a second naval base on the peninsula’s south shore. Called Sebastopol, it lay on a deep, protected bay that offered anchorage for scores of ships.

In 1786, Potemkin designed and began to build a new capital for this southern empire. The site he chose was on a bend in the Dnieper at a point where the river was almost a mile wide. He named it Ekaterinoslav (Catherine’s Glory). He planned a cathedral, a university, law courts, a musical conservatory, public parks and gardens, and twelve factories for making silks and wool. In 1789, he founded Nikolaev, another seaport and shipyard twenty miles upriver from Kherson. And once the Turkish war was over, Potemkin chose the site and made plans to build the city that is now Odessa; he died before this work began.

In May 1781, Joseph signed a treaty with Catherine pledging Austria’s aid to Russia in the event of war with Turkey. The signing of this treaty marked the end of Nikita Panin’s influence on Russian foreign policy.

OVER TIME, the story of Catherine the Great’s journey down the Dnieper River to the Crimea in the spring of 1787 has passed from history into legend. It has been described as the most remarkable journey ever made by a reigning monarch and as Gregory Potemkin’s greatest public triumph. It has also been disparaged as a gigantic hoax: the prosperous villages shown to the empress were said to have been made of painted cardboard; the happy villagers were declared to be costumed serfs, marched from place to place, appearing and reappearing, waving and cheering as Catherine passed by.

From the year of her journey until the German invasion in 1941, and then the independence of Ukraine in 1991, these lands never passed from Russian hands. The Crimean Peninsula, which Potemkin most wanted the empress to see, had a history embracing many peoples and cultures. In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Greeks had established colonies along the Crimean coast. Then called the Taurus, it was the site where Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is said to have served as a priestess in the Temple of Diana. Three hundred years later, these Greek colonies became part of the Roman Empire; later, the Crimea was conquered and occupied by the Mongols. When Catherine annexed the peninsula in 1783, she instructed Potemkin to build roads, cities, and ports, enrich and broaden agriculture, and integrate the Muslim population into her empire without destroying their religion or culture.

During the years 1788–90, Russia was fighting two wars, in the north as well as the south. In June 1788, Gustavus III, king of Sweden, seeing an opportunity to recover the lands lost to Peter the Great in the early century, succumbed to the temptation offered by the concentration of the Russian army in the south. His objectives were to retake Finland and strip away Russia’s Baltic provinces; if he failed to do this, he melodramatically promised to follow the path of Queen Christina a century before, renounce the throne, convert to Catholicism, and move to Rome.

On July 1, 1788, Catherine received his ultimatum, which went beyond demanding the return of all former Swedish territories on the Baltic. He now also insisted that the empress accept Swedish mediation in the Russo-Turkish war and restore to Turkey the Crimea and all other Ottoman territory won since 1768. A final insult in this provocative document referred to the “aid” he had given Russia by not attacking the empress during her first Turkish war and during the Pugachev rebellion.

A century passed. In 1899, the American ambassador to France, Horace Porter, used his own money to search for Jones’s body. It was found in a lead coffin, under a pavement, in an obscure cemetery outside Paris. When Theodore Roosevelt was president and creating a great American navy became one of his passions, he sent four American armored cruisers to Cherbourg to carry Jones back across the Atlantic to his adopted country. In 1913, 121 years after his death, the body of John Paul Jones, proclaimed to be the father of the United States Navy, was placed in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of the U.S. Naval Academy chapel. Since then, every midshipman has been taught Jones’s words, whether they were exactly his words or not: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

THE FOUNDATION of the superb collection of art in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum today was laid by Catherine only a year after she reached the throne. In 1763, she learned that a collection of 225 paintings accumulated by a Polish art dealer in Berlin who regularly supplied pictures to Frederick II had not been paid for. The dealer had been buying and holding the paintings for the king’s Potsdam palace, Sans Souci, but Frederick had decided that he could not afford them. His finances, personal and national, had been ravaged by the cost of the Seven Years’ War, and the need to pay his army and to begin reconstruction of his devastated country took precedence over the purchase of paintings for his palace walls. The art dealer was, therefore, deeply in debt and urgently needed a customer. Catherine stepped forward and, without serious bargaining, bought the entire collection.

During her reign, Catherine’s collection expanded to almost four thousand paintings. She became the greatest collector and patron of art in the history of Europe.

In the Seven Years’ War, ending in 1763, England had stripped away most of France’s important colonial possessions in North America and India. In return, by backing the American colonists in their fight for independence, France had taken revenge. The euphoria following the military triumph in America was as great in Paris as in Philadelphia.

The Estates-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789. Three estates—classifications of people—were represented by twelve hundred delegates. The clergy, considered the First Estate, owned 10 percent of the land in France, were exempt from most taxes, and had three hundred delegates. The nobility, the Second Estate, owned 30 percent of the land, enjoyed many tax exemptions, and made up another three hundred delegates. One hundred of these noblemen were liberal-minded, and fifty, under forty years old, were ready, even eager, for change. The commoners of the Third Estate, represented by six hundred delegates, were there to speak for the people who made up 97 percent of the French population. The great majority of these people were agricultural peasants, although the Third Estate also included urban laborers. Bread constituted three-fourths of an ordinary person’s diet and cost one-third to one-half of his or her income. The bourgeoisie, or middle class—bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, shopkeepers, and others—were also reckoned among the Third Estate. Plagued by heavy taxes, food shortages, unemployment, poverty, and general restlessness, the Third Estate was anxious, even desperate, for change. Its delegates were aware, however, that they had been summoned not for the purpose of improving the condition of the people they represented but because the government was desperate for money. Within a few weeks of the first meeting, delegates from the two privileged estate...

The Count of Mirabeau, a nobleman elected as a commoner who quickly became the leading presence among the delegates of the Third Estate, confronted the king’s messengers. “Go tell those who have sent you,” he said, “that we are here by the will of the people and that we will not be dispersed except at the point of bayonets.” On June 27, a decree from Louis terminated all meetings of the Estates-General, declaring them “null, illegal, and unconstitutional.” Riots in cities and uprisings in the countryside were the result. The most famous of these was the storming of the Bastille.

The fall of the Bastille was a political and psychological turning point. The National Assembly wrote a new constitution and voted on August 4 to abolish most of the aristocratic rights and fiscal privileges of the nobility and clergy. On August 26, the assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a charter of liberties whose wording reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment and the language of the American Declaration of Independence. Louis XVI and his family remained at Versailles. On October 5, a procession of five thousand women (and men disguised as women; it was rightly believed that the king would not order soldiers guarding the palace to fire on women) walked ten miles from Paris, invaded the palace built by the Sun King, and, the following day, forced the royal family to return with them to Paris. The family was installed in the Tuileries Palace in a state of semidetention (afternoon carriage rides in city parks were permitted). They remained there for nine months while the leaders of the National Assembly, most of them intellectuals and lawyers, with a few noblemen, all of whom thought in terms of maintaining order while bringing reform, tried to create a new form of constitutional monarchy.

When the Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly and Catherine realized that the peasants and the bourgeoisie had been joined by a group of noblemen willing to give up their own political and social privileges, she was astonished. “I cannot believe in the superior talents of cobblers and shoemakers for government and legislation,” she wrote to Grimm. As the weeks went by, astonishment turned to alarm. “It’s a veritable anarchy,” she exclaimed in September 1789. “They are capable of hanging their king from a lamppost!” She was especially concerned about Marie Antoinette. “Above all, I hope that the situation of the queen will match my lively interest in her. Great courage triumphs over great perils. I love her as the dear sister of my best friend, Joseph II, and I admire her courage.… She may be sure that if I can ever be of use to her, I shall do my duty.”

Knowing that Gustavus III of Sweden, always in search of glory, coveted the leadership of a monarchist crusade against the revolution in France, she chose him as the figure to support. In October 1791, only a year after the end of the short, pointless Baltic war between Russia and Sweden, she offered to provide Gustavus a subsidy to maintain a corps of twelve thousand Swedish soldiers to be used in an invasion of France. The date discussed for this operation was the spring of 1792. A violent event in Sweden prevented this military enterprise. On March 5, 1792, Gustavus III was shot in the back and gravely wounded at a masked ball in Stockholm; he died at the end of the month. Although the assassin was a Swedish aristocrat and the issue was peculiar to Swedish politics, Catherine immediately saw it as part of a rising tide of antimonarchical violence.

In June 1905, a respected French medical doctor was permitted to experiment with the freshly severed head of a prisoner named Languille. He reported that “immediately after the decapitation … the spasmodic movements ceased.… It was then that I called out in a strong sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up … with an even movement, quite distinct and normal.… Next, Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.… I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.… After several seconds, the eyelids closed.… I called out again, and once more the eyelids lifted and living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids … [and] no further movement.”

Catherine had observed with dismay the destruction of the French monarchy and the Old Regime. Every month, French émigrés and refugees arrived in Russia with frightful stories. More than any other European monarch, she felt that the ideology of radical France was also directed at her, and the more radical France became, the more defensive and reactionary were her responses. She now discovered dangers implicit in Enlightenment philosophy. Some responsibility for the excesses of the revolution seemed traceable to the writings of philosophers she had admired.

In 1791, she ordered all bookshops to register with the Academy of Sciences their catalogs of available books that were opposed to “religion, decency, and ourselves.” In 1792, she ordered the confiscation of a complete edition of the works of Voltaire. In 1793, she ordered provincial governors to forbid the publication of books that appeared “likely to corrupt morals, concerned with the government, and, above all, those dealing with the French revolution.” She began to fear the ease with which revolutionary ideas could cross frontiers, and the importation of French newspapers and books was prohibited.

In September 1796, the first formal system of censorship during her reign was established. All private printing presses were closed; all books were to be submitted to a censorship office before publication. One of the first to be affected by these new restraints was a young, intellectual nobleman who had risen to a significant position in the imperial administration.

During the 1780s, Radishchev began writing a book, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In 1790, he printed a few copies on his private home printing press. As required, he submitted a copy to the chief police censor in St. Petersburg. This official glanced briefly at the book’s title, assumed it to be a travelogue, approved it, and returned it to the nobleman in the Customs House. Radishchev then printed six hundred copies anonymously. His timing was unlucky, coming a year after the fall of the Bastille, and while Russia was still at war with Turkey and Sweden. Radishchev’s Journey was not a travelogue. Instead, it was a passionate indictment of the institution of serfdom and a criticism of the government and social structure that permitted serfdom to exist.

Radishchev told this story not only as an example of the nature of master-serf relationships but also to warn his readers that many serfs, driven to desperation, were only awaiting a chance to rise in revolt: Do you know, dear fellow citizens, what destruction threatens us and in what peril we stand? … A stream that is barred in its course becomes more powerful. Once it has burst the dam, nothing can stem its flood. Such are our brothers whom we keep enchained. They are waiting for a favorable chance and time. The alarm bell rings. And the destructive force of bestiality breaks loose with terrifying speed.… Death and fiery desolation will be the answer to our harshness and inhumanity. The more procrastinating and stubborn we have been about the loosening of their fetters, the more violent they will be in their vengefulness. Bring back to your memory the events of former times [Pugachev].… They spared neither sex nor age. They sought more the joy of vengeance than the benefit of broken shackles. This is what awaits us. This is what we must expect.

For Poland, the Third Partition meant national extinction. Not until the signing of the Versailles Treaty after the First World War, when the Russian, German, and Austrian empires had collapsed, did Poland physically reemerge. In the interim, for 126 years, the people and culture of Poland did not possess a nation.

The company listened to a concert, watched a French or Russian play, or simply played games, performed charades, or played whist. During these gatherings, her long-standing rules remained in force: formality was banned; it was forbidden to rise when the empress stood; everyone talked freely; bad tempers were not tolerated; laughter was required. To her friend Frau Bielcke, she wrote: “Madame, you must be gay; only thus can life be endured. I speak from experience for I have had to endure much, and have only been able to endure it because I have always laughed whenever I had the chance.”

From Alexander’s earliest years, Catherine nourished a hope that she could put him in place of her son, Paul, as her successor. Just as it had not taken Paul long to suspect that his mother’s intention to disinherit him was behind her possessive behavior regarding his son, Alexander, as he grew older, realized that he was the object of a struggle between his parents and his grandmother. He learned to adapt himself to the company he was in. At Gatchina, he listened to his father’s diatribes against the empress; back at court, he concurred with whatever his grandmother said. Unable to choose, he retreated into irresolution and equivocation; throughout his life, Alexander had difficulty making straightforward, unambiguous decisions.

Suspense filled the room. At first, Catherine was calm. Then, as time passed, her smile disappeared and her face became red. Nearby, her granddaughter was in tears. The hands of the clock passed nine and moved toward ten. At last the double doors opened. Zubov appeared and handed Catherine a paper. The king had changed his mind again. His last word was that he had given his word of honor that Alexandra would not be hindered in the practice of her religion, but that he would put nothing in writing and would not sign the marriage contract as long as it contained the clause Catherine demanded. Catherine could scarcely believe what she was reading. Rising from her throne, she tried to speak, but her words were unintelligible. To some, it seemed that she was suffering from dizziness; others thought it was a mild stroke. The attack, whatever it was, was temporary, and, a minute later, she was able to announce, “His Majesty King Gustavus is not well. The ceremony is postponed.” She left the room on the arm of Alexander. Although the regent sent an apology for his nephew’s behavior, Catherine was shaken. The next morning she reappeared and spoke briefly to the regent and the king. The regent was in despair, but Gustavus, “stiff as a ramrod,” kept repeating, “What I have written, I have written. I will never change what I have written.”

Paul, his family, the court, and the diplomatic corps walked behind, through streets lined by the Guards regiments. A figure from the past also walked. Eighty-year-old Alexis Orlov, who had commanded the guard at Ropsha and written the note informing Catherine of her husband’s death, had been commanded by Paul to walk behind Peter’s casket, carrying Paul’s crown on a cushion held before him. Orlov endured this humiliation, his head erect, his face carved in stone.

After Potemkin’s death, Catherine wrote an epitaph for herself: HERE LIES CATHERINE THE SECOND Born in Stettin on April 21, 1729. In the year 1744, she went to Russia to marry Peter III. At the age of fourteen, she made the threefold resolution to please her husband, Elizabeth, and the nation. She neglected nothing in trying to achieve this. Eighteen years of boredom and loneliness gave her the opportunity to read many books. When she came to the throne of Russia she wished to do what was good for her country and tried to bring happiness, liberty, and prosperity to her subjects. She forgave easily and hated no one. She was good-natured, easy-going, tolerant, understanding, and of a happy disposition. She had a republican spirit and a kind heart. She was sociable by nature. She made many friends. She took pleasure in her work. She loved the arts. This description is, of course, both idealized and excessively modest.

She always refused extravagant titles, whether from the Legislative Assembly in 1764, which wished to name her Catherine the Great; from Voltaire, who filled his letters with flowery tributes; or from Grimm, who called her Catherine the Great in a letter in 1788. Replying to Grimm, she wrote, “I beg you no longer to call me Catherine the Great, because … my name is Catherine II.” It was after her death that Russians began speaking of her as “Catherine the Great.” She was a majestic figure in the age of monarchy; the only woman to equal her on a European throne was Elizabeth I of England. In the history of Russia, she and Peter the Great tower in ability and achievement over the other fourteen tsars and empresses of the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty. Catherine carried Peter’s legacy forward. He had given Russia a “window on the West” on the Baltic coast, building there a city that he made his capital. Catherine opened another window, this one on the Black Sea; Sebastopol and Odessa were its jewels. Peter imported technology and governing institutions to Russia; Catherine brought European moral, political, and judicial philosophy, literature, art, architecture, sculpture, medicine, and education. Peter created a Russian navy and organized an army that defeated one of the finest soldiers in Europe; Catherine assembled the greatest art gallery in Europe, hospitals, schools, and orphanages. Peter shaved off the beards and truncated the long robes of his leading noblemen; C...