Peter the Great died on 8 February 1725. He had been in agony for several weeks, and when doctors operated on his blocked urinary tract they released 4 pints of infected urine. The gangrene that had spread to the tsar’s bladder killed him soon afterwards. He was 52 years old; he had reigned for more than 40 of those years and had transformed Russia from a struggling, landlocked state to a major and still-expanding empire. But for a man so dedicated to efficiency, Peter left the country in a muddle. Having decreed that the monarch should appoint his own successor, he had signally failed to do so.
The result was that for more than three decades, the descendants of Peter the Great were locked in power struggles and palace coups. When his niece Anna came to the throne in 1730, a small but influential group of nobles asked her to sign a series of ‘conditions’ obliging her to consult a council of the aristocracy before raising taxes, fixing state spending, embarking on military action or appointing senior officials. The idea was in tune with developments in parts of Western Europe, including Britain, where the Bill of Rights had set limits on the power of the king. Had Anna agreed to the ‘conditions’, it might have opened the way for Russia to become a constitutional monarchy, perhaps eventually a Western-style parliamentary democracy.
But Anna refused. She enlisted the backing of the Imperial Guard and insisted on preserving the old system of unfettered autocracy. She spent much of her reign banishing, humiliating and executing those who opposed her.
Ten years later, in 1741, it was the turn of Peter’s surviving daughter, Elizabeth, to seize power, again with the help of the military. The story has it that she turned up at the headquarters1 of the Preobrazhensky Regiment in St Petersburg in a metal breastplate, brandishing a silver crucifix and demanding to know whom the army intended to support. ‘Listen, lads!’ she is said to have declared. ‘You know whose daughter I am. As you served my father, Great Peter, so now you must serve me … You must choose between your natural sovereign and those scoundrels who have stolen my birthright!’ The regimental commanders were so impressed by Elizabeth’s bravado that they agreed to march with her to the Winter Palace, where they arrested the stopgap infant tsar Ivan and those claiming to rule on his behalf, and installed Elizabeth on the throne instead.
Elizabeth may have come to power by unconstitutional means, but her style of governing was very different from that of the abrasive, unyielding Anna. She operated through compromise and conciliation. She made a pledge not to execute anyone during her reign, and kept it. At the prompting of her advisers Ivan and Peter Shuvalov, Elizabeth revived the possibility of ‘permanent, fundamental laws’ that would bind the monarch’s conduct and make her at least partially answerable to the nobility. A commission was set up to develop proposals, including guarantees of property rights, a promise that nobles would be tried only by a jury of their peers, and provisions for consultation on key issues of state policy. But in the end Elizabeth, too, fought shy of sharing power. It took the advent of another, quite remarkable woman before the idea of liberal reform would finally gain serious consideration.
The woman history would know as Catherine the Great2 began life as a German princess, Sophia Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, born in the Baltic seaport of Stettin on 2 May 1729. At the prompting of Frederick II of Prussia, the young Sophia was taken to Petersburg by her mother in 1743. She was just 14 and had no experience of life outside her home town. But Frederick knew the childless Elizabeth of Russia was looking for a bride for her nephew and heir, the future Peter III, and he hoped Sophia would find favour. His aim was undoubtedly to arrange a match that might improve Prussia’s standing and influence at the Russian court.
In the event, Sophia and Elizabeth took to each other at once. The young Lutheran princess converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1744 and took the name of Yekaterina, or Catherine. She spent her days learning Russian, which she mastered quickly, although she never lost her German accent. Writing much later in her memoirs, Catherine admitted she would have done ‘anything that was necessary3 … and profess anything that was demanded in order to gain the crown of Russia’.
A marriage was quickly agreed and the wedding took place in August 1745. Catherine was barely 16, and married life was to be a torment for her. Peter was physically repulsive, mentally immature, paranoid and probably impotent. (His portrayal in a memorable 1930s Hollywood epic by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a brooding, homicidal Prince Hamlet swinging from manic bursts of energy to periods of darkest gloom seems remarkably close to the truth.) Catherine’s diaries list the torments she went through, as Peter spent his time leering at his courtiers, pouring wine over the heads of visiting dignitaries and whipping his dogs with an obsessive sadism. ‘I understood very clearly that the Grand Duke did not love me4,’ she writes. ‘Just 15 days after our wedding he told me he was in love with Mademoiselle Karr, the empress’s maid of honour … I realised that my life with this man would be very unhappy if I allowed myself to show tender feelings for him that were destined to be so ill rewarded. I concluded that to die of jealousy would be of no use to anyone …’
For a 16-year-old, the logic is remarkable. Spurned and humiliated by her cretinous husband, she simply decided to make a life for herself without him. In response to his cruelty and disdain, it is hardly a surprise that the beautiful, sensuous, intelligent Catherine should have turned elsewhere, and stories of her extramarital activities abound. The noble Counts Saltykov, Poniatowski, Orlov, Vasilchikov, Zavadovsky, Zorich, Lanskoy, Yermolov and Zubov are among many who enjoyed her favours, although the widely quoted figure of 300 lovers has never been substantiated. She hints in her memoirs that her marriage with Peter was not consummated, but Catherine nonetheless produced three children, one of whom was destined to become tsar.
It’s unfortunate that Catherine the Great is so universally remembered for her interest in sex. She certainly wasn’t shy about taking virile lovers among her court favourites, but most of the more outlandish stories – including the one about the wild stallion and the leather sling – were almost certainly concocted by her enemies. The inveterate misogynist Frederick II of Prussia was being deliberately mischievous in spreading scandalous gossip to belittle Catherine’s political acumen (‘in government by women5, the vagina always has more influence than a sensible policy guided by the light of reason’ being one of the more printable of his outrageous claims).
Frederick’s bitchiness was a response to Catherine’s courageous, and sensible, support for closer relations with England and Austria, to the detriment of her native Prussia. When Frederick helped engineer Catherine’s rise to power he had assumed she would repay him by becoming a loyal ally. She had the chance to do so in January 1762, when Elizabeth died and Catherine’s husband became Tsar Peter III of Russia. Peter had long been a strong advocate of Prussian interests, and one of his first acts on ascending the throne was to withdraw from the Seven Years War, concluding a peace treaty with Frederick that gave up nearly all Russian gains. The move provoked anger among the Russian nobility and – ever the pragmatist – Catherine seized the moment. Together with her lover Grigory Orlov, she encouraged a palace coup that deposed Peter in July 1762. He had reigned for just six months; a week later he was murdered by guards loyal to Catherine.
From that moment onwards she ruled alone, taking the title Empress Catherine II of All the Russias. Like Elizabeth, Catherine had come to the throne through military force, but it did little to overshadow her reign. She ruled with single-minded dedication, showing tactfulness and skill in domestic policy and choosing international allies to meet the needs of her country. Peter the Great had laid the foundations for Russia’s emergence as a European power, but it was Catherine who would bring it to fruition. George Macartney, the British ambassador to Catherine’s court in 1765, was among the first to recognise her achievements:
I never saw in my life6 a person whose port, manner and behaviour answered so strongly to the idea I had formed of her … Russia is no longer to be gazed at as a distant, glimmering star, but as a great planet that has obtruded itself into our system, whose place is yet undetermined, but whose motions must powerfully affect those of every other orb.
The Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Macartney had no doubt that another semi-Asiatic power, the Russian Empire, was about to take its place. To Western observers like Macartney, Russia seemed vast and menacing. But the Russian perspective was somewhat different: as always, her show of strength was connected with the ingrained fear of vulnerability that had haunted her since the days of the Mongols.
Catherine launched a rapid expansion to the south that was intended to provide a buffer against the hostile forces on her borders, but would actually sow the seeds of ethnic tensions that have lasted into our own times. To the west, she used Russia’s military strength and her flair for alliance building to engineer the partitioning of Poland, ruthlessly annexing Polish territory in collusion with the Prussians and Austrians in a chilling foretaste of the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939. By the end of Catherine’s reign, Poland had ceased to exist as a physical entity, surviving only in the hearts of her people and their burning determination to see their country reborn.fn1 Catherine the Great negotiated and bullied Russia into the role of continental Europe’s most feared superpower. But at home, her reign was on shaky ground. An incomer with no hereditary claim to the throne, a Prussian and a convert from Lutheranism, she could easily have been despised by the population. It was a tribute to her unflagging tact and energy that she won the respect of many. When famine sparked rebellions in some Russian provinces, she refused requests from provincial governors to put them down with military force. Instead, she sent emergency food supplies from government stocks with a message that they should reach the people most in need. Where Peter the Great would have tortured and executed, Catherine negotiated and compromised. In the early years of her reign, she was regarded as a progressive reformer very much in tune with the democratic trends of the European Enlightenment.
Walking through the stacks and storage rooms of the Russian National Library on Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg is like stepping back into a previous age. The elegant neo-classical interiors have changed little since Catherine the Great had it built as the Imperial Library in 1795. The catalogue of the library’s 35 million items is still kept on cardboard slips in wooden drawers and it can take days for books to be fetched out of vaults that run for many miles under the city streets. I have known the workings of the library for a long time, but I recently discovered a new set of rooms, smelling of fresh varnish and distinctly smarter than the rest of the place. A proud curator told me they had just been renovated with a grant from the government of France. They were, she explained, a reconstruction of Voltaire’s library and they now housed the 7,000 books, manuscripts, notebooks and drafts he owned at the time of his death.
The story of how Voltaire’s worldly goods ended up in Russia is an intriguing one. Having secured the Russian throne, Catherine seemed determined to put into action the Enlightenment principles she had absorbed in her youth from the writings of liberal French, German and British philosophers. The Hermitage Museum was founded on her orders in 1764 to house her collection of Western paintings and books. She would spend days there, reading and copying out in longhand the works of the French philosophes, those revolutionary champions of reason, democracy and freedom. Catherine learned by heart long passages from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1752), the iconic manifesto of constitutionalism, separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law. When the French authorities suppressed Diderot’s revolutionary Encyclopédie (1751–72), she invited him to come to Petersburg to complete its composition. Strange, incendiary bedfellows, you might think, for the ruler of a country where autocracy was the established rule!
But Catherine was her own woman. She welcomed foreign investment, relaxed censorship and encouraged the spread of education. From 1763, the year after her coronation, she embarked on a long, earnest correspondence with Voltaire, the best-known writer of the age and the leading exponent of political liberalism. ‘By chance your works fell into my hands7,’ Catherine wrote in her first letter to him, ‘and since then I have never stopped reading them. I have had no desire to have anything to do with books that were not written as well as yours, and from which the same profit could not be derived.’
Voltaire could not resist flattery and replied in similar glowing terms. Their correspondence continued for over a decade, during which he came to regard Russia under Catherine’s leadership as the world’s best hope for the enactment of the Enlightenment ideals he espoused. She employed Voltaire to write an official history of Peter the Great as a signal that she would honour and expand her predecessor’s Europeanising policies. And Voltaire responded by becoming her head of global PR. ‘You are greater than the Aurora Borealis8,’ he gushed, ‘you are the brightest star of the North; there never has been a luminary so beneficial … Diderot and I are the lay missionaries who preach the cult of Sainte Cathérine and we can boast that our Church is almost universal.’
Catherine was viewed, and viewed herself, as a patron of culture, of philosophy and of social change, a ‘philosophe on the throne9’. It was a brave stance by a brave woman, and it was bound to be controversial.
But the reason Catherine rushed to buy up Voltaire’s effects after his death was no longer one of mutual admiration. By then, the two of them had quarrelled in dramatic fashion, after the empress’s political views had undergone a remarkable sea change. Catherine’s real interest in acquiring his library was because she feared her letters to him would be placed in the public domain and she would be pilloried for the liberal sentiments she had expressed in them. So how did the putative liberal reformer who vowed to enlighten Russia morph into an entrenched conservative for whom her former ideals had become anathema?
Her first steps had been bold ones. In 1767, the young Catherine had been in a hurry to embody the abstract principles of the Enlightenment in legal practice. She convened an All-Russian Legislative Commission with delegates from the nobility, the merchants, the Cossacks and the (non-serf) peasants. She issued them with a Nakaz – an Instruction – to create a new code of law that would end the oppression and injustice suffered by the Russian people:
For it is the wish of all worthy members10 of society … to see each individual citizen protected by laws, which – so far from injuring him – will protect him against every attack on his welfare … to prevent the rich from oppressing those who are not so wealthy as themselves and converting the employments entrusted to them as state employees to their own private profit … For liberty can exist only in the ability of doing what everyone ought to desire, and not being forced to do what should not be desired.
Catherine’s Nakaz proclaimed the equality of all men before the law. It rejected capital punishment and torture. Large parts of it were copied verbatim from Montesquieu. Here at last, it seemed, was an attempt to create a law-governed state, what Catherine called a ‘civil society’. It was full of high-flown ideals and aspirations, but other European monarchs found it decidedly disconcerting. The French immediately forbade publication of the Nakaz as dangerously revolutionary, and Diderot gleefully commented on it in a phrase that set the tone for much of the rhetoric of the coming revolutions in America and France itself. ‘There is no true sovereign except the nation11,’ he proclaimed. ‘There can be no true legislator except the people.’
It seemed to many that Russia was preparing to boldly go where few others would dare to tread. Having been the most backward of the European powers, she now appeared to be leading the way to the enlightened future. But Russia’s steps on the road to reform are always fraught with trips and stumbles. Having advanced some way down it, Catherine would soon be scurrying back again.
The Tauride Palace in St Petersburg is one of those half-forgotten behemoths that litter the city’s imperial heritage. If you ask Russians what they know about the Tavrichesky Dvorets (the name comes from Taurida, the ancient Greek for the area now known as Crimea), they will probably mention its role in the revolutions of 1917. Today the palace is a somnolent backwater, home to the Inter-parliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a talking shop with few real powers and little political influence. But the place itself is a marvel, a magnificent, symmetrical two-winged creation of columns and domes, with a central grand entrance of staggering proportions. The main corridor leads to a cavernous, gilded ballroom and the former Winter Garden, now converted into a debating chamber, but originally considered one of the marvels of the age. The poet Gavril Derzhavin described the palace’s opening festivities in April 1791, when 3,000 people, the cream of Russia’s noble elite, witnessed fireworks, acrobats, orchestras and dazzling illuminations throughout the building:
At first you doubt12 your eyes and think this is the work of some magician. Living things are everywhere – trees and plants bloom and works of art proliferate. Everywhere spring reigns, and the greatest achievements of human art vie with the delights of nature … In the rotunda, a statue rises of Catherine the Law Giver …
Zoya, the palace’s historian, showed me where the real Catherine had sat during the festivities, on a mighty raised platform at the western end of the ballroom. The royal dais was topped with not one, but two thrones, and the person who sat beside the empress that night was the man for whom Catherine had had the Tauride Palace built. From the moment they had met a decade and a half earlier, Grigory Potemkin had been the love of her life:
My dear friend, I love you13! You are so handsome, so clever, so witty; when I am with you I forget about everything in the world … I love you so much! … Come quickly to my bedroom and prove your love to me!
Catherine the Great had taken many lovers among her court favourites, but when she first invited Prince Potemkin into her bed, in February 1774, she sensed this one would be different. In a welter of passionate letters, he declared his undying love for her and she responded in a frenzy of desire:
Oh, Monsieur Potemkin, what sorcery have you used14 to unbalance a mind that was previously reckoned among the best in Europe? … What a scandal for Catherine the Second to be the victim of this crazy passion! … Your power over me is so strong! … Enough! I have scribbled enough – go, crazy, mad letter to that place where my hero dwells … my colossus, my golden cockerel, my tiger! … come to see me so I can tame you with my endless caresses … My heart cannot be content for even an hour without love.
The relationship began when Catherine was in her forties, on the throne for over a decade and one of the most powerful rulers Russia had known. She was looking for more than just an affair; she wanted love in her private life and a counsellor in her role as empress. Her sex life was the talk of the court, but she didn’t care to hide it. The British ambassador, Sir Robert Gunning, sent a detailed diplomatic dispatch back to his masters in London:
A new scene has just opened15 which is likely to merit more attention than any that has presented itself since the beginning of this reign … [The former] favourite whose understanding was too limited to admit of his having any influence on affairs or sharing his mistress’s confidence is replaced by a man who bids fair for possessing them both in the most supreme degree. Potemkin’s figure is gigantic and disproportioned and his countenance is far from engaging, but he appears to have a great knowledge of mankind … and as much address and suppleness in his station … Though the profligacy of his manner is notorious … he may naturally flatter himself with the hopes of rising to that height to which his boundless ambition aspires … It seems the Empress is going to commit the reins of government to Potemkin.
Grigory Potemkin was tall and very well built (Catherine reputedly kept a plaster cast of one part of his anatomy to console herself when he was away). He was also a war hero, having fought the Turks in the southern campaigns; intellectually sharp, boisterously charismatic and very forceful. Soon they were living as man and wife – they almost certainly held a secret marriage ceremony – and it’s clear from their correspondence that Gunning’s assessment was only slightly exaggerated: Catherine did indeed trust Potemkin with affairs of state. But their partnership as rulers was about to be put to the test by the most serious crisis Russia had faced in a generation.
In the spring of 1774, the good citizens of Orenburg – the provincial capital and a strategic staging post in the southern Ural Mountains – were in a panic. News had arrived that revolutionary forces led by the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev were advancing from the south to pillage and loot the city. The rebels had already seized Kazan and Samara; vast swathes of territory from the Volga to the Urals were under Pugachev’s control. What had started as a Cossack revolt in the mould of Stenka Razin a century earlier had turned into something close to a national revolution. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, factory workers, Old Believers and serfs had turned against their masters; landowners were being massacred and their estates ransacked. It was a foretaste of the revolutionary terror that was about to sweep away Louis XVI in the French Revolution of 1789. Unlike revolutionary France or America, though, where the people were demanding ever more radical changes to society, in Russia the spark for revolt, paradoxically, was a reaction against reform. Pugachev had convinced the people that Catherine was a false tsar who must be overthrown and executed: she had handed Russia to the Germans, he told them, and they must rise up and seize back their own land. Anyone not wearing traditional Russian dress of kaftans and beards must be a German and therefore slaughtered without mercy. Alexander Pushkin’s classic tale ‘The Captain’s Daughter’ (1836) captures the apocalyptic atmosphere of the times. Pugachev was threatening not just Orenburg, but Nizhny Novgorod and even Moscow itself. No one was safe; violent revolution was at hand, and the downfall of the monarchy seemed only a matter of time:
At that moment great crowds16 of horsemen appeared, and soon the steppe was covered with a multitude of men. A figure in a red coat, with a bare sword in his hand, was riding among them on a white horse … it was Pugachev! With terrible shouting and yelling, the rebels came rushing towards the fortress … The brigands were inside the fortress now, plundering the officers’ quarters. Their drunken shouts resounded everywhere and the gallows, with their freshly hanged victims, loomed menacingly in the dark. Pugachev and a dozen Cossacks … were sitting around a table littered with bottles and glasses, their faces flushed with drink and their eyes aglitter. I couldn’t help marvelling: a drunkard who had spent his life wandering from inn to inn was capturing fortresses and shaking the very foundations of the state!
Fortunately for Catherine, her new lover and co-ruler was made of stern stuff. Potemkin faced down the opposition of the Petersburg court and insisted that the empress travel to Moscow as a visible figurehead of resistance. He replaced the squabbling military commanders and dispatched new, bolder generals to fight the rebels. In August, Pugachev was defeated at Tsaritsyn, later to be the scene of another historic battle under its future name of Stalingrad (see here). By mid September, the revolution was in tatters, its leaders betrayed and handed over to the authorities. In January 1775, Pugachev was publicly beheaded on Red Square. The immediate threat to the monarchy was over, but the underlying causes remained.
In the History Museum in Yekaterinburg – a city that came close to sharing the grim fate of Orenburg but was spared when Pugachev fell at Tsaritsyn – the director showed me examples of the roughly produced tracts the rebels had distributed in the region. They announced that Pugachev was really Tsar Peter III, who had miraculously survived the attempt by the usurper Catherine to depose him and was now returning to reclaim the throne:
Those who rally to me17, the true tsar, Peter III, will be rewarded with money and bread and advancement. They and their kin will find a place in my kingdom and will carry out glorious deeds. But those who neglect their duty to support their true ruler and do not rally to my loyal troops with weapon in hand will find the harshest punishment …
The rebels’ manifestos reproached Catherine for her secularisation of society and advanced ‘Tsar Peter’ (Pugachev) as the true standard-bearer of the old national myth of Holy Russia, the defender and champion of Christianity. It was a message that found a ready response from the peasants and common people. Ever since the days of the Mongols, Orthodoxy had been the cement that bound Russia together against its enemies, and now a foreigner – a German! a Lutheran! – was seizing Church lands and making its priests servants of the state. Pugachev himself was an Old Believer (and there were millions of them, estranged from tsarist authority) and his cause was theirs.
The peasants could not, of course, read the rebels’ leaflets (and Pugachev and most of his comrades were themselves illiterate), but there was no lack of willing intermediaries. In pulpits throughout the land, disgruntled priests enthusiastically read out Pugachev’s manifestos, with their denunciations of Catherine as ‘the Devil’s daughter’.
The paradox of the Pugachev rebellion is that the peasants and common people had shown themselves to be more conservative than the reformers who set out to improve their lot. They simply didn’t want Catherine’s newfangled ‘Western’ ideas. So having spent the first years of her reign winning the support of the Russian people, Catherine was now in danger of losing it. She needed to respond to the Pugachev debacle – and the people’s mistrust of change – and she did so by retrenching. Her great Legislative Commission, originally inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and the rule of law, was wound up. Instead of giving power to the people, as Voltaire and Diderot had hoped, Catherine’s final document was a resounding endorsement of the old system of autocracy: uncontrolled authority in the hands of one person, namely herself!
The possessions of the Russian Empire18 extend upon the globe to 32 degrees of latitude, and to 165 of longitude. The sovereign is absolute, for no authority but the power centred in his single person can act with the vigour proportionate to the extent of such a vast dominion. The extent of the dominion requires that absolute power be vested in the one person who rules over it. It is expedient so to be, that the quick dispatch of affairs, sent from distant parts, might make ample amends for the delay occasioned by the great distance of the places. All other forms of government whatsoever would not only be prejudicial to Russia, but would provoke its entire ruin.
What clearer statement could there be of the basic, underlying determinant of how Russia must be governed? Russia is too big and too unruly ever to be suited to democracy, it says; only the strong hand of centralised autocracy can keep such a disparate, centripetal empire together and maintain order among her people. It was the same doctrine enunciated by Rurik and Oleg, by Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, by Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich and Vasily Tatishchev.
Yet if Catherine was determined to remain a supreme ruler and autocrat, why did she embark on reform at all? Like Peter the Great, Catherine was forced to make changes because her survival depended on it. Her claim to the throne was a slim one, and the Pugachev revolt convinced her she couldn’t keep relying on military force to maintain it. So she aimed to create a system of laws and administration that would entrench the authority of the monarch throughout society, making it impossible to uproot.
In the very nature of things19, the sovereign is the source of all civil and imperial power. Intermediate powers, subordinate to the monarch’s supreme power and dependent on it, must form an essential part of monarchical government. Through them, as if through smaller streams, the power of the government is poured out and diffused … These laws undoubtedly constitute the firm and immoveable basis of the state.
To ensure what she called the ‘efficient diffusion of the monarch’s authority’, Catherine enlisted the help of the landed nobility. In 1785, she granted them a Charter guaranteeing their property and personal freedom; protecting them from judicial abuse and corporal punishment; exempting them from taxation, and giving them the right to form regional assemblies to run local government. In return, they were bound to eternal loyalty to the throne and to the empress herself:
Since the honourable title20 of a noble is acquired by service and efforts beneficial to the empire and the throne … therefore at any time needful for the Russian autocracy, every nobleman is obligated to respond at once to the first summons from the autocratic power and to spare neither his efforts nor his life itself in serving the state …
The freedoms granted in Catherine’s Charter were perceived as a sort of emancipation of the nobility. But there was no corresponding emancipation of the serfs – that would have to wait another 76 years. The peasants were aware of, and resented, the new privileges of their masters. They received no such legal entitlements and their lot worsened as that of the nobles improved. The gap between the top and bottom of society was widening, and a century later it would lead to violent confrontation.
When Alexander Radishchev, a Russian liberal with a social conscience, exposed the evils of serfdom and social inequality in his polemical Journey from Petersburg to Moscow in 1790, Catherine scribbled angry rebuttals in the margins of her copy, and then had him arrested and exiled. By now, in the final years of her reign, she was simply in denial about the realities of poverty and suffering in her realm, so much so that stories circulated of Potemkin having to build false façades of prosperous buildings along her route when she travelled to the provinces – the so called ‘Potemkin villages’ that have become a synonym for self-deluding blindness.
Having flirted with the liberal values of the European Enlightenment, Catherine grew horrified by the forces of revolution they were unleashing. The spectacle of another European monarch – Louis XVI – dragged to the guillotine in 1793 by a baying mob of ‘enlightened’ revolutionaries gave her nightmares. She renounced her previous admiration for Voltaire and Diderot and offered to send Russian troops to quash the Enlightenment ideals she had once espoused. The great reformer had become the great reactionary.
fn1 Even today, the words of the Polish national anthem commemorate the nightmare of Russo–Germanic oppression – ‘Poland has not died, so long as we still live!’ I well remember how poignant that sounded at demonstrations of the Polish opposition during the long years of Soviet domination.