Russian Empresses
Russia offers a unique historical example: the same century has seen five or six women reigning despotically over an empire where women were previously slaves of male slaves.
—Charles-François-Philibert Masson, Mémoires secrets sur la Russie (1800)
Despite Russia's reputation of being semioriental, its Westernizing eighteenth-century governments experienced the longest period of female rule anywhere in Europe. Between 1725 and 1796, four tsarinas and a female regent governed it for all but three and a half years. Like the four heiresses of Latin Europe during the same century, the combined reigns of these Russian women total almost seventy years, with one woman being responsible for half of each total. But essential differences also separate the Russian from the Latin Christian cohort of eighteenth-century female rulers, and historians have yet to analyze the Russian phenomenon adequately in either national or international contexts. Russia's leading eighteenth-century expert, Evgeny Anisimov, reduced the subject to a series of disconnected biographical sketches, although these women's political situations abound in shared experiences.1
Three peculiarities distinguish the Russian cluster of female rulers. First, although all five were related to male tsars either by blood or marriage, three (both empresses named Catherine and the eighteenth-century female regent) had changed their names after converting from Protestantism to Russian Orthodoxy. Second, none of the four empresses, unlike the married heiresses of Latin Europe, had husbands at any time during their reigns. Third and most important, none of Russia's female autocrats inherited her throne. Instead, for the first time in European history, four women, including a regent, acquired autocratic power through coups by the elite guards regiments created by Peter the Great; and immediately after her proclamation, a fifth woman used these regiments for a constitutional coup to restore absolute rule. So while Russia was indeed Westernizing during this period, it experienced female rule under conditions utterly different from those elsewhere in Europe.
Although Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725) is justly famous as Russia's great Westernizer, his numerous female successors, beginning with his widow, were intimately connected with the successful implementation of his policies. Their role begins with the location of Russia's capital. In 1727 his young grandson returned it from Peter I's newly built “window on west” to its traditional home in Moscow, which remained the location for Russian coronations. However, by 1732 his female successor had returned it to her uncle's new Baltic seaport of St. Petersburg, and her female successors kept it there. They built, remodeled, and rebuilt all of the numerous European-style imperial palaces in and around Russia's new capital. The most famous of these, their downtown Winter Palace, now known as the Hermitage, ranks among the world's greatest museums; it was constructed by Peter the Great's daughter and furnished magnificently by her successor.
As rulers, these women became increasingly autonomous and autocratic. If Russian tsarinas were not the only eighteenth-century female rulers to be portrayed riding horses in masculine fashion (a few of Maria Theresa's medals used this pose in the 1740s), only Russian women wore men's hats and even an officer's uniform while riding. Considering their collective achievements, it is perhaps not coincidental that only in the mid-eighteenth century, after a longer delay than in any other non-Muslim country, including China, did chess-loving Russians finally put an extremely powerful woman on their boards alongside the king.2 It would be more appropriately Russian to create a Matrushka doll commemorating its women rulers, with a gaudy Catherine II on the outside concealing Elisabeth, who conceals Anna, who conceals Catherine I; its ultimate figure would be a tiny Sophia, the female regent who preceded them.
Before and After Peter the Great
Few of Peter I's numerous biographers notice that his personal reign (1689–1725) was both preceded and followed by the earliest examples of female rule in Russian history. Both situations were also unparalleled in any major state for many centuries. Peter's predecessor was the first female regent to claim formal sovereignty since Irene of Athens usurped the throne of Byzantium almost nine centuries previously; his successor was the first former concubine of humble birth to govern a major state since Egypt's Shagarrat al-Durr in 1250. If Peter's half sister Sophia was officially only a coruler with her brother and himself in 1686–89, his widow Catherine I became Russia's first full-fledged empress (Imperatritsa) in 1725–27. Both women exercised sovereignty in customary ways, issuing decrees and putting their faces and titles on Russian coins. Neither was married, and both conducted government business through a male favorite with whom they worked closely.
Sophia's regency began as literally the power behind the throne when a dynastic dilemma was resolved in 1682 by the joint rule of her younger brother Ivan, who by all accounts could not rule unaided, and their half brother Peter, who seemed very competent but was underage. Until April 1686 she remained simply “the great Sovereign Lady, Pious Tsarevna [tsar's daughter] and Great Princess Sophia Alekseevna,” and her name invariably followed those of her male siblings. As Lindsay Hughes notes, not until the political and diplomatic success of this odd Russian troika reached its peak did Sophia reinvent her title by moving the key term autocrat (samoderzhitsy) to follow her name instead of preceding it. Under the leadership of a great Westernizer, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, Russia's joint rulers had already begun a new land survey and conducted an extremely active foreign policy, sending ambassadors to several European countries and making treaties, including an Eternal Peace with Poland in 1686.3
The three years following Sophia's full association as joint ruler were dominated by Golitsyn's unsuccessful war in the Crimea against the Ottoman Empire. These military adventures coincided with Sophia's expanding political ambitions. In the 1680s eulogies addressed to her outnumbered those honoring Russia's nominal sovereigns; after 1686 her image decorated the reverse of Russia's gold coins, with the co-tsars on the front, and her first overtly secular European-style portraits appeared. These seem realistic; unlike previous Western portraiture of female rulers, none displays any flattering physical features, and all foreign chroniclers considered Sophia remarkably ugly. By 1687 she was contemplating a separate coronation for herself; portraits depicting her with imperial regalia circulated both in Russia and abroad. The most daring, an anonymous oil painting that was not published until 1895, placed her, crowned and holding imperial regalia, within a double-headed imperial eagle.4
After the failure of Golitsyn's Crimean campaign became apparent in 1689, Sophia's downfall was sudden and complete. Peter I, now seventeen, opposed her publicly, stripped her of all state titles, and shut her in a Moscow convent. Nine years later, compromised in an abortive revolt of palace guards (strel'tsy) while Peter was in Europe, Sophia was interrogated. An Austrian diplomat claimed that Peter threatened her with the fate of Mary Stuart, executed “by command of her sister [sic] Elizabeth.”5 Instead, Sophia was forced to become a nun, taking the name Susanna, while the corpses of rebel leaders were hung on the convent walls where she could see them. But an oil portrait of Sophia within the double-headed eagle was also preserved in the same convent, perhaps in the same rooms where Peter I later lodged his repudiated first wife, who outlived him.
Peter's second wife, Catherine I, a Baltic Protestant servant named Marta Skavronsky who had been taken by a Russian officer in 1702, followed him on the imperial throne. Europe's only illiterate female ruler, she also offered its best example of female promotion based on political merit. While bearing several children to the tsar, she also accompanied Peter on several military campaigns and greatly impressed him with her courage and judgment during his most desperate emergency in 1711. Afterward, Peter honored Catherine in special ways, first by marrying her in 1712. Two years later, celebrating a naval victory over Sweden, Peter created a new honorary order bearing her name and made her its grand master. It became Russia's second-ranking order behind that of St. Andrew, which Peter had previously created. Women were prohibited from becoming members, but every eighteenth-century empress, beginning with Peter's widow, immediately put on the order's blue sash and declared herself its head. The most extraordinary honor Peter bestowed on Catherine was to crown her as empress in May 1724, an unprecedented event which began Russia's “uncharted and unplanned journey towards female rule.” Peter himself put the crown on her head while she knelt in prayer. A peculiar coronation sermon omitted both scriptural citations and historical precedents; as the inscription on its commemorative medals proclaimed, this event was entirely the “work of God and Peter the Great.”6
Because the Guards trusted her to continue Peter's policies, his widow rather than any of his relatives became his successor. Governing in association with Peter's closest adviser, Alexander Menshikov, who had employed her and converted her to Russian Orthodoxy before introducing her to the tsar, Catherine's two-year reign was relatively uneventful. Its most important achievement was to inaugurate Russia's Academy of Sciences, chartered before Peter's death but not opened until 1726. All of its members were foreigners. In 1727 the dying empress named her husband's eleven-year-old grandson as her successor, with Menshikov as regent. This arrangement lasted only six months, until Russia's old aristocrats persuaded young Peter II to alter his grandfather's policies and return the capital to Moscow.
Two years after Catherine I died, a German journalist named David Fassmann paired her with Zenobia in his 129th Dialogue in the Land of the Dead. Because both women had accompanied a husband or son into battle, it highlighted their wartime experiences. Zenobia complains about being insulted by men, Catherine about Russian soldiers needing brandy before battles. The author knew the ancient ruler of Palmyra better than he knew Catherine; Fassmann thought Catherine came from minor nobility (a great exaggeration) and wasn't certain of her birth year. Zenobia boasted of her descent from Cleopatra but acknowledged that Catherine's achievement was unprecedented for a woman of her rank. After Peter's death, “there was no man who was in the smallest degree capable of ruling.” Only the Turks expressed amazement at her rule and refused to send ambassadors to a land governed by a woman.7 One year after this dialogue appeared, Catherine's stepgrandson died unmarried, leaving Russia once again without a male tsar.
An Underrated Empress?
The next woman to rule the Russian Empire, Anna Ivanovna, remains an ugly duckling: an undeniable coarseness permeated her ten-year reign. Although England's Bloody Mary and even Spain's Juana the Mad have now found academic defenders, this empress continues to resist positive evaluations. Russia's leading historian has shown no desire to rehabilitate her reign, while her best-known biography in English comes from a ballet expert unable to read Russian. Disdain for this large, unusually strong, and physically unattractive female monarch began early. Soon after her accession, a Russian nobleman commented that “although we are confident of her wisdom, high morals, and ability to rule justly, she is still a female and thus ill-adapted to so great a number of duties.” When the same ecclesiastical dignitary who had preached at Catherine I's coronation in 1724 undertook the same task for Anna Ivanovna's, his sermon avoided discussions of female exceptionality and, astonishingly, he never even mentioned the new empress by name. Many charges have been leveled against her: an “absolute nonentity” in government; a shallow, coarse woman, devoid of introspection and cruel to the point of sadism. Several female rulers of early modern Europe enjoyed hunting, but only Anna Ivanovna had the results recorded when she gunned down a thousand small animals and a few wild boars during a single summer.8
Like her recent female predecessor, Anna Ivanovna called herself an autocrat but governed through an all-powerful male minister. A crucial difference was that Anna's principal minister, Ernst Biron, whom she made Duke of Courland in 1737, was a minor Baltic German noble rather than an upstart Russian like Menshikov. Russians have never forgiven her for imposing a “German tyranny” for which they invented a special term, bironsh-china, that combines notions of brutality, corruption, and foreign rule. Russia had experienced many brutal regimes—Peter the Great's was especially noteworthy—and corrupt officials permeate its history; what made bironshchina so intolerable was a quasi-colonial foreign domination that employed such brutality and profited most from the corruption.
However, Europe's two greatest German-born eighteenth-century rulers, both writing in French, showed considerable respect for Anna's political record. In 1746 Frederick the Great, who acquired Prussia's throne shortly after Anna's death, wrote that her reign “was marked by many memorable events, and by some great men whom she was clever enough to employ; her weapons gave Poland a king. In 1735 she helped Emperor Charles VI by sending 10,000 Russians to the edge of the Rhine, a place where this nation had been little known. Her war against the Turks was a succession of prosperities and triumphs” in which “she dictated terms to the Ottoman empire.” Anna did more than wage war. “She protected the sciences in her capital,” Frederick continued. “She even sent scientists to Kamchatka to find a shorter route for improving commerce between Muscovites and Chinese. This princess had qualities that made her worthy of the rank she occupied; her soul was elevated, her mind firm; she repaid service liberally and punished with severity; she was good by temperament, and voluptuous without disorder.” But Frederick had little praise for her chief minister, who had once been expelled from Prussia's university. Biron, “the only one who had a noticeable ascendancy on the spirit of the Empress, was naturally vain, crude and cruel, but firm in business and not intimidated by vast undertakings.” He possessed “some useful qualities, without having any that were good or agreeable.”9
In her private sarcastic dialogue the Castle of Chesmé, Catherine the Great preferred Anna's rule to those of her successor Elisabeth and her predecessor Catherine I. Here Anna tells Elisabeth, “I liked authority as much as you, but I didn't waste it on frivolities.” Challenged about who had made better use of her authority, Anna replies, “My reign showed more nerve than yours,” to which Elisabeth retorts, “What some people call nerve, others call cruelty.” When Catherine I interrupts them by remarking that Elisabeth was always her favorite, Anna retorts tartly, “We noticed that more than once” and asks, “Didn't she sign your name to Prince Menshikov's orders?” However, Catherine II's greatest praise for Anna comes later, when young Peter II tells her, “I loved you because your firm and masculine spirit made me suppose that you were further removed than any of my female kin from trivial bickering.”10
Anna Ivanovna's selection as empress seemed fortuitous. With no male Romanovs available, Russia's aristocrats decided that a widowed and childless niece of Peter the Great, who had been ruling a small, poor Baltic principality for nineteen years as a Russian protectorate, would be more manipulable than her sisters or Peter's daughter. They imposed constitutional limitations which she signed unhesitatingly and then tore up publicly as soon as she had been proclaimed (the torn original remains in Russia's state archives).11 Anna moved quickly to secure her position by creating a new guards regiment, commanded by Biron's brother. Too old to have children, she resolved the succession issue by bringing her older sister's German-born daughter to court to be raised as a Russian. Anna's most important early decision was to return Russia's capital to St. Petersburg, where it would remain until 1917.
Some of her other early decisions proved equally permanent. In 1731 Anna created a ruthlessly efficient secret police bureau. It quickly expanded the definition of high treason through the notorious phrase “by word or deed” (slovo i delo) and except for a six-month abolition in 1762 it endured under various titles at least as long as the Russian Empire. In 1732 Anna also created an elite training school for Russian military officers, the first founded by a woman ruler (Maria Theresa began one more than twenty years later). Housed in Menshikov's former palace, the Cadet Corps endured until 1917, benefitting Russia's cultural as well as its military history. During Anna's reign it participated in Russia's nascent theatrical tradition, and five years after her death its printing office produced the first useful maps of Russia's empire. Another durable creation of Anna's reign was the ballet school founded in 1736 to train young Russians of both sexes.
Anna's propaganda preferred to celebrate other achievements. The ice palace which she had constructed in the bitter winter of 1740 and opened to the public is notorious today as the site of a bizarre and sadistic icy wedding of court dwarfs, but at the time it was presented as both a scientific and an artistic triumph. Peter the Great introduced the custom of striking medals glorifying the ruler's achievements; Anna was the first tsarina to imitate him. Commemorations of her coronation were in Russian, while one in Latin celebrated her liberation of the Don River basin from the Tartars in 1736 for a European audience. Three medals, two in Russian, commemorated her peace treaty of 1739 with the Ottoman Empire. It gained land for Russia in the same region where her illustrious uncle had been defeated in 1711, and the Latin version proclaimed “Peter Great, Anna Greater” (Petrus Magnus, Anna Maior).12 Soon after her death, a life-sized bronze statue, the first that celebrated a modern woman ruler, depicted her accompanied by a small child (see fig. 12).
Many blemishes offset Anna's successes. A state bank of 1733 soon failed, while taxes increased and other reforms were stalled by wars over the Polish succession (1733–35) and against the Ottoman Empire (1735–39) which filled much of her reign. A general survey to resolve disputes about landownership was announced in 1731 but stagnated after its guidelines were drafted in 1735. Her restored capital suffered a serious famine in 1733 and a devastating fire in 1737. Her government pursued religious dissenters with considerable brutality: a Jew was burned alive in St. Petersburg in 1738 for converting a naval officer, who was burned along with him. Both state persecution of Russia's Old Believers and state attempts to convert Muslims through bribes long outlasted Anna's reign. In failing health, Anna named the newly born son of her own Russianized niece as her heir, passing over Peter I's daughter. On her deathbed, a “positive declaration” signed by 194 Russian dignitaries named Biron as regent instead of the baby's mother.
After her death, another German Dialogue in the Land of the Dead paired Empress Anna with Elizabeth I of England. A woodcut of both women bore the legend, “The heart of a courageous hero in a woman's breast frightens enemies and brings joy to others,” and its subtitle promised to assess both women's “wise and successful governments.” Inside, Anna's achievements were overshadowed by those of England's long-dead monarch, who receives twice as much space as the newly arrived Russian empress who sought her out. At its end, Elizabeth learns that Anna's testament named her newly born great-nephew as her heir, but with her favorite Biron as regent rather than her niece. Elizabeth immediately predicts a bitter struggle between them, and a messenger bursts in to announce that Biron has been overthrown.13
Biron's regency lasted exactly three weeks before he was replaced by Russia's second female regent, Anna Leopoldovna, who held power in her son's name for exactly a year. Known before her conversion in 1733 as Elisabeth Katharina Christine von Mecklenburg-Schwerin, she had married a German prince related to both Russian and Austrian royalty. Her husband's role remains mysterious, apart from procreating children: the regent gave birth to a daughter in 1741. The combination of Anna Leopoldovna's unimportant husband and her exceptional closeness to a female companion, Julia Mengden, makes her regency resemble the reign of England's Queen Anne. Its strangest incident was the arrival of a Persian embassy seeking to marry the shah to the daughter of Peter the Great, bringing as gifts fourteen elephants: nine for the infant tsar, four for the intended bride, and one for the regent (they were still alive when the future Catherine II arrived). Its most important act was Russia's endorsement of Austria's Pragmatic Sanction supporting Maria Theresa's claims, a policy which provoked France's traditional ally Sweden to declare war on Russia. After the regent's army, commanded by two English Jacobite exiles, won a victory in Finland and before Anna Leopoldovna could proclaim herself empress, French diplomacy helped organize a coup that overthrew the regent and replaced the baby tsar with the last surviving child of Peter the Great, his daughter Elisabeth.14
The most remarkable aspect of Anna Leopoldovna's one-year regency is the extent of its erasure from official Russian memory. The fate of the infant who had been proclaimed Tsar Ivan VI is extraordinary even by Russian standards: he was taken to a remote fortress and left to rot for more than twenty years as “Nameless Prisoner Number One,” until his guards killed him because someone tried to liberate and restore him. Meanwhile, in 1745 the acts of his mother's regency were officially expunged from Russian records, and no state document could contain the name or title of Ivan VI. Coins issued in his name were recalled and melted down, although a few have survived. Even books describing his reign, whether in Russian or European languages, were ordered to be collected by the secret service and locked up in the Academy of Sciences. However, like the charter so ostentatiously torn up by Empress Anna in 1730, Russia's state papers from the year 1740–41 were preserved and finally published in the 1880s.
Even though the new empress categorically opposed capital punishment, the personal fate of her immediate predecessors was severe. After an abortive plot to restore them was discovered in 1743, the ex-regent and her husband were transported to a remote Arctic village, while two high-ranking noblewomen were whipped and banished permanently to Siberia. In 1746 the former regent died in childbirth; she received a state funeral, at which no mention was made of the cause of her death. Her husband survived in the Arctic for another thirty years. Not until 1780 did Catherine II permit their four surviving children to move to Denmark, where Anna Leopoldovna's last child finally died in 1807.
Peter the Great's Daughter
Russia's third female autocrat and fourth woman to rule its empire in sixteen years, Tsarina Elisabeth would remain on her throne for twenty years, the longest female reign since her English namesake died in 1603. She was also the third woman ruler, after Elizabeth I and Christina, who never married. Yet she has always been eclipsed by her flamboyant successor Catherine II, who composed autobiographical memoirs describing most of her predecessor's reign in rather sly fashion. For such reasons, Elisabeth's best recent foreign-language biography is subtitled “the other Empress.”15
The cultural distance between Elisabeth's reign and her mother's seems greater than the eighteen years which separated their coronations. In early 1742 an entourage of twenty-four thousand people and nineteen thousand horses left the new capital for a five-day trip to Moscow. Elisabeth made her formal entry through four triumphal arches. The first, erected by the city government, included images of the biblical Judith and Deborah in addition to her parents and herself. The second featured a deliberately unfinished statue of her father, with an effigy of his daughter wielding the equipment needed to finish it and an epitaph urging her to “Act with firmness and courage.” Her carriage was drawn by eight Neapolitan horses, and behind her, in a carriage drawn by six horses, rode her young orphaned nephew and designated heir. Eighty-five cannon salvos saluted her entrance to the cathedral. The archbishop's sermon struck an old-fashioned note by greeting Elisabeth as a regent for a grandson of Peter the Great, who sat in the place traditionally reserved for the tsar's wife.16
But at her coronation ceremony eight weeks later, the same archbishop saluted her as “all-powerful Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias” after she had placed the crown on her own head. The new empress then entered the sanctuary, strictly reserved for priests, and took communion in both kinds. The accompanying festivities included an Italian opera, La clemenza di Tito; it was performed before five thousand spectators, with court nobility and military cadets playing minor roles and a Ukrainian choir singing from a libretto whose Italian words were transcribed phonetically into Cyrillic. Three years later these events were artfully massaged in a pamphlet published for foreign consumption by the Academy of Sciences.17
In an age when protocol mattered greatly, Elisabeth devoted considerable attention to diplomacy, and gaining formal acceptance of Russia's imperial status throughout Europe became her first objective. In 1721 her father had proclaimed himself Emperor (Tsar) of All the Russias, thus giving Russia equal standing with the Holy Roman Empire and putting it ahead of all European kingdoms, but neither France nor Austria had acknowledged this new title. In 1725 France also rejected Peter's proposal that its young king marry Elisabeth. A memorandum argued that the Romanovs were unworthy of such an alliance because they ignored both primogeniture and the Salic law. Elisabeth used the War of the Austrian Succession to make early progress toward international recognition of her imperial rank. In 1743 Frederick II gave Russian diplomats precedence at the Prussian court, while his enemy Maria Theresa, acting as monarch of Hungary, recognized Elisabeth's imperial title later in 1743, and the king of Poland followed in 1744. But the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII, elected instead of Maria Theresa's husband, evaded the issue, while his French allies stubbornly refused to entitle her empress. In 1745 France botched the issue so badly that Russia broke off diplomatic relations for a decade, and a rupture with France's ally Frederick II soon followed. From this point on, the female Russian autocrat became a firm ally of the female Habsburg heiress against the misogynistic Prussian king.18
As part of her diplomatic offensive Elisabeth produced commemorative medals intended primarily for foreign consumption; in 1772 Prussia owned eleven of these with Latin inscriptions but only four with Russian inscriptions. Elisabeth's Latin medals celebrated her domestic achievements: freeing prisoners (1741), opening a canal begun by her father (Perfecit Parentis Opus, 1752), and proclaiming a tax rebate (1753). Several were struck in 1754: for founding a national university in Moscow, declaring a tax rebate for twenty-three years, and creating a town called New Serbia; but her most remarkable medal that year celebrated the birth of her nephew's son. It depicts the empress offering incense to the gods, but the baby's father is not shown, and his mother is never mentioned. The final medal from her reign, in Cyrillic but featuring Russian soldiers dressed as ancient Romans, celebrated two victories over Prussia in 1759.19
Although interested in her reputation abroad, Elisabeth was notoriously lazy about conducting domestic political business. She never signed into law the most important political initiative of her reign, a much-needed revision of Russia's legal code of 1649. Containing such interesting features as denying special treatment to nobles, it had been prepared in 1755 by the capable and versatile Peter Shuvalov, who would soon turn his talents to war finance and military engineering. Why Elisabeth refused to sign it will remain unknown, the most charitable explanation being that it retained capital punishment, a practice she consistently opposed. She was Europe's first eighteenth-century ruler who never permitted public executions, well before such enlightened policies became fashionable.20
Elisabeth's lengthy reign was generally prosperous both for herself and her subjects. Its first fifteen years saw no foreign wars, Russia's longest such respite in two centuries, and the population rose from 15.6 million in 1723 to 23.3 million in the census begun at Elisabeth's death. Foreign trade also increased dramatically: by the mid-1740s the average number of ships, primarily English, trading in Russia's new capital had more than doubled from Anna's reign. Elisabeth's personal prosperity increased after 1744 through income from new silver mines in the Urals that were managed for her private use; significant amounts of gold were also produced there after 1748. Thus she could afford elaborate displays of conspicuous consumption at court while proclaiming measures of tax relief in 1753 and 1754.21
During her reign, Russia began replacing imported leadership in military and cultural affairs. In the early 1740s most Russian generals were still foreigners, but Anna's cadet school was now producing high-quality Russian officers. Elisabeth's brief military intervention in western Europe in 1748 was a failure, but after 1757 native officers performed far better during the long, difficult war against Frederick the Great. However, Russian naval officers never matched its infantry commanders. Culturally, the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg remained a foreign enclave, but Russia's first European-style university was founded at Moscow. Russian music progressed: in 1753 the brother of Elisabeth's vocally talented lover Alexis Razumovsky formed a forty-man orchestra that played in her capital, while the empress ordered an opera to be composed and sung in Russian. A French director trained the first generation of Russian painters in her Academy of Fine Arts, created in 1757 under the patronage of Elisabeth's next important lover. Something similar happened with architecture, in which by 1760 young Russians had begun to compete with famous foreigners.22
Elisabeth's private life could not have been more different from that of her sixteenth-century unmarried English namesake. Instead of a pretense of virginity, the empress preferred a simulation of marriage to Razumovsky, who soon became known in Russia as the Nocturnal Emperor. No dashing noble courtier, he was the son of a Ukrainian peasant and had attracted Elisabeth's attention through his exceptional singing voice. The enormous social gulf between them resembles that between Elisabeth's own parents, with the sexes reversed. Although proud of his honorary title as count of the Holy Roman Empire (1744), Razumovsky never displayed any interest in Russian political questions. In a reversal of the conventional double standard, he had no known mistresses, but she had several brief affairs. The last half of Elisabeth's reign saw a prolonged liaison with Ivan Shuvalov, a man eighteen years younger than herself who also became a major political adviser. Like a queen-consort dealing with her husband's most important mistress, Razumovsky remained on good terms with his young successor and maintained an apartment immediately adjoining Elisabeth's throughout her reign.
Tsarina Elisabeth displayed a bewildering variety of moods about gender codes. She rode astride horses, even wearing a man's hat, but forbade other women from doing so. She also enjoyed dressing as a man, appearing as a French musketeer or Dutch sailor at court masquerades where she required both sexes to cross-dress. At the same time, she acquired prodigious numbers of dresses, changing them at least once a day while threatening beatings and exile to Siberia for any woman who deliberately imitated her hairstyle or her dress. She was also so terrified of mice that she hired a man to supervise thirty giant castrated cats in order to keep her palaces free of them.
The last part of Elisabeth's reign is dominated by her military alliance with her female colleague Maria Theresa. Rarely has Europe seen two major female sovereigns so close in age (Elisabeth was eight years older) whose reigns coincided for twenty years. The Russian empress and the Habsburg heiress overcame their early mutual wariness to remain close diplomatic allies after 1748, even though their religious traditions were different and their states had not been traditional allies. Although their political portraits reflected completely different domestic situations (Maria Theresa was frequently portrayed amidst her numerous children, while Elisabeth was never painted together with her nephew and heir), the similarities between these women seem important. Both refused to put vanquished political enemies to death in the 1740s. Both constructed huge residential palaces which still delight tourists today, and both did so while engaged in an enormously expensive war against Prussia. Both even expressed a desire to fight the famous soldier-king Frederick II in person. As we have seen, Maria Theresa blamed her inability to do so during the early 1740s on her continual pregnancies. A dozen years later, Russia's pleasure-loving, childless tsarina, now well into middle age and overweight, similarly contemplated commanding her army in person and told her attendants, “My father [Peter I] went; do you believe that I am stupider than he?” They reportedly replied, “He was a man; you are not.”23
Elisabeth and her chancellor understood clearly the relationship between diplomacy and warfare, that only through large-scale successful military intervention in European dynastic wars could the Russian Empire become a major player in European power politics. When the next major conflict erupted in 1756, Russia jumped in with a large army. Austro-Russian collaboration raised occasional difficulties. Shuvalov exhibited his versatility by creating a conical long-range howitzer, but only after Frederick II captured some of them and exhibited them at Berlin in 1758 did Shuvalov compose a letter to Maria Theresa, in excellent French, explaining how to make them. The two female sovereigns came very close to destroying the famous soldier-king and his no-longer invincible armies, as Maria Theresa's troops raided Berlin, while Elisabeth's even occupied it for three days. In March 1760 their last treaty contained a secret clause proposing “mutually and in most solemn fashion” a somewhat premature division of Frederick II's possessions: the Austrian heiress reclaimed all of Silesia, while the Russian empress remained in possession of those parts of the kingdom of Prussia that are “presently conquered by the armies of Her Imperial Majesty of all Russia.” Their common enemy escaped humiliation only through Elisabeth's death. No other prolonged military alliance between two major women rulers has been recorded in the annals of European war and diplomacy.24
Russian occupation of eastern Prussia lasted three years before Elisabeth's Prussophile nephew immediately returned it to Frederick II, demanding nothing in exchange. Old Fritz admitted in private that the bears had behaved themselves quite well, and the extent of Prussian collaboration with the occupying forces so annoyed him that he never visited the region again. The Russian National Library preserves eulogies of Elisabeth printed at Königsberg in 1760 and 1761, and the empress used her private silver hoard to make high-quality coins bearing her image for use in Prussia. Now a forgotten Russian exclave, the oblast of Kaliningrad still contains a Stalin-era statue of Elisabeth dressed in her Guards uniform.25
Catherine II: Greatness and Female Rule
The volume and variety of information both by and about Europe's only female ruler generally known as the Great are simply overwhelming. In the first years of her reign, hyperbole was confined to such phrases as “the most praiseworthy, most powerful Empress and lady Catherine, autocrat of all the Russias, our God-sent most gracious Mother of the Country.” But official adulation soon escalated; in subsequent decades she was routinely called simply the Great. A recent French series profiling great statesmen points out that both Voltaire and the Prince de Ligne used the masculine form le Grand to describe her. Catherine herself apparently preferred to have it both ways: on the exterior was a charming, gracious woman, while inside were the mental habits of a man—and, one might add, more disciplined energy than all but a very few men or women have possessed.26
Her coup d'état of 1762 could only have happened in a state already long accustomed to seeing women seize power in this manner. Her political perils before acquiring the throne recall those of Elizabeth Tudor in England or Isabel la Católica in Castile, but Catherine II's acquisition of sovereign power was far more remarkable than theirs because of the total absence of any hereditary claim. Hers was not Europe's longest period of female rule—Catherine II was nearly a decade older than these illustrious predecessors when she seized power—but it undeniably ranks among the most transformational. She became Russia's second major Westernizer, Peter's political heir, whose task and glory were to fulfill his dream. Her most enduring monument, Étienne-Maurice Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great, which inspired Aleksandr Pushkin's “The Bronze Horseman,” still occupies a central location in her capital city. Its dual inscriptions, four simple Russian and Latin words, proclaim it a gift to Peter the First from Catherine the Second. If Peter's biological daughter transformed her father's simple log house into a pilgrimage shrine, his German-born admirer totally eclipsed her when it came to commemorations.
The sheer number of written public documents surviving from Catherine's reign necessarily makes any brief summary unsatisfactory. Perhaps only Louis XIV or Philip II ever read and annotated more papers. As she remarked in an epitaph she wrote for herself in 1788, “Work was easy for her.” Catherine composed almost 10,000 letters, in both French and Russian (with occasional phrases in German), and signed about 14,500 decrees, by far the largest totals for any prerevolutionary Russian ruler. She also wrote incessantly about an amazing variety of subjects, ranging from the nascent study of comparative languages to numerous plays, educational manuals for her grandchildren, and a great deal of Russian history; she even began the first translation of the Iliad into Russian. Before the Revolution of 1917, many of her most essential state papers were published by the Russian Historical Society, and twelve volumes of her personal works also appeared between 1901 and 1907. But because the Soviet regime long ignored her, both series remain incomplete. In particular, the preparatory drafts and memoranda that preceded Catherine's major decisions remain widely scattered and hard to assemble. A senior Russian archivist calculated in 1996 that updating these source publications will require “more than one generation of historians.”27
Since 1917 more biographies of Catherine II have appeared in west European languages, especially English, than in Russian. The title Great is more often attached to her on foreign titles, whereas a thousand-page-long Russian anthology from 2006 discusses Catherine II pro et contra. Nevertheless, most Russian scholars agree that the most important recent study of her reign was published in England by Isabel de Madariaga, the daughter of an exiled Spanish statesman. Catherine would have enjoyed the flurry of commemorative conferences for the bicentennial of her death in 1996. In Russia, an enormous gathering at her capital (once again named St. Petersburg) presented no fewer than 128 papers, subsequently published only in Russian summaries later that year. Meanwhile, other commemorations were held at her coronation site (Moscow), her German birthplace (Stettin), the seat of her father's tiny patrimony (Zerbst), the home of both her mother and her husband (Holstein), and elsewhere in Germany (Mainz). Another international commemoration in Paris coincided with the opening at Amsterdam of a major exposition of treasures from her reign in the Hermitage Museum.28
Even if coups d'état by women were becoming a Russian tradition, Catherine's displayed unusual daring. Voicing his habitual misogyny, Frederick II subsequently claimed that “neither the honor nor the crime of this revolution can be justly credited to the empress,” but it is undeniable that her audacity reached levels never imagined by her recent female predecessors: at her coup, Catherine named herself a colonel of the guards and led them on horseback, dressed in one of their traditional uniforms. She took great pride in commemorating this feat with a very large canvas, one that still hangs in the largest room of the palace where she received her husband's surrender (see fig. 14).
Why did it succeed? In only six months her husband, Peter III, had first alienated public opinion by abandoning conquered Prussian territory with no visible advantages. He then alienated the elite Russian guards by making them wear Prussian-style uniforms and terrified the Orthodox church by secularizing many of its properties. At the same time, he made two popular changes, freeing the Russian nobility from Peter I's obligation to serve the state either militarily or bureaucratically for twenty-five years and abolishing the much-feared secret police, thereby greatly reducing the risks to plotters. Peter III also affected an eighteenth-century aristocratic nonchalance about his wife's pregnancy by another man. But it was a serious mistake because the father, Grigory Orlov, was a popular Guards officer with four well-placed brothers. After Catherine gave birth to her second son, the Orlovs and their friends provided the muscle for her coup. Frederick II heard about their plot and tried to warn his great admirer Peter III, but, as Old Fritz put it, the tsar abdicated “like a child being sent to bed"—and conveniently died a few days later while under the supervision of one of Orlov's brothers. Because she had absolutely no hereditary claim to govern, several plotters believed Catherine would become regent for her eight-year-old son. After rewarding the Guards and reassuring the church, the new empress skillfully finessed this option. She refused to ratify her husband's shameful peace with Prussia and created commissions to study the problem of abolishing the service requirement for nobles and the fate of church lands.29
Many political questions were sorted out during the next two years. Grigory Orlov was put in charge of the artillery; like Elisabeth's Nocturnal Emperor, he took no official part in Russia's government. Very few high-ranking officials who had served Peter III were dismissed; some were transferred, but none was exiled. Peter III had recalled Anna's former chief minister, Biron, now seventy-three years old, after twenty years in Siberia, and Catherine II restored him as Duke of Courland, a title he had held since 1737. An important piece of old business was resolved in 1764 when Nameless Prisoner Number One, the former baby Tsar Ivan VI, was killed by his guards during a botched attempt to liberate him. The conspirator was executed, the first such public event in over twenty years, while Ivan's actual killers received secret but tiny rewards. Meanwhile, Catherine began tidying up Russia's finances and modernizing its administration. She increased the number of officials, doubled their salaries, and appointed an incorruptible chief investigator who prosecuted bribery vigorously.
After using them as pretexts for overthrowing him, Catherine began implementing her husband's changes in both foreign policy and church affairs. Abroad, she signed a treaty with Frederick II in 1764 that became the cornerstone of her foreign policy for sixteen years. Prussian support helped Catherine to seat one of her former lovers, Stanislas Poniatowski, on the Polish throne after it became vacant in 1763 (Biron became one of his vassals). Besides abandoning Elisabeth's alliance with Maria Theresa for her husband's Prussian alliance, Catherine quietly accepted two of Peter III's major changes in domestic affairs. She confirmed his highly popular abolition of the service requirement for nobles and resumed his controversial policy of transferring church peasants to state control. She ruthlessly silenced an arrogant and eloquent prelate who also supported the claims of Ivan VI. After ordering his arrest at a synod, the new empress attended his interrogation and deprived him of his offices. When he remained obstinate, she ordered him defrocked and shut in an Estonian fortress, where his guards spoke no Russian and knew him only as Andrew the Liar.30 Catherine did reverse one of Peter III's reforms: within a few months she quietly reinstated the secret police, while attempting to eliminate their use of torture.
Catherine II believed that “true talent is usually modest and hidden away somewhere on the periphery” and that “true valor … never strives for recognition, never displays greed, and never advertises itself.”31 She searched diligently for these qualities. Once she had located reliable collaborators for sensitive positions, the empress tended to keep them in office indefinitely. Even her love life settled down after a period of promiscuity in the 1750s, one which continues to perplex her biographers over the paternity of the crown prince, Grand Duke Paul. Orlov was undoubtedly the father of the boy born in 1762 and raised as Alexander Bobrinskoy, and he remained Catherine II's lover for twelve years, the longest tenure of any holder of this particular position. Some key civilian officials served for at least thirty years; A. A. Vyazemsky, her incorruptible prosecutor, remained in this capacity until his death in 1792, while Stepan Sheskovsky, the reliable head of her secret police, also held his position for thirty years. So did a third important official. Her husband had named George Browne, an eccentric Irish Catholic soldier with a distinguished record in the Seven Years’ War, to command the army for his proposed invasion of Denmark. Instead, Catherine named him governor of her two Baltic provinces with German nobility, Estonia and Livonia, and kept him in office until he died in 1792 at the age of ninety-four.32 South of him, old Biron, who died in his Italianate palace built during Anna's reign at the age of eighty-two, and his son Peter ruled Courland as reliable Russian clients until it was surrendered to Catherine at the third Polish partition in 1795.
Catherine II's early political program culminated with the convening of Russia's unprecedented legislative convention of 1767, which accomplished little beyond increasing her stature outside Russia. Reforms were sidetracked in 1768 by a war declared by Turkey, which Catherine excitedly claimed had “aroused the sleeping cat and … now they [in Europe] will talk about us.”33 It lasted six years, produced some remarkable victories, provoked Emelyan Pugachev's rebellion, and ended with minor but strategic territorial acquisitions in the south. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire also gained large amounts of territory in the west through the first partition of Poland, about which Catherine boasted even less than Maria Theresa. During the later years of her reign, when Russian armies seemed invincible, imperial aggrandizement through both military and diplomatic aggressions became increasingly naked. Russian hegemony in Moldavia and Georgia encountered little opposition, but Russian usurpation of the supposedly autonomous Crimea provoked a second major Turkish war in 1788–91, accompanied by a largely naval war with Sweden in 1789–90. Huge territorial acquisitions followed the abolition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth after the partitions of 1793 and 1795.
Under Catherine II, foreigners no longer commanded Russian armies, but Russia's native naval officers continued to lag far behind its infantry generals, and at one point the empress even hired the naval hero of the American Revolution, John Paul Jones. When he died in 1788, her greatest naval hero, Admiral Samuel Grieg, an old Scot, belonged to no fewer than five Russian chivalric orders, including two created by Catherine II: the Order of St. George, established during her first major war in 1769, and the Order of St. Vladimir, created in 1782 to celebrate her twentieth anniversary as empress.34
Less gloriously, Catherine II's reign confronted the last and largest popular rebellion in imperial Russia, Pugachev's revolt of 1773–74. Catherine's counterfeit husband and his main collaborators exhibited unusual panache by creating not only a counterfeit court but also a counterfeit government that issued printed and sealed decrees in the name of Peter III. A rebel nobleman conducted the illiterate Pugachev's official correspondence in French and German, while two literate Tatars did likewise in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Both its so-called College of War and the adopted names of principal rebels directly mimicked Russia's real court and government, including Catherine's lover, Count Orlov. Pugachev himself abandoned his family to marry the daughter of a Yaik Cossack, who was then addressed as Her Imperial Majesty. The real empress attempted to liquidate these affronts to her prestige as rapidly, efficiently, and completely as possible. Once the revolt was broken and the rebel leader himself captured, Catherine II concentrated her efforts first on avoiding torture, which she said always obscured the truth and had thus far proved unnecessary, and then on ensuring a minimum of bloodshed. “As regards executions,” she informed her chief prosecutor, “there must be no painful ones, and only three or four people.”35 She took special care to discover whether Pugachev had coined money, who had painted his portrait, and what medals he had granted his followers. The artist turned out to be an icon painter who had painted Tsar Peter III over a likeness of the empress captured from a government office; no coins had been minted, but captured silversmiths had made about twenty medals for him. At his execution, Pugachev's counterfeit seal was broken in his presence. Then, to the bitter disappointment of the Moscow crowd, he was beheaded before traditional barbarities were inflicted on his corpse. Catherine's final objective was to obliterate all memory of this revolt by erasing the names of key places and persons connected with it. Pugachev's house was destroyed, and his village was renamed after one of her generals. The main village of his rebellious Yaik Cossacks likewise had its name changed, and the Yaik River became the Ural. Even Pugachev's brother, who had not taken part in the revolt, had to change his surname.
Pugachev was the most important of several men claiming to be Peter III, but he was not Russia's strangest impostor. This dubious distinction belongs to his immediate successor, the first and only documented female royal pretender in European history. Her real name remains unknown, but she became known in Russia as Tarakanova (literally, “of the cockroaches”). Accompanied by an entourage of Polish exiles and French agents who claimed she was the daughter of Empress Elisabeth, she was astutely kidnapped in 1775 at the Adriatic port of Ragusa with the help of British diplomats. Together with two Polish aides and six Italian servants, she was sent to St. Petersburg for interrogation, in French because she spoke no Russian. In captivity, she spun a series of fairy tales and wrote a letter to the empress which Catherine furiously noted “extended her insolence to the point of signing herself as Elisabeth.” This “rank scoundrel,” who died of natural causes after six months in prison, inspired several romantic novels and a very early silent French film.36
Domestically, Catherine's first major achievement was to summon Russia's earliest elective assembly in December 1766; it would also be the last until 1905. When it opened in July 1767, it contained 29 deputies representing government institutions, including the Orthodox church, 142 deputies from the provincial nobility, 209 deputies from Russian towns, and 200 peasant deputies, including 54 from non-Russian tribes. Catherine's final document began by asserting that “Russia is a European power” and claimed in a burst of Enlightenment optimism that “Peter the Great, on introducing European manners and customs among a European people, found such facility as he himself never expected.” Its next article boasted that “the Empire of Russia contains 32 degrees of latitude and 165 of longitude on the terrestrial globe"—and Catherine II later extended its western and southern limits considerably. Article 9 asserted, “The Sovereign is absolute, for no other than absolute power vested in one person can be suitable to the extent of so vast an Empire.” She borrowed a great deal from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws but finessed his assertion that the law of succession was the most fundamental of any country, because she could not devise one that would retrospectively justify her seizure of power.37
Her leading biographer, Isabel de Madariaga, asserts that Catherine's Nakaz, or Instruction, to the assembled deputies constituted “one of the most remarkable political treatises ever compiled and published by a reigning sovereign in modern times.” It was also widely disseminated across Europe. A deluxe edition of 1770 was printed in Russian, Latin, French, and German, and a luxurious bilingual Russian–Greek edition followed in 1771. An English translation appeared in 1768, followed by Italian, Dutch, and Polish versions. French censorship guaranteed its notoriety by banning the work. Her famously misogynist ally Frederick the Great complimented her legislative efforts as a “masculine, nervous performance, and worthy of a great man.” Comparing the Russian autocrat to Semiramis, Elizabeth I of England, and their peer Maria Theresa, the Prussian king remarked, “We have never heard of any female being a lawgiver; this glory was reserved for the Empress of Russia.”38 The assembly attempted to honor her with the title of Mother of the Fatherland, which she refused after their proposal had entered the official record.
Although no general law code for the empire ever emerged from these discussions, many of its central provisions were incorporated into subsequent legislation, especially the major administrative reforms which followed the end of her first Turkish war (Maria Theresa's greatest administrative reforms also followed the end of her first major war). With her usual energy, Catherine II and her advisers made six drafts, including more than six hundred worksheets written in her own hand, before the “Statute for the Administration of the Provinces [gubernyi] of the Russian Empire” was promulgated in November 1775. Its key provisions, carried out under Catherine II's constant close personal supervision, divided her empire into twenty-five major units of approximately equal population and multiplied the number of courts, schools, almshouses, public buildings, and subaltern officials in each. By 1785 further conquests and treaties had increased the number of imperial gubernyi to forty-one; they had reached fifty when she died in 1796. As these reforms were implemented, the cost of Russia's local government mushroomed from 1.7 million roubles in 1774 to 5.6 million by 1785; by her last year, they had nearly doubled again to 10.9 million. De Madariaga notes that the share of Russian state income devoted to military expenses declined considerably throughout her reign, while civilian administration ate up more than half of the budget by the time she died, and asserts that “the demilitarization of administration and society was the corollary of the presence of a woman on the throne.”39
The sharp increase in numbers of gubernyi indicates the scale of Catherine II's territorial acquisitions at the expense of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. From the commonwealth she claimed to have liquidated only the Slavic part, the former grand duchy of Lithuania, while leaving the Catholic Poles to her German partners in crime; in fact, she took only slightly less than Joseph Stalin would after 1945. Her southern acquisitions from the Turks gave Russia permanent control of the Black Sea. Such huge gains merely whetted Catherine's appetite for the fantastic Greek project of her old age, which envisioned destroying the Ottoman Empire completely and installing her younger grandson Constantine in the ancient Byzantine capital of Constantinople.
Catherine II was Europe's only female ruler to consciously promote her political greatness, and she closely supervised the production of various forms of durable propaganda to perpetuate her achievements. At her coronation, 850 commemorative medallions were struck in gold and silver for the most distinguished guests, 2,000 more in bronze for lesser notables, and about 30,000 small copper pieces were thrown to the crowd. To celebrate her tenth anniversary in power, she put her accession medal of 1767, depicting her as a helmeted Minerva, on snuffboxes for her closest associates. At the same time, she reinforced her credentials as a Russian patriot by ordering a series of 57 medals representing every previous Russian ruler from tenth-century Rurik to Tsarina Elisabeth (omitting, of course, Ivan VI and Peter III).
Catherine II used medals far more extensively than any previous female ruler. That same year, 1772, her Prussian allies gave her a printed pamphlet listing every Russian medal in their possession. In the first decade of her reign this German-born Westernizer had issued far more of these in Russian than in Latin, mainly commemorating such new institutions as a Foundling Hospital (1763), an Academy of Fine Arts (1765), the Carousel Theater (1766), Russia's Legislative Assembly (1767), St. Isaac's Cathedral (1768), and the Economic Society (1768). More recent medals celebrated Russia's success in its ongoing war with the Ottomans; one, with a beautiful map, commemorated Alexis Orlov's naval victory over the Turks. However, Prussia did not possess all of Catherine II's early medals. Two more, both with Latin inscriptions, went to British physicians to celebrate the introduction of vaccination (1768) and “Liberation from Plague” (1770). A large collection subsequently acquired by France included medals in Russian commemorating an expedition to Kamchatka (1762), her foundation of the Smolny Institute for girls (1764), her new honorary military order of St. George (1769), the transportation of the pedestal for her great equestrian statue of Peter I (1770), and Grigory Orlov's actions in plague-ridden Moscow (1771).40
Across the next decade, Catherine II maintained a steady stream of political accomplishments, also commemorated by medals. By 1781 she proudly enumerated no fewer than 492 notable political achievements throughout her burgeoning empire: 29 provinces reorganized, 144 towns organized and built, 30 foreign treaties, 78 military victories, 88 memorable edicts, and 123 edicts for ameliorating the general welfare of her subjects. Only a few of these deserved medals, while some of her most famous but insufficiently glorious political events of the 1770s were not commemorated in this way—for example, the suppression of Pugachev's revolt and the first partition of Poland, in which Catherine, unlike Maria Theresa, did not reclaim provinces lost many centuries earlier. Nevertheless, both London and Paris possess Russian medals from this decade commemorating such events as her renovation of the Kremlin (1773); the marriage of Crown Prince Paul (1773); her peace treaty with Turkey and her victorious general, Prince Peter Rumiantsov (both 1774); her creation of new provincial governments (1775); the second marriage of Crown Prince Paul (1776); the fifty-year jubilee of Russia's Academy of Science (1776); the birth of her first grandson, Alexander (1777), depicting the empress but not the father; homage from her new Greek subjects in the Crimea (1779); and the birth of her second grandson, Constantine (1779).
In 1782 a whole series of medals celebrated the unveiling of Falconet's statue of Peter the Great, with tokens thrown to the crowd as at a coronation; others celebrated the strengthened Russian navy and Russia's new Imperial Academy of Language, headed by Princess Ekaterina Dashkova. In 1783 medals celebrated Potemkin's conquest of the Crimean peninsula, including a superb map; formal Russian annexation of the Crimea, also with a map; and Russia's new client, the king of Georgia. The next year produced one celebrating the creation of a free port at Theodosia (present-day Sebastopol). Those from 1788 celebrated Potemkin's victory over the Turks at Ochakov, including a diagram of the battle; another marked the death of Russia's naval hero Admiral Greig, for whom Catherine personally composed an epitaph in Tallinn's Protestant cathedral (and ensured that the inscription tells us so). A year later she also composed the inscriptions for three more medals honoring Potemkin. The empress did not overlook older events: in the 1780s she planned a new series with 235 motifs from Russian history, of which 94 were eventually struck. Another cluster of medals were struck in 1790 to celebrate both a land victory over Sweden and the subsequent peace treaty; Marshal Alexander Suvorov's victories over the Turks; and laws guaranteeing the security of private property. Catherine II's medals were so numerous that they were occasionally exported in bulk. Complete sets in silver and bronze went to Vienna in 1767 and again in 1790, by which time their number had increased to 188; numerous medals were also given to King Gustav III of Sweden during his state visit in 1777. By the end of her reign, two engravers—one doing designs of the empress while his partner engraved the subject—had together created no fewer than 250 medals.
Here, as in much else, Catherine II surpassed nearly all of her male predecessors, and her numismatic legacy goes beyond her medals. A Swedish expert has shown how Catherine II's coinage reflected both Russian territorial expansion and the cost of war. After 1774 Russian-made coins replaced Moldavian coins, and Russianized Georgian coins employing imperial double eagles were minted during the last fifteen years of her reign. New mints were opened in Siberia and at the old Genoese port of Kaffa in the newly conquered Crimean peninsula. Paper banknotes were introduced in 1769 during Catherine II's first Turkish war, but they fell rapidly in value and were supplemented by very large and unwieldy copper roubles, which lost half of their face value by the end of her reign. However, Russia's silver coins never diminished in value throughout her entire reign.41
To a greater extent than her female predecessors, Catherine II aided other capable women. Maria Theresa did as much as Catherine II to educate schoolgirls (and more to teach them music), and Russian policies on coeducational primary education adapted her Austrian models. Catherine II did more for women's secondary education. Early in her reign she adapted the French model developed by Louis XIV's second wife to create two boarding schools in St. Petersburg, one for girls of noble descent, which lasted until the Bolshevik Revolution, and one for nonnobles. The major statue honoring Catherine II on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg surrounds her with prominent figures from her reign; unlike Maria Theresa's otherwise similar Denkmal in Vienna, Catherine II's group includes another woman, Princess Dashkova.
Despite being the sister of Peter III's mistress, Dashkova was a close collaborator at Catherine's coup of 1762, and offers the best example of a talented woman being entrusted with important official positions by a female ruler. After two decades of often strained personal relations, during much of which Dashkova lived abroad as a widow raising her son, Catherine II named her to head the Academy of Sciences in 1782. On first hearing of her appointment, Dashkova wrote a protest that “even God, in making me a woman, has dispensed me from being employed as director of an Academy of Sciences.” But she took the oath of office in a cold sweat and served for twelve years in a position that no woman has held since. In 1783 the empress also named Dashkova president of the newly founded Russian Academy of Letters. Like its French prototype of 1635, it was responsible for producing an official dictionary of the Russian language. Under Dashkova's energetic direction a complete six-volume Russian dictionary appeared between 1789 and 1794.42
Dashkova reputedly sought even less conventional posts. “It is well known,” asserted the notorious memoirist Charles-François-Philibert Masson in 1800, “that [Dashkova] long ago petitioned Catherine to make her a Colonel of the Guards, a task which she doubtless would have filled better than most of those she exercised; but Catherine was too suspicious of a woman who boasted so much of placing her on the throne to offer her such a post. However,” Masson concluded sourly, “one more female reign, and we would have seen a girl as an army general and a woman as minister of state.” After Catherine II's death, Dashkova defended her patron against such detractors, considering her far superior to Peter I, a “brutal and ignorant tyrant” obsessed by “the ambition to change everything without distinguishing the useful and good from the bad.”43
Catherine's patronage also benefited Europe's outstanding eighteenth-century woman sculptor, Marie-Anne Collot. The first Frenchwoman to master this art, she worked in St. Petersburg in 1766–78 as an assistant to the French sculptor Falconet, then creating the famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Collot's greatest talent lay in sculpting heads (Falconet's weakest point), and in 1770 she made Peter's head. She also did portraits. The empress invited her to court balls and gave her numerous commissions. In 1767 Russia's Academy of Fine Arts made Collot a foreign member. Her work in marble was copied in plaster, terra cotta, and bronze, and a bust of the empress she made in 1768 is in the Hermitage. Collot's portrait of Catherine II with a laurel wreath, celebrating a victory over the Turks in 1769, was copied for medals. A marble bust of the empress in an informal pose with a veil, sculpted from life, was intended as a gift for Voltaire. “Without Catherine II,” concludes a recent study, Collot “would never have been able to exhibit her talents as a portraitist, nor her artistic genius.”44
Catherine II lived very well indeed. In a letter of 1790 to her old friend Baron Frederick Grimm, she described her surroundings in her Winter Palace: “My collections, not including the pictures and Raphael's Loggia, consist of 38,000 books, four rooms filled with books, prints, 10,000 engraved stones, about 10,000 drawings, and a natural history section housed in two large rooms; all this is accompanied by a charming theatre … to go to and from my room takes three thousand paces, there I walk among a mass of things I like and enjoy, and these winter strolls are what keeps me healthy and active"—she forgot to mention her 16,000 coins and medals.45 She had already published a three-volume catalogue of her paintings in 1785, which contained information about 2,658 items, including 58 by Rembrandt and 87 by Rubens. A truly attractive side of Catherine II emerges from her rules of conduct for visitors to this palace, which can still be found there (now in Russian and English). They begin with “Leave your rank at the door.” Her self-confidence extended to the point of having herself painted in traditional Russian headgear, and even as a casually dressed old lady out walking in her garden with one of her dogs (see fig. 16). One cannot imagine a greater departure from the idealized late portraits of her most illustrious female predecessor, Elizabeth I.
Catherine II's panache extended even to her tableware. Her Green Frog Wedgwood service for fifty people took its name from its original destination, a minor palace outside Petersburg, a place whose Finnish name meant “frog marsh” (Catherine called it La grenouillière). Shipped from England to Russia in 1774, it included a 680-piece dinner service and 264-piece dessert service; the decoration of each piece contained both a green frog and a view of some English subject. Wedgwood's plates also had practical advantages: lacking heavy gilding or ornaments, they were surprisingly light and stacked well. Most of them have survived: the Hermitage still holds 1,025 of the original 1,222 views.46
As is all too well known, Catherine II's love life kept pace with her other forms of acquisitiveness, even (or especially) in her old age. She was the first female monarch since Urraca in the early twelfth century to acknowledge an illegitimate son, and, like Urraca, she neither disowned him nor showered him with privileges. The two most important men of her reign followed the same pattern as that of her immediate predecessor, Elisabeth: first, a handsome man her own age with little interest in affairs of state (Orlov), then a brilliant younger man full of political advice (Potemkin). But Orlov managed some important public tasks—his service in Moscow during the plague of 1771–72 was exemplary—and Potemkin's record as a statesman completely dwarfs Shuvalov's. Catherine II's reputation for promiscuity rests largely on the officially acknowledged bedmates who followed Potemkin in relatively rapid order; on average, they were almost thirty years younger than she.47 Her most illustrious female predecessor, Elizabeth I of England, spent all but two of her last sixteen years acting out a romance with a man thirty-three years younger than herself.
Catherine's most important official by far, Potemkin, was also a former lover whom, as noted earlier, she may well have secretly married in 1774. But Potemkin, accompanied by a small harem that included some of his married nieces, exercised his vast responsibilities as a de facto viceroy at the opposite end of the Russian Empire from the woman in St. Petersburg whom he called his mother-sovereign. None of Catherine's other sexual partners exercised any political influence except the last one, Platon Zubov, and her leading biographer suggests that his “rapid rise is the measure of Catherine's own decline.”48
Catherine's fear and loathing of revolutionary France also darkened the final years of her reign. An enormous distance separates her discussions with Denis Diderot during Pugachev's revolt from the loyalty oath she imposed on all French subjects in her empire twenty years later. She persecuted enlightened critics ruthlessly and urged unified action by European monarchs against revolutionary France but never committed Russia's formidable army to this cause. She also remained sufficiently acute to predict in 1794 that “France could be reborn more powerful than ever if some providential man, adroit and courageous, arose to lead his people and perhaps his century.”49 A few years after her death Napoleon seized power, and the French repaid her by publishing various legends about her sexual behavior.
Before then, the unprecedented turbulence of the French Revolution inspired the last notable eighteenth-century dialogue of the dead, composed by an unidentified French émigré and printed in southern Germany in 1797.50 As it opens, Charon ferries Catherine II's shadow across alone because she was “a colossus in a century of pygmies” who risked sinking his boat—something he says has happened about twenty times in the previous six thousand years with the very greatest poets, scientists, and statesmen. Catherine II was already called the Semiramis of the North. But in 1797 her semilegendary predecessor, here called the Catherine of Asia, had a positive reputation; as Charon told Catherine, “Semiramis … effaced [her usurpation of power] by forty consecutive years of glory.” Upon arrival, Catherine, “with the title of a great king,” is taken to a special space reserved for sovereigns, where she converses first with Peter the Great. When he asks if his “barbarous and Asiatic subjects have become civilised Europeans,” she replies, “At least they now have its laws and will soon have its manners.” She boasts, “I have reigned as a woman of genius” and, echoing the author's view of Semiramis, says, “Thirty-four years of clemency and justice are the only abuse I have made from one day of hope and audacity.” Omitting Pugachev, she concludes by listing her political and cultural achievements, noting that “one or two of the pages I have furnished to history I would like removed one day.” The dialogue's agenda emerges after Catherine II upbraids Louis XVI for seeking approval from his subjects and even offers grudging praise for revolutionary France: “It is impossible to defend a worse cause with more energy and sometimes with more talent.” Her dialogue with Frederick II, whom Charon also ferried across alone, mixes astute remarks about flattery with analysis of Europe's current situation. Catherine tells Frederick, “I fear it is we who have prepared all this disorder.”
Seventeen years earlier, Catherine herself had composed a more original dialogue of the dead that said a great deal about modern female monarchs. The central hall and ten surrounding rooms of one of her palaces (renamed Chesmensky in commemoration of Russia's great naval victory over Turkey) contained portraits of all reigning European royalty as well as marble bas-reliefs of all Russian rulers from Rurik to Tsarina Elisabeth, as usual omitting Peter III and Ivan VI. Inspired by this setting and informed by personal experience and her vast reading, in 1780 Catherine composed a wickedly malicious private satire mocking both her fellow west European monarchs and her Russian predecessors through imaginary dialogues between their representations.51
It began with Maria Theresa complaining to her son Joseph II about the scandalous behavior of her daughters, among whom Marie Antoinette was far from the worst. The Habsburg matriarch then complains that Catherine II's palace “needs a crucifix. My old eyes are accustomed to always having one around, and I've always put my entire hopes in the miracles of Christ Jesus.” Joseph II, with whom Catherine got along much better, comments, “Yes, mom, but nevertheless we've still lost Silesia. All we need is money, troops, and a good general to work the miracle that will get it back for us.” His antique mother then comments, “I want to die in peace. Another war would be a burden on my conscience, and I can't decide anything without asking my confessor. Besides, my good friend Empress Elisabeth is no longer on earth, except as a medal.” On this cue, Catherine II's predecessor remarks, “And this medal, I believe, is as unflattering as every other extant portrait of me.” Their dialogue spins along, with Elisabeth remarking, “Empress is a title that includes the privilege of doing whatever you like without being bothered by it,” to which Maria Theresa responds, “That's just what I've often thought, but I only said so in secret.” Elisabeth is then mocked by her predecessor Anna for wasting her authority on trivialities. Catherine concluded the satire by mocking her illustrious contemporary Frederick II, to whom she had previously admitted that she felt herself inferior as a ruler.52 Her distant Russian predecessor St. Alexander Nevsky tells Frederick II, “I never undertook any unjust wars.” When Frederick insists, “Let's see more closely how much merit hides behind your beard,” St. Alexander replies, “My dear colleague, it's not enough to be clever,” adding that the Prussian philosopher wastes his time composing mediocre French poetry and doesn't know him “any better than you know German literature.” Catherine II also dropped hints about Frederick's rumored homosexuality. She expected, correctly, that these remarks would remain unknown for a century after her death.
Catherine II always managed several projects simultaneously, and some were left unfinished because of her death. Militarily, a Russian army commanded by the brother of her current lover was at Baku, preparing to invade Persia. Domestically, she had been constructing a building to house the newly created Imperial Public Library on the widest boulevard of her capital, close to its busiest shopping complex. Pace Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the evil that women rulers do need not live after them, nor is the good interred with their bones. After Catherine II's death Russia's army was immediately recalled from Persia, while both her shopping center and her national library continue to fulfill their original purposes on Nevsky Prospect. Catherine II was also the only female ruler of Europe who kept all government business out of the hands of her son and heir. Rumors abounded that the old empress wished to pass over Grand Duke Paul in favor of her beloved older grandson Alexander, whom she had trained from infancy to be a model ruler; but for once Europe's customary rules of succession held firm in Russia. Paul's first public act was to rebury his father at a solemn state funeral and place his bones next to his mother's, where they rest today. Another of his early acts was to decree a law of succession that explicitly barred any woman from ever inheriting Russia's throne. An era ended in 1796: Europe would not see another woman governing a major state for almost two centuries.