Catherine the Great (33 page)

Such tones were always reserved for officials who should have known better. Even so, a degree of tetchiness was understandable as the empress became impatient with the protracted preparations for battle. Although war had been declared in the autumn, it was not until the following spring that campaigning could begin. While more than 50,000 troops were being recruited, Catherine spent the winter of 1768–9 reading herself into a world as far removed from Panin’s Northern System as it was possible to imagine. Since there was no prospect of drawing the Italian states into her conflict with the Turks–Naples, she discovered, danced ‘to the sound of the French flute, and this flute is not in harmony with the voice of Russia’–she concentrated on trying to support the Corsican revolt against France. Boswell’s account of his travels on the island, provided for her by Lord Cathcart, enhanced her admiration for the revolt’s leader, General Pasquale Paoli.
⁵³
Judging from the letter she wrote to Ivan Chernyshëv on 14 December, Paoli’s buccaneering spirit proved more infectious than the smallpox:

Meanwhile, spontaneous revolts among the Balkan Slavs seemed to offer the prospect of coordinated resistance against the Turks, and especially in Montenegro, where an Italian bandit calling himself Stephen the Little had publicly declared that he was Peter III, giving Catherine an added incentive to intervene. She employed an Italian aristocrat in a vain attempt to draw the Order of the Knights of Malta into her struggle against the infidel. ‘Above all,’ as Franco Venturi has shown, ‘she created a net of agents and listening posts in Italy and thus set in motion a type of diplomacy quite different from the traditional one.’
⁵⁵

Most of this was as much the stuff of fantasy as the ancient prophecy, unexpectedly given renewed credence by Russian designs on Constantinople, that the downfall of the Ottoman Empire would be brought about by a race of blond men.
⁵⁶
Yet for Catherine the deeds of war were bound to remain a thing of the mind. Unlike the male monarchs of her age, who regularly led their troops into battle, she could experience war only vicariously. For much of the time, she was
forced to play a waiting game, not without its stresses for a sovereign accustomed to rapid progress in all her activities. Both her mood and her health fluctuated sharply with the news from the front. Victories were greeted with unrestrained joy, reverses with undisguised irritation. During the anxious intervals in between, her entourage did their best to keep her relaxed and amused.

At the beginning of April 1769, Vladimir Orlov reintroduced her to Ivan Kulibin, the inventor from Nizhny Novgorod whose clock in the form of a mechanical toy egg struck the hour with Easter tunes and opened to reveal a scene of the Resurrection, played out by miniature figures done in gold and silver. Catherine rewarded him with 1000 roubles.
⁵⁷
God seemed firmly on her side when campaigning opened just before her fortieth birthday. General A. M. Golitsyn was her commander-in-chief, appointed as a compromise between two more distinguished candidates: General Peter Panin (favoured by his brother, Nikita) and General Peter Rumyantsev (supported by Grigory Orlov against the Panins).
⁵⁸
When news of his first victory at Khotin, the main Turkish fort on the Dniester, reached Tsarskoye Selo on the afternoon of 30 April, Catherine called her courtiers into the dining room to deliver the glad tidings herself. ‘The Turkish camp is taken,’ she informed Saltykov next day, ‘along with a great number of trophies and prisoners. Our losses were almost nil, since the enemy cannon fired over our heads.’ That morning, the Court travelled to St Petersburg for a thanksgiving service at the Kazan Church where she made sure Paul was present. A jubilant crowd lined the streets to join the celebrations.
⁵⁹
Soon there were more. By 10 May, Catherine was delighted to report that Golitsyn had defeated another 30,000-strong Turkish army.
⁶⁰

Confident of his further progress, she relaxed at Gatchina, where Rinaldi’s building work was advancing apace, and where she and Grigory Orlov strolled through the park to see the pheasants in the menagerie after Lev Naryshkin had played the violin for them in the new wooden apartments on 15 May. Eight days later, Zakhar Chernyshëv and Praskovya Bruce joined the three of them at the dacha at Bronnaya, where they sat up all night playing cards to watch the long-awaited transit of Venus through a telescope set up by Paul’s science tutor, Professor Aepinus (the Russian Academy of Sciences played a central part in the world-wide observations of the event).
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Military matters loomed larger at the beginning of June, when Grigory, acting in his capacity as Master of the Ordinance, took Catherine on a tour of the Liteyny cannon foundry in St Petersburg attended by all her artillery generals. Not that the common people were forgotten. At the accession day celebrations in the Dutch Hall at Monplaisir, the empress
made a patriotic gesture by proposing a new toast ‘to all her subjects’ after the usual toasts to herself and the heir to the throne.
⁶²

The summer brought more disconcerting news. Catherine’s early boasts were made to seem embarrassing when adroit manoeuvring by the Ottomans forced Golitsyn to retreat across the Dniester, abandoning his earlier gains. Yet no sooner had she given orders to sack him on 13 August than he embarrassed her again by retaking Khotin in September. That was a more pardonable offence. ‘The tsarina is drunk with joy,’ reported the appalled French ambassador. ‘Her health, which had been crushed by the reverses, is visibly restored.’
⁶³
Until then, the atmosphere had indeed been tense in St Petersburg, where rumours of conspiracies and mysterious disappearances circulated in the sort of ‘confidential whispers’ that Richardson attributed to a people ‘prohibited from speaking or writing about politics’:

Richardson’s timing could hardly have been less felicitous. Far from spurning public opinion, Catherine was even keener to nurture it in the aftermath of the abortive Legislative Commission. Now that it was clear that the ideas she had borrowed from Montesquieu and Beccaria were unrecognisable to the majority of Russian nobles, she tried another tack. Posing as ‘Granny’ (
Babushka
), the benign editorial persona of a new journal,
All Sorts
, at the beginning of 1769, Catherine tried to coax her subjects to improve their manners by mocking their bad habits in light-hearted journalism in the tradition of Addison and Steele’s
Spectator
. Much of their material was indeed paraphrased in Catherine’s journal, which openly acknowledged its debt to its progenitor: ‘There is not a little salt in the English
Spectator
, and
All Sorts
resembles it, so why should it not contain something useful for society?’
⁶⁵
Although she was still a woman in a hurry–‘We
have no doubts regarding the speedy correction of morals and expect an immediate extirpation of all vices’, Granny confidently declared–Catherine permitted a degree of playful banter between her own journal and others in the same vein published by Nikolay Novikov, a former minute-taker at the Legislative Commission who was as keen as she was to disperse the clouds of prejudice and injustice.
⁶⁶
His journal
The Drone
mocked corrupt judges who had unaccountably failed to read Beccaria
On Crimes and Punishments
and understood as little of their own duties as they did of the Syrian and Khaldean languages: ‘O enlightenment, heavenly gift, lift the veil of ignorance and cruelty swiftly for the defence of humanity!’
⁶⁷

Although it remains a mystery why Catherine chose to encourage public discussion of the defects of Russian society at the start of her war with the Turks, her turn to journalism was entirely of a piece with the first of five aims she had once jotted down under the heading ‘Maxims of Administration’: ‘One must refine the nation one is to govern.’
⁶⁸
Conscious of the benefits of her own reading, she paid 5000 roubles a year to support a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books, founded in November 1768 under the aegis of her secretary Grigory Kozitsky, a graduate of the Kiev Spiritual Academy who had studied in Leipzig. Kozitsky translated her Instruction into Latin and Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
into Russian before committing suicide in December 1775. (‘He was in bed with his wife,’ Jeremy Bentham learned later, ‘who finding herself wet in the morning spoke to her husband, and receiving no answer, drew aside the Cloaths and found him with a penknife in his hand, dead, with upwards of 30 wounds about him.’)
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The Society’s life lasted longer. More than forty titles were in print by 1772, and by the time its work was transferred to the newly created Russian Academy in 1783, 112 translations had been published with a further 129 still in progress. Many of the first works to appear were extracts from the
Encyclopédie
which reflected the empress’s current interest in Greece and the Mediterranean. Boswell’s
Corsica
came out in 1773. Fielding’s
Joseph Andrews
and Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
may well have reflected her personal tastes (Catherine read English literature in French and German translation). Corneille and Voltaire were also on the list.
⁷⁰

Though she confessed to Voltaire in March 1771 that she was ‘too busy fighting’ to contemplate a widespread implementation of her Instruction, such a burst of intellectual activity helped to create an atmosphere in which the empress might reasonably think that her treatise had not been in vain. That autumn, Novikov published a number of positive European responses to it in his journal
The Painter
.
⁷¹
Archbishop Platon had offered more explicit reassurance in his New
Year sermon, given in her presence at the Winter Palace. ‘Our age is the age of enlightenment,’ he proclaimed in his most fulsome acknowledgement of the achievements of secular reform, going on to praise impartial judges for bringing clarity to Russian legislation, in words which echoed Catherine’s own, and to praise her for stressing the need for moderate punishments. The aim was to destroy vice itself, rather than the unhappy criminal. ‘Never, indeed, has a government incorporated so abundantly the spirit of guardianship and philanthropy.’
⁷²
On her forty-second birthday in April, the empress began a memoir designed to highlight the uncivilised features of Elizabeth’s Court. So it came as a shock when she discovered in May that her own servants were still being dragged off to the palace candle factory to be flogged, just as they had been when she first arrived in Russia. Since this was an ‘evil custom’ that she had banned at the beginning of her reign, she expressed outrage that it had been revived. Henceforth, no liveried servant was to be beaten on any account. ‘If some of them commit a major crime such as theft, then they should be stripped of their livery and sent to the criminal courts. Attempts should be made to correct drunks, defaulters and the disobedient by: 1) gentleness, and if that doesn’t work: 2) detention. 3) The punishment should be 48 hours on bread and water.’
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Evidently the empress was unable to rely on books alone in her quest for polite refinement. Many Russian nobles were illiterate and, as Novikov discovered, it was impossible to make a profit from the small number of sophisticated men who subscribed to his journals (many of which were eventually recirculated as hair-curlers). Though it sold better than any other Russian journal in the eighteenth century,
The Drone
petered out like the others as print runs slipped. They would scarcely have survived at all without support from Catherine and her Court. Novikov was swift to return the compliment, as part of a new compact between writer and ruler in Russia. When the empress turned to her beloved theatre as the best way of promoting civilised noble values in 1772, Novikov declared
O these times!
, the first, best-known and most successful of the five comedies she wrote that year, worthy of comparison with Molière. The play was modelled on
Die Betschwester
by C. F. Gellert, transposing its plot into a denunciation of superstitious bigotry that must have made uncomfortable viewing for some of her more conspicuously pious courtiers.
⁷⁴

It was precisely because she was so keen to eradicate it that Catherine was so prickly in response to condescending foreign verdicts on Russian backwardness. Even so sympathetic a foreigner as Lord Cathcart, who praised the empress for her ‘quickness of thought and discernment, an attention to business and a desire
to fill her throne with dignity and with utility even to the lowest of her subjects’, followed a widespread tendency to dismiss ‘the Russians in general’ as ‘men of no education or principles of any sort, though not without quickness of parts’.
⁷⁵
Travelling to Russia in 1769, the Lutheran pastor and political thinker Johann Gottfried Herder regarded the Russians’ desire to imitate as ‘nothing but the healthy disposition of a developing nation–a tendency in the right direction’. But he was equally sure that ‘the great work of “civilizing a nation to perfection”’ was ‘yet to be accomplished’ because the Russians had bungled the adoption of everything they had taken from Western Europe, from the art of navigation to French manners.
⁷⁶
Anxious to counter that her subjects showed ‘great natural aptitude’ for reasoned behaviour, Catherine attributed their earlier failings to faulty methods on the part of her predecessors. ‘I would willingly blame the government for acting clumsily. When this nation is better known in Europe, people will take back many errors and prejudices about Russia.’
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