The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (3 page)

As Grand Duchess, Catherine’s position depended on producing a male heir and cultivating political supporters at court. She was under constant scrutiny—no part of her life at court, nor anything in the memoirs, most especially her love life, was private. Catherine had innate political instincts that guided her well during and after her introduction to life in the Russian court. By contrast, even such a successful veteran of court politics as her mother nearly caused her and her daughter’s dismissal before the wedding.
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Princess Sophie willingly learned Russian, and on June 28, 1744, she converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and became Ekaterina Alekseevna, in honor of Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine I; the next day, she was betrothed and became Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess.
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Married on August 21, 1745, the sixteen-year-old bride and seventeen-year-old groom, according to Catherine’s middle memoir, failed to consummate their marriage until 1754, when each was having an officially sanctioned affair in the hopes that experience would encourage them.
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After two miscarriages, Catherine gave birth, on September 20, 1754, to Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich, the future Paul I (d. 1801), perhaps fathered by Sergei Saltykov (1726–1813).
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The significance for Catherine of the long-awaited birth of a male heir constitutes the underlying plot of her early memoir, written around 1756. Her son made Catherine’s position at court much more secure, for she was now not only the wife of the heir apparent but also the mother of the future heir. Catherine’s personal security became especially important as Elizabeth’s health worsened and a succession struggle loomed .
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Thus in 1756, in a letter to her mentor, Hanbury-Williams, Catherine planned ahead. “After being informed of her death and making sure that there is no mistake, I will go straight to my son’s room.”
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Her son and timely information through her allies were crucial to her political and even physical survival. The Empress countered Catherine’s intrigues by isolating her—from her son, friendly courtiers, and bad news about Elizabeth’s health—to make her less of a threat. As the memoirs make clear, the Empress also carefully kept Catherine on a limited budget of 30,000 rubles per year and watched what Catherine spent. However, Catherine ran up a debt of six hundred thousand rubles by 1762, money she used to buy the loyalty of courtiers and of her husband, as well as dresses.
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After another miscarriage, she had two more children, a daughter, Anna Petrovna (1757–59), by a future King of Poland, Count Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1732–98), and by Count Grigory Orlov, a son, Count Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, born on April 11, 1762 (d. 1813), without any of the usual fanfare. On June 28, Catherine seized power, aided by forty supporters, including Orlov and his four brothers, and became Catherine II, Empress of Russia. This pragmatic mixture of love and politics affected her relations with her son, Paul, and with Orlov, and would reach its apogee with Prince Potemkin. Catherine’s personal relations had serious political consequences for her and others due to the concentration of power in individuals and the intimate, familial nature of rule in Russia at this time.
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In all her memoirs Catherine balances her relationships with her husband and with Elizabeth, for although her ultimate future depends on Peter, her immediate future is in Elizabeth’s hands. This central double thread in the memoirs reflects a system of inheritance in which Elizabeth could choose and, equally important, dismiss her chosen successor. Having disinherited his eldest son, Alexei, on February 3, 1718, in a manifesto, on February 5, 1722, Peter the Great issued the Law of Succession to the Throne, in which he concluded: “We deem it good to issue this edict in order that it will always be subject to the will of the ruling monarch to appoint whom he wishes to the succession or to remove the one he has appointed in the case of unseemly behavior.” 24 He nevertheless died in 1725 without naming a successor, and his second wife, born Martha Skavronska, a Livonian peasant, became Catherine I (1684– 1727). Surely it was no more fantastic for a well-connected German Princess, not only married to Emperor Peter III but also related to him and Empress Elizabeth, to become Empress.

Much has been made of Catherine’s ominous desire for the throne, which she does not hide in the memoirs. For example, on the eve of her wedding, filled with foreboding, Catherine consoles herself: “My heart did not foresee great happiness; ambition alone sustained me. At the bottom of my soul I had something, I know not what, that never for a single moment let me doubt that sooner or later I would succeed in becoming the sovereign Empress of Russia in my own right.” Catherine’s correspondence with Hanbury-Williams gives some idea of her machinations to promote her husband, her son, and by extension herself during an uncertain succession. This all seems quite damning evidence of excessive ambition, except that it was in fact possible, though unlikely, for Catherine to rule legitimately—if Elizabeth named her as heir. According to the early and middle memoirs, Catherine’s mother urged Procurator General Prince Trubetskoi to ask the Empress whether her title should include Heiress to the Throne, and Elizabeth declined (50, 453). Yet the final memoir ends with a very important conversation between Catherine and Elizabeth that hints at the possibility that Elizabeth might disinherit Peter III, which reinforces Catherine’s case for her legitimacy.

While Catherine’s legitimacy was questioned in Russia, in the eyes of public opinion in Europe her coup and the consequent murder of her husband reflected badly on the stability of Russia and its government, which undermined her credibility.
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Catherine’s final memoir addresses her ability to create a stable government by stressing her good judgment, even temper, fairness, and ultimately, her genius for rule. Catherine’s long rule broke a pattern. In eighteenth-century Russia, coups were the rule, not the exception. In the absence of male heirs of the right age, the practice of naming an heir appears to have led to a series of coups by unmarried female rulers and their favorites.
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In 1727, Catherine I was succeeded by the last direct male heir of the Romanov line, Peter II (1715–30), Peter the Great’s grandson by his son Alexei (1690–1718).
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Before her death, Catherine I had signed a will naming first Peter II and then her daughters, Anna and Elizabeth, as heirs.
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After the sudden death three years later of Peter II at age fifteen, Elizabeth was pushed aside for Anna Ivanovna (1693–1740), the widowed Duchess of Courland and daughter of Peter the Great’s half brother and co-czar, Ivan V (1666–96). On her deathbed, Empress Anna designated her grandnephew, the infant Ivan VI (1740–64), as heir, and her German favorite, Ernst Johann Bühren (1690–1772), Duke of Courland, as regent.
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Bühren lasted twenty-two days before being ousted by the infant’s parents, Anna Leopoldovna of Mecklenburg and Prince Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Bevern. In November 1741, Elizabeth seized power and imprisoned Ivan VI for life; unfortunately for Catherine, he was killed on her watch in 1764. Later, the French
philosophe
Denis Diderot (1713–84) advised Catherine to reinstate primogeniture as a check on the ruler’s power, which she of course could not do without making her own rule illegitimate.
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But her son, Paul, in his rejection of all things Catherinian, had three sons, and upon his coronation, he immediately returned to a system of primogeniture and the ideal of a proper royal family. However, as Catherine feared, this did not prevent Paul, who behaved as a tyrant, from being overthrown and killed in a coup. Ironically too, if the memoirs are accurate and Catherine in fact knew, Paul was perhaps biologically a Saltykov, and so despite all the male heirs, the Romanov bloodline ended not with Nicholas II (1868– 1918) but with Peter III and Ivan VI.

Because of the fundamental weakness of her position, Catherine’s success depended on her political skills, her policies, and her personality. Her memoirs paint an unflattering picture of Elizabeth’s personality and style of rule, and Catherine thus implies that she has done things differently.
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For example, under Elizabeth, allies could become enemies overnight, and such elder statesmen as Bestuzhev-Riumin were humiliated, stripped of all privileges, condemned to death, and exiled. Elizabeth thus continued her predecessors’ method of midnight arrests, torture, and imprisonment of her enemies, which one historian has termed “mini-coups.”
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In contrast, Catherine carefully promoted and rewarded opponents until they were no longer in a position to harm her. Like Elizabeth, Catherine depended for support on family clans, political factions, ministers, favorites, and the elite guards, who formed a complex network of alliances. Throughout her early reign, Catherine relied extensively on the clan of Grigory Orlov (her favorite from 1760 to 1772), who with the Chernyshev extended family and the elite guards supported her coup.
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Her opponents, the faction around her son’s governor, Count Nikita Panin (1718–83), favored making Paul the Emperor and Catherine his regent until his majority in 1772, and generally tried to limit Catherine’s power. As 1772 approached and Panin agitated for transferring rule to Paul, Catherine’s son became a double-edged sword in her career, important for her legitimacy on the one hand and a potential (though never actual) threat to her power as he grew older and became independent. Catherine quashed several conspiracies, and after she put down Pugachev’s armed revolt in 1774, her hold on power became reasonably secure.

Catherine was above all a working ruler, unlike Elizabeth. In the memoirs, Catherine criticizes Elizabeth, who let her advisers and favorites write up papers based on what she said, and often did not follow through on matters. In contrast, Catherine did her own writing, had a good memory for details, delegated well, and expected things to get done. As Empress, Catherine wrote and read every day, adapting her ideas, which she acquired through reading classical, French, German, and English political philosophy, to what was possible in Russia. She inherited a country that Peter the Great had dramatically turned in the direction of modern European statehood at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Reforms, however, had remained incomplete. After Peter’s death, in 1725, the six rulers who followed did not build significantly or systematically on his reforms. Intelligent, well-read, energetic, and ambitious, Catherine, like Peter, applied herself to all aspects of Russian politics, society, history, and culture, and had a profound and lasting impact on Russia and Europe.

Histories of her reign and biographies tend to mention Catherine’s writing separately from her life and rule. Though as Grand Duchess she had written, and could write safely, relatively little, with her coup, Catherine unleashed a sudden deluge of what she called “scribbling.”
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From the very beginning of her reign, Catherine’s writing was everywhere intertwined with her reading, her thinking, and her reign. Barely a month after the coup, having written manifestos proclaiming her rule, she sent one to the French philosophe and celebrity Voltaire (1694 –1778) to initiate a literary, political, and philosophical correspondence of mutual flattery and usefulness that lasted until his death. Throughout her reign, she corresponded constantly with statesmen and women, the
philosophes,
her ministers, historians, and favorites. Aside from letters and state business, her daily writing included extensive notes on her reading and marginalia in her books. To the leading Enlightenment
salonnière
Madame Geoffrin (1699–1777), Catherine elaborates on her routine:

I regularly get up at six A.M., I read and I write all alone until eight; then someone comes to read the news to me, those who have to speak to me come in one by one, one after the other, which can take until eleven or later, and then I dress. On Sundays and feast days I go to mass, on other days I go into my antechamber, where a crowd of people usually awaits me, and after a half- or three-quarter-hour conversation, I sit down to lunch . . . and I bring my papers. Our reading, when it is not interrupted by packets of letters or other hindrances, lasts until half past five, when I either go to the theater, or play cards, or else chat with the early comers until dinner, which ends before eleven when I go to bed, to do the same thing tomorrow, and this is as fixed as the lines on a sheet of music.
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The emphasis on the regularity of her day, in contrast to her description in the memoirs of Empress Elizabeth’s bohemian lifestyle, reflects Catherine’s perception of regulated time as European and enlightened.
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Like her favorites, writing and reading were a daily part of her life and rule.

To treat Catherine’s writing as either a personal or a cultural or a literary or an intellectual exercise diminishes the breadth and context, not to mention the significance, of her work. As one Soviet literary historian starkly summarizes the paradox her writings present, “Her work rarely meets the standard even of the average literary output of the time. . . . But everybody was interested in everything the Empress wrote and published.”
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The didactic tone of her writings has aged poorly, but in her day, together with most writers in a variety of genres, Catherine actively published in what Cynthia Whittaker has termed the literature of justification and advice between the monarch and her elite.
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Catherine never claimed to be a literary writer, a position that was socially beneath her. Although she wrote in many genres, her memoirs and letters, especially to Voltaire, are among Catherine’s best writing, lively and polished. The integration of her writings with her life and rule ideally ought to address not only their literary quality and policy significance at the time but also their quantity, variety, and complex political, historical, and cultural functions, the sum of which she meant to transcend her era.
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However, we still lack a comprehensive account, a complete collection, or even a complete bibliography of her writings.
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