CATHERINE THE GREAT
WALISZEWSKI, a vivid historical writer who has covered nearly the whole
period of the dynasty, calls the Empress Elizabeth “the last of the
Romanoffs.” If every rumour of those gossipy days were admitted, few
genealogical trees of the Russian aristocracy would hold good. There
have not been wanting historians who have claimed that Catherine the
Great was a natural daughter of Frederick the Great; and a grave writer
has said of Catherine’s son, Paul, that the _only_ ground for regarding
him as the son of Peter III is his resemblance to that monarch. We may
assume that Peter, who now peacefully ascended the throne and continued
the dynasty, was the grandson of Peter the Great, the son of his
daughter Anne.
It is, however, true that the moral physiognomy of the Romanoffs changes
with Peter III, and it is not clear how a German father and a few years
of early life in Germany could so thoroughly Teutonise his blood. We
must, of course, not forget that most of what we read about him was
written by his wife or by other enemies. Mr. Bain refuses to believe
that he was brutal to Catherine, as she says. At his accession he paid
her heavy debts and settled upon her the large domains of the late
Empress. His unfaithfulness to her was at least balanced by her own
vagaries. She, a German, took the throne from him, and she was bound to
make a dark case against him in order to justify her usurpation. They
were, at all events, as ill-assorted a pair as ever mounted a throne,
and every informed person in Europe wondered what would be the issue,
and was prepared for another revolution.
We have seen a little about their earlier years. Elizabeth drew them in
their childhood from Germany, changed their religion, and appointed
tutors to prepare them for the throne. Catherine prepared very
diligently, but Peter went in a precisely opposite direction. While
Catherine steeped herself in the Russian spirit, he remained German,
looked with contempt upon Russian ways, and surrounded himself with
foreigners. He had the vices, without the good qualities, of the
Romanoffs. He drank heavily, was boorish to those about him, and lived
loosely. Catherine tells a story which is a cameo of life at the court,
if so sordid a sketch may be compared with a work of art. Empress
Elizabeth’s private room, in which the little suppers of the later part
of her reign were held, was separated only by a door from one of Peter’s
rooms. The noise he heard in it at nights piqued him, and he bored holes
in the door, and found Elizabeth, lightly dressed, carousing with her
lover and a few intimate courtiers. He called Catherine, who (she says)
refused to peep, and then he called a bunch of ladies of their court to
come and enjoy the spectacle. Catherine pictures him keeping dogs in
their bedroom and coming to bed, very drunk, in the early morning to
kick and pummel her.
There can be little doubt that the young prince was coarse, violent, and
drunken; and Catherine hated his insipid, pock-marked face and boorish
ways. Long before the death of Elizabeth she took a lover, Sergius
Saltykoff, a handsome young fellow of Peter’s suite. Bestuzheff sent
Sergius on a mission abroad, but his place was soon taken by a handsome
young Pole, Count Poniatovski. In the meantime, Catherine had given
birth to her son Paul, and the genuineness of the claim of the later
Tsars to be considered Romanoffs hangs upon the very slender thread of
Catherine’s morals. Saltykoff was at the time generally regarded as the
father. The boy, however, grew up to resemble Peter, morally and
physically, so closely that historians now generally consider him a son
of Peter. It looks as if Catherine, to save her position with Elizabeth,
who pressed for an heir, reluctantly consented to provide one. Legend
has it that the court deliberately instructed her to have a child
by her lover if she could not be reconciled to her husband. Catherine
tells us that, when the child was born, Elizabeth sent her a present of
fifty thousand dollars, and that Peter got the draft cancelled.
It is sometimes said that Poniatovski, who is described as being put in
Catherine’s way by political schemers, was detected by Peter and fled to
escape a whipping. The legend really runs that he was held up by Peter’s
servants, as he left the palace, and brought before Peter. He was a
youth of twenty-two, of no courage, and he expected a whipping, but
Peter laughed at his fright. Peter’s mistress at the time, and until his
death, was Elizabeth Vorontsoff, niece of a great noble of the court; a
very plain and insignificant little woman whom Catherine disdained to
notice. The prince felt that he could now force Catherine to be
courteous to his mistress, and it is said that he arranged suppers for
the quartet. The Empress, however, heard of the _liaison_, and
Poniatovski had to go. Catherine had a second child, Anna, in 1758, who
is believed to be the daughter of the Pole. The court was by this time,
we saw, thoroughly demoralised, as all knew that the Empress herself
caroused at night, and Catherine cast aside all pretence of propriety.
At the time of the Empress’s death her lover was Gregory Orloff, a very
dashing young officer: a young man of superb and colossal frame, of
features that fascinated women and of the time-honoured habits of
dissipation.
If we are to understand the character of Catherine, we must endeavour to
regard these irregularities with her eyes. It is sheer nonsense to seek
to put her on a moral level with Elizabeth or any other aristocratic
Russian dame who mingled amours with prayers, and equally venerated
monks and lovers. Catherine had not the least inner respect for the
Russian Church, or any branch of the Christian Church, and its ideals.
For political reasons she conformed outwardly, but it is difficult to
find that she had more than a vague and not very serious deism. She read
and corresponded with the French “philosophers,” and in her letters to
them (when she became her own mistress) she ridiculed the “mummeries” of
the priests. “I congratulate myself that I am one of the imbeciles who
believe in God,” is the extent of her profession of faith. She did not
respect the authority and ideals of the Church, and so she regarded
herself as free. These irregularities need not in themselves be
considered inconsistent with her title of “the Great.”
Liberal writers express some surprise that her lovers were never more
than handsome and sensual blockheads. We shall see that Orloff, little
intelligence as he had, could work for her, but that she probably never
weighed. She was a woman of high intelligence and self-confidence. She
chose ministers to do work and lovers only for enjoyment. There is no
psychological mystery in such an attitude.
When Peter ascended the throne he surprised all by his policy of
conciliation. He issued an amnesty, and from all the frozen recesses of
the Empire came the victims--the sobered Lestocq, old Marshal Münnich,
Julia Mengden and her sister, the Birens, and so on--of the earlier
revolutions. Then he set himself to conciliate his subjects. Peter the
Great had forced education and public service upon the reluctant nobles:
Peter the Little removed the compulsion, flatteringly observing that it
was no longer necessary. Peter the Great had created a secret police
which had ruled the aristocracy by terror and corruption: Peter III
abolished it. Peter the Great had put crushing taxes upon peasants and
dissenters: Peter III relieved them, and, caring nothing about Russian
orthodoxy, favoured the industrious dissenters. He abolished the
corporal punishment of officers; he confiscated the wealth of the clergy
and the monks, making them an annual allowance; he bade the monks
educate themselves, and forbade them to take young novices.
But these reforms angered one very powerful class--the clergy and the
monks--and Peter went on to alienate the army. He despised everything
Russian. Elizabeth had given him the palace (built by Menshikoff) of
Oranienbaum, about twenty-seven miles from St. Petersburg, and there he
had established a few companies of Holstein soldiers, the nucleus or
model of his future army. He fancied himself a soldier, and spent his
time there as Peter had spent his at Preobrajenshote. After his
accession he announced that the army was to be Germanised. New uniforms
were provided. Old regiments were threatened with extinction. What was
worse, he made peace with Frederick of Prussia, who might now have been
utterly crushed, and held up that monarch to Russia as a model king and
soldier.
To Catherine he was at first, as I said, generous, but serious rumours
got about that he intended to send her into a convent and marry his
Vorontsoff. At a public and important banquet he is said to have
insulted her, calling across the table that she was “a fool.” In short,
he put together an admirable collection of combustible material, and he
was surprised when the flame of revolution burst forth.
How it was arranged is not very clear, as Catherine afterwards claimed
the entire merit, yet a dozen others claimed the merit--and the reward.
As far as one can judge, Catherine was nervous and did little. Gregory
Orloff and his brothers had not so clear a vision of the possibilities,
in case of failure, and they worked zealously. Catherine’s
little friend. Princess Dashkoff, a very romantic young lady who read
Voltaire and Diderot and had great ideas, claims that she did more than
anybody; she clearly helped to buy or convert supporters. The French
agents found money, the soldiers were secretly canvassed, and the
growing discontent with the Emperor was carefully nourished. A
statesman, Panin, was more or less won: some say at the cost of the
virtue of Princess Dashkoff. Catherine herself had, about this time
(April, 1762), a third child, who was quite acknowledged to be the son
of Orloff.
The last blunder of Peter was that, after making an ignominious peace
with Prussia, he wanted to make war upon the Danes for his little
principality of Holstein. On June 24th he went, with Elizabeth, to
Oranienbaum, and ordered Catherine, whom he refused to regard as a
serious danger, to the palace of Peterhof. The Emperor’s name-day feast
fell on July 10th, and he sent word that he would spend it with
Catherine at Peterhof. He arrived there on July 9th, to find that
Catherine had fled, with one of the Orloffs, in the early morning; and
before many hours he learned that the capital was taking the oath of
allegiance to her.
On the previous evening one of the chief conspirators, Captain Passek,
had been arrested, and Gregory Orloff had been kept under observation by
an agent carousing and playing cards with him all night. Princess
Dashkoff says that she ran about, stirring the conspirators, and saved
the situation. At all events Alexis Orloff rushed into Catherine’s
bedroom, at Peterhof, at five in the morning, and urged her to come to
St. Petersburg and begin the revolt at once. They arrived at the
barracks of the most reliable regiment at seven, and roused the
soldiers. There were soon a copious supply of brandy and shouts of
“Long Live the Empress.” Catherine went to the Winter Palace, and
courtiers stumbled over each other in their eagerness to offer
allegiance. Catherine maliciously says that Princess Dashkoff was
one of the last to arrive. The soldiers cast off their new German
uniforms, and begged to be led against those accursed Holsteiners of
Peter’s; and Catherine--she and the little, snub-nosed Dashkoff
dressed as officers--led twenty thousand men to Oranienbaum.
Peter had sent for his Holstein guards and loudly protested that he
would fight. As the news from the capital trickled in, however, he
changed his mind and took boat to Kronstadt. It is said that when the
sentinel, in the dark, challenged him, and was told that he was the
Emperor, the man said: “Go away; there is no Emperor.” He returned,
shaking with fear, to Oranienbaum, and offered to share his throne with
Catherine. She contemptuously refused that dangerous half-measure.
Peter, weeping like a child, and begging that they would not separate
him from Elizabeth, abdicated, and was sent into the country about
twenty miles away. Elizabeth Vorontsoff was sent to Moscow.
What precisely happened to Peter III is one of the many dark mysteries
of the romance of the Romanoffs. Five days later Catherine coldly
announced that the late Emperor had died of a colic which had sent a
fatal flow of blood to his brain. There is a rumour that he was
poisoned. There is another rumour, which is generally accepted, that
Alexis Orloff, who conducted him to Ropcha, strangled him; and there is
no evidence whether Catherine was or was not (as is generally believed)
a party to the murder.
There were the usual sunny days for all who had assisted in the
revolution. In three months nearly half a million dollars in money, and
great gifts of land and serfs, were showered upon the new court. Many of
the courtiers, however, did not long enjoy favour. In 1763, when
Catherine had gone to Moscow for her coronation, a certain Feodor
Hitrovo was arrested for treason. For some time there had been rumours
of plots to put Ivan V, the son of Anne and Anthony whom Elizabeth had
displaced, back upon the throne. Peter III had brought the poor youth,
now almost an idiot, to St. Petersburg, and Catherine had confined him
in the fortress of Schlüsselburg. The latest rumour in the capital was
that Catherine was to wed Orloff, and that the jealous courtiers were
determined to prevent her or to kill Orloff. Whether there was a plot or
no, it is clear that the promotion of the Orloffs had caused grave
murmurs. Princess Dashkoff, Panin, Captain Passek, and other
conspirators of 1762, were, to their mighty indignation, arrested on
suspicion of treason. They were released, but their term of favour was
from that moment clouded.
Another of the blots on Catherine’s reign, or one of those dark
tragedies into which the historian cannot penetrate, occurred in the
following year. The unfortunate Prince Ivan was killed in prison. An
officer of the garrison named Mirovitch plotted to release him, and it
is said that his guardians, who had orders to despatch him in case of a
dangerous effort to free him, carried out that instruction. Mirovitch
was executed, but it was remarked that there was no inquiry, and there
was not the customary punishment of the relatives of the executed
criminal. It seems, however, absurd to suppose that Mirovitch was hired
to give the opportunity of killing Ivan. History, again, gives Catherine
a not very cheerful verdict of “not proven.”
These early threats or suspicions of revolt were attributed by Catherine
to the traditional discontent and ambition of courtiers who were ever
ready to create a new throne for their own profit. But she saw clearly
enough the miserable condition of the country at large, and she opened
her reign with a determination to apply the remedy prescribed by the
liberal and humane principles of her French teachers. There must be
education, and in 1764 she issued an instruction to the authorities who
were to take up that work. Her own ideas were necessarily vague and
unscientific, and she soon found herself confronted by the traditional
difficulties: a massive and general ignorance so dense that it did not
want education, a shortage of funds, and a corrupt and listless body of
officials. A number of technical and normal schools--in all about
200 schools--were founded, and at St. Petersburg Catherine
established a large and admirable school for girls, but her vague
general scheme came to naught. Russia lingered on in the darkness of the
Middle Ages.
The reform of law and justice was the next great need. Catherine eagerly
devoured the writings of such reformers as Montesquieu and Beccaria, and
in 1767 she issued an instruction which was so liberal that it was not
permitted to appear in French. It abounds in humane reflections which
illustrate the soundness of her attitude as a ruler in her earlier
years. “The laws must see that the serfs are not left to themselves in
their old age and illness,” she said; and “The people are not created
for us, but we for the people.” She laid it down, vaguely, that “the
rich must not oppress the poor,” and “every man must have food and
clothing according to his condition.” There were even echoes of the
new French words, liberty and equality. The torture of witnesses was
described as a barbaric practice. Sentence of death must be imposed
only in the case of political offenders.
Little came of her large scheme of reform. A Legislative Assembly, drawn
from all ranks of the people, met in 1767 to give definite shape to her
ideals, but its two hundred sittings ended in futile disagreement. No
one wished to better the condition of the serfs at the expense of the
landowners, and Catherine partly undid with one hand what she did for
them with the other. The serfs of the ecclesiastical estates, which she
secularised, were set on the way to freedom, and Catherine theoretically
wanted to see the end of a virtual slavery which was inconsistent with
her philosophy. But she herself gave enormous estates, with tens of
thousands of serfs, to her favourites, and she knew that human beings
who were transferred like cattle were treated like cattle. In her reign
the Countess Daria Saltykoff had to be imprisoned for barbarously
causing the death of a hundred and thirty-eight of her serfs. They were
still bought and sold as blacks were in America, and their proprietors
could for slight causes send them to Siberia. The great mass of the
Russian people lived in this state of degradation.
[IMAGE: img240.jpg Catherine II]
Catherine’s strong will nearly always failed before an internal problem
of this kind. The nobles triumphed, and Russia remained in darkness and
chains. In her later years, when her early benevolent despotism had
given place to a fierce hatred of democracy, she persuaded herself that
her people were better off than most of the peoples of Europe. She
clung, however, to other parts of her programme of reform. Few were
knouted, and no other torture was permitted in her reign; and she
boasted that she never signed a sentence of death. Men were,
nevertheless, put to death, as we shall see; and it was commonly said
that the secret police were merely replaced by her mysterious official,
Tchechkoffski, who suavely invited suspected folk to his house. It was
believed that the chair on which his visitor sat sank below the floor,
leaving only the man’s face invisible to the servants in the room below
who applied torture to his limbs.
While Catherine pursued these and other designs of reform, which we will
consider later, her prodigality toward her favourites caused much
murmuring, and to this grievance she added the costly burden of war. It
is clear that in her early years she trusted to remain at peace, and had
no thought of the enlargement of the country. But the greed of Frederick
the Great now turned upon the decaying kingdom of Poland, and, to obtain
his large share, he had to invite the participation of Russia in the
plunder. Catherine, we saw, had hated Frederick, her husband’s
idol. It is said that amongst her husband’s papers she found a
letter in which Frederick spoke flatteringly of her, and she began to
turn to him. She did, at all events, change her attitude, and share with
him in the historic crime which is known as the partition of Poland. She
joined Frederick in imposing upon the Poles her old lover, Poniatovski,
and her armies went to the support of his rule against the rebellion
which followed.
France and Austria were now opposed to Russia and Prussia, and France
resorted to the familiar stratagem of inciting Turkey to attack Russia.
Catherine, whose energy was now fully roused, spurred her generals to
meet the Turks. They took the Crimea and a large part of the Slav
dominions of the Turk, but Austria now threatened to oppose the
southward expansion of Russia and suggested that compensation should be
sought in Poland. The first partition took place in 1771, and Catherine
secured “White Russia,” with a population of 1,600,000 souls. Turkey, in
turn, was forced to surrender the Crimea, pay a large indemnity, and
open the Dardanelles to Russian ships and the Ottoman Empire to Russian
trade.
But the burden of the war had fallen, as usual, upon the impoverished
people, and murmurs rumbled from one end of Russia to the other. The
plague broke out at Moscow, and tens of thousands died. The country
seethed with discontent, and it chanced that at that moment a figure
appeared round which the discontent might crystallise. A Cossack named
Pugatcheff claimed that he was the Empress’s husband, Peter III,
who was supposed to have been murdered at Ropcha, and his little troop
quickly grew into a formidable and devastating army. Soldiers sent
against him enlisted under his banner; brigands, barbarians, and Poles
joined in his campaign of loot and slaughter; an immense area of the
country was captured or laid waste by him. The revolt went on for four
years, when Pugatcheff was captured and beheaded. From that date
Catherine’s zeal for “the people” abated; and it was with some
recollection of this that she in a later year put an end for
ever to the power and remaining independence of the Cossacks.
The Empress, nevertheless, continued her work of reform. Official and
judicial corruption was as rife as ever, and she retraced more
practically the spheres of jurisdiction, and separated the
administrative from the judiciary officers. Like Peter (though unlike
him in her extravagant liberality to favourites, which increased the
evil) she hated and sternly prosecuted official corruption. Her scheme,
both of administration and of the dispensing of justice, was a great
reform, embracing every class of her people, if we take a liberal view
of the little she did for the serfs. She encouraged agriculture and
industry, made wise efforts to ensure the colonisation of the fertile
steppes of the south which she had acquired, founded about two hundred
new towns, and secularised (with just compensation) the enormous
property of the clergy and the monks. She pressed the introduction of
medical service, in order to combat the appalling death-rate of the
prolific people, and boldly submitted to vaccination and imposed it upon
her people. Her philanthropic institutions included a school for nearly
500 girls and a large Foundling Hospital which, during her reign,
received forty thousand children. In reforming the terribly loose fiscal
system she made notable improvements and raised the national revenue
from ten to eighty million roubles; but the increasing extravagance of
her court made a mockery of her financial reforms.
In fine, as is well known, she corresponded with Voltaire and the other
leading French thinkers, and made strenuous efforts, in her earlier
years, to arouse a corresponding culture in Russia. Her letters to
Voltaire are now believed to have been written, at least in part, by
Alexis Shuvaloff, and one cannot say, nor would one expect, that her
genuine letters and other writings indicate any great literary skill;
though her constant humour and vivacious personality make them good
reading. She purchased the libraries of Voltaire and Diderot, and made
famous collections of works of art, rather because it was the part of a
great monarch to patronise art than from any personal taste. To Russian
art and science, apart from (to some extent) letters and history, she
gave no impulse; and her own “discoveries” in the field of
science were amiable nonsense. However, the great literary output which
she stimulated, the foundation of an Academy (on the Parisian model) at
St. Petersburg, and the encouragement of the theatre must be counted
amongst her untiring efforts to educate Russia. How the French
Revolution checked her ardour, and turned her love of France into
hatred, we shall see later.
This programme of work, which I am compelled to compress into a few
paragraphs, fairly entitles Catherine, when we take its results in
conjunction with her extension of her Empire, to the epithet of “the
Great.” That she chose men of ability to carry out her will, even to
assist her in making plans, goes without saying; but she paid close and
industrious attention to all that was done, and she fierily resented the
obstacles to the complete realisation of her scheme. I have doubted if
the modern spirit can grant Peter the title of “the Great” for two
reasons: first, because of features of his character which we must
describe as brutal; secondly, because of the vagueness and casualness of
many of his plans and the lack of obstinacy in realising them. Catherine
was far from brutal. Her character had defects, which we will consider,
but they are not such as to make us refuse her the homage her work
deserves. That, on the other hand, her plans were imperfect, inadequate
to the vast need, often sketchy and not enforced with masculine
stubbornness, we must admit; but she was a great ruler. Let us complete
her work before we regard the personal features that lower her prestige.
The Crimea, now part of Russia, remained in a state of constant
disorder, and this became at length an open revolt. Catherine suppressed
the rebellion, and a few years later Turkey was induced to relinquish
all claim to the old Tatar principality. Catherine was now supremely
eager for a further extension toward the blue waters of the
Mediterranean, the immovable goal of all Russian policy. She suggested
to the Austrian Emperor, with whom she was now on excellent terms, that
Turkey should be dismembered. Austria should take the nearer provinces;
a new kingdom of Dacia should be founded, recognising the Orthodox
Church; and the Greek Empire should be revived and extended so as to
embrace Constantinople. Her grandson Constantine was to be the first
Greek Emperor.
Austria accepted the scheme, and Russian agents were sent to agitate in
the Slav provinces of Turkey. In 1787 Catherine herself made an imposing
journey in the south. Turkey clearly saw the threat to its Empire, and
in 1787 it declared war. Potiamkin, Catherine’s favourite at the
time, was entrusted with the supreme command, and marched south. Then
the ever-ready Swede fell upon the flank of Russia, and Catherine, who
could from St. Petersburg hear the roar of the Swedish guns on the
Baltic, had a momentary fright. She called up all her energy and stirred
her commanders, and in the following year she had peace with Sweden and
was free to attack Turkey, in conjunction with the Austrians. The
details do not concern us. The war lasted five years, and a little more
of the coast of the Black Sea was brought within the Russian Empire. It
may be added, briefly, that continued internal trouble in Poland, of
which Catherine took as mean an advantage as any, led to the second and
third partitions of that country. Poland ceased to exist; the once great
kingdom, ruined by the quarrels and obstinate conservatism of its
nobles, was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
The vast addition to her territory which Catherine obtained from the
spoils of Poland will not be regarded by the modern mind as a title to
glory. More creditable was the wresting of territory from the Turks, but
her chief merit lies in the reform-edicts (she counted 211 of her ukases
under that head) with which she sought to uplift Russia. Against this we
have her personal repute as it is given in many historians. There were
those at the time who called her “the Messalina of the north,” and
writers on her still differ in their estimate of her moral personality.
That she was, in the narrow sense of the word, flagrantly immoral no one
questions. We may recall that Europe at large was still very far from
the standard of these matters which adorns our generation. Paris under
Louis XV, or the Directorate, or even Napoleon; London under the
Georges; even Rome under the Popes of the period would not pass modern
scrutiny. Russia was a little more mediæval than the others, and
Catherine inherited a court in which an Empress of advanced years and
conspicuous piety had given an example of wild debauch. To a woman of
Catherine’s views and strong personality there would seem to be no
reason for restraint; and she observed none.
We have seen her early lovers, and I do not intend to examine the
lengthy gallery with any minuteness. Gregory Orloff, an indolent and
very sensuous Adonis, enjoyed her extravagant favour until 1772. His
three brothers and he cost her, in those few years, about nine million
dollars. In 1772 she sent Orloff on a mission to the Turks, and during
his absence another mere sensualist, Vassiltchikoff, earned her favour.
Gregory heard it, and covered the two thousand miles which separated him
from St. Petersburg with a speed that beat all records. He was directed
to retire to his provincial estate, and from there he bombarded the
palace with entreaties. Catherine hardly attended to imperial business
for several months. At length she definitely discharged Orloff with an
annual income of 75,000 dollars, a present of 10,000 peasants, and the
right to use the imperial palaces and horses when he willed.
Vassiltchikoff made way in 1774 to the famous Patiomkin, a different
type of man from any of the others. He was in his thirty-fifth year and,
as we saw, he had ability. Her letters to him show the nearest approach
to tender feeling that we ever find in Catherine, except in her
relations with her grandchildren and her dogs. Patiomkin was of an age
to take his position philosophically when his two years of intimate
relationship were over, and he remained her favourite minister. From
first to last it is calculated that he cost her about twenty-five
million dollars.
After Patiomkin there was a period of what one is almost tempted to call
promiscuity. Man after man was lodged for a brief period in the
luxurious chambers near Catherine’s room, and any handsome young officer
felt that promotion lay within his power. Stories are told of ambitious
young men persistently mistaking their rooms and of Catherine maternally
sending them home for correction. No young soldier of athletic build and
fair face knew when he would be drafted to the well-known suite, and
find a preliminary present of 50,000 dollars in gold in his cabinet. For
the closer details of his initiation I must refer the reader to
Waliszewski’s “Roman d’une Impératrice.” In 1780 Lanskoi seemed to have
taken firmer root, but he died in Catherine’s arms in the same year.
Jermoloff succeeded him, and in 1792, when Catherine was sixty-three
years old, she adopted her last and strangest lover, Plato Zuboff, a
handsome youth of twenty-two. On this series of mere ministers to her
pleasure Catherine spent a sum which is estimated at more than forty
million dollars. That was a national scandal and entirely unworthy of
her character.
It is curious that in other respects Catherine had a great regard for
propriety. None dared repeat in her presence the kind of story or verse
that would have pleased Peter the Great, and she discharged several
officials for loose conduct. She also forbade mixed bathing; though she
allowed artists to enter the women’s baths. She was sober in eating and
drinking. The chief luxury of her plain table was boiled beef with
salted cucumbers, and until her later years, when she took a little
wine, she generally drank water coloured with a little gooseberry-juice.
She knew well, however, that in other parts of her palace her favourites
were enjoying the most luxurious banquets, and she never checked their
criminal waste. Her own son, Bobrinski, whom she seems to have regarded
with indifference, continually outran his generous income and contracted
heavy debts. She virtually exiled him to the provinces. It was reserved
for her lovers to riot as they pleased; that is to say, as far as money
was concerned, for she had the strictest guard kept upon their conduct.
With all her strength of will and tireless energy she loved social
intercourse of the liveliest description. She would play with children,
especially her grandchildren, for hours, and she had not the least
affectation of haughtiness. Although she never visited her nobles, she
was just as reluctant to receive the ceremonious and tedious visits of
foreign sovereigns. To her smiling favourites she responded, as we saw,
with an almost criminal generosity. When Potiamkin’s niece married, she
gave her half a million dollars, though her uncle had already been
enriched beyond any man in Russia; and she gave the same sum to the
bridegroom to pay his debts. When, on the other hand, she wanted some
difficult work done, especially by her commanders, she had a
persuasiveness that none could resist. Scores of times her mingled
pleading and driving induced her armies to do what seemed to her generals
impossible.
She had occasional flashes of temper, but her quick humour seized upon
this defect and helped her to control it. This other, occasional self
she called “my cousin,” and she watched it carefully. Normally her good
nature was remarkable, and one could give three anecdotes in
illustration of it for every anecdote that refers to her irregularities.
She rose at five or six every morning, and would often light the fire
herself. One morning, when she had done this, she heard shrieks and
curses up the chimney, and realised that a sweep was at work in it. She
hastily put out her fire and asked the man’s pardon. On another occasion
it occurred to her to ask, during a long drive, if the coachman and
servants had dined. She learned that they had not, and she held up the
carriage while they did so. When she heard that a lady she liked was
undergoing a dangerous delivery, she had herself driven to the house,
and she put on an apron and assisted the midwife. If her pen became bad,
she would (or did in one case) scribble on and tell her correspondent
that she had not courage to trouble a valet to bring a new one. On one
occasion she went out of her room to find a valet for that purpose. She
found him playing cards, and she took his hand while he ran for a pen.
But perhaps the best anecdote is that which tells of one of her
secretaries whom she overheard saying, after she had angrily scolded an
ambassador: “What a pity she loses her temper.” He was summoned to her
room, and in an agony of apprehension he fell upon his knees. Catherine
handed him a diamond snuff-box and quietly advised him in future to
take a pinch when he was tempted to give useful advice to his sovereign.
This geniality was in her later years somewhat soured. The first cause
of the change was the French Revolution; the second was the unfortunate
development of her son Paul. A short consideration of these two points
will form a useful introduction to the change which, with the nineteenth
century, comes over the rule of the Romanoffs.
That humanitarian zeal with which Catherine sought to reform her
country, and which she was careful to communicate to the grandson
Alexander whom she reared for the throne, was plainly due to the
influence of the French philosophers. If, like modern Europe, she
learned irreligion from them, she also, like the modern world, learned
the elementary lesson of the rights of man. She introduced tolerance
into Russia. That she sheltered the Jesuits, when even the Pope sought
to extinguish them, was not wholly a matter of toleration. “Scoundrels”
as they were (to use her own genial description), they helped her to
keep Poland quiet. But she believed in toleration, and she believed that
the state of the mass of the people was a reproach to any right-minded
monarch. Peter’s reforms had had a utilitarian basis: Catherine’s
were humanitarian, learned from the French humanitarians.
But the dark development of the Revolution turned her zeal for France
and democracy into hatred. In 1791 she wrote that if the Revolution
succeeded it would be as bad for Europe as if Dchingis Khan had come to
life again. In 1793, when she heard of the execution of the king, she
wrote: “The very name of the French must be exterminated.” She proposed
that all the Protestant nations should embrace the Greek religion “in
order to preserve themselves from the irreligious, immoral, anarchic,
scoundrelly, and diabolical pest, the enemy of God and of thrones; it
alone is apostolic and truly Christian.” We see the new Russia already
foreshadowed: a Russia fighting western ideas in the name of sound
ideals. But Catherine took no action beyond controlling the importation
of French literature. Even in that she showed her old personality. She
read the Parisian journal, the _Moniteur_, herself before she allowed it
to circulate. One day she found herself described in it as “the
Messalina of the North.” “That’s my business,” she said; and she allowed
the issue to pass.
The second source of annoyance was her son Paul. It seems--though the
point is disputed--that from the first she was cold to him (a fair
indication that he was Peter’s son), and to her grief he grew up
into a counterpart, in some respects, of Peter. It is said that she one
day learned that he asked why his mother had killed his father and
occupied the throne. He visited Frederick at Berlin against her wish,
and he married a German princess, the Princess of Hesse, whom she
disliked. This lady died in 1776, and he then married another German
princess, the Princess of Württemberg. He was thoroughly German,
flattered and duped by Frederick. “Russia will become a province
of Prussia when I am dead,” Catherine sighed.
In 1781 she sent the pair on a tour of Europe. “The Count and Countess
du Nord,” as they styled themselves, had a magnificent reception at
Paris, which made little impression on Paul, and a fresh grievance
awaited them on their return. Their sons, the little grand Dukes
Alexander and Constantine, had been removed by the Tsarina for
education, and she declined to give them up. The Prince and his wife had
to live apart, and Paul brooded darkly over every feature of his
mother’s conduct. He had the Romanoff taint in a form not unlike that we
find in Peter III, except as regards drink and coarseness. He was moody,
irritable, sensitive, suspicious, and obstinate. He quarrelled with
every good man, and as a result had about him a circle of dissembling
adventurers. Some said that he was epileptic; others that he took drugs.
It is said that when he was at Vienna an actor refused to play Hamlet,
observing that one Hamlet was enough.
Such a man readily accepted the rumour that Catherine intended to
disinherit him and pass on the crown to his elder son. She kept him out
of affairs, and, although he fancied himself a soldier and, like Peter,
brooded over dreams of military reform, she kept him out of the war. He
retorted with pungent criticisms of her young lovers; and they
insolently repaid him. “Have I said something silly?” Zuboff asked one
day when Paul expressed approval of what he had said.
It is believed that if Catherine had lived six months longer, Paul would
have been excluded from the succession. The Grand Duke Alexander, his
eldest son, was now a fine and promising youth of twenty. Catherine had
taken minute pains with his education, and even with the choice of a
bride for him. Eleven German princesses were invited to St. Petersburg,
and sent away disappointed, before the young Princess of Baden-Durlach
was selected. The parents were not consulted. Everybody expected that
Alexander would succeed his grandmother; indeed it was rumoured that the
decree was already composed and would be published on January 1st, 1797.
And on November 17th, 1796, Catherine died suddenly of apoplexy. There
seems little doubt that the cynical sensuality of her seventh decade of
life destroyed her strong constitution. I say cynical, not that she was
ordinarily cynical, but because there seems to be in her later conduct a
somewhat cynical defiance of moral and religious traditions. This was
weakness rather than strength; the same weakness which squandered forty
million dollars upon lovers when the national treasury had to be
replenished by extortion. Her mind was greater than her character; her
achievements were greater than both. Russia--the mighty Russian
people--was still chained in the dungeon of mediævalism. But Catherine,
the German who divested herself of Germanism--“Take out the last drop of
German blood from my veins,” she said to her physician--the pupil of the
French humanitarians, impressed the fact upon the Romanoffs that they
ruled a semi-civilised world.