Biography

Catherine II of Russia, called the Great (Russian:
Екатерина II Великая or Yekaterina II Velikaya,
2 May
1729 —
6 November
[O.S.
17 November]
1796), born Sophie Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst) — sometimes
referred to as an epitome of the "enlightened
despot" — reigned as

Empress of Russia for more than three decades, from
June 28,
1762 until her
death.

Early life

A German
princess with a very remote

Russian ancestry, and cousin to

Gustav III of Sweden and

Charles XIII of Sweden, Sophie Augusta Fredericka (nicknamed Figchen) was
born in Stettin (now
Szczecin,
Poland) to

Christian Augustus, Prince of

Anhalt-Zerbst, who was also a
Prussian
general governing the city in the name of the king of
Prussia. In
accordance with the custom then prevailing in German nobility, she was educated
chiefly by a French governess and tutors.

The choice of Sophie as wife of the future tsar —

Peter of Holstein-Gottorp — was the result of not a little diplomatic
management in which
Count
Lestocq and

Frederick the Great took an active part, their object being to strengthen
the friendship between Prussia and Russia, to weaken the influence of
Austria and
to ruin the chancellor

Bestuzhev, on whom
Tsarina

Elizabeth relied, and who was a known partisan of the Austrian alliance.

The diplomatic intrigue failed, largely through the flighty intervention of
Figchen's mother,

Johanna of Holstein, a clever but very injudicious woman. Catherine's
mother, by accounts, was emotionally cold and physically abusive, as well as a
social climber who loved gossip and court intrigues. Johanna aspired to become
famous through her daughter being future Empress of Russia, but her pushy,
arrogant behaviour infuriated the Empress, who eventually banned her from the
country. Luckily Elizabeth took a strong liking to the daughter, and the
marriage finally took place in
1744. The Empress
knew the family well because Princess Johanna's brother Karl had gone to Russia
to marry Elizabeth years earlier, but died of smallpox before the wedding took
place.

Sophie had spared no effort to ingratiate herself not only with the Empress
but with her husband and the Russian people. She applied herself to learning the

Russian language with such zeal that she rose at night and walked about her
bedroom barefoot repeating her lessons. The result was a severe attack of
pneumonia in March 1744. When she wrote her
memoirs she
represented herself as having made up her mind when she came to Russia to do
whatever had to be done, and to profess to believe whatever she was required to
believe, in order to be qualified to wear the crown. The consistency of her
character throughout life makes it highly probable that even at the age of
fifteen she was mature enough to adopt this worldly-wise line of conduct.

Her father, who was a very devout
Lutheran,
was strongly opposed to his daughter's conversion. Despite his instructions, on
28 June 1744
she was received into the

Russian Orthodox Church and was renamed Catherine Alexeyevna (Yekaterina
or Ekaterina). On the following day she was formally betrothed, and was
married to the Grand Duke Peter on
21 April
1745 at St.
Petersburg. The newlyweds settled in the palace of

Oranienbaum, which would remain the residence of the "young court" for 16
years.

Coup d'etat

The marriage was unsuccessful - it may not have been consummated for 12 years
due to Peter III's impotence and mental immaturity. While Peter took a mistress,
Catherine carried on liaisons with

Sergei Saltykov and

Stanislaw Poniatowski. She became friends with

Ekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova, the sister of her husband's mistress, who
introduced Catherine to several powerful political groups that opposed her
husband. Catherine was well read and kept up-to-date on current events in Russia
and the rest of Europe. She corresponded with many of the great minds of her
era, including
Voltaire and
Diderot.

After the death of
Elizabeth
in 1762, Peter
succeeded to the throne as

Peter III of Russia and moved into the new

Winter Palace in
St.
Petersburg. However, his eccentricities and policies, including an unusual
fondness for Prussian ruler

Frederick the Great (whose capital the Russian army occupied as a result of
the

Seven Years' War), alienated the same groups that Catherine had cultivated.
Compounding matters, he insisted upon intervening in a war between
Holstein
and Denmark
over the province of
Schleswig.
Peter's insistence on supporting his native
Holstein in
an unpopular war ruined much support he had in the nobility.

In July her husband committed the grave error of retiring with his
Holstein-born
courtiers and relatives to Oranienbaum, leaving his wife at St. Petersburg. On
July 13 and 14 the revolt of the
Leib Guard
removed him from the throne and proclaimed Catherine their empress. The result
was a bloodless coup;

Ekaterina Dashkova, confidante of Catherine, remarked that Peter seemed
rather glad to be rid of the throne, and requested only a quiet estate and a
ready supply of tobacco and burgundy in which to rest his sorrows.

Six months after his ascension to the throne, on
July 17,
1762, Peter III was
killed at Ropsha
by
Aleksey Orlov (younger brother to

Gregory Orlov, then court favorite and a participant in the
coup)
in what was supposed to have been an accidental killing, the result of Alexei's
overindulgence in
vodka. During the
Soviet period
it was assumed proven that Catherine ordered the murder, as she also disposed of
other potential claimants to the throne —
Ivan VI and

Princess Tarakanova — at about the same time. Now, some historians tend to
doubt her involvement because of the long-running tensions between Alexey Orlov
and Catherine.

Personal life

Catherine, throughout her long reign, took many lovers, often elevating them
to high positions for as long as they held her interest, and then pensioning
them off with large estates and gifts of serfs. After her affair with

Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin, he selected a candidate that had both the
physical beauty as well as the mental faculties to hold Catherine's interest.
Some of these men loved her back, as she was considered quite beautiful by the
standards of the day, and was ever generous with her lovers, even after the
affair was ended. The last of her lovers,
Prince
Zubov, 40 years her junior, was the most capricious and extravagant of them
all.

She was a harsh mother to her son

Paul, who she hinted was fathered by her first lover, Sergei Saltykov, but
who physically resembled her husband, Peter. (Her illegitimate son by Grigori
Orlov was a
half-witted invalid, named
Alexis
Bobrinski, whom she sequestered from the court.) It seems highly probable
that she intended to exclude Paul from the succession, and to leave the crown to
her eldest grandson Alexander, afterwards the emperor

Alexander I. Her harshness to Paul was probably as much due to political
distrust as to what she saw of his character. Whatever else Catherine may have
been she was emphatically a sovereign and a politician who was at last resort
guided by interests of state. Keeping Paul in a state of semi-captivity in
Gatchina
and Pavlovsk,
she resolved not to allow her authority to be disputed or shared by her son.

Catherine suffered a
stroke while
taking a bath on
November 5,
1796, and
subsequently died at 10:15 the following evening without having regained
consciousness. She was buried at the

Peter and Paul Cathedral in

Saint Petersburg. Palace intrigue generated several

urban myths about the circumstances of her death that put her in rather
unfavorable light. Because of their sexual nature, they survived the test of
time and are still widely known even today.

Contributions

Foreign affairs

During her reign, Catherine extended the borders of the

Russian Empire southward and westward to absorb
New Russia,
Crimea,

Right-Bank Ukraine,
Belarus,
Lithuania,
and Courland
at the expense of two powers — the

Ottoman Empire and the

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. All told, she added some 200,000 miles²
(518,000 km²) to Russian territory, and she further shaped the Russian destiny
to a greater extent than almost anyone before or since, with the possible
exceptions of Lenin,
Stalin, and

Peter the Great.

Catherine's foreign minister,

Nikita Panin, exercised considerable influence from the beginning of her
reign. Though a shrewd statesman, Panin dedicated much effort and millions of

rubles to the creation of a "Northern Accord" among Russia, Prussia, Poland,
and Sweden, to counter the power of the

Bourbon-Habsburg
League. When it became apparent that his plan could not succeed, Panin fell out
of favor and in 1781
was dismissed.

Russo-Turkish Wars

Catherine made Russia the dominant power in south-eastern
Europe after
her

first Russo-Turkish War against the

Ottoman Empire (1768-1774),
which saw some of the greatest defeats in Turkish history, including the

Battle of Chesma and the

Battle of Kagul. The victories allowed Russia to obtain access to the
Black Sea
and to incorporate vast steppes of what is now South
Ukraine,
where the new cities of
Odessa,
Nikolayev,

Dnepropetrovsk, and
Kherson were
founded.

Catherine annexed
Crimea in
1783, a mere nine
years after it had gained independence from the Ottoman Empire as a result of
her first war with it. The Ottomans started a

second Russo-Turkish War (1787-1792) during Catherine's reign. This war
proved catastrophic for them and ended with the

Treaty of Jassy, which legitimized the Russian claim to Crimea.

Relations with Western Europe

In the European political theater Catherine was ever conscious of her legacy,
and longed to be perceived as an enlightened sovereign. She pioneered for Russia
the role that England was later to play with aplomb throughout most of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, that of international mediator in
disputes that could, or did, lead to war. Accordingly, she acted as mediator in
the

War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-1779)
between Prussia and Austria. In
1780 she set up a
group designed to defend neutral shipping against
Great
Britain during the

American Revolution, and she refused to intervene in the revolution on the
side of the British when asked.

From 1788 to 1790 Russia was engaged in a

war with Sweden, instigated by Catherine's cousin, the Swedish King

Gustav III. Expecting to simply overtake the Russian armies still engaged in
war against the Ottoman Turks and hoping to strike Saint Petersburg directly,
the Swedes ultimately faced mounting human and territorial losses when opposed
by Russia's
Baltic
Fleet. After
Denmark declared war on Sweden in
1789, things looked
bleak for the Swedes. After the

Battle of Svensksund a treaty was signed
August 14,
1790, returning all
conquered territories to their respective nations, and peace reigned for 20
years.

Partitions of Poland

In 1763
Catherine placed

Stanisław Poniatowski, a former lover, on the

Polish throne. Although the idea came from the Prussian king, Catherine took
a leading role in the

partitions of Poland in the
1790s, afraid
that the

May Constitution of Poland might lead to a resurgence of power in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the growing democratic movements inside the
commonwealth might become a threat to the European monarchies.

After the

French Revolution, Catherine rejected many of the principles of the
Enlightenment that she had once paid at least lip service to. In order to stop
reforms of the May Constitution and not allow modernization of the

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth she provided support to a Polish anti-reform
group known as the

Targowica Confederation. After defeating Polish loyalist forces in the

War in Defense of the Constitution and in

Kosciuszko Uprising, Russia divided all of the Commonwealth territory with
Prussia and Austria.

Arts and culture

Catherine subscribed to

the Enlightenment and considered herself a "philosopher on the throne." She
was well aware of her image abroad, and ever desired to be perceived by Europe
as a civilized and enlightened monarch, despite the fact that in Russia she
often played the part of the tyrant. Even as she proclaimed her love for the
ideals of liberty and freedom, she did more to tie the

Russian Serf to his land and his lord than any sovereign since
Boris
Godunov.

Catherine was known as a patron of the arts, literature and education. The

Hermitage Museum, which now occupies the whole of the old Winter palace, was
begun as Catherine's personal collection. At the instigation of her factotum,
Ivan
Betskoi, she wrote a manual for the education of young children, drawing
from the ideas of
John Locke,
and founded the famous

Smolny Institute for noble young ladies. This school was to become one of
the best of its kind in Europe, and even went so far as to admit young girls
born to wealthy merchants alongside the daughters of the nobility. She wrote
comedies, fiction and memoirs, while cultivating
Voltaire,

Diderot and

D'Alembert, all French

encyclopedists who later cemented her reputation in their writings. The
leading economists of her day, such as
Arthur
Young and

Jacques Necker, were foreign members of the

Free Economic Society, established on her suggestion in St. Petersburg. She
was able to lure the scientists

Leonhard Euler and

Peter Simon Pallas from Berlin to the Russian capital.

Subtle as she was forceful, she enlisted to her cause one of the great minds
of the age, Voltaire, with whom she corresponded for fifteen years, from her
accession to his death. He lauded her with epithets, calling her "The Star of
the North" and "Semiramis
of Russia," making reference to the legendary Queen of Babylon. Though she never
met him face-to-face, she mourned him bitterly when he died, acquired his
collection of books from his heirs, and placed them in the

Imperial Public Library.

Within a few months of her accession, having heard that the publication of
the famous French

Encyclopedie was in danger of being stopped by the French government on
account of its irreligious spirit, she proposed to
Diderot that
he should complete his great work in Russia under her protection. Four years
later she endeavoured to embody in a legislative form the principles of
enlightenment which she had imbibed from the study of the French philosophers. A
Grand Commission, which might be called a consultative
parliament,
composed of 652 members of all classes — officials, nobles, burghers and
peasants and of various nationalities — was called together at Moscow to
consider the needs of the empire and the means of satisfying them. The
Instructions for the
Guidance of the Assembly were prepared by the empress herself and were, as
she frankly admitted, the result of pillaging the philosophers of the West,
especially

Montesquieu and
Beccaria.
As many of the democratic principles frightened her more moderate and
experienced advisers, she wisely refrained from immediately putting them into
execution. After holding more than 200 sittings the so-called Commission was
dissolved without getting beyond the realm of theory.

Her patronage furthered the evolution of the arts in Russia more than any
sovereign of that nation before or since. Under her reign, the classical and
European influences which inspired the "Age of Imitation" were imported and
studied.

Gavrila Derzhavin,

Denis Fonvizin and

Ippolit Bogdanovich laid the groundwork for the great writers of the
nineteenth century, especially the immortal
Pushkin.
Catherine was a great patron of

Russian opera, see

Catherine II and opera for details. However, her reign was also marked by
the omnipresent censorship and state control of publications. When

Radishchev published his

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1790, warning of uprisings
because of the deplorable social conditions of the peasants held as serfs,
Catherine exiled him to
Siberia.

Achievements

Famous quotes