Dan Snow's History Hit - Catherine the Great

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Catherine the Great came from minor German nobility to become Empress of Russia and one of the most extraordinary women of the eighteenth century. Dan is joined today on the podcast by Hilde Hoogenboom, translator of Catherine the Great’s Memoirs https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/25280/the-memoirs-of-catherine-the-great-by-catherine-the-great/. Hilde is a literary historian who has delved deep into the archive material about Catherine, much of it written by Catherine herself, which details her thoughts about constitutions and how governments should be run. Hilda also helps bust some of the myths around Catherine's life and reign, in particular, the misogynistic rumours about her sex life which have persisted long after the end of her reign.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. We've got Hilda Hugenboom on the podcast. We're talking Catherine the Great. Catherine the Great, a German princess from a fairly minor royal house who became Tsarina of Russia, overseeing a massive expansion of the Russian Empire, ruling in her own right, a truly extraordinary woman. Hilda Hugenboom is a literary historian, a translator. She has been through acres, acres of archive material about Catherine, much of it written by Catherine the Great. She wrote fluently and thoughtfully about constitutions, about how government should run. Most of it, to be fair, based on the assumption that she would be in absolute control of everything, but still interesting interesting better than that absolute slacker charles the first anyway she also is

really interesting on busting the myths around catherine or the misogynistic myths for example about her addiction to sex when in fact she seemed about as sexually active as any of us normal human beings are, and particularly in comparison to our male counterparts, the crowned heads of Europe. It's a fascinating conversation about one of the 18th century's most remarkable people. If, like me, you love 18th century history, there's plenty of it available. You know what I'm going to say. It's available at history.tv. It's our new history channel, folks. Someone pointed out to me over the weekend, it's like a history channel, but there's no aliens on it, or neo-Nazis on this history channel. So go and check it out if you actually like,

you know, history. It's historyhit.tv. Please head over there. It's like Netflix history. Got hundreds of documentaries on there. Thousands of episodes of podcasts, this one and many others. You're going to love it. That's all I can say. Welcome to the team. Welcome to the family. I'm in some big meetings today about some projects for the second half of this year. It's good news, folks. We're doing some big stuff. You're going to enjoy it. to the family i'm in some big meetings today about some projects the second half of this year it's good news folks we're doing some big stuff you're going to enjoy it in the meantime everybody enjoy the wonderful hilda hoogan boom talking about katherine the great hilda thank you very much coming on the podcast thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much, Dan, for having me. I think this is going to be exciting. I mean, where do you start with Catherine the Great? Because there's the misrepresentations

of her, there's her rule, her upbringing. I mean, I think, can we just start maybe by how unlikely was it that this young woman would end up being ruler of the Russian Empire? Well, she had a long apprenticeship. Where did she come from exactly? She comes from a minor German principality on the Baltic, Stettin, Sretzen, today in Poland. And she was in part chosen because she came from a place that wouldn't cause any problems for Russia, they thought.

This wasn't Prussia. And there were important connections between her family and the Empress Elizabeth, who had been engaged to be married to the brother of Catherine's mother. So they thought this young girl will come quietly and won't give us any trouble. That's exactly right. And how wrong were they? She would reshape Russia. So she goes to Russia. And how does she get on initially? Well, she goes with her mother and her mother has her political agenda. And so the two of them have to manage

their relations while they're there. Her mother nearly causes a crisis for both of them, and Catherine has to smooth that over. So she's getting very early lessons in what it takes to survive in the court at St. Petersburg. And she's transformed very quickly. She gets a new name. She becomes Ekaterina Alexeyevna. She has to abandon Lutheranism and become Russian Orthodox. And she learns Russian. She comes to Russia already knowing French and German. She was educated as a part of the German elite for an international marriage. So French was a necessary part of that. And it turns out that Catherine had a real love of languages. She loved Russian proverbs, and she had real Russian. So this was one of the things that I, as a scholar of Catherine the Great, of her memoirs, was very interested in when I was in the archives to just kind of get a sense of what her writing was like.

And so she transformed herself very successfully in a way that her husband, Peter III, was really not able to. Yeah, let's ask, what did she make of her husband? Kind of an impressive figure. Well, that's very interesting because a lot of her take on her husband we have through her memoirs. And those memoirs, there were three of them. There was a fourth, the first one that she burned. It was a short character sketch. But for the rest of her life, she wrote memoirs at intervals of 20 years. So the first one was written before she became empress. And each of these memoirs, they all cover the same years. So the first one was written before she became empress. And each of these memoirs, they all cover the same area. So they cover the part of her life that is the series

The Great before her coup. And her view of her husband changes each time because she's telling a different story. So that first story is really about, I'm a German princess, I married the heir to the Russian throne, and finally, after nine years of marriage, I deliver the heir. And literally the last lines of that memoir are, and I gave birth to Paul, I gave birth to Paul, and that was in 1754. And so the damning portrait of her husband isn't that essential to that story. That story is a story that she tells, in fact, for the British envoy to the court of St. Petersburg for Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. The second memoir is in the early 1770s. She's fully in control now. She has a war going on with Turkey. She is dealing with problems at home. There's a plague. There's a Pukachov rebellion. Her son has come into his majority, and so there are problems there. And she, in this memoir, spends more time on her upbringing because she's combating French memoirs, which are painting her as a little nothing who came to the Russian throne. And so she really burnishes her court credentials in Germany before she comes to the throne.

And so she shows herself at the court in Brunswick, Braunschweig, and she also has been to Berlin. But by the third memoir, the last one, the one that my husband and I translated, she started writing this after the death of her great love and her great general, Potemkin. And this is her kind of re-evaluation of her life and reign all set before her coup in 1762. And here she begins with Peter III. And there's a maxim that she puts at the very front comparing her and Peter. And for those of us who have some classical training, we will recognize that she is drawing on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, in which he compares the Greeks and the Romans, and she is comparing her character, her suitability to rule, with that of Peter. And so that is really where the character of her

husband becomes the most important factor in all of her memoirs. So that is where we get the most damning portraits. We see, for example, how he decides it would be really good fun to drill a hole in the wall so that he and his friends can all line up on a bench and watch Elizabeth cavort with her various favorites and with her closest circle. And so this Catherine thinks to herself, this is going to lead to tears for everyone. This is such a stupid idea. And there are other stories. His having a mock court ceremony for the execution of a rat, the dogs in the chambers, all of those stories, they really come from that final memoir, which was to show how unsuited he was by his character. And so by character, Catherine had a very 18th century idea, an idea of the philosophes in France and before that, that they called the Annette Amme.

And that is a model of moderation, of prudence, of good judgment. Someone who is able to moderate themselves in all situations, who is appropriate always in speech, in writing. And this is Catherine's idea of herself. And she shows how far short Peter III falls of that idea. So Peter III, her husband, in the summer of 1762, she stages a coup, basically. She has him arrested and he has to abdicate. And a bit like sort of Richard II, he's transported to a little provincial place and mysteriously dies. You have just mentioned Elizabeth, who was the previous ruler of Russia. Female rule, therefore, was accepted, was it, in 18th century Russia? Or was it hugely controversial? No, it wasn't controversial at all, because it's politics. And so Peter the Great had changed the succession rules because Peter

had a son, Alexei, who died under torture, basically. He had tried to escape from his father. He went to Vienna. He had to be brought back, and he was killed. And so Peter changed the succession rules so that he could nominate his successor. And he died before he did that, but his wife became Catherine I. And then there was a Peter II, and then there were two more women. Elizabeth, her predecessor, came to the throne in a coup also. So there were a lot of precedents in the 18th century for Catherine's situation. And I don't need to remind you or your listeners that, of course, England had long had female rule and does. And Catherine had another female ruler that was very important in the 18th century

at her side, and that was the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. Her father found himself in a similar situation and changed the rules of primogeniture so that his daughter could inherit the throne. The country that did not do this, because they didn't have to do this, was France. And so France adhered to Salic law. And not coincidentally, I think, the French were the most hostile to women on the throne. And the most hostile biographies and histories of Catherine's reign have come from France. Right. Well, I'm going to ask you about Catherine, how she's portrayed in a sec, because I know that's an area that you're particularly expert in. But let's just quickly remind everyone just how important Catherine was as Empress of Russia.

She ruled for over 30 years. She was modernizing. of Russia. She ruled for over 30 years. She was modernizing. She wrote these almost constitutional tracts about modern governments and her aspiration to be an enlightened monarch. But I'm always struck by the expansion of Russia under her. I mean, it really starts to resemble the gigantic state that we know and recognize today, doesn't it? Yes, it does. So Catherine basically came to the throne with a fairly weak hand. Her last memoirs end with her in conversation discussing Peter and his suitability. And there's a dot, dot, dot. It's the end. It wasn't meant to be the end. We have outlines for what was to come later. But the implication is that Elizabeth might agree with her and Elizabeth could have designated her as her heir. very aware of all the constituencies for her power, people who are interested in having power. The coup is really thanks to her liaison with Grigori Arloff, and Arloff is one of five Arloff

brothers, and they have deep connections to the elite guard regiments in St. Petersburg, and those are her first stops in her coup. But the Arloffs are battling on Catherine's side against the Nikita Pannon party, which wants to put Paul on the throne with Catherine as regent. And so speed is of the essence. And the Arloffs manage to pull everything off, and they keep Pannon and his party at bay. But Catherine's going to have to deal with them again when Paul becomes 18 and enters his majority and can legitimately inherit the throne on his own. That will be in the early 70s. And so Catherine also has to keep the Arloffs at bay. She's completely dependent on what they have done for her, but she doesn't initiate the coup when Elizabeth dies at the end of 1761 because she's pregnant.

She's pregnant with Arloff's son, Alexei Grigoryevich Bobrinsky, and she gives birth in April, and two months later, there's a coup. And so she is very sensitive to all the parties. The Arloffs want to marry. They want a position. They want a seat at the table. They want a rule. Catherine can't allow that to happen because she has to balance that against her son and his party. And she understands and she hands out more lucre in those first few months of her reign than was customary in order to keep people close. She learned how to keep her enemies close and her friends close. She gave many gifts, large sums of money, land with serfs. And this was her method throughout her reign. And her reign was known as the golden

age of the nobility for good reason. She codified their privileges in 1785, and this was her great reorganization of the Russian state. After the Pukachev rebellion in the early 70s, she realized she needed her nobles to really be at home managing their estates and have those nobles be the representatives of her government in provincial Russia everywhere. So Pugachev was able to amass a serf army and go on a campaign that lasted nearly two years in the countryside. And so this is something that Catherine took in hand through her reorganization. She created the gubernia system. We have states, Russia has gubernias, and that system was in place through the Russian Revolution. So the gubernias were

organized then according to population. So they had about 300,000 or 400,000 people per gubernia. There were towns that were created so that ideally people wouldn't be more than a day's ride from justice and the other institutions of her government so that her government would be seen to be present everywhere through provincial Russia. And so this is also how she incorporated all of the territories as she moved south and she moved east. So she began her wars with Turkey. So the war with Turkey in 1768 was started over Poland. And that war led to an increase in territories along the Black Sea. That, in turn, increased tensions with Europe because they didn't want to see Russia as

such a big player in the Black Sea. And so each time she kind of steps forward in one way, she's forced to take more steps in other ways. And so one of the things that I think is fascinating about her history is watching how she develops. As a thinker, she seems to come out fully formed. Certainly, that's how Tony McNamara portrays her arrival in Russia with her enlightenment ideas fully formed. But all the evidence really points to her learning on the job in her long apprenticeship

before Elizabeth dies. And then once she comes to the throne, she has ideas and she just kind of moves forward with everything. So her legislative commission, which you mentioned, that was really an enlightenment project. And the great instruction that she assembled for the commission, scholars have now shown, she took many of those passages from classic works, so Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, from Beccaria's work on criminal justice. And today, we don't think of plagiarism in a good light, but in the 18th century, it wasn't seen like that at all.

The fact that people could identify that these ideas came from the illustrious works that they were familiar with was only to her credit. And this document was translated into half a dozen European languages. It was circulated by the Russian government to all the major courts. And this was her enlightenment calling card. major courts. And this was her Enlightenment calling card. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we've got Hilda Hugenboom talking about Catherine the Great. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions, and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers, and over on the Warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict.

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Yeah, and just coming back to those conquests she conquered vast chunks of what was then poland's kind of lithuania that we would recognize as belarusia or bits of ukraine now and yeah totally annexed the north and east banks of the black sea extraordinary but let's come down to the kind of mythologizing and we've become obsessed with her as a kind of sexual being. What is the reality here, if we know what it was? And why have so many people come away with this impression that she was kind of hypersexual addict almost? Well, in part, we can thank the French for this, because that was really the idea that they promoted in their memoirs. But there is another story to this that I think your audience will really appreciate hearing. And that is that there was a real void in Russia in producing histories, producing historians, producing royal biographies, all the ways that

you get the word out about who your rulers are. So in the 18th century, Peter the Great created St. Petersburg University, and Catherine created Moscow University. They brought in professors from Europe, mostly Germans, and it was the Germans who were writing Russian history. So Catherine and Russians were upset by this. The Germans had their interpretations. And so Catherine, in fact, wrote her own histories. And she, in fact, was ahead of the Europeans in beginning to gather the primary sources of Russian history. These were the chronicles in the monasteries throughout the Russian countryside. And so the writing of history begins in the 18th century with mostly biographies of Peter the Great. There are a lot of them. When her son Paul

comes to the throne, he is opposed to everything that his mother did. He was always a threat to her power, and she kept him carefully at arm's length. But his temperament also really wasn't suited to being a ruler. He didn't realize that when you rule, you rule with. And so he imposed his will on the nobles. He took away some of their privileges that Catherine had given them, and they rewarded him by assassinating him within five years in 1801. So nothing really about Catherine and her reign is produced in that time. Then her favorite grandson, Alexander I, comes to the throne, and there are many more documents that come out about Catherine, but the memoirs are always top secret until the early 20th century because they essentially reveal that her son, the heir, was the product of her liaison with Sergei Saltikov.

And that liaison, as she explains to Potemkin, and Helen Mirren makes this point in the four-part BBC series, there is a letter that Catherine wrote to Potemkin explaining what her situation was, how many lovers had there been. And she explained that the first lover was of necessity. And what the memoirs show, and this is in a passage that is so sensitive that even when the memoirs were published by the Academy of Sciences in 1907, that passage was a dot, dot, dot passage. And so we are the first translators to go back to the manuscript. That passage was published in the 19th century editions that Alexander Hertzen published from a smuggled edition of the memoirs that came out of the court of Alexander II. But that dot-dot passage explains that Elizabeth needed an heir. They all needed an heir. And the royal couple, their sex life

was an open secret for good reason, because everyone wanted to know, would there be an heir? And so Elizabeth gave both Peter and Catherine lovers and gave Catherine the choice of L, N, or SS. And this was Lev Naryshkin or Sergei Saltikov. And not because they were hunks at court that Catherine had expressed some preference for in some way, but because they were the scions of the leading noble families that had already married into the Romanovs. So Peter the Great's mother was a Norishkin, and his half-brother's wife was a Saltikoff. And so Elizabeth had come up with a very good dynastic solution to a terrible problem. Peter, it turned out, had erectile dysfunction. They somehow circumcised him

or something, and he was able to function. He had several mistresses, but he never produced a child. Catherine, on the other hand, had a child by each of her first three lovers. So Paul was by Saltykov, and then she had a daughter, Anna, by Count Poniatowski, who later she installed as the King of Poland. And then she had her son, Alexei Grigorievich Bobrinsky, with Arloff. And her relationship with Poniatowski was very agreeable. He was an intellectual, he was cultured. He was well-traveled. But Polish politics have always been vexed for Russia. He was installed in part because he would be agreeable. And so then she is with Arloff. And she's with Arloff until the early 70s, until Paul's majority. So that's a total of three lovers in all of those years.

that's a total of three lovers in all of those years. And Arloff cheats on her, but she also has to deal with another problem. Paul comes into his majority and the Ponnen-Paul party sees the Arloff party as their biggest threat. So Catherine is very clever. She sends Arloff out of town on an important military mission to the South. And she tells the Pond and party, I will strip him of all his honors and of his chivalric orders if Paul will trade away his father's patrimony, Holstein-Gottar, which is his foreign power base. And she makes the case in the memoirs in a very patriotic sounding way, as if she's already had this discussion with her husband over 20 years ago. She gets the deal done. So the Ponnan party thinks it's very unlikely that we're going to get Paul on the throne. So we might as well go for what we

can get, which is get the Arloffs out. So Arloff is out at that point. So we can look at Catherine as being heartbroken, as being deceived by Arloff, her partner for all these years. But she is very clear-headed politically about what she has to do. Arloff comes back, he gets all his honors, and everything is back to normal for Arloff, except he's no longer her favorite. So then she has another favorite, and then comes Pachomkin. And Pachomkin is really her great love. The evidence is good that they were married secretly. But Pachomkin only lasts at court for two years, and then he goes and becomes her great general. And the rest of her military exploits is really that partnership. And then there are various favorites

who have that position for a year or two. Being a favorite is a great honor for the family that is selected, and she bestowed great honors and wealth on these families. And so this was a kind of figurehead position. And there is enough evidence that Potemkin had a say in some of this. There was one, Lenskoy, who she had real feelings for, and he died. So that was a six-year relationship. monogamist and that these were important positions. We can look at her grandson, Alexander I, who had six or seven mistresses and 11 children by these mistresses. And his wife never produced an heir. She had two children who died young, probably by other men. So I don't know what's better or what's worse, but this is the Russian court. It's the European court. These things happen. These things happen. And then the French will make up naughty stories about you. Yes. So the Russians, they don't have the

history. They're not producing the history. By the 19th century, there is a wholesome image around the royal family, even though there are favorites, there are mistresses. And so it's only by the end of the 19th century that the Russians start producing the documents about Catherine's reign. And there is a large biography that is in the works by a man named Bill Bossoff. by a man named Bill Bossoff. But the second volume has to be published in Berlin because he can't get permission to publish it in Russia because the Tsar is displeased. And those two volumes only take us to the coup. So we're not even in her reign. So then after the revolution of 1905, censorship is lifted sufficiently and we get Catherine's memoirs, we get a 12-volume edition from the Academy of Sciences, but it turns out only to be a 12-year window because then you have the Bolshevik Revolution

in 1917. And the Bolsheviks, of course, want nothing to do with royal history, royal biography. Those are the bad old days. And so there is no production of history of documents of much of anything in the Soviet period. So it's only as of the end of the Soviet Union, as of 1990, 91, that you really get the production of history of royal biography, an art form with which the British are intimately acquainted and are masters of. The things that seem to be quite normal are completely new to the Russians. And so the greatest biographers of Catherine have been British, American. And so the stream of titles, I can give you a few choice words from those titles

of the kind of work that was coming out in France. So, Loves and Principal Lovers, this was an important one by Charles Messon. Then The Romance of an Empress by a Paul. The Favorites, The Passions, which was translated for an English edition as The Passions and Letchery. But then comes Isabel de Madriaga's Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great in 1981. And really, the field changes then. It's really not possible to write those kinds of biographies anymore because Madriaga was a full European. She had a Scottish mother and a Spanish father.

She knew a half a dozen European languages. She was trained at SEAS in London. She was a real phenomenon, and she really did Catherine and her reign justice. So the picture that we have of all of Catherine's achievements in their full European framework, this is thanks to the work of Isabel de Madriaga. work. This is thanks to the work of Isabel de Madriaga. And so that has really changed the field. And that is, I think, part of the great interest. So the 10-part series by Tony McNamara says occasionally true. And so what's fascinating is I see lots of articles where people are coming out and saying, no, but these were her achievements. This is what was true. This is what she was doing. There's been a bit of a backlash, I think. And it's really thanks to the work that Isabel de

Madriaga pioneered that we have that bigger picture. And then there's the terrible urban myth about the horse, about Catherine the Great being crushed by a horse that she was trying to have sex with. There's no truth in that, right? No, but what has historians working hard is to figure out where that came from. They don't know how that myth got started, but they do know that it did not start in the 18th century. It did not start under Catherine, and so I think Tony McNamara got it wrong. It seems to be a 19th century myth, and it's connected to a passage in Pliny the Elder's Natural History on Animals where he cites Juba II, king of Mauritania, and I'll read the quotation, Juba records that Semiramis was deeply in love with a horse to the point of having sexual intercourse with it. Semiramis was an

Assyrian queen from the 800s BC, and Catherine and other rulers were called Semiramises of the North by Voltaire and others. Lord Byron mentions Catherine the Great as the greatest of all sovereigns and whores in his Don Juan, but he saves the Semiramis, which he sources to Pliny, he saves that for Queen Caroline, the consort of George IV. The horse idea was also applied to the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa in Romania, and that is the evidence that we have so far. And this is thanks to my colleague, Eric Zitzer, who is a historian at Duke University. So we don't know. There's a history to that story itself. So it sounds like it was a kind of insult leveled at nearly anybody

who was a powerful woman in the period. you knew plenty if you knew plenty which i mean who everyone knows plenty right thank you so much you're welcome i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all work on and finish i've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small, windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that, frankly, is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys.

In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.