In Our Time - Catherine the Great

Episode Date: February 23, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catherine the Great. In Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery hangs perhaps the most well-known picture of Russia's most well-known ruler. Dimitri Levitsky's 1780 'Portrait of Catherine the Great in the Justice Temple' depicts Catherine in the temple burning poppies at an altar, symbolising her sacrifice of self-interest for Russia. Law books and the scales of justice are at her feet, highlighting her respectful promotion of the rule of law. But menacingly, in the background an eagle crouches, suggesting the means to use brutal power where necessary. For an obscure, small-town German princess Catharine’s ambition was large - the transformation of semi-barbaric Russia into a model of the ideals of the French 18th century Enlightenment. How far was Catherine able to lead her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe? Was she able to liberate the serfs? And should she be remembered as Russia's most civilised ruler or a megalomaniacal despot? With Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics; Simon Dixon, Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds; Tony Lentin, Professor of History at the Open University.

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UK, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in Moscow's Tretiakov Gallery hangs perhaps the most well-known picture of Russia's most well-known ruler. Mitri Levitsky's 1780 portrait of Catherine the Great in the Justice Temple depicts Catherine in the temple burning poppies at an altar, symbolising her sacrifice of self-interest for Russia. Law books and the scales of justice are at her feet,

highlighting her respectful promotion of the rule of law. But menacingly, in the background, an eagle, crouching the means to use brutal power, where necessary. This was one of many images that Catherine commissioned that demonstrated her skill at manipulation and reinvention. For an obscure small-town German princess, her ambition was large, the transformation of a semi-baric country into a model of the ideals of the French 18th century enlightenment. Half-hour was Catherine able to lead her country into full

participation in the political and cultural life of Europe? Was she able to liberate the serfs, and should she be remembered as Russia's most civilised ruler or as a megalomaniacal despot. With me to discuss Catherine Greight, Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. Simon Dixon, Professor of Modern History

at the University of Leeds, and Tony Lenton, a professor of history at the Open University. Janet Hartley, 50% of Russians in the 18th century were serfs. First of all, what was a serf, what was the status? And secondly, how did that compare with the rest of Europe? Russia was an overwhelmingly peasant society

in the 18th century, and of those peasants, over 50% of those peasants were serfs. Serfs were peasants who lived on noble land rather than state land. That doesn't mean that their life was essentially very different from that of state peasants, but it meant that they had even fewer rights than people who were not serfs, and to our mind they would be unfree. If you compare this with the rest of Europe,

then of course most people were unfree in some sense, even if they weren't technically serfs. but nevertheless Russia is more overwhelmingly rural than at least most central Western European countries and serfdom does become what's perceived as a particular feature of Russian life. As I understood it, they could be sold and passed on. Was that a big difference with what was happening in other parts of what we can call Western Europe? They could be sold as families and sold separately,

and I think that makes a difference. They could be transferred from one estate to another estate. I think there are examples in the West where people could be transferred from one place, place to another. But there's very little recourse against that in Russia, except if peasants fled. And of course, they were always able to do that because the country was so vast and the police force was practically nonexistent. We talked about the second half of the 18th century. How powerful was Russia at that time in a crude balance with, say, France and England?

It wasn't a negligible power by any means. Russia had already proved in the early 18th century that she was formidable both as a military power and even as a naval power. Nevertheless, I think, in terms of great power status, Russia isn't first-ranking power. Simon Dixon, can you tell us of the background of Catherine and how she came to marry the Grand Duke, Peter? Well, when Catherine was born in 1729, no one would have supposed that she'd ever go to Russia. She hadn't got a drop of Russian blood in her veins.

She went in 1744, as the fiancé to the Grand Duke Peter, for two reasons, I think. One was dynastic, and the other was to do with the international power relations that Janet's just been talking about. The Empress of Russia in the 1740s was Elizabeth, who'd come to par by virtue of a coup in 1741, and she was very anxious to secure her own position on the throne. So she nominated, as Zars were allowed to do in the 18th century,

her nephew, the Grand Duke Peter, as her successor, and she needed a wife, a fiancé, for Peter. So she chose the niece of her own late fiancé, the niece of Karl August of Hochstain Gottop. and Catherine was at that time really a princess of a very small German house of no significance and Elizabeth was clearly hoping for a pliable, dutiful spouse, a member of the family, a member of the dynasty, as I've said, and additionally, very helpfully, a Protestant whose father was in Prussian service.

And some sort of link into the Prussians was hinted at by the alliance with Catherine. So her nephew, Grand Duke Peter, was marched off to marry her, and did he have any say in it at all? What sort of a person was he? No, no, I don't think they had much saying it. This was an arranged marriage. They had met before outside Russia, but they were only very young at the time. Peter was a person of capable of flights of fancy, but not capable of sustained thought.

His primary interest was in soldiers. Real soldiers or toy soldiers? Well, real soldiers and toy soldiers, I think. And toy soldiers as real soldiers. They had a country palace at Iranian Baum, which Elizabeth had given them. and the 2,500 serfs they had there were set to work to build a great big fortress called Paterstadt. And he trained the guns of this Paterstadt on a smaller fortress called Yacetareneburg,

Catherineburg. And that's rather a symbol of their marital life. Yes, it didn't go happy, it is. Pretty bumpy. Pretty bumpy. What was the bumpiness of it? Well, I think initially Catherine had been friendly with Peter and reasonably attracted to him,

but shortly after she arrived in Russia, he suffered from chickenpox, which disfigured him even further and she could never quite bring herself to look at him after that. There must have been told to get an hour, weren't there? How did that go? Catherine was quite explicitly told that. She was given a written instruction in which Article 2 very much made it clear that that was her primary job in Russia.

And the difficulty was she didn't produce an air until 1754, so that's 10 years after she arrived in Russia. And when she did produce the air, it wasn't at all certain that Peter was the father because by that time she'd been attracted to a number of more handsome, more agreeable young courtiers, and in particular to Sergei Salticoff. And her own memoirs, which she wrote much later in life, gave a pretty broad hint, in fact, that the Grand Duke Paul, born in 1754, wasn't Peter's son,

although one really can't be sure about it. Tony Lenton, in 1762, as we've had this sort of wonderful battery of dates from Simon. Now, following the Accu-Dat-Peter, Peter, her husband was murdered. And Catherine's lover, Grigory Orlov, was set of masterminded the plot. How far was Catherine herself implicated in Peter's death? The short answer is we don't know.

It seems improbable that she masterminded it. I think that the Orlovs did and that Catherine connived at it. She certainly benefited from it. And the problem is that she had quite a lot to live down because nobody believed that she was not complicit in it. So she had to give out, or she did give out, manifestos saying that her husband had unfortunately died of colic,

severe colic brought on by haemorrhoids, which gave rise too much joking in the West about the dangers of getting haemorrhoids in Russia. We have another lover here, Oloff. Were these lovers disturbing the court? Was it a terrible thing that she was doing there, or was it just taken for granted? I think it was more or less taken for granted,

but the important thing was that they were members, high-ranking members of the Imperial Guards regiments, and it was the Guards regiments which successively throughout the first half of the 18th century had really dictated who came to the throne. Catherine Great Eclay went around from one regiment to the other seated on a white stallion, and by each of the regiments she was acclaimed,

formally acclaimed, as Empress with great ceremony. And that was that, it was done, four or five days later, Peter III dies. Can you give us some idea of her personality? You have by implication she seems to be dashing, forceful, but can you fill it out more? She is dashing and forceful. She also has the most tremendous charm of a very unique kind, I think.

The ability to get on with people, put them at their ease, a sense of humour, not wit, but humour, informality combined at the same time with sparkling intelligence and an ability to project herself majestically. She was intrigued by the French Enlightenment. Who would she be reading, for instance? Catherine read the leading writers of the day.

She read the main French writers of the day, Montesquier, Voltaire. She also read Blackstone on the Comptories of the Laws of England, which she read in French translation. And I think she genuinely believed that what was written about by the best, the elite of Western Europe, could be applied to Russia. I think that was one of her also her great problems, a lack of realization that something which could just be written could then be implemented in a country which was so different in many ways

from the countries where the writers originated from. Tonya Landon, she corresponded with Walter. What do we have that correspondence? Oh yes, we certainly do. And it's a question of really who duped who in that correspondence. both of them had an agenda. Catherine's was to maximize the publicity, which she knew that correspondence with the greatest, most celebrated thinker of the 18th century

would give her in Western Europe, in the civilized world. Voltaire was to spread his own eclat around the world through the Empress. Here was someone, it seemed, who was a kind of spiritual disciple and who might put some of his ideas about. about enlightenment into actions. She was quite unabashed in her use of spin. She said, for example, that, oh, we're so well off in Russia

that the peasants, some of the peasants tired of having chicken in the pot, they can have turkey if they prefer it. She had to work at being clever, didn't she, Catherine? She had to work at being clever, but she was clever when it came to projecting this image, for example, when she decided to have herself and her family and her court inoculated. The denoculation was the great modern scientific medical advance, but in France and other Catholic countries it was actually forbidden

as being contrary to the will of God. So when she made a great display of it at St. Petersburg, this had Voltaire eating out of her hands because she was doing exactly what he recommended. I think it's probably fair to say that Catherine wasn't an original thinker. No one would claim that she's on the same level in this correspondence, even though she herself might have projected that image. In fact, I think all of us might be conceded.

that were Catherine a student, she probably would be accused of plagiarism for some of her writings. I don't think she thought of it that way, of course. She simply thought that what was written in the West could be simply applied to Russia. But quite often it's simply by copying various ideas rather than thinking through the applicability of some of these ideas to particular Russian situations, let alone adding something to them. Sana, can we begin to talk about how she tried to put these ideas into effect in Russia? Well, her initial hope, I think, was quite ambitious, and as she convened in 1767, a legislative commission,

which was designed to bring together deputies from all over the empire of all parts of the population, except the clergy and serves, and their aim was to produce a codified codex of laws. But unfortunately, the thing was interrupted by war and never achieved very much in actual practice. And I think Catherine realized when she presented a... big written instruction to this legislative commission, which is drawing on Montesquia, drawing on Becaria, drawing on all sorts of advanced Western ideas, she realized that, in fact, her own

nobles simply weren't up to speed with these ideas. They were much more bothered by parochial disputes of their own, so she would have to go a little bit slower in the later part of the rain than she'd initially intended to. But at the same time, I think she did realize that there were genuine concerns in the country about the way that the country was run, about a lack of substantial administration, about the inadequacy of Russian legal institutions, about the lack of doctors, of welfare institutions, not a great demand it has to be said for enlightened ideas or high-level education, but a general sense that Russia was lacking things in the provinces. And when Catherine had the opportunity after the first Russo-Turkish war to think through some of

these things, it did result in quite substantial legislation. Yes, I wanted to pick up on precisely this point, she herself drafted most of the really important laws in the middle and latter part of the reign. She suffered from what's called legislator mania for drafting laws.

And I think this was a reflection of her enlightened absolutism that although she consulted other people, in the final analysis, she took her own decisions and imposed these laws. Can I move more to the cultural side now? I don't know. And she

Based herself at St. Petersburg at the Winter Palace. How opulent was court life at the Winter Palace? Well, spend, spend, spend, seems to have been her motto. As Grand Duchess, she didn't trouble her to get into debt. She spent something like 13% of her annual budget on court expenditure, which was a colossal amount if you think that I think she spent about maximum 2% on education. she realised the importance of symbolism. She looked back to Louis XIV. It was the spectacular nature of Versailles that won her admiration and her emulation. And so she was concerned that when foreign ambassadors came to St. Petersburg,

they should be overwhelmed by the splendor of her court, representing her country and, of course, her own splendor. Tony is absolutely right. Of course, splendor was useful in the 18th century. I think that's the key point to make, that power in the early modern world depended very much on the visibility of the monarch and an expensive court

as a fount of all her magnificence was something that she thought was well worth paying for didn't mean that she didn't like a bargain I mean all her art collections were bought at knock down prices when her rivals were weak but she certainly was prepared to spend in the cause of magnificence she brought an immense amount of works of art

and transferred the hermitage again in St. Petersburg is a major centre for European art She did. A whole series of collections bought wholesale from the West. An extraordinary Parisian collection, the merchant Crozer, who'd collected things in Louis XIV's time. She bought from him about 500 paintings, 19,000 drawings, 1,500 engraved gemstone. She loved those. And, of course, she bought Walpole's collection in 1778 from Houghton. If you go to Houghton now, you can see in return all they got was, well, they got 40,000 pounds in a rather grim picture of Catherine,

which still hangs in the drawing room there. And that was taken, that sale was taken as a symbol of Britain's international decline and Russia's international rise. So in other words, displaying these paintings was a sign not only of Russian civilization, but also of Russian international power. Can we talk, Simon, about the Nakhaz, is that how you pronounce it, her attempt to make a political manifesto in 1766 out of Enlightenment ideas? Yes, it's a set of...

principles culled very largely from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. It translated it was the instruction, isn't it? The great instruction, yes, exactly. And it was her instruction to the Legislative Commission. So it's a set of desiderata, really, the sort of country that she wants to see. And these are principles of humanity, gentleness, justice, and moderation. These principles are copied from elsewhere. In a Russian context, they have a very original force.

And I think that's the way that one wants to interpret. It's not the ideas of themselves that are new, but they're very new as applied by a Russian monarch, who might previously have depended entirely on force. And when in the Nakhaz she quite modestly suggests that the condition of the serf might be mitigated a little, she has to turn this down from her original drafts, and her advisers tell her these are principles that will bring walls crashing down. Yes, the passage on serfdom, the chapter on serfdom in the Nakhaz is really the feeblest. isn't it? It's the passages on justice and the nature of moderation of government which are powerful in their impact, I think.

Janet Hartley, can you tell us something about how she, in the second half of the range, she set about with this, Macaast. They tried to undertake a huge programme of, let's call it modernisation in education, welfare and institutional reform. What did she actually do and how far did she get? Catherine was primarily, I think, interested in structures. So in terms of local government, she established completely new structures, for administration, for even deciding what a province should be, subdivisions of a province, and those structures included new legal structures as well,

and they also incorporated a whole range of welfare institutions, many of which were new to Russia, where traditionally less able people in society that have been looked after either by the church or by the family. So it was a direct imposition not only of modernisation, but of Western models as well. in terms of trying to make things work in a more civilised, modernised fashion than I think Simon's point about the great instruction is very valid here.

Catherine did try to introduce, I would say, fairly revolutionary in concepts in Russian law like outlawing torture, for example, or in terms of welfare by outlawing corporal punishment in Russian schools, which is quite extraordinary in a Russian context, in a European context, even in the 18th century. Did these things dig in? were there schools which continued to be schools after her death? There were schools, schools were set up, they were state schools, they were in principle, free of charge, open to every set of the population.

Including the serps? In principle, but in practice, of course, you couldn't go to a school if you were served without permission. And this is boys and girls, is it? Boys and girls, yes, and there were some girls educated. In principle, it was open. But the practice, of course, is it doesn't touch the rural community. It can't, if it's urban. It doesn't even touch more towns.

And then, of course, you are up against... Overwhelmingly rural, but you are up against perceptions of society as well. And although amongst the nobility there was a valuing of education, for practical reasons as well as cultural reasons, to simply expect that a normal townsman, artisan, trading peasant, would want their sons, let alone their daughters, to acquire more than the absolute minimal amount of education, was probably unrealistic.

so that Catherine's achievement seemed very, very slight in numerical terms, but considering the cultural background that she was working with, it's at least a start in what was essentially a vacuum. That's absolutely right. I mean, at the peasant level, really, education is not so much a matter of supply as of demand, and demand was very weak until the end of the 19th century. Most peasants saw absolutely no point in sending their children to school

because they would get nothing from it, and they would be taken away from work in the fields. There were quite a few uprisings. There was one in 1774, Cossack called Pogachoff incited a rebellion. Can you tell us something about that, Janet? It was a serious rebellion, although I think the background of this is an understanding that Russia was generally violent anyway. The disorders were always prevalent in the countryside.

But this particular one was that the most major revolts that in Catherine's reign, it did take place at time of one of the Russo-Turkish wars, so Russia was particularly unable to put it down by regular forces. and it was essentially a revolt against modernisation by Cossacks who disliked their way of life being changed, who saw their autonomy being eroded, plus resentful peasants who could always be found. And I think in the short term it was very dangerous,

it was very extensive, it was very bloody, it involved thousands of Cossacks and peasants. In the longer term, it was very humiliating for Catherine and that she had to put the revolt down. But in fact, when a regular army met this, this rabble, they were always able to crush them fairly effectively. There is one or two beacons of enlightenment, but we're still talking about a largely barbaric, unsettled and difficult country-stroke continent.

From about 1760s, Catherine was engaged in a big war campaign against the Ottoman Empire. So that was going on for a long time, these Turkish wars. How did that affect what else she was trying to do? Well, it certainly made her more vulnerable. at time of war to internal worry, I think. Any crisis which emerged during war was difficult for her. And for Russia, of course, the problem was that her borders were simply so big, stretching from the Baltic in the north, right down to the Black Sea.

And it was very difficult for her to get a suitable series of alliances to guarantee both the northern part of the border and the southern part. Russia was fortunate that all her enemies in the 18th century, Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, were all satellites of the French. So that in a period of declining French power, Russia had an opportunity. And Catherine was nothing, if not an opportunist.

All her gains were made at times of French weakness. It's also true to say that she relished war, which doesn't entirely seem to go with enlightenment. Diderot, who visited St. Petersburg, remonstrated with her about this. But she brushed this aside. War was also part of her. her image, the successful warrior queen.

And the prestige which accrued to Russia as a result seems to me one of the most important, though perhaps forgotten, legacies of her reign. And she was egged on by Voltaire, let's not forget. Voltaire was strongly in favour of her, bashing the Turks. Indeed, bashing the Turks as allegedly uncivilised people, Mustafa doesn't speak French, never goes to the theatre, locks women up, he will be defeated.

The Poles, well, react. Optionary, obscurantists, Roman Catholics, squabbling monks, this kind of thing. The typical Voltaire. He designed a chariot for her to use against the Turks, but most ofly she never adopted it. Janet Hunter, can you see the wars against the Ottomans and pushing into Poland and so? Can you see this part of a coherent policy? Are we talking about an opportunist and an old-fashioned despot who also ran the Enlightenment icing on top there? I suppose it's quite possible to be both at once.

I think Catherine very clearly had our ambitions in the South. I think it's slightly less clear that there were clear-cut ambitions in the West. She wanted Russia to expand. I think it's clear, as Tony said, that she felt that Russia should expand against Islam, that this was a Christian-Russian triumph, but there were also very practical gains to be had by gaining territory in the South,

particularly in terms of trade and of naval power. She drew in ideas from the Enlightenment. We talked a bit about that. The French Revolution changed that, didn't it? Well, he certainly modified it. In one respect, nothing changed. She was able to use the French Revolution to continue her policy of expansion. The French monarchy being so disbally weak in her view,

she was able to pursue her expansion at the expense of Turkey unopposed, except by the Turks, of course. As far as her reaction to the French Revolution per se is concerned, yes, obviously she could not be expected. to like it since it menaced her own position or appeared to. She was horrified at the guillotine of Louis XVIth of Marion Antoinette. But again, she used it. She said, I will crush Jacobinism wherever it appears in Eastern Europe.

Oh, it's in Poland. Right, we'll see to that. So she annexes another bit. It began to be quite tough on radicals in her own. Yes, she did. I think this is a paradox for reign. These are often people whom she herself has patronised has brought up to be educated in Western Enlightenment norms

and who by the end of the reign are using their critical independence to criticise conditions at home, including absolutism. And she doesn't like that a bit. That she regards as treason. There's only one ruler here. There is one public opinion which I form, and it's people's duty to conform with that. So the writer Rajizhjv, who produced, in the form of a travelogue,

a critique of conditions in Russia, his first sentence to death and then mercifully reprieved and sent to Siberia. He commits suicide. There was always a tension, wasn't there, in any enlightened absolute society between the Enlightenment as self-knowledge

and self-cultivation and a sense of obedience. And in Russia it's always obedience which dominates self-knowledge. In Catherine's Russia, the Enlightenment isn't know-thyself, it's know-thy place, which is quite a different concept.

And the concept which she encouraged of a true son of the fatherland. A true son of the fatherland had to be obedient, not critical. I think there's a sense here as well of Russian simply growing up in the earlier part of Catherine's reign. And indeed before Catherine's reign, it was the Tsars who educated them and taught them and introduced them to Western ideas

and really told them what they had to learn. And suddenly these people grow themselves. And the result of almost inevitably is that children turn against their parents when they've been educated. She described herself, I understand it, as a professional not beginner, Simon Dixon. How many projects do you think she finished, and what's her legacy? Well, it's certainly true that her critics always claimed that she'd spent much more time on creating

facades than on completing anything. So the legacy is a difficult one. I think that the primary difficulty for her legacy was strictly that she was followed in the 19th century by a primarily male dynasty. And there was no way that these military, big, strong men could look back to Catherine and claim her in their image. You think of the Kaiser, Kaiser Wilhelm II, used to love the image of Frederick Great.

He dressed as Frederick the Great. There are some wonderful pictures of the Kaiser dressed as Frederick the Great. Now, you won't find a photograph of Nicholas II dressed as Catherine. He didn't do it. And he couldn't. She represented to the 19th century male Romanovs

an era in which the normal power relations had been reversed. And so she developed, or rather her successors, developed, an unpleasant posthumous image Catherine as Libertine and as an assassin. All her projects were designed to give her posthumous glory, but ultimately they failed. Can I ask you, Tony, and then finally, Janet,

what do you consider her legacy? As you said at the beginning, small town girl made good. It's an incredible individual achievement. I see her as a brilliantly successful Russian Becky Sharp, but a Becky Sharp who succeeded in the end who didn't fail. I think there are some genuine, legacies. I think she stimulated

provincial cultural life and that was not reversed. I think she stimulated institutional structures in Russia and educational structures and that was not reversed. And I think also she very much brought forward Russia in the international diplomatic scene

and made Russia a great power and an integral part of European diplomacy and that wasn't reversed until after the Bolshek revolution. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Janet Hartley, Simon Dixon and Tony Linton. Next week we'll be talking about Aristotle's three models of friendship. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about

history, science and philosophy at bbc.com.uk forward slash radio 4.