The Romance of the Romanoffs

by Joseph McCabe

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.

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.