Catherine the Great
Catherine II, commonly known as Catherine the Great, was the reigning Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. She came to power after a coup d'etat against her husband, Peter III. Her long reign helped Russia thrive under a golden age during the Enlightenment. This renaissance led to the founding of many new cities, universities, and theatres, along with large-scale immigration from the rest of Europe and the recognition of Russia as one of the great powers of Europe.
After overthrowing and possibly assassinating her husband and her subsequent rule of the Russian Empire, Catherine often relied on noble favourites such as Count Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin. Assisted by highly successful generals such as Alexander Suvorov and Pyotr Rumyantsev and admirals such as Samuel Greig and Fyodor Ushakov, she governed at a time when the Russian Empire was expanding rapidly by conquest and diplomacy. In the west, she installed her former lover to the throne of Poland, which was eventually partitioned. In the south, the Crimean Khanate was annexed following victories over the Bar Confederation and the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War. With the support of Great Britain, Russia colonised the territories of New Russia along the coasts of the Black and Azov seas. In the east, Russians became the first Europeans to colonise Alaska, establishing Russian America.
Many cities and towns were founded on Catherine's orders in the newly conquered lands, most notably Yekaterinoslav, Kherson, Nikolayev, and Sevastopol. An admirer of Peter the Great, Catherine continued to modernise Russia along Western European culture. However, military conscription and the economy continued to depend on serfdom, and the increasing demands of the state and of private landowners intensified the exploitation of serf labour. This was one of the chief reasons behind rebellions, including Pugachev's Rebellion of Cossacks, nomads, peoples of the Volga, and peasants.
The Manifesto on Freedom of the Nobility, issued during the short reign of Peter III and confirmed by Catherine, freed Russian nobles from compulsory military or state service. The construction of many mansions of the nobility in the classical style endorsed by the empress changed the face of the country. She is often included in the ranks of the enlightened despots. Catherine presided over the age of the Russian Enlightenment and established the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens, the first state-financed higher education institution for women in Europe.
Early life
Catherine was born on 2 May 1729 in the Ducal Castle in Stettin in Prussian Pomerania, as Princess Sophia Augusta Frederica von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg. Her mother was Joanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. Her father, Christian August, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, belonged to the ruling German family of Anhalt. He failed to become the duke of Courland and Semigallia and, at the time of his daughter's birth, he held the rank of a Prussian general in his capacity as governor of the city of Stettin. However, because her second cousin Charles Peter Ulrich converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, her mother's brother, Adolf Frederick, became the heir to the Swedish throne and two of her first cousins, Gustav III and Charles XIII, became Kings of Sweden.In accordance with the prevailing custom among the ruling dynasties of Germany, she received her education chiefly from a French governess and from tutors. According to her memoirs, Sophie was considered a tomboy and trained herself to master a sword.
Catherine found her childhood to be uneventful; she once wrote to her correspondent Baron Grimm, "I see nothing of interest in it". Although Sophie was born a princess, her family had little money; her rise to power was supported by her mother Joanna's wealthy relatives, who were both nobles and royal relations. The more than 300 sovereign entities of the Holy Roman Empire, many of them small and powerless, made for a highly competitive political system in which the various princely families competed for advantages over one another, often by way of political marriages.
For smaller German princely families, an advantageous marriage was one of the best means of advancing their interests. To improve the position of her house, Sophie was groomed throughout her childhood to become the wife of a powerful ruler. In addition to her native German, Sophie became fluent in French, the lingua franca of European elites in the 18th century. The young Sophie received the standard education for an 18th-century German princess, concentrating on etiquette, French, and Lutheran theology.
In 1739, when Sophie was 10, she met her second cousin who would later become her future husband and Peter III of Russia. She later wrote that she immediately found Peter detestable and that she stayed at one end of the castle and Peter at the other. She disliked his pale complexion and his fondness for alcohol.
Marriage and succession
The choice of Sophie as wife of the future emperor was a result of the Lopukhina affair, in which Count Jean Armand de Lestocq and King Frederick the Great of Prussia took an active part. The objective was to strengthen the friendship between Prussia and Russia, to weaken the influence of Austria, and to overthrow the chancellor Alexey Bestuzhev-Ryumin, a known partisan of the Austrian alliance on whom the reigning Russian Empress Elizabeth relied. The diplomatic intrigue failed, largely due to the intervention of Sophie's mother, Joanna Elisabeth.Contemporary and later accounts present Joanna as a figure of strong will and ambition, often involved in court affairs. Her efforts to secure her daughter’s advantageous marriage in Russia brought her into conflict with Empress Elizabeth, who ultimately expelled her from the country amid allegations of espionage on behalf of King Frederick. Elizabeth knew the family well and had intended to marry Joanna's brother Charles Augustus. He died of smallpox in 1727, before the wedding could take place. Despite Joanna's interference, Elizabeth took a strong liking to Sophie, and Sophie and Peter were eventually married in 1745.
When Sophie arrived in Russia in 1744 at age 15, she spared no effort to ingratiate herself not only with Elizabeth, but also with Elizabeth's lover Alexei Razumovsky and with the Russian people at large. She zealously applied herself to learning the Russian language, rising late at night to repeat her lessons in her bedroom. She became ill with pneumonia, but survived and recovered. In her memoirs, she wrote that she made the decision then to do whatever was necessary and to profess to believe whatever was required of her to become qualified to wear the crown. Although she was able to learn Russian, she spoke with a heavy accent, and made grammatical errors. In most circumstances Catherine II spoke French in her court. In fact the use of French as the main language of the Russian imperial court continued until 1812, when it became politically incorrect to speak French in court due to the French invasion of Russia.
Image:Catherine03.jpg|thumb|upright=.8|An equestrian portrait of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna from before 1749
Sophie recalled in her memoirs that as soon as she arrived in Russia, she fell ill with a pleuritis that almost killed her. She credited her survival to frequent bloodletting; in a single day, she received four phlebotomies. Her mother's opposition to this practice brought her the Empress's disfavour. When Sophie's situation looked desperate, her mother wanted her confessed by a Lutheran pastor. Awaking from her delirium, however, Sophie said, "I don't want any Lutheran; I want my Orthodox father ". This increased her popularity with the Empress and her court as a whole. Elizabeth doted on Sophie and their relationship grew stronger after this.
Sophie's father, a devout German Lutheran, opposed his daughter's conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. Despite his objections, on 28 June 1744, the Russian Orthodox Church received Sophie as a member. It was then that she took the baptismal name Catherine and the patronymic Алексеевна, so that she was in all respects the namesake of Catherine I, the mother of Elizabeth and the grandmother of Peter III. The following year, on 21 August 1745, the long-planned dynastic marriage between Catherine and Peter finally took place in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, St Petersburg. Catherine had recently turned 16. Her father did not travel to Russia for the wedding.
The bridegroom, then known as Peter von Holstein-Gottorp, had become Duke of Holstein-Gottorp in 1739. The newlyweds settled in the palace of Oranienbaum, which remained the residence of the "young court" for many years. From there, they governed the small duchy to obtain experience to govern Russia.
In all other aspects, the marriage proved unsuccessful; it remained unconsummated for years due to Peter III's mental immaturity. After Peter took a mistress, Catherine became involved with other prominent court figures. She soon became popular with several powerful political groups that opposed her husband. Unhappy with her marriage, Catherine became an avid reader of books, mostly in French. She disparaged her husband for his devotion to reading on the one hand "Lutheran prayer-books, the other the history of and trial of some highway robbers who had been hanged or broken on the wheel".
It was during this period that she first read Voltaire and the other philosophes of the French Enlightenment. As she learned Russian, she became increasingly interested in the literature of her adopted country. Finally, it was the Annals by Tacitus that caused what she called a "revolution" in her teenage mind as Tacitus was the first intellectual she read who understood power politics as they are, not as they should be. She was especially impressed with his argument that people do not act for their professed idealistic reasons, and instead she learned to look for the "hidden and interested motives".
According to Alexander Hertzen, who edited a version of Catherine's memoirs, Catherine had her first sexual relationship with Sergei Saltykov while living at Oranienbaum, as her marriage to Peter had not yet been consummated, as Catherine later claimed. Nonetheless, Catherine would eventually leave the final version of her memoirs to her son, the future Paul I, in which she explained why Paul had been Peter's son. Saltykov was used to make Peter jealous, and she did not desire to have a child with him; Catherine wanted to become empress herself, and did not want another heir to the throne; however, Empress Elizabeth allegedly blackmailed Peter and Catherine to produce this heir. Peter and Catherine had both been involved in a 1749 military plot to crown Peter in Elizabeth's stead. As a result of this plot, Elizabeth likely wished to deny both Catherine and Peter any rights to the Russian throne. Elizabeth, therefore, allowed Catherine to have sexual lovers only after a new legal heir, Catherine and Peter's son Paul, born in 1754, survived and appeared to be strong.
After this, Catherine carried on sexual liaisons over the years with many men, including Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov, Alexander Vasilchikov, Grigory Potemkin, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov and others. She became acquainted with Princess Ekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova, the sister of her husband's official mistress. In Dashkova's opinion, she had introduced Catherine to several powerful political groups that opposed her husband; however, Catherine had been involved in military schemes against Elizabeth with the likely goal of subsequently getting rid of Peter III since at least 1749.
Peter III's temperament became quite unbearable for those who resided in the palace. He would announce trying drills in the morning to male servants, who later joined Catherine in her room to sing and dance until late hours.
In 1759, Catherine became pregnant with her second child, Anna, who only lived to 14 months. Due to various rumours of Catherine's promiscuity, Peter was led to believe he was not the child's biological father and is known to have proclaimed, "Go to the devil!" when Catherine angrily dismissed his accusation. She therefore spent much of this time alone in her private boudoir to hide away from Peter's abrasive personality. In the first version of her memoirs, edited and published by Alexander Hertzen, Catherine strongly implied that the real father of her son Paul was not Peter, but rather Saltykov.
Catherine recalled in her memoirs her optimistic and resolute mood before her accession to the throne:
After the death of the Empress Elizabeth on 5 January 1762, Peter succeeded to the throne as Emperor Peter III and Catherine became his empress. The imperial couple moved into the new Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. The Emperor's eccentricities and policies, including his great admiration for the Prussian King Frederick II, alienated the same groups that Catherine had cultivated as allies. Russia and Prussia had fought each other during the Seven Years' War and Russian troops had occupied Berlin in 1761.
Peter's support for Frederick II eroded much of his support among the nobility. Peter ceased Russian operations against Prussia, and Frederick suggested the partition of Polish territories with Russia. Peter also intervened in a dispute between his Duchy of Holstein and Denmark over the province of Schleswig. As Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, Peter planned war against Denmark, Russia's traditional ally against Sweden.
In July 1762, barely six months after becoming emperor, Peter lingered in Oranienbaum with his Holstein-born courtiers and relatives, while Catherine lived in another palace nearby. On the night of 8 July 1762, Catherine was given the news that one of her co-conspirators had been arrested by her estranged husband and that the coup they had been planning would have to take place at once. The next day, she left the palace and departed for the Izmailovsky Regiment, where she delivered a speech asking the soldiers to protect her from her husband. Catherine then left with the Izmailovsky Regiment to go to the Semenovsky Barracks, where the clergy was waiting to ordain her as the sole occupant of the Russian throne and began her reign as Empress of Russia as Catherine II.
She had her husband arrested and forced him to sign a document of abdication, leaving none to dispute her accession to the throne.
On 17 July 1762—eight days after the coup that amazed the outside world and just six months after his accession to the throne—Peter III died at Ropsha, possibly at the hands of Alexei Orlov. Peter supposedly was assassinated, but it is unknown how he died. The official cause, after an autopsy, was a severe attack of haemorrhoidal colic and an apoplexy stroke.
At the time of Peter III's overthrow, other potential rivals for the throne included Ivan VI, who had been confined at Schlüsselburg in Lake Ladoga from the age of six months and was thought to have been insane. Ivan was assassinated during an attempt to free him as part of a failed coup against Catherine. Like Elizabeth before her, Catherine had given strict instructions that Ivan was to be killed in the event of any such attempt. The woman later known as Princess Tarakanova was another potential rival.
Catherine succeeded her husband as empress regnant, following the legal precedent of Empress Catherine I, who had succeeded her husband Peter I in 1725. Historians debate Catherine's technical status, whether as a regent or as a usurper, tolerable only during the minority of her son, Grand Duke Paul.