Great Catherine (38 page)

Page after page, Catherine poured her best judgment and the wisdom of her mentors into over five hundred separate nuggets of political counsel, grouped under twenty headings. Guided by her "heart and reason," as she later wrote, she brought her best

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judgment to bear on what she saw as the central task of rule: to teach and educate her people to pursue their own betterment.

Catherine's view of human nature was emphatically optimistic. It was in full accord with the prevailing view among the French encyclopedistes and philosophes, one that saw humanity as intrinsically good or at worst redeemable, and institutions such as the law, the state and the church as instruments of corruption and repression. As both philosophe and monarch, Catherine was in a unique position to try to put the tenets of Enlightenment thought into practice by enshrining them in law. It was with this noble endeavor very much on her mind that she undertook her journey down the Volga, knowing that soon after its completion she would convene a great assembly where delegates chosen from among her subjects would draft legislation based, she expected, on her voluminous instructions.

In her instructions she had stated confidently that "Russia is a European country." Now, in Kazan, feeling very much as if she were in Asia, not Europe, Catherine began to perceive the limitations of her own knowledge. Kazan was a little universe in itself, with a distinctive cultural profile and distinctive needs and problems. Each town she visited was unique. Beneath the very thin veneer of European-style government, ancient traditions lingered and ancient feuds simmered. There was an immemorial quality to Russian provincial life that defied change of any sort, a primordial resistance, like the resistance of a stubborn beast. Catherine felt it, and observed it, and found it humbling to her understanding.

Something else disturbed her as well. The region along the Volga was prey to violent unrest and attacks by outlaw bands, and the frequency of these incidents was increasing. More and more serfs were rising up against their masters, burning crops and mansions, maiming and killing. Some serfs joined army deserters and vagabonds to form large gangs of brigands, heavily armed and difficult to subdue. All the major Volga towns had suffered attacks from these brigands, who sometimes turned cannon on the townspeople and always left terrified victims in their murder-

ous wake. The lawlessness, and the relative defenselessness of the towns, was worrisome to the empress; it challenged her vision of a peaceful society and a contented polity as nothing else ever had.

After six weeks on the river Catherine cut short her Volga journey, which was taking longer than she expected it would, and hurried to Moscow to await the convocation of the Legislative Commission, the assembly of delegates that would grapple with the huge task of overhauling Russia's laws.

Nearly six hundred deputies, including delegates from towns, from Cossack communities, from noble assemblies, and meetings of state peasants gathered in the Granovitaia Palace in the Kremlin to commence their work. Although the deputies did not constitute a representative body—Catherine was no democrat, and had no intention of becoming a constitutional monarch—they did bring with them statements of concern and grievances (the taxes were much too heavy, labor services too arduous, restrictions on merchants too binding) that spoke for the subjects at large. No one spoke for the serfs, of course; even though they made up more than half of the total population, they had no rights and hence they chose no delegates. In theory their masters spoke for them.

The empress opened the Legislative Commission in great state, wearing her crown and mantle, flanked by her son, court officials and an imposing retinue of priests and dignitaries. Her instructions, leather-bound and voluminous, were prominently displayed. The deputies sat on benches in the spacious hall, the nobles in front, then the Cossacks, the delegates from the towns and finally the state peasants. All listened in respectful silence as the vice chancellor addressed them, reminding them of the solemnity and importance of the task they faced. They were to rewrite the laws in such a way as to bring about that perfect commonwealth Catherine envisioned, in which each person would put aside his selfish desires for the sake of the common good, in which humane values would replace vice and crime, bringing lasting happiness and creating a model for other societies

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to follow. They were to "glorify themselves and their times" by looking beyond the old order toward a felicitous, if not quite Utopian, future.

Visionary sentiments soon gave way to practicalities. The hundreds of deputies were divided into dozens of committees and subcommittees, each of which began burrowing through piles of recommendations. Elaborate protocols were followed, with secretaries making notes, editing drafts, recording the contents of debates. Progress was difficult, as the delegates were mired in paperwork and procedures. Views were freely aired by the delegates, some of which horrified the empress when they were reported to her. But it soon became evident that the magnitude of the undertaking was too great for swift progress to be made. The deputies were better at talking than they were at arriving at a consensus, written or oral; they attacked one another (verbally only, as they were prohibited from carrying swords during sessions); they came and went at will, reluctant to commit themselves to staying in Moscow for as long as it took to complete the commission's work.

By the winter of 1767, the empress, who was always impatient with anyone who could not work at her own lightning pace, was frustrated and irritable. She was uncomfortable in her apartments, she resented having to spend months among the arrogant, gossipmongering Moscow nobility, and she was eager to get on with other projects.

Abruptly in December Catherine ordered the deputies to cease work and to reassemble in Petersburg in mid-February. Many failed to make the journey to the capital, including officials whose work kept them in Moscow. The remnant seemed to lose energy and momentum, though the debates remained long and lively. Months went by, until after a year of labor only one document, a draft law on the rights of the nobility, had been completed, and even this could not be adopted because of interminable amendments, reconsiderations and differences of opinion. Meanwhile Catherine was reeling from another blow. More conspirators had

been uncovered, one group intending to kill Gregory Orlov, another sworn to assassinate the empress.

Amid these alarms, and the looming threat of conflict with Turkey, the empress lost her last ounce of patience with the Legislative Commission. Disillusioned not only by the evident failure of the grand legislative effort but by the ignorance and boorishness of the noble deputies in particular, she adjourned the commission at the end of 1768. A few sub-committees continued to meet on and off for three more years, but no significant work was accomplished. The experiment with populism was over. The great event that was, Catherine hoped, to represent "the cast of mind of this century," ended in nothing.

But if the commission created nothing substantive it did add an important dimension to Catherine's international repute. Copies of her instructions were translated into French and German, and made their way to the West as well as being publicized in journals and newssheets. European journalists wrote of the Russian empress's efforts to reach out to her people, Voltaire praised the great northern lawgiver, and even King Frederick, still recovering from his virtual defeat at the hands of the Russian armies, had to admit that the lawgiving work o£ the clever Catherine was worthy of admiration. The deputies themselves fawningly offered Catherine the title of "the Great, Most Wise, and Mother of the Fatherland," but she declined to accept it—and her modesty resulted in even more praise.

Outside the salons where the commission met, there was less eagerness for Catherine's reexamination of the laws, and some unrest. Stones were thrown at the palace, guardsmen complained that the empress and her commissioners were bent on freeing the serfs and undermining the time-honored social structure. Clearly the population at large was not yet ready for the kind of overhaul of the laws the empress envisioned.

In October of 1768, while the commission was in its last weeks, hostilities broke out at the southern town of Balta, an area under Turkish protection just across the Polish border. For several years

Catherine, with Panin's enthusiastic support, had been aggressively advancing Russian interests in Poland, placing her client Poniatowski on the Polish throne and intervening militarily to try to force the Polish Diet to protect the rights of Orthodox Poles, who were being harassed by the Catholic majority. Now her policy led Russia into unforeseen conflict.

A Russian military presence in Poland was bound to be provocative to the Turks, and to create a tense and volatile situation. Beyond this, the French government, well aware of Catherine's gallophobia and convinced that her hold on her empire was fragile, poured three million livres into the treasury of the Porte in hopes of financing a quick and decisive Turkish victory.

Certainly the advantage lay with the Turks, for their army of more than half a million men outnumbered the Russian forces by three to one, and their control of the Crimea gave them logistical superiority. It was not clear whether the Russian soldiers would fight willingly for Catherine; she was unproven as a war leader and her generals had not taken the field in a decade.

By January of 1769, however, the empress and her advisers had begun to gear up for war, and Catherine was displaying a fine zeal for battle. With an overconfidence that was coming to typify her, she made plans for a bold assault on the Turkish forces by sea and by land. Orlov was a member of her war council, and as in the past, she led where he followed, though she also listened to the more cautious Panin. Orlov proposed meeting the Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean while at the same time moving against key enemy fortresses in Moldavia and at the head of the Sea of Azov. Armies under Field Marshal Golitsyn, General Rumyantsev, and later Nikita Panin's brother Peter Panin were swelled by some thirty thousand new recruits, and by late summer Khotin, Jassy, Azov and Taganrog were all in Russian hands.

"My soldiers go to war against the Turks as if they were on their way to a wedding," was Catherine's boast. To Voltaire she wrote, "We are at war, to be sure, but Russia has long been used to warfare; she ends each war in a more flourishing state than

when she entered it!" Catherine reminded her admirer at Ferney that in capturing Azov and Taganrog she was completing a work begun long before by Peter the Great. In war, as in so many other spheres of Russian life, she was following the lead of her great predecessor and indeed surpassing him. She referred to the two strongholds as "two jewels which I am having mounted" and crowed that the Turkish sultan Mustafa III was so unmanned by the ferocity of Russian arms that "all the poor man can do is cry." "So much for the terrible phantom that I was supposed to be so afraid of!" she went on. The empire of the Turks might be large, their armies as numerous as the grains of sand on the sea shore. But were not her own armies even stronger? Had not the Russians sent the Turks fleeing for their lives, not once but twice, each time routing a Turkish force twice its size?

The second year of the war saw the most resounding victory of all. The Russian fleet, refitted, manned by Russian and Livonian seamen and with many officers recruited from Britain, made its way from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The European states were taken aback. Russian armies had proven themselves formidable, but a Russian navy, never.

On June 24, 1770, twelve Russian ships engaged twenty-two Turkish vessels in the Aegean off Khios near Chesme on the Anatolian coast. Neither fleet was well manned; both the Russians and Turks were poor sailors and blind courage was no substitute for seamanship. Still the Russians, though outgunned, made the most of their opportunities and, having driven the Turkish fleet into Chesme harbor, sent in fireships and destroyed it completely. By one reckoning, eleven thousand Turkish sailors drowned.

The Battle of Chesme demoralized the Turks, sent the Russians into transports of nationalistic ecstasy and made Catherine an international heroine. The Russian David had slain the Turkish Goliath, for centuries the quintessential enemy of Christendom.

Fireworks, grand celebrations, and church services of thanksgiving went on in Petersburg for weeks. All the Russian sailors were given special rewards, and Alexis Orlov, architect of

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the Mediterranean naval venture, was granted the title "Ches-mensky."

The public mood was higher than it had ever been since the thrilling, tumultuous early days of Catherine's reign. Ever since the start of the war people had been talking excitedly of the transit of Venus, convinced that such a significant event in the heavens inevitably meant that human affairs had come to a critical juncture; a momentous change was under way. The victory at Chesme was taken to be the turning point in that momentous change. With it Russia moved into the forefront of European affairs as a great power, a power to be reckoned with, bargained with, and feared.

Catherine promoted her famous victory enthusiastically, setting aside a room in the Peterhof Palace as the Chesme Room and ordering medals, paintings, and commemorative memorabilia in abundance.

"What an ugly thing war is!" the empress wrote to Voltaire in mock horror. "Count Orlov tells me that on the day following the burning of the fleet, he was aghast to see that the waters of the bay of Chesme—a fairly small area—were tinted red with blood, so many Turks had perished there."

Catherine's lament was a thinly disguised boast. She gloated over her victory, not only for the renown it gave Russia and the prestige conferred on her but because it gave the lie to those who had dismissed her as a weak woman whose reign was sure to be a nine days' wonder. Though she privately credited luck as much as skill in causing Russia to win the day, publicly she swaggered.