The Memoirs of Catherine the Great (5 page)

The “invisible hand” that guided Catherine in her letter to Hanbury-Williams in 1756 was history, or history as she had read it, especially as the
philosophes
understood and wrote the history of rulers. These rulers, and the histories of them, served Catherine as models for thinking about her own life and her memoirs as history. In 1762, in her first letter to d’Alembert, Catherine acknowledges his refusal to be her son’s tutor and compares herself to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–89, reigned 1632–54).
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Catherine had read and annotated d’Alembert’s Mémoires et
réflexions sur Christine, reine de Suède
(1753), which presents a model life for a woman ruler that attracted and challenged Catherine. One of the most noted learned women of Europe, Christina corresponded with the philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and invited him to Sweden. Doubtless, Count Gyllenborg had Christina in mind as he advised Catherine on her education. D’Alembert argues that despite Christina’s abdication in 1654, her life is worthy, “not in her reckless love of glory and conquests, but in the grandeur of her soul, in her talent for rule, in the knowledge of men, in the expansiveness of her views, and in her enlightened taste for the sciences and arts.”
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Like d’Alembert, Voltaire emphasizes the individual and culture in his histories of great rulers—Henry IV (1553–1610), Louis XIV (1638–1715), Charles XII (1682–1718) of Sweden, and Peter the Great—and their contributions to the overall progress of mankind. Under Louis XIV, Voltaire connects the flowering of the arts and humanities with his rule and with the prominence of educated women in French society.

While Catherine purposefully and selectively published many of her writings during her lifetime, the continuous stream of the whole of her writing, including her unpublished memoirs, served the still larger purpose of the future professional history of her reign. When Catherine thanks Voltaire for
The History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great,
commissioned by Shuvalov in 1757, she discusses the business of writing history.
⁶³
She writes that had she been Empress when he was writing, she would have given him “many other memoirs,” and that she is collecting Peter’s papers and letters, “in which he paints a picture of himself,” for publication.
⁶⁴
Catherine proposed materials to Voltaire for him to write Le Siècle de Catherine II.
⁶⁵
Catherine’s handwriting, in documents described as in “her own hand” and “written by herself,” does more than ascertain authorship; it is fundamental to her overall historical project. Like Peter’s letters, about which Catherine uses Horace’s metaphor from the
Ars Poetica
for writing as painting, these writings would create her self-portrait as an individual and a ruler. From the very beginning of her reign, Catherine actively supported the collection and publication of Russian historical documents, and similarly thought about the future of her own papers.

Central to the mutual interests of Catherine and the
philosophes
were the mind and character of Catherine, precisely the declared subject of her final memoir in its opening maxim. This memoir in particular is therefore an Enlightenment document that reflects Catherine’s nature as a ruler through her evaluations of Peter III and Elizabeth, and through her own actions as Grand Duchess. In his history of Peter the Great, Voltaire saw evidence for the tremendous difference one ruler could make in a nation as a lesson in reform for Europe. Despite disagreements among the
philosophes
about the dangers of a strong monarch, which was a necessary evil in their programs for reform, Catherine captured their imagination as a “great man” of her age, who might in their lifetime inscribe an enlightened government on the tabula rasa of the Russian state.
⁶⁶
She read their works, and could bring to life their ideas—for rational, secular government and for natural laws, inalienable rights, and a social contract. She promoted Russia and herself shamelessly, but only Diderot accepted her invitation to visit Russia in 1773–74, and he left disillusioned, as Catherine later read in his posthumous memoirs.
⁶⁷
Her famous response to his theories was that rulers must “work on human skin.”
⁶⁸
More successful was her extensive correspondence with Diderot’s friend Grimm, who was in St. Petersburg in 1773; after many conversations, they began a relatively informal, wide-ranging exchange that lasted until her death. Her letters contain her responses to his biweekly newsletter,
Literary Correspondence
(1753–90), with new works and French news that was sent to fifteen royal subscribers, who like Catherine (who subscribed in 1764) were heads of state and nobles in central and eastern Europe. The French Revolution brought an end to Grimm’s newsletter and to Catherine’s support for the
philosophes,
whose radical ideas she held responsible for attacks on monarchy, and she banned their books. She of course disappointed them by not living up to their ideals. Yet, just as she balanced their theories with the exigencies of rule, the
philosophes
also made compromises to have the ear and generous support of one of Europe’s most powerful rulers.

In practice, during her thirty-four-year reign, Catherine maintained absolute rule as she consolidated control over Russia’s administration and vast lands by organizing them in a consistent manner. Although the memoirs take place before her reign, Catherine nevertheless carefully projects the ability and reasonable behavior necessary for an enlightened, absolute Russian ruler. She institutionalized Peter the Great’s reforms, thus building a solid foundation for the Russia of the next two centuries. She continued his, Elizabeth’s, and Peter III’s secularization of Russia by subordinating the Orthodox Church’s land and serfs to the state, in a decree she first published abroad in French (1764). Like her predecessors, Catherine attempted long-overdue legal reforms, including the codification of existing laws and the establishment of legal training, through the elected Legislative Commission (1767–68), a consultative process that allowed her to consolidate her position but also cost Catherine her ambition to undo serfdom.

Relations with her advisers and the nobility were central to her hold on power, and Peter III and the coup had raised their expectations. Catherine’s reign has been referred to as “the golden age of the Russian nobility,” and her memoirs indicate her willingness to please those upon whom she depended.
⁶⁹
In particular, Peter III had freed the nobility from compulsory service to the state (1762), which Catherine agreed to only when she reorganized the nobility into a more independent, privileged body (1785). At the same time, Catherine used the nobility to institute a system of local administrative control over extensive, sparsely populated territory (1775). This problem became especially urgent after the plague in Moscow (1770–72) that killed 120,000, and which together with Pugachev’s armed uprisings (1773–74) in the southern borderlands reaching up to Kazan challenged her authority. In this period she wrote her second memoir, of which parts 1 and 2 begin with cheerful dedications to friends. With much the same deceptively light tone, she wrote many letters to Voltaire concerning these problems, and in 1772 she wrote her first plays, five social comedies, beginning with O These Times!, where only the title hints at the situation in Moscow, where the play is set.

To implement her administrative reforms of the 1770s and 1780s and create more qualified civil servants and useful citizens, Catherine, with Ivan Betskoi (1704–95), promoted universal general education. They published the
General Plan for the Education of Young People of Both Sexes
(1764) abroad in French with Diderot’s help, and the
Statute of National
Schools
(1786). Her own pedagogical writings for young people included a Russian primer for reading, which was a bestseller and the first Russian work translated into English (1781); the first Russian children’s literature, written for her grandsons, translated into German, French, and English (1781, 1783), one tale of which she then made into an opera (
Fevei,
1786); a collection of Russian proverbs (many of which she composed) for children (1783); her
Notes Concerning Russian History
(1783–84); and her
In
struction to Prince Saltykov on educating her grandsons (1784).
⁷⁰

Catherine inherited a country exhausted by the Seven Years’ War against Prussia (1756–63), which forms the background to the conclusion of her final memoir. She took control of foreign policy from the outset of her reign, dispensing with a chancellor for foreign affairs, and built on Peter the Great’s military legacy. She centralized the financial administration, which allowed for budgetary planning and a national debt to pay for the costs of wars. In pursuit of a Prussophile foreign policy, Peter III had ended the war by ceding Russia’s gains back to Prussia, which Catherine used against him to justify her coup; nevertheless, she then maintained the alliance. Russia won new territories in two wars with Turkey (1768–74 and 1787–91), which, after her victory over Prussia in the Seven Years’ War, cemented her reputation in Europe as a major power. Russia had long guarded itself in the north through alliances first with Austria (1746), then briefly with France while fighting Prussia (1756), and then with Prussia (1764), in the so-called Northern Alliance. But southern acquisitions played into Catherine’s wish to regain Constantinople from Islam for Eastern Christianity, and she turned again secretly to Austria (1781).

The last expansion of Russia on this scope had happened in the sixteenth century, under the first Czar, Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (1530–84). Catherine expanded the Russian Empire to the south, adding Walachia and Moldavia (1770–74), and the Crimea (1783) and other lands north of the Black Sea, where she continued Peter the Great’s priority of building a naval fleet. As part of the spoils of war, Catherine shared out Poland in three successive partitions (1772, 1793, 1795), and the rest of Ukraine, White Russia, and Lithuania. Catherine handed out conquered lands with serfs as rewards and she encouraged immigration because she believed that agriculture and an adequate farming population formed the basis of a successful economy. When she died, in 1796, her armies were poised to take over Georgia and Armenia, and she had ordered up 60,000 troops to join with Britain in an attack on France. Though Catherine was called “Great” during her reign in recognition of the above achievements, she always refused honorific titles in her lifetime.
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CATHERINE’S CULTURAL OFFENSIVE

It is hard to overestimate Catherine’s attention and sensitivity to what was written abroad about Russia and herself, and her ceaseless work to influence foreign opinion through her writings and emissaries. Her middle and final memoirs certainly belong in this context, a genre of foreign writings that Russian scholars term “Russica,” which partly explains her decision to write them in French.
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Russia’s enemies throughout the eighteenth century were Sweden, Turkey, and, behind the scenes, France. Catherine fought France in part through words—via her representatives, articles in the press, political and historical books, and her correspondence, especially with Voltaire.
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As with everything Catherine wrote, the fact that she was a writer demonstrated her explicit argument that Russia and Russians were civilized and that she was an enlightened ruler.

Catherine persistently engaged her French critics from the very beginning of her reign. In her first letter to Voltaire, in 1763, Catherine wrote: “I will respond to the prophecy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by giving him a most rude refutation, I hope, for as long as I live.”
⁷⁴
In The Social
Contract
(1762), Rousseau disagreed with Voltaire’s hopeful assessment of Russia’s future in the first volume of
The History of the Russian Empire Under
Peter the Great
(1759). Rousseau saw no chance for progress in Russia because Peter the Great had crushed the desire for liberty, which had to develop naturally in the people. Yet even Voltaire thought that before Peter the Great, Russia had been a barbaric country. Encouraged directly by Shuvalov and indirectly by Catherine, Voltaire softened his negative assessments of Russia. Catherine’s correspondence with Voltaire, which, after proceeding at the rate of a handful of letters each year, increased to about forty letters each in 1770 and 1771 during the war with Turkey, as she spread her version of the war. Her letters to Mme. Geoffrin promoted Russia too, as for example when she writes: “For the past two months I have been busy working three hours every morning on the laws of this empire. It is an immense undertaking. But people in your country have many incorrect ideas about Russia.”
⁷⁵
Throughout her reign, Catherine’s
Great Instruction
served as her most important credential in Europe that she was indeed an enlightened ruler. Indeed, the existence of her
Great Instruction
and the Legislative Commission confirmed that laws governed her reign.

In Russia, Catherine banned accounts of her coup, and in France, she suppressed publication by Claude Carloman de Rulhière (1734–91), the former secretary at the French embassy, of his
History or Anecdotes on the
Revolution in Russia in the Year 1762.
⁷⁶
Rulhière’s portraits of Peter and Catherine, though sympathetic, had nuances that Catherine would vigorously dispute indirectly through her middle and final memoirs. Rulhière’s
History
was well-known because of readings in the salons of Mme. Geoffrin and the Duc de Choiseul, the French foreign minister (served 1758– 70), Catherine’s outspoken opponent. To stop the readings, she turned to Voltaire, Diderot, and Mme. Geoffrin. Written in 1768, the work fed general European skepticism about Catherine’s chances of staying on the throne, given the series of coups in Russia.

Catherine responded most energetically to Chappe d’Auteroche’s
Voyage in Siberia,
about his voyage to Russia and Siberia in 1761–62 at the behest of the French Academy, which he published at the urging of Choiseul. Despite his positive references to Catherine’s reforms, Chappe d’Auteroche, like Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Rulhière before him, insisted on the barbaric nature of the Russian people. His account of Catherine’s coup, which could only be secondhand, as he left St. Petersburg in May 1762, coincided with Rulhière’s
History
and thus angered Catherine.
⁷⁷
Catherine’s Antidote makes more than a dozen references to herself and her
Instruction,
and a rebuttal to Rulhière’s assertion that she did nothing as Grand Duchess finds its way into Catherine’s final memoir. The promised third volume of
Antidote
never appeared. Instead, in 1771 she began to write her middle memoir, as another kind of defense of herself and Russia against Rulhière as well as Chappe d’Auteroche. Her autobiographical mode of writing continued in her lifelong literary, political correspondence (1774–96) with Grimm; the letters contain numerous autobiographical passages that echo her middle and final memoirs. Other later French works that aroused Catherine’s ire included
History of
the Two Indies
(1781) by Abbé Raynal (1713–96), an indictment of slavery and despotism that influenced
A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
(1790) by Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802), for which the author was exiled.
⁷⁸
Catherine’s constant vigilance against French historiography of Russia shaped the polemical subtext of many of her writing projects, including the memoirs.