Catherine II ('the Great')

Catherine, by J. B. Lampi, 1780s
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Public domain

The century of the empresses

Russia in the eighteenth century saw four reigning empresses. This was made possible because of a degree of Peter the Great in February 1722 which overturned the traditional laws of succession and decreed that the tsar would have absolute right to choose his successor. The crown thus became a piece of personal property that he could dispose of at will. 

Catherine I: In 1724 Peter signed a decree bequeathing the crown to his second wife, Catherine, a Lithuanian of very obscure origins, who was then crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. But later in the year Peter learned of her affair with the court chamberlain. He was executed and Peter tore up the succession decree. He died in January 1725, without naming his successor. Catherine was then proclaimed empress. She died in 1727 and was succeeded by Peter’s grandson, Peter II, who died without naming a successor in 1730. 

Anna: The Supreme Privy Council offered the throne to Peter the Great’s niece, Anna Ivanovna, a childless widow, who became the first female sovereign to rule in fact as well as in name. She died in 1740.

Elizabeth: After a complicated transition period, in which the unfortunate  child tsar Ivan VI was overthrown and then imprisoned for life, Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth seized power in November 1741. 

A year later she named as her heir her nephew, Peter the Great’s grandson, Duke Peter of Holstein. She brought him to Russia, made him convert from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and began to search for a bride for him. Her choice fell on his second cousin, a German princess Sophie Auguste Fredericke, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. 

Grand Duke Peter,
later Tsar Peter III.

Catherine in Russia

Sophie was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) in Pomerania in 1729, the daughter of the reigning prince, Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who was in the service of Frederick II ('the Great'). Her mother, Joanna, was the sister of the prince-bishop of Lübeck. The marriage to Peter was promoted by Frederick, who wished to cement his relationship with Russia and to prevent an alliance between Russia and Austria.

Sophie and her mother arrived in St Petersburg in February 1744. She learned Russian quickly and was received into the Orthodox Church in June 1744 where she was given her Russian name Ekaterina Alekseyevna in honour of the Empress Catherine I. On 21 August she and Peter were married. By this time Peter had already been ill twice – first with measles and then with smallpox.

 Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna
around the time of her wedding,
 by George Christoph Grooth, 1745
Hermitage Museum.
Public domain.

The court at St Petersburg was presided over by Elizabeth and her lover, Alexei Razumovsky, whom diplomats privately called ‘the night emperor’. She then took a lover eighteen years her junior, Nikita Beketov, who founded Moscow University, a newspaper and the Academy of Arts. He gradually became the real power in Russia.


Elizabeth made it clear to Catherine that her sole purpose in Russia was to produce an heir. But the marriage was not going well. Catherine quickly became bored with her husband who preferred military exercises and childish games to her company, and she later claimed that her first eighteen years in Russia were a time of acute depression. She also alleged that the marriage was not consummated for five years, though her statements about Peter were contradictory and need to be viewed sceptically. 

She took a lover, Sergei Saltykov, a married man, and in December 1752 she miscarried his child. She had another miscarriage the following May. On 20 September (OS)/1 October (NS) 1754 her son Paul, was born in the Summer Palace in St Petersburg. In her private writings, she insisted that Saltykov was the father, even though Paul physically resembled Peter. The truth will never be known. 

Catherine's lover, Sergei Saltykov
the first of many
New York Public Library.
Public domain.

Elizabeth took over the care of the child leaving Catherine free to pursue her great interest of reading, to observe how court politics worked and to take more lovers. The first of these after the birth of Paul was a twenty-two-year-old Polish diplomat, Stanislaw Poniatowski, later King of Poland, by whom she had a daughter, who did not live long.

The coup

From the summer of 1761 Elizabeth was a sick woman and Catherine was probably already preparing for a coup against her husband. The empress died on 25 December 1761 (OS) and Peter became Tsar Peter III. He and Catherine moved into Rastrelli’s new Winter Palace. On 11 April 1762 Catherine secretly gave birth to a son by her new lover Lieutenant Grigory Orlov, a lieutenant of the Izmailovsky Guards. His brother, Alexei, was already plotting a coup against the tsar.

Lieutenant Grigory Orlov.
Public domain.

Russia had been at war with Prussia since 1756, and in 1760 Russian troops had occupied Berlin, though only for four days. However, Peter was a great admirer of Frederick the Great, and one of the first acts of his reign was to make peace with Prussia. This lost him the support of many of the nobility, who had already decided that he was not fit to rule. 

In June 1762, Peter retired with his Holstein-born courtiers and relatives to Oranienbaum, on the Gulf of Finland. Before he returned to St Petersburg, Orlov mounted a coup. At dawn on 13 July he woke Catherine at Peterhof and the two drove to St Petersburg, where they were met by the Izmailovsky Guards, who proclaimed her empress and sovereign of all the Russias. By this swift action they had undercut any attempt to make her simply the regent for her son. Peter was arrested and taken to his country seat, the Ropsha Palace, where he abdicated. 

Catherine wearing the uniform of the
Preobrazhensky Guards, which
she wore on the day she
overthrew her husband.
Public domain.

Peter died abruptly on 6 July 1762 at the Ropsha. An official announcement attributed his death of ‘haemorrhoidal colic’. (The French philosophe and mathematician, D’Alembert later commented that haemorrhoids were obviously very dangerous in Russia!). He was probably strangled or smothered, though he may have died in a drunken scuffle.

Catherine succeeded her husband as Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias. On 22 September 1762 she crowned  herself in the Dormition Cathedral.  But her position was potentially fragile: she was a woman, a foreigner, and associated with a murder. 

Catherine: Enlightenment monarch

Though inexperienced in the practice of ruling, the new Empress brought to the task great talents. She was highly intelligent, quick to grasp central issues, widely read, eager to learn and to teach others, a shrewd judge of character, determined yet flexible, and incredibly industrious. The indolent, erratic statecraft of Elizabeth and Peter III appalled her; she aspired to be a female Peter the Great but without his despotic, militaristic tendencies, At thirty-three she felt at the height of personal and political power, eager to show her mettle. John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (OUP, 1989, p. 62).

Catherine was well aware of the fragility of her position and worked hard to establish herself as a ruler. She rose each morning at six, made her own coffee, and started work. Much of her day was taken up with letter-writing and receiving ministers, and her evenings were spent at the theatre or at masquerades. She was an avid collector of English paintings and she greatly admired English gardens.  

In 1764 work started on an extension to the Winter Palace, which she christened ‘the Hermitage’. In the same year she purchased 225 paintings belonging to the Berlin picture dealer, Johann Ernst Gotkowsy. In 1768 she added a new gallery to house her growing collection and her agent, Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, acquired over 1,000 more paintings. Her collection forms the basis of the art in the Hermitage Museum.

Catherine and the philosophes: Throughout her reign Catherine presented herself as a monarch of the Enlightenment in the manner of Frederick the Great. Like him, she corresponded with the great philosophe, Voltaire, who christened her ‘Our Lady of St Petersburg’. She began to write to him in the autumn of 1763 and continued until his death fifteen years later.

Catherine was a great reader, and during the years 1762 to 1800 the number of books published in Russia increased dramatically. In 1765 she purchased the library of Denis Diderot and paid for him to look after it. Diderot visited Russia in September 1773 and stayed for five months. But the visit was not a success. Diderot was critical of Russian absolutism and said of Catherine, she ‘is the soul of Caesar with all the seductions of Cleopatra’ and ‘the soul of Brutus in the body of Cleopatra’. She had a more productive relationship with the German-born philosophe, Melchior Grimm, who played chess and cards with her and arranged some of her art purchases.

Legal reforms: In 1767 Catherine called a Legislative Commission in order to provide Russia with a workable legal code. The members of the Commission were elected in local gatherings of the relevant estates – though clergy and serfs were absent. Her instructions to the commission drew on the most enlightened legal thinking of the day and when they were published they were greatly admired by foreigners. 

Catherine’s agenda was to draw up a comprehensive legal code, but she was soon frustrated by the way each social estate concentrated on its own interests. The Commission was interrupted by the war against the Ottoman Empire, and it produced few tangible results. As a result, Catherine decided to concentrate on institutional reform and to lay the foundations of the civil society that Russia lacked.

Education and learning: Catherine encouraged western intellectual ideas. She founded a society journal, This and That, to disseminate culture. In 1786 she issued a National Statute of Education, which provided for a two-tier network of schools, primary and secondary, free of charge and co-educational. Though the programme was over-ambitious, the principle of universal education was established and was carried on by her successors.

Serfdom:The most serious contrast between Catherine’s Enlightenment principles and reality can be seen in the fact that serfdom extended in Russia during her reign. She herself was the biggest serf-owner in Russia, and she gave away tens of thousands of serfs to her favourites. Her decree of 1767 reinforced the system and it was established definitively in the Ukraine in 1783. She could not do without the support of the nobles. As one historian has noted, 

The system of government which Catherine perfected, an autocracy based on the support of the landowning classes, was entirely Russian. Only in a few cosmetic details did it owe anything to French or other West European influences…As a woman, a foreigner, and a usurper, Catherine was never able to dispense with the backing of the landowning class in Russia. (Anderson, p. 162) 

Catherine as administrator: On the other hand, her administrative reforms were remarkable. She began to create a civilian bureaucracy capable of administering her vast empire. She almost doubled the number of civil servants, created standardised salaries, and handed over tax-collecting to civilian officials. In 1773 a special office of State Revenues was created, and from 1781 it became possible to submit a meaningful budget to the empress. 

In 1775 the empire was divided into districts of 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, centred on a town that was to be the centre of local administration. As a result 200 new towns, all of them of a standard size, were created, ‘an achievement which no other eighteenth-century government could match, and which was one of the most important practical legacies of the age of Catherine’(Anderson, p. 123).

However, Catherine did not succeed in creating an efficient modern state on Prussian lines. She was defeated by the size and backwardness of Russia.

The Pugachev revolt

In September 1773 Catherine faced the most serious revolt of her reign. A Cossack, Emelian Ivanovich Pugachev, an army deserter, led a serf revolt in southern Russia. In his first manifesto, in September, he claimed to be Peter III. Later manifestos ordered the peasants to massacre landlords. In July 1774 a force of 20,000 rebels captured Kazan on the Volga. For a while the army was tied down in a war with the Ottoman Empire (see below), but when the war ended, the rebels were defeated. Pugachev was captured and executed - on Catherine's insistence, without torture -  in Moscow in January 1775.

Pugachev, the Cossack leader
 of the most, serious
revolt of Catherine's reign.

Potemkin

Catherine had an active love life but it has been argued that far from being promiscuous, she was a serial monogamist. (This may be splitting hairs!) Orlov was replaced by three more lovers and then by the great love of her life, Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, ten years her junior, who became her chief minister. He was an officer in the horse guards, who had participated in the coup that brought her to power. His exploits as a cavalry commander in the first Turkish War (1768-74) led to his installation in March 1774 as official favourite with the title of adjutant-general. His affair with Catherine only lasted two years, but in this period it is possible that the couple went through some form of marriage. 

Prince Grigory Potemkin
the great love of Catherine's life.
Public domain.

In 1787 he arranged Catherine’s tour of the southern provinces, giving rise to the myth of the ‘Potemkin villages’.

Catherine had many other lovers, who grew increasingly young as she aged but she never stopped loving Potemkin and relying on his advice. She was devastated when he died in southern Russia in October 1791. She wrote, ‘You can’t imagine how broken I am'.

Russia and the Ottoman Empire

Russia's first war with the Ottoman Empire began in 1768. Its outstanding event was the defeat of the Turks at the naval battle of Chesma in the eastern Mediterranean in 1770. 

The war  was ended in 1774 by the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji, which gave Russia a large area north of the Black Sea and also the right to make representations on behalf of Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Catherine described the day the treaty was signed as the happiest of  her life. The Crimea became an independent khanate but it was annexed by Russia in 1783, while Britain and France were too distracted by the negotiations to end the American war to make a protest.

The second Russo-Turkish War lasted from 1787 to 1792. The Ottoman attempt to regain the Crimea was defeated by Potemkin and Alexander Suvorov, one of the greatest generals in Russian history. Russian victories gave the country access to the Black Sea and southern Ukraine, where the port city of Odessa was founded in 1794. Further confrontations with the Ottoman Empire were inevitable.

The Partitions of Poland

The complex diplomacy of the early 1770s led to an arrangement between Russia, Prussia and Austria over Poland. In August 1772 the three powers divided Poland between them. By the standards of the eighteenth century there was nothing wrong with this and contemporary opinion blamed Poland for its fate. Only Maria Theresa of Austria felt any moral scruples, but she overcame them. As a result Poland lost a third of her territory. 

With the second partition in 1793 Russia acquired Minsk, the capital of Belorus. There were further gains in the Third Partition in 1795, after which Poland ceased to exist.

Catherine’s achievements

Catherine died on 6 November [16 November NS] 1796 and was succeeded by her unstable son, Paul. She had put her faith not in Paul, but in her favourite grandchild his eldest son, Alexander, the future Tsar Alexander I. 

Her achievements may have been overrated, and her attachment to Enlightenment values superficial.  Nevertheless, she was a genuine intellectual, and her reign was a period of modernisation and westernisation. She increased Russian territory at the expense of Poland and the Ottoman Empire. When she died in 1796 Russia was firmly established as a European state.

Coda: Paul I (1796-1801)

Catherine’s son Paul deliberately turned his back on his mother’s legacy. He stabilised the monarchy by issuing an unambiguous law of succession providing for the descent of the throne through the oldest male heir. He presented himself as the defender of Orthodoxy against modernity. He forbade the import of foreign books and journals and prohibited travel abroad.

Tsar Paul I
murdered autocrat.

His foreign policy was erratic. He was a leading figure in the anti-French Second Coalition, until he turned against Britain and was captivated by Bonaparte.  He ordered noble army officers to be whipped. Perceiving enemies at every turn, Paul had over 12,000 people arrested, including high-ranking army officers.

His treatment of the military elite brought about his downfall. On 11 March [OS] 1801 a group of Guards officers obtained the consent of his heir, Grand Duke Alexander, to depose him. Having forced him to sign an abdication deed, they strangled him. The cause of death was given out as apoplexy.

The new Tsar, Alexander I,  felt permanently guilty that he had inherited his throne from his murdered father. But his accession was welcomed. Like his grandmother he was a devotee of the European Enlightenment. Would he continue her legacy?