Catherine II of Russia

Catherine II of Russia: The Usurper Who Read Montesquieu

On 9 July 1762 a thirty-three-year-old German princess with no Russian blood and no legal claim to anything took the loyalty of the guards regiments and deposed her husband, the Emperor Peter III. The coup was swift and very nearly bloodless. Eight days later Peter was dead at Ropsha; the official cause was recorded as haemorrhoidal colic and apoplexy. She was crowned at the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow that September and ruled for the next thirty-four years.

Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst

She was born on 2 May 1729 in Stettin, in Prussia, as Princess Sophie Auguste Friederike of Anhalt-Zerbst — minor German nobility with better connections than money. She was brought to Russia in 1744, aged fifteen, as a candidate bride for the heir to the throne. On 28 June 1744 she converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Yekaterina, and on 21 August 1745 she married Peter Fyodorovich in Saint Petersburg. The marriage was a disaster and the long wait was productive: over the seventeen years before the coup she read deeply in French political philosophy and built the relationships among the guards officers who would eventually put her on the throne.

Enlightened Despotism, Drafted

She took power as a usurper and immediately set about legitimising it with legislation. In 1766 she convened a Grand Commission of 652 delegates drawn from most classes of Russian society and handed them the *Nakaz*, an Instruction she had written herself, drawing heavily on Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria. Enlightenment legal philosophy, issued under the seal of an absolute monarch, was a genuinely startling thing to publish. It was also, in practice, sterile: after more than two hundred sessions the commission dissolved without, as the record dryly has it, getting beyond the realm of theory.

Voltaire's Correspondent

Her cultural project was more successful, partly because it did not require anyone's consent. She corresponded with Voltaire for fifteen years, until his death in 1778; he called her the Star of the North. In 1762 she invited Denis Diderot to finish the *Encyclopédie* in Russia under her protection, and she wrote to d'Alembert and Grimm as well. She recruited working scientists — Leonhard Euler and Peter Simon Pallas from Berlin, Anders Johan Lexell from Sweden.

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In 1764 she founded the Hermitage as a court museum beside the Winter Palace, a private gallery that did not open to the public until 1852, long after her death; by 1790 it held 38,000 books, 10,000 engraved gems and 10,000 drawings. The same year she founded the Smolny Institute, the first state-financed institution of higher education for women in Europe. Her Statute of National Education in 1786 built a two-tier system of free schools for the non-serf population; by the end of the reign some 62,000 pupils were enrolled in 549 state institutions. In 1773 she founded what became the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

The Inoculation

The single most revealing thing she did was medical. In 1768, when smallpox variolation was still widely feared, she summoned the English physician Thomas Dimsdale and had herself inoculated — publicly, deliberately, and at real personal risk — so that her nobility and then her subjects would follow. They did. By 1800 roughly two million inoculations had been performed across the empire. It was an argument made with her own body, and it worked better than the *Nakaz*.

Pugachev and the Bargain

The limits arrived in 1773, when Pugachev raised a mass peasant rebellion on the claim that Peter III was still alive. It took two years to crush. Catherine had inherited an empire built on serfdom and owned around half a million serfs herself. After Pugachev she abandoned any intention of dismantling it and did the opposite: to secure the nobility that had saved her, she increased landowners' power over their peasants, culminating in the Charter to the Nobility of 1785. Serfs could file complaints through legal channels; nobles could also sentence them to hard labour in Siberia. Her Provincial Statute of 1775 was more durable, cutting the empire into fifty provinces and nearly five hundred districts and giving Russia its first working administrative geography.

The Map

Territorially she was the most successful ruler Russia ever had. The first Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74 produced the victories at Chesma and Kagul in 1770, and the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in July 1774 took Azov, Kerch, Yenikale and Kinburn and opened the Azov Sea to Russian shipping. She annexed Crimea outright in 1783 and made Georgia a protectorate the same year by the Treaty of Georgievsk. A second Ottoman war from 1787 to 1792 confirmed the gains. Poland she dismembered in three stages — she had installed her former lover Stanisław Poniatowski on its throne in 1764 — with the final partition of 1795 taking 120,000 square kilometres and 1.2 million people. In all she added roughly 520,000 square kilometres to the empire. Her stated ambition was larger still: "I shall not die until I have ejected the Turks from Europe, suppressed the pride of China and established trade with India."

Why Catherine Is Called a Genius

Catherine's claim is unusually well documented because she wrote so much of it down herself. She was a working intellectual in a way almost no other eighteenth-century monarch was: she composed the *Nakaz* personally from her reading of Montesquieu and Beccaria, sustained fifteen years of correspondence with Voltaire on something close to equal terms, and recruited mathematicians and naturalists rather than merely collecting them. The inoculation of 1768 is the clearest single proof of a genuinely empirical mind — she assessed evidence, concluded the risk was worth taking, and staked her own life on the conclusion to move a superstitious court.

The counter-case is substantial. She held power by a coup in which her husband conveniently died, and her position was not earned but seized. The great legislative project produced nothing. Her tolerance was selective and often cynical: she permitted Old Believers to worship openly in 1762 and deported more than twenty thousand of them to Siberia two years later, and she confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, taxed them double and declared them official foreigners. Above all, she strengthened serfdom rather than ending it, buying the nobility's loyalty with other people's freedom. Her own grandson Nicholas I judged her foreign policy dishonest and lacking long-term strategy.

The fair verdict is that she was a genuine intellect operating inside an autocracy that would not let her be a reformer — and that she chose the autocracy every time the two conflicted. That is a real mind, honestly assessed, making unheroic choices.

Legacy

She died at the Winter Palace on 17 November 1796, aged sixty-seven, and was buried beside the tsars in the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul; her estranged son succeeded her as Paul I. Her reign is conventionally called the golden age of the Russian Empire, and the case for it is physical rather than rhetorical: the borders she drew held for over a century, the provincial system she designed outlived her, and the private court gallery she started in 1764 became, long after her death, one of the world's great public museums.