Catherine the Great

52

“All Free Estates of the Realm”

CATHERINE HAD WRITTEN the Nakaz as a preliminary to summoning an assembly that would assist in creating a new code of laws for the empire. Once the document was published, even in its severely truncated form, in December 1766, she initiated this second stage by issuing an imperial manifesto calling on “all free estates of the realm”—this meant all Russians except serfs—to select delegates to a legislative commission. During the spring of 1767, delegates were chosen, representing the many creeds, ranks, occupations, and social classes of the Russian empire. They included government officials, members of the nobility, townspeople, merchants, free peasants, and the inhabitants of outlying parts of the empire whose people were neither Christian nor racially Russian. Their task would be to inform the empress of the grievances, needs, and hopes of the people they represented, thereby providing her with material to use in drafting a new code of laws.

The basic electoral criteria were geographic territory and class. The central government offices sent 29 delegates. All noblemen living in a particular district were to elect a single delegate for their district; this produced 142 noble delegates (among them three Orlov brothers, including Gregory and Alexis). All property owners in a town were to choose one deputy to represent their town, regardless of the size of the town’s population; the result was that the towns, with 209 delegates, had the largest representation in the assembly. The state peasants, working on state lands but legally free, sent one delegate for each province for a total of 56. The Cossacks of the Don, the Volga, the Yaik, and Siberia were to send whatever number of delegates their own chieftains determined; they sent 44. Another 54 delegates came from the non-Russian tribes, Christian, Muslim, and even Buddhist; they sent one delegate for each tribe. Serfs, the overwhelming majority of the Russian population, were considered property and were not represented; they and their interests were presumed to be represented by their owners. When the elections were over, the Legislative Commission was to be composed of 564 delegates.

It was understood that the assembly would limit itself to providing information and advice, and that all final decisions would continue to be made by the empress. Catherine never intended that the Legislative Commission should discuss how Russia was governed. She had no wish to create a body that would limit the absolute power of the Russian autocrat, and she had made clear in the Nakaz that she considered absolutism the only form of government workable in Russia; nor was the Legislative Commission to be permitted to aspire to a permanent political role. There was to be no restriction on the expression of general political views, and any grievance, local or national, could be discussed, but the commission was to be purely advisory. As it happened, the delegates in the Legislative Commission showed no inclination to extend their authority. The status and supreme powers of the sovereign were understood and accepted.

Most of the delegates were confused as to exactly what was wanted from them. Any previous demand involving participation in the central government had been regarded with suspicion by the nobility, who considered a summons to the capital for state duty a form of service to be evaded if possible. Catherine endeavored to reverse this perception and make the role of delegate attractive by attaching rewards and privileges to the work. All expenses were to be paid by the state treasury. Delegates were also to receive a salary, ranging from 400 rubles a year for noblemen and 122 rubles a year for town delegates to 37 rubles a year for free peasants. All delegates were to be exempted for life from capital punishment, torture, and corporal punishment, and their property was to be protected from confiscation. Delegates were to wear a special badge of office, which was to be returned to the state when they died. Nobles were entitled to incorporate this badge in their coats of arms so that their descendants would know that they had taken part in this historic work. “By this institution,” Catherine’s manifesto concluded, “we give to our people an example of our sincerity, of our great belief in them, and of our true maternal love.”

Catherine announced that the new Legislative Committee would meet in Moscow and that she would open the proceedings in person. By summoning the assembly to the ancient capital, she hoped to prove to the city’s large, conservative population that she, her Nakaz, and the new legal code intended to serve Old Russia as well as the new. Before the delegates gathered, she strengthened this message by announcing that she would make a voyage down the Volga, cruising through the heartland of Old Russia. Beside adding to her personal knowledge of her empire, she meant by showing herself among her people to impress observers at home and abroad. In fact, she was excited by this prospective journey. On March 26, 1767, she wrote to Voltaire, “Perhaps at the moment when you least expect it, you will receive a letter from some corner of Asia.”

The voyage was on a grand scale. More than a thousand people accompanying her boarded a flotilla of large riverboats at Tver, on the upper Volga, on April 28, 1767. The voyagers stopped at Yarolslavl and then at Kostrama, where, in 1613, a delegation representing “all the classes and all the towns of Russia” had come to petition the first of the Romanov dynasty, sixteen-year-old Michael, to accept the Russian throne. From Kostrama, she and they moved down the river to Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, and Simbirsk. Catherine delighted in this method of travel. “There can be nothing more pleasant than voyaging as an entire house without fatigue,” she wrote to Nikita Panin.

In Kazan, where she stayed for a week, Catherine found herself in a different world. Surrounded by ethnic and cultural diversity, she considered the applicability to Russia of the principles she had inscribed in the Nakaz. On May 29, she wrote to Voltaire:

These laws, about which so much has been said, are … not yet enacted, and who can answer for their usefulness? It is posterity, and not we, who will have to decide. Consider, if you will, that they must be applied to Asia as well as Europe, and what difference of climate, people, customs, and even ideas! … There are in this city twenty different peoples who do not resemble each other at all. We have, nevertheless, to design a garment to fit them all. They can agree on general principles well enough, but what about the details?

Two days later, in another letter to Ferney, she returned to this theme:

There are so many objects worthy of a glance, one could collect enough ideas here for ten years. This is an empire to itself and only here can one see what an immense enterprise it is as concerns our laws, and how little these conform to the situation of the empire in general.

Traveling south down the great river, Catherine marveled at the wealth of nature along its banks. To Nikita Panin, she wrote:

Here, the people along the Volga are rich and extremely well fed. The grain of every kind is so good here and the wood is nothing other than oak and linden. The earth is such dark stuff as is seen nowhere else. In a word, these people are spoiled by God. Since birth I have not eaten such tasty fish as here, and everything is in such abundance that one cannot imagine, and I do not know anything they might need; everything is here.

She and her party disembarked in Simbirsk to return to Moscow. A century and a half later, Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister of the 1917 Russian provisional government, described Simbirsk, which was his birthplace:

The town rose high on a hill overlooking the river and the meadowlands of rich, fragrant grass stretching to the eastern horizon. From the summit right down to the water stretched luxuriant apple and cherry orchards. In the spring the whole mountainside was white with blossoms, fragrant, and at night, breathless with the songs of nightingales.

Back in Moscow, Catherine prepared for the opening of the Legislative Commission. With the delegates arriving in the city, Catherine decided to impress them with the importance of the work they were about to undertake. On the morning of Sunday, July 30, she drove though the streets to the Kremlin, sitting alone in a gilded carriage. After a religious ceremony in the Assumption Cathedral, she walked to the Palace of Facets, where the delegates were presented to her as she sat above them on a raised throne. On her right, a table draped in red velvet displayed copies of the Nakaz bound in red leather; on her left stood Grand Duke Paul, the ministers of the government, members of the court, and foreign ambassadors. A welcoming speech compared Catherine to Justinian. She responded by telling the delegates that they had a unique opportunity “to glorify yourselves and your country, and to acquire for yourselves the respect and gratitude of future centuries.” She presented each delegate with a copy of the Nakaz and a gold medal on a chain. The medal was stamped with an image of the empress. Its inscription read: “For the welfare of one and all.” The medals were popular and many were promptly sold.

The following morning, the commission began its work. Over several days, the vice-chancellor, Prince Alexander Golitsyn, read Catherine’s Nakaz aloud. This was the first of many readings, necessary because many delegates could not read. The impact of this document on moderately educated noblemen, town merchants, peasants whose horizons were limited to their own province, if not their own village, not to mention tribesmen from beyond the Volga, can only be guessed. The difficulty lay in knowing what a Cossack from the Don, or a Kalmuck from the steppes, would make of principles largely borrowed from Montesquieu, and selected and arranged by a German-born princess. Aphorisms such as “Liberty is the right to do all that is not forbidden by law” were ideas so alien to the majority of Russians as to be almost incomprehensible.

In the meeting hall, the delegates sat on benches according to the district from which they had come. The nobility sat in front; behind them were the townspeople, the Cossacks, and the peasant delegates. For the important role of marshal (or president) of the commission, the empress chose General Alexander Bibikov, a soldier; he was charged with organizing and guiding the commission’s work. Before the delegates began the work they had been summoned to do, they insisted on debating what title they should present to the empress in gratitude for her calling them together. “The Great” and “All Wise Mother of the Fatherland” were the most popular. Discussion lasted several sessions, provoking Catherine to say impatiently to Bibikov, “I brought them together to study laws, and they are busying discussing my virtues.” Eventually, she refused all titles, explaining that she had not earned any of them; that only posterity could impartially judge her achievements, and that God alone could be called “All Wise.” Nevertheless, she was far from displeased when the title “Catherine the Great” received the greatest number of votes; she had been on the throne for only five years, whereas Peter the Great had not received this title from the Senate until his fourth decade as tsar. And there was no doubt that the offer of this title by an elected assembly of the free estates strengthened the legitimacy of her position. It eliminated further discussion of her ever reverting to the role of regent, as well as any talk of the accession of Paul when he came of age.

The commission took up rules of procedure and assignment to subcommissions. The full assembly was to act as a general debating arena, and the main work of analysis, coordination, and drafting of new laws was to be distributed among nineteen subcommissions. The assembly turned to the reports the delegates had brought with them. Catherine believed that discussion of these grievances and proposals, setting forth the needs of each area and class, would be one of the Legislative Commission’s most important functions; she expected it to give her a valuable picture of social conditions in Russia. Each delegate was certain that his own list of complaints should be the primary concern of the assembly. Hundreds of these lists and petitions had arrived; the six state peasant delegates from the Archangel region brought with them a mass of seventy-three petitions. Some were simple lists, often unrelated or contradictory; others were relatively sensible proposals for reform. In all, over a thousand peasant petitions were submitted to the Legislative Commission. Naturally, the peasants were less able than the nobles and the townspeople to clearly spell out their grievances, and they tended to limit themselves to descriptions of local problems: fences knocked down, crops trampled by wandering cattle, the scarcity of timber, the cost of salt, the law’s delay, the insolence of government officials. Because they were vulnerable to pressure from the local nobility or local government officials, it was difficult for them to be explicit in their complaints. Attempting to hear them all, the sessions went on spawning subcommittees, where much was begun and little finished. Eventually, Catherine realized that the mission assigned to the delegates to find laws suitable for all the citizens of the empire was beyond their reach. Nevertheless, an extraordinary thing was happening: for the first time in Russia, representatives of the people had been brought and were sitting together to speak frankly and publicly without fear of serious retribution about what troubled them and the people they represented.

Catherine was often present, secluded on a platform behind a drawn curtain. She learned something about conditions in her empire, but the commission’s stumbling pace irritated her—so much so that at one point she rose from behind her curtain and walked out. Not only did the full assembly sessions disappoint her; some of the subcommittees made her angry. On one occasion, told that the subcommittee on towns had adjourned while waiting for additional copies of the Nakaz to be bound, she exploded, “Have they really already lost those copies which they have already been given?” In December, after five months of talk, she decided that she had heard enough and halted the commission session in Moscow. Hopeful that a change of place might revitalize the delegates, she ordered them to reconvene in St. Petersburg two months later. In mid-January, she set off in her sledge over the frozen road. A long string of other sledges, filled with delegates, followed.

When the Legislative Commission met again in St. Petersburg on February 18, 1768, it began by discussing the status of the nobility and the townspeople, the merchants, and the free peasants. Nobles asked that their prerogatives be extended in the form of greater power in provincial and local governments; they also wanted the right to enter commerce and industry in the towns. In addition, the noblemen argued among themselves over definitions of the status and rights of the different layers of nobility. The old hereditary nobility demanded establishment of a strict demarcation between nobility of birth and men recently raised to noble rank for service or merit—men like the Orlovs.

Another bitter debate set noble landowners against town merchants. The nobility claimed the exclusive right to own serf labor and complete freedom in dealing with the serf problem, economically and administratively. The merchants, having heard from the Nakaz that all citizens were equal before the law, demanded the same privileges as the nobility, including the right to own serfs. The landowners fought to prevent this, just as the merchants were fighting the attempt by landowners to engage in industry and trade. In the end, both initiatives failed.

In the course of these debates between nobles and merchants on the right to own serfs, the larger, more explosive subject of serfdom arose. The assembly was divided between two fundamentally opposing viewpoints. Those who supported serfdom declared that the institution must be permanent; that it was the only solution to an economic problem that went deeper than the owner’s social status and privilege; namely, that serfdom was essential to the supply and control of labor in a huge, primarily agricultural country. Serfdom’s opponents spoke of the evils and human misery caused by a form of bondage approaching slavery. With economy and tradition on one side, and philosophy and compassion on the other, there appeared no bridge to span the gulf.

Catherine was no better able to find a solution than anyone else. In her original version, the Nakaz had gone as far as to advocate the gradual abolition of serfdom in Russia by allowing serfs, with the permission of their owners, to purchase their own freedom. The Russian nobility overwhelmingly opposed ideas like this, which had been stricken from the document before it went to print. The question of whether serfs should be allowed to own personal property apart from land came before the assembly. It led to heated discussions on the relationship between landowners and serfs, and the administrative and punitive powers landowners should have over their serfs. To the charge that the peasants were lazy and drunk, a liberal delegate replied, “The peasant has his feelings. He knows that all he owns belongs to his landowner. How can he be virtuous when he is deprived of all means of being so? He drinks, not from laziness, but from downheartedness. The hardest worker becomes careless if he is constantly oppressed and owns nothing.”

Other enlightened landlords spoke in favor of legal limitations on landlords’ power over serfs; Bibikov, the marshal, urged that noblemen who tortured their serfs be declared insane, which would allow the law to seize their estates. But when specific improvements in the condition of serfs and the eventual abolition of serfdom were proposed, the speakers were shouted down. Liberals among the noble delegates were vilified and even threatened with death by extremist members of the conservative majority.

Catherine had hoped for support from Count Alexander Stroganov. He had been educated in Geneva and Paris, and it was he who had supported her at the moment when Peter III had shouted “Dura!” in a crowded banquet hall. But when Stroganov rose to speak in the Legislative Commission, he defended the institution of serfdom with passion. Prince Michael Scherbatov, who considered the hereditary nobility an institution ordained by God, argued that because Russia was a cold, northern country, peasants would not work without being forced to do so. The state could not force them, he said, because Russia was too large. Only the nobility could do it, but they had to do it in the traditional way, with no interference by the state.

The poet and playwright Alexander Sumarokov objected to the special privileges, such as immunity for life from corporal punishment, granted in advance to peasant delegates to the Legislative Commission. Sumarokov also objected to the principle of majority voting. “The majority of votes does not confirm the truth, but only indicates the wishes of the majority,” he said. “Truth is confirmed by profound reason and impartiality.” Sumarokov further complained that “if the serfs were freed, the poor nobles would have neither cook nor coachman, nor lackey; their trained cooks and hairdressers would run away to better paid jobs and there would be constant disturbances requiring military force to put them down. Whereas at present landowners live quietly on their estates.” (“And have their throats cut from time to time,” commented Catherine.) It was known, Sumarakov concluded, that lords loved their serfs and were loved by them. In any case, he said, the common people did not have the feelings of noblemen. (“And cannot have in present circumstances,” Catherine noted.) In the end, the empress reacted to Sumarokov’s opposition by saying, “M. Sumarokov is a good poet … but he does not have sufficient clarity of mind to be a good lawgiver.”

Despite Catherine’s personal beliefs and misgivings regarding serfdom, the reactions by nobles in the assembly made her back away from further confrontation. Her recognition of the inherent danger in keeping this huge majority of the population in permanent bondage appeared in a letter she wrote to Procurator General Vyazemsky:

A general emancipation from the unbearable and cruel yoke will not ensue … [but] if we do not agree to the diminution of cruelty and the amelioration of the intolerable position of the human species, then, even against our will, they themselves will seize it sooner or later.

As her Enlightenment principles were battered in the assembly, Catherine, aware that she governed primarily through the support of the nobility, decided that she could not go further. Later, she commented:

What had I not to suffer from the voice of an irrational and cruel public opinion when this question was considered by the Legislative Commission? The mob of nobles … began to suspect that these discussions might bring about an improvement in the position of the peasants.… I believe that there were not twenty human beings who reflected on the subject with humanity.

The discussions in St. Petersburg were proving even more unproductive and divisive than those in Moscow. The commission continued to stumble along, burdened by procedure, by conflicts of class, and by the generally impossible nature of its task. The twenty-nine Russian peasant delegates played little part in the discussions, except for one indefatigable delegate from the Archangel peasantry who spoke fifteen times. Many peasant delegates simply transferred their limited right to speak to noblemen from their districts. The few free peasants who did speak concentrated on grasping their chance to lay their complaints before the empress herself. Catherine, listening as they jumbled together every abuse, burden, and future fear, realized how far they were—and how far she now was—from Montesquieu. By the autumn of 1768, still without seeing any concrete results, the empress was tired. The commission had dragged on for eighteen months through more than two hundred sessions and not one new law had been written.

In the summer and fall of 1768, the attention of the empress and her ministers was turning in a different direction. Russia’s involvement in neighboring Poland and the shadow of a possible war with Turkey loomed over the sessions of the Legislative Commission. Catherine’s enthusiasm for a new code of laws faded, and when Turkey declared war in October 1768, her thoughts and energies were directed toward this new challenge. Already, a number of noblemen who were assembly delegates were leaving to serve as officers in the army. On December 18, 1768, Count Bibikov announced that, by order of the empress, the full Legislative Commission would be prorogued indefinitely, although a subcommission would continue to meet. The last session of the full assembly took place on January 12, 1769, after which delegates dispersed to their homes, where they were to await a further summons. The subcommission met intermittently, but by September 1771, even this had ceased. At intervals in 1772 and 1773, the procurator general was informed that the empress intended to summon the full assembly after the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish war. But no summons ever came. The Legislative Commission never met again.

No new code of Russian laws was produced. The distance stretching between an Enlightenment philosopher’s definition of an ideal monarchy and the immediate problems of everyday life in rural Russia was simply too great. Catherine looked to Montesquieu, but the nobles wanted confirmation and extension of status and privileges, and the peasants wanted restitution for broken fences, trampled crops, and illegally felled timber. Nevertheless, eighteen months and 203 sessions of effort were not entirely wasted. The documents submitted and discussed by delegates in the full assembly and the subcommissions contained a wealth of valuable information. Studying this mass of detail—these hundreds of grievances and competing claims—reinforced Catherine’s conviction that the stability of Russia depended on maintaining the absolute authority of the autocracy.

Along with strengthening Catherine’s belief in absolutism, something else had happened. Under the stimulus and protective cover of the Nakaz, the discussions in the full assembly and the various subcommissions had furnished delegates with new ideas that had never before been publicly discussed in Russia. In some cases, delegates actually quoted from a specific paragraph of Catherine’s Nakaz, using the authority of the empress to introduce and support their own ideas. Ultimately, despite the failure of the Legislative Commission to create a new law code, it made a contribution to the nation’s history. Taken together, the summons, the elections, and the 203 assembly sessions established a precedent for popular participation in government. It was the first attempt in imperial Russia to give the people a voice in their own political destiny.

Some have believed that the Legislative Commission achieved nothing, and that from the beginning both the Nakaz and the Legislative Commission were created simply for show, as no more than propaganda to impress Catherine’s Enlightenment friends abroad. This judgment is shallow. Naturally, Catherine welcomed Voltaire’s overheated praise for the Nakaz, but it does not follow that she wrote it simply to catch Voltaire’s eye and win his blessing. Indeed, the Catherine scholar Isabel de Madariaga says:

The idea that the principal purpose of such an expensive and time-consuming operation … was only to throw dust in the eyes of Western intellectuals … is difficult to accept. It was possible for Catherine to win their golden opinions by corresponding with them as she did with Voltaire; by buying Diderot’s library and leaving it in his possession; by inviting d’Alembert and Beccaria to come to Russia [although both refused]; by appointing Grimm as her personal agent in Paris.… This was sufficient evidence of Enlightenment credentials.… There was no need for her to embark on an enterprise of such major and time-consuming dimensions as the Legislative Commission.

It is worth noting that Catherine’s writing of the Nakaz and summons to the Legislative Commission took place nine years before Thomas Jefferson wrote, and the Continental Congress voted to approve, the American Declaration of Independence. It preceded by twenty-two years Louis XVI’s summons to the Estates-General. None of Catherine’s successors on the Russian throne dared to summon such an assembly again until 1905, when Nicholas II was forced by revolution to sign a document transforming Russia from an absolute autocracy to a semiconstitutional monarchy—and then, in 1906, to summon Russia’s first elected parliament, the State Duma.

53

“The King We Have Made”

ANEW LEGAL CODE adapted to the needs of contemporary Russia was important to Catherine, but conduct of foreign policy ranked first among her concerns. From the beginning of her reign, Catherine pursued an active, forward strategy in the tradition of Peter the Great. As soon as she took the throne, she assumed absolute control of Russia’s relations with foreign states. It was to inform her use of autocratic authority that she immediately demanded that she be shown all diplomatic dispatches arriving at the College of Foreign Affairs.

There was much to be done. When Peter the Great took sole possession of the throne in 1694, Russia was a landlocked giant, lacking a year-round, ice-free, saltwater port. Sweden dominated the upper Baltic, and the Black Sea was controlled by the Ottoman Turks. Later, as a result of his triumph in the Great Northern War, Peter broke the Swedish grip, extended Russian possessions down the Baltic coast to include the great port of Riga, and built a new national capital, St. Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland. In the south, fighting the Turks, he tried to reach the Black Sea, succeeded at first on the mouth of the Don River at Azov, and then lost this prize when the Turks defeated him on the river Pruth. When Peter died in 1725, Russia still had no southern opening to the sea and the outside world. Along Russia’s western border lay the huge, chaotically governed kingdom of Poland, which in earlier times had stripped away huge stretches of Russian and Ukrainian territory. For Catherine, therefore, wishing to emulate Peter by expanding her empire and creating new pathways to the world, the places to look were to the south and west. South lay Turkey; west, Poland.

The terminal illness of a king determined that her first objective would be Poland. The Polish Commonwealth, which merged the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, was as large as France. It stretched east to west between the Dnieper and the Oder, and north to south from the Baltic to the Carpathians and Turkey’s Balkan provinces on the Danube. The frontier between Poland and Russia meandered north and south for nine hundred miles. In earlier centuries, under native kings, Poland had been one of the most powerful states in Europe; in 1611, a Polish army had occupied the Kremlin. More recently, the tsars had won back some of these lost lands—Smolensk, Kiev, and the western Ukraine were Russian again—but large areas of western Russia populated by Orthodox Slavs still remained a part of Poland.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Poland was in steep decline. The Polish Diet was a weak, quasi-parliamentary body, elected by the Polish and Lithuanian nobility with each of its thousand aristocratic members possessing a single equal vote. The office of king of Poland—not a hereditary position but the result of an election by unanimous vote of the Diet—was weaker still. The king was elected only by unanimous vote and was therefore beholden to every member of the Diet. Furthermore, the Diet had been reduced to choosing a foreigner as king because the powerful figures in the Polish nobility could not agree and unite behind one of their own. Since 1736, the crown had been on the head of the elector Augustus of Saxony, who simultaneously reigned as King Augustus III of Poland. Now Augustus was dying and a successor was needed.

Along with the weakness of being a republic ruled by an elected king, Poland suffered from other uniquely harmful political arrangements. Any single member of the Diet could interrupt and terminate a session by exercising the liberum veto. This procedure empowered one member to veto any decision of the assembly even when the decision had been approved by every other member. This single negative vote also overturned and negated all previous decisions made in that session of the Diet. As one deputy’s vote could always be bought, the liberum veto made reform impossible. The Polish government lurched and staggered from crisis to crisis, while powerful, immensely wealthy landowners ruled the country.

There was, however, a political procedure by which the liberum veto could be neutralized. This was the establishment of a temporary “confederation,” a gathering of a group of nobles assembled for the purpose of achieving a single specific goal. Once summoned, a confederated Diet could make decisions by majority (rather than unanimous) vote and then, having achieved what it wanted, dissolve itself, allowing Poland to lapse back into routine political anarchy.

Not surprisingly, this repeated convergence of dissension and incompetence opened wide the door to foreign interference; indeed, no system could have been better devised to enable powerful neighbors to intervene in internal Polish affairs. Meddling was never more likely than in 1762, when the king of Poland was on his deathbed. It was generally assumed that his son would succeed him both as Saxon elector and Polish king; he was the candidate favored by Austria and France and by many Poles.

He was not favored by Catherine. Without waiting for Augustus to die, she had made a different choice. The strongest native Polish figure would have been Prince-Chancellor Adam Czartoryski, the leading member of Poland’s Russophile party, a strong character and a man of influence and wealth. But strength, experience, and wealth were not the qualities Catherine was seeking in a new king. She wanted someone weaker, more pliable—and in need of money—and she had a candidate who would suit her purpose admirably. This was Adam Czartoryski’s nephew—and her former lover—Stanislaus Poniatowski. As early as August 2, 1762, a month after her accession, she had written to Stanislaus, “I am sending Count Keyserling immediately as ambassador to Poland to make you king after the death of August III.” Catherine had told Hermann Keyserling that he was authorized to bribe whomever was necessary and could spend up to a hundred thousand rubles. To add steel to gold, she moved thirty thousand soldiers to the Russian-Polish frontier.

Not wishing her candidate’s election to be seen as based purely on Russian money and bayonets, she looked for another monarch to support her choice. She knew that Austria and France would prefer the Saxon; she also knew that Frederick of Prussia emphatically did not want another Saxon; that, in fact, he would automatically oppose whomever Maria Theresa of Austria favored. She believed that Frederick would support a native Pole. She understood that if Prussia joined Russia, Poland would feel pressure from both east and west, and that the floundering state would find itself in a diplomatic and military vise.

Frederick carefully considered Catherine’s proposal. His own diplomatic situation was weak. Having narrowly escaped defeat in the Seven Years’ War, Prussia was exhausted, impoverished, and diplomatically isolated. Frederick needed an ally, and Russia seemed the best—perhaps the only—prospect. But Frederick was too skillful a negotiator to rush into an arrangement in which the Polish crown was the only subject on the bargaining table. He, like Catherine, prefered a native Pole to a Saxon candidate, but he realized that Catherine’s interest in the continuation of “fortunate anarchy” in Poland was greater than his own. Cannily, therefore, he declared that he would cooperate with her, but only in return for what he most wanted: a Prussian-Russian alliance. Initially, this bargain suited Catherine not at all; she was aware that a new alliance with Prussia would remind Russians of Peter III’s short-lived, highly unpopular alliance with Frederick, whom he had called “the king my master.”

She delayed giving a definite answer, attempting to soothe and woo him with exotic gifts. Instead of a treaty, Frederick received watermelons from Astrakhan, grapes from the Ukraine, dromedaries from central Asia, caviar, sturgeon, and furs of fox and marten. Frederick thanked her for the gifts, noting wryly, “There is a vast difference between melons from Astrakhan and the assembly of deputies in Poland, but everything comes within the scope of your activity. The same hand that gives away fruit can distribute crowns and guarantee the peace of Europe, for which I and all those who are interested in the affairs of Poland will eternally bless you.”

Mutual interest prevailed. Frederick made a gesture of approval of Catherine’s choice for Poland by awarding Stanislaus the Order of the Black Eagle, Prussia’s highest military decoration. Catherine allowed herself to forget that not long before, Frederick had bestowed the same award on her husband, Peter III, who was no more a soldier than Stanislaus. But Frederick had the alliance he wanted, a reciprocal defense treaty, binding for eight years. Each of the two powers pledged to assist the other in the event of an attack by a single power, sending an annual financial subsidy of four hundred thousand rubles. Should two hostile powers attack one of the allies, its partner was pledged to send a force of ten thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry. Further, it was understood that Russia and Prussia would cooperate in all matters concerning the Polish political quagmire. In the immediate situation, this meant Prussian support for the candidacy of Stanislaus. There was to be no subtlety and no hesitation. In a secret corollary, the two monarchs declared that both parties were resolved to guarantee “a free and uninfluenced election” and “to resort, if need be, to force of arms, should anyone attempt to prevent the free election of the king in Poland or to meddle with the existing constitution.” If certain Poles opposed their new “lawfully elected king” by proclaiming an opposing confederation, the allies agreed to employ “military severity against them and their lands without the slightest mercy.”

Negotiation of this treaty was still incomplete when, in September 1763, Augustus III died. By then, the timing of his death was politically irrelevant; Catherine’s agreement with Frederick was fixed and the Russian-Prussian candidate had been chosen. The empress received news of the death with mordant wit: “Do not laugh at me for jumping off my chair when I received the news of the death of the Polish king,” she wrote to Panin. “The king of Prussia jumped out from behind his desk when he heard it.”

For two years after Stanislaus Poniatowski had been summarily sent home from Russia by Empress Elizabeth in 1758, Catherine had remained emotionally tied to the Polish nobleman. She had written to him often as the father of her little Anna, and had tried to secure his recall as ambassador to St. Petersburg. Then she met Gregory Orlov, a man less polished but with greater self-assurance, strength, and drive. Catherine and Stanislaus still corresponded, and their letters were filled with mutual expressions of affection—indeed, the warmth of their language led Poniatowski to consider himself permanently bound to Catherine. The grand duchess, however, was not telling him the whole truth. She managed to omit from her letters details of her affair with Gregory Orlov, including her pregnancy and the birth of her child by Orlov. If Stanislaus learned about Gregory from other sources, he persuaded himself that this raw, uneducated soldier could not be anything more than an infatuation. And once Catherine had taken the throne and her husband was dead, he put Orlov out of his mind and counted the days until she called him back to her side.

Catherine, knowing or sensing his feelings, tried to warn him away. On July 2, 1762, she wrote to him:

I beg you most urgently not to come here as your arrival in the present circumstances would be dangerous for you and do me much harm. The revolution which has just taken place in my favor is miraculous. Its unanimity is unbelievable. I am deeply engaged in work and would be unable to devote myself to you. All my life I will serve and revere your family, but at the moment it is important not to arouse criticism. I have not slept for three nights and have eaten twice in four days. Good bye. Keep well, Catherine.

The note was affectionate, but it was written in an unmistakable tone of emotional disengagement. Her next letter, written a month later, was an account of the coup and the death of Peter III and included the announcement that she was sending Count Keyserling to make Stanislaus a king. By this point, it had become urgent that she stifle any hope that he would soon rejoin her as her lover and future husband:

I beg you not to come here now.… I received your letter. A regular correspondence would be subject to a thousand inconveniences. I have twenty thousand precautions to take and have no time for harmful little love letters.… I have thousands of proprieties to consider and also bear the burden of government.… Good bye, the world is full of strange situations.

She still said nothing about her intimate relationship with Gregory Orlov, but she did praise him and his four brothers:

[The coup was] in the hands of the brothers Orlov … [who] shone by their art of leadership, their prudent daring, by the care introduced in small details, by their presence of mind and authority.… Enthusiastically patriotic and honest, passionately attached to me and my friends … there are five of them in all … the eldest of whom [in fact, Gregory was the second] … used to follow me everywhere and committed innumerable follies.… His passion for me was openly acknowledged and that is why he undertook what he did.… I have great obligations to them.

These letters stunned Stanislaus. A desire to wear the Polish crown had never excited him. He did not want to be a king; he did not even wish to live in Poland. Considering himself a European sophisticate, he found that he had little in common with the rough, unruly Polish aristocracy, which rejected all authority except its own and would turn against any elected king at the first sign of a threat to its privileges. If he was to be near a throne, he saw himself more in the role of a prince consort, helping an empress to civilize her empire, than as the ruler of a country in which he had always felt a stranger. Accordingly, Catherine’s plan, which would have stranded him on a throne in Poland, had no appeal.

Catherine, however, had three reasons for terminating their personal relationship and making him king: she wanted to make certain that he was permanently disengaged from her personal life; this achieved, she wanted to compensate him for removing herself from his reach; and, more important, she wanted, through him, to dominate Poland. Her letters to her former lover grew cooler. She stopped making a secret of her relationship to Orlov. Stanislaus still believed that his physical presence would reignite her passion for him. He implored that he be allowed to come to Russia, at least for a few months, or even a few weeks. Catherine said no.

Stanislaus refused to accept or even to comprehend his rejection. In his mind, he still carried a picture of a lonely woman coping with the problems of an enormous empire, a woman who desperately needed his help. A more rational man might have seen that Catherine was telling him that she had another lover whose place in her life and contribution to her success had raised him far above himself. Only gradually, Stanislaus grasped this bitter fact, and that the crown of Poland was to be his consolation. He responded with a final, despairing cry:

I beg of you to listen to me. You, of all women, I never thought would change. Let me be with you in any capacity you will, only do not make me a king. Call me back to you. I will be able to render you far greater service as a private citizen. That any other woman could have changed, I would believe, but you, never! What is left for me? Life without you is nothing but an empty shell, emptiness and frightful weariness of heart. I beg of you to listen to me. Sophie, Sophie, you make me suffer terribly! I would a thousand times rather be an ambassador close to you than a king here.

His appeal was wasted. Catherine had made up her mind. It would be useful to have a man who loved her on the Polish throne, and it was even more convenient that this man was poor and that the Polish crown paid only a pittance. This would ensure that he would always need money and be dependent on her. Stanislaus, although wearing the robes of a king, would become a pawn on the Polish chessboard. The most powerful piece on the board would be a queen—in this case, an empress. Given her former lover’s submissive character and disinterest in the bruising business of royal politics, Catherine was certain that it would be only a matter of time before Poland fell completely under Russian influence.

When news of the Russian-Prussian decision in favor of Stanislaus traveled to foreign capitals, it was widely assumed that the empress wanted to make her former lover king of Poland in order to marry him later and then incorporate his kingdom into her empire. Although the announcement raised the danger of antagonizing both Austria and France, neither of these states—both, like Prussia, weakened by war—was prepared to fight over the Polish succession. This did not mean that they approved of Catherine’s plan. France lodged its protest through its ally, Turkey, Poland’s southern neighbor. French diplomats in Constantinople lost no time in pointing out to the sultan and the grand vizier the danger of having a young, unmarried man on the throne of Poland, one whom the Russian empress had already had as a lover and might well choose as a husband if the marriage settlement brought her territory west of the Dnieper. Skillfully planted, these anxieties quickly took root. In June 1764, the grand vizier sent a note to St. Petersburg declaring that his country was willing to recognize the Russo-Prussian alliance, and also to approve the election of a native king to the Polish throne, but objected to the person of Stanislaus on the grounds that he was too young, too inexperienced, and, above all, unmarried.

In Poland, the Czartoryskis, Stanislaus’s family, accepted the logic of Turkey’s objections. They proposed a solution: the king-to-be would marry, preferably a Polish Catholic girl—at thirty-two, he was well past the age when most eligible young noblemen were married. They pressed their nephew to do this before election day in the Diet. All parties—Catherine, his family, the Turks, and, behind them, the French—now had a common goal: to force Poniatowski to promise that he would marry only with the approval of the Diet and that he would select a Polish Catholic wife. Stanislaus refused, declaring that no one could force him to become king on these terms and that he would rather forfeit the crown.

Ultimately, it was Catherine who forced a decision on him. Stanislaus received an official message from the Russian foreign ministry in St. Petersburg telling him that it was essential that, before the opening of the election Diet, he marry, or at least select a bride. He realized that the message must have been approved by Catherine. Understanding, finally, that he had lost the woman he loved, he surrendered and signed a declaration that he would never marry anyone other than a Roman Catholic, and then only with the approval of the Polish Diet. He was sufficiently practical, however, to write to Catherine that if she wanted to make him a king, she must provide the money for him to live up to this position. She sent him money. His promise to marry calmed Turkish fears, and the election was allowed to proceed.

Once Stanislaus agreed, Catherine sent the Russian army to help him keep his promise. Fourteen thousand Russian troops surrounded Warsaw to “keep the peace” and “guarantee a free and tranquil election.” Some Poles talked of armed resistance and appealing for foreign assistance, but most Diet members were too pleased by the prospect of a native king to oppose Russian intervention.

The “free election” took place by voice vote on a summer day, August 26, 1764, in an open field outside Warsaw where members of the Diet, standing in the meadow grass, had a good view of the large Russian military camp nearby. Stanislaus was elected, and, as he wrote afterward, “The election was unanimous and tranquil.” He was now King Stanislaus II Augustus of Poland, and, as it turned out, he had become the last king of Poland. Catherine’s former lover, who had dreamed of becoming her husband, became her royal vassal. In St. Petersburg, a relieved empress of Russia saluted the event by sending a note to Panin: “My congratulations on the new king we have made.”

54

The First Partition of Poland and the First Turkish War

CATHERINE WAS PLEASED. Stanislaus’s election as king had been a triumph for her, if not for Poland or for Stanislaus. Her victory, however, led to an optimistic view of her ability to influence Polish affairs. Two years later, by attempting to force the Diet to alter policies on the issue of Polish “dissidents,” she opened the door to adversity and war.

The “dissident issue” was the official terminology applied to the conflicted status of various religious minorities in predominantly Roman Catholic Poland. These minorities—the Russian Orthodox population in the eastern third of the country, and hundreds of thousands of Protestant Lutherans in the north—had been actively harassed in their religious practices and had been denied most political rights. They were not permitted to elect deputies to the Diet or to occupy high administrative and military posts. For years, their leaders had looked abroad for help: Orthodox believers to Russia; the Protestants to Prussia. Their continuing troubles and recurrent appeals for protection gave Russia and Prussia another common interest in Poland and a further pretext for interference in Polish internal affairs.

From the beginning of her reign, Catherine had heard that Orthodox believers were forbidden to build new churches and frequently barred from attending those that existed. The empress had a reason to respond. She had secularized church lands and serfs in Russia and she wished to do something to earn back the favor of the church at home. A further incentive was that any restriction of the authority of the Catholic Church would be in keeping with Enlightenment principles of religious toleration.

Three months after Stanislaus’s election to the Polish throne, the Russian ambassador, Prince Nicholas Repnin, informed the new king that the empress would not permit the reforms in Poland for which the Czartoryskis and other powerful noblemen were asking—abolition of the liberum veto, making the crown hereditary, an increase in the army—until they made concessions to religious minorities: Orthodox and Protestant believers must be allowed to worship in their own churches and to take part in the public life and government of the community. Stanislaus agreed to raise the dissident issue in the next Diet. Antidissident agitation flared immediately, fanned by ardent Catholic churchmen. Both sides were unyielding. By demanding political rights for religious minorities, Catherine was imposing demands on a fervently Catholic people who would rather fight than suffer the slightest alteration of their faith or infringement of their privileges. Religion was the overriding national issue; a threat to the Catholic faith reminded every Pole that he was a patriot. When the 1766 Diet met, it firmly refused to respond to any dissident grievance. Catherine reiterated her position: there were to be no other reforms until Poland permitted dissidents’ rights.

Stanislaus was caught in the middle. Familiar with the beliefs of his Catholic countrymen, he begged the empress not to intrude in religious matters. To his ambassador in St. Petersburg, the king wrote, “[This demand] is a real thunderbolt for the country and for me personally. If it is still humanly possible, try to make the empress see that the crown which she procured for me will become a shirt of Nessus. I shall be burned alive and my end will be frightful.”

Catherine ignored his plea. She felt her moral position to be unassailable; she was upholding the rights of a persecuted minority against the Catholic Church. Beyond that, she had given money to Stanislaus; she felt that she had bought and paid for his support. She instructed her ambassador to enforce her policy.

Frederick of Prussia was happy to stand aside in Catherine’s struggle with the king and the Diet, and to devote himself to fomenting discontent in the Protestant areas of northern Poland. This served to strengthen the resistance of Polish Catholics to all foreign intervention and make Catherine’s effort more difficult. With members of the Diet obdurate and sullen, with Catholic bishops thundering against the wickedness of the dissenters, with some members of the nobility arming their followers, Catherine saw no alternative except to send more Russian troops into Poland. When the next Diet met in October 1767, Warsaw was occupied by a Russian army. Repnin surrounded the Diet building with soldiers and placed some of them inside the Diet chamber to ensure that members voted as he instructed them. At first, the Diet refused to be intimidated. When bishops spoke against dissident rights, members roared approval. Repnin then arrested the two leading bishops, including the elderly bishop of Kraców, and sent them across the border to exile in Russia. Members looked to their king to protest, but Stanislaus accepted Repnin’s demands, whereupon they accused the king of betraying his country to the Russians. On November 7, 1767, the Diet, with multiple absentees, with Russian bayonets gleaming everywhere, and finding no one to rally behind, grudgingly submitted and agreed to equal rights for “dissidents.” Catherine and Repnin, however, were not finished. In February 1768, they forced the signing of a Polish-Russian treaty of alliance that confirmed the granting of liberty of worship to dissenting minorities and committed the king not to attempt any change in the Polish constitution without Russian consent.

Two days after the Diet in Warsaw dispersed, a group of conservative Catholic noblemen gathered in the southern Polish town of Bar, near the Turkish frontier, and declared themselves to be a Confederated Diet whose purpose was to defend Polish independence and the Catholic religion. Polish patriotism led to an ill-prepared and uncoordinated uprising. Russian troops marched south and easily dispersed this group of confederates, but other anti-Russian confederations arose elsewhere in Poland, and Catherine was forced to send more troops. The confederates appealed for support from Catholic Austria and from France; both sent money and officers to advise. Catherine responded by flooding the country with even more Russian troops. She realized that she had badly underestimated the strength of Polish Catholicism and national pride, and, to her surprise, she found herself enmeshed in a serious military campaign. The Poles were fighting, she wrote to Voltaire, “in order to prevent a quarter of their nation from enjoying civic rights.”

Catherine had succeeded in making Poland a vassal state with a puppet king, but she had also succeeded in arousing the hatred of the Poles, the alarm of Turkey, the anxiety of Austria, and even the nervousness of Prussia. Frederick had not signed a treaty with Russia in order to see the whole of Poland fall under Russian control.

Apprehension caused by events in Poland spread across Europe. Monarchs and statesmen, already astonished by the success of the former Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst in making herself an empress, now watched as she turned her lover into a king and extended Russian influence over his new kingdom. The Turks, neighbors of both Poland and Russia, were greatly alarmed by the growing increase in Russian military power in Poland, which Turkey had assumed would remain a permanently weak buffer state. Russian troops now were in a position to advance down the Dnieper, the Bug, and the Dniester and threaten the Turkish Balkan provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. If they reached and crossed the Danube, they could threaten the city of Constantinople itself. France, Turkey’s traditional ally, was also eager to curtail Russia’s growing influence in Poland. It was, therefore, not difficult for French diplomats in Constantinople to convince the sultan and the grand vizier that Russian expansion must be checked and that the wisest course would be to declare war before the Russians were ready. French bribes made this case persuasive in Constantinople. Turkey now needed only a pretext.

An ideal casus belli presented itself in October 1768. Russian troops, fighting Poles in southeastern Poland, pursued them over the border into Turkish territory. The Ottoman Empire responded by issuing an ultimatum to the Russian ambassador, demanding that all Russian troops be removed not only from Turkish territory but from all of Poland. When the Russian ambassador refused even to communicate this demand to St. Petersburg, the Turks escorted him to the Seven Towers and locked him up—the Ottoman protocol for declaring war. Frederick II, following these events from Berlin, clapped his hand to his head and groaned, “Good God, what does one have to endure to make a king of Poland?”

Catherine was undismayed by Turkey’s declaration of war. Indeed, she believed that it provided an opportunity to achieve significant Russian goals. Of course, she would be going to war without an ally; as long as Russia was fighting only a single hostile power, Frederick of Prussia was not obliged by treaty to mobilize a single grenadier. He limited himself to the payment of annual subsidies to Russia which the Russian-Prussian treaty required. Privately, he dismissed the war as a contest between “the one-eyed and the blind,” but he stopped this talk in 1769 and 1770 when the brilliant successes of Catherine’s generals proved him wrong.

In the the spring of 1769, Russian troops occupied and fortified Azov and Taganrog, which Peter the Great had conquered and subsequently, in 1711, had been forced to return to the Turks. Control of these ports and their fortresses meant command of the mouth of the Don, where the river enters the Sea of Azov. The Russians then took Kerch, at the point where the Sea of Azov meets the Black Sea, providing access to the Black Sea itself. Meanwhile, a Russian army of eighty thousand, using Poland as its base, advanced south into the Turkish provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. General Peter Rumyantsev’s forces occupied all of Moldavia and much of Wallachia up to the Danube. In 1770, Rumyantsev led 40,000 men across the Dniester and inflicted two devastating defeats on larger Turkish armies. At the Battle of Larga, on July 7, he defeated 70,000 Turks, and at the Battle of Kagul, on July 21, he routed 150,000. Rumyantsev was promoted to field marshal. Watching from St. Petersburg, an overjoyed Catherine boasted to Voltaire that “at the risk of repeating myself or becoming a bore, I have nothing to report to you but victories.” The empress met almost daily with her war council and constantly sent long letters of appreciation and encouragement to her generals. Officers on leave were entertained at the Winter Palace, and at every military parade in the capital, the empress appeared in the uniform of one of the regiments of which she was honorary colonel.

From the first months of the war, Catherine was also looking for ways to use her navy to fight the Turks. Russia had no Black Sea fleet because the Russian empire possessed no foothold on that body of water. Peter the Great had constructed a Baltic fleet, but it had been allowed by his successors to fall into decay. Early in her reign, Catherine had begun to rehabilitate this fleet by repairing old ships, constructing new ones, and asking the British government to permit her to hire some experienced Royal Navy officers. A number of British captains had been recruited, including Captains Samuel Greig and John Elphinstone, both of whom were given the rank of rear admiral and paid twice the salaries they had received in their own navy.

Catherine wished to put this fleet and these officers to use. When, at a meeting of the war council, Gregory Orlov wondered aloud whether this weapon could be employed in the Mediterranean to attack the Turks from the rear, Catherine was interested. It was a daring concept that would involve sending a large part of the Russian navy completely around the ocean periphery of the European continent. The fleet would sail down the Baltic, across the North Sea, through the English Channel, past the coasts of France, Spain, and Portugal, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and into the eastern Mediterranean, carrying the flag of the Russian empress into the Aegean Sea. To make this strategy work, however, Catherine would need the support of a friendly European power. Again, she approached England, and again Whitehall consented. When Russians were fighting Turks—so the British government reasoned—they were also fighting France, which was Turkey’s traditional ally. And anything that might damage France, England’s permanent enemy, would always be approved in London. Accordingly, Britain offered facilities to the Russian fleet to rest, resupply, and carry out repairs in the English naval harbors of Hull and Portsmouth, and again at Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean.

On August 6, 1769, Catherine watched the first Russian squadron sail from Kronstadt on the initial leg of its long voyage. The ships resupplied in Hull and then wintered at the British base in Minorca in the western Mediterranean. A second squadron commanded by Admiral John Elphinston followed in October, sailing across the North Sea to winter in Spithead, off the Isle of Wight. In April, these ships put to sea and arrived in Leghorn, where the Grand Duke of Tuscany resupplied them. In May 1770, the combined Russian fleet appeared off Cape Matapan, at the tip of the Peloponnesus, which marked the western entrance to the Aegean Sea. By then, senior command of the fleet had shifted to Gregory Orlov’s brother Alexis, who had joined the fleet in Leghorn. The tall, scar-faced Russian, instrumental in Catherine’s coup d’etat and the death of Peter III, made up in determination what he lacked in nautical experience, and he had retained Samuel Greig as his technical adviser. Gathering his ships, he began scouring the blue waters of the Aegean for the enemy. Near the end of June, he found them.

The island of Chios lies off Turkish Anatolia, and in the waters of Chios on June 25, a Turkish admiral commanding sixteen ships of the line saw an unexpected sight: fourteen large ships flying the white ensign with the blue cross of St. Andrew—the naval flag of Russia—approaching in line of battle. Orlov engaged immediately near the north end of Chesme Bay, a coastal inlet. A Russian ship rammed the Turkish flagship, and Russian and Turkish sailors grappled on deck in hand-to-hand combat. Fire broke out and both ships exploded. The remaining Turkish vessels scurried into Chesme Bay, where the Turkish admiral believed he was safe in the narrow, shallow waters in which Russian ships would have little room to maneuver. The next morning, Orlov attacked again. Greig entered the bay with three ships and assaulted a 96-gun Turkish ship of the line. Behind them, masked by the smoke and confusion of this engagement, three ancient Greek hulks configured as fireships and crammed with combustibles bore down on the anchored Turkish fleet; the Turkish sailors’ first sight was a towering wall of flame moving toward them. Fanned by a stiff breeze in a constricted space, the flames spread quickly, and, one after another, the Turkish ships caught fire and exploded. The result was annihilation; fifteen Turkish ships of the line were destroyed, and only one escaped. Nine thousand Turkish seamen died—and thirty Russians.

Chesme Bay was an astonishing achievement for a fleet and a nation with no naval reputation. The victory allowed Orlov, who now saw himself as the liberator of the Orthodox Greeks, to move his fleet at will around the Aegean, attempting to persuade the Greeks to rise against their Turkish overlords. Lacking the active support of an ally with a land army, he failed. For a while he blockaded the Dardanelles. By autumn, the Russian crews were suffering from dysentery, and the fleet withdrew to winter quarters in Leghorn. In the spring, Orlov was ordered to sail for home. He returned to a hero’s welcome. Kneeling before Catherine, he received the Order of St. George.

Russia’s surprising 1770 successes—the advance of Russian armies to the Black Sea and the Danube, the presence of a Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, and the total destruction of the Turkish fleet at Chesme—struck Europe with an astonishment heavily freighted with alarm. The rapid expansion of Russian power began to worry her friends as well as her enemies. One of these was Catherine’s ally Frederick of Prussia, who took little pleasure in imagining Catherine’s permanent domination of all of Poland. Neither Prussia nor Austria liked the prospect of Russia reaching deep into the Balkans or the idea of a Russian seizure of Constantinople. On the other hand, neither Frederick nor Maria Theresa saw how to prevent Russia from achieving these goals. Thus, although Frederick congratulated Catherine (“I cannot keep writing to you for every victory; I shall wait till there are half a dozen”), the last thing he desired was a wider war, which might bring in France and Austria against Russia and, therefore, require the participation of Prussia as Catherine’s ally in the fighting. In the 1764 treaty, Prussia had pledged to come to Catherine’s aid if Russia were attacked. In the present war, Turkey was clearly the aggressor, and, as a result, Prussia was already sending financial subsidies to Russia. But now Austria, alarmed by Russian penetration of the Balkans, was threatening to ally herself with the Turks. If this led to war, Russia would demand that Prussia fulfill her further treaty obligation, and he, Frederick, would have to fight Austria for the third time in his life. By now, Frederick had had enough of war. At fifty-five, he had already fought two wars against Austria to add Silesia to his kingdom; now the province was his and he had no wish to fight for it again. He preferred diplomacy. Poland’s independence was tottering; the Russian ambassador was already the de facto ruler of the kingdom, and it was only a matter of time before Catherine swallowed the country completely. To prevent this and do it peacefully, Frederick scrambled to find a solution that might satisfy all three of Poland’s powerful neighbors. Suppose Prussia, Austria, and Russia could be appeased by each taking an area of the crumbling state? If Catherine would consent to take only the eastern, predominantly Orthodox, part of Poland, and Frederick took only what he wanted in the Protestant northwest, then Austria might be satisfied with the extensive Catholic-populated territory in the south. He was certain that if the three powers could agree on this plan, no one else in Europe could resist such a combination of power—not the Turks or the French, and certainly not the Poles.

At the heart of this cynical appeal to Poland’s neighbors to cooperate in joint aggrandizement was the territorial prize Frederick wanted for himself. East Prussia was physically separated from the rest of his Hohenzollern possessions. For years, Frederick had hoped to remedy this flaw by acquiring the Polish Baltic coastal territories that split his country. In the autumn of 1770, Frederick’s diplomatic scheming was assisted by the presence of his younger brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, who was making a state visit to St. Petersburg. A short man with an inexpressive demeanor, he had come to the Russian capital reluctantly at the request of his brother to promote Frederick’s plan for dividing up Poland. Henry was as little interested in ceremonial pomp as his brother, but his eye was as sharp and his perceptions as keen. Catherine plied him with banquets, concerts, and balls. Henry moved uncomfortably in the luxury of Catherine’s court; he was punctual and meticulous, but he did not enjoy himself. Nor did his stolid demeanor and curt Prussian bow please many in the Russian court. But with Catherine, a fellow German, he got on well.

By December, the prince and the empress were seriously discussing Frederick’s proposal for the partition of Poland. Would Catherine agree to lower her demands for territorial cessions by a defeated Turkey in exchange for permanent territorial gains in Poland? Catherine pondered the question; savoring her military and naval victories, she was reluctant to compromise. After all, Russia was the only power actually at war with Turkey; it was she who was fighting and had defeated the Turks. Further, having invested so much effort and money in Polish affairs, she would have preferred, through Stanislaus, to make all Poland a permanent Russian satellite. As she considered her situation, however, she became more amenable. She realized that neither her ally Prussia nor an increasingly hostile Austria was likely to allow her to make sweeping Balkan acquisitions at Turkey’s expense. In the back of her mind, she feared that Austria and France might enter the war as Turkey’s allies; for months now, both Austria and France had been sending help in the form of money and military advisers to the confederates in Poland. Further, she realized that the deep permanent hatred between Orthodox and Catholic Poles was probably going to make Poland an endless military and financial drain. Finally, she knew that for many Russians, including leaders and believers of the Orthodox Church, bringing the Orthodox population of Poland under Russian protection would be enthusiastically welcomed, and that this would be sufficient to quiet those who had wanted more.

In January 1771, while Prince Henry was edging his way through the Russian Christmas and New Year, Austrian troops suddenly crossed the Carpathians and occupied an area in southern Poland. This news reached the empress and Prince Henry at a concert at the Winter Palace. Henry, hearing the news, shook his head and observed, “It seems that in Poland one only has to stoop and help oneself.” Catherine picked up his lead and replied, “Why shouldn’t we both take our share?” Henry reported this exchange to Frederick with the comment, “Although this was only a chance pleasantry, it is certain that it was not said for nothing and I do not doubt that it will be very possible for you to profit by this occasion.”

In March, soon after his brother returned to Berlin, Frederick wrote to Catherine suggesting that, in view of Austria’s aggression, perhaps it would be appropriate if Prussia and Russia simply followed her example and took what they wanted. In mid-May the Prussian minister in St. Petersburg reported to Berlin that the empress had consented to a partition of Poland.

A year of negotiation passed before agreement on partition could be reached with Austria. During this year the diplomatic focus was on Maria Theresa. Already alarmed by Russian victories in the Balkans and objecting particularly to any suggestion that the Turks should be replaced on the Danube by the Russians, the Austrian empress committed herself in July 1771 to a secret treaty with Turkey to come to the assistance of this ancient Muslim enemy of the Hapsburgs. Secrets have short lives, however, and when Frederick and Catherine learned of it, they ignored Austria and, on February 17, 1772, signed an agreement to partition Poland. Meanwhile, Maria Theresa’s son and co-ruler, Emperor Joseph II, was struggling to persuade his mother that it was in Austria’s interest to join Frederick and Catherine. This was an excruciating moment for the Austrian empress. She hated and despised these two monarchs; Frederick was a Protestant who had stolen Silesia; Catherine was a usurper who had taken lovers. Maria Theresa was a devout Catholic, and she shuddered at the idea of assisting in despoiling a neighboring Catholic state.

It took time to overcome these scruples, and her son worked hard to set her decision in a larger context than personal feelings. The Austrian empress faced a choice: either she maintained her recently signed treaty with Turkey and had to go to war with Russia with no help from any other European power, or she abandoned the Turks and joined Prussia and Russia in helping herself to another, larger slice of Poland. In the end, Maria Theresa abandoned the Turks. On August 5, 1772, Emperor Joseph II, on his mother’s behalf, added his signature to the agreement to partition Poland.

The three partitioning powers sent troops into their newly claimed territories and then demanded that a Polish Diet be called to ratify their aggression. In the summer of 1773, Stanislaus obediently summoned a Diet. Many Polish noblemen and Catholic churchmen refused to attend; some who came were arrested; others accepted bribes and remained silent. The rump Diet then transformed itself into a confederation that did not require a majority decision. In this way, on September 30, 1773, Poland signed the partition treaty formally ceding the land it had already lost.

In what came to be called the First Partition of Poland, the crumbling state lost almost a third of its territory and more than a third of its population. Russia’s share was the largest in territory, 36,000 square miles, comprising all of eastern Poland as far as the Dnieper River and the whole course of the river Dvina flowing north toward the Baltic. This area, known as White Russia (now a part of the independent nation of Belorussia) had a population of 1,800,000 people, primarily of Russian stock with Russian identity, traditions, and religion. Prussia’s slice of Poland was the smallest, both in area and population: 13,000 square miles, with 600,000 people, predominantly German and Protestant. Frederick was satisfied, at least at that moment. By acquiring the Baltic enclaves of West Prussia and Polish Pomerania, he achieved his goal of uniting his kingdom geographically, stitching the separated province of East Prussia onto Brandenburg, Silesia, and other Prussian territories in Germany. Austria took a substantial piece of southern Poland: 27,000 square miles, including the greater part of Galicia. Maria Theresa acquired the largest number of new subjects: 2,700,000 Poles, overwhelmingly Catholic. A few Poles resisted this aggression, but against the strength of three major powers, they had little success. England, France, Spain, Sweden, and the pope condemned the partition, but no European state was prepared to go to war on behalf of Poland.

Catherine’s intervention in Poland was successful. She had returned Russia’s frontier to the great trade route of the Dnieper. Two million Orthodox believers could profess their faith unhindered. But she still had important objectives in her war with Turkey. The fact that Russia’s western frontier had been brought back to the Dnieper did not mean the opening of that great water route to the Black Sea, because the Turks still controlled the estuary where the river flowed into the sea. Catherine meant to free this river mouth. The war with Turkey continued.

The year 1771 had produced a disappointment on the battlefields. On the Danube, Russian generals had been unable to follow up their victories of 1770. Even though General Vasily Dolgoruky had stormed into the Crimea and overrun the peninsula, this had not inclined the sultan to make peace. Three years of stalemate and frustration followed. Not until the end of 1773 did Russian prospects brighten. In December, Sultan Mustapha III died and was succeeded by his brother, Abdul Hamid. The new sultan, recognizing the unprofitability as well as the danger of continuing the war, decided to end it. Catherine prompted him with a new offensive on the Danube. In June 1774, Rumyantsev crossed the Danube with fifty-five thousand men. On June 9, fifty miles south of the river, a night bayonet attack by eight thousand Russians on forty thousand Turks broke the Turkish lines and led to a crushing Russian victory at Kozludzhi. The grand vizier, fearing that nothing could stop the Russians from reaching Constantinople, sued for peace. Rumyantsev opened direct negotiations in the field, and he and the grand vizier agreed to terms. On July 10, 1774, in an obscure Bulgarian village, the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi was signed. Rumyantsev immediately sent his son to St. Petersburg with the news, and on July 23, Catherine hurried out of a concert to receive it.

The treaty brought Russia greater gains than she had dared to hope for. Catherine traded her conquests on the Danube for more important acquisitions on the Black Sea coast. The Balkan provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia were restored to Turkey. In exchange, Catherine gained the transfer to Russia of Azov, Taganrog, and Kerch, which provided unfettered access to the Black Sea. Farther west, she acquired the southern delta of the Dnieper River, and the mouth of the river itself, giving her empire another vital outlet to the Black Sea. Although the west bank of the river’s broad estuary still retained the massive Turkish fortress at Ochakov, the Russians now had a fort and port at Kinburn on the east bank, and the estuary was large enough to permit Russian commercial navigation and the unhindered construction of Russian warships. The peace terms also included the ending of the sultan’s political sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, where a Tatar khanate under Turkish protection had existed for centuries. The Crimean Tatars were now declared to be independent of Turkey. Everyone realized that the independence of the Crimea was unlikely to last; indeed, nine years later, Catherine was to annex the peninsula outright.

Russian gains were not purely territorial. The treaty opened the Black Sea to Russian commerce by guaranteeing complete freedom of navigation. The treaty also included the right of Russian merchant ships to unlimited transit through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean. Turkey was also to pay to Russia a war indemnity of four and a half million rubles. Persecution of Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia was to cease, and Orthodox believers in Constantinople were to be able to worship at a church of their own. On a grander scale, the war had tipped the balance of power in the region in Russia’s favor; Europe was now aware that predominance in the Black Sea had passed to Russia. In Catherine’s mind, these were achievements to match those of her predecessor, Peter the Great, who, on the faraway Baltic, had first opened a Russian pathway to the world.

55

Doctors, Smallpox, and Plague

THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE considered themselves a national family. The tsar, or emperor, was the Little Father, Batushka. His wife, the tsaritsa, or an unmarried soverign empress such as Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, or Catherine II, was the Little Mother, Matushka. Catherine liked thinking of herself this way and took seriously the responsibility of maternal care for her people. If she could not give them a new legal code, she could at least address the problem of their health. “If you go to a village and ask a peasant how many children he has,” she said,” he will say ten, twelve, and sometimes even twenty. If you ask how many of them are alive, he will say, one, two, three, rarely four. This mortality should be fought against.”

In 1763, the second year of her reign, Catherine founded Russia’s first College of Medicine to train Russian doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries. Until a sufficient number of Russian doctors became available, she attempted to recruit western European physicians by offering generous salaries and pensions. In the same year, to discourage infanticide among unmarried and impoverished mothers, she established with her own funds a foundling hospital with an attached lying-in hospital in Moscow. The anonymity of the mother was assured by a system of baskets, pulleys, and bells. When a bell was rung in the street, a basket was lowered from an upper story, the unwanted baby put in, and the basket raised. All children, legitimate or illegitimate, from any class, were accepted, cared for, and educated, with precautions to ensure that when they left, they were, or remained, free. The hospital was five stories high and had two hundred beds. Dormitories were large and airy. Each child had his or her own bed, with a clean gown, clean sheets, and a small bedside table holding a jug of water, a glass tumbler, and a bell to summon assistance. An English visitor wished “that the same attention to cleanliness was given in English hospitals.” The hospital served as a model for similar foundling institutions in St. Petersburg and other places. The empress attacked another problem by creating a hospital for venereal disease, where both women and men were treated. In 1775, Catherine decreed that the capital of every province must have a general hospital, and that every county in the province must have a physician, a surgeon, two surgical assistants, two apprentices, and an apothecary. Since twenty to thirty thousand people lived in some counties, this coverage was thin, but before there had been nothing.

Personally, Catherine did not care for doctors. She was subject to illness; indeed, when she was a grand duchess, her health had frequently worried Empress Elizabeth. Once she reached the throne, Catherine’s ailments had political significance. She felt the burden of absolute power: reports had to be studied, advisers consulted, decisions made. She tried to keep herself healthy through adequate rest, dietary restraint, fresh air, and outdoor walks; nevertheless, she often complained privately of headaches and back pains. In 1768 she wrote to Nikita Panin: “I am quite sick, my back hurts worse than I ever felt since birth. Last night I had some fever from the pain, and I do not know what to attribute it to. I swallow and do everything they [the doctors] wish.” Again to Panin: “It has been four years since the pain in my head has left me. Yesterday I ate nothing the whole day.”

Although she believed that she was healthier because she ignored physicians, she eventually agreed to keep a personal doctor at court. She chose a young Scotsman, Dr. John Rogerson, of Edinburgh University. Still convinced that she had no need of him, she made him the butt of jokes about modern medicine and liked describing him to others as the kind of medical charlatan found in Molière. “You couldn’t cure a flea bite,” she would say to him. Rogerson would laugh and continue to urge her to take the pill he was offering. When he succeeded, he would pat the empress on the back and say jovially, “Well done, ma’am! Well done!”

There was no joking, however, when Catherine confronted one of the most serious diseases afflicting her contemporary world: smallpox. Here, the imperial family had no greater protection than the poorest peasant. The boy emperor Peter II had died of the disease at fifteen. Empress Elizabeth’s Holstein fiancé, Catherine’s uncle, had been carried off on the eve of their marriage. Nor could Catherine forget the suffering and disfigurement of her husband, the future Peter III. She considered herself fortunate in having reached adulthood without contracting the pox, but she knew that this reprieve might not last.

The devastating smallpox experience being inflicted on the Hapsburgs frightened Catherine. In May 1767, Empress Maria Theresa and her daughter-in-law, Maria Josepha, the wife of her son and heir, Joseph II, both contracted smallpox. Five days later, Maria Josepha died; Maria Theresa recovered but was scarred. Her widower son, Joseph II, refused to marry again and had no surviving children. The following October, Maria Theresa’s daughter, also named Maria Josepha, died of smallpox; two other Hapsburg daughters had the disease but survived, with prominent scars. This succession of tragedies convinced Maria Theresa to have her three youngest children inoculated.

Aware of these personal and dynastic tragedies, Catherine worried about the threat of smallpox to Paul as much as to herself. She knew that the court was never free of talk about the grand duke’s uncertain chance of succession, because he had not yet faced and defeated the disease. She and Panin worried constantly about the boy’s possible exposure. They sought to isolate Paul from crowds and from anyone who was or might be afflicted. Paul chafed at the restrictions put on him. At twelve, he was asked whether he would attend a masquerade. He replied,

You know I am a child and cannot be supposed to be a judge whether I ought to go there or not, but I will wager that I do not go. Mr. Panin will tell me that there is a great monster called Smallpox, walking up and down the ballroom. This same monster has very good foreknowledge of my movements for he is generally to be found in precisely those places where I have the most inclination to go.

The disease came close to Catherine and Paul in the spring of 1768 when Nikita Panin’s fiancée, Countess Anna Sheremeteva, described by a British diplomat as a woman of “uncommon merit, beautiful, and immensely rich,” was struck by smallpox. At Tsarskoe Selo, the empress waited anxiously. When, on May 5, she learned that Panin himself had been placed in quarantine for two weeks, she secretly ordered Paul brought to her. “I am very upset,” she said, “not being able to focus on anything better, for everything is awful in this critical situation.” Paul arrived at Tsarskoe Selo on May 6, and mother and son waited together. Catherine herself was ill on May 14 and better the next morning; she quickly informed Panin of her overnight recovery and passed along her doctor’s assurance that “these difficult days for your fiancée will pass.” Two days later she was told that Countess Sheremeteva was dead. “Having this hour learned of the demise of Countess Anna Petrovna, I could not help letting you know my real sorrow,” she wrote to Panin on May 17. “I am so touched for you by this grievous misfortune that I cannot sufficiently explain it. Please watch your own health.” She spent seven weeks at Tsarskoe Selo, and for the rest of the summer, she and Paul moved between country estates to avoid crowds.

• • •

Fear for herself, her son, and the nation prompted the empress to investigate a new, controversial method of inoculation that assured permanent immunity: the injection of matter taken from the smallpox pustules of a patient recovering from a mild case. This medical technique was being used in Britain and the British North American colonies (Thomas Jefferson was inoculated in 1766) but was shunned in continental Europe as being too dangerous.

Dr. Thomas Dimsdale was a Scot and a Quaker whose grandfather had accompanied William Penn to America in 1684. Thomas Dimsdale himself, now fifty-six, had a degree from Edinburgh University and had just published The Present Method of Inoculating for the Small Pox, describing his success and claiming to have minimized the risks. His book had gone through four editions in Britain, and Catherine, hearing about it, invited the author to St. Petersburg. Dimsdale arrived in Russia at the end of August 1768, bringing with him his son and assistant, Nathaniel. Catherine soon received them privately at dinner.

Dimsdale was charmed by Catherine, finding her, “of all that I ever saw of her sex, the most engaging.” He was amazed by “her extreme penetration and the propriety of the questions she asked relative to the practice and success of inoculation.” The empress, in turn, liked his common sense, but in her opinion, he was overly cautious. She smiled at his stumbling French and tried to understand his English. She told him that she had feared smallpox all her life, but now she wished to be inoculated as the best way of overcoming the fears of others about the disease and about inoculation. She wanted to be inoculated as soon as possible. Dimsdale asked to first consult her court physicians, but Catherine said that this was unnecessary. Dimsdale then suggested that, as a trial measure, he should first innoculate other women of her age; again, Catherine said no. Bowed by the responsibility, Dimsdale begged her to wait a few weeks while he experimented on several local youngsters. She reluctantly agreed, on condition that he keep his preparations secret. The official court register ignored Dimsdale’s presence entirely, although the British ambassador reported on August 29 that the empress’s intention “is a secret everybody knows. And which does not seem to occasion much speculation.” Finally, the empress and the doctor agreed on a date for inoculation: October 12.

Catherine stopped eating meat and drinking wine ten days before this date and began taking calomel, powder of crab’s claws, and a tartar emetic. At nine in the evening on October 12, Dimsdale inoculated Catherine in both arms with smallpox matter taken from a peasant boy named Alexander Markov, whom she subsequently ennobled. The next morning, Catherine drove to Tsarskoe Selo for rest and isolation. She felt healthy “except for some slight uneasiness” and exercised outdoors for two or three hours a day. She developed a moderate number of pustules that dried up in a week. Dimsdale pronounced the inoculation a success, and three weeks later Catherine resumed her regular schedule. She returned to St. Petersburg on November 1, and Paul was inoculated without difficulty the next day. Congratulated by the Senate and the Legislative Commission, she responded, “My objective was, through my example, to save from death the multitude of my subjects who, not knowing the value of this technique, and frightened of it, were left in danger.”

Catherine’s example was followed by 140 of the St. Petersburg nobility, including Gregory Orlov, Kyril Razumovsky, and an archbishop. Dimsdale then went to Moscow and inoculated another fifty people. A Russian translation of his treatise explaining his technique was published in St. Petersburg, and inoculation clinics were established in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Irkutsk, and other cities. By 1780, twenty thousand Russians had been inoculated; by 1800, two million. As a reward for his service, Catherine made Dimsdale a baron of the Russian empire and awarded him ten thousand pounds plus a life annuity of five hundred pounds. In 1781, Dimsdale returned to Russia to inoculate Catherine’s first grandson, Alexander.

Catherine’s willingness to be inoculated attracted favorable notice in western Europe. Voltaire compared what she had allowed Dimsdale to do with the ridiculous views and practices of “our argumentative charlatans in our medical schools.” At the time, the prevailing attitude toward the disease was fatalistic: people believed that, sooner or later, everyone must have it, and that some would survive and some would die. Most refused inoculation. Frederick of Prussia wrote to Catherine urging her not to take the risk. She replied that she had always been afraid of smallpox and wished more than anything to escape this fear. In May 1774, almost six years after Catherine was inoculated, smallpox killed the king of France. Louis XV took to bed a barely pubescent girl who was carrying smallpox. He died soon after, ending a reign of fifty-nine years. His successor, nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, was inoculated immediately.

• • •

Catherine’s personal confrontation with smallpox occurred three years before Russia was plunged into a desperate struggle with an even more terrible disease: bubonic plague. Plague was a perennial threat along the empire’s southern frontiers with European Turkey. It was believed to appear only in warm climates; the link with fleas and rats was unknown. The traditional defense was isolation, ranging from quarantine of suspected individual carriers to cordons of troops sealing off entire regions.

In March 1770, plague appeared among Russian troops occupying the Turkish Balkan province of Wallachia. In September, it reached Kiev, in the Ukraine. Cooler autumn weather slowed the advance of the disease, but by then, refugees were fleeing north. By mid-January 1771, the scare seemed over, but with the first spring thaw, Muscovites began to develop the distinctive dark spots and swollen glands. One hundred and sixty workers died in a single week at one textile factory in the city. On March 17, Catherine decreed emergency quarantine measures in Moscow: theatrical performances, balls, and all large public gatherings were banned. A sudden freeze at the end of March brought an abrupt decline in the death rate. Catherine and the municipal authorities began lifting restrictions. At the end of June, however, plague reappeared. By August, it was ravaging the city. Soldiers removing bodies from the streets fell ill and died. The city’s chief doctor requested medical leave for a month to receive treatment for his own illness. On September 5, Catherine was told that the daily death toll was between three and four hundred; that abandoned corpses littered the streets; that the network of checkpoints around the city was collapsing, and that the people were hungry because no supplies were being delivered. Men, women, and children already ill were required to enter quarantine centers.

The imposition of medical precautions led to rioting. Many in Moscow’s terror-stricken population came to believe that the physicians and their medicines had brought the plague to the city. They refused to obey orders forbidding them to gather in marketplaces and churches and to kiss supposedly miraculous icons in hope of protection. Instead, they gathered to seek salvation and solace around these icons. A famous icon of the Virgin at Varvarsky Gate became a magnet; day after day, crowds of diseased people swarmed around her feet. She became the deadliest center of contagion in the city.

The doctors knew what was happening but dared not intervene. The archbishop of Moscow, Father Ambrosius, was an enlightened man who saw that the physicians were helpless. Attempting to reduce infection by preventing the formation of crowds, and relying on his authority as a priest, he had the Varvarsky Virgin removed from the city gate under cover of night and hidden. He believed that once the people knew that he was the one responsible, they would go home and the plague-ridden site would be eliminated. Instead, his well-meaning attempt provoked a riot. The crowd, rather than dispersing, was enraged. Ambrosius fled to a monastery and took refuge in a cellar, but the mob pursued him, dragged him out, and tore him apart. The riot was put down by troops, who killed a hundred people and arrested three hundred.

Catherine realized that Moscow and its population were slipping out of control. The nobles had abandoned the city for their estates in the countryside; the factories and workshops were closed; the workers, serfs, and urban peasants, living in crowded wooden houses that harbored swarms of rats carrying the plague-bearing fleas, had been left to shift for themselves. Late in September, the empress received a message from the governor of Moscow, seventy-two-year-old General Peter Saltykov, saying that, with deaths exceeding eight hundred per day, he was helpless; the situation was our of control. He asked to be allowed to leave the city until winter. The empress was shocked. The rising death toll, Ambrosius’s violent murder; Saltykov’s desertion of his post. How was she to cope with this? To whom was she to turn?

Gregory Orlov stepped forward and asked permission to go to Moscow to halt the epidemic and restore order. This was the kind of challenge he had sought; after years of idleness, he needed to redeem himself in his own eyes and Catherine’s. The empress accepted his “fine and zealous” offer, she told Voltaire, “not without feelings of acute anxiety over the risks he would run.” She knew his restlessness and eagerness for action; his frustration at being kept in St. Petersburg while his brother Alexis and other officers won victories and praise on land and sea. She gave him full authority. Orlov assembled doctors, military officers, and administrators and departed for Moscow on the evening of September 21.

Orlov took control of the stricken city. With the death toll between six hundred and seven hundred a day, he asked the physicians what they wanted done and then bullied the people into obedience. He was forceful and effective but also humane. He accompanied doctors to patients’ bedsides, he oversaw the distribution of medicines, he supervised the removal of corpses rotting in houses and the streets. He promised freedom to serfs who volunteered to work in hospitals, he opened orphanages, he distributed food and money. Over a period of two and a half months, he spent a hundred thousand rubles on food, clothing, and shelter for survivors. He had victims’ clothes burned, and he burned more than three thousand old wooden houses. He reimposed compulsory quarantine, the policy that had caused the riots. He scarcely slept, and his dedication, courage, and effort inspired others. Deaths in the city, which had risen to 21,000 in September, dropped to 17, 561 in October, 5,255 in November, and 805 in December. In part, this was a result of Orlov’s actions; in part, it was a function of the arrival of cold weather.

Confidence in Gregory, together with hope for the coming of an early winter, sustained the empress during these weeks. She had feared that the epidemic might move northwest toward St. Petersburg; already there had been suspicious outbreaks in Pskov and Novgorod. Precautions were taken to protect the capital on the Neva: checkpoints blocked all roads; extra care was taken in handling mail; a medical examination became mandatory after every suspicious death. She worried about the effect of reports and rumors at home and abroad. At first she tried to suppress stories about mass sickness, terror, and violence. Then, at the peak of the epidemic, to counter further inflammatory rumors—for example, that people were being buried alive—Catherine authorized publication of an official account of the Moscow riots. Foreign newspapers picked up and circulated her version. Privately, however, she was dismayed by what was happening. To Voltaire, she gave her comment on Ambrosius’s death: “The famous Eighteenth Century really has something to boast of here. See how far we have progressed!” To Alexander Bibikov, the former president of the Legislative Commission, she wrote, “We have spent a month in circumstances like those that Peter the Great lived under for thirty years. He broke through all difficulties with glory. We hope to come out of them with honor.”

By mid-November 1772, the crisis was waning and Catherine allowed public prayers of thanksgiving. When Orlov returned to St. Petersburg on December 4, she covered him with honors. She had a gold medal struck with a likeness of a mythical Roman hero on one side and a likeness of Orlov on the other. The inscription was, “Russia also has such sons.” She commissioned a triumphal arch in the park at Tsarskoe Selo; on it was emblazoned: “To the hero who saved Moscow from the plague.”

“Saved” was accurate only in the sense that the losses could have been greater. One contemporary estimate was that the plague had killed 55,000 people in Moscow, one-fifth of the city’s population. Another estimate was that 100,000 had died in Moscow and 120,000 throughout the empire. To prevent a recurrence, quarantine was maintained along Russia’s southern border for another two years, until the Turkish war ended in 1774.

56

The Return of “Peter the Third”

DURING THE LAST, climactic year of the war with Turkey (1773–74), another crisis, more threatening than the foreign war, arose inside Russia. This was the rebellion known as the Pugachevshchina, after its leader, the Don Cossack Emelyan Pugachev. In a single year, by uniting Cossacks, runaway serfs, peasants, Bashkirs, Kalmucks, and other discontented tribal groups and malcontents, Pugachev produced a storm of violence that swept across the steppes, at one point menacing Moscow itself. A civil war and a social revolution descended into anarchy, and the upheaval challenged many of Catherine’s Enlightenment beliefs, leaving her with memories that haunted her for the rest of her life. Of palace revolutions she had experience. This upheaval, however, occurred in the vast, empty territories of Russia stretching far beyond St. Petersburg and Moscow—out on the Don, the Volga, and in the Urals. It awakened her to the passions seething in the countryside and brought her to the decision that her primary duty as empress was to enforce the authority of the crown. She did this by summoning soldiers, not philosophers.

Most Russians still lived in a world of oppression and discontent. There had been previous uprisings: mine workers had attacked their overseers; villagers had resisted tax collectors and recruiting levies. Pugachev’s revolt, however, was the first mass explosion of what might be described as class war. Neither Catherine’s Nakaz nor the discussions of the Legislative Commission had brought significant change; the serfs and peasants who worked on the land or labored in the mines still worked under a system of forced labor. The empress had tried to change this and had discovered that she could not. The unwieldy machinery of the imperial government, her dependence on the nobility, the vastness of Russia—all these were obstacles to change. In the end, she had been forced to leave things as they were. And then, in the fifth year of the war with Turkey, Russia exploded.

On October 5, 1773, Catherine attended a routine meeting of her war council in St. Petersburg. Presiding was General Count Zakhar Chernyshev, the handsome officer with whom Catherine had enjoyed a flirtation twenty-two years before, and whose military abilities had raised him to leadership of the College of War. Catherine listened closely as Chernyshev read reports from Orenburg, a garrison town three hundred miles southeast of Kazan, describing the appearance of a band of rebellious Cossacks. Restlessness among the Cossacks was not new in Russia, but this disturbance differed from its predecessors. It was led by a man who proclaimed that he was Tsar Peter III, Catherine’s husband, miraculously saved from assassination. Now, riding across the southeastern borderlands of Russia, he was issuing incendiary manifestos, promising the people freedom once they had helped him regain his throne.

Cossacks traditionally were adventurers who resented the stream of imperial decrees that restricted their freedom. To escape, they had fled to the borderlands, where, over time, they established their own settlements, chose their own leaders, and lived in their own communities by their their own laws and customs. Some were Old Believers who had fled the reach of the traditional Orthodox Church and now prayed only in their own churches. The men were often splendid horsemen, who, once forcibly recruited into the army, were used as irregular cavalry and, as such, terrified Russia’s enemies. The Polish and Turkish wars had brought even more frequent visits by government tax collectors and recruiting parties. By August 1773, the Cossack communities were simmering, needing only a leader to rise in protest. In such an atmosphere, no leader would seem better than a man rumored to be a tsar.

• • •

The appearance of impostors was not rare in Russia; the nation’s turbulent history had often featured false tsars whom an uneducated, credulous population was only too ready to accept. In 1605, an adult impostor claiming to be Ivan the Terrible’s son Dmitry (who had, in fact, died as a child), seized the throne from Tsar Boris Godunov. Stenka Razin, a Cossack, had defied Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexis, for two years and, after capture and execution, became a legendary folk hero. Peter the Great himself, in the Great Northern War against Sweden, had been forced to deal with the defection of the Ukrainian Cossacks under hetman, Ivan Mazeppa. Following Peter’s death in 1725, the uncertainties surrounding the Romanov succession produced a series of pretenders claiming to be Peter II or Ivan VI. During the first ten years of Catherine’s reign, there had already been impostors claiming to be Peter III, all of whom had been arrested before they could make trouble. Catherine had no interest in them beyond a wariness that foreign powers might attempt to sponsor them. But the promises of these earlier impostors had been localized and specific. Their followers, usually few in number, were protesting against local government officials, not against the tsar or even against the nobility. What distinguished Pugachev’s rebellion was that it was directed at the empress herself.

The seedbed of the revolt lay between the Don and Ural rivers, intersected by the Volga. It was an unsettled land, with rich grasses, dense forests, and fertile, black soil, watered by the three great rivers. On the west lived the Don Cossacks, who had gradually progressed from an undisciplined, itinerant life to a more organized and settled existence. Although still sending many recruits to the army, they had also developed agriculture and trading and had prospered. The Volga district farther east, with its mixed population of Russians and non-Christian tribes, was less organized and disciplined; in the 1770s, it was a land of trading posts, roaming adventurers, and vagabonds. And still farther east, where the Yaik River flowed west from the Ural Mountains, lay the true frontier, the province of Orenburg, a thinly settled area whose rivers teemed with fish, whose earth was studded with salt mines, and whose forests were a fruitful source of lumber and furs. The principal town, also named Orenburg, was a fortress and trading center standing at the junction of the Orel and Yaik rivers.

Here in Orenburg province, in the village of Yaitsk, Pugachev appeared in September 1773 and proclaimed that he was Tsar Peter III and that he had eluded the assassination plotted by his usurping wife. Now he had returned to regain his throne, punish his enemies, save Russia, and free his people. According to Pugachev, Catherine, aided by the nobility, had driven him from the throne and then tried to kill him because he was planning to liberate the serfs. Some believed his story; for years there had been a rumor that, after Peter III’s decree releasing the nobility from compulsory service, his next intention was to liberate the serfs, and that the empress had prevented him. Some even said that his decree was already drawn up but then was suppressed by his wife when she usurped the throne. For those who accepted this story, Peter III, who in his brief reign had been enormously unpopular, now became a hero, while Catherine became his tyrannical wife.

Pugachev bore no resemblance to the tall, narrow-shouldered Peter III, who had spoken mostly German, who had been a parade ground soldier, and who had never seen a battle. This new “Peter” was short, stocky, and muscular; his matted black hair grew in a heavy fringe across his forehead; he had a short, bushy, black beard; he was missing a number of teeth. These physical dissimilarities did not disqualify him, however, because the real Peter III had reigned too short a time for most Russians to know what he looked like. The new Peter who roamed the countryside at the head of his army of Cossacks and tribesmen surrounded by bearded officers and waving banners was a charismatic figure, an experienced soldier who spoke of a bright future in which all Russians would be free. He had little difficulty attracting followers. For people in the southeastern provinces who had never seen a tsar, this short, robust, magnetic fellow with the black beard, crimson caftan, and fur cap satisfied their imagination.

In reality, Emelyan Pugachev was a Cossack born around 1742 in one of the Cossack communities on the lower Don. He owned a small farm, married a local woman, and had three children. He was drafted into the Russian army and served as one of the Cossack cavalrymen in Poland and again in Rumyantsev’s army in the 1769 and 1770 campaigns against the Turks. In 1771, he deserted, was captured and flogged, and escaped. He made his way back to the eastern steppes, but not to his homeland and family on the Don. Instead, he moved toward the lower Volga, from one Old Believer community to another. In November 1772, he reached the river Yaik, hoping to find safety among the Yaik Cossacks.

During his wanderings, Pugachev acquired knowledge of the state of mind of the people of the lower Volga: it was a fierce antagonism to authority similar to his own. This shared hatred, added to his military experience, made him a figure around whom the Yaik Cossacks could rally. When he offered to lead discontented Cossacks against their local officials and other oppressors, they accepted. Their plans were postponed when Pugachev was identified, arrested, and taken to Kazan for interrogation. Within six months he escaped again, and in May 1773 he returned to Yaitsk. In September, when the local governor of Yaitsk learned where he was and moved to recapture him, Pugachev and the Cossack dissidents hastily proclaimed their revolt. It was at this point that Pugachev suddenly announced that he was Tsar Peter III.

He promised freedom from a harassing government and a return to the old way of life. He promised an end to the harassment of Cossack Old Believers. He promised “forgiveness of all previous crimes” and “freedom of the rivers from their sources to their mouths and the land and the grass on both sides, and the trees and wild animals that grew thereon.” He promised free salt, arms, lead, powder, food, and a gift of twelve rubles a year to every Cossack. In an “imperial manifesto,” distributed on September 17, 1773, he declared, “I give eternal freedom to you and your children and your grandchildren. You will no longer work for a lord and you will no longer pay taxes. We make you a gift of the cross and your ancient prayers, of the long hair and beard.” He named specific enemies: “If God permits me to reach St. Petersburg,” he said, “I shall put my wicked wife Catherine into a convent. Then I will free all the peasants and exterminate the nobles down to the last man.”

The message carried beyond the Yaik Cossacks. The Bashkirs declared for him and were followed by the Kalmucks, the Kirghiz, and other seminomadic tribes of the lower Volga. Soon, agricultural serfs and peasants were setting out to join him. A few came on horseback carrying swords and lances, but most brought only farm tools—scythes, axes, and pitchforks. Before winter, the industrial serfs of the mines and foundries of the Urals were rallying to him.

Pugachev first attacked the small fort at Yaitsk, set on a high bank overlooking the Yaik River. He had only three hundred men, and the government commander had a thousand, but many of these soldiers were Cossacks. When they quickly deserted, the government commander retreated into the fort and abandoned the rest of the settlement to the rebels. Pugachev left him there and moved up the river. On October 5, he reached the larger town and government fortress at Orenburg. Pugachev’s force now had grown to more than three thousand, outnumbering the garrison except in artillery. Again, the soldiers withdrew into the fortress, which was defended by seventy cannon; again, the rebels were not strong enough to take the fortification by storm. This time, Pugachev settled down to starve the defenders into surrender, and established his headquarters at Berda, three miles away.

By November, the impostor’s large following was constantly augmented by the arrival of volunteers. Pugachev’s appeals now reached across the area between the Volga, the Yaik, and western Siberia. In December, another thousand Bashkirs joined his army, and in January 1774, two thousand Tatars. Factory serfs and peasants seized the copper foundries and other metalworks in the Urals; soon forty-four foundries and mines were supplying guns and ammunition to the rebel army. There was one interesting exception to this mushrooming support: the Cossacks of the Don, from whom Pugachev came, were glaringly absent.

News of the revolt on the Yaik was slow to reach St. Petersburg. When it arrived, the empress and her advisers were unperturbed; it seemed a local affair, occurring in a perennially unstable region. Catherine and her war council were concentrating on Poland and the Danube, where Russia’s armies were deeply committed and where, during the coming summer, they hoped to force an end to the Turkish war, now entering its sixth year. Because the army was straining to mount a fresh offensive, few regular troops could be spared. The best that could be managed was to send General Vasily Kar from Kazan with a small detachment of soldiers. In addition, to counter Pugachev’s appeals, Catherine issued a manifesto for distribution only in the areas affected by the revolt; otherwise the troubles were to be kept secret. She denounced Pugachev’s imposture as “this madness” and “this godless turmoil among the people” and called for cooperation with General Kar to defeat and capture “the chief brigand, incendiary and impostor.” Unfortunately, she and her advisers had grossly underestimated the strength of the enemy Kar had been sent to face. On approaching Orenburg, Kar found the rebel army far more numerous than he had foreseen; moreover, they were being reinforced daily by new recruits. Led by Pugachev, they routed Kar’s small force. When Kar escaped and returned to report what had happened, he was dismissed. Another small expedition was immediately dispatched from Simbirsk. Pugachev easily defeated this force and hanged its colonel.

In his Berda headquarters, Pugachev enjoyed playing the role of tsar. Dressed in a scarlet caftan, wearing a velvet cap, and holding a scepter in one hand and a silver axe in the other, he looked down at the supplicants kneeling before him. Unable to read or write, he kept a secretary at his side and dictated his orders, which were signed, “The great sovereign, the Russian Tsar, the Emperor Peter the Third.” He would deign to write his name himself, he announced, when he had mounted his throne. Medals were struck with his likeness and inscribed “Peter III.”

Every day, he ate heavily, drank continually, and bellowed Cossack songs with his comrades. Many of these men had now become “noblemen.” Having sworn to exterminate the real nobility, Pugachev distributed titles among his close companions, naming them after the principal members of Catherine’s court. There was a Count Panin, a Count Orlov, a Count Vorontsov, a Field Marshal Count Chernyshev. These newly created grandees were decorated with medals ripped from the tunics of dead officers. They were granted future estates on the Baltic coast; some were even presented with gifts of serfs. In February 1774, Pugachev, who had abandoned his wife and three children on the Don, “married” Yustina Kuznetsova, the daughter of a Yaik Cossack, and surrounded her with a dozen Cossack maids of honor. Prayers were said daily for the emperor and for Yustina, who was addressed and treated as “Her Imperial Majesty.”

Pugachev’s lieutenants were never in doubt that the man sitting next to them, claiming to be an emperor, was in fact an illiterate Cossack, and that his so-called empress was a Cossack girl from the Urals who was not his legal wife. His real wife was on the Don, and his other, supposed wife, the usurping Empress Catherine, was in St. Petersburg. For most of his brief “reign,” both he and his intimate circle lived in overlapping worlds of reality and make-believe. No one complained about this amateur theater, and Pugachev profited from the unspoken agreement to mutual playacting. Believing that the growing momentum of the revolt permitted him everything, the illiterate Cossack could not stop himself.

His costumed make-believe was played against a backdrop of blood and terror. Pugachev’s imperial decrees, proclaiming that the nobility must be killed, unleashed a frenzy of hatred. Peasants killed landlords, their families, and their hated overseers. Serfs who had always been considered resigned, submissive to God, the tsar, and the master, now flung themselves into orgies of cruelty. Noblemen were dragged from their hiding places, flayed, burned alive, hacked to pieces, or hanged from trees. Children were mutilated and slaughtered in front of their parents. Wives were spared only long enough to be raped in front of their husbands; then they had their throats cut or were thrown into carts and carried off as prizes. Before long, Pugachev’s camp was filled with captured widows and daughters, who were distributed as booty among the rebels. Villagers who persisted in recognizing “the usurper, Catherine,” were hanged in rows; nearby ravines were filled with bodies. Desperate townspeople, not knowing what their interrogators wished to hear, gave stock answers when asked whom they considered their lawful sovereign: “Whomever you represent,” they replied.

As Pugachev’s army, swelling to a torrent, moved down the long roads, flames from landlords’ burning mansions glowed in the night, and smoke hung like curtains on the horizon. Towns and villages opened their gates to surrender. Priests hurried to meet and welcome the rebels with bread and salt. Officers of the tiny garrisons were hanged; the men were offered a choice: change sides or die.

At first, before Catherine realized the gravity of the uprising, she attempted to play down its importance in the eyes of western Europe. In January 1774, she wrote to Voltaire that “this impudent Pugachev” was merely “a common highway robber.” She personally did not intend that Pugachev’s antics should disturb the stimulating conversations she was having in St. Petersburg with her famous visitor Denis Diderot, editor of the Encyclopedia. Voltaire agreed that Catherine’s dialogue with one of the leaders of the Enlightenment ought not to be interrupted by the “exploits of a brigand.” She complained that the European press was making too much fuss over the “Marquis de Pugachev who is giving me a little trouble in the Urals.” When she passed along the information that the impertinent fellow was actually claiming to be Peter III, Voltaire picked up her airy, dismissive tone, mentioning to d’Alembert “this new husband who has turned up in the province of Orenburg.” But the “new husband” and “Cossack brigand” was giving Catherine more trouble than she admitted. By the spring of 1774, when Pugachev’s army had grown to over fifteen thousand men, she understood that a local Cossack revolt was becoming a national revolution. After General Kar failed to capture the “miscreant,” and the besieged governor of Orenburg reported severe shortages of food and ammunition, she confessed to Voltaire that “for more than six weeks I have been obliged to devote my uninterrupted attention to this affair.”

Determined to crush the rebels, Catherine summoned the experienced General Alexander Bibikov and gave him full power over all military and civilian authorities in southeastern Russia. Bibikov was a veteran of the wars in Prussia and Poland, and had acquired national prestige as president-marshal of the Legislative Commission. Although the Turkish war still prevented the withdrawal of any significant part of the regular army, Bibikov was assigned as many troops as could be found. He arrived in Kazan on December 26, made it his headquarters, and took immediate steps to stabilize the situation. Nobles were persuaded to form a volunteer militia, arming peasants they considered loyal. Catherine had also ordered Bibikov to establish in Kazan a commission of inquiry to investigate the source of the revolt by “this motley crowd which is moved only by seething fanaticism or by political inspiration and darkness.” It was to interrogate captured rebels to ascertain whether any foreign influence was at work. Was Turkey implicated? France? What or who had prompted Pugachev to assume the name of Peter III? Were there any traces of conspiracy involving her own subjects? What were his connections with the Old Believers? With disgruntled nobles? Bibikov was instructed not to use torture. “What need is there to flog during investigations?” she wrote to him. “For twelve years the Secret Branch under my own eyes has not flogged a single person during interrogations, and yet every single affair has been properly sorted out, and always more came out than we needed to know.” If guilt was established, Bibikov was empowered to execute death sentences, although in cases of nobles or officials found guilty, his judgments were to be referred to the empress for confirmation.

Before sending Bibikov on his mission, Catherine had issued another manifesto, for use only in the region of the rebellion:

A deserter and fugitive has been collecting … a troop of vagabonds like himself … and has had the insolence to arrogate to himself the name of the late emperor Peter III.… As we watch with indefatigable care over the tranquility of our faithful subjects … we have taken such measures to annihilate totally the ambitious designs of Pugachev and to exterminate a band of robbers who have been audacious enough to attack the small military detachments dispersed about these countries, and to massacre the officers who have been taken prisoner.

Two weeks later, after reports confirmed the expansion of the revolt, Catherine decided that the rebellion could no longer be concealed from the public. To explain her decision, she wrote to the governor of the Novgorod region:

Orenburg has already been besieged two full months by the crowd of a bandit who is committing frightful cruelties and ravages. General Bibikov is departing there with troops who will pass through your gubernia in order to curb this distemper which will bring neither glory nor profit to Russia. I hope, however, that with God’s aid, we shall prevail. This riffraff is a rabble of miscreants who have at their head a deceiver as brazen as he is ignorant. Probably it will all end on the gallows; but what sort of expectation is that for me who has no love for the gallows? European opinion will relegate us to the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. That is the honor we must expect from this contemptible escapade.

On arriving in Kazan at the end of December, Bibikov found the situation more serious than anyone in St. Petersburg realized. His assessment was that, as an individual, Pugachev was not to be feared, but that as a symbol of widespread, popular discontent, he mattered very much. Bibikov’s forces struck quickly to relieve Orenburg, which had been under siege for six months and where the shortage of food was acute. Pugachev made a stand with nine thousand men and thirty-six cannon, but the battle was decided by the professionally served artillery of the regular army. Pugachev was routed, four thousand of his men were captured, and “Peter III” galloped away to Berda. The siege of Orenburg was over.

In Pugachev’s headquarters in Berda, his lieutenants and camp followers were ready to flee, but all knew that only those with horses would be able to escape. “Leave the peasants to their fate,” became the rationale. “The common people are not fighters; they are just sheep.” On March 23, Pugachev left his headquarters in Berda, taking with him two thousand men and abandoning the rest of his army. Bibikov’s advance guard entered Berda the same day. The scale was balanced, however, when Bibikov, the architect of victory, suddenly developed fever and died. Catherine, saddened, assumed that his subordinate officers would complete his mission. Pugachev disappeared into the Urals.

Before he died Bibikov had assured Catherine that “the suspicion of foreigners is completely unfounded.” The empress then wrote to Voltaire attributing “this freakish event” to the fact that the Orenburg region “is inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past forty years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies have been populated.” She defended her policy of leniency in the treatment of rebel prisoners by writing her friend Frau Bielcke of Hamburg, who had complained that the measures taken had not been sufficiently severe: “Since you like hangings so much, I can tell you that four or five unfortunates have already been hanged. And the rarity of such punishments has a thousand times more effect on us here than on those where hangings happen every day.”

Catherine believed that the rebellion was over. For the next three months she turned her attention away from Pugachev and back to the Russian offensive on the Danube. She continued to follow the investigation into the causes of the upheaval. A commission report issued on May 21, 1774, restated Bibikov’s earlier assessment, discounting the possibility of domestic conspiracy or foreign meddling. The revolt was blamed on Pugachev’s exploitation of discontent among the Yaik Cossacks, the tribal peoples, and the serfs assigned to the Urals metalworks. Pugachev was depicted as crude and uneducated, but the investigators cautioned that he was also crafty, resourceful, and persuasive—a dangerous man who should not be ignored or forgotten until he was dead or delivered in chains into the hands of imperial officers.

57

The Last Days of the “Marquis de Pugachev”

BY THE TIME Catherine read the Secret Commission report, at the end of May 1774, she considered it a kind of postmortem on the Pugachev revolt. Then, to her astonishment, on July 11, Pugachev appeared before the town of Kazan on the Volga at the head of an army of twenty thousand men. The following day he stormed, captured, and burned the almost defenseless town. His next objective, he announced, was Moscow. Already he had promised, “If God gives me power over the state, and when I have captured Moscow, I will order everyone to follow the Old Belief and to wear Russian clothes. I will forbid the shaving of the beard, and will have hair cut in Cossack fashion.”

Kazan, with its ethnically diverse population of eleven thousand, had fascinated Catherine during her visit in July 1768. Now, Pugachev’s attack had quickly overwhelmed the town’s outnumbered defenders, and his men reduced the city, built mostly of wood, to ruins by fire. A maelstrom of killing, raping, and looting accompanied the flames. Unbearded men in European dress were instantly killed; women in foreign dress were dragged away to Pugachev’s camp. Two-thirds of Kazan’s twenty-nine hundred buildings were destroyed. Nobles and their families who could get away fled to Moscow.

The old capital began to prepare its defenses, but Pugachev did not come. A Russian army, already hurrying to Kazan, arrived too late to save the town, but on July 15, it struck and defeated Pugachev. The following day, the false tsar reappeared with fifteen thousand men. In a four-hour battle, the rebel army was routed; two thousand died, and five thousand were taken prisoner. After the battle, ten thousand men and women held captive in Pugachev’s camp were freed. The pretender with the remnants of his army fled to the south, down the Volga.

The taking and burning of Kazan was the high-water mark of Pugachev’s revolt. Had he not been defeated there, he might have marched on Moscow, carrying the revolt into the heart of serf-owning Russia. Immediately afterward, the impostor learned about the Russian-Turkish peace treaty and realized that regular troops would now be available to the government, By August, a veteran Russian army under General Vasily Suvorov, released from the Danube campaign, was advancing in his direction. Pugachev’s men, demoralized by defeat and retreat, began to worry about the consequences of their rebellion. In increasing numbers, they began to desert.

Pugachev was now entering an area populated by small landowners possessing few serfs. Attempting to raise a new army, he called on these serfs to rise against their masters, promising liberty to “be forever Cossacks, free from taxes, levies, recruiting, evil landowners, and corrupt judges.” Some serfs slipped away from their owners, but their number was dropping; the revolt was faltering, losing energy and purpose. In turning south, Pugachev was returning to his childhood home, the land of the Don Cossacks. But few impostors can be successful among people with whom they have been raised. “Why does he call himself Tsar Peter?” the Don Cossacks asked. “He is Emelyan Pugachev, the farmer, who deserted his wife Sophia and his children.”

After Pugachev’s sudden reappearance before Kazan, Catherine knew that the government had relaxed too soon. At a council session on July 14, she had declared that Rumyantsev’s victories on the Danube had brought Russia close to peace. And then, on July 21, news of the destruction of Kazan had reached St. Petersburg, two days before Rumyantsev’s son arrived with news of peace with the Turks. That morning as Catherine convened her council, she did not know either about Pugachev’s defeat after his sacking of Kazan or that a peace had been reached with Turkey. “Extremely shaken” by the news from Kazan, she interrupted the council’s discussion and announced that she intended to leave for Moscow immediately to restore confidence. Her councillors were silent until Nikita Panin spoke up, saying that her unexpected arrival might alarm rather than calm the people. It was decided that Panin’s younger brother, General Peter Panin, the most experienced general available, then in retirement near Moscow, would be appointed to assume command against Pugachev.

Catherine approved this choice reluctantly. She recognized Peter Panin’s military abilities, but she disliked him personally. He had often declared that Russia should be ruled by a man; his preference was Grand Duke Paul. Catherine also worried about his reputation as a military martinet and about his unconventional personal behavior: he sometimes appeared in his headquarters wearing a gray satin nightgown and a large French nightcap with pink ribbons. She had been annoyed by the histrionic nature of his abrupt retirement, taken because he felt inadequately rewarded for his successes in the Turkish war. By the fall of 1773, she had authorized surveillance of “the insolent windbag.” Now, facing the need to appoint Peter Panin, she confessed to her new admirer Gregory Potemkin: “Before the whole world, frightened of Pugachev, I commend and elevate above all mortals in the empire a prime big-mouth who insults me personally.” Nevertheless, Catherine the empress took precedence over Catherine the affronted woman, and on July 22, Peter Panin was appointed general in chief. The following day, July 23, news of the peace treaty with Turkey reached St. Petersburg. Catherine was doubly pleased: the territorial gains of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi were substantial, and her army would now be free to confront Pugachev.

Peter Panin demanded authority over all military forces assigned to deal with the revolt and over all officials and people in the affected areas. To Potemkin, Catherine continued, “You see, my friend, that Count [Nikita] Panin wants to make his brother the ruler with unlimited powers in the best part of the empire. If I sign this, not only will Prince Volkonsky [the governor-general of Moscow] be offended and made to look silly, but I myself will be seen publicly to be praising a man who is a first class liar and who has personally offended me.”

Catherine did not completely surrender to Peter Panin. Buoyed by her sweeping victory over the Turks and by Pugachev’s defeat at Kazan, she restricted his authority to the regions directly affected and declared that the Investigating Commission would remain under her direct personal supervision. Panin was further circumscribed by being given Suvorov as his second in command. Panin, like Bibikov, was encouraged to enlist the nobility in the rebellious provinces. As their reward, all privileges of the aristocracy, including absolute power over their serfs, were guaranteed by the crown. This approach produced results: the noblemen mustered men, money, and supplies of food.

In the field, Panin’s methods of retribution were only marginally less cruel than those of Pugachev. Earlier, under Bibikov, the army had dealt leniently with captured rebels. After the relief of Orenburg, the vast majority of Pugachev’s followers taken prisoner had been released with a safe conduct pass and told to go home. Most of the prisoners captured in the battles outside Kazan were released with fifteen kopecks travel money. Now, as the revolt entered the final phase with Pugachev’s destructive move down the Volga, Panin imposed fierce reprisals. On August 24, he issued a proclamation threatening all who had taken part in the revolt with death by quartering. Panin knew that he was exceeding the authority granted him by Catherine, but she was far away and he ignored her.

Catherine spent August at Tsarskoe Selo anxiously following Pugachev’s rampage down the Volga. By the end of the month she told Voltaire that she was expecting “something decisive,” because for ten days she had not heard from Panin, and since “bad news travels faster than good, I am hoping for something good.” As Suvorov’s veterans advanced, Pugachev’s army began melting away. Yet even near the end he inspired fear. On July 26, in Saransk, he dined in the house of the governor’s widow and then hanged her outside her window. Nobles were hanged upside down in groups with their heads, hands, and feet cut off. On August 1, horsemen announced in the marketplace of Penza that “Peter III” was coming and that if he were not welcomed with the traditional bread and salt, everyone in the town, including babies, would be slaughtered. He came, was welcomed, two hundred men were forcibly recruited, and the governor’s house was burned down with the governor and twenty of the gentry locked inside. In another town, a resident astronomer was hanged so that he might be “nearer the stars.”

Pugachev’s attempts to recruit among his fellow Don Cossacks were mostly ignored. Everyone knew that a reward of twenty thousand rubles had been posted for his capture and that veteran government troops were approaching. Many also knew that Pugachev was not Peter III. When he appeared on August 21 before Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd), riding forward to talk to a group of Don Cossack leaders, he was publicly recognized and denounced as an impostor. Two days later, on August 24, he suffered final defeat at Sarepta, south of Tsaritsyn. The defeat became a rout. Pugachev escaped by swimming the Volga with thirty followers. But defeat, fear, and hunger were sapping the loyalty of everyone around him.

On September 15, 1774, almost exactly a year after he had launched his revolt, Pugachev was back where he had begun: at Yaitsk on the Yaik River. There, a group of frightened lieutenants, hoping to save themselves by betrayal, fell on their sleeping chief. “How dare you raise your hands against your emperor?” he shouted. “You will achieve nothing.” Unmoved, they delivered him in chains to Peter Panin.

On September 30, Panin wrote to Catherine that he had seen the “infernal monster.” Pugachev had made no attempt to sustain his imposture. He fell on his knees, declared that he was Emelyan Pugachev, and admitted that, in parading himself as Peter III, he had sinned before God and Her Imperial Majesty. He was placed inside an iron cage not large enough to allow him to stand, and the cage was bolted onto a two-wheeled cart. In this manner, he was trundled for hundreds of miles to Moscow, through towns and villages where he had been hailed as a liberating hero.

On November 4, 1774, Pugachev and his rolling cage arrived in Moscow. Six weeks of interrogation began. The empress was resolved to satisfy her doubts about the rebellion; she still could not believe that an illiterate Cossack had instigated the revolt on his own. Voltaire lightheartedly proposed that Pugachev be asked, “Sir, are you master or servant? I do not ask who employs you but simply whether you are employed.” Catherine wanted more: if there were employers, she wished to know their identities. Catherine carefully monitored the proceedings, but despite the intensity of her curiosity, she refused to allow the use of the rack. Before the investigation began, she had written to Prince Volkonsky, governor-general of Moscow, “For God’s sake, refrain from all questioning under torture which always obscures the truth.” Behind this command was not only her opposition to barbarism but also political calculation. The rebellion appeared to have spent itself, but that had also seemed the case before the surprise assault on Kazan. Perhaps, even now, there might be another leader waiting to revive the rebellion. Torture of the man whom many peasants had believed was a tsar could provide another spark. Although she was intrigued by the impostor’s character and motives, she had no desire to see him. She was already planning a lengthy visit to Moscow to celebrate the peace with Turkey, and she wished the whole Pugachev business to be finished before she arrived. As for foreign influence, even before the interrogators were finished Catherine concluded that there was none. To Voltaire she wrote, “The Marquis de Pugachev has lived like a scoundrel and will die like a coward. He cannot read or write, but he is a bold and determined man. So far there is not a shred of evidence that he was the instrument of any foreign power. It is to be supposed that Monsieur Pugachev is a master brigand and no man’s servant. No one since Tamerlane has done more harm than he.”

On December 5, the work of the interrogating commission was completed. Pugachev had confessed and expressed hope for mercy, but a death sentence was inevitable. Nevertheless, Catherine wrote to Voltaire, “If it were only me he had harmed, his hopes could be justified and I should pardon him, but this trial involves the empire and its laws.” To dissociate herself publicly from the trial and execution, she privately sent Procurator General Vyazemsky to Moscow with instructions to end the affair quickly. She followed by writing to the Moscow governor, Prince Volkonsky: “Please help to inspire everyone with moderation both in the number and in the punishment of the criminals. The opposite will be regrettable to my love for humanity. We do not have to be clever to deal with barbarians.”

Vyazemsky did his best to obey. To avoid public pressure in the vengeful atmosphere of Moscow, he established a special court made up of high officials and members of the Holy Synod. The trial was conducted secretly in the Kremlin on December 30 and 31. Pugachev was brought before the court on the second day. He fell on his knees, admitted again that he was Emelyan Pugachev, acknowledged his crimes, and declared that he repented before God and the all-merciful empress. When he was led away, the judges decided that he should be quartered alive and then beheaded. But when the same sentence was awarded to one of his lieutenants, several judges protested that the sentence on Pugachev should be more severe and painful than that on others. “So they wanted to break Pugachev on the wheel,” Vyazemsky wrote to Catherine, “in order to distinguish him from the rest.” Eventually, the procurator general persuaded the court to leave Pugachev’s sentence as it was. Knowing that the empress would never accept the public spectacle of Pugachev being quartered alive, Vyazemsky secretly arranged with Moscow’s chief of police to have the executioner “accidentally” behead Pugachev first and afterward chop off his hands and feet. The execution took place before an immense crowd in a Moscow square on January 10, 1775. Pugachev crossed himself and laid his head on the block. Then, to the indignant rage of spectators who included noblemen come to savor their revenge, the executioner seemed to bungle his job by immediately decapitating Pugachev; many were convinced that either the executioner was incompetent or that he had been bribed by someone. Four of Pugachev’s lieutenants were quartered first, then beheaded. The lieutenants who had betrayed and handed over their chief were pardoned.

A few days after Pugachev’s death, Catherine departed for Moscow to celebrate Russia’s victory over Turkey. While there, she also began obliterating all traces of the internal revolt. Pugachev’s two wives and three children were incarcerated in the fort of Kexholm in Russian Finland. Pugachev’s house on the Don was razed. It was forbidden to speak his name, and his brother, who had not participated in the revolt, was ordered to stop using the family name. The Yaik Cossacks were renamed the Ural Cossacks, and Yaitsk, their capital, and the river flowing past it were renamed Uralsk and Ural, respectively. On March 17, 1775, the empress issued a general amnesty to all involved “in the internal mutiny, uprising, unrest, and disarray of the years 1773 and 1774,” consigning “all that has passed to eternal oblivion and profound silence.” All sentences of death were commuted to hard labor; lesser sentences were reduced to exile in Siberia; deserters from the army and fugitive state peasants were pardoned. Peter Panin was thanked, and allowed to withdraw and sulk in Moscow for the rest of his life.

In the countryside, few among the nobility shared Catherine’s belief in restraint. In reprisal for the massacre of their families and friends, the landowners were determined to exact revenge. Once order was reestablished by the army, the landowners were pitiless. Serfs thought to be guilty were condemned to death without trial. With few exceptions, property owners gave no thought to ameliorating the conditions which had driven the peasantry to its fearful rampage.

The Pugachevshchina (time of Pugachev) was the greatest of all violent internal Russian upheavals. One hundred and thirty-four years later, the 1905 Revolution produced nationwide strikes, urban violence, Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, the arrival of the mutinous battleship Potemkin in Odessa harbor, the storming of barricades in Moscow—and eventually the granting of a parliamentary Duma, which had the right to speak but not to act. The Russian Revolution of 1917, measured in terms of violence, was no more than a peaceful coup d’état, removing from power the Duma ministers who had replaced the abdicated Tsar Nicholas II.

Pugachev’s revolt was also the most serious challenge to Catherine’s authority during her reign. She took no pride in the defeat of Pugachev and his execution. She was aware that many in Russia and Europe considered her responsible—some for what she had done, others for what she had not done. She noted their criticism, moved on, and never turned back. She never forgot, however, that, after she had reigned for eleven years, her people, whose lives she had hoped to better, had risen against her and rallied to “Peter III.” Nor did she forget that, once again, her supporters had been the nobility. There would be no further talk of eliminating serfdom. Landowners were encouraged to treat their serfs and peasants humanely, but the empress now was convinced that enlightenment could not be bestowed on a nation of illiterates until the people had been prepared by education. The Nakaz, which embodied the principles of the Enlightenment and the ideals and aspirations of her youth, became no more than a memory. After Pugachev, she concentrated on what she believed to be Russian interests within her power to change: the expansion of her empire and the enrichment of its culture.