Such was the tragedy of Peter III. He dies, as Catherine said, unpitied: a fool, echo her friends, who perished in his folly.
Continuing Reign of Catherine the Great,
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Previously in Reign of Catherine the Great.
Such was the tragedy of Peter III. He dies, as Catherine said, unpitied: a fool, echo her friends, who perished in his folly. But history is precise and simple; truth complex and difficult. Was there no light, no touch of nobility at all in that strange chaotic temperament? No reverence in the boy who would kneel to the picture of the great Frederick? No generosity in the Czar who sacrificed victory to a sentiment; who abolished the hateful “secret chancery,” torture, monopolies, and refused a statue of gold offered by St. Petersburg, “desiring rather to raise a monument in the hearts of the people”? There was something inarticulate there, surely — in the would-be musician who must shut himself up for hours to squawk madly, passionately, on a crazy violin, and whose last request was for his confidant and instrument. “What is history,” said Napoleon, “but a fiction agreed upon?” Such, nevertheless, is the form and spirit of the hapless Peter as portrayed by his enemies.
This was the Catherine of Elizabeth’s court, and protagonist of that revolution which first made her known to Europe. But it was the sovereign who dazzled her contemporaries, and still lives splendidly with the “Great Czar” in the annals of Russia. That exuberant personality of hers is so eloquent, so omnipresent in the sphere of politics, that one is often the most luminous illustration of the other. There is a note you will find common to her grandiose schemes of territorial expansion, of intellectual enlightenment and domestic reform. It is the note of theatricality, of extravagance, of excess. The strangest chimeric phantasy sometimes here possesses her, hitherto prosaic enough in so many ways; and it communicates itself to men like the Orloffs, Patiomkin, Suvaroff. It is, I think, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who remarks that in Russia the shows of things are more important than reality. So rite, ceremonial, the spectacular, the symbolic, seem to have a power there greater than in any other people of civilization.
But stronger still was Catherine’s overmastering desire to play to the applause of Europe. She had conceived herself as the heroine of a grandiose drama. It was her ambition to be the “Grand Monarque” of the North, and to show the Paris of Louis Quinze that the age of Olympian sovereignty was not yet past. Hence her sensitiveness to Western opinion, her assiduous court to the men of intellect, her anxiety to be admired and feared in Europe. Nowhere is this pose, this consciousness of a gallery, more evident than in the sphere of foreign policy. The great Peter had fulfilled the dream of Ivan in reaching the Baltic, and so, in her wars with the Turk, Catherine realized the aim of Peter by forcing her way to the Black Sea.
But a Hellenic empire at Constantinople haunts her dreams. She stirs up Greek against Ottoman, and her trumpeter Voltaire heralds a new Sparta and Athens; she calls her grandson Constantine and surrounds him with Greek nurse and servants. Her famous progress southward, the most eccentric pageant in history, is typical of Patiomkin’s régime. This extraordinary man — mountebank, writes the English envoy, “esprit réveur,” says the keener-eyed Prince de Ligne — a barbarian, of terrific appearance; fantastic beyond the verge of madness, acquired a greater influence with Catherine than any other man of her reign. He had been created “Prince of Taurida” (the Crimea) after the conquest of the southern provinces; and was resolved to dazzle Europe and his sovereign with her new acquisitions.
In January, 1787, she set out on her triumphal journey. A huge retinue accompanied her, together with the foreign ambassadors, Cobenzl, Fitzherbert, and Ségur, the last of whom has described this strange procession. Forty miles were covered every day. There is a palace at every stopping-place; towns and villages dot what six months ago had been a howling wilderness. Painted forests seem to clothe the horizon: fertile solitudes swarm with gayly dressed peasants — imported for this occasion only. From Kiev floating pavilions carry them down the Dnieper: the prince-magician alone has a hundred twenty of his beloved musicians. Again the same mise-en-scène: operatic Cossacks rowing out from either shore, the village of yesterday in the foreground, roofless façades in the middle distance; the same reviews in successive provinces of hussars out of her own escort! The greatest of optimists saw everything and affected to see through nothing — the works of his highness surpass conception. Suddenly spring appears, glittering on the enameled meadows and majestic river; they journey to the music of the galleys between throngs of spectators from thirty nations. Every morning a fresh scene opens, the days “travel more quickly than they themselves.”
At Kanioff she is met by his majesty of Poland, none other than Poniatowski, the lover, of Peterhoff in the old days! At Kherson, on an eastern gate, appears the famous legend “The road to Byzantium”; and there it is the Holy Roman Emperor who is drawn into her train — they have already mapped out the Ottoman dominions. So with excursions and alarums eastward by Poltava of glorious memory to the new “Glory of Catherine,” her city of Ekaterinoslaff; and last of all through undulating steppes to the gorgeous palace piled upon the sand at Inkerman, where after banquets a curtain falls away, and behold — the pasteboard fortifications of Sebastopol! where a green-wood squadron anchored beneath them splutters forth its husky artillery. Splendide mendax! The West applauded frantically: never had such a travelling-show been seen in Europe.
At home, too, the cult of appearances went hand in hand with generosity and enthusiasm. “C’est presque un monde,” she writes to Voltaire, “à créer, à unir, à conserver!” First comes the administration of justice, and her ukase of 1762, on its abuses, has a ring of sincerity that can hardly be mistaken. There is a real courage again in her dealings with the clergy. Four years later she summons a great assembly to Moscow to consider a new code; and her “Instruction” to the delegates, saturated as it is with Montesquieu and the rest, shows her abreast of her time. Politicians of the old school, indeed, shuddered at its array of grandiloquent maxims — “there are bombs enough in it,” cried Panin, “to bring the walls about our ears.” She is here, in spite of all that has been said, exactly where we invariably find her, neither a day in front of her age nor a day behind.
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