Reign of Catherine the Great – 6

Today’s installment concludes Reign of Catherine the Great,
our selection by W. Knox Johnson.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of six thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in Reign of Catherine the Great.

This is not the place to describe the campaigns of Rumaintsoff, Patiomkin, and the rest, against Sweden and the Ottomans. Her own ideas in the field of foreign policy we have already seen. After the Revolution another policy, that of spurring on Gustavus and the Western powers to a crusade against France, takes the first place. It gave them something to think about, she explained to Ostermann, and she “wanted elbow-room.” The third Polish partition explains why she was so anxious for “elbow-room.” Schemes of the kind were common enough in the eighteenth century, everybody was dismembered on paper by everybody else; it was but a delicate attention reserved for a neighbor in times of trouble and sickness. And John Sobieski had foretold the doom of Poland a hundred years before. But it remains a blot upon her name. For her final fate overtook Poland, not, as is commonly said, because of her internal anarchy — sedulously fostered by the foreign powers — but because that anarchy seemed about to disappear. The spirit of reform had penetrated to Warsaw, and after the Constitution of May 3d Catherine was afraid of a revival of the national forces similar to that which had followed the reforms of 1772 in her neighbor Sweden. She was aided by traitors from within, a’quali era piu cara la servitu che la liberta della loro patria; and on the field of Maciejovitsy they were able to cry, “Finis Poloniæ!” No question has been more obscured. The fashion of liberal thought has changed, the history, like that of town and gown, has been written by the victorious aggressors, and Poland is become the rendezvous of the political sophistries, as it has been the cockpit of the political ruffianism, of all Europe. But Catherine could boast that she had pushed the frontiers of Russia farther than any sovereign since Ivan the Terrible. “I came to Russia a poor girl. Russia has dowered me richly, but I have paid her back with Azov, the Crimea, and the Ukraine.”

There remains the side of her which attracted Byron, and which no one has failed to seize. The beginnings of her moral descent are there before us in the memoirs; ennui and solitude weighed upon her, and as she gained greater liberty she sought distractions which, at first, were harmless. The third stage was the infamous command of the Empress — the Grand Duke and she have no children; the succession must be secured. If Soltikoff, as Catherine implies, were the father of her son Paul, the sovereigns who have since occupied the throne of Russia are Romanoffs only in name. From this point till her death, in 1796, she entirely ignored the code of morality convenient in a society whose basis is the family. In the succession of her “lovers” only Patiomkin, and for a moment Gregory Orloff, acquired a position of the first political importance; and Patiomkin’s was maintained long after his first relation had come to an end. It has been ascribed to her as a merit that she pensioned these worthies handsomely, instead of dealing with them after the manner of Christina of Sweden; and that she was able to make passion, which has lost others, coincident with her calculated self-interest.

Certainly she entered, a child, into a society “rotten before it was ripe.” She was surrounded with a court long demoralized by a succession of drunken and dissolute czarinas, which aped the corruption of Versailles more consummately than its refinement. The age was that of Louis XV, of Lord Sandwich, of Augustus the Strong: in it even a Burke had persuaded himself that “vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.” The reader of Bayle and Brantôme had been introduced to a bizarre sort of morality; her “spiritual father,” Voltaire, was the author of La Pucelle and Jacques le Fataliste proceeded from the same pen as the University for Russia. Diderot, indeed, whose moral obscenity was not the whole of the man, but was, nevertheless, sincere and from the centre, was able to compliment her on the freedom from “the decencies and virtues, the worn-out rags of her sex.” She had no fund of theoretical cynicism on such matters, nor, on the other hand, the slightest moral pretence. The revolutionary Moniteur branded her as Messalina. “Cela ne regarde que moi,” she said haughtily, and the sheet circulated throughout the empire. Such is the summary of the gallons of printers’ ink that have soiled paper on this account. It is the aspect of her allowed to escape no one, and therefore we say no more of it here. How easy it is to “hint and chuckle and grin” with the “chroniques scandaleuses!” easier still to be incontinent of one’s moral indignation. The truth is that this back-stair gossip misses, on the whole, that just proportion necessary if you would not only see but also perceive. Catherine, whom her generation called “the Great,” had one absorbing passion; it was the greatness of Russia, and of herself as ruler of Russia — “mon petit ménage,” as she would call it, with her touch of lightness — and she desired to be the first amateur of “la grande politique” in Europe.

“Elle brillait surtout par le caractère,” says Waliszewski, whose volumes, collecting most of what is known about Catherine, I have freely consulted. It is only natural that her biographer should regard her as a strikingly complex and exceptional being. Nous sommes tous des exceptions. Yet she is not essentially different from the “woman of character” you may meet in every street. Given her splendid physical constitution there is nothing prodigious about her except her good-fortune in every crisis and important action of her career. In one of his Napoleonic fits of incoherence, Patiomkin said vividly enough that the Empress and himself were “the spoilt children of God.” For herself, she says in that introductory page, which Sainte-Beuve has well compared with Machiavelli, that what commonly passes for good-fortune is in reality the result of natural qualities and conduct. If that satisfies, it is so much to her credit. Certainly, “the stars connived” with her from the day in 1762 when she galloped in her cuirassier’s uniform through the streets of St. Petersburg. “Toute la politique,” she said, “est fondée sur trois mots circumstances, conjectures et conjonctures;” and like many leaders of action she was in her moments a fatalist, for then she saw how little after all, the greatest, as Bismarck says, can control events.

This ends our series of passages on Catherine the Great Takes Throne by W. Knox Johnson. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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