First Lady
Ronald Hingley
Isabel in the Age of Catherine the Great ,sabel de Madariaga (Weidenfeld and Nicolson pp. 698, £20) This is an exhaustive study of a key period in Russia's evolution: the age of Catherine H, often called The Great', who ruled from 1762 to 1796. Isabel de Madariaga is not ,,°ffering one more popular biography of the clnpress, but places a thorough examination of her evolution, personality and Policies in an even larger setting: the first Completed, full-scale history of the reign to appear since 1883. Catherine almost challenges comparison with that other giant of the Russian 18th cehturY, her predecessor Peter the Great. She dared to claimequality with him through the proud inscription PETRO PRIMO CATHERINA sEcuNDA, incised on one of the many superb monuments that St. Petersburg/ Leningrad still owes to her: Falconet's bronze Horseman. In their impact on Russia the two prodigious sovereigns widely differed. Cather ine's weapon was persuasion, Peter's ter t.nr. They also viewed the ever-crucial Influence of Western Europe from diver gent angles. Peter forcibly europeanised the Country, whereas Catherine restored it to itself. As this book well puts it, 'Peter denigrated Russia in the interests of wester nisation. Catherine, the foreigner, extolled the native virtues of Russia and the Rus sians and imbued them with a high sense of their equality with, if not their superiority Over, Western Europe.' Non-Russian subjects and neighbours Were less favoured. The Empress virtually enslaved the Ukrainian peasantry, and she destroyed Polish independence in what Dr de Madariaga does not hesitate to call "Stalinist style'. Catherine, like Stalin, spent far too much revenue on ostentation. She also shared with Stalin, as with Peter the Great, a flair for simultaneously learning and rewriting the grammar of Russian Power politics for a generation and beyond., Catherine was nearly always certain that she was right. And yet she would listen to the counsel of others. An absolute ruler ,Indeed, she early decided that her notional ly unlimited power would remain unlimited only so long as her measures were properly adapted to their context. 'My orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind Of orders that could be carried out.' Even this solid, well-researched study cannot conceal the exotic atmosphere of 1__.5!h-century Russia — a country so ntnte with palace plots, handsome guardsen, susceptible princesses, endungeoned Princes, dastardly assassinations and romantic intrigues as to seem like an anticipatory projection of The Prisoner of Zenda. Catherine was a German, without a drop of Russian blood, and she was catapulted into St. Petersburg in 1744 as child-bride to the heir to the throne, the Grand Duke Peter. Allied to this lout, and subject to the caprices of the indulgent but callous Empress Elizabeth, the young Grand Duchess might easily have come to grief during the 18 years preceding her accession had she not been endowed with patience, courage and resourcefulness. Then at last — after Elizabeth's death, followed by the bungling, six-month rule of Peter III — came the most famous of all Russian guards' officers' coups, headed by Catherine's current lover. It suddenly propelled her on to the throne, aged 33. Her deposed husband Peter was conveniently murdered shortly afterwards.
Catherine was far too complex, controlled and sophisticated to qualify as a typical heroine of historical romance. And yet the Ruritanian element remained prominent even in her personal life. This was assured by the succession of her lovers, whose status was usually acknowledged by appointment to the rank of Personal Adjutants: in effect Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. They were always younger than she. The age gap grew wider with time, and an increasing source of scandal. But Catherine's was no life of unbridled licentiousness. She was lusty, not promiscuous, and she watched over the education of her young men with maternal solicitude. This delicate subject is treated with sensitivity and scholarly insight by Dr de Madariaga. There turns out to be no evidence for some of the spicier tales such as `the alleged tests of virility carried out on candidate lovers by Catherine's ladies-inwaiting Countess Bruce or Anna Protasova (the eprouveuse of Byron's Don Juan): Nor were the young men vetted for venereal disease by the aptly named Dr .1 Roggerson, as was also commonly believed.
It is disappointing to find legends so fecund authoritatively discounted, and I part with special regret from the myth of the Potemkin Villages. It turns out that the huge, one-eyed Grigory Potemkin, Catherine's chief satrap, did not (as is commonly believed) erect two-dimensional cardboard buildings on the banks of the Dnieper in order to impress his ex-mistress with the prosperity of the newly colonised South as she glided, Cleopatra-like, downstream in 1787 with her fleet of luxury barges.
Potemkin was the arch-Favourite in a century of favouritism run riot. His tenure as royal lover was short, but his span of 'power as Catherine's most powerful henchman was prolonged, and he retained his ability to charm her long after he had quitted her bed. He ventured to mimic her strong German accent to her face, he managed large tracts of her Empire, and he was rewarded with palaces, provinces, titles and honours on a stupendous scale. The sway of this Cyclops of the North helped to conciliate the many humble Russians who distrusted female rule on the principle of the proverb, 'Woman is long on hair and 'short on wit.' How grievously they erred on the second point Catherine herself and the author of this book both amply testify.
There was nothing mannish about Catherine, who proved to her age that extreme femininity need be no barrier to strength of purpose. The point is well illustrated by the nickname 'Catherine le (sic) Grand', which foreign diplomats sometimes applied to Russia's formidable First Lady. Now, in retrospect, the joke can only remind us how feeble the four 18th century post-Petrine Russian male sovereigns were. A boy, a baby, a buffoon, a near lunatic: all were brief tenants of the thone, and three of them perished by assassination.
Catherine sought to reduce or abolish torture, issuing decrees against flogging, knouting and other brutal methods of interrogation and punishment. Yet she felt impelled to countenance the savagery of her age whenever she felt her throne menaced, and nostrils continued to be slit. The most vivid example of her impact on penological history is the secret instruction that she gave for the execution of Yemelyan Pugachov, whose mutinous peasant armies had exten sively bloodied the Volga. Catherine ordered that the great rebel's head should be cut off before he was quartered: not afterwards, as was the correct procedure. This deserves inclusion in any Book of Records as history's most extreme example of velvet glove on iron hand.
Dr de Madariaga deals skilfully with the accusation of outrageous hypocrisy commonly levelled against the Empress.
Catherine frequently paid lip service to the causes of enlightenment, liberalism and reform, but made few practical concessions to the spirit of democracy. She could indeed seem 'a glaring example of the divergence between theory and practice', and she showed herself a very East-Coast Liberal in potential when instructing her grandson, the future Alexander I, on the merits of French revolutionary thought.
It was a rash subject who dared, in the later, harsher years of the reign, to air liberal views, similar to those often voiced by Catherine herself, on the undesirability of serfdom and kindred topics. Such liberties might lead to imprisonment and even, in one notorious case (that of Radishchev) to a sentence of execution, later commuted to exile. 'Roughly dragged away in chains, Radishchev's lot was much alleviated thanks to A.R. Vorontsov.' Thus writes the author of this book, for whose addiction to the marooned participle clinical aid should be sought as a matter of urgency.
Dr de Madariaga denies the commonly promoted thesis that Catherine formed an anti-serf alliance — based on a shared fear of peasant revolt — with her gentry. How far and in what way that and other fallacies 'simplify out of all recognition a very complex situation' the body of the text testifies. It leaves few stones of Catherine's Russia unturned, surveying all the social classes from the gentry to the serfs, while dealing exhaustively with foreign policy, military affairs, local government, education, ecclesiastical matters and the administration of justice. It also touches on architecture and the arts. But there is, alas, an insistence on cramming into the text a plethora of statistical information that — valuable as it is — should most certainly have been consigned to appendices. It is a measure of the book's quality that one forgives (however reluctantly) this sad error in editing policy.
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