Great Catherine (32 page)

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meant to reign. They were also summoned to view the body, which was to lie in state at the Nevsky monastery.

Thousands of people made the journey to witness the lifeless remains of Emperor Peter III —and many among them drew back in horror at the sight. For the face of the corpse, imperfectly disguised by a large military hat, was a ghastly purplish-black and a voluminous cravat covered the entire throat—carefully arranged, people murmured, to conceal the bruises made by the murderer's hands. It was rumored that Peter had been poisoned and then strangled.

A disturbing wave of feeling against the new regime gathered force and swept outward from the capital. In the provinces, where Peter had never been the hated ogre that he was to the citizens of Petersburg, the late emperor was sincerely mourned. Some provincial soldiers denounced the Petersburg guards regiments for taking power into their own hands and using it to create a new empress. Many denounced Catherine—sometimes openly, more often in whispers—for compounding the iniquity of usurpation with the evil of regicide.

The manner of the late emperor's burial also led to mutters of dissatisfaction. Catherine had denied her husband burial in the honored resting place of the Russian rulers, the Cathedral of Peter and Paul. Instead he was immured in the Nevsky monastery, isolated from his ancestors, as if in a sort of eternal disgrace. To be sure, Peter was unlike his predecessors in that he had never been crowned, and so lacked the spark of divinity lent by the sacrament. Still, the unconventional burial seemed to confirm the general suspicion that the manner of his death had been both ignoble and deplorable. And Catherine, who did not even attend the funeral, ostensibly dissuaded from doing so by the Senate for reasons of health, was clearly to blame.

The reaction of Catherine's subjects in Russia was disturbing enough, but that of the journalists and newsmongers in Western Europe was upsetting in the extreme. Almost without exception

they denounced the empress as the barbarous ruler of a barbarous realm, where cruelty and murder were the hallmarks of power and where the light of reason and humane government had yet to penetrate. To Catherine, who saw herself as a beacon of enlightenment in a swamp of vulgarity, ignorance and dissipation, such aspersions were distasteful in the extreme. To be compared to Ivan the Terrible, or to the English Queen Isabella, who had ordered the murder of her husband Edward II, was deeply vexing, particularly when she saw herself in the mold of Peter the Great, and the English Queen Elizabeth, sovereigns who were masters of their own and their realm's destinies.

Few observers, in Russia or outside it, believed that Catherine's government would last long. A young woman ruling alone, lacking the protection and authority of a husband and largely without experience in rulership, would surely be devoured by a palace revolution, or a governmental crisis, or a revolt of the guards. The English ambassador Lord Buckingham referred to Russia as "one great mass of combustibles with incendiaries placed in every corner," and the other representatives of foreign courts agreed with him, all the more so when the Semenovsky guards revolted in August.

The volatile guardsmen, always combustible, were ignited by some ember of discontent—a rumor, a brawl, an insult, a challenge—which set off a small conflagration. At midnight their drummers beat the call to arms, all the men scrambled for their weapons and rushed out into the barracks courtyard, shouting and calling out to one another. Weapons were discharged, blows flew. Entire neighborhoods were aroused to panic, and people thought that another revolt was under way. With great difficulty the officers managed to corral their men and quell their turbulence, but not before the police, the authorities and Catherine herself had become alarmed.

On the following night the same thing happened again: the midnight summons to arms, the pell-mell rush into the court-

yard, the noise, the panic. This time some officers joined the men in unleashing chaos, and the remaining officers were all but helpless in extinguishing the tumult.

Catherine moved swiftly to respond. Many officers and soldiers were arrested and whisked off to unknown destinations where they were detained indefinitely. But the threat of a guards' revolt did not dissipate; everyone knew that, having put Catherine where she was, the guardsmen could supplant or overthrow her with equal ease.

Even if Catherine's fledgling government succeeded in controlling the explosive guardsmen, it could hardly hope to surmount the huge obstacles of debt, disorganization and administrative chaos that were the legacy of Elizabeth's reign. These alone, observers believed, would combine to overwhelm the new ruler and her advisers, who would then be vulnerable to another palace revolution.

Catherine's government faced disaster. The fiscal crisis was of enormous proportions, and demanded an immediate and drastic solution. The treasury was utterly depleted, debts were running into many millions of rubles and mounting fast, and, because Russia's credit had become worthless in foreign markets, no further loans could be raised. The severe shortage of money produced another predicament: army pay was in arrears, and the government relied on the army, not only to protect itself and the realm against attack, but to keep order, collect taxes, and suppress revolts.

Calamities of many sorts were descending on the new regime. Crops failed, bringing famine and leaving many peasants unable to pay their taxes; some fled from their masters, or rebeled, and as local government had all but broken down, the rebellions flared unchecked. On the Ukrainian borderlands, Turks and Tatars made frequent forays into Russian territory, carrying off peasants and enslaving them. Bandits terrorized the roads, pirates raided traffic on the Volga. Added to these were natural disasters and the

vagaries of a harsh climate, which left some regions devastated by floods and others prey to fierce storms or prolonged droughts.

To deal with this array of catastrophes the empress relied on the Senate, a handful of underpaid, unreliable provincial governors, and an antiquated bureaucracy far too small in numbers to control the huge expanse of Russia. No one knew better than she did how difficult was the task that faced her. As she herself wrote, recalling the early weeks of her reign, "The Senate remained lethargic, deaf to the affairs of state. The seats of legislation had reached a degree of corruption and disintegration that made them scarcely recognizable."

And there was another obstacle to surmount. Well aware that her hold on power was precarious, Catherine had to constantly woo the senators and senior civil servants, to earn their loyalty. She knew that while no one wanted to undertake the hard labor of governing, everyone in the government wanted to feel important. So she spent long hours with elderly officials who offered her uninformed advice, made longwinded requests and proposed impractical plans. Every court day brought a fresh group of importunate petitioners and would-be counselors, who tried her patience and took up her time with their demands and their rambling conversation. She did her best to convince each one that she took his needs or proposals seriously, she acknowledged each suggestion as best she could, and when she could not follow a particular piece of advice, she made an effort to explain why.

All this effort left her drained. She confided to the French ambassador that she felt like a hare being hounded by hunters, forced to dart this way and that, running in a dozen directions, ever alert to danger.

Still, she rose to the challenge. Within days of Catherine's accession it was clear to every secretary, clerk and minister that a new pair of hands held the reins of power. Where Elizabeth had been indolent and averse to business, and Peter had been an empty martinet, Catherine was industrious, pragmatic, attentive to de-

tail and full of common sense. She and Panin had clear ideas about the direction in which they wished to guide the empire and how to guide it there.

Early each morning the empress was at her desk, reading reports and dispatches, answering petitions, deciding on appointments. She wrote to each provincial governor and regional military commander ordering him to send her regular written summaries of conditions within his jurisdiction, and she addressed herself to drafting orders, or ukases, on everything from the conditions of road transport to disputed fishing rights to the consecration of religious shrines.

To protect her subjects against exploitation by grain speculators she ordered that an imperial granary be established in each town, so that she could regulate the price herself. Perhaps remembering the wretched lunatics whom Elizabeth had kept at court for her amusement, Catherine instructed the College of Foreign Affairs to gather information from European countries on how the insane were treated there, so that the best available western models could be instituted in Russia.

Determined to reinvigorate the premier governing body, the lethargic Senate, Catherine restored to it powers removed by her husband, principally the right to legislate and to review petitions. She divided it into departments, with each department responsible for a different facet of governance, and added more clerks and secretaries to improve efficiency. Instead of emasculating the Senate, as Peter had done, Catherine intended to rely on it to oversee routine tasks, so that she and Panin would not be overburdened with time-consuming mundane labors and could concentrate on the more difficult and longer range issues facing the empire. At the same time, however, Catherine made it clear that she meant to stay firmly in charge; instead of the brief summary reports the senators usually sent to the sovereign, she demanded detailed reports, leaving nothing out. She might delegate, but she would remain watchful.

For years Catherine had been turning over in her mind the

riddle of how Russia ought to be governed. She had defined her political principles, with the help of Montesquieu. "I want the laws obeyed," she wrote in one of her notebooks several years before she became empress, "but I want no slaves. My general aim is to create happiness without all the whimsicality, eccentricity, and tyranny which destroy it." She wanted to set in place just laws, to enforce them fairly and humanely, to raise the state above faction and above the fallibility of the rulers. Rulers come and go, generations of subjects are born and die, she wrote, but a wisely constituted governing system goes on forever.

To a large extent, that governing system, as Catherine envisioned it, must enshrine morality and counteract the primitive ferocity, greed and self-seeking inherent in mankind. Institutions exist to promote the primacy of reasonable relations among men, to foster moderation and toleration, above all to create a bastion against the excesses to which humanity's lower nature makes it prone.

Such were the empress's lofty aims, formed to a large extent by her thoughtful reading but also by her observation of her predecessors' incapable rule. She was determined not to be capricious, as Elizabeth had been, or narcissistic, as Peter had been, or lazy and inconsistent, as both had been. Where they had vaunted themselves, she meant to vaunt the state itself, and to make it an instrument of progress. She would be the midwife of that progress, bringing to birth a reformed, enlightened Russia.

Panin and his assistant Teplov drew up a document stating the aims of the new government. In it they made clear that henceforth there would be no favoritism, no individuals advanced to high office merely because the sovereign found them pleasing. The era of arbitrary rule was at an end, and a new era was beginning, in which established legal procedures would govern the exercise of power and the monarch would surround herself with professional advisers who would be her conscience, helping her to rein in her impulses so that she would never slip into tyranny.

These high-minded aims would have been empty had Cather-

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ine not possessed the energy, thirst for goodness and fervor for betterment to carry them out. Without being a zealot, she was profoundly and intensely committed to her goals, and she had the patience, sanity and even-tempered steadiness of purpose needed to implement them. Her personal symbol was the bee, tirelessly flying from flower to flower, gathering whatever it could use; the bee appeared on her crest, with the inscription L'Utile, "The Useful."

Her constant inspiration throughout these early days was Peter the Great, whose larger-than-life energy, visionary ambition and administrative ability she emulated. The great Peter's successors had been unworthy of him, but Catherine would not be. Among the things she carried with her everywhere was a snuffbox decorated with his portrait. It reminded her, she told her advisers, "to ask each moment, what would he have ordained, what would he have forbidden, what would he have done, if he were in my place?"

Catherine felt the ghost of Peter the Great looking over her shoulder, weighing her actions, calling her to account. He had brought Russia into the sphere of European influence, reinvigorating her with his own dynamism and introducing fresh habits of mind, aggressive, active policies and forcefulness in effectuating change. He had challenged all that was static, passive and timeless in Russian culture, churning the old ways with the force of his own vitality and forward-looking plans. She hoped to continue his work—work that had virtually come to a halt during the reigns of his three far less capable successors.

And Catherine meant to do more. Where Peter the Great had been preoccupied with importing the military skills and technological expertise of Western Europe, she would bring to Russia the invigorating breezes of European thought.

She would import a valued freight of new ideas, bold assertions of human freedom, of emancipation from the deadweight of tradition. She would introduce to Russian intellectuals— admittedly a very small group, to be enlarged through widened

education—the concepts of limited government, free-ranging religious thought, unhampered by centuries-old dogmas, rational challenges to superstitious folkways, fresh and creative approaches to learning. She would teach Russians to play with ideas, setting them against one another, weighing them not according to age or the dictates of accepted authority but according to their real merits, as determined by the collective judgments of discerning, educated minds. She would make the members of the Russian intelligentsia, insofar as she could, into copies of herself. And she would continue to model herself, as far as possible, in the likeness of Voltaire.