Catherine the Great
Simon Dixon
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0060786280
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Admired for her achievements and satirized for her personal life, Catherine the Great was one of the most celebrated monarchs in history, turning eighteenth-century Russia into arguably the largest and most powerful state since the fall of the Roman Empire. She promoted radical political ideas while emphasizing moderation in government. She could be ruthless when necessary, but she charmed everyone she met, joking at private dinner parties in the Hermitage, which she had built for her own use. Determined to endear herself to the Russians, she made religious devotions in which she never believed.
Intimate and revealing, Catherine the Great examines the lifelong friendships that sustained the empress throughout her personal life and places her within the context of the royal court: its politics, its flourishing literature and the very culture that became central to her exercise of absolute power.
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ethnic Rus. Underlying them all lay the dilemma facing any ruler. How far should she seek to build consent? When should she resort to force? In the immediate aftermath of her coup, Catherine had passed a series of crucial tests. She had staged a coronation that fused Orthodox tradition with classical imagery in a symbolic reconciliation of mercy and conquest. More important still, she had demonstrated the personal qualities that persuaded all those who met her that success lay within her grasp.
82. M. S. Anderson, ‘Great Britain and the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774’, English Historical Review, 69 (1954), 44. 83. Cross, 185–8; E. V. Tarle, Chesmenskii boi i pervaia russkaia ekspeditsiia v arkhipelag (Moscow-Leningrad, 1945), 45–53; Venturi, End of the Old Regime, 74. The latest scholarly study is G. A. Grebenshchikova, Baltiiskii flot v period pravleniia Ekateriny II: dokumenty, fakty, issledovaniia (SPb, 2007). 84. Best. D16670, C. to Voltaire, 16 Sept. 1770. Turkish losses were
in June 1778: see Grimm, 95. 115. Grimm, 84, 2–4 Mar. 1778; N. Rotshtein, ‘Novyia knigi po keramiki’, Starye gody, Apr. 1909, 219. ‘A Rouble is 5 French livres’, Bentham, ii: 126, J. Bentham to S. Bentham, 18 June 1778. 116. Grimm, 135, 16 Apr. 1779. 117. Quarenghi, 58, to Betskoy, July 1784. 118. Madariaga, 387–9; Smith, Love and Conquest, 115–20; Montefiore, 246–9, 252–9; Lopatin, 176, 15 July 1783. 119. L. V. Tychinina and N. B. Bessarabova, Kniaginia Dashkova i imperatorskii dvor (M,
Russians’ lasting reputation for bad breath–‘especially at court’ reported a visitor in the early nineteenth century, ‘where the ladies not merely chew them all through dinner, but send plates back to their rooms’.47 All told, the catering budget for the imperial family and the leading courtiers in 1746 came to 83,714 roubles–well over twice as much as Anna’s total of 35,388–and actual expenditure was almost certainly higher.48 Although the 1740s was the decade in which Peter the Great’s reforms
crimes? Order it so that the light of knowledge may be diffused among the people.’ But were there enough people? As we have seen, Catherine shared the widespread contemporary anxiety–particularly acute in the vast, empty spaces of the Russian empire–that the world’s population had fallen since classical times. The way to increase it was to make people happy: ‘The more happily people live under a government the more easily the number of the inhabitants increases.’76 Such ideas may have been