Catherine the Great, though she figures large in the history of the Germans from Russia, remains an elusive character even to those who take a special interest in her. Carolly Erickson, who knows both historical research methods and how to please a popular audience, brings Catherine II to life as nothing else you have ever read, and does it at least as well as most movies you may have seen.
Biographer Erickson used hundreds of primary sources, including seven autobiographies written in French by Catherine herself at various stages in her life. They reveal a well-read, observant, robustly healthy, fun-loving first-born, who occupied a status in her German home well behind that of her ailing brother. Catherine's thinking was shaped by early contacts with teachers who discussed with her French and English ideas about modern government, including the then-bizarre notion of the equality of all persons. She also became acquainted with a female relative who was very independent and lived as she pleased, without regard to rules and criticism. Unfortunately, the story in all of her autobiographies stops at the time she becomes Empress.
We learn that the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, who arranged Catherine's marriage to Grand Duke Peter, was her aunt. Peter was her cousin Karl Ulrich, and she had met him briefly once early in their lives. Even at an early age, he was so beset by handlers that he envied Catherine her freedom. When she was invited by Elizabeth to come to Russia and become Peter's wife, he was not a total stranger to her. The royal families of Europe intermarried until almost everyone was related in some way.
Erickson read and used as information a variety of primary sources. She quotes from Jean Louis Favier, a French informant who knew and wrote about Catherine in the time before the death of the Empress Elizabeth. Erickson read from many years of the dispatches of English ambassadors to their home government, and read in their original languages the voluminous correspondence Catherine carried on with friends and confidantes throughout her reign. She refers to Catherine's letters to the French philosophers Voltaire and Diderot (who spent 6 months at the Russian court) and to notebooks Catherine kept. These pick up where the autobiographies leave off. She quotes from guards, the observations of foreign visitors and diplomats, notes from one Senator to another, Catherine's multiple hand drafts of laws, love letters to her favorite Gregory Potemkin, and from the journals of Philippe de Segur, who kept a written record of Catherine's trip to the Crimea. Erickson also read journalists' accounts of Catherine in the European press of her day, and read a play Catherine wrote.
Catherine survived for two years after her arrival at the Russian court and many years after her marriage to the feckless Peter by developing a canny ability to sense what was going on. She found, not long after she arrived, that there was often a very short path from the gilded, indulgent court to the torture chambers and/or to Siberian exile. Through clever maneuvering and astonishing boldness, she became Empress of Russia at the age of 32. Peter died within weeks under circumstances that remain mysterious to this day.
Catherine was quite the idealist when she took power. She believed she could dispense with the Empress Elizabeth's Secret Chancery, which spied on everyone and reported back to her. She thought that if she treated people with kindness and justice, that harsh laws and methods were not necessary. But such dreams were not to be realized. She codified the laws of Russia for the first time, a refreshing change from the traditional reliance on custom and imperial whim, and reorganized the way the entire country was governed. Catherine was always the scholar and a prodigious worker, forever thinking how she could make life in Russia better, but she also set up the Secret Branch, her own version of the Secret Chancery. She found she could retain power and order only with her predecessors' harsh methods--torture and exile and military might. And, late in her reign, when she learned of the overthrow of the French government (with the help of the guillotine) and of the rebellion of England's American colonies, she entertained the notion of invading France with her Russian armies and restoring the royal family to its rightful place.
The book is a treat for someone who enjoys reading about medical history. Catherine, who was several times ill almost unto death, lived in an age in which only the fittest survived, if not from diseases of all kinds, then from the medical treatment. The cure of choice was bloodletting, and it was used so long and so frequently because occasionally, after it, someone revived and felt better. Old women healers from the peasantry were called to the Empress Elizabeth's bedside when she was ill and aided her during four years of an off-again, on-again final illness. Women died in childbirth even within the royal palace with the best doctors in the nation available to them.
Erickson traces Catherine's rich and varied love life, putting each man's tenure in Catherine's bed into the context of what was happening in her reign. Catherine needed someone to share responsibility for governing with her, and found it best with Gregory Potemkin, to whom she may have been secretly married.
The book does not touch on Catherine's attention to collecting works of art and her fabulous Hermitage, but it tells about much of interest to Germans from Russia.
The Russians had many reasons to distrust Germans long before Catherine arrived on the scene. They both hated them and depended on them to organize their army, teach in their schools, and manage the details of government. Germans brought modern methods when the Russian people were little educated and largely steeped in the barbarism initiated by the Mongols.
There is no mention of the Germans who settled the steppes along the Volga during her reign. Erickson mentions only "foreigners" who had been brought in to settle and cultivate the area. In the latter part of her reign, Catherine and a vast entourage floated down the Dniester River to visit the Crimea, which her armies had struggled to free from Tatars. She did take a look at the countryside, in the company of Emperor Joseph of Austria, and saw the need for many additional settlers. Carolly Erickson questions the existence of "Potemkin villages," a term for elaborate fakery, which entered the world's languages as a result of this trip. Though Gregory Potemkin, who was the governing prince of this area, put on quite a show for her, the "villages" were a fabrication of western European journalists, not of Gregory Potemkin.
There is a long chapter about Pugachev, that bane of the Volga Germans (the Black Sea Germans had not yet arrived). It is told from Catherine's point of view, while we are accustomed to hearing about him from the accounts of the German colonists who had to deal personally with his depredations. Pugachev represented himself to the countryside as Peter III, Catherine's dead husband come to life. He instigated the murder of nobles and anyone with wealth or power (this included settled, prospering villages such as those of the German colonists), murdered, raped, and stole everything he could get his hands on. He promised to empower the downtrodden peasantry, and set himself to dethrone Catherine and put himself, "the rightful heir," on the throne. He threatened the countryside with death and torture if they did not follow him. (Talk about mixed messages!) Even persons in Moscow and other cities of the north, who never believed in Catherine as a legitimate monarch, were intrigued by him. It was only with great brutality that Catherine's army crushed this rampant rebellion. They caught and put Pugachev to death only because some of his own followers betrayed him. In the book, it is clear that there was plenty of precedent in Russia for the methods the communists years later employed in taking over and retaining power.
Great Catherine entertained me mightily across several days of the flu. It is a find for someone who wants to know more about Catherine the Great but wants to let an entertaining writer do the work.
Review © 2003 by Edna Boardman
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