Catherine the Great (28 page)

As her galley weighed anchor on 23 May, Catherine was leaving the longest settled Russian lands for the intersection of the Orthodox and Islamic worlds. She had given her first audience to a Tatar delegation at Kostroma.
⁴⁷
Now she was entering an area where a brutal missionary campaign, sponsored by Church and state in the early 1740s, had culminated in the forcible mass baptism of some 400,000 Finno-Ugric people: Mordvins, Chuvash and Maris. The driving force behind the attack on ‘the vile Mordvin faith’ had been none other than Catherine’s trusty Archbishop Dimitry, who claimed to have barely escaped with his life when a group of Mordvins attacked his convoy in protest against the razing of a sacred burial ground. This incident led to reprisals by Russian troops and mass flight into the forest on the part of the native population. In the following decade, hundreds of mosques were destroyed, particularly in areas where they might ‘seduce’ converts to revert to their former ways.
⁴⁸
Though Orthodox missionary work had continued in a more emollient key under Catherine, who scarcely troubled to conceal her distaste for Elizabeth’s methods, violence was still a living memory in the Volga region in 1767. So it is perhaps no coincidence that no converts were presented to the empress at Kozmodemyansk or Cheboksary (‘superior to Nizhny Novgorod in every way’), or that she sailed straight past Svyazhsk, where the government office in charge of the conversions had been closed in 1764.
⁴⁹
A reminder of the deviant potential of popular Orthodoxy came at Kozmodemyansk, where a merchant presented her with an icon of the Holy Trinity with three faces and four eyes. She sent it to the Holy Synod, anxious lest ‘senseless icon-painters’ succumb to the temptation ‘to add several further arms and legs’ in the manner of Chinese paintings. Appalled by ‘such a ridiculous and unworthy image’, the Synod swiftly decreed that no more icons should be painted without the express permission of its own specialist artists. That was ‘all very well,’ Catherine retorted, but ‘scarcely possible in an empire of Russia’s dimensions’ since ‘it could give rise to a lot of pestering’. She required only that ‘all bishops be instructed that in future no such indecent images should be permitted in their dioceses’.
⁵⁰

Had there been any doubt about the friendliness of the reception she could expect in Tatar territory, it was dispelled when the empress arrived at Kazan on the evening of 26 May. ‘All along the way my welcome has been equally affectionate,’ she told Adam Olsufyev, ‘only here it seems a degree higher owing to
the rarity of their seeing me.’
⁵¹
Overlooking the point where the Volga carves out a majestic 90-degree turn to the south, Kazan is one of the most attractively situated towns in Russia. The decorations in honour of Catherine’s visit were no less impressive. She told Panin that the triumphal arches there were better than any she had so far seen. One of them had been designed by Julius von Canitz, director of the town’s high schools, founded at the instigation of Ivan Shuvalov to feed suitably qualified noble and non-noble entrants to Moscow University in 1758 (the poet Derzhavin was the most famous pupil). Struggling against unsympathetic neighbours, who littered the road to the schools with dung, Canitz increased the roll to a peak of 125 between his appointment in 1765 and 1773. But Vladimir Orlov found the institution ‘in a very bad condition’ in 1767, ‘with 12 teachers and only 40 pupils’ whose speeches in German, French, Russian and Latin were ‘very imperfect’. Catherine did not visit the school, but she encouraged the provincial governor to revive the amateur theatricals that Canitz had instituted there as a way of fostering the ‘pleasant address and the
savoir vivre
essential in polite society’.
⁵²

‘Pleasant address’ seemed a distant enough prospect at Kazan where the cancellation of Canitz’s plays was a symptom of feuding between the governor and local nobles. Such tensions were only to be expected in a provincial society that had only recently begun to break away from patriarchal ways of life, in which the greater part of the nobility, living
en famille
on small estates in circumstances not much different from their own peasants, had been unaccustomed to socialising.
⁵³
Arguments among the Russian elite nevertheless helped to cast a more flattering light on the Tatars. The Orlovs were by no means the last Russians to be impressed by the simplicity of the Muslim service they witnessed at a mosque where the attentive humility of the worshippers contrasted sharply with the disrespectful behaviour of many Orthodox in church.
⁵⁴
Catherine herself watched with pleasure at a ball on 31 May as ‘the Mordvins, Chuvash, Cheremis, Votiaks and Tatars…all danced according to their custom to the sound of Tatar music and songs’. But it was impossible not to be unnerved by the kaleidoscopic variety she encountered in Kazan. In the course of the week she spent there, the empress saw the Tatar children at the seminary, finally received a delegation of recently baptised converts, greeted the son of the Kazakh khan and was presented to a party of Siberian merchants who had travelled almost 500 miles to petition her.
⁵⁵
Such experiences impressed upon her as never before the complexity of her multinational empire. Daunted by the challenge facing the Legislative Commission, she sat down to write her promised letter to Voltaire:

Although Catherine’s original intention had been to sail all the way to Astrakhan, the
Geographical Description
allowed for a shorter cruise ending further north, at Dmitrevsk. In the event, to speed her return to Moscow, the empress travelled only as far as Simbirsk, almost 700 miles downstream from Tver and ‘one hour eleven minutes and twenty seconds ahead of St Petersburg time’.
⁵⁷
Here she stayed on an estate belonging to Ivan Orlov. The beauty of the Volga lands was breathtaking. ‘These people are spoiled by God,’ she wrote to Panin, whose brother Peter owned an estate not far away. ‘Everything you can imagine is here in plenty and I do not know what else they could need: everything is available and everything is cheap.’
⁵⁸
Having taken seven weeks to reach her destination, she raced back to Moscow in seven days, travelling by night and sleeping through the heat of the steppe, pausing only to change horses. Hundreds of subjects who lined the roadside to pay homage were passed by in a blur. When she reached the Golovin Palace at 7 p.m. on Thursday 14 June, she needed two days’ rest to recover from the journey.
⁵⁹

Though the Court was immediately plunged into mourning–first for Prince Frederick of Prussia and then for Joseph II’s unhappy second wife, Josepha, who had fallen victim to smallpox in May–there was nothing gloomy about the empress’s mood.
⁶⁰
While Vasily Maikov celebrated her return with verses hymning the usefulness of her enlightened voyage, the deputies converged on Moscow in readiness for the opening of the Legislative Commission. Once Catherine had put the finishing touches to the protocols, she took the opportunity to relax.
⁶¹
Although she had to review the cavalry on exercise in the Petrovsky woods and there were the usual festivities in honour of her accession day and
Paul’s name day on 28 and 29 June, she preferred the less formal entertainments to be found on the various imperial estates dotted around the old capital. As soon as she returned from the Volga, she inspected her new apartments and stables at Kolomenskoye. ‘There is no need for any sort of rich decorations inside,’ she had insisted the previous December, after six months of close involvement with the plans. Though the project had been scheduled for completion by the Feast of St Peter at the end of June, she eventually moved in on 11 July, greeted at the gates by the local clergy in full fig.
⁶²
While waiting for Prince Makulov to finish the work, she found time to play on the new sledging pavilion at Pokrovskoye, to drive to the Sparrow Hills on the far side of the city, and to watch the fishing at Tsar Boris’s Ponds.
⁶³
She also inspected the stallions brought up from the provinces for the annual sale at the imperial stud farms at Khoroshevo and Pakhrino, where a huge quadrangular stable for 532 horses, under construction since 1752, had been completed in 1764.
⁶⁴
Perhaps she saw Gardi, a black stallion bred from Lombard stock in 1766, whose exceptionally luxuriant tail made him one of the most celebrated animals of the age.
⁶⁵

Hunting was by far Catherine’s most frequent leisure activity. Between 18 June and 15 October, the court journal (by no means necessarily a complete record) registered some thirty-seven separate outings. The detailed breakdown–two grouse shoots, three hare chases and no fewer than thirty-two hawking expeditions–gives a good sense of her personal preferences, already reflected in institutional changes over the previous five years, which had seen the animal hunt cut back while the staff of the bird hunt rose from thirty-nine to forty-nine. As in St Petersburg, the preferred time for hawking was after lunch, at four or five in the afternoon, when Catherine liked to ride out in her carriage with her falconers alongside her to while away the journey.
⁶⁶
They also accompanied her as far as the palace at Bratovshchina on her pilgrimage to worship at the remains of St Sergii on his feast day, 5 August. For all her reservations about monasticism, the empress had always found at the Trinity
lavra
a scholarly atmosphere quite different from the obscurantism she encountered at the Fëdorov monastery, and it was a pleasure to return to the library she had so admired in 1762.
⁶⁷

All this, however, was but a prelude to the ceremonial opening of the Legislative Commission on 30 July. Whereas her predecessors’ abortive commissions had been dry, bureaucratic affairs, hidden away in the chancelleries of St Petersburg, Catherine wanted hers to begin in a blaze of publicity. It was launched in the manner of a major Court occasion with a glittering carriage procession from the Golovin Palace to the Kremlin. The deputies assembled in the Monastery of
Miracles before processing with the empress to a liturgy at the Dormition Cathedral at which those who belonged to other faiths remained outside. Afterwards, Catherine, wearing the small crown, stood before the throne in the audience hall of the old Kremlin palace (it does not survive today) with copies of her Instruction on the table beside her. In a notable departure from earlier Muscovite assemblies, only one clerical deputy had been elected. The ubiquitous Archbishop Dimitry, elected on behalf of the Synod, made a speech comparing the empress with Justinian. Replying on her behalf, the vice chancellor Prince Alexander Golitsyn (Alexander Stroganov’s friend from their student days in Geneva) stressed her hopes that the deputies would confer glory on themselves and their age by contributing to ‘the common good, the happiness of mankind, and the introduction of good manners and humanity, tranquillity, security and happiness to your dear fatherland’. Those who had already gathered in Moscow (some 460 out of the eventual total of 564) were permitted to kiss her hand.
⁶⁸

On the following morning, the Commission began its formal proceedings in the Palace of Facets. Once Bibikov had duly been chosen as its marshal, the deputies listened to a public reading of her Instruction by Grigory Orlov. Though Catherine had compiled her treatise in French, each deputy was presented with a copy of the Russian translation by her secretary, Grigory Kozitsky, published simultaneously with a German version on 30 July. ‘There is not a foreign word in it,’ the empress boasted in a characteristic effort to advertise the richness and subtlety of her adopted language. ‘However, the subject matter is not of the simplest, and I hope that no one will mistake one word for another.’
⁶⁹
Fond of listening to her friends read to her (and conscious of the illiteracy of a good proportion of the Russian elite), Catherine had written her text to be read aloud, giving it ‘an urgent rhythm’ by imitating Montesquieu’s series of ‘short, staccato chapters’ in 526 laconic paragraphs of her own.
⁷⁰
Even so, it took a full five sessions of the Commission to hear it out, as Yelagin and Volkov succeeded Orlov on the reader’s podium.
⁷¹

Catherine was not an original thinker and the Instruction was not a systematic work. Yet there was nothing conventional about her treatise. It set out her vision of a tolerant, educated society in which her subjects’ liberty and property would be protected by unambiguous laws, established by a virtuous absolute sovereign and implemented by judges who were to presume the accused innocent until proved guilty. The widespread nineteenth-century belief that she had suggested that it was better to release ten guilty people than convict a single blameless man prompted Solzhenitsyn to quip that Stalin had reversed the empress’s maxim by
preferring to incarcerate 999 innocents rather than miss a single genuine spy. Although there is no such passage in the Instruction–it was Diderot, in his critical commentary on the text, who declared that ‘for humanity’s sake, we should allow a crime to escape unpunished rather than put innocence to death’–the legend says much about the Instruction’s reputation as a repository of Enlightened thought.
⁷²
Never had such radical ideas been publicly proclaimed by a Russian ruler.