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.
the Romanoffs. Some misgiving in regard to the future seemed to
trouble her. Peter, though a Romanoff, was emphatically a brutal
German. He lived in an entirely German atmosphere; an atmosphere
of smoke and beer-fumes and Teutonic disdain of everything Russian.
Catherine, on the other hand, had developed into a thorough
Russian. Her strong sense and feeling of policy told her to eradicate
all Germanism from her composition and wholly transnationalise
herself. Peter had an immense admiration of Prussia and Frederick,
while Catherine was a Russian patriot.
And Elizabeth hated Prussia. Throughout her last years she kept
alive the League against Frederick and spurred her generals in the
struggle. Frederick sought peace, and she refused it. France and
Austria became faint under their efforts and sacrifices, and she
lashed them to the task. All through the year 1761 her strength
ebbed, and she saw Frederick sinking from defeat to defeat. Would
death spare her to see Prussia crushed? Would that unhappy nephew
take over her power before her work was completed, and spare his
idol? Her own ministers drooped, and her resources wore thin, but
she cried for decisive and utter victory. In December a fit of coughing
brought on hemorrhage, and she entered the last stage. She died on
January 11th, 1762, in the fifty-third year of her age, not the least
picturesque figure of the Romanoff gallery of monarchs.
 CHAPTER XI
CATHERINE THE GREAT

Waliszewski, a vivid historical writer who has covered nearly the whole
period of the dynasty, calls the Empress Elizabeth “the last of the
Romanoffs.” If every rumour of those gossipy days were admitted,
few genealogical trees of the Russian aristocracy would hold good.
There have not been wanting historians who have claimed that
Catherine the Great was a natural daughter of Frederick the Great;
and a grave writer has said of Catherine’s son, Paul, that the only
ground for regarding him as the son of Peter III is his resemblance to
that monarch. We may assume that Peter, who now peacefully
ascended the throne and continued the dynasty, was the grandson of
Peter the Great, the son of his daughter Anne.
It is, however, true that the moral physiognomy of the
Romanoffs changes with Peter III, and it is not clear how a German
father and a few years of early life in Germany could so thoroughly
Teutonise his blood. We must, of course, not forget that most of what
we read about him was written by his wife or by other enemies. Mr.
Bain refuses to believe that he was brutal to Catherine, as she says.
At his accession he paid her heavy debts and settled upon her the
large domains of the late Empress. His unfaithfulness to her was at
least balanced by her own vagaries. She, a German, took the throne
from him, and she was bound to make a dark case against him in
order to justify her usurpation. They were, at all events, as ill-
assorted a pair as ever mounted a throne, and every informed person
in Europe wondered what would be the issue, and was prepared for
another revolution.
We have seen a little about their earlier years. Elizabeth drew
them in their childhood from Germany, changed their religion, and
appointed tutors to prepare them for the throne. Catherine prepared
very diligently, but Peter went in a precisely opposite direction. While
Catherine steeped herself in the Russian spirit, he remained German,
looked with contempt upon Russian ways, and surrounded himself
with foreigners. He had the vices, without the good qualities, of the
Romanoffs. He drank heavily, was boorish to those about him, and
lived loosely. Catherine tells a story which is a cameo of life at the
court, if so sordid a sketch may be compared with a work of art.
Empress Elizabeth’s private room, in which the little suppers of the
later part of her reign were held, was separated only by a door from
one of Peter’s rooms. The noise he heard in it at nights piqued him,
and he bored holes in the door, and found Elizabeth, lightly dressed,
carousing with her lover and a few intimate courtiers. He called
Catherine, who (she says) refused to peep, and then he called a
bunch of ladies of their court to come and enjoy the spectacle.
Catherine pictures him keeping dogs in their bedroom and coming to
bed, very drunk, in the early morning to kick and pummel her.
There can be little doubt that the young prince was coarse,
violent, and drunken; and Catherine hated his insipid, pock-marked
face and boorish ways. Long before the death of Elizabeth she took a
lover, Sergius Saltykoff, a handsome young fellow of Peter’s suite.
Bestuzheff sent Sergius on a mission abroad, but his place was soon
taken by a handsome young Pole, Count Poniatovski. In the
meantime, Catherine had given birth to her son Paul, and the
genuineness of the claim of the later Tsars to be considered
Romanoffs hangs upon the very slender thread of Catherine’s morals.
Saltykoff was at the time generally regarded as the father. The boy,
however, grew up to resemble Peter, morally and physically, so closely
that historians now generally consider him a son of Peter. It looks as
if Catherine, to save her position with Elizabeth, who pressed for an
heir, reluctantly consented to provide one. Legend has it that the
court deliberately instructed her to have a child by her lover if she
could not be reconciled to her husband. Catherine tells us that, when
the child was born, Elizabeth sent her a present of fifty thousand
dollars, and that Peter got the draft cancelled.
It is sometimes said that Poniatovski, who is described as being
put in Catherine’s way by political schemers, was detected by Peter
and fled to escape a whipping. The legend really runs that he was
held up by Peter’s servants, as he left the palace, and brought before
Peter. He was a youth of twenty-two, of no courage, and he expected
a whipping, but Peter laughed at his fright. Peter’s mistress at the
time, and until his death, was Elizabeth Vorontsoff, niece of a great
noble of the court; a very plain and insignificant little woman whom
Catherine disdained to notice. The prince felt that he could now force
Catherine to be courteous to his mistress, and it is said that he
arranged suppers for the quartet. The Empress, however, heard of
the liaison, and Poniatovski had to go. Catherine had a second child,
Anna, in 1758, who is believed to be the daughter of the Pole. The
court was by this time, we saw, thoroughly demoralised, as all knew
that the Empress herself caroused at night, and Catherine cast aside
all pretence of propriety. At the time of the Empress’s death her lover
was Gregory Orloff, a very dashing young officer: a young man of
superb and colossal frame, of features that fascinated women and of
the time-honoured habits of dissipation.
If we are to understand the character of Catherine, we must
endeavour to regard these irregularities with her eyes. It is sheer
nonsense to seek to put her on a moral level with Elizabeth or any
other aristocratic Russian dame who mingled amours with prayers,
and equally venerated monks and lovers. Catherine had not the least
inner respect for the Russian Church, or any branch of the Christian
Church, and its ideals. For political reasons she conformed outwardly,
but it is difficult to find that she had more than a vague and not very
serious deism. She read and corresponded with the French
“philosophers,” and in her letters to them (when she became her own
mistress) she ridiculed the “mummeries” of the priests. “I
congratulate myself that I am one of the imbeciles who believe in
God,” is the extent of her profession of faith. She did not respect the
authority and ideals of the Church, and so she regarded herself as
free. These irregularities need not in themselves be considered
inconsistent with her title of “the Great.”
Liberal writers express some surprise that her lovers were never
more than handsome and sensual blockheads. We shall see that
Orloff, little intelligence as he had, could work for her, but that she
probably never weighed. She was a woman of high intelligence and
self-confidence. She chose ministers to do work and lovers only for
enjoyment. There is no psychological mystery in such an attitude.
When Peter ascended the throne he surprised all by his policy of
conciliation. He issued an amnesty, and from all the frozen recesses
of the Empire came the victims—the sobered Lestocq, old Marshal
Münnich, Julia Mengden and her sister, the Birens, and so on—of the
earlier revolutions. Then he set himself to conciliate his subjects.
Peter the Great had forced education and public service upon the
reluctant nobles: Peter the Little removed the compulsion, flatteringly
observing that it was no longer necessary. Peter the Great had
created a secret police which had ruled the aristocracy by terror and
corruption: Peter III abolished it. Peter the Great had put crushing
taxes upon peasants and dissenters: Peter III relieved them, and,
caring nothing about Russian orthodoxy, favoured the industrious
dissenters. He abolished the corporal punishment of officers; he
confiscated the wealth of the clergy and the monks, making them an
annual allowance; he bade the monks educate themselves, and
forbade them to take young novices.
But these reforms angered one very powerful class—the clergy
and the monks—and Peter went on to alienate the army. He despised
everything Russian. Elizabeth had given him the palace (built by
Menshikoff) of Oranienbaum, about twenty-seven miles from St.
Petersburg, and there he had established a few companies of
Holstein soldiers, the nucleus or model of his future army. He fancied
himself a soldier, and spent his time there as Peter had spent his at
Preobrajenshote. After his accession he announced that the army was
to be Germanised. New uniforms were provided. Old regiments were
threatened with extinction. What was worse, he made peace with
Frederick of Prussia, who might now have been utterly crushed, and
held up that monarch to Russia as a model king and soldier.
To Catherine he was at first, as I said, generous, but serious
rumours got about that he intended to send her into a convent and
marry his Vorontsoff. At a public and important banquet he is said to
have insulted her, calling across the table that she was “a fool.” In
short, he put together an admirable collection of combustible
material, and he was surprised when the flame of revolution burst
forth.
How it was arranged is not very clear, as Catherine afterwards
claimed the entire merit, yet a dozen others claimed the merit—and
the reward. As far as one can judge, Catherine was nervous and did
little. Gregory Orloff and his brothers had not so clear a vision of the
possibilities, in case of failure, and they worked zealously. Catherine’s
little friend. Princess Dashkoff, a very romantic young lady who read
Voltaire and Diderot and had great ideas, claims that she did more
than anybody; she clearly helped to buy or convert supporters. The
French agents found money, the soldiers were secretly canvassed,
and the growing discontent with the Emperor was carefully
nourished. A statesman, Panin, was more or less won: some say at
the cost of the virtue of Princess Dashkoff. Catherine herself had,
about this time (April, 1762), a third child, who was quite
acknowledged to be the son of Orloff.
The last blunder of Peter was that, after making an ignominious
peace with Prussia, he wanted to make war upon the Danes for his
little principality of Holstein. On June 24th he went, with Elizabeth, to
Oranienbaum, and ordered Catherine, whom he refused to regard as
a serious danger, to the palace of Peterhof. The Emperor’s name-day
feast fell on July 10th, and he sent word that he would spend it with
Catherine at Peterhof. He arrived there on July 9th, to find that
Catherine had fled, with one of the Orloffs, in the early morning; and
before many hours he learned that the capital was taking the oath of
allegiance to her.
On the previous evening one of the chief conspirators, Captain
Passek, had been arrested, and Gregory Orloff had been kept under
observation by an agent carousing and playing cards with him all
night. Princess Dashkoff says that she ran about, stirring the
conspirators, and saved the situation. At all events Alexis Orloff
rushed into Catherine’s bedroom, at Peterhof, at five in the morning,
and urged her to come to St. Petersburg and begin the revolt at
once. They arrived at the barracks of the most reliable regiment at
seven, and roused the soldiers. There were soon a copious supply of
brandy and shouts of “Long Live the Empress.” Catherine went to the
Winter Palace, and courtiers stumbled over each other in their
eagerness to offer allegiance. Catherine maliciously says that Princess
Dashkoff was one of the last to arrive. The soldiers cast off their new
German uniforms, and begged to be led against those accursed
Holsteiners of Peter’s; and Catherine—she and the little, snub-nosed
Dashkoff dressed as officers—led twenty thousand men to
Oranienbaum.
Peter had sent for his Holstein guards and loudly protested that
he would fight. As the news from the capital trickled in, however, he
changed his mind and took boat to Kronstadt. It is said that when the
sentinel, in the dark, challenged him, and was told that he was the
Emperor, the man said: “Go away; there is no Emperor.” He returned,
shaking with fear, to Oranienbaum, and offered to share his throne
with Catherine. She contemptuously refused that dangerous half-
measure. Peter, weeping like a child, and begging that they would not
separate him from Elizabeth, abdicated, and was sent into the
country about twenty miles away. Elizabeth Vorontsoff was sent to
Moscow.
What precisely happened to Peter III is one of the many dark
mysteries of the romance of the Romanoffs. Five days later Catherine
coldly announced that the late Emperor had died of a colic which had
sent a fatal flow of blood to his brain. There is a rumour that he was
poisoned. There is another rumour, which is generally accepted, that
Alexis Orloff, who conducted him to Ropcha, strangled him; and there
is no evidence whether Catherine was or was not (as is generally
believed) a party to the murder.
There were the usual sunny days for all who had assisted in the
revolution. In three months nearly half a million dollars in money, and
great gifts of land and serfs, were showered upon the new court.
Many of the courtiers, however, did not long enjoy favour. In 1763,
when Catherine had gone to Moscow for her coronation, a certain
Feodor Hitrovo was arrested for treason. For some time there had
been rumours of plots to put Ivan V, the son of Anne and Anthony
whom Elizabeth had displaced, back upon the throne. Peter III had
brought the poor youth, now almost an idiot, to St. Petersburg, and
Catherine had confined him in the fortress of Schlüsselburg. The
latest rumour in the capital was that Catherine was to wed Orloff, and
that the jealous courtiers were determined to prevent her or to kill
Orloff. Whether there was a plot or no, it is clear that the promotion
of the Orloffs had caused grave murmurs. Princess Dashkoff, Panin,
Captain Passek, and other conspirators of 1762, were, to their mighty
indignation, arrested on suspicion of treason. They were released,
but their term of favour was from that moment clouded.
Another of the blots on Catherine’s reign, or one of those dark
tragedies into which the historian cannot penetrate, occurred in the
following year. The unfortunate Prince Ivan was killed in prison. An
officer of the garrison named Mirovitch plotted to release him, and it
is said that his guardians, who had orders to despatch him in case of
a dangerous effort to free him, carried out that instruction. Mirovitch
was executed, but it was remarked that there was no inquiry, and
there was not the customary punishment of the relatives of the
executed criminal. It seems, however, absurd to suppose that
Mirovitch was hired to give the opportunity of killing Ivan. History,
again, gives Catherine a not very cheerful verdict of “not proven.”
These early threats or suspicions of revolt were attributed by
Catherine to the traditional discontent and ambition of courtiers who
were ever ready to create a new throne for their own profit. But she
saw clearly enough the miserable condition of the country at large,
and she opened her reign with a determination to apply the remedy
prescribed by the liberal and humane principles of her French
teachers. There must be education, and in 1764 she issued an
instruction to the authorities who were to take up that work. Her own
ideas were necessarily vague and unscientific, and she soon found
herself confronted by the traditional difficulties: a massive and
general ignorance so dense that it did not want education, a shortage
of funds, and a corrupt and listless body of officials. A number of
technical and normal schools—in all about 200 schools—were
founded, and at St. Petersburg Catherine established a large and
admirable school for girls, but her vague general scheme came to
naught. Russia lingered on in the darkness of the Middle Ages.
The reform of law and justice was the next great need. Catherine
eagerly devoured the writings of such reformers as Montesquieu and
Beccaria, and in 1767 she issued an instruction which was so liberal
that it was not permitted to appear in French. It abounds in humane
reflections which illustrate the soundness of her attitude as a ruler in
her earlier years. “The laws must see that the serfs are not left to
themselves in their old age and illness,” she said; and “The people
are not created for us, but we for the people.” She laid it down,
vaguely, that “the rich must not oppress the poor,” and “every man
must have food and clothing according to his condition.” There were
even echoes of the new French words, liberty and equality. The
torture of witnesses was described as a barbaric practice. Sentence of
death must be imposed only in the case of political offenders.
Little came of her large scheme of reform. A Legislative
Assembly, drawn from all ranks of the people, met in 1767 to give
definite shape to her ideals, but its two hundred sittings ended in
futile disagreement. No one wished to better the condition of the
serfs at the expense of the landowners, and Catherine partly undid
with one hand what she did for them with the other. The serfs of the
ecclesiastical estates, which she secularised, were set on the way to
freedom, and Catherine theoretically wanted to see the end of a
virtual slavery which was inconsistent with her philosophy. But she
herself gave enormous estates, with tens of thousands of serfs, to
her favourites, and she knew that human beings who were
transferred like cattle were treated like cattle. In her reign the
Countess Daria Saltykoff had to be imprisoned for barbarously
causing the death of a hundred and thirty-eight of her serfs. They
were still bought and sold as blacks were in America, and their
proprietors could for slight causes send them to Siberia. The great
mass of the Russian people lived in this state of degradation.
 Catherine’s strong will nearly always failed before an internal
problem of this kind. The nobles triumphed, and Russia remained in
darkness and chains. In her later years, when her early benevolent
despotism had given place to a fierce hatred of democracy, she
persuaded herself that her people were better off than most of the
peoples of Europe. She clung, however, to other parts of her
programme of reform. Few were knouted, and no other torture was
permitted in her reign; and she boasted that she never signed a
sentence of death. Men were, nevertheless, put to death, as we shall
see; and it was commonly said that the secret police were merely
replaced by her mysterious official, Tchechkoffski, who suavely invited
suspected folk to his house. It was believed that the chair on which
his visitor sat sank below the floor, leaving only the man’s face
invisible to the servants in the room below who applied torture to his
limbs.
While Catherine pursued these and other designs of reform,
which we will consider later, her prodigality toward her favourites
caused much murmuring, and to this grievance she added the costly
burden of war. It is clear that in her early years she trusted to remain
at peace, and had no thought of the enlargement of the country. But
the greed of Frederick the Great now turned upon the decaying
kingdom of Poland, and, to obtain his large share, he had to invite
the participation of Russia in the plunder. Catherine, we saw, had
hated Frederick, her husband’s idol. It is said that amongst her
husband’s papers she found a letter in which Frederick spoke
flatteringly of her, and she began to turn to him. She did, at all
events, change her attitude, and share with him in the historic crime
which is known as the partition of Poland. She joined Frederick in
imposing upon the Poles her old lover, Poniatovski, and her armies
went to the support of his rule against the rebellion which followed.
France and Austria were now opposed to Russia and Prussia, and
France resorted to the familiar stratagem of inciting Turkey to attack
Russia. Catherine, whose energy was now fully roused, spurred her
generals to meet the Turks. They took the Crimea and a large part of
the Slav dominions of the Turk, but Austria now threatened to oppose
the southward expansion of Russia and suggested that compensation
should be sought in Poland. The first partition took place in 1771, and
Catherine secured “White Russia,” with a population of 1,600,000
souls. Turkey, in turn, was forced to surrender the Crimea, pay a
large indemnity, and open the Dardanelles to Russian ships and the
Ottoman Empire to Russian trade.
But the burden of the war had fallen, as usual, upon the
impoverished people, and murmurs rumbled from one end of Russia
to the other. The plague broke out at Moscow, and tens of thousands
died. The country seethed with discontent, and it chanced that at
that moment a figure appeared round which the discontent might
crystallise. A Cossack named Pugatcheff claimed that he was the
Empress’s husband, Peter III, who was supposed to have been
murdered at Ropcha, and his little troop quickly grew into a
formidable and devastating army. Soldiers sent against him enlisted
under his banner; brigands, barbarians, and Poles joined in his
campaign of loot and slaughter; an immense area of the country was
captured or laid waste by him. The revolt went on for four years,
when Pugatcheff was captured and beheaded. From that date
Catherine’s zeal for “the people” abated; and it was with some
recollection of this that she in a later year put an end for ever to the
power and remaining independence of the Cossacks.
The Empress, nevertheless, continued her work of reform.
Official and judicial corruption was as rife as ever, and she retraced
more practically the spheres of jurisdiction, and separated the
administrative from the judiciary officers. Like Peter (though unlike
him in her extravagant liberality to favourites, which increased the
evil) she hated and sternly prosecuted official corruption. Her
scheme, both of administration and of the dispensing of justice, was
a great reform, embracing every class of her people, if we take a
liberal view of the little she did for the serfs. She encouraged
agriculture and industry, made wise efforts to ensure the colonisation
of the fertile steppes of the south which she had acquired, founded
about two hundred new towns, and secularised (with just
compensation) the enormous property of the clergy and the monks.
She pressed the introduction of medical service, in order to combat
the appalling death-rate of the prolific people, and boldly submitted
to vaccination and imposed it upon her people. Her philanthropic
institutions included a school for nearly 500 girls and a large
Foundling Hospital which, during her reign, received forty thousand
children. In reforming the terribly loose fiscal system she made
notable improvements and raised the national revenue from ten to
eighty million roubles; but the increasing extravagance of her court
made a mockery of her financial reforms.
In fine, as is well known, she corresponded with Voltaire and the
other leading French thinkers, and made strenuous efforts, in her
earlier years, to arouse a corresponding culture in Russia. Her letters
to Voltaire are now believed to have been written, at least in part, by
Alexis Shuvaloff, and one cannot say, nor would one expect, that her
genuine letters and other writings indicate any great literary skill;
though her constant humour and vivacious personality make them
good reading. She purchased the libraries of Voltaire and Diderot,
and made famous collections of works of art, rather because it was
the part of a great monarch to patronise art than from any personal
taste. To Russian art and science, apart from (to some extent) letters
and history, she gave no impulse; and her own “discoveries” in the
field of science were amiable nonsense. However, the great literary
output which she stimulated, the foundation of an Academy (on the
Parisian model) at St. Petersburg, and the encouragement of the
theatre must be counted amongst her untiring efforts to educate
Russia. How the French Revolution checked her ardour, and turned
her love of France into hatred, we shall see later.
This programme of work, which I am compelled to compress into
a few paragraphs, fairly entitles Catherine, when we take its results in
conjunction with her extension of her Empire, to the epithet of “the
Great.” That she chose men of ability to carry out her will, even to
assist her in making plans, goes without saying; but she paid close
and industrious attention to all that was done, and she fierily
resented the obstacles to the complete realisation of her scheme. I
have doubted if the modern spirit can grant Peter the title of “the
Great” for two reasons: first, because of features of his character
which we must describe as brutal; secondly, because of the
vagueness and casualness of many of his plans and the lack of
obstinacy in realising them. Catherine was far from brutal. Her
character had defects, which we will consider, but they are not such
as to make us refuse her the homage her work deserves. That, on
the other hand, her plans were imperfect, inadequate to the vast
need, often sketchy and not enforced with masculine stubbornness,
we must admit; but she was a great ruler. Let us complete her work
before we regard the personal features that lower her prestige.
The Crimea, now part of Russia, remained in a state of constant
disorder, and this became at length an open revolt. Catherine
suppressed the rebellion, and a few years later Turkey was induced to
relinquish all claim to the old Tatar principality. Catherine was now
supremely eager for a further extension toward the blue waters of
the Mediterranean, the immovable goal of all Russian policy. She
suggested to the Austrian Emperor, with whom she was now on
excellent terms, that Turkey should be dismembered. Austria should
take the nearer provinces; a new kingdom of Dacia should be
founded, recognising the Orthodox Church; and the Greek Empire
should be revived and extended so as to embrace Constantinople.
Her grandson Constantine was to be the first Greek Emperor.
Austria accepted the scheme, and Russian agents were sent to
agitate in the Slav provinces of Turkey. In 1787 Catherine herself
made an imposing journey in the south. Turkey clearly saw the threat
to its Empire, and in 1787 it declared war. Potiamkin, Catherine’s
favourite at the time, was entrusted with the supreme command, and
marched south. Then the ever-ready Swede fell upon the flank of
Russia, and Catherine, who could from St. Petersburg hear the roar
of the Swedish guns on the Baltic, had a momentary fright. She
called up all her energy and stirred her commanders, and in the
following year she had peace with Sweden and was free to attack
Turkey, in conjunction with the Austrians. The details do not concern
us. The war lasted five years, and a little more of the coast of the
Black Sea was brought within the Russian Empire. It may be added,
briefly, that continued internal trouble in Poland, of which Catherine
took as mean an advantage as any, led to the second and third
partitions of that country. Poland ceased to exist; the once great
kingdom, ruined by the quarrels and obstinate conservatism of its
nobles, was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
The vast addition to her territory which Catherine obtained from
the spoils of Poland will not be regarded by the modern mind as a
title to glory. More creditable was the wresting of territory from the
Turks, but her chief merit lies in the reform-edicts (she counted 211
of her ukases under that head) with which she sought to uplift
Russia. Against this we have her personal repute as it is given in
many historians. There were those at the time who called her “the
Messalina of the north,” and writers on her still differ in their estimate
of her moral personality.
That she was, in the narrow sense of the word, flagrantly
immoral no one questions. We may recall that Europe at large was
still very far from the standard of these matters which adorns our
generation. Paris under Louis XV, or the Directorate, or even
Napoleon; London under the Georges; even Rome under the Popes of
the period would not pass modern scrutiny. Russia was a little more
mediæval than the others, and Catherine inherited a court in which
an Empress of advanced years and conspicuous piety had given an
example of wild debauch. To a woman of Catherine’s views and
strong personality there would seem to be no reason for restraint;
and she observed none.
We have seen her early lovers, and I do not intend to examine
the lengthy gallery with any minuteness. Gregory Orloff, an indolent
and very sensuous Adonis, enjoyed her extravagant favour until
1772. His three brothers and he cost her, in those few years, about
nine million dollars. In 1772 she sent Orloff on a mission to the Turks,
and during his absence another mere sensualist, Vassiltchikoff,
earned her favour. Gregory heard it, and covered the two thousand
miles which separated him from St. Petersburg with a speed that beat
all records. He was directed to retire to his provincial estate, and
from there he bombarded the palace with entreaties. Catherine
hardly attended to imperial business for several months. At length
she definitely discharged Orloff with an annual income of 75,000
dollars, a present of 10,000 peasants, and the right to use the
imperial palaces and horses when he willed.
 Vassiltchikoff made way in 1774 to the famous Patiomkin, a
different type of man from any of the others. He was in his thirty-fifth
year and, as we saw, he had ability. Her letters to him show the
nearest approach to tender feeling that we ever find in Catherine,
except in her relations with her grandchildren and her dogs.
Patiomkin was of an age to take his position philosophically when his
two years of intimate relationship were over, and he remained her
favourite minister. From first to last it is calculated that he cost her
about twenty-five million dollars.
After Patiomkin there was a period of what one is almost
tempted to call promiscuity. Man after man was lodged for a brief
period in the luxurious chambers near Catherine’s room, and any
handsome young officer felt that promotion lay within his power.
Stories are told of ambitious young men persistently mistaking their
rooms and of Catherine maternally sending them home for
correction. No young soldier of athletic build and fair face knew when
he would be drafted to the well-known suite, and find a preliminary
present of 50,000 dollars in gold in his cabinet. For the closer details
of his initiation I must refer the reader to Waliszewski’s “Roman d’une
Impératrice.” In 1780 Lanskoi seemed to have taken firmer root, but
he died in Catherine’s arms in the same year. Jermoloff succeeded
him, and in 1792, when Catherine was sixty-three years old, she
adopted her last and strangest lover, Plato Zuboff, a handsome youth
of twenty-two. On this series of mere ministers to her pleasure
Catherine spent a sum which is estimated at more than forty million
dollars. That was a national scandal and entirely unworthy of her
character.
It is curious that in other respects Catherine had a great regard
for propriety. None dared repeat in her presence the kind of story or
verse that would have pleased Peter the Great, and she discharged
several officials for loose conduct. She also forbade mixed bathing;
though she allowed artists to enter the women’s baths. She was
sober in eating and drinking. The chief luxury of her plain table was
boiled beef with salted cucumbers, and until her later years, when
she took a little wine, she generally drank water coloured with a little
gooseberry-juice. She knew well, however, that in other parts of her
palace her favourites were enjoying the most luxurious banquets, and
she never checked their criminal waste. Her own son, Bobrinski,
whom she seems to have regarded with indifference, continually
outran his generous income and contracted heavy debts. She virtually
exiled him to the provinces. It was reserved for her lovers to riot as
they pleased; that is to say, as far as money was concerned, for she
had the strictest guard kept upon their conduct.
With all her strength of will and tireless energy she loved social
intercourse of the liveliest description. She would play with children,
especially her grandchildren, for hours, and she had not the least
affectation of haughtiness. Although she never visited her nobles, she
was just as reluctant to receive the ceremonious and tedious visits of
foreign sovereigns. To her smiling favourites she responded, as we
saw, with an almost criminal generosity. When Potiamkin’s niece
married, she gave her half a million dollars, though her uncle had
already been enriched beyond any man in Russia; and she gave the
same sum to the bridegroom to pay his debts. When, on the other
hand, she wanted some difficult work done, especially by her
commanders, she had a persuasiveness that none could resist.
Scores of times her mingled pleading and driving induced her armies
to do what seemed to her generals impossible.
She had occasional flashes of temper, but her quick humour
seized upon this defect and helped her to control it. This other,
occasional self she called “my cousin,” and she watched it carefully.
Normally her good nature was remarkable, and one could give three
anecdotes in illustration of it for every anecdote that refers to her
irregularities. She rose at five or six every morning, and would often
light the fire herself. One morning, when she had done this, she
heard shrieks and curses up the chimney, and realised that a sweep
was at work in it. She hastily put out her fire and asked the man’s
pardon. On another occasion it occurred to her to ask, during a long
drive, if the coachman and servants had dined. She learned that they
had not, and she held up the carriage while they did so. When she
heard that a lady she liked was undergoing a dangerous delivery, she
had herself driven to the house, and she put on an apron and
assisted the midwife. If her pen became bad, she would (or did in
one case) scribble on and tell her correspondent that she had not
courage to trouble a valet to bring a new one. On one occasion she
went out of her room to find a valet for that purpose. She found him
playing cards, and she took his hand while he ran for a pen. But
perhaps the best anecdote is that which tells of one of her secretaries
whom she overheard saying, after she had angrily scolded an
ambassador: “What a pity she loses her temper.” He was summoned
to her room, and in an agony of apprehension he fell upon his knees.
Catherine handed him a diamond snuff-box and quietly advised him
in future to take a pinch when he was tempted to give useful advice
to his sovereign.
This geniality was in her later years somewhat soured. The first
cause of the change was the French Revolution; the second was the
unfortunate development of her son Paul. A short consideration of
these two points will form a useful introduction to the change which,
with the nineteenth century, comes over the rule of the Romanoffs.
That humanitarian zeal with which Catherine sought to reform
her country, and which she was careful to communicate to the
grandson Alexander whom she reared for the throne, was plainly due
to the influence of the French philosophers. If, like modern Europe,
she learned irreligion from them, she also, like the modern world,
learned the elementary lesson of the rights of man. She introduced
tolerance into Russia. That she sheltered the Jesuits, when even the
Pope sought to extinguish them, was not wholly a matter of
toleration. “Scoundrels” as they were (to use her own genial
description), they helped her to keep Poland quiet. But she believed
in toleration, and she believed that the state of the mass of the
people was a reproach to any right-minded monarch. Peter’s reforms
had had a utilitarian basis: Catherine’s were humanitarian, learned
from the French humanitarians.
But the dark development of the Revolution turned her zeal for
France and democracy into hatred. In 1791 she wrote that if the
Revolution succeeded it would be as bad for Europe as if Dchingis
Khan had come to life again. In 1793, when she heard of the
execution of the king, she wrote: “The very name of the French must
be exterminated.” She proposed that all the Protestant nations should
embrace the Greek religion “in order to preserve themselves from the
irreligious, immoral, anarchic, scoundrelly, and diabolical pest, the
enemy of God and of thrones; it alone is apostolic and truly
Christian.” We see the new Russia already foreshadowed: a Russia
fighting western ideas in the name of sound ideals. But Catherine
took no action beyond controlling the importation of French literature.
Even in that she showed her old personality. She read the Parisian
journal, the Moniteur, herself before she allowed it to circulate. One
day she found herself described in it as “the Messalina of the North.”
“That’s my business,” she said; and she allowed the issue to pass.
The second source of annoyance was her son Paul. It seems—
though the point is disputed—that from the first she was cold to him
(a fair indication that he was Peter’s son), and to her grief he grew
up into a counterpart, in some respects, of Peter. It is said that she
one day learned that he asked why his mother had killed his father
and occupied the throne. He visited Frederick at Berlin against her
wish, and he married a German princess, the Princess of Hesse,
whom she disliked. This lady died in 1776, and he then married
another German princess, the Princess of Württemberg. He was
thoroughly German, flattered and duped by Frederick. “Russia will
become a province of Prussia when I am dead,” Catherine sighed.
In 1781 she sent the pair on a tour of Europe. “The Count and
Countess du Nord,” as they styled themselves, had a magnificent
reception at Paris, which made little impression on Paul, and a fresh
grievance awaited them on their return. Their sons, the little grand
Dukes Alexander and Constantine, had been removed by the Tsarina
for education, and she declined to give them up. The Prince and his
wife had to live apart, and Paul brooded darkly over every feature of
his mother’s conduct. He had the Romanoff taint in a form not unlike
that we find in Peter III, except as regards drink and coarseness. He
was moody, irritable, sensitive, suspicious, and obstinate. He
quarrelled with every good man, and as a result had about him a
circle of dissembling adventurers. Some said that he was epileptic;
others that he took drugs. It is said that when he was at Vienna an
actor refused to play Hamlet, observing that one Hamlet was enough.
 Such a man readily accepted the rumour that Catherine intended
to disinherit him and pass on the crown to his elder son. She kept
him out of affairs, and, although he fancied himself a soldier and, like
Peter, brooded over dreams of military reform, she kept him out of
the war. He retorted with pungent criticisms of her young lovers; and
they insolently repaid him. “Have I said something silly?” Zuboff
asked one day when Paul expressed approval of what he had said.
It is believed that if Catherine had lived six months longer, Paul
would have been excluded from the succession. The Grand Duke
Alexander, his eldest son, was now a fine and promising youth of
twenty. Catherine had taken minute pains with his education, and
even with the choice of a bride for him. Eleven German princesses
were invited to St. Petersburg, and sent away disappointed, before
the young Princess of Baden-Durlach was selected. The parents were
not consulted. Everybody expected that Alexander would succeed his
grandmother; indeed it was rumoured that the decree was already
composed and would be published on January 1st, 1797.
And on November 17th, 1796, Catherine died suddenly of
apoplexy. There seems little doubt that the cynical sensuality of her
seventh decade of life destroyed her strong constitution. I say
cynical, not that she was ordinarily cynical, but because there seems
to be in her later conduct a somewhat cynical defiance of moral and
religious traditions. This was weakness rather than strength; the
same weakness which squandered forty million dollars upon lovers
when the national treasury had to be replenished by extortion. Her
mind was greater than her character; her achievements were greater
than both. Russia—the mighty Russian people—was still chained in
the dungeon of mediævalism. But Catherine, the German who
divested herself of Germanism—“Take out the last drop of German
blood from my veins,” she said to her physician—the pupil of the
French humanitarians, impressed the fact upon the Romanoffs that
they ruled a semi-civilised world.
 CHAPTER XII
IN THE DAYS OF NAPOLEON

The story of the Romanoffs has three phases. The first is the
preparation, when the primitive democracy of the Slavs is slowly
destroyed and the people are enslaved to an autocracy. The second,
and longest, phase is the enjoyment of power by the Romanoffs: the
succession of brutal or genial, strong or weak, merry or pious
sovereigns whom the accident of birth or the red hand of revolution
raises to the throne. A certain nervous instability runs through nearly
the whole series, but it is almost invariably expressed in a
determination to enjoy—to kill, to drink, to love, to spend, to seize
territory, to use power for self-gratification. In Peter the Great we find
a glimmer, amidst the old disorder, of a new day. In Catherine the
Great it revives and grows. Now the middle phase is over. We enter
upon a period of grave and sober-living monarchs, at first bent upon
the reform of their people, according to their ideals, then struggling
in fear against the people they have awakened from a long slumber.
The reign of Paul I is merely a dark episode between the second
and the third phase. He was now forty-two years old: a short, ugly,
bald, sour-tempered man, of diseased nerves. He hardly concealed
his joy as he hastened to the throne and strove to obliterate the
memory of his great mother. If she must have an imperial funeral, his
martyred father shall have one also. He digs up the corpse, or what is
left of it after thirty-four years, puts it in a magnificent coffin, and
makes the survivors of the conspiracy of 1762 walk humbly behind it,
before they are exiled. St. Petersburg is still a land of rumours, and
we do not know precisely what form his mad idea took. Some say
that there was body enough left to seat in the throne; some say that
the skull was put upon the altar and crowned with a superb diadem;
some say that only the boots and a few fragments of Peter III were
found. Whatever there was received an imperial funeral; and the