Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

In April 1790, the chief of the St Petersburg police entered Catherine’s inner sanctum to present her with Denis, a four-year-old boy of unknown origin found wandering the streets. Since no one had yet answered advertisements for his parents, the empress adopted him at the Court’s expense and placed him in the care of a courtier living close by the Hermitage. 98She was capable of demonstrative acts of kindness to those who had no right to expect them. Yet she was certainly no saint. Despite her idealised view of the Russian people as a whole, she took a dim view of many of the individuals she met on her travels, reserving some of her cattiest remarks for the earnest merchants’ wives who served her at table. Though her legislation allowed for a limited degree of social mobility, her policy was always to encourage her subjects to seek satisfaction in the station into which they had been born. As befitted a believer in a rigid social hierarchy, she relaxed only in the privacy of a narrow circle of aristocratic friends which remained remarkably constant throughout her fifty-two years in Russia (Ivan Betskoy, one of her first contacts at Elizabeth’s Court, died at the age of ninety-three in August 1795). Having begun her reign as a usurper, she sought a degree of legitimacy by portraying many of her early edicts as an attempt to complete the work of Peter the Great. But she was never a slavish imitator. 99On the contrary, having sought throughout to exceed the achievements of her glorious predecessor, she ended her life surrounded by images of her own triumphs on the European stage: paintings commemorating the battle of Chesme by the English artist Richard Paton were originally hung in the Hermitage but significantly moved in 1779 to the throne room at Peter’s own summer residence, Peterhof. 100Catherine had presided over the greatest expansion of Russian territory since the mid-sixteenth century and seen her empire’s economy grow in proportion. She had shown at least as great a commitment to the power of ideas as Peter I. But since she had ultimately been unable to trust the Enlightenment’s fundamental belief in self-development, a reign which began by fostering a degree of intellectual independence ended by enveloping some of Russia’s most interesting writers in clouds of suspicion. Catherine had not succeeded in her aim of establishing a firm rule of law, and the rational bureaucratic institutions she had worked so hard to establish never emasculated the informal patronage networks by which Russia has long been governed. Although she had offered her subjects the example of a tolerant and trusting ruler, her gentle methods have rarely been adopted by her successors. For them, the empress’s conduct has most often been an anti-model, not least because it has served as a subtle form of ammunition for their critics for most of the two centuries since her death.

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