Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

Making a virtue from necessity, Panin envisaged the Prussian alliance as the first building block in a new ‘Northern System’ designed to protect Russia’s hegemony in the Baltic. He described what he meant to Ivan Chernyshëv, who set out for London as ambassador in 1768:

By the Northern System we have in mind and mean the largest and closest possible union of northern powers in a direct focal point for our common interest, in order to oppose to the Bourbon and Austrian Houses a firm counter-weight among European Courts, and a northern peace completely free from their influence, which has led so often to harmful effects. 16

This was easier said than done. Frederick had no interest in an alliance with Britain and was anxious not to be drawn into Russian machinations in Sweden. Willing enough to support such machinations as a way of embarrassing the French, the British saw no reason to support Catherine’s ambitions in Poland or the Ottoman Empire. Though the empress renewed the Anglo-Russian trade treaty of 1734 in 1766, on terms favourable to Russia, Macartney failed to conclude a diplomatic alliance because Catherine insisted on unilateral British assistance in the event of war with the Turks. ‘This Court has listened to me with the most provoking phlegm and the most stoical indifference,’ the ambassador was forced to admit. ‘The result of the whole is a flat refusal.’ 17In the end, the only tangible evidence of a wider Northern System was the defensive alliance concluded between Russia and Denmark—still a significant naval presence in the Baltic—at the end of February 1765. This scarcely counted as a close union of northern powers. And even if it had, there remained an obvious defect in Panin’s Northern System, which left the southern and south-western parts of Russia’s extensive borders exposed to precisely the sort of incident that sparked off the Russo-Turkish War in 1768.

Though he remained at Catherine’s side until 1781, Panin’s authority was never the same again. Against his advice, she decided to direct the war through a newly created council, which bore all the marks of her deft approach to government. Though the council was a purely advisory body, the empress left its members in no doubt that they were complicit in any decisions that might emerge from their deliberations:

I intend to carry out all the measures proposed with great firmness, since I take them to be measures which you, moved by zeal, fervour and devotion to me and to your country, have unanimously advised me to take in this important matter: hence, if any one still has any doubts, let him say so without loss of time. 18

Not content with risking her empire in war with the Turks, Catherine risked her own life in October 1768 by electing to be inoculated against smallpox. As an advocate of fresh air and a wholesome diet, the empress generally maintained a healthy disrespect for doctors—‘charlatans’, as she described them on the death of the French king, ‘who always do you more harm than good, witness Louis XV, who had ten of them around him and is dead all the same’. 19Still, faced with two evils, as she emphasised to Frederick the Great, ‘every reasonable man’ would choose the lesser, ‘all other things being equal’. 20So, rather than relapse into more indecisive shuttling between suburban palaces—her pattern, as we have seen, throughout the summer of 1768—Catherine determined to submit herself to a controversial treatment. Inoculation had been banned by the Sorbonne as an interference with the workings of Providence and was opposed even in some Enlightened circles on the grounds that it might lead to infection. Provided all went well, she could claim to have acted both rationally and courageously. 21

The doctor chosen to perform the operation was the fifty-six-year-old Thomas Dimsdale, whose celebrated treatise on the subject had been published in 1767. 22When he arrived in St Petersburg at the end of August, Dimsdale found himself ‘upon as free and easy a footing in the imperial palace as he could be in the house of any nobleman in England’. 23Despite his execrable French and Catherine’s minimal English, doctor and patient established an immediate rapport (their interpreter, on days when he was not paralysed by gout, was Alexander Cherkasov, who had studied informally at Cambridge in the early 1740s and now headed the Medical College). Understandably nervous about exposing a foreign sovereign to risk, and sharing the widespread belief that diseases varied according to climate and geography, Dimsdale hesitated to operate until he was sure that his treatment would be as effective in Russia as it had been at home. Catherine gave him the confidence to continue, even when tests on impoverished local youths proved equivocal. Adding sauce to an already titillating story, a Scottish merchant in St Petersburg reported that the doctor, whose presence in Russia was an open secret, had ‘free access’ every morning to the empress’s bedroom, where Grigory Orlov often sat on the bedspread beside them. 24Grigory, however, was away on a hunting expedition when Catherine finally summoned Dimsdale to the Winter Palace in the dead of night on 12 October. Apart from Cherkasov, only two others were present at the inoculation: Panin, the treatment’s leading advocate, and Caspar von Saldern, the fixer from Holstein who had attached himself to Paul’s household in the 1760s.

Complaining of low mood, Catherine retreated to Tsarskoye Selo on the following day. At first she was able to live relatively normally, chatting and playing cards in the afternoon, taking regular walks outside and even a drive to inspect the new road to Gatchina. 25As she retired to her apartments over the course of the next few days, Panin let it be known that she continued to work, and that her only reported symptom, other than ‘a very favourable eruption of small pox, very few in number’, was a mild fever. 26She also complained of persistent giddiness, ‘in a manner according to her like drunkenness’, and of mild constipation, which Dimsdale treated with his trusty bedtime laxative made from calomel, crabs’ claws and tartar emetic, either crushed into pills or mixed with syrup or jelly. To keep her temperature down, he prescribed the occasional glass of cold water and a stroll in the unheated Great Hall. Having noticed the first marks on her arm on the evening of 19 October, he spent the whole of the following day on watch in her apartments. Catherine woke at seven, having ‘sweated considerably in the night’. ‘The inflammation of the arms was spread considerably & a number of small pustules were discoverable around the incision.’ Only one spot had appeared on her forehead, offering no serious threat to her complexion, and two more on her hand or wrist. ‘Her complaints were of stiffness under the arms, particularly the left, of some pain in her back and legs and a sort of general weariness, but not sleepy as yesterday. Upon the whole Her Majesty was very brisk and cheerful the whole afternoon.’ 27Now the danger was past, she began a period of active convalescence, informing Saltykov in Moscow on 27 October that she had not only remained on her feet throughout, but experienced only the sort of minor discomfort that was to be expected. ‘I tell you this happy outcome so that you can counter any erroneous rumours.’ 28After another drive and a walk in the fresh air, she felt sufficiently confident to reassure Falconet, who had written to her in mock reproach for defying the Sorbonne, that she had no intention of succumbing to the disease: ‘They often decide in favour of absurdities, which in my opinion should have discredited them long ago; after all, the human species are no longer goslings.’ 29

Following Catherine’s return to St Petersburg on 1 November, Paul, who might have been inoculated earlier had he not been recovering from chickenpox, was treated next evening after a formal Te Deum in the palace chapel led by Archbishop Gavriil. 30More than a hundred nobles soon followed suit. ‘Starting with me and my son,’ Catherine boasted to Ivan Chernyshëv a fortnight later, ‘there is not an aristocratic household that does not contain some of the inoculated—and many complain that they had smallpox naturally and so cannot follow the fashion.’ Grigory Orlov and Kirill Razumovsky were among the ‘countless others’ who had ‘passed through Mr Dimsdale’s hands’, including even ‘beauties’ such as Princess Shcherbatova and Princess Trubetskaya. ‘See what setting an example can do! Three months ago, no one wanted to hear of it, and yet now they look on it as salvation.’ 31