Catherine the Great an unlikely candidate for the Russian throne

In the June 19 column, we discussed the rise of Russian imperial power in the time of Peter the Great, with particular reference to his impact on Russian religion and political expansion into Ukraine. We continue that saga with a reflection on the life and times of one of his successors, Catherine II, better known as Catherine the Great.

Catherine was an unlikely candidate for the Russian throne, given the fact that she was not in the least Russian, being born and raised in Germany, and raised as a Lutheran. She was born in Pomerania in the Kingdom of Prussia.

What is now Germany was at the time of Catherine’s arrival a collection of over 300 squabbling little states, each ruled by some very minor royal family. Intrigue, gossip, diplomacy and of course war were the topics of the day. Her family was among the poorer of the nobility although it was tied to the royal family of Sweden. King Frederick the Great of Prussia was desperate to gain the sympathy of the Russian czars so that he could rival his enemy, Austria. With a certain amount of diplomatic skullduggery, the young princess was engaged to the heir to the Russian throne, the future Peter III.

Catherine met Peter when she was 10 years old and detested him on sight. Peter was childish, impulsive and had no manners. Catherine’s diary refers to her fiancé as an “idiot” and the “drunkard from Holstein.” When they married, the marriage was not consummated for several years and Peter spent their wedding night playing with his tin toy soldiers on the floor beside the wedding bed.

Nevertheless, Catherine embraced the Russian Orthodox faith. When she was sick with the fever as a young adult, the courtiers feared for her life and asked if she wanted to speak with a Lutheran pastor, but she refused and demanded an Orthodox priest. This delighted the court. She spent hours each day learning the Russian language and was seen pacing in her room for hours at night memorizing vocabulary. There was not a lot of other things going on with the couple in the evening.

Catherine was born in an important time, in the year 1726. This was the age of the Enlightenment, when philosophers across the European world were arguing against tradition and religion. The best known Enlightenment writer was Voltaire, who wrote that he looked forward to the day when the last nobleman was strangled in the bowels of the last priest.

At first, Catherine and the royal heads of Europe embraced many of the precepts of the Enlightenment ideals, and they called for “Enlightened

despotism” whereby they could ignore traditional restrictions on their power. Catherine embraced the Enlightenment ideals because in her mind this could justify her new religious policies, continued conquest and the murder of her unenlightened and moronic husband.

Six months after becoming emperor, Peter III began to realize that his wife detested him and he discovered that she was actually plotting against him. When he ordered one of her friends arrested, she fled to the army and they acclaimed her empress regent and her husband deposed. Peter III somehow managed to die a few months later, with the official cause of death being “apoplexy.” Indeed.

Catherine was crowned empress of Russia without one drop of Russian blood in her veins. Fortunately, she had managed to get pregnant from the czar and bore a son, Paul. Given the considerable number of future lovers she had, many wondered if Peter III was really the father of the boy. If they were wise, they wondered about it in silence. As it turned out, the future Emperor Paul was even more of an imbecile than his dad and was snuffed out by his own sons.

Although Catherine was officially Russian Orthodox, she did not care a great deal for organized religion, in keeping with the Enlightenment. In 1773, she decreed the toleration of all religions, including both Jews and Muslims. She was particularly careful to win the support of the Muslim clerics in what is now Ukraine, and accepted their semilegal authority over their own believers. She allowed them to build mosques in their territories and provided state funding for them. She gave Muslims the right to own serfs. One can only wonder how “enlightened” this appeared to the serfs.

Catherine dealt with the Orthodox Church quickly. She nationalized all church lands, emptied out the monasteries, seized church endowments and removed the study of religion from state schools. What religious instruction went on was strictly supervised by court officials. Priests lost their status as government employees and were obliged to live off of the offerings of the faithful, which given the endemic Russian poverty was a hard life indeed. Those who disagreed with her religious reforms got a oneway ticket to Siberia.

Catherine’s religious reforms in some ways might be compared to those of her contemporary leaders in what is now the United States in the separation of church and state. Nonetheless, Catherine insisted that she had the right to defend Orthodox Christians in other nations. This claim of a right to intervene casts a long shadow in Russian history.

The seizure of church lands and money gave her the funding she needed for imperial expansion, and Russian forces moved across Siberia and into the distant land of Alaska. These conquests also took Russia into the south, in part because of the Turkish alliance with Poland, a traditional rival of Russia.

In the Russo-persian War of 1796, Catherine’s army occupied Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Crimean, and moved into eastern Ukraine. As we see the modern Russian forces pounding the eastern portions of Ukraine in the media today, it is Catherine’s conquests they are repeating. By the end of her reign, most of Ukraine was occupied and remained under Russian control until the 1917 revolution.

Catherine and her lover Potemkin made a visit to their new lands. Potemkin thoughtfully arranged for temporary villages to be built filled with happy looking peasants so Catherine could see her happy new subjects as they rode through the countryside.

Many people are familiar with the trite old proverb attributed to Arnold Toynbee that those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it. As the smoke rises from Kyiv and other ruins, this author suspects that more accurate principle might be that those who do know history are condemned to watch it helplessly happening again and again and again.