The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Read online

  Though the idea that Catherine was a nymphomaniac is pure speculation, one thing is sure: she was a graphomaniac. Catherine wrote about herself from the time she arrived in Russia, in 1744, at the age of fourteen, until her death, in 1796, at age sixty-seven. The memoirs are not one but three main documents in French. She wrote her first full memoir around 1756; her middle memoir (in three parts) dates to 1771–73, a text she revised in 1790–91; and she began the final memoir (in two parts) around 1794. In addition, there are two early, short verbal self-portraits, two extensive outlines for the middle and final memoirs, numerous sketches, notes, and anecdotes for the memoirs, and autobiographical letters. These autobiographical writings in French and Russian add up to seven hundred pages, forming the last and largest of a dozen volumes of her works, which the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences published in 1907, the first time this archival material was made public in Russia.8 Under Catherine’s successors—her son and his male descendants—the memoirs remained a state secret because they indicate that Paul was perhaps illegitimate and thus he and his offspring were not Romanovs. Moreover, Catherine’s unflattering picture of life at court and in the royal family, not to mention her and Peter’s affairs, were an embarrassment to the wholesome image of the nineteenth-century Russian royal family. Before 1907, scholars knew about the existence of only the final memoir, which circulated after her death in several handwritten copies. A copy was used for their first publication, in London in 1859, by the Russian radical Alexander Herzen (1812–70), in English, German, French, Russian, Swedish, and Danish.

  This is the fourth English translation of her final and also fullest and longest memoir, and only the second complete translation; moreover, we are the first translators to study Catherine’s original manuscript. 9 We also translated her outline for the memoir, noting what she crossed out and added as she was writing. Our goal has been an accurate, readable translation that conveys her voice, which combines a well honed art of plain speaking with a vigorous style of thought. In fact, Catherine tells us that how she writes is essential to her rhetorical purpose: “Besides, this writing itself should prove what I say about my mind, my heart, and my character.”10 Catherine appears to have sought and found a profound connection between herself and her writing. For more than fifty years, she used her autobiographical writing to understand herself as a human being, a woman, and an Empress. She wrote to take stock of her life and reign. Catherine also wrote to persuade future readers, for each memoir contains a different overall rhetorical purpose related to her concerns at the time she was writing.

  This preface traces Catherine’s autobiographical impulse over the course of an extraordinarily rich, accomplished, and controversial life. She expected her readers to be familiar with the history of her reign, which she does not recount in the memoir. Those eager to encounter Catherine and her memoir directly with no further introduction should have a sufficient overview of her reign and her memoirs from the preceding few pages. The remainder of this preface illuminates in detail the historical context, legacy, and uniqueness of Catherine’s memoirs. It addresses the importance of writing to Catherine’s rule and reputation abroad, the influence of the memoirs on Catherine scholarship since her death, and the genesis and unusual structure of this significant, original document. It brings together literary and historical analyses of the memoirs in a contribution to Catherine scholarship that is meant to be informative for those encountering Catherine for the first time and for experts alike.

  A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF A GREAT LIFE

  Born on April 21, 1729, Princess Sophie Auguste Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst died of a stroke on November 6, 1796, as Empress Catherine II of Russia. The space between her birth and death is divisible into three parts; with each transformation of her identity, Catherine acquired a different title and name to match her new role. From 1729 to 1744, she was Princess Sophie, the daughter of German nobles; from 1745 to 1762, she was Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna, wife of the heir to the Russian throne and mother of his son and successor; and finally, from 1762 to 1796, she was Empress Catherine II. The opening of her last memoir indicates that her mother’s family connections—more than Catherine’s personality, experiences, or desire for glory—paved the way for her marriage to Peter III, who was Catherine’s second cousin. Catherine’s mother, Princess Johanna Elisabeth (1712–60), came from the same German family as Peter III, the house of Holstein-Gottorp (1544 –1773).11 Peter’s father, Karl Friedrich (1700–39), was Princess Johanna’s paternal first cousin and married Anna Petrovna (1708–28), the eldest daughter of Peter I, “the Great” (1672–1725). 12 In addition to her cousin’s marriage, Princess Johanna had another connection to the Russian royal family: her brother Karl August had been engaged to Anna’s sister, the future Empress Elizabeth, but had died before the wedding.13 These ties to the Russian royal family assumed great importance for Catherine when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1741 and brought Anna’s orphaned son Peter to Russia as her heir. A year later, when Elizabeth sought a wife for her nephew and heir, she chose her dead fiancé’s niece Catherine.

  According to Catherine’s early and middle memoirs, Princess Johanna performed her job as mother and aristocrat well, and did everything to arrange a prestigious royal match for her daughter. Two presentation portraits of Catherine were sent to Elizabeth.14 Elizabeth in turn performed kind gestures for Catherine’s family. In 1742, Elizabeth became the godmother for Catherine’s new sister, Elisabeth (1742–45), named after her, and sent a portrait of herself set in diamonds that were worth 25,000 rubles. She also provided an annual pension to Catherine’s maternal grandmother, Princess Albertine Friederike (1682–1755) of Baden-Durlach.15 To please Elizabeth and potentially further his own interests in Russia, the Prussian King Frederick II, “the Great” (1712–86, reigned 1740–86), promoted Catherine’s father to Field Marshal. Frederick the Great and Princess Johanna also intrigued in the Russian court, where other factions favored a French or Saxon bride. Aside from Peter, Princess Sophie’s only other serious suitor was her mother’s brother, Georg Ludwig (1719–63), who proposed and was accepted by the young Princess, but not her parents, who had greater aspirations for her. In late 1743, Elizabeth invited the fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie and her mother, but for reasons unknown, specifically not her father, Prince Christian August (1690–1747), to Moscow.

  On February 9, 1744, Princess Sophie arrived in Moscow. As her early and middle memoirs make clear, although Catherine was born into a minor German noble house, her mother had prepared Catherine well for life at a royal court. In fact, Catherine shows her disappointment in the quality of Russian court life. Thanks to her mother’s godmother, the dowager Duchess Elisabeth Sophie Marie of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1683–1767), she and her mother had spent several months each year at one of the most brilliant courts in Germany, where she met and played with some of the future royalty of Europe. While her mother traveled in Europe to keep up family contacts, Princess Sophie stayed with her grandmother in Hamburg and visited, among other places, the Prussian court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. Her governess, Elisabeth Cardel, a French Huguenot and professor’s daughter, introduced her to the customs of French society and to French classical literature. This education allowed her to aspire to a royal marriage.

  As Grand Duchess, Catherine’s position depended on producing a male heir and cultivating political supporters at court. She was under constant scrutiny—no part of her life at court, nor anything in the memoirs, most especially her love life, was private. Catherine had innate political instincts that guided her well during and after her introduction to life in the Russian court. By contrast, even such a successful veteran of court politics as her mother nearly caused her and her daughter’s dismissal before the wedding.16 Princess Sophie willingly learned Russian, and on June 28, 1744, she converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and became Ekaterina Alekseevna, in honor of Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine I; the next day, she was betrothed and became Her Imperial Hig
hness Grand Duchess.17 Married on August 21, 1745, the sixteen-year-old bride and seventeen-year-old groom, according to Catherine’s middle memoir, failed to consummate their marriage until 1754, when each was having an officially sanctioned affair in the hopes that experience would encourage them.18 After two miscarriages, Catherine gave birth, on September 20, 1754, to Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich, the future Paul I (d. 1801), perhaps fathered by Sergei Saltykov (1726–1813). 19

  The significance for Catherine of the long-awaited birth of a male heir constitutes the underlying plot of her early memoir, written around 1756. Her son made Catherine’s position at court much more secure, for she was now not only the wife of the heir apparent but also the mother of the future heir. Catherine’s personal security became especially important as Elizabeth’s health worsened and a succession struggle loomed .20 Thus in 1756, in a letter to her mentor, Hanbury-Williams, Catherine planned ahead. “After being informed of her death and making sure that there is no mistake, I will go straight to my son’s room.”21 Her son and timely information through her allies were crucial to her political and even physical survival. The Empress countered Catherine’s intrigues by isolating her—from her son, friendly courtiers, and bad news about Elizabeth’s health—to make her less of a threat. As the memoirs make clear, the Empress also carefully kept Catherine on a limited budget of 30,000 rubles per year and watched what Catherine spent. However, Catherine ran up a debt of six hundred thousand rubles by 1762, money she used to buy the loyalty of courtiers and of her husband, as well as dresses. 22 After another miscarriage, she had two more children, a daughter, Anna Petrovna (1757–59), by a future King of Poland, Count Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1732–98), and by Count Grigory Orlov, a son, Count Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, born on April 11, 1762 (d. 1813), without any of the usual fanfare. On June 28, Catherine seized power, aided by forty supporters, including Orlov and his four brothers, and became Catherine II, Empress of Russia. This pragmatic mixture of love and politics affected her relations with her son, Paul, and with Orlov, and would reach its apogee with Prince Potemkin. Catherine’s personal relations had serious political consequences for her and others due to the concentration of power in individuals and the intimate, familial nature of rule in Russia at this time.23

  In all her memoirs Catherine balances her relationships with her husband and with Elizabeth, for although her ultimate future depends on Peter, her immediate future is in Elizabeth’s hands. This central double thread in the memoirs reflects a system of inheritance in which Elizabeth could choose and, equally important, dismiss her chosen successor. Having disinherited his eldest son, Alexei, on February 3, 1718, in a manifesto, on February 5, 1722, Peter the Great issued the Law of Succession to the Throne, in which he concluded: “We deem it good to issue this edict in order that it will always be subject to the will of the ruling monarch to appoint whom he wishes to the succession or to remove the one he has appointed in the case of unseemly behavior.” 24 He nevertheless died in 1725 without naming a successor, and his second wife, born Martha Skavronska, a Livonian peasant, became Catherine I (1684– 1727). Surely it was no more fantastic for a well-connected German Princess, not only married to Emperor Peter III but also related to him and Empress Elizabeth, to become Empress.

  Much has been made of Catherine’s ominous desire for the throne, which she does not hide in the memoirs. For example, on the eve of her wedding, filled with foreboding, Catherine consoles herself: “My heart did not foresee great happiness; ambition alone sustained me. At the bottom of my soul I had something, I know not what, that never for a single moment let me doubt that sooner or later I would succeed in becoming the sovereign Empress of Russia in my own right.” Catherine’s correspondence with Hanbury-Williams gives some idea of her machinations to promote her husband, her son, and by extension herself during an uncertain succession. This all seems quite damning evidence of excessive ambition, except that it was in fact possible, though unlikely, for Catherine to rule legitimately—if Elizabeth named her as heir. According to the early and middle memoirs, Catherine’s mother urged Procurator General Prince Trubetskoi to ask the Empress whether her title should include Heiress to the Throne, and Elizabeth declined (50, 453). Yet the final memoir ends with a very important conversation between Catherine and Elizabeth that hints at the possibility that Elizabeth might disinherit Peter III, which reinforces Catherine’s case for her legitimacy.

  While Catherine’s legitimacy was questioned in Russia, in the eyes of public opinion in Europe her coup and the consequent murder of her husband reflected badly on the stability of Russia and its government, which undermined her credibility.25 Catherine’s final memoir addresses her ability to create a stable government by stressing her good judgment, even temper, fairness, and ultimately, her genius for rule. Catherine’s long rule broke a pattern. In eighteenth-century Russia, coups were the rule, not the exception. In the absence of male heirs of the right age, the practice of naming an heir appears to have led to a series of coups by unmarried female rulers and their favorites.26 In 1727, Catherine I was succeeded by the last direct male heir of the Romanov line, Peter II (1715–30), Peter the Great’s grandson by his son Alexei (1690–1718).27 Before her death, Catherine I had signed a will naming first Peter II and then her daughters, Anna and Elizabeth, as heirs.28 After the sudden death three years later of Peter II at age fifteen, Elizabeth was pushed aside for Anna Ivanovna (1693–1740), the widowed Duchess of Courland and daughter of Peter the Great’s half brother and co-czar, Ivan V (1666–96). On her deathbed, Empress Anna designated her grandnephew, the infant Ivan VI (1740–64), as heir, and her German favorite, Ernst Johann Bühren (1690–1772), Duke of Courland, as regent.29 Bühren lasted twenty-two days before being ousted by the infant’s parents, Anna Leopoldovna of Mecklenburg and Prince Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Bevern. In November 1741, Elizabeth seized power and imprisoned Ivan VI for life; unfortunately for Catherine, he was killed on her watch in 1764. Later, the French philosophe Denis Diderot (1713–84) advised Catherine to reinstate primogeniture as a check on the ruler’s power, which she of course could not do without making her own rule illegitimate.30 But her son, Paul, in his rejection of all things Catherinian, had three sons, and upon his coronation, he immediately returned to a system of primogeniture and the ideal of a proper royal family. However, as Catherine feared, this did not prevent Paul, who behaved as a tyrant, from being overthrown and killed in a coup. Ironically too, if the memoirs are accurate and Catherine in fact knew, Paul was perhaps biologically a Saltykov, and so despite all the male heirs, the Romanov bloodline ended not with Nicholas II (1868– 1918) but with Peter III and Ivan VI.

  Because of the fundamental weakness of her position, Catherine’s success depended on her political skills, her policies, and her personality. Her memoirs paint an unflattering picture of Elizabeth’s personality and style of rule, and Catherine thus implies that she has done things differently. 31 For example, under Elizabeth, allies could become enemies overnight, and such elder statesmen as Bestuzhev-Riumin were humiliated, stripped of all privileges, condemned to death, and exiled. Elizabeth thus continued her predecessors’ method of midnight arrests, torture, and imprisonment of her enemies, which one historian has termed “mini-coups.” 32 In contrast, Catherine carefully promoted and rewarded opponents until they were no longer in a position to harm her. Like Elizabeth, Catherine depended for support on family clans, political factions, ministers, favorites, and the elite guards, who formed a complex network of alliances. Throughout her early reign, Catherine relied extensively on the clan of Grigory Orlov (her favorite from 1760 to 1772), who with the Chernyshev extended family and the elite guards supported her coup.33 Her opponents, the faction around her son’s governor, Count Nikita Panin (1718–83), favored making Paul the Emperor and Catherine his regent until his majority in 1772, and generally tried to limit Catherine’s power. As 1772 approached and Panin agitated for transferring rule to Paul, Catherine’s son became a double-edged sword in h
er career, important for her legitimacy on the one hand and a potential (though never actual) threat to her power as he grew older and became independent. Catherine quashed several conspiracies, and after she put down Pugachev’s armed revolt in 1774, her hold on power became reasonably secure.

  Catherine was above all a working ruler, unlike Elizabeth. In the memoirs, Catherine criticizes Elizabeth, who let her advisers and favorites write up papers based on what she said, and often did not follow through on matters. In contrast, Catherine did her own writing, had a good memory for details, delegated well, and expected things to get done. As Empress, Catherine wrote and read every day, adapting her ideas, which she acquired through reading classical, French, German, and English political philosophy, to what was possible in Russia. She inherited a country that Peter the Great had dramatically turned in the direction of modern European statehood at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Reforms, however, had remained incomplete. After Peter’s death, in 1725, the six rulers who followed did not build significantly or systematically on his reforms. Intelligent, well-read, energetic, and ambitious, Catherine, like Peter, applied herself to all aspects of Russian politics, society, history, and culture, and had a profound and lasting impact on Russia and Europe.