Catherine the Great Ruled Russia for 34 Years From a Throne She Seized in a Borrowed Guards Uniform

She arrived from a minor German principality at fourteen, taught herself Russian barefoot at night, took the crown from her husband in a Guards coup, dressed autocracy in the language of Voltaire, then censored Voltaire's own books when the French Revolution reached her borders.

The borrowed uniform

At six on the morning of June 28, 1762 (Old Style, July 9), a tall, dark-eyed officer pushed open her bedroom door at the summer palace of Peterhof. Catherine was thirty-three, the unhappy wife of the new emperor Peter III, and she had been waiting for this knock. Alexei Orlov told her, in her own written account of the day, "It is time to get up; all is ready for your proclamation." She dressed without stopping to make her toilet and climbed into his carriage (Catherine's own account, in Warren B. Walsh, Readings in Russian History, 1948).

At the gates of the Ismailovsky Guards regiment in St. Petersburg there were only twelve men and a drummer. The drummer sounded the alarm and the soldiers came running out, in her words, "kissing me, embracing my hands and feet and clothes, and calling me their deliverer." A priest walked ahead with a cross. The Semenovsky regiment marched out to meet her crying "Vivat!" The Preobrazhensky arrived last, apologizing: their officers had tried to hold them back. "We want what our brothers want," they told her. She had borrowed a Guards officer's uniform for the day, the old national uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment that her fellow conspirator Princess Dashkova remembered being put away when Peter III made his army dress like Prussians. By nightfall she had 14,000 men behind her, the Senate and the Church had sworn allegiance, and her husband had abdicated at Oranienbaum (Victoria Ivleva, on the uniform's provenance, Vivliofika).

Eight days later Peter III was dead at Ropsha, a country estate twenty-five versts away, in the custody of Alexei Orlov. Catherine's account is carefully vague. "But God disposed otherwise," she wrote, then listed his last requests, "his mistress, his dog, his Negro and his violin," of which she sent only the last three. The throne she had just won was not hers by blood. It was hers because a regiment had said so. That was the founding fact of her thirty-four years, and it set the limit on everything she would do with them.

Barefoot at night

To see how a German princess with no claim and no army came to be woken at six with a throne waiting, go back eighteen years. She was born Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1729 in the garrison town of Stettin, the daughter of a minor Prussian general and a scheming, socially climbing mother. "I was not very joyfully welcomed," she later wrote of her arrival in the world (National Geographic). At fourteen she was summoned to Russia by Empress Elizabeth, who needed a bride for her nephew and heir, the Grand Duke Peter, a childish Holstein prince who loved toy soldiers and hated the country he was born to rule.

Sophie understood, before she had any power, that legitimacy in Russia was something you performed. She converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy, took the name Catherine Alexeevna, and set about learning the language with a convert's urgency. "To make more rapid progress in Russian," she remembered, "I rose from my bed at night and, while everyone slept, memorized the lessons that Adadurov gave me. Because my room was warm and I had no experience of the climate, I neglected to put on my shoes and studied in my bedclothes" (Catherine, Memoirs, tr. Cruse and Hoogenboom, Modern Library, 2005). The barefoot studying gave her pleurisy and nearly killed her. When she was delirious and her mother called for a Lutheran priest, she waved him away and asked for an Orthodox one. The court was charmed. Her own tutor had to be told to stop: "That's enough studying for her," the empress said, "she's smart enough without it."

The marriage was a disaster. Peter was infantile, vainglorious, and possibly impotent; the match went unconsummated for years by her own account. For eighteen years she read, took lovers, and waited. She bore a son, Paul, in 1754, and in her memoirs later hinted that her husband had not fathered him. She read Montesquieu and Voltaire. She watched the Guards depose emperors and learned the lesson of her century: in St. Petersburg, the Preobrazhensky regiment "disposed of the crown like the Pretorians of old," as the editor of her memoirs put it (Memoirs of the Empress Catherine II, Project Gutenberg).

When Empress Elizabeth died in December 1761 and Peter III took the throne, he alienated the army, the Church, and the Guards in six months, making peace with Prussia on humiliating terms and ordering his Russian troops into Prussian uniforms. Catherine had a choice, as she framed it later in her memoirs: it was "a question of perishing with him, or by him, or else of saving myself, my children, and perhaps the state from the disaster" that was Peter III. "The last choice seemed to me the surest" (National Geographic, citing her memoirs). She did not aim to be regent for her son. She took the throne for herself, with her lover Grigory Orlov and his brothers doing the work in the barracks.

The costume of the philosophes

A usurper with no blood claim needs legitimacy in two directions, and Catherine needed it badly. At home she reached for the language of the Enlightenment. Abroad she reached for the man who had coined that language.

In 1767 she summoned the Legislative Commission, the first body of elected representatives ever assembled in Russia, hundreds of deputies drawn from every class except the private serfs. To guide them she wrote the Nakaz, or Instruction, 655 articles lifted liberally from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments. Its most quoted article was also its central contradiction. "The Sovereign is absolute," it began, "for there is no other authority but that which centers in his single Person that can act with a Vigour proportionate to the Extent of such a vast Dominion" (The Nakaz, 1768 English translation, NYPL). Russia, she argued, was too vast for anything but autocracy, and autocracy was justified because she would exercise it humanely. The Commission met for a year and a half, produced no new code of laws, and was dissolved when war broke out with the Ottoman Empire in 1768. But the Nakaz was published in more than twenty foreign editions. Voltaire, taking it at face value, declared it "the finest monument of the century" (Thomas Riha, ed., Readings in Russian Civilization, via UNC Greensboro). France forbade its entry as too radical.

The fifteen-year correspondence with Voltaire was the other half of the project. He addressed her as "the Semiramis of the North," "Saint Catherine," "Our Lady of St. Petersburg," and she showered him with sable furs and jewelled snuffboxes (Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, 2011). When European opinion murmured about the murder at Ropsha, Voltaire waved it away: "I know that [Catherine] is reproached with some bagatelle about her husband, but these are family matters in which I do not mix." To a friend he was blunter, joking that Peter had been freed from "a small annoyance of losing an empire of two thousand miles" by "a violent colic diarrhea," and that "a truly great good can result from this small evil" (Marek Mosakowski, on Rulhière's testimony). French philosophy, as one historian noted, became a tool of Russian diplomacy. Catherine knew every letter to Voltaire would be passed around the salons of Paris, and she wrote accordingly.

Her masterpiece of the form was the smallpox inoculation of October 12, 1768. Smallpox was scourging her court, and she feared it for herself and for her son and heir, Paul. Variolation, the precursor to vaccination, was known but feared. Catherine invited the English doctor Thomas Dimsdale to St. Petersburg and insisted on being his first Russian patient, in secret. Her first minister, Nikita Panin, told Dimsdale, "In your hands are the lives of two of the most important personages in the world" (ABC News, citing Luke Ward, The Empress and the English Doctor). A yacht waited in the Gulf of Finland to whisk Dimsdale to safety if she died. She developed a mild case, recovered in two weeks, and then publicized the triumph everywhere. Dimsdale inoculated more than 140 courtiers. A medal was struck with the legend "She herself set the example" (CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases). The British press hailed her "great resolution and firmness of mind, as well as of uncommon attention to the welfare of her people." Frederick the Great wrote reproachfully that she had risked too much. She had risked exactly enough: one act of personal courage, staged as a spectacle, to drag a fearful empire one step forward.

The man who helped her hold the empire together through the wars that followed was Grigory Potemkin, a one-eyed giant of a general she summoned south during the crisis of 1773. Their partnership became, by every surviving letter, the great political love affair of her reign, and probably a secret marriage. "Since I very much desire to preserve fervent, brave, clever, and skilful individuals, so I ask you not to endanger yourself for naught," she wrote him from the siege of Silistria in December 1773 (Douglas Smith, ed., Love and Conquest, 2004, reviewed by Simon Sebag Montefiore, NYRB). She called him her "tiger," her "hero," her "twin soul." They quarreled ferociously. "We quarrel about power, never about love," she told him. "This is the truth" (Massie, Catherine the Great). Potemkin became her commander-in-chief, the governor of half her empire, the architect of the new southern cities and the Black Sea fleet, and the man who engineered the annexation of Crimea in 1783. He stayed her partner until his death in 1791, long after the physical affair had ended. "What was the genius of Catherine the Great?" Stalin once asked his circle by the Black Sea. "Her greatness lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin to govern the State" (Montefiore, NYRB).

The pretender and the revolution

Two upheavals broke the costume.

The first came from inside Russia. In 1773 a Don Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev launched a revolt on the Volga and, in the most dangerous stroke, proclaimed himself to be Tsar Peter III, miraculously saved from Ropsha, come to free the serfs. Runaway peasants, factory serfs, Bashkirs, and Cossacks flocked to him. At first Catherine played it down for European consumption, telling Voltaire in January 1774 that "this impudent Pugachev" was merely "a common highway robber" (Massie, Catherine the Great). By the spring his army numbered over fifteen thousand and he had burned the city of Kazan. "For more than six weeks," she confessed to Voltaire, "I have been obliged to devote my uninterrupted attention to this affair." The revolt was crushed in 1774, Pugachev was betrayed by his own followers and executed in Moscow in January 1775, and Catherine learned the lesson that would shadow the rest of her reign. Her throne rested on the nobility and the Guards. The millions of serfs beneath them were the raw material of the next Pugachev. She did not free them. She tightened serfdom, extended it to the newly conquered lands, and gave the nobility a charter of privileges in 1785 that bound the gentry to her in exchange for their monopoly over the peasants.

The second upheaval came from France. The disciple of Montesquieu and the friend of Voltaire watched the Revolution of 1789 turn to regicide and recoiled. "I shall remain an aristocrat," she wrote to her correspondent Grimm; "that is my metier" (Aspects of European History 1494-1789). In 1790 a young nobleman and former protégé, Alexander Radishchev, published Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, an indictment of serfdom and autocracy. Catherine read it and filled the margins with notes. The author, she declared, was "a rabble-rouser, worse than Pugachev," "infected and filled with the French madness," "inciting the serfs to bloody rebellion." The book "could not be tolerated" (Massie, Catherine the Great). Radishchev was sentenced to death; Potemkin, quietly, urged mercy, writing her, "I've read the book you sent me. I am not angry... Your deeds are your shield." She commuted the sentence to ten years in Siberia. Then she began to censor the Enlightenment itself. In 1792 she ordered the confiscation of a complete edition of Voltaire's works. In 1793 she forbade books "dealing with the French revolution." In September 1796 she established Russia's first formal censorship system and shut the private printing presses. The empress who had been acclaimed as the Semiramis of the North ended her reign closing down the words of the man who had given her the title.

She died of a stroke on November 17, 1796, aged sixty-seven, thirty-four years to the month after the morning Orlov knocked on her door. In her last years she had expanded the empire by force, partitioning Poland three times, in 1772, 1793, and 1795, until it vanished from the map, and annexing Crimea. She had shelved the reforms. In her memoirs she had drafted her own epitaph, half in jest: "Here lies Catherine II, born in Stettin in 1729. She arrived in Russia in 1744 to marry Peter III. At 14, she had three desires, to be loved by her husband, Empress Elizabeth, and her people. She omitted nothing to achieve this" (National Geographic, citing her memoirs). The husband was dead by her hand, the empress was long dead, and the people, the millions she never freed, were not asked.

Read the full life: Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House, 2011).