Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon
Profile Books, £25
It’s not until you get one-third of the way through this detailed biography that Catherine gets rid of her pathetic husband and is proclaimed empress and sovereign of all of Russia by the Imperial Guard. It had been a long journey from the moment when Sophie Friederike Auguste, as a 15-year-old princess from the small German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, arrived in St Petersburg to marry the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter, until she finally became the absolute ruler of Russia. And, in the end, it all happened so quickly.
When she set out for the Russian court she wanted to “please the grand duke, to please the empress (her mother in law, Elizabeth), and to please the nation”. To please, she embraced the custom and culture of the Russian court, converted to Russian Orthodoxy, changed her name to Catherine and learned the Russian language.
The marriage was very unhappy, but she did produce a son and heir. On the orders of her mother in law, the baby was taken away from her at birth, and she was left untended for hours after.
Catherine could not have bonded with her baby and she probably suffered from post-natal depression, according to Simon Dixon. There have always been doubts about the child’s paternity, but Dixon believes he was the son of the Grand Duke and not Catherine’s lover Sergei Saltykov.
Catherine clearly pleased the Russian people because she got away with being a usurper, with promoting a string of lovers to influential positions, the most famous of whom was Grigory Potemkin, and ruled for 34 years until her death in 1796.
Once in charge, she began the process of codifying Russian laws and modernising Russian life and she continued with the Westernisation project begun by Peter the Great. Dixon explains the strategies – both military and social – that she adopted to expand the Russian empire into Belarus, Lithuania and Crimea and, later, Poland to turn her adopted country into a major power.
This sympathetic book takes the reader through Catherine’s journey as an absolute monarch from wannabee social reformer to the conservative upholder of the status quo that she became. From being concerned about – and wanting to deal with – the plight of the serfs to ending up giving the aristocrats even greater control over their land and their serfs.
Dixon also paints an elaborate picture of court life. He delves into Catherine’s personal, social and political life to explain what made her tick. There did not seem to be a part of life or culture that she didn’t get involved with; she was a substantial patron of the arts, literature and education.
Unimaginable roubles were spent on conspicuous consumption, clothes, palaces, parties, celebrations, balls and travel. Every conceivable event had to be celebrated – her birthday, name day, accession day, favourite retainer’s wife’s sister’s daughter’s best friend’s day – with banquets for thousands. Dixon describes a woman who, in essence, was a show-off. Everywhere she went and everything she did involved opulence, splendour and huge public display.
A great reformer she may have been in modernising the country, but I didn’t get the sense of a woman in a hurry, not from this book, at any rate. I was fascinated by the descriptions of new building and war memorials that she had erected. One such involved a block of stone so big that it took hundreds of men a month to roll it a mile.
Catherine did everything big and the book raised in me a sneaking admiration for that. She was also a prolific writer of letters. Her circle included the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and Grimm, to whom she wrote such revealing letters that she wanted them burned to prevent them being published. Today she would probably be a champion tweeter with a massive number of followers. But I do think this book should come with a health warning – every time Baron Sergei Stroganov is mentioned, I feel hungry.
Mary Maguire
