CATHERINE THE GREAT

In her memoirs, Catherine wrote this description of her talents:

“I used to say to myself, happiness and misery depend on ourselves; if you feel unhappy, raise yourself above unhappiness, and so act that your happiness may be independent of all eventualities. With such a disposition I was born… and with a face, to say the least of it, interesting and which pleased at first sight, without art or effort. My disposition was naturally so conciliating that no one ever passed a quarter of an hour in my company without feeling perfectly at ease and conversing with me as if we had been old acquaintances. Naturally indulgent, I won the confidence of those who had any relations with me, because everyone felt that the strictest probity and goodwill were the impulses that I most readily obeyed, and, if I may be allowed the expression, I venture to assert on my own behalf that I was a true gentleman, whose cast of mind was more male than female, though, for all that, I was anything but masculine, for, joined to the mind and character of a man, I possessed the charms of a very agreeable woman.”

SOURCE: ALEXANDER HERZEN, ED., MEMOIRS OF CATHERINE THE GREAT (NEW YORK: APPLETON, 1859), 319–20.

In late December 1761 the empress died and Peter III ascended the throne. He was not popular with many of the powerful at court, and he made things worse by pursuing controversial domestic and foreign policies. He may also have contemplated exiling Catherine to a convent so that he could marry his latest lover, Elizaveta Polianskaia. These proved to be fatal mistakes. In June 1762, after giving birth to a baby fathered by her current lover, Grigori Orlov, Catherine organized a coup against her husband. Peter was arrested, and church, military, and government leaders proclaimed his wife “autocrat of all the Russias.” A few days later, Peter was murdered by his captors. The same fate soon befell the former tsar Ivan VI, now a man in his early twenties who had spent his entire life as a prisoner.

Catherine’s audacity in seizing power in her own name is astonishing. A foreigner who had no powerful relatives at court, who was subject to the absolute authority of an empress who did not like her much, who had made an enemy of her theoretically powerful husband, Catherine was nonetheless able to cultivate allies among the cliques and clans of Elizabeth’s court. When the moment came to act, she chose to make herself reigning empress rather than taking the more cautious and time‑honored path of becoming regent for her son Paul, despite the fact that important people at court favored that latter arrangement. She prevailed because she was a far more able politician than her hapless husband. Ambitious, intelligent, pragmatic, and duplicitous, Catherine devoted the rest of her life to governing Russia. Her overriding mission was to maintain herself in power, and at that she succeeded magnificently.

Catherine owed her success in part to her skillful blending of contemporary European ideas about queens with much older Russian notions. An ethnic German whose first language was French, Catherine presented herself as a sophisticated member of cosmopolitan European royalty. She urged her nobility to study the ideas of the Enlightenment, that is, the new thinking about politics, economics, and education that was making a stir elsewhere. Catherine’s interest in Enlightenment thought was genuine, and her espousal of it enabled her to pose as a modern‑day Athena bestowing Western culture on her subjects. This image of the modernizing monarch appealed both to those courtiers who wanted to be perceived as social leaders and to educated people who admired Western thought. Catherine emphasized her own enlightenment by corresponding with leading intellectuals abroad and liberally patronizing the development of Russian arts and sciences.

The empress also exploited more traditional Russian ideas about royal women. She publicized her devotion to Russian Orthodoxy and she portrayed herself as deeply solicitous, in a very feminine way, of her people’s well‑being. Catherine appeared often in loving concourse with her son Paul while he was a child. At court, she played the kindly mistress, wielding power with tact and generosity. As she aged, she encouraged her people to think of her as “Matushka,” Little Mother. This term of endearment was used throughout Russia not only by children but also by subordinated people, such as serfs, when addressing noblewomen whom they served. By claiming to be Russia’s Matushka, Catherine clothed herself with those qualities of benevolence, piety, authority, and maternal care that had long been attached to Russia’s royal women.⁸

Assessing Catherine’s more concrete accomplishments has occupied generations of historians. Most have agreed that she further developed the innovations of Peter I in government, trade and commerce, intellectual life, and the arts. Catherine introduced such progressive measures as inoculation against smallpox and the abolition of capital punishment. She eased the central government’s demands on the nobility and confirmed the elite’s political and economic prerogatives in her “Charter to the Nobility” (1785). Noblemen as a result spent less time in government service and could devote more of their energies to managing their estates. Catherine’s foreign policy impressed observers at home and abroad: she expanded Russia’s borders, won minor wars with Poland, Turkey, and Sweden, and maintained her empire’s standing among the Great Powers.

Her critics argue that the empress talked a far better game than she played. Her foreign policy was financially extravagant and rapacious; it also complicated the governing of Russia by bringing into the empire still more ethnic groups hostile to their Russian overlords. She avoided dealing with her country’s most pressing problem, serfdom, even though she recognized it as a moral evil and an obstacle to economic development. She did nothing to improve the situation of serfs on private estates or on the extensive lands owned by the crown and the royal family. Indeed, when she awarded tens of thousands of acres of state land to private owners, she increased the burdens borne by the peasants on those lands. Power was Catherine’s lodestar, her critics assert. To them, her oft‑stated admiration for Enlightenment humanism was simply part of a public relations campaign aimed at building her reputation.

These disputes can never be fully resolved, for the record of Catherine’s life will support a variety of interpretations. As regards the history of elite women in Russia, her reign figures as a time of significant progress. It was remarkable in her era for a monarch, even a female one, to have a set of policies concerning women. Catherine did; and moreover she directly addressed women’s education and their role in the arts and intellectual life. She even appointed a woman to head the Academy of Sciences.

SCHOOLING FOR GIRLS

Catherine began laying the foundation for a system of education for girls soon after she seized power. There was much to be done, for Russia had only a few private schools for female pupils. In 1764 the empress ordered the establishment in St. Petersburg of the Smolny Institute, a public boarding school for noble girls that was designed to set the standard for other such institutions. At the same time she authorized the creation of a school for girls from the middling classes, the Novodevichy Institute, located on the grounds of the Moscow convent where Tsarevna Sophia had been imprisoned. The Smolny curriculum included courses in history, languages, literature, mathematics, manners, religion, and that safeguard of feminine virtue, embroidery. The Novodevichy offered a less academically rigorous curriculum and tutored its students in household management and crafts such as sewing. Catherine also established a foundling home in St. Petersburg in 1763. It contained a maternity ward for unmarried mothers and an orphanage for abandoned children. The girls living there learned trades and received dowries when they graduated to improve their marriage prospects.

Over the following decades, publicly and privately funded schools, many of them coeducational, proliferated. By 1792 there were 302 public schools spread across the European part of the empire, enrolling 17,178 students, of whom 1,178 (7 percent) were girls.⁹ Far more upper‑class girls were being educated at home by governesses and tutors. Comparable figures for female education elsewhere in Europe are difficult to come by, but the patterns were similar: there were schools catering to the propertied classes; most young women were educated at home. Higher education was closed to women everywhere. Few monarchs, other than Catherine, were making any effort to promote education for girls.

The Smolny Institute was her flagship institution, and Catherine supervised its administration herself, visiting the premises occasionally, corresponding with students, and requesting pedagogical advice from Enlightenment luminaries such as Voltaire. The teachers, all of whom were women for the first twenty years of the school’s existence, emphasized to their charges that education was a privilege granted them by the beneficent empress. Inspiring curiosity and developing rationality had been the goals Peter had identified for the education of men; Catherine was now seeking to do the same for women. She was not a radical on the subject of women’s education; she justified it with the Enlightenment argument that women had to learn to think clearly in order to be good mothers and good subjects of enlightened monarchs. She also declared that educated women would be more self‑controlled, and hence more modest, devout, and self‑sacrificing than ill‑educated ones. Thus did the eighteenth‑century advocates for women’s education turn to their uses the ancient notion that women’s irrationality led them to sin.¹⁰

Twenty years after the institute’s founding, Catherine decided to lay more stress on training its students to be good wives and mothers. New government instructions emphasized the importance of teaching young women to be actively involved in rearing their children and reaffirmed the importance of women’s accepting the power structure of the family. In terms reminiscent of The Domostroi, the empress wrote, “Everyone in the household, that is, the lady of the house, the children and the servants, must love the head of household or master as a benefactor or guardian.”¹¹ As if to symbolize this sharp new emphasis on the patriarchal order, the government replaced the female staff at the Smolny with male teachers.

Historians are still debating whether the instructions of the early 1780s represent a shift in the educational goals of the Smolny, or whether they simply made more explicit values that had been assumed from the founding of the institute.¹² It is clear is that Catherine’s pronouncements, so redolent of The Domostroi, were also quite in tune with, indeed had been influenced by, the thinking of the leading European pedagogue in the second half of the eighteenth century, Jean‑Jacques Rousseau. The fact that Catherine herself had not lived a life devoted to family was an irony lost on the monarch. She always thought of herself as a dutiful wife and mother who had done her best for an idiot husband and an ungrateful son. They had failed her, not she them.

She did believe that elite women should be active members of Russia’s Enlightenment culture, and here she set a powerful personal example. She read widely, patronized artists and writers, and wrote essays, poetry, plays, and memoirs. To press home the message that women could play an important part in the development of the Russian intelligentsia, Catherine appointed Princess Ekaterina Dashkova to head the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1782. The next year she named Dashkova founding president of the Russian Academy, an institution devoted to the study of the Russian language. These were extraordinary positions for a woman to hold, but Dashkova, as Catherine knew, was an extraordinary woman.

EKATERINA DASHKOVA (1743–1810)

She was a widow in her forties when Catherine chose her to head the two academic institutions. A member of the aristocratic, cultivated Vorontsov family, which had provided high‑ranking servitors to the tsars for generations, Ekaterina had married Mikhail Dashkov when she was sixteen. Their happy union lasted only five years; the prince died when he was just twenty‑eight years old. Thereafter Dashkova concentrated on managing her property, rearing her son and daughter, and playing court politics. She proved far more skilled at finance than at parenthood or political intrigue. Although she was an important member of the conspiracy that brought Catherine to power, Dashkova soon fell from the empress’s favor, perhaps because she quarreled with Catherine’s lover, Grigori Orlov, and his influential brothers.

Throughout her life, Dashkova admired and emulated Catherine. Like the empress, Dashkova was independent and ambitious. In 1805 she wrote that she had decided as a teenager “to become all I could be by my own efforts.” She prided herself, with reason, on her intellect. “There were no other two women at the time,” she wrote, “apart from the Grand Duchess [Catherine] and myself, who did any serious reading.”¹³ To continue her education (her formal schooling had consisted of tutoring in languages and deportment), Dashkova journeyed across Europe in the 1770s, meeting royalty and famous intellectuals, admiring the great art of Western Europe, and cultivating her knowledge of science, literature, and philosophy. She enrolled her son Pavel in the University of Edinburgh, then a major center of European science and moral philosophy, and lived with him there, soaking up the vibrant cultural life of that city. Dashkova returned to Russia in 1782 well versed in the ideas of the Enlightenment and well known to its leading lights abroad.

Catherine chose Dashkova to head the Academy of Sciences because she wanted to send a message about women’s intellectual capacities. She also believed that Dashkova could bring order to that poorly run organization. The princess proved up to the task, straightening up the academy’s finances and broadening its curriculum. Dashkova also took a leading role in compiling the etymological dictionary of Russian that was published by the Russian Academy, edited two literary journals, wrote articles on various scholarly subjects, and composed several plays.

^{Ekaterina Dashkova in court dress. Notice the medal bearing Catherine’s portrait.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vorontsova‑Dashkova.jpg. Accessed June 27, 2011.}

EKATERINA DASHKOVA

Dashkova prided herself on her relations with her serfs. In her memoirs, she described a reception to welcome an Irish friend, identified only as “Mrs. Hamilton,” to one of her estates.

“I organized a village fete for my friend, which pleased and affected her and the memory of which will remain with me so long as I live. A village had been newly built a few miles away from Troitskoe [one of Dashkova’s estates]. I had all the peasants who were going to dwell in it gathered together, all dressed in their best clothes, embroidered by the women, as is the custom with us. The weather was gorgeous, and I made them dance on the grass and sing Russian songs. My friend, who had never seen or heard anything like it, was delighted with it all–the songs, the dances, the women’s dresses. Russian dishes and drinks were not forgotten, and the whole formed such a truly national picture and was so novel for Mrs. Hamilton that she enjoyed it more than the most magnificent Court entertainment I could imagine.

At the moment when these good people were about to drink my health I presented my friend to them as the person to whom their respect was due, told them their new village must be called ‘Hamilton’ after her, and wished them all kinds of prosperity in a place which bore so dear a name. I then presented them with a gift of bread and salt and sent them away so happy and grateful that the memory of that day is still preserved in the little colony.”

SOURCE: DASHKOVA, E. R., THE MEMOIRS OF PRINCESS DASHKOVA, TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY KYRIL FITZLYON, INTRODUCTION BY JEHANNE M. GHEITH (DURHAM, N.C.: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995), 218.

Upper‑class women across Europe were participating in the Enlightenment as patrons, writers, and scholars. Dashkova matched and in some ways surpassed this elite company in the range of her interests as well as in ambition and achievements. No other woman of her time headed a university‑level academic institution. Dashkova was empowered by the long‑standing Russian practice of granting autonomy and authority to high‑ranking widows, and also by the presence on the Russian throne of another innovative woman. They both used their power to promote the development of their country’s intellectual life and women’s participation in that life.

Catherine fired Dashkova in 1793 because the princess had authorized the publication of a play that the empress–spooked by the French Revolution–found subversive. Dashkova retired to her estates and devoted herself to enlightened agriculture. She believed that serfdom was a necessary institution, arguing that it protected peasants from rapacious government officials and guaranteed the nobility a livelihood. She also believed, despite much evidence to the contrary, that sensible nobles would usually treat their serfs well. “A landowner would have to be crack‑brained to want to exhaust the source of his own riches,” she wrote in her memoirs. Dashkova acted on her beliefs by personally managing her estates, even, we are told, working alongside the peasants. Martha Wilmot, an Anglo‑Irish woman who lived with Dashkova in the first decade of the nineteenth century, left this description of the energetic princess: “She feeds the cows, she composes music, she sings and plays, she writes for the press, she shells the corn, she talks out loud in Church and corrects the Priest…, she talks out loud in her little Theater and puts in the Performers when they are out in their parts, she is a Doctor, an Apothecary, a Surgeon, a Farrier, a Carpenter, a Magistrate, a Lawyer…”¹⁴