Catherine the Great

Catherine II, known as Catherine the Great, ruled the Russian Empire as empress regnant from 1762 to 1796. Born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst in a minor German princely house, she came to the Russian court as a bride, converted to Orthodoxy, and took power after overthrowing her husband, Peter III. Her reign is remembered for territorial expansion to the Black Sea and into Poland, a sustained effort to present Russia as an Enlightenment state, and a court culture that bound Russia more closely to Europe in art, learning and diplomacy. She ranks among the most consequential rulers in Russian history, and her name is attached to some of the empire's most visible monuments and institutions.

The entry treats Catherine's reign both as a sequence of political decisions and as a system of governance. It covers the circumstances of her accession and the legitimacy problems that shaped her early years, her ambitious but unfinished attempt to rewrite the law through the 1767 Legislative Commission, and her administrative reforms of provinces, cities, and the nobility. It then examines the social base of the state, especially serfdom and the Pugachev rebellion, and the court politics organized around favorites. Foreign policy receives a set of dedicated sections: the Russo-Turkish wars and the annexation of Crimea, the three partitions of Poland, and Russia's diplomacy in Europe. The later sections address the economy and state finance, urban and frontier development, education and public health, cultural patronage, religious and ethnic policy, the historiography of her reputation, and the succession that followed her death in 1796.

Origins and arrival at the Russian court

Catherine was born Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst on 2 May 1729 (21 April, Old Style) in Stettin, then part of Prussia and now Szczecin, Poland. Her father, Christian August, was a prince of Anhalt-Zerbst serving as the Prussian commander at Stettin; her mother, Johanna Elisabeth, belonged to the house of Holstein-Gottorp. Sophie thus grew up within the interconnected ruling families of the German principalities, but without the wealth of a major royal court. In 1742, when Christian August became joint ruler of Anhalt-Zerbst, the family moved to Zerbst. Her upbringing was Lutheran, and her education took place at home. The French Huguenot governess Elisabeth “Babet” Cardel taught her reading and fostered her lasting attachment to French; the pastor Friedrich Wagner provided instruction in German, religion, history, and geography. Visits to relatives at Brunswick and other courts introduced her to aristocratic etiquette and dynastic expectations. (us.macmillan.com)

In early 1744, the fourteen-year-old Sophie travelled to Russia with her mother at the invitation of Empress Elizabeth. The proposed marriage was to Elizabeth’s nephew and designated successor, Grand Duke Peter Fyodorovich, born Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp and a grandson of Peter the Great. Sophie had already met him in 1739. Johanna’s Holstein family connections helped recommend the match, while Frederick II supported it as a possible means of strengthening Prussian influence at the Russian court. Their journey passed through Berlin and continued to St Petersburg and Moscow, where Elizabeth and Peter were staying. (us.macmillan.com)

At court, Sophie undertook intensive preparation in Russian and Orthodox doctrine. Her memoirs name Vasily Adadurov as her language teacher and Simon Todorsky as her religious instructor, and describe her rehearsing Russian lessons at night. Despite her father’s opposition to abandoning Lutheranism, she was received into the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow on 9 July 1744 (28 June, Old Style), taking the name Yekaterina Alexeyevna. Formal betrothal followed the next day. Conversion was a prerequisite for the intended marriage and established her public identity within the imperial household; the Russian name and patronymic also echoed those of Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine I. (gutenberg.org)

Catherine married Grand Duke Peter in St Petersburg on 1 September 1745 (21 August, Old Style), aged sixteen; Peter was seventeen. The marriage proved emotionally distant and increasingly antagonistic. In her later memoirs, Catherine depicted his enthusiasm for military drill, drinking, and childish amusements as sources of estrangement, although this account was written retrospectively by the spouse who ultimately displaced him. Elizabeth closely supervised the young couple’s household, leaving Catherine little independence. When her son Paul was born in 1754, the empress assumed control of his care, restricting Catherine’s access to him. The marriage’s central dynastic obligation was therefore fulfilled without resolving her isolation. (worldhistory.org)

Reading supplied an occupation during these constrained years. Her German upbringing and fluency in French preceded her acquisition of Russian, but French remained an important language of her self-education. According to her memoirs, she progressed from novels to historical and political works. For the winter following Paul’s birth, she listed a history of Germany, Voltaire’s universal history, Russian books including two large volumes of Cesare Baronio in translation, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and Tacitus’s Annals. She associated Tacitus particularly with a new habit of looking for concealed interests behind political conduct. This reading brought her into sustained contact with the Enlightenment, while classical history offered examples of court rivalry and the exercise of power. (gutenberg.org)

The 1762 coup and accession

Peter III succeeded Empress Elizabeth on 5 January 1762 (25 December 1761, Old Style), but his reign lasted only six months. His reversal of Russian policy in the Seven Years’ War alienated important military supporters. The Treaty of Saint Petersburg, signed on 5 May 1762, restored all Russian conquests to Prussia, including East Prussia, without territorial compensation. Officers who had fought against Frederick II regarded the settlement as the abandonment of their victories. Peter’s introduction of Prussian-style uniforms and drill, preference for troops from his native Holstein, and preparations for war against Denmark over Schleswig further antagonized the imperial guards. His March manifesto releasing nobles from compulsory state service won approval, but did not overcome opposition within the military and court. (ebsco.com)

The conspiracy depended on officers’ networks within the guards, particularly those organized by Grigory Orlov, Catherine’s lover, and his brothers. News of the arrest of Lieutenant Pyotr Passek, one of the conspirators, precipitated action. On 9 July 1762 (28 June, Old Style), Catherine travelled from Peterhof to Saint Petersburg, where the Izmailovsky Guards proclaimed her sovereign. The Semyonovsky, Preobrazhensky, and Horse Guards subsequently joined them. At the Kazan Cathedral, the clergy proclaimed Catherine autocratic ruler; civil and military officials then swore allegiance at the Winter Palace. Messengers were dispatched to Kronstadt and to army formations outside the capital, preventing Peter from readily mobilizing alternative support. Although some dignitaries had envisaged Catherine governing as regent for her seven-year-old son Paul, the coup established her as empress in her own right. Peter abdicated the following day. (prlib.ru)

Peter was confined at Ropsha, outside the capital, under guards associated with the victorious faction. He died there on 17 July 1762 (6 July, Old Style), eight days after Catherine’s proclamation. The official explanation attributed his death to a hemorrhoidal attack accompanied by colic. Accounts implicating Alexei Orlov and other custodians in a fatal struggle have supported the widespread interpretation that Peter was killed, but the precise circumstances remain unresolved. Catherine’s knowledge of, or authorization for, his death has not been established. The distinction between responsibility for overthrowing and imprisoning Peter and responsibility for his death is therefore essential: the former is documented, while the latter remains a disputed historical question. (en.wikipedia.org)

Catherine consolidated the support of the groups that had enabled her accession through rewards and selective policy reversals. The Orlov brothers received titles and material grants, while participating officers obtained promotions; Grigory Potemkin, then a junior Horse Guards officer, was among those advanced. She also recalled the experienced former chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev-Ryumin and restored his honours. To reassure the Russian Orthodox Church, whose hierarchy had opposed Peter’s secularization measures, she temporarily returned ecclesiastical estates to church administration. A manifesto of 12 August 1762 confirmed this reversal while a new examination of church property proceeded. These measures secured immediate allies without committing Catherine permanently to all their demands. (erenow.org)

The coronation supplied a ceremonial and religious foundation for an accession achieved by force. Catherine was crowned in Moscow’s Assumption Cathedral on 3 October 1762 (22 September, Old Style). Georg Friedrich Eckart and Jérémie Pauzié were principal makers of the new imperial crown; its precious stones were valued at two million rubles. The regalia and coronation garments were subsequently displayed publicly for eighteen days. A commemorative medal translated the claim of legitimate rule into allegory: figures representing Faith and Russia supported Catherine’s monogram, crowned by Divine Providence. Her silver-brocade coronation dress, decorated with imperial coats of arms, likewise presented the new sovereign through established symbols of Russian monarchy rather than through the military circumstances of her elevation. (prlib.ru)

The Nakaz and the Legislative Commission

Catherine issued the Nakaz, or Instruction, in 1767 to guide a commission charged with preparing a new legal code in place of the outdated code of 1649 and subsequent, often inconsistent enactments. It was a statement of legislative principles, not itself a replacement code. Drawing extensively on the Enlightenment, Catherine adapted arguments from Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, and other European writers. Montesquieu supplied ideas about the relationship between laws, government, and a country’s circumstances; Beccaria’s criticism of arbitrary punishment informed its treatment of criminal justice. Catherine nevertheless selected and rearranged these arguments to support reform under an absolute monarch rather than a limitation of imperial authority. (real.mtak.hu)

The Instruction’s humanitarian provisions were concrete. Article 194 maintained that an accused person should not be treated as guilty before judicial sentence, while its discussion of torture questioned both the legitimacy of punishing someone whose guilt remained unproved and the reliability of confessions extracted through pain. Other passages advocated proportionate penalties, the prevention of crime, and greater restraint in punishment. These principles coexisted with an explicit defence of autocracy: articles 9–11 argued that Russia’s immense territory required concentrated sovereign power to overcome distance and administrative delay. Thus, protection through law did not entail a representative constitution or an independent authority capable of restraining the ruler. (home.uncg.edu)

The Legislative Commission opened in Moscow in July 1767 and moved to St Petersburg in February 1768. It brought together more than 560 deputies chosen through separate estate and territorial arrangements, including nobles, townspeople, state peasants, Cossacks, representatives of non-Russian communities, and central government offices. Privately owned serfs had no separate representation. Deputies arrived with local nakazy: instructions recording grievances and requests from those who selected them. These differed from Catherine’s general Instruction and supplied detailed evidence about conditions throughout the empire. The assembly was consultative, not a sovereign legislature; its task was to assist the crown in preparing legislation, not to govern alongside it. (real.mtak.hu)

Across 203 sessions, deputies discussed noble privileges, the position of the Baltic nobility, merchants’ rights, judicial procedure, and serfdom. Estate interests repeatedly obstructed agreement: proposals concerning rights and obligations encountered resistance from groups defending existing privileges. Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov was among the prominent noble speakers whose interventions exposed the distance between Catherine’s reforming language and aristocratic priorities. Following the outbreak of war with the Ottoman Empire, the plenary assembly was suspended in December 1768 and never reconvened. It produced no new code, although specialist subcommittees continued working, and their drafts and collected evidence contributed to subsequent legislation. Its immediate value lay more in gathering information and exposing competing interests than in enacting the Instruction’s principles. (encyclopedia.com)

The project also strengthened Catherine’s reputation abroad. Translations and more than twenty editions made the Nakaz unusually familiar European reading for a Russian governmental document; an English edition appeared in London in 1768. Her French-language correspondence with Voltaire, documented from 1763, connected her directly with an influential advocate of enlightened monarchy. Patronage complemented these exchanges: she purchased Denis Diderot’s library in 1765 and provided him with financial support, and he visited her court in 1773–1774. In a letter to Voltaire dated 7 January 1774, Catherine described frequent, extended conversations with Diderot and Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Such exchanges presented the empress as a participant in European intellectual debate, while the commission’s limited results revealed that philosophical endorsement did not amount to implementation. (library.law.yale.edu)

Provincial administration and the Charters of 1785

On November 7 (18, New Style), 1775, Catherine issued the Statute for the Administration of the Provinces of the Russian Empire, restructuring local government after the Pugachev rebellion had exposed weaknesses in provincial control. Implementation extended over the following decade. The statute replaced the existing three-tier arrangement of governorates, intermediate provinces, and districts with governorates subdivided directly into districts (uezdy). Population became the principal criterion for administrative boundaries: a governorate was intended to contain approximately 300,000–400,000 inhabitants, and a district approximately 30,000. Governors were appointed and dismissed by the sovereign; governors-general could supervise several governorates and report directly to Catherine and the Senate. The reform thus multiplied local administrative centres without transferring ultimate authority away from the crown. (prlib.ru)

The new institutions differentiated executive, fiscal, and judicial responsibilities. A provincial treasury chamber managed revenue and expenditure, while a board of public welfare supervised schools and charitable establishments. Provincial prosecutors monitored legality. Separate courts served nobles, townspeople, and state peasants, with provincial civil and criminal chambers above them and the Senate at the highest level. This was an estate-based judicial hierarchy, not equality before the law. At district level, the lower land court, headed by a captain-ispravnik elected by local nobles, also performed executive and policing functions. The proliferation of offices expanded the local administrative apparatus, but it depended partly on landowners acting as judges, assessors, and police officials rather than on an independently recruited bureaucracy. Noble participation and centrally appointed supervision therefore operated together. (prlib.ru)

The Charter to the Nobility, issued on April 21 (May 2, New Style), 1785, consolidated privileges accumulated during the eighteenth century. It confirmed the freedom from compulsory state service granted by Peter III in 1762, exemption from personal taxation and corporal punishment, and trial by peers. It also protected hereditary property and recognized rights to exploit forests and minerals and establish manufacturing enterprises on noble estates. These provisions strengthened the legal position of landowners without establishing a constitutional restraint on the monarchy or a general body of rights applicable to all subjects. (constitution.garant.ru)

The charter also recognized provincial noble societies as corporate bodies. Assemblies met every three years, elected district marshals and judicial personnel, maintained genealogical registers, and could present collective petitions to the governor, Senate, or sovereign. Their independence was explicitly limited. Article 38 required the governor’s or governor-general’s summons and permission for provincial meetings; article 39 provided for the governor to select the provincial marshal from two candidates nominated by the assembly. Elections of district judges and police captains likewise required gubernatorial confirmation. These arrangements institutionalized noble influence over local administration while preserving the crown’s control over appointments and the conduct of corporate business. (constitution.garant.ru)

Issued on the same date, the Charter to the Towns comprised 178 articles and defined an urban corporation through six registered categories: owners of immovable property; merchants belonging to three guilds distinguished by declared capital; guild artisans; merchants from other towns or countries; “eminent citizens,” qualified by wealth, education, or public service; and other established residents earning their livelihood in town. Each category supplied representatives to a general town council and one representative to a six-member executive council. Municipal representation consequently followed property, occupation, and legal status rather than equal citizenship. (old.bigenc.ru)

Urban self-government had practical as well as administrative limits. Municipalities received only restricted tax-raising powers, while appointed officials retained policing authority. Although the charter was instituted, at least formally, in more than four hundred towns, many smaller settlements lacked the differentiated population required to fill all six categories. St Petersburg and Moscow fitted the scheme more closely than provincial district towns. The council structure could therefore exist on paper without producing the complete representative machinery envisaged by the legislation. (prlib.ru)

Serfdom and the Pugachev rebellion

Catherine’s government upheld serfdom as a structure of rural authority, requiring privately owned peasants to obey their landlords and fulfil established obligations. A decree of 1767 threatened serfs who submitted unlawful complaints against their owners—especially petitions addressed personally to the empress—with whipping by the knout and lifelong penal servitude at Nerchinsk. The punishment extended to those who drafted the petitions, and the deportees could count toward their landlords’ military recruitment quotas. The decree therefore restricted direct appeals to the sovereign while reinforcing the landowner’s intermediary role between peasants and the state. Its wording concerned unauthorized petitions rather than declaring every possible legal complaint inadmissible. (history.hanover.edu)

In Ukrainian territories, restrictions on peasant mobility accompanied the dismantling of Cossack Hetmanate autonomy. Catherine abolished the office of hetman in 1764; the establishment of the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Siverskyi vicegerencies in 1781 removed the Hetmanate’s remaining political framework. (encyclopedia.com) Serfdom was formally imposed in Left-Bank and Sloboda Ukraine in 1783. This consolidated an earlier process through which Cossack officers and monasteries had restricted peasants’ movement and acquired control over their labour: during the 1740s, peasants could still change landlords, but generally had to leave their land and inventory behind. The recognition of Cossack officers’ Russian noble rights in 1785 further integrated the regional landowning elite into the imperial social hierarchy. (encyclopediaofukraine.com)

The Pugachev rebellion began in September 1773 among the Yaik Cossacks, following the suppression of their mutiny in 1772. Its leader, the Don Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev, claimed to be Catherine’s deceased husband, Peter III. This impersonation offered a monarchist justification for resistance: followers could profess loyalty to a supposedly legitimate sovereign while attacking Catherine’s officials and landlords. The movement attracted fugitive serfs, religious dissenters, factory workers, and non-Russian populations, but their grievances were not identical. Pugachev promised peasants freedom from their owners and access to land; Bashkir supporters sought relief from taxation and protection of religious freedoms and customary limits on imperial intervention. Harvard’s Imperiia project, drawing on historian Charles Steinwedel, records an estimated 10,000–12,000 Bashkirs in rebel forces by January 1774. (encyclopedia.com)

The rebels besieged Orenburg in autumn 1773 and defeated the initial relief expedition commanded by General Vasily Kar. Catherine then dispatched forces under General Alexander Bibikov, whose campaign compelled Pugachev to abandon the siege in spring 1774 without extinguishing the wider revolt. Fighting spread through the Urals and Volga region; in July, Pugachev’s forces occupied much of Kazan before Ivan Mikhelson drove them out. Retreating across the Volga, they stimulated further attacks on estates and officials before suffering a decisive defeat near Tsaritsyn in late August. Pugachev’s own Cossacks subsequently surrendered him to the authorities, and he was publicly executed in Moscow in January 1775. Catherine also ordered the Yaik River renamed the Ural and Pugachev’s birthplace renamed Potemkinskaya, suppressing geographical reminders of the uprising. (unm.edu)

Suppression combined battlefield operations with coercion against communities that had supported the rebels. In the Bashkir lands, Grigory Potemkin demanded submission under threat of destruction; the prominent rebel leader Salavat Yulayev was captured in November 1774. The provincial reforms introduced in 1775 subsequently strengthened police and judicial institutions, extending the government’s capacity to intervene locally rather than emancipating the peasantry. (scalar.fas.harvard.edu) Historiographical disagreement concerns how far this outcome represented Catherine’s deliberate intensification of serfdom rather than the continuation of inherited institutions. Isabel de Madariaga challenged the interpretation that Catherine systematically enlarged landlords’ coercive powers to purchase noble support after her accession. Her work distinguished legal changes from existing practices and emphasized differences between privately owned serfs and state peasants, who could face heavier economic burdens despite their different status. The debate thus involves both the demonstrable extension of bondage into additional territories and the more complex question of how Catherine’s legislation altered authority within established serf society. (thebritishacademy.ac.uk)

Court politics and the favorite system

The position of favorite joined personal intimacy to privileged access to Catherine, but it did not confer a uniform set of powers. A favorite could approach the empress outside ministers’ scheduled audiences, recommend petitioners, and obtain offices and rewards for associates. Political authority nevertheless depended on additional appointments, administrative experience, and Catherine’s continuing confidence. The contrast between Grigory Orlov, Grigory Potemkin, and Platon Zubov illustrates these differences: Orlov’s standing rested heavily on the guards and the accession of 1762; Potemkin combined intimacy with extensive military and provincial responsibilities; Zubov acquired influence through direct access during Catherine’s final years. Catherine continued to oversee government rather than formally delegating sovereignty to a favorite. (encyclopedia.com)

Orlov and his brothers formed an important court network after helping Catherine seize the throne in 1762. All five brothers received the title of count, while Grigory became a major general, chamberlain, and adjutant general. His subsequent responsibilities included artillery, military engineering, cavalry, and the administration of foreign colonists. These appointments supplied institutional channels through which personal favor could affect appointments and expenditure. His patronage also extended to Mikhail Lomonosov and the Free Economic Society. Within the Imperial Council, established in 1768 to coordinate military and foreign policy during the war with the Ottoman Empire, Orlov promoted Mediterranean operations and proposed his brother Alexei as their commander. Family connections thus helped shape military leadership, although Catherine did not accept the proposed marriage that would have transformed his dynastic position. (encyclopedia.com)

Potemkin became Catherine’s favorite in 1774, following distinguished service in the Russo-Turkish War. He entered the Imperial Council, became vice-president and subsequently president of the War Department, and received the governor-generalship of New Russia. Their intimate relationship changed around 1776, but his political partnership with Catherine lasted until his death in 1791. His authority therefore cannot be measured simply by the duration of their affair. As southern governor-general and, from 1787, commander of Russian forces in the south, he linked court decisions to provincial administration and military operations. Their correspondence carried both policy discussions and personal concerns, allowing him to retain direct access while away from St Petersburg. (encyclopedia.com)

Rewards connected these networks to landed wealth and dependent labor. Potemkin’s participation in the 1762 coup brought a grant of 600 serfs even before his emergence as the leading favorite. Zubov, who became Catherine’s last favorite in 1789, likewise received estates, including the Šiauliai crown estate in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He accumulated southern governorships—Yekaterinoslav and Taurida in 1793, and Voznesensk in 1795—and became head of the Black Sea fleet in 1796. Such grants and appointments converted proximity to the monarch into revenue and administrative influence; they also placed favorites between the central court and distant territories. Potemkin’s southern responsibilities, however, involved substantial administrative work rather than merely the enjoyment of a lucrative title. (encyclopedia.com)

Formal consultation and personal intervention operated together. The Imperial Council brought favorites into discussion with senior military officers and civil officials, but access to Catherine’s private rooms provided another route to decisions. In July 1774, Nikita Panin complained to his brother about Potemkin’s intervention in a council meeting concerning the Pugachev crisis, then approached Catherine privately to challenge the proposed policy. Later accounts describe Zubov appearing during her morning ministerial meetings and dining with her without invitation. These episodes reveal competing channels of influence, while Panin’s hostility also makes his testimony evidence of factional rivalry rather than a neutral assessment of Potemkin’s competence. (escholarship.org)

The court’s reputation for scandal presents a distinct evidentiary problem. Intimacy, officeholding, and political influence must be reconstructed separately from correspondence, appointment records, and contemporary testimony. Catherine and Potemkin’s possible secret marriage remains less securely established than their documented political partnership. Similarly, the “Potemkin villages” associated with Catherine’s southern tour of 1787 became a durable image of fraudulent display; James A. Duran’s study of southern colonization instead examined administrative activity and identified the influence of the Saxon diplomat Georg Adolf von Helbig’s hostile account on Potemkin’s reputation. The existence of court gossip does not itself establish either the extent of a favorite’s authority or the character of his administration. (sgecr.co.uk)

Russo-Turkish wars and the annexation of Crimea

The war of 1768–1774 brought Russian armies into Moldavia and Wallachia and extended Catherine’s military reach into the Mediterranean. Field Marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev defeated Ottoman forces at Larga and Kagul in 1770; the latter victory, on 1 August, weakened Ottoman resistance north of the Danube. At sea, a Russian expedition under Alexei Orlov destroyed the Ottoman fleet at Çeşme, or Chesme, on 5–7 July 1770. These operations placed pressure on the Ottoman Empire on separate fronts: land armies threatened its Danubian possessions, while naval forces operated far beyond Russia’s existing coastal bases. (militarymaps.rct.uk)

The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed on 21 July 1774, secured Russian possession of Azov, Kerch, Yenikale, and Kinburn, together with territory between the lower Dnieper and Southern Bug. These gains provided footholds on the northern Black Sea and control of strategically important approaches to the Sea of Azov. Russian merchant vessels obtained navigation rights in Ottoman waters, including passage through the straits, linking the new southern outlets to Mediterranean commerce. The treaty did not transfer the whole of Crimea to Russia: it recognized the Crimean Khanate as politically independent, while preserving the Ottoman sultan’s religious authority over its Muslim population. Separating political sovereignty from religious allegiance removed Ottoman overlordship without immediately replacing the khanate with direct Russian administration. (encyclopediaofukraine.com)

Crimean independence nevertheless became increasingly constrained by Russian intervention. Russia supported Şahin Giray, whose attempts to reform the khanate encountered opposition and rebellion; Russian military assistance helped maintain his position. After renewed upheaval in 1782, Grigory Potemkin pressed for annexation rather than continued dependence on an unstable client ruler. Catherine’s manifesto of 19 April 1783—8 April in the Julian calendar then used in Russia—declared the incorporation of Crimea, Taman, and the Kuban territory into the empire. The annexation abolished the khanate’s separate political existence and made the peninsula available for permanent naval installations. A base established that year at Akhtiar, renamed Sevastopol in 1784, became the principal home of the Black Sea Fleet; Potemkin coordinated fleet-building and southern military infrastructure. (openaccess.hacettepe.edu.tr)

Catherine’s ambitions also extended beyond Crimea through the “Greek Project,” discussed with Joseph II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and ruler of the Habsburg lands. Their alliance of 1781 established a framework for cooperation against the Ottomans. In her letter of September 1782, Catherine proposed, conditionally upon successful war, a restored Greek empire centred on Constantinople, with her grandson Constantine as its ruler. This crown was to remain separate from Russia’s. Moldavia and Wallachia would form an independent buffer state called Dacia, while Austria and Russia would receive territorial compensation. Byzantine dynastic imagery thus accompanied a concrete scheme for redistributing Ottoman European territory, although the projected states were never established. (vostlit.info)

The second war, beginning in 1787, arose from Ottoman efforts to reverse Russian gains, particularly the annexation of Crimea. Austria joined Russia in 1788. Potemkin directed the southern campaign and captured Ochakov in December 1788; Alexander Suvorov defeated Ottoman forces at Rymnik in 1789 and stormed Izmail in December 1790. The developing Black Sea Fleet also supported Russian operations. The Treaty of Jassy, signed at Iași on 9 January 1792—29 December 1791, Old Style—confirmed Ottoman recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. It transferred the territory between the Southern Bug and Dniester, including Ochakov, to Russia and established the Dniester as the European frontier between the empires. Russia returned its conquests beyond that boundary, including Moldavia: the settlement consolidated northern Black Sea expansion rather than implementing the proposed reconstruction of the Balkans. (en.wikipedia.org)

The partitions of Poland

Catherine initially sought to control the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth without dissolving it. Stanisław August Poniatowski, her former lover, was elected king in September 1764 with Russian backing. Russian influence operated through diplomatic pressure, military intervention, and support for institutions that limited independent royal action. In 1767–1768, Russia secured recognition as guarantor of the Commonwealth’s constitutional order, including the liberum veto, which allowed an individual parliamentary deputy to block legislation. Opposition produced the Confederation of Bar in 1768, whose members fought both Russian domination and the king while defending Catholic and noble privileges. The ensuing conflict exposed the difficulty of maintaining the Commonwealth as a dependent but intact state. (encyclopedia.com)

The First Partition emerged from negotiations over the European balance of power during Russia’s war with the Ottoman Empire. Frederick the Great of Prussia promoted territorial compensation in Poland as a means of reconciling Russian expansion with Habsburg interests and avoiding an Austro-Russian conflict. Russia, Prussia, and Austria signed their partition agreement on August 5, 1772. Russia acquired northeastern territories; Austria took southern lands organized as Galicia; and Prussia obtained most of Royal Prussia, excluding Gdańsk and Toruń, thereby connecting its Brandenburg-Pomeranian possessions with East Prussia. The Commonwealth lost approximately one-third of its territory and population. Under pressure from the occupying powers, its Sejm ratified the settlement on September 30, 1773. (germanhistorydocs.org)

The surviving Commonwealth attempted to strengthen itself through the Four-Year Sejm of 1788–1792 and the Constitution of May 3, 1791, which introduced a hereditary monarchy and curtailed parliamentary obstruction. Catherine supported the conservative Targowica Confederation against these reforms, and Russian troops invaded in 1792. Poniatowski eventually ordered resistance to cease and joined the confederation. The Second Partition in 1793 involved Russia and Frederick William II’s Prussia, not Austria. Russia annexed extensive Belarusian and Ukrainian territories, while Prussia took Gdańsk, Toruń, and much of Greater Poland. The Grodno Sejm, meeting under Russian intimidation, approved the territorial cessions and dismantled the constitutional settlement of 1791. Only about four million inhabitants remained within the reduced Commonwealth. (encyclopedia.com)

The Kościuszko Uprising of 1794 challenged both foreign occupation and the partition settlement. Tadeusz Kościuszko, a veteran of the American War of Independence, assumed command in Kraków in March. His forces included regular soldiers and peasants armed with scythes; their victory over Russian troops at Racławice encouraged further resistance, including urban uprisings against Russian garrisons. Russian-Prussian cooperation nevertheless reversed these gains. Although Warsaw resisted a summer siege, Kościuszko was wounded and captured on October 10, 1794, at Maciejowice. Russian forces subsequently stormed Warsaw’s eastern suburb of Praga, where the assault was accompanied by a massacre, and the insurrection collapsed. (home.nps.gov)

The Third Partition of 1795 eliminated the Commonwealth rather than leaving another dependent remnant. Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg monarchy divided its remaining lands: Prussia received Warsaw, Austria acquired Kraków and surrounding territory, and Russia absorbed the remaining Lithuanian and eastern regions. Poniatowski abdicated in November 1795. The sequence thus transformed Catherine’s policy from supervision of a neighboring monarchy into direct annexation in cooperation with rival powers. Polish independence was restored in 1918, although intervening arrangements, including the Duchy of Warsaw and Congress Poland, created more limited forms of Polish statehood. (zpe.gov.pl)

The partitions became enduring subjects of Polish national memory, expressed through representations of resistance and debates over responsibility. Jan Matejko’s Rejtan: The Fall of Poland (1866) depicted the deputy Tadeusz Rejtan’s protest against parliamentary acceptance of the First Partition in 1773. Rather than simply commemorating foreign conquest, the painting associated national collapse with elite misconduct and political betrayal. Its exhibition provoked objections from critics and descendants of the nobles portrayed; subsequent reproduction in newspapers and textbooks made the scene a widely recognizable image of lost independence. (encyclopedia.com)

Diplomacy and the balance of power in Europe

Catherine retained peace with Prussia after her accession in 1762 rather than re-entering the Seven Years’ War. Her alliance with Frederick II in 1764 made cooperation with a former enemy the foundation of Russian diplomacy. Nikita Panin, her principal foreign-policy adviser, promoted a “Northern System” intended to associate Russia, Prussia, Britain, and northern European states against the influence of France and Austria. Its wider ambitions remained unrealized, but the Prussian alliance helped secure Russia’s position in Poland and reduced the danger of intervention while Russian armies fought the Ottoman Empire. By the late 1770s, Catherine increasingly preferred cooperation with Joseph II: Austria offered a more useful partner for southern expansion, and an Austro-Russian alliance followed in 1781. (cambridge.org)

Relations with Britain combined commercial interests with resistance to British maritime power. During the American War of Independence, Catherine’s declaration of armed neutrality in 1780 asserted that neutral vessels could trade with belligerent ports and that enemy-owned cargo aboard neutral ships should be protected, except for contraband. It also required a blockade to be effective, rather than merely proclaimed. Denmark-Norway and Sweden joined the resulting league, whose members backed these principles with naval preparations. The initiative challenged British interception of neutral commerce without making Russia a belligerent or an American ally. Francis Dana, sent to St Petersburg in 1781 to obtain recognition of American independence and admission to the league, failed to secure either: Catherine preferred the possibility of mediation to formal support for the insurgent colonies. (govinfo.gov)

The war with Sweden in 1788–1790 exposed the vulnerability of Russia’s northern frontier while its principal military effort was directed against the Ottomans. Gustav III attacked in June 1788, bringing fighting into Finland and the Baltic and threatening the approaches to St Petersburg. Catherine consequently faced simultaneous demands on troops, ships, and supplies in two widely separated theatres. Sweden also experienced a political crisis: the Anjala officers’ movement challenged the war and sought negotiations with Catherine in August 1788. Neither side achieved a decisive territorial breakthrough. A major Russian naval defeat at Svensksund on 9–10 July 1790 strengthened Gustav’s negotiating position, but the Treaty of Värälä, signed on 14 August, restored peace without territorial transfers. It allowed Catherine to end the northern conflict while the Ottoman war continued. (en.wikipedia.org)

Britain and Prussia nevertheless sought to restrain Russian gains in the south. In the Ochakov crisis of 1791, William Pitt’s government demanded that Russia surrender the Black Sea fortress captured in 1788. Britain prepared a fleet for possible deployment to the Baltic, acting within its 1788 Triple Alliance with Prussia and the Netherlands. Catherine refused to yield. Parliamentary opposition and resistance to war in Britain weakened Pitt’s position, and on 26 July 1791 the British government decided against intervention. The confrontation demonstrated that Britain’s naval strength did not automatically translate into an effective continental check on Russia. (encyclopedia.com)

The French Revolution introduced an ideological dimension into these shifting alignments. Catherine encouraged European monarchies to oppose the revolutionary movement, while retaining freedom to pursue Russian objectives in eastern Europe rather than immediately committing a field army against France. Her cooperation with Britain became substantially closer in 1793. A convention signed on 25 March committed both governments to close their ports to France, prevent food exports there, and discourage neutral powers from protecting French maritime commerce. This reversed, in practice, the protection of neutral trade that Catherine had championed in 1780: revolutionary France was treated as an exception to those principles. Russia’s anti-revolutionary diplomacy thus included concrete economic measures, although its military priorities during Catherine’s remaining years lay chiefly elsewhere. (ell506.cankaya.edu.tr)

Finance, currency, and foreign trade

Catherine’s fiscal administration sought to increase receipts through revised taxation, better collection, and more centralized accounting, but revenue gains did not keep pace with expenditure, even in peacetime. Wars intensified the resulting deficits and encouraged the simultaneous use of paper currency and foreign borrowing. Russia obtained its first foreign loan in 1769 through the Amsterdam banking house Hope & Co. Because Russian obligations were unfamiliar to foreign investors, the firm issued smaller-denomination securities backed by large Russian government bonds, with a Russian representative confirming the underlying guarantee. By Catherine’s death in 1796, outstanding foreign debt amounted to approximately 62 million Dutch guilders, equivalent to 41.5 million rubles. This figure excludes the state’s liabilities represented by its paper currency. (cambridge.org)

The manifesto authorizing Russia’s first paper money, usually called assignats or assignations, was dated 29 December 1768 in the Russian calendar—9 January 1769 in the Gregorian calendar. It established exchange banks in St Petersburg and Moscow, which issued notes of 25, 50, 75, and 100 rubles against copper coin. The immediate practical justification was the weight and inconvenience of copper currency: paper made substantial payments easier to transport and count. Acceptance was also supported by fiscal rules requiring taxpayers in the two capitals to include at least one 25-ruble note in every 500 rubles paid to the treasury. These notes were exchangeable monetary claims, not the land-backed assignats subsequently introduced during the French Revolution. (prlib.ru)

Increasingly, note issuance became a means of financing government expenditure rather than merely replacing cumbersome coin. A manifesto of 1786 authorized expansion of the paper issue from 46 million to 100 million rubles; by 1793, circulation had reached 120 million. The growing issue, military expenditure, and payments on foreign obligations contributed to depreciation. One silver ruble exchanged for 103 paper kopecks in 1786, 135 in 1793, and 142 in 1796: at the latter rate, a paper ruble was worth approximately 70 silver kopecks. These exchange rates demonstrate monetary depreciation, rather than providing a direct measure of consumer-price inflation. In 1793 the government also increased duties and prohibited several categories of luxury imports, attempting to improve the ruble’s external position by restricting expenditure abroad. (api.pageplace.de)

Foreign trade connected these financial policies to agricultural and industrial production. Grain exports from St Petersburg rose from 16,750 chetverts, a Russian measure of volume, in 1768 to 90,157 in 1769, although annual shipments fluctuated. Baltic commerce remained important: Riga handled substantial exports of rye, barley, and oats, while southern wheat began moving through Black Sea outlets. Opening Black Sea ports to foreign commerce in 1784 broadened access, but their later predominance should not be projected backward into Catherine’s reign. Grain represented only 6.7 per cent of Russia’s total export value in 1793–1795; timber, hemp, flax, iron, and other commodities remained substantial components of overseas commerce. (cambridge.org)

Commercial agreements helped regulate access to these markets. The Anglo-Russian treaty of 1766, renewed in 1793, supported an exchange in which Russian materials supplied British industry and shipping. Agreements with other partners included the French commercial treaty of 1787 and a Portuguese treaty signed in December 1787 and ratified in 1788. The French agreement extended to French merchants a specific incentive for southern commerce: customs duties at Black Sea and Sea of Azov ports were reduced by one quarter relative to the general tariff, under reciprocal arrangements. (cristoraul.org)

Agricultural improvement was promoted through the Free Economic Society, founded in 1765 by figures including Grigory Orlov and Roman Vorontsov under Catherine’s patronage. She granted 6,000 rubles for premises and an economic library. The society circulated practical information through its Transactions, collected agricultural data, and encouraged improved implements, livestock breeding, crop rotation, and dairy production. Its international essay competition on peasant property rights linked productivity to the organization of rural society; the winning essay by Béardé de l’Abbaye appeared in Russian translation in 1768. Such competitions made agricultural management and property arrangements subjects of public economic discussion without themselves changing the legal position of the peasantry. (veorus.ru)

Urban development and the southern frontier

The province of New Russia (Novorossiya), established in 1764, combined military frontier districts and territories taken from the Ukrainian Hetmanate; subsequent expansion incorporated Zaporozhian lands and territory acquired from the Ottoman Empire. Its settlement programme linked land distribution to recruitment and military service. Settlers received subsidies and allotments of 26–30 desiatinas; cavalry recruits obtained additional assistance and exemption from taxation. Landowners and recruiting agents could establish hereditary settlements, but forfeited their grants if they failed to populate them within three years. Foreign recruiters received military ranks according to the number of colonists they brought: recruiting 300 earned the rank of major, 150 that of captain, and 30 that of sergeant major. Grigory Potemkin, placed in charge in 1774, became the principal organizer of southern development. (encyclopediaofukraine.com)

The new ports combined defensive, naval, and civilian functions. Catherine decreed the establishment of Kherson in 1778, with a fortress, admiralty, and shipyard on the lower Dnieper. Potemkin administered the project, while General Ivan Hannibal supervised construction. Thousands of conscripted sailors, soldiers, labourers, prisoners, and serfs supplied its workforce; the first Black Sea Fleet warship built there, the 66-gun Glory of Catherine, was launched in 1783. At Akhtiar in Crimea, Rear Admiral Thomas Mackenzie established a naval station in 1783. Catherine ordered the fortress enlarged and renamed Sevastopol in 1784. These foundations developed existing sites rather than an uninhabited coastline: Kherson incorporated an earlier fort, while Sevastopol occupied the vicinity of the Tatar village of Ak-Yar. (encyclopediaofukraine.com)

Yekaterinoslav illustrates the experimental character of frontier urban planning. An initial town was established near the confluence of the Samara and Kilchen rivers in 1776; the project subsequently shifted to the right bank of the Dnieper. Catherine’s southern journey in 1787 included the laying of the foundation stone of its projected cathedral. The new administrative centre was intended to give monumental form to imperial authority, although much of its development remained prospective. Odessa followed a different trajectory. In 1794 Catherine approved a military harbour and commercial port at Khadjibey, whose Ottoman fortifications Russian forces had captured in 1789. José de Ribas directed construction, and engineer François de Wollant prepared the plan. The conventional foundation date therefore marks the beginning of the imperial port project, not the earliest settlement at the site. (gorod.dp.ua)

Settlement incentives attracted Ukrainian peasants, Russian state peasants and Old Believers, alongside Moldavians, Germans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Armenians, and Greeks. This process also reorganized existing communities through coercion. Following the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, its lands were confiscated and divided between New Russia and Azov provinces. Some remaining Cossacks were drafted into the Kherson Settlement Picket Regiment to protect and help construct the city and shipyard. The southern frontier thus offered subsidized land to newcomers while absorbing former autonomous populations into imperial military and administrative structures. At Kherson, compulsory labour was as important to construction as voluntary immigration. (encyclopediaofukraine.com)

In St Petersburg, Catherine’s government used planning institutions to regularize an established capital. The Commission for St Petersburg and Moscow Stone Construction, created in December 1762 under Senate supervision, organized a planning competition in 1763 and prepared district plans in 1764–1768. Its work coordinated street layouts, waterways, and central architectural ensembles; it also produced plans for more than 300 provincial towns before its abolition in 1796. Granite embankments strengthened the Neva’s banks from the early 1760s, while the Catherine and Kryukov canals and Fontanka received embankments during 1764–1790. These works combined architectural ordering with bank stabilization and land reclamation. (encspb.ru)

The imperial suburbs were developed as landscaped court environments rather than military settlements. At Tsarskoye Selo, Charles Cameron’s gallery, constructed in 1784–1787, stood at the junction of the Catherine Park’s formal and landscape sections. Its elevated colonnade of 44 Ionic columns provided views over the Great Pond and surrounding park. Catherine conceived it as a place for walking and philosophical conversation; rooms beneath accommodated members of the court household. The project integrated palace accommodation, garden circulation, and classical architecture within a single ensemble. (eng.tzar.ctorstudio.com)

Education, public health, and social institutions

Catherine established the Smolny Institute in Saint Petersburg on 5 May 1764 (16 May, Gregorian calendar), following a proposal by Ivan Betskoy, who drafted its charter. Designed for 200 daughters of hereditary nobles, it offered a twelve-year residential education divided into four three-year stages. Betskoy regarded separation from existing society as essential to producing a morally reformed generation: education was to shape character, not simply impart knowledge. The curriculum combined reading, languages, history, geography, and mathematics with music, dancing, needlework, and household management. This broadened formal education for women while retaining the stated objective of preparing educated mothers and useful members of families and society. A separate department opened in 1765 for girls from non-noble families, excluding serfs; the institutional expansion therefore preserved distinctions of social estate rather than creating equal access. (prlib.ru)

The Statute on Public Schools, approved on 5 August 1786 (16 August, Gregorian calendar), provided a framework for provincial schooling beyond elite boarding institutions. It prescribed four-class “main” schools in provincial capitals and two-class “minor” schools in smaller towns. The lower classes taught reading, writing, arithmetic, religious instruction, and the duties of citizens; the main schools added subjects including geography, history, geometry, and elementary natural science. Instruction was to be conducted in Russian. The statute also regulated teachers’ responsibilities, school supervision, examinations, and the preparation and certification of teachers for lower schools. School directors reported through the provincial boards of public welfare, linking education to the provincial administration. Attendance remained voluntary, and the system did not establish a comprehensive network of village schools. Funding arrangements placed much of the practical burden on provincial and municipal institutions, limiting the implementation of the centrally prescribed scheme. (rusneb.ru)

Catherine’s most conspicuous intervention in public health was her inoculation against smallpox by the English physician Thomas Dimsdale on 12 October 1768 (23 October, Gregorian calendar). The procedure was variolation: material from smallpox lesions was introduced through the skin to induce an infection intended to provide subsequent immunity. It was not vaccination, and it could cause severe disease or transmit smallpox to others. Although Catherine’s example became public, the operation itself was performed secretly. She developed a mild illness and recovered within two weeks; her son Paul was subsequently inoculated. News of the successful procedure was widely circulated, and Dimsdale inoculated more than 140 members of the court. Imperial endorsement encouraged the adoption of inoculation elsewhere in Russia and interest in financing hospitals and medical training. (wwwnc.cdc.gov)

Betskoy also organized foundling institutions that combined infant relief with upbringing and education. Catherine authorized the Moscow Foundling Home in September 1763, and its foundation ceremony took place in 1764. She contributed an initial 100,000 roubles and promised annual donations of 50,000 roubles; private benefactors, particularly Prokofy Demidov, supplied additional resources. The institution received orphans, abandoned infants, and other children without parental care. A Saint Petersburg branch was established by decree in 1770. Its experience demonstrated the material difficulties of institutional childcare: the original premises near Smolny were damp, exposed to flooding, and associated with high childhood morbidity and mortality. Catherine granted it another building in 1778, although those premises also required repair. (mosmuseum.ru)

Outside the capitals, the provincial reform of 1775 created boards of public welfare responsible for schools, orphanages, hospitals, almshouses, institutions for people with mental illness, and workhouses. Each board operated under the governor with representatives of local social estates and received 15,000 roubles as initial capital. Donations and income from lending supplemented these funds, making provision dependent on both governmental administration and local philanthropy. Implementation was gradual: boards opened in Novgorod in 1776, Tver and Yaroslavl in 1778, and several further provinces in 1779. In Yaroslavl, the House of Charity founded in 1786 supported orphaned boys and girls, but excluded children of serfs; approximately 150 local donors contributed to its establishment, and donated capital financed its upkeep through interest income. (rusfond.ru)

Art, collections, and cultural patronage

The Hermitage collection originated in Catherine’s purchase of Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky’s paintings in Berlin in 1764, the year conventionally treated as the museum’s foundation. Rather than acquiring masterpieces only individually, she bought established European collections, rapidly assembling a gallery through diplomatic agents and advisers such as Denis Diderot, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, and Prince Dmitry Golitsyn. Major purchases included Count Heinrich von Brühl’s collection in 1769, the Crozat collection in 1772, Sir Robert Walpole’s gallery in 1779, and Count Baudouin’s collection in 1783. These acquisitions brought together Italian Renaissance and seventeenth-century paintings, French works, and extensive holdings of Dutch and Flemish painting, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck. Displayed in galleries adjoining the Winter Palace, the collection initially belonged to the imperial residence rather than to a public museum; its scale also demonstrated Russia’s participation in European artistic culture. (hermitagemuseum.org)

Collecting extended to drawings, engraved gems, sculpture, and books. Following Voltaire’s death in 1778, Catherine purchased his library from his niece and heir, Marie-Louise Denis. Grimm and Ivan Shuvalov negotiated the transaction, valued at approximately 30,000 gold rubles, with additional gifts of furs, jewels, and a diamond-decorated imperial portrait. In 1779 the books travelled through Lübeck to St Petersburg, where Voltaire’s secretary, Jean-Louis Wagnière, arranged them beside Catherine’s apartments. The surviving library contains 6,814 volumes, more than a third bearing Voltaire’s marginal annotations. Catherine’s projected replica of his residence at Ferney, intended to house the books at Tsarskoye Selo, was never constructed. The acquisition preserved an important working library of the Enlightenment, not simply editions of the philosopher’s published writings. (nlr.ru)

Architectural commissions gave court culture an increasingly neoclassical setting. Giacomo Quarenghi built the Hermitage Theatre in 1783–1787, using an amphitheatre-shaped auditorium, and constructed the Raphael Loggias in 1783–1792. The latter reproduced the Vatican gallery, with copies of its frescoes executed on canvas by artists supervised by Christoph Unterberger. At Tsarskoye Selo, Charles Cameron’s gallery, built in 1784–1787, combined a stone lower storey with a light classical colonnade; bronze busts installed in the following years formed a sculptural collection in a setting chosen by Catherine. Court patronage also sustained Russian portrait art: Dmitry Levitsky’s celebrated series depicting Smolny pupils was commissioned for the Peterhof palace, while his Catherine II the Legislatress in the Temple of the Goddess of Justice (1783) translated the sovereign’s legislative role into allegorical imagery. (hermitagemuseum.org)

Catherine participated directly in literary production. In 1769 she began publishing Vsyakaya vsyachina, commonly translated as All Sorts, and contributed satirical articles concerning manners, superficial education, and cultural pretensions. Nikolay Novikov’s Truten (The Drone, 1769–1770) became a rival voice in the expanding satirical press, engaging with the empress’s journal rather than merely reproducing its positions. Her dramatic writing included The Gambler’s Name-Day (1772), followed in 1786 by The Deceiver, The Deceived, and The Siberian Shaman, plays directed against Freemasonry. She also contributed satirical sketches to the periodical Interlocutor of Lovers of the Russian Word in 1783. Her autobiographical writing had a different circulation: the French memoirs remained unpublished during her lifetime and appeared in an edition associated with Alexander Herzen in 1859. (gutenberg.org)

Imperial support for theatre included administrative organization as well as court performances. In 1783 Catherine established a theatre committee overseeing dramatic and musical productions, while the Bolshoi Stone Theatre opened in St Petersburg with Giovanni Paisiello’s Il mondo della luna. Its performers combined Italian soloists with Russian choristers from the Court Cappella. The repertoire subsequently incorporated Russian historical subjects, including The Beginning of Oleg’s Reign, for which Catherine supplied the libretto and Vasily Pashkevich, Carlo Canobbio, and Giuseppe Sarti composed the music. These productions connected imported operatic techniques with Russian-language and historical material, alongside the more intimate performances staged in the Hermitage Theatre. (mariinsky.ru)

Religion and governance of a multi-ethnic empire

Catherine subordinated the Russian Orthodox Church more closely to the imperial administration. Her secularization decree of 1764 transferred episcopal and monastic estates to the state’s College of Economy; approximately two million peasants of both sexes passed from ecclesiastical ownership into state administration. They paid a monetary levy to the treasury, while approved monasteries, bishoprics, and ecclesiastical schools received government funding. The arrangement reduced the Church’s independent economic resources and made its institutions more dependent on state appropriations. Treatment of the Old Believers, who rejected the seventeenth-century liturgical reforms, was less consistent. Catherine invited emigrant communities to return from 1762, but troops forcibly removed inhabitants of the Old Believer settlement at Vetka in 1764. Later concessions included abolition of their discriminatory double poll tax and permission to hold public office in 1788. (sedmitza.ru)

The religious-toleration decree of 1773 restricted Orthodox bishops’ intervention in other confessions and placed decisions concerning non-Orthodox worship under secular authorities. For adherents of Islam, this facilitated mosque construction, but toleration also became a means of administrative supervision. In 1788 Catherine established the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, headquartered at Ufa. Developed with the involvement of Baron Osip Igelstrom, it licensed Muslim clerics, supervised religious instruction, and operated under government oversight. A salaried mufti headed the institution, and its business was conducted in both Russian and Tatar so that provincial officials could monitor its proceedings. Recognition therefore did not mean institutional independence: approved clerics became intermediaries between Muslim communities and the imperial state. (sedmitza.ru)

In the western territories acquired through the partitions of Poland, Catherine recognized the Catholic Church while limiting its freedom to act independently of the crown. Catholic ecclesiastical administration was centered on Mogilev, and papal documents could not be promulgated without imperial approval. A conspicuous application of this authority came in 1773, when Catherine prevented publication of Pope Clement XIV’s suppression of the Society of Jesus. Approximately 200 Jesuits consequently continued their work in Russian territory, preserving colleges and an institutional continuity lost elsewhere. Their educational usefulness helped explain this protection. Accommodation of Latin-rite Catholics did not extend equally to Eastern Catholics: from 1794 the government supported a large-scale movement of Uniate communities into Orthodoxy. (sedmitza.ru)

The incorporation of substantial Jewish populations after 1772 produced a different combination of recognition and restriction. The decisive measure underlying the Pale of Settlement came in 1791, following complaints by Moscow merchants about competition from Jewish merchants registered in the Belarusian provinces. Catherine’s government denied these merchants access to registration in the empire’s interior, while extending permitted registration to Yekaterinoslav and Taurida in the south. Because urban registration governed residence and commercial status, the decree established a territorial restriction rather than simply a rule about religious worship. Its boundaries subsequently expanded with further annexations and legislation; the fully developed nineteenth-century Pale was not created at once in 1791. This framework concentrated much of the empire’s Jewish population in its western and southern territories and made residence elsewhere dependent on specified legal exceptions. (encyclopedia.yivo.org)

Administration of ethnic diversity likewise combined cooperation with local elites and erosion of regional autonomy. Baltic German nobles continued to supply imperial officers and administrators within provinces possessing Lutheran institutions and German-language traditions, although Catherine curtailed their corporate autonomy through administrative standardization. Tatar nobles, merchants, and clerics served as intermediaries in governing Muslim populations and maintaining relations with the Kazakh steppe. Among the Cossacks, the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775 accompanied the incorporation of loyal officers into imperial military and noble hierarchies. Yet the government subsequently recruited former Zaporozhians for the Black Sea Cossack Host: Potemkin ordered volunteer recruitment in 1787, and Catherine granted the host lands on the right bank of the Kuban in 1792. Such arrangements preserved useful military communities while placing their service and territorial organization under imperial authority. (encyclopedia.com)

Historiography and the question of reputation

Catherine’s reputation as an enlightened absolute monarch was partly a product of her own management of European opinion. Her correspondence with Voltaire, maintained from 1763 to 1778, associated her government with religious toleration, cultural patronage, and rational reform. This relationship served both participants: Catherine gained the endorsement of a celebrated writer, while Voltaire presented her as evidence that sovereign power could advance the Enlightenment. Kelsey Rubin-Detlev’s research treats their exchanges as a reciprocal use of literary authority rather than simply a philosopher flattering a patron. The circulation of the 1767 Nakaz likewise made Catherine’s reforming language accessible to readers who had little direct knowledge of Russian administration. (editionsnonlieu.fr)

Nineteenth-century Russian assessments differed according to their authors’ understanding of monarchy, noble privilege, and reform. Nikolai Karamzin described Catherine’s period as exceptionally happy for Russian citizens, a judgment particularly applicable to the increased security and freedom of the upper classes. Alexander Pushkin, by contrast, interpreted the Legislative Commission as an exercise in manipulating public opinion. Vasily Kliuchevsky emphasized the entrenchment of serfdom, corruption, and the inadequacies of noble-dominated provincial government. Even commemorations became occasions for competing interpretations: the centenary of the two charters in 1885 divided commentators who stressed corporate rights and constitutional possibilities from those who celebrated aristocratic privilege and imperial power. These disagreements concerned the meaning of her institutions, not merely her personal character. (nybooks.com)

The expansion of documentary scholarship around the turn of the twentieth century did not immediately resolve these disputes. Catherine’s collected writings, published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1901–1907, omitted substantial correspondence and the Nakaz, leaving an uneven basis for assessing her political thought. Critical readings also treated her memoirs as evidence of the distance between a ruler’s self-absorption and the condition of her subjects. The methodological difficulty was that these memoirs were themselves retrospective constructions, not an unmediated record. Catherine repeatedly revised the account of her early life; comparing its versions therefore reveals changes in how she wished her accession and personal conduct to be understood. (thebritishacademy.ac.uk)

In the Soviet Union, Marxist interpretations shifted emphasis from Catherine’s personality and professed intentions to the social interests sustained by autocracy. Noble domination, peasant exploitation, and class conflict supplied the principal framework, making the preservation of serfdom more consequential than her exchanges with the philosophes. Nevertheless, Soviet scholarship was not confined to a single formula. Studies such as P. V. Ivanov’s 1950 article on enlightened absolutism and I. A. Fedosov’s treatment of the subject in 1970 examined whether the term adequately described Russian policy. Research on deputies’ instructions to the Legislative Commission also investigated the demands of particular social groups rather than accepting the empress’s presentation of the assembly. (erenow.org)

Reassessment began in Western scholarship before the Soviet collapse. Isabel de Madariaga’s Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981) provided a substantial political and institutional study alongside the established biographical tradition. Russian publication of Catherine’s memoirs resumed in 1989, followed by four editions in 1990; international conferences and collections marked the bicentenary of her death in 1996. Subsequent scholarship broadened the evidentiary base and the questions asked. Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom’s annotated memoir translation (2005) examined her revisions, while Douglas Smith’s edition of Catherine–Potemkin correspondence (2004) documented the interconnection of affection and state business. Such work made self-representation, gender, and informal political relationships subjects of analysis rather than incidental background. (books.google.com)

Sexual reputation presents a distinct problem of source criticism. Catherine’s documented relationships, notably with Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin, must be separated from hostile anecdotes that converted female sovereignty into alleged sexual disorder. The notorious story linking her death to intercourse with a horse is fabricated; she died following a stroke. Political caricatures and scandal narratives are consequently evidence of how contemporaries and later audiences represented her, not reliable testimony about her conduct. Personal correspondence provides a firmer basis for examining intimacy, although its survival and selection still require scrutiny. Simon Dixon’s 2009 biography reconstructed court relationships extensively, but the historian Anthony Cross’s review questioned whether its narrative emphasis on emotional life sometimes displaced explanation of legislation and social change—an example of the continuing tension between biographical appeal and institutional history. (smithsonianmag.com)

Death, succession, and legacy

Catherine died following a stroke on 17 November 1796 (6 November in the Julian calendar then used in Russia), aged sixty-seven. Her son Paul I succeeded her, ending a reign of thirty-four years. The funeral also brought a public restoration of the status of her deposed husband, Peter III: Paul ordered his father’s remains brought from the Alexander Nevsky monastery, and the two coffins were conveyed together to the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg. The joint burial placed both parents within the imperial dynasty’s principal burial church, despite the coup that had separated their political fortunes in 1762. (time.com)

Paul challenged several arrangements associated with Catherine’s rule, particularly the privileged position of the nobility. He undermined the protection against corporal punishment secured by the Charter to the Nobility of 1785, taxed noble estates, and imposed tighter requirements on service and conduct. His reorganization of the army according to Prussian models also departed from established practices under Catherine. These changes did not constitute a rejection of autocracy or the landed social order: they asserted greater personal control by the sovereign over elites whose corporate privileges Catherine had formalized. After Paul’s assassination in 1801, the nobility looked to Alexander I for restoration of the Charter’s rights. (encyclopedia.com)

The most durable dynastic change was the Act of Succession, promulgated at Paul’s coronation on 16 April 1797 (5 April Old Style). It replaced Peter the Great’s 1722 provision allowing the reigning monarch to designate a successor with a predetermined hereditary order, prioritizing male dynastic lines and admitting female succession only after their exhaustion. Paul and his wife Maria Feodorovna had drafted the act in 1788; its stated purpose was to prevent uncertainty and the exclusion of lawful heirs. Rather than making the monarchy constitutional, the act restricted sovereign discretion in one crucial area. With subsequent amendments, it remained the basis of imperial succession until 1917. (prlib.ru)

Catherine’s administrative legacy survived these immediate reversals. The provincial statute of 1775 supplied the framework of governors, districts, courts, police, and welfare institutions through which the nineteenth-century empire was governed. Its basic institutional structure endured until the reforms of the 1860s, while elements of its territorial organization persisted until 1917. Her settlement combined enlarged state capacity with the political and economic predominance of landowners; the bureaucracy developed within this framework, while serfdom remained central to rural society until emancipation in 1861. Thus the enduring inheritance was not the unrealized legislative program of the Nakaz, but a working apparatus of provincial administration and estate-based authority. (jstor.org)

Her territorial acquisitions likewise shaped the empire inherited by her successors. The annexation of Crimea in 1783 and the Treaty of Jassy in 1792 established Russian control along the northern Black Sea and extended the frontier to the Dniester. Southern ports provided a foundation for nineteenth-century grain exports as well as military operations. The partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795 incorporated extensive western territories and populations into Russia, eliminated the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and brought the empire into direct frontier contact with Prussia and Austria. These acquisitions enlarged Russia’s resources and strategic reach while creating lasting problems of governing populations with distinct religious and national identities. (countrystudies.us)

Later commemoration emphasized both imperial expansion and cultural patronage. The monument erected before St Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1873, designed by Mikhail Mikeshin, placed Catherine above nine figures of her reign, including Potemkin, Suvorov, Derzhavin, and Ekaterina Dashkova. The Hermitage, tracing its foundation to her acquisition of paintings in 1764, became a public museum in 1852, transforming a court collection into an enduring cultural institution. Its international exhibitions, including Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great in Melbourne in 2015, continued to associate her name with European artistic collecting; dramatizations such as the 2019 television series starring Helen Mirren extended that presence into popular historical culture. (rmgallery.rusmuseumvrm.ru)

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