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Catherine II, known as the Great, was Empress of Russia from 1762 to
1796. Born Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst ,
she was the daughter of an obscure German prince. At the age of
fourteen, in 1744, she arrived in Russia to marry the heir to the
Russian throne, the future Peter III. In 1762, the Empress Elizabeth
died and Peter ascended the throne of Russia, which he ruled as
Emperor for only six months. Catherine was proclaimed Empress in
July following a coup d’état led by Grigory Orlov, a lover,
who, along with his four bothers won over the support of the army.
Peter III was killed shortly afterwards.
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Catherine II. Portrait by
G. Groot |
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Catherine ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years. She continued
the task of the Europeanization of Russia started by Peter the
Great. However, while Peter’s practical focus was on the scientific
rationalism of the late seventeenth century, Catherine’s
intellectual focus was on the eighteenth century Philosphes.
Catherine died in 1796 and is buried in the Cathedral of Saints
Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. This essay will evaluate the
character of Catherine’s reign, looking specifically at:
Enlightened Absolutism or Enlightened Despotism;
Catherine as the enlightened lawmaker; Catherine’s reign as the
Golden Age of the Nobility and the Apogee of Serfdom; and
finally, Catherine’s treatment of Poland.
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The
latter half of the seventeenth century, particularly the several
decades before the French Revolution, was a time when several
European monarchies used principles of the Enlightenment to temper
their reigns; this style of reign is known as Enlightened
Absolutism (Chubarov 1999: 37). The monarchs considered to be
enlightened were Fredrick the Great of Prussia, Joseph II of
Austria, Charles III of Spain and Catherine the Great of Russia (Chubarov
1999: 37). There has been much debate over whether Catherine’s reign
can truly be called enlightened.
It
is true that Catherine was inspired by leading figures of the
Enlightenment. She had a long correspondence with Voltaire, from
1763 until his death in 1778, and gained much stimulation from
Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws)
(Gorbatov 2007: 387), which is evident in her Instruction.
The political thought that was being borne out of the
Enlightenment’s Philosophes was moving towards the view of
the Monarch as ‘the first servant, as a caring head of state’ (Chubarov
1999: 37). Indeed, Catherine believed that ‘[c]ontrary to the
flatterers who daily keep telling the monarchs that peoples were
created for them, We believe and take pride in saying that we were
created for our people’ (Cited in Chubarov 1999: 39). Michael
Kheraskov, a contemporary poet, said ‘Peter gave Russians a body,
Catherine gave them a soul’ (Klyuchevsky 1998: 36). This sentiment
was reiterated later by many, including Vissarion Belinsky, an
associate of the great revolutionary Alexander Herzen, who said in
1841 that ‘Peter had awakened Russia from apathetic sleep, but it
was Catherine who breathed life into her’ (Cited in Chubarov 1998:
36).
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