The Real Catherine The Great

The Real Catherine The Great | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"[Russia] was already a European state, though many people would not agree with that. But certainly by the standards of Central and Western Europe, this was a backward country. It was an enormous country, of course, even then, and that was part of the cause of its backwardness economically, but it hadn't really taken off industrially. This social structure we would regard as backward. There were, was a noble class, relatively small noble class.

And then the social feature, which is always a scar on Russia in the 18th or 19th century - serfdom. The peasants were tied to noble land. Not all peasants were serfs. But those on noble land were tied to that land and had very few rights, almost no rights, and then an absence of what we'd call the middle class. It's not the case that there were no merchants, but there were far fewer merchants with far fewer rights and power in the state than you had in the West. So I think the central structure was definitely very different.

In religion, it's a Christian country, but it was Russian Orthodox. It hadn't gone, undergone a reformation, like Western and Central Europe. Russian Orthodoxy is Christianity, but there were no great teaching orders in the Russian Orthodox Church, so it seemed more insular, if you like, than the church in the West. In cultural terms, this is before the great period of Russian writers, of Russian artists, of Russian musicians. It wasn't the case that there was no cultural life. But compared with Catherine's own upbringing in Germany, it seemed backward.…

Catherine, from a German background, saw Russia as a European state, and it's something she states in her instruction: Russia is a European state. One of her rather more spiteful advisors at this point pointed out that three quarters of it was in Asia. But this wasn't a geographical state, it was a cultural statement. And I think she genuinely believe that some of the best ideas of Europe at the time could be translated into Russia, sometimes almost pathetically naively. So that for example, Catherine, bless her, read legal documents, Blackstone on the English law, in French, didn't read English. And she thought that some concepts like the concept of equity could simply be translated into Russia with a completely different legal system. So in some ways, you might say that's ambitious, but it's ambitious, but it's also rather naive.

It's not that Catherine never left St. Petersburg, she did leave St. Petersburg, she traveled to Moscow. She traveled a couple of times, quite deep into Russia, to Kazan, which was a part tartar city, down to the south when she acquired territories the South. But it's doubtful whether you could say that she ever really engaged with real Russia. But then what rulers do. So, understanding how serfdom actually worked, what it was like to be an impoverished nobleman with half a dozen serfs and to be desperate to hang on to them, that sort of thing she didn't understand.

And I don't think she understood that you couldn't simply translate Western institutions, Western concepts into that social structure. One obvious example of that is Catherine's urban administration, where she thought Russian towns could become like German towns if you simply gave them a different structure, different institutions, German names, without realizing that Russian towns were dominated by nobles and peasants and not by a strong middle class…

The main charge against Catherine, of course, is she didn't abolish serfdom. But I think I'd make two defenses of that. One is that nobody else did really, not until the French Revolution. This is pre the French Revolution. Medica [sp?] had slaves, through to the 19th century. There were other social structures in Europe that were not so different from serfdom, Russia only became, looked odd really after the French Revolution in the 19th century when they had serfdom.

And the other was simply the practicalities of it. How are you going to abolish serfdom? Who owned the serfs? The nobles. Who were the key members of authority in the country? The nobles. Who are the army officers? Nobles. Hardly a police force. So actually if the nobility opposed it was almost impossible to abolish serfdom, and in fact, in Russia when serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was only after the enormous shock of the Crimean War made people think that there was something fundamentally wrong with Russia. Until that point, they didn't think that, because they kept winning wars.

So I think it's very much a later judgment on Catherine, but one can see when it comes about because she projects herself as somebody who's very enlightened, corresponds with Voltaire, Grim [sp?], with Diderot, invites Diderot to Russia, and yet Russia still in social terms remains backward."