Book Review: Catherine the Great and the Expansion of Russia

Title: Catherine the Great and the Expansion of Russia

Author: Gladys Scott Thomson

Date: 1947

Publisher: Macmillan

ISBN: none

Length: 213 pages plus index

Quote: “Not that it was to be an immediate marriage…The bride-to-be must be received into the communion of the Greek or Orthodox Church…[S]he was baptized afresh, as had been her husband-to-be. She took the names of Catherine Alexandrovna.”

Thus Sophie Auguste, daughter of Prince Christian August, became Catherine, Empress of Russia. “Alexandrovna” to translate “daughter of August” was a bit of a stretch, but who cared? Sophie-Catherine didn’t like the future Emperor Peter, through whom she received her title by marriage, nor did she even seem to care much about their son, Prince Paul, but who cared? Power in a monarchical system has nothing to do with freedom. At least Sophie-Catherine seems to have managed to like Russia; she learned the language and dressed in the style of her husband’s country.

She liked power. Though often grouped among the more “enlightened” monarchs of the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great was far more concerned with expanding the Russian Empire than with rights or benefits for the common people. The few official gestures she made toward improving the lot of the lower classes either benefitted only a few of the masses (as when she organized schools, which most children still found themselves unable to attend) or backfired (as when her proposed pay raise generated the inevitable price rise). She disapproved vigorously and vocally of the proto-democratic tendencies embedded in the British parliamentary system. She thought a monarch ought to be the sole and unlimited ruler of a nation. 

And she liked…revenge. Czar Peter asserted the traditional right of a male monarch to demand sexual favors from any subject he fancied, of any class. What was sauce for the goose, Catherine clearly felt, was sauce for the gander. After one of her longer-lived affairs flamed out, Catherine used an ex-boyfriend to enlist a steady stream of younger men to share her bed, long after Peter’s demise. Like Peter, she seems to have cared nothing about any of these men, but only used them for a night or two to show her power over her subjects. Catherine was not considered especially attractive even when young but there seems to be no record of threats or blackmail being used to get the younger men to do whatever their Empress demanded. Whether they received the traditional “morning gift” male aristocrats gave to lower-status women after use, or were even expected to offer “morning gifts” to Catherine, Thomson doesn’t say.

Catherine did much of her writing in French. She wrote extensively, corresponding with French scholars and collaborating with French, Russian, and other members of the ruling class to produce a book of her political philosophy (which, she complained, was a compromise). She probably signed her official name the French way more often than she did the German way (Katharine) or Russian way (Yekaterina). 

(Nevertheless, when twentieth century essayist Paul Fussell described the trendy American version, “Kathryn,” as an “illiterate and vulgar” name, at least one of the readers who complained wrote that she had been named “not after the Empress of Russia, but after Kathryn or Katryn Parr of England, a more dignified and worthier queen.” Though “Madame Parr” never actually ruled England, as Henry VIII’s widow she seems to have been content with one second husband, and to have made some effort in the direction of being a decent stepmother to Edward and Elizabeth.)

Gladys Scott Thomson, proud in her lifetime to be tagged as “one of Britain’s leading women historians,” summarizes the historical records of Catherine the Great in a fairly succinct way. (When considering whether to keep or sell this book, I noted that some of Thomson’s sentences are as long and awkward as my worst ones, and decided to look for a better example of prose style.) Catherine the Great and the Expansion of Russia gives matter-of-fact, unflinching answers to the questions raised by hostile gossip: Was Catherine actually involved in the murders of Peter and Paul? (Nothing was ever proved.) Was her short-term boyfriend and long-term consultant, Gregori Potemkin, a man, a myth, or a monster? (He was a man, albeit a big, scarred, scary-looking one.) How did she die? (Sedately, at what was then considered a ripe old age, of what were presumed to be natural causes; though her death had been reported many times before it happened.)

Nobody is perfect. Perhaps more than other widows who broke out of the pattern of conventional femininity to do things men usually did, Catherine of Russia overtly rejected every conventionally feminine virtue, while wallowing in the stereotypically feminine vices of unchastity, greed, and vanity. She was about as far from being a nice girl as it was possible to get. She may have yielded to the demand that she change her religion because, going by the available evidence, she had no real religious faith and merely went through the motions of attending major religious events.. Still, she did govern a great nation at least as well as her male counterparts did, and though her book was hardly a bestseller, Catherine accomplished more than some of the male Emperors—notably Peter—by finishing a readable book at all.