Chapter 1Stettin

Foreword

She wrote to Voltaire about liberty and she signed away human beings, and this book argues that those were not two Catherines.

They were one transaction, and she understood it perfectly.

A German princess with no Russian blood and no legal claim to the Russian throne took it by a Guards coup in June 1762. Her husband died in custody eight days later. From that moment she reigned entirely at the pleasure of the men who had put her there, and a usurper in eighteenth-century Russia paid her supporters in the only currency available: land, rank, and souls.

The first grants of serfs were signed within weeks.

So this book prices every liberal gesture against what was signed in the same year, and the structure enforces it. Chapter 8 establishes the debt before Chapter 9 opens the Nakaz. And the serfdom chapter sits at Chapter 14, in the middle of the book, rather than arriving late as a chapter of regret.

I want to be clear that this is not an argument that the Enlightenment was a pose.

The Nakaz was written over two years and published in 1767, assembled openly out of Montesquieu and Beccaria, condemning torture, asserting law above whim and the sovereign's duty to the governed. She meant it. The Legislative Commission she convened in Moscow that summer had more than five hundred elected deputies in it, including state peasants.

And what the noble deputies used it for was to demand more power over their serfs, not less.

She was shown the price in 1767 and she paid it for the next twenty-nine years. Chapter 9 is where the reign's central fact becomes visible: she had a programme, she put it in front of the people who would have to implement it, and they told her what it would cost her.

There is one act in this reign that is unambiguously and entirely to her credit, and it is in Chapter 11.

In October 1768 an English Quaker physician named Thomas Dimsdale inoculated the Empress of Russia against smallpox, in secret, with a carriage and relays of horses standing by to get him out of the country if she died. Then he inoculated the heir.

That is the most genuinely enlightened act of the reign and it is also a perfect demonstration of what autocracy is good for. Nobody could stop her, so she did it, and the argument for inoculation in Russia was won by a body rather than by a parliament.

Chapter 14 is the chapter this book exists for.

The decree of 1767 forbidding serfs to petition the crown against their owners. The provincial reform of 1775 that handed the countryside to the gentry. Serfdom extended into Left-Bank Ukraine in 1783. And the Charter to the Nobility of April 1785, which made the nobility a legal estate holding property in human beings.

The figure usually given for the number of state peasants she transferred into private serfdom is cited in that chapter with the objections to it attached.

And the silence is named rather than filled. Nobody wrote down what any of this felt like from below. There is no serf memoir of the reign of Catherine II, because there was no mechanism by which one could have been produced, and a book that supplied an interior for those people would be inventing it.

Three things this book does not resolve, and says so where they arise.

Peter III died at Ropsha on 6 July 1762, eight days into custody, with an official cause of haemorrhoidal colic and a drunken confession from one of the men who had held him that survives only as a copy of disputed provenance. Chapter 7 sets out what can be established and what cannot, because a biography that resolves that question for narrative convenience has forfeited its authority in every chapter afterwards.

Paul's paternity is claimed for Sergei Saltykov by exactly one source, which is Catherine's own memoir, written decades later by a woman with every reason to run the Romanov line through herself rather than through the husband she had deposed.

And the marriage to Potemkin is probable and has no register, no ceremony and no witness.

What is new here is a body of material the standard biographies did not have. The Potemkin correspondence in a modern scholarly edition, published in 2004. The unabridged memoirs, published in 2005. Kelly O'Neill's archival reconstruction of the Crimean annexation, published in 2017.

And the fact that since 2014 the Russian state has claimed her as a political ancestor, and made an eighteenth-century annexation into a live title deed. Every standard life of her predates that.

Two things this book refuses.

It refuses the tribute that Russian officialdom now wants, and it refuses the pornography that her enemies wrote. The horse story, the impossible lover-counts and the obscene death arrived within a generation, from émigré and French aristocratic circles with an interest in discrediting a woman who had ruled, and Chapter 21 sets out where each of them came from.

Two conventions. Dates in this book are Old Style, with New Style given where a treaty or a foreign event requires it, and the rule is held for the whole book. Russian names are transliterated in a simplified form without diacritics.

She was born in a Prussian garrison town on the Oder in 1729, to a father on a general's salary and a mother who openly preferred her son.

She died in the Winter Palace in November 1796, and her son went through her papers.

Chapter 1 · Stettin

The Oder comes down through flat country and runs north to the Baltic, and where the river widens towards the lagoon the Prussian crown kept a fortress. Stettin was a port with a garrison built around it, or a garrison with a port attached, depending on who was doing the describing and what he wanted. It had been Swedish and then it was Prussian. Its business was grain and timber and fish, customs duties, and drill. On 2 May 1729 a daughter was born there to a Prussian officer and his wife, and she was christened Sophie Auguste Friederike, of the princely house of Anhalt-Zerbst.

That is a Western date, and it is worth settling the point at the outset, because this book will spend its whole length crossing a line that most of its readers have never had to think about. Russia kept the Julian calendar throughout the reign described here, and in this century the Julian reckoning stands eleven days behind the Gregorian one the rest of Europe used. Russian events are given here in Old Style, as Russians dated them, and marked O.S. where the difference does any work; foreign events and treaties are given in New Style. Russian names are transliterated in a simplified form, without diacritics. Sophie was born on 2 May 1729 New Style, and in Stettin there was no reason for anyone to think about the other calendar at all.

What everybody knows about this childhood is that it was obscure. The story is repeated in the same shape wherever it is told: a small German princess of no importance, a father with no money, a town nobody had heard of, and then Russia, and then the throne, and then thirty-four years of it. The shape is a fairy tale, and fairy tales are not usually the fault of the person they are about. This one is. Almost the only witness to this childhood is the woman herself, writing fifty years later with a case to make, and the smallness of Stettin is the first thing her case requires.

It is worth being precise about where the fairy-tale version comes from, because it did not arrive from nowhere and it is still in print. The romantic tier of the literature — Vincent Cronin, Henri Troyat, Carolly Erickson — told the Stettin childhood at length and told it warmly, and all of them were writing before the unabridged text of her memoirs existed in English; the Cruse and Hoogenboom translation of 2005 came too late to shape any of them. Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011) is the best-selling narrative life and it is at its strongest exactly here, in the early years and the marriage, though it uses the new material lightly. At the other end of the shelf, Isabel de Madariaga's Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981) remains the definitive scholarly account, and it is a book about a reign rather than a life; it has comparatively little to say about a girl in Stettin, because a girl in Stettin did not legislate. Between a warm tradition working from a partial text and a rigorous tradition that begins when the subject reaches power, the childhood has been left mostly to its own author.

Take the household, then, on the terms the record allows. Her father, Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, belonged to a princely house small enough that its princes went out and took employment. He was a professional soldier in the Prussian service, and at the time of his daughter's birth he was not the reigning prince of anything. The family lived on a general's salary. That phrase is not an insult; it is an accounting fact, and it governs everything else about the house. A general's salary buys a household, servants, an education, and a place at the top of a garrison town's small society. It does not buy a court, a gallery, an orchestra, an embassy, or a dowry that would interest a great power. Rank without revenue was the ordinary condition of the minor German nobility in the eighteenth century, and it produced a specific kind of family: proud, exact about precedence, Lutheran, permanently short of the money that precedence implied.

What that house was determines what she was for, and it needs describing. The German lands were a patchwork of sovereignties of wildly unequal weight, and Anhalt-Zerbst sat at the bottom of the scale: sovereign in law, negligible in fact, possessed of a name and a pedigree and almost nothing else that a great power would want. Houses in that position had one exportable commodity, and it was their children. A prince of Anhalt-Zerbst could not raise an army worth an alliance or lend money worth a treaty, but he could produce legitimate, well-descended, Protestant offspring whose blood was unimpeachable and whose relations were harmless — and the courts that could do all the other things needed exactly that, repeatedly, in every generation. This was not a sideline of German dynastic life. It was the business model. A daughter of such a house was not being raised towards a marriage in the way a modern reader hears the phrase; she was being maintained as an asset against the day a larger house had a vacancy. Her mother's family, Holstein-Gottorp, stood higher on the same ladder, with connections that reached north and east, and a name that would in due course be attached to the Russian imperial line itself — though nobody in Stettin could have known that, or how.

The town supplied the rest. A garrison runs on a timetable, and the timetable was audible — drums, bells, the changing of guards, the working of a river port that froze and thawed on the Baltic's schedule. The society available to an officer's family was officers, their wives, the clergy of the garrison church, the officials of the customs house, and the merchants who dealt in what came up and down the Oder. Sundays were Lutheran and long. This was the whole of the ceremonial world into which the woman who would rule Russia was born, and it is the reason the usual instruments are no use here. There is no court chronicle of Stettin, because there was no court. There is no ambassador's dispatch describing the child, because the envoys of the great powers write about what their masters might one day need, and no great power needed anything from this house. The reporting on her begins abruptly, later, when she becomes worth reporting on. Before that, the outside record is thin to the point of silence, and the silence has a cause, and the cause is rank.

Her mother was Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. She was ambitious, she was disappointed, and she openly preferred her son. Those facts are the substance of this chapter's family, and they are also, characteristically, facts for which the daughter is the principal source. Disappointment implies an expectation, and the expectation is not hard to reconstruct: a woman of a house with reach, married into a house without it, living in a garrison town on a soldier's pay, with the knowledge that in the marriage market of the German principalities a well-connected name was capital and a garrison posting was not. That the ambition was real is not in doubt. It is confirmed later, in Russia, by people who were not her daughter and who had every reason to write down exactly what she did; but that confirmation belongs to a later part of this story, and it does not tell us how the preference for the boy was expressed at home.

Because we do not know. That has to be said flatly and early, and it will have to be said again. We do not know what was spoken in that house. No letter from the parents about this daughter has come down in a form that settles anything; no servant left a deposition; no visitor recorded a scene. What survives is the recollection of a woman who was, when she wrote it, the Empress of All the Russias, setting down what her mother had thought of her when she was a child. That is not evidence of the ordinary kind. It is testimony from an interested party about events fifty years gone, and the interest is not vague — it is precise, documented, and central to how the memoir was written.

Consider what the document actually is. Catherine wrote and rewrote her life across decades in several redactions, returning to it at different points and from different positions, and every version breaks off before the coup. She did not publish it. It circulated after her, not by her. It is, in its bones, a brief for her own legitimacy: the explanation, prepared by the defendant, of how a German princess with no Russian blood and no legal claim came to be the rightful ruler of Russia. Earlier translations into English were cut and bowdlerised; the fullest modern English text is the Cruse and Hoogenboom translation of 2005, which is the version a reader today can hold. And the first thing to understand about it is that it is the most interested document in the entire file on her life, and that its account of Stettin is the section where its interest is least visible and most active.

What does a usurper's brief need from a childhood? It needs, above all, smallness. If the girl in Stettin was nobody — unwanted, unpromising, placed behind a brother in her mother's affections, raised on a salary in a garrison town — then everything that followed was achieved rather than inherited, and achievement is the only claim available to a sovereign who has none by blood. Smallness also does a quieter piece of work. A woman who began with nothing was made by nobody. She was not the creature of her mother's scheming, nor of a Prussian king's, nor of the Guards regiments who put her on the throne. The obscurity at the start of the story is what allows the whole of the rest of it to be hers. That is an argument, and it is being made by the person who would most benefit from its being believed.

None of which means it is false. This is the discipline the material demands. An interested witness is not a lying witness, and the temptation to treat every self-serving document as fiction produces a biography as unreliable as one that swallows it. The salary was real; a house of that size in a town of that size did not have money it did not have. The garrison was real, and so was the confessional and linguistic world it sat in. The mother's ambition is corroborated by her later conduct, in another country, in front of other people. What cannot be corroborated is the interior — what the child felt about any of it — and the interior is exactly what the memoir supplies most generously and what a reader should hold most loosely.

So the honest procedure is the one the evidence permits: we cannot establish what she thought, but we can establish a good deal about what she knew. She knew, because a child of that rank in that century could not avoid knowing it, that she was an asset with a market value. The exportable product of the small German princely houses was children with pedigrees, and a daughter's use to her family was the alliance she could be turned into. She knew the order of precedence and the size of the gap between her father's house and the houses that mattered, because precedence was rehearsed at every dinner and every church door. She was taught French, the working language of every court in Europe including the one she would eventually rule. She was raised Lutheran, in a town where that was the established confession, and the religion she was given was a thing she would later be required to put down and exchange, which is not something most children have to contemplate about a faith. She knew that her brother came first.

That last item deserves a sentence of its own, because it was not merely a matter of a mother's affection. In a house of that kind the son and the daughter were assets of different types. The son carried the name forward and might inherit something; the daughter was the item that could be traded outward. Preference for the boy was therefore not only temperament, it was arithmetic, and any child sharp enough to notice the preference was sharp enough to work out the reason for it. The daughter of such a house occupied a peculiar position: she was simultaneously the most valuable thing the family owned and the member of it whose own wishes counted for least. We are not told what she made of that, and any biographer who claims to know is telling you about themselves. What can be said is that it is an unusual thing to learn young, and that she cannot have failed to learn it.

She knew, finally — this being the condition of nearly every well-born girl in Europe at the time, and not a private cruelty invented for her — that she would have no say whatever in where she was sent, or to whom, or when.

That is the inventory, and it is inference, and it is offered as inference. What it produces is not a psychology but a position. A child in that position has one instrument available and only one: the study of other people. If the regard you want is directed elsewhere, you learn to watch the person who is not looking at you — what pleases them, what bores them, what they say when they think they are unobserved, what they will forgive and what they will not. It is an unglamorous education and there is no examination in it, but it is the same skill, exactly, that would later let a foreign woman in a hostile court identify which officials took money and from whom, which servants reported and to whom, and which men could be relied on to act when acting became necessary. The record cannot show us her learning it. The record can show us that she had it, and had it early, and that the household described in her own account is precisely the sort of school in which it is acquired.

There is one decisive act available to us here, and it does not belong to the girl. It belongs to the empress. Fifty years after Stettin, a woman who had taken a throne by force and held it against every argument in law sat down and wrote the Oder, the garrison, the salary, the mother who preferred the boy. She had at her disposal the whole apparatus of an imperial court and the services of every flatterer in Europe. She could have had a genealogy drawn up. She could have had the German connections inflated, the house dignified, the childhood furnished with omens; monarchs had been doing exactly that for as long as there had been monarchs, and hers was the century in which the machinery for doing it was best developed. She did the opposite. She made herself small on the page, on purpose, in a document written to argue that she deserved what she had taken.

Two readings are available and the evidence does not settle between them. The first is that the smallness was simply true, and that she wrote it down because it was true and because she had the nerve to. The second is that the smallness was true and she also understood, with the political intelligence visible in everything else she ever wrote, exactly what a small beginning would do for the story — that a rise from nothing is the only legitimacy a usurper can manufacture, and that the way to manufacture it is not to boast about the summit but to be scrupulous about the base. These are not contradictory. The most probable position is that both are the case, which is to say that she told the truth and used it, and that the two operations were not distinguishable to her because they had never needed to be.

The document's other tell is where it stops. She wrote and rewrote for years and never carried the account past the point where she seized the throne. The fullest self-portrait she ever produced ends just short of the act that requires the most explanation. It is possible that she meant to finish and did not. It is also possible that the brief could not be written, because the events of that particular June admitted no version she was willing to sign. Either way, the shape of her memoir is the shape of the whole problem this book has to work with: enormous, articulate, first-person testimony, running right up to the edge of the thing you most want explained, and then nothing.

Stettin, then, is a place we can describe and a childhood we mostly cannot. The river and the fortress and the drums are documented, and so is a general's salary, and so is the family tree. The rest is a woman decades later telling us about a girl, and telling us about her in a way that serves her. What is left when the interest is subtracted is not nothing. It is a household with rank and without money, in a town that mattered to nobody, on the wrong side of Europe from every decision that would ever be worth making; and a daughter in it who came after her brother in her mother's regard and knew it, and who possessed, as far as her family were concerned, one asset, which was her name and the marriage it might buy.

That is the smallness. She would spend the rest of her life outrunning it — through a court where she was watched, a marriage that gave her nothing, a coup she had no right to make, and thirty-four years of a reign in which she made herself the most articulate defender of enlightened absolutism in Europe, and never quite stopped explaining where she had come from. At fourteen the outrunning began, when Russia sent for her and other people started, for the first time, writing her down.