CATHERINE THE GREAT

Born in May 1729 in a merchant's house in Stettin (then German but now Polish), Sophie Auguste Friderike of Anhalt-Zerbst was the eldest daughter of the Prince of an insignificant cadet branch of the German House of Anstalt, who was forced to take service as a general in the service of the King of Prussia in order to make ends meet. By dint of a pushy mother, an advantageous marriage to the heir to the Russian Empire, his subsequent accession and murder, and - not least - her own indomitable force of character, she ended her days in November 1796 as Yekaterina Alekseyevna, the most serene and all-powerful Princess and lady, Catherine II, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias. History knows her more simply as Catherine the Great.

The 18th century was a good age for female Russian rulers. Between the death of Peter the Great in 1725 and the murder of Catherine's own son Paul in 1801, there were no less than four Empresses; Peter's widow Catherine (1725-7), his niece Anna (1730-40), his daughter Elizabeth (1741-61), and the wife of his grandson, Catherine the Great (1762-96), all of whom died peacefully on the throne. The only times that men got a look in were in 1727-30, 1740-41, 1761-62 and 1796-1801, and their respective fates were death from smallpox, incarceration followed by murder, murder and murder. Not until the accession of Catherine's grandson Alexander I in 1801 did the Romanov dynasty acquire a stable succession in the male line. Yet despite that, Russia's already vast size continued to grow steadily during the century, with the acquisition of the Crimea and northern Black Sea coast, what is now Eastern Finland, Estonia and Latvia, and the greater part of Poland, which was casually partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria in three bites, in 1772, 1793 and 1795.

Legend has it that Catherine was a nymphomaniac. Although the wilder rumours that she gradually worked her way through her own personal Guards regiment, and even a horse, can be discounted, it is certainly true that she had lovers even in the early days of her marriage to the future Peter III, by all accounts a very unattractive man. Even after he had been conveniently bumped off and she was crowned Empress at the age of 33, she continued to have an active, if not voracious, sex life, taking a series of "favourites", ever more younger than her, until the end (her last, Platon Zubov, was 22 when she was 60). When these relationships ended, as they invariably did, she treated the men kindly, generously even. Though never at the expense of realpolitik. Count Stanislaw Poniatowski was one of her earliest lovers, whom she helped to get elected as the last King of Poland in 1764 with the aid of Russian troops. But that did not stop her dismembering his kingdom thirty years later (though she allowed him to live in exile in St. Petersburg and gave him a pension).

Although Catherine had to convert to Orthodoxy on her marriage and was assiduous in promoting Russian interests, she remained throughout her life a product of the German enlightenment, dedicated to order and rationality. Her natural language was French, then the lingua franca of European diplomacy, she was a correspondent of Voltaire and Diderot (and eventually purchased the latter's library), she was influenced by the political philosophy of Montesquieu, which she tried to incorporate in her great project to codify Russian law, and her court buildings and ritual borrowed heavily from those of France and the larger German states. She even believed in freeing the serfs; though that didn't happen in Russia until the 1860's.

That it didn't is testimony to the difficulties she faced. Despite an iron will, and the advantages of autocracy, ruling the vastness of Russia was like dealing with a huge, soggy pudding. A large proportion of the nobility were still illiterate, 200 years after a revolution in education amongst the elite in (say) England. The country could mobilise immense resources, not least in terms of manpower, that would ultimately frustrate the likes of Napoleon and Hitler. But the "old ways" ran so deep in the population that attempts to yank them from on high into a new age were always doomed to ultimate failure. Although true of Catherine, it applied equally to other energetic Russian rulers from Peter the Great through Alexander II (the emancipator of the serfs, assassinated for his pains) to Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachev.

This has lessons for modern Russia, in my view. Look at Catherine's title; Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias. Most nation states have ultimately developed through their people's willingness to view themselves as part of a nation. That process has taken place at different times in different places; early in countries such as England and Denmark, much later in countries such as Italy and Germany. In some countries (Belgium, for instance, or Spain) the process is incomplete and may ultimately fail. I have never been to Russia, but I suspect that the nation-building process has never happened there, the country has always been an empire rather than a nation state. If true, then we should deal with the current Russian leadership on that basis, and stop believing that Russia is like other European countries, just bigger.

Walter Blotscher