Catherine II’s Ukrainian Policy
Numerous portraits show this clever woman’s calm and confident face, unmistakably that of a person who knew all there was to know about life and politics, emanating cold inner strength. Precisely half her life (34 of 68 years), Sophie Fredericke Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, a German princess by birth, but rather French by education (she spoke mostly French before she was about 20), ruled Russia, one of the greatest empires of all time. A remarkable pragmatist with clear elements of cynicism — she was an absolute (and well-educated) monarch — perhaps this explains her rare gift for hypocrisy. And she was never a puppet on strings operated by her numerous favorites, as sometimes it has later been portrayed.
A modern individual with an average education, knowing something about Catherine II (also known as Catherine the Great — or Yekaterina Alekseyevna, as by the Orthodox tradition she had to officially adopt a Russian first name and patronymic) must feel quite some respect for this regal woman. After all, she did strengthen the state, substantially expanding its southern and western boundaries. Also, the Russian nobility blossomed during the period. Against this flattering background one is surprised to read Taras Shevchenko’s verse brimming with hatred mixed with scorn. In his mystery Velyky Liokh [The Great Den] he writes about a small girl, so small she could not talk and walk, and was carried by her mother. The baby once saw a gold galley sailing down the Dnipro with the tsaritsa and her entourage onboard (the setting must be in 1787). The small girl smiled at the tsaritsa and suddenly vanished. Her mother died of shock... Shevchenko punished the child and mother, turning the child into a phantom, “a wingless bird,” for smiling at the empress who was Ukraine’s “implacable enemy” and a “voracious she-wolf.”
We will see later that the poet had every reason to feel that way, but first briefly about Catherine as a woman and politician.
POOR EMPRESS
The future ruler of Russia spent her childhood at a castle in Stettin (Pomerania, now Szczecin, Poland). Her father was an obscure German prince and their funds were so scarce they often could not afford bed linen, although they managed to keep up external appearances. Fikchen, as she was known then, suffered mostly because their mother paid more attention to her younger brother. “With a long nose, sharp jaw, and a curved back until she was eleven, thin like a stray cat, she understood at an early age that, for a girl with her face, it would be difficult to find a worthy fiance,” wrote the noted French author and Catherine’s best biographer Henri Troyat.
The girl, however, quickly developed an almost animal instinct for recognizing the right time and place to act. Fikchen knew exactly when to back down and when to attack, so when, quite suddenly, they received a message from St. Petersburg, from none other but Elizabeth of Russia, offering marriage to her nephew P С tr Feodorovich, heir to the throne (actually also German, Karl-Peter Ulrich, Grand Duke of Holstein), Fikchen did not hesitate for a moment. She knew it was the chance of her life. How could one even try to compare the Anhalt-Zerbst drabness to the splendor of St. Petersburg — even if she were going there as a grand duchess? True, she did not like her fiance and very soon learned to hate him thoroughly. He was spineless, hysterical, had a dozen affairs going, openly loathed his country (being its future emperor). By contrast, Catherine readily converted into Russian Orthodoxy and eagerly studied the language. But did any of that matter? Her marriage was pure politics.
After the death of Elizabeth (December 25, 1761), her nephew became Peter III, Emperor of Russia, but his servile pro-Prussian views (he would say out loud that his cherished dream was to serve as a sergeant in Frederick II’s army, rather than be Russian emperor), petty tyranny, and sheer incompetence as a statesman antagonized the entire court. The only alternative was his wife, clever, well-educated, calmly biding her time to take over the throne. She was then 34 and outwardly paid no attention to her husband’s outrageous conduct, even open insults (by then he had a concubine and made no secret of it). Also, the Orlov brothers (Grigory, the eldest, was the father of Catherine’s illegitimate child) were always watchful and near. They were actively agitating against Peter III in the Royal Guards. A palace coup took place on June 28, 1762. The emperor was arrested and forced to abdicate. He kept crying hysterically and a week later it was announced that he had died of hemorrhoidal colic, although contemporaries were sure that the ex-emperor was strangled by the Orlov brothers with Catherine’s silent consent.
There she was, Catherine II, an absolute monarch. At that stage she had only a vague idea about what was happening in Russia. After listening to the finance minister’s report, she was horrified, although she tried to joke, “I am a poor empress of a poor empire...” Addressing the Senate in 1762, she said, “Almost all trade is monopolized by private persons. The state budget has not been approved within clear limits. Our justice is corrupt; he that pays more is right. People are embittered by inhuman tortures as punishment for minor offences, as though they were the gravest of crimes. People everywhere complain of rampant corruption, theft, and injustice.” French Ambassador de Corberon wrote at the time: “One can only wonder about how this state is kept afloat. I have an answer. This state is ruled now and then and is kept in one piece owing to a natural equilibrium, the way huge boulders are embedded by their own immense weight.”
Catherine loved power. Another French diplomat, Baron de Bretel, special envoy of Louis XV, wrote in a secret message to his sovereign: “I heard crowds cheer the new empress, shouting ‘Long live Mother Catherine!’ I noticed that every time, hearing her name shouted by the mob, she shuddered with delight, as though touched by her lover. This is precisely what she needs, her people as her many-faced lover, always impassioned and always obedient.”
But how was she to enhance her power? The only way was to centralize. Yes, she spoke and wrote about enlightened reforms, but this was just a posture, a fashionable mask. She corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, but this did not prevent her remaining pragmatic (and egotistical) to the marrow. She once wrote to Diderot that in his planned reforms he forgot the difference between them; he wrote things on paper and paper allowed everything, so smooth to the touch and flexible, offering no resistance to the author’s imagination, while she, a poor empress, had to work using human skin, so very sensitive and capable of revolt. Diderot visited St. Petersburg in 1773-74 and later said that she had the spirit of Brutus and the charms of Cleopatra. Apparently, he did not realize that when she wrote about working using human skin she meant exactly that: putting the backs of serfs bereft of any rights under the cudgel and the whip (for that was how the nobility, the pillars of the throne, liked to amuse themselves). And in 1783, after 135 years of freedom, the Ukrainian peasantry was given over to the tender mercies of serfdom.
THE HUNGRY SHE-WOLF
Perhaps nowhere else was Catherine II’s gift of lying in wait, planning an attack, and then dealing a swift accurate blow as clearly manifest as in her Ukrainian policy. To her, Little Russia was one of many provinces of the vast essentially Asiatic empire she, a woman brought up in Europe and thinking like a European, now ruled. From this flowed her resolution to centralize the imperial rule to the greatest possible extent, acting consistently and steadily, without any allowances or concessions for ethnicity. That was what the empress had in mind, secretly instructing Procurator General Viazemsky: “Little Russia, Livland [Livonia], and Finland are actually provinces enjoying the privileges conferred on them; annulling these privileges at once would not be proper, but nor can we consider these provinces as alien; treating them as foreign lands would be utterly stupid.”
And so Ukraine was not to be treated as a foreign land. Catherine II saw her ultimate objective is having Ukraine colonized by Great Russians and Germans, especially in the south. This is precisely what happened and thus appeared a new province, Little Russia, placed under the command of her favorite Grigory Pot С mkin. She went about that task ruthlessly, consistently, and skillfully. Baron de Bretel also wrote in his message, “Her [Catherine’s — I.S.] rule is being firm in her decisions; it is better to be wrong than to change your mind; indecisiveness is worst of all, because it is the destiny of fools.”
Catherine’s “glorious” deeds in doing away with what was left of Ukrainian autonomy are well known: the elimination of the Hetmanate in 1764 (she said, stressing every word, “I want the very notion of hetman to disappear, let alone appoint anyone to the post”); her Governor General P С tr Rumiantsev’s “able” administration in Little Russia (he managed to win over to his side a considerable part of the Ukrainian starshyna, Cossack senior officers); liquidation of the Zaporozhzhian Sich and its privileges and liberties in 1775 (this was done secretly and suddenly, using Serbian General Peter Tecelja’s troops considered “friendly” toward the Zaporozhzhian Cossacks’ as a reward for their faithful performance in the Russo- Turkish War; Zaporozhzhian Otaman Petro Kalnyshevsky, who called for offering no armed resistance against the empress, was exiled to Solovetsky Islands where he spent the remaining thirty years of his life in a cell that looked more like a pit, going blind and being denied contact with anyone). Add here the treacherous extradition of Ivan Honta, leader of the legendary Koliyivshchyna rebellion, to Poland, into the hands of his deadly enemy — and this considering that both he and Maksym Zalizniak trusted Catherine II implicitly (Zalizniak, as a Russian subject, was whipped and exiled to Siberia).
That same year, 1775, satisfied that she had subdued the Zaporozhzhian Cossacks, Catherine decreed: “Even using the words, Zaporozhzhian Cossacks, shall be considered contempt of Our Royal Majesty” (the old technique of erasing something from history). Methodically implementing the main point of her strategy, she instructed Count Rumyantsev: “Ukraine is an extremely rich land, but the empire has put it to very little use and received very little revenue from it, owing to its autonomy.” Catherine’s well-known administrative reforms in the 1780s (the destruction of the military Hetmanate in 1783, reorganizing Hetman troops as regular Russian regiments with six years of service; the barbarous ukase of May 3, 1783, attaching all peasants to the places where they had been registered during Rumiantsev’s last inventory and forbidding them to move to any other place, explaining this by the need to have tax payments regularly sent to the State Treasury — it was then that the free Ukrainians were actually turned into slaves whose great grandfathers had supported Khmelnytsky in his bloody campaign in 1648 precisely because they wanted freedom...) were aimed primarily at receiving such revenues, primarily for the benefit of the nobility.
One might well feel outraged by Catherine’s cruelty and hypocrisy when, ascending the throne, she announced in a manifesto, “We intend to win the affection of our people as we acknowledge being enthroned solely for the good of this people.” Yet one may also ask oneself: What about the Ukrainian elite at the time? They were well aware that their homeland was being deprived of all its remaining liberties, but they remained silent. Why? A short and ruthless answer is that this elite had betrayed its own people, receiving in return the status and attendant privileges of the Russian nobility (mainly the right to have a thousand peasants). Catherine knew human nature only too well. Encouragingly, she wrote to Rumiantsev in 1766: “Coveting lucrative posts, and above all good pay, will get the better of old outlooks.” So when she extended the Letters Patent of Nobility to the Ukrainian starshyna in 1785, giving them that status in the Russian Empire in perpetuity, the Ukrainian elite was delighted — except for a handful of rarae aves like Vasyl Kapnist who felt indignation at the Pot С mkin administration’s despotic rule (in fact, Kapnist conducted secret negotiations with the Prussian government in 1791 concerning possible assistance to the Ukrainian liberation movement, but obviously to no avail). Another important question arises: How did ordinary people, tillers, burghers, and soldiers feel at that period? Only yesterday free Cossacks, now without land and any guarantees of personal dignity, they could only vent their feelings in song. Mykhailo Hrushevsky correctly noted that, while there were few folks songs about the Hetmanate, the end of the Zaporozhzhian Sich produced a great many of them. The following are lines from one such song:
“Oh, Mother Tsaritsa, have mercy on us,
Give us back our land and dark meadows.”
“Zaporozhzhian Cossacks, I sent the Muscovite
Not to give you back your land and dark meadows,
And I ruined your Sich not to let you have back
Your steppe and meadows and power.”
These are words filled with bitterness and despair, yet wrath would overcome despair. Several decades later, in 1844, a young genius, flesh and blood of the people, would write a poem with lines addressing two Russian monarchs of the eighteenth century, Peter I and Catherine II (remember the legend on the Bronze Horseman in St. Petersburg? “To the First from the Second”): “Butchers! Hangmen! Cannibals! You both ate our flesh and stole our wealth/ And what did you take with you to your graves?” Who could put it better than Taras Shevchenko in his Dream ?
— P.S.: History can be frightfully ironic. Catherine II, that inveterate oppressor of Little Russia, appears to be quite popular in today’s independent Ukraine. Demand begets supply. Candies in gorgeous wrappings proudly reading “Catherine the Great” have hit the market in Dnipropetrovsk, a short ride from the Sich so ruthlessly destroyed by her in the heart of Ukraine. Try to picture “Muraviov the Hangman” on sale in Poland (the Russian general who mercilessly suppressed the 1863-64 Polish rebellion). On the other hand, when one’s own nation state, often too weak and hypocritical, is no longer regarded as one’s own, 200-year-old “enlightened absolutism” is idealized, for it means an “iron but educated hand.” So much for national identity. Morals? Has anyone bothered to remember Ivan Honta? He was handed over to the Poles by General Krechetnikov on Catherine’s orders. In Poland, the glorious Ukrainian was subjected to indescribable tortures, but when the hangman was cutting twelve strips out of his back, Honta told his enemies, “They said it would hurt, but it doesn’t, it’s just like flea bites.” Then they quartered him.
