THE ERA OF CATHERINE THE GREAT

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32020, 21 June 1969, Page 4

THE ERA OF CATHERINE THE GREAT

Life in Russia Under Catherine the Great. By Miriam Kochan. Battford, Putnam. N.Z. Agents Whitcombe and Tombs. 174 pp. Index.

As a rounded picture of an era, this short but highly informative book could hardly be better. It contains 171 illustrations which cover every facet of the life of the time from the lavish magnificence of the Court, to the primitive hovels of the serfs who shared one room with what livestock they were permitted to possess. The mercantile classes, soldiers, architecture and civic lay-outs together with every variety of costume are all portrayed in pictorial detail—and emphasise that this was the most backward country in eighteenth century Europe. “At the end of the seventeenth century, Russia, in European eyes, was a vast Asiatic desert, inhabited by long-robed, long-bearded savages—at the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia was a leading European power.;." With this startling phrase the author open* her book, and the transformation begun by Peter the Great (whose consuming passion was to absorb the lessons of European civilisation in social, military - and cultural matters) were to be consolidated by Catherine, a virtually unknown German princess who married, four decades later, the equally, unknown n.

heir-presumptive to the Russian throne, Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of SchleswigHolstein Gottorp. After his murder, at which Catherine was said to have connived, she reigned as an absolute monarch from 1762 to 1796, and though she instituted many reforms, strengthened Russia's armed forces and developed further a rapproachement with the West, she concentrated these efforts on one class only—her powerful, but still woefully primitive, nobility.

Catherine's lovers who were numerous—and always well treated, even after they were discarded—were able men who helped her to acquire the enormous stretch of an already enormous empire which embraced all the country between the Baltic and the Blaek Sea, and furnished her with good bases for sea power. Of these men Potemkin—part gigolo, part-states-man—was the man to whom she owed most, and it was he, as much as any one, who kept the sufferings of the millions of serfs from impinging on his mistress’s expansionist plans. That she neglected to improve the lot of nine-tenths of her subjects—perhaps because the task was beyond even her almost limitless powers—is a measure of the preponderant influence enjoyed by the nobility. The serfs were born in captivity, without rights of any sort, and were the undisputed property of their owners. Merchants, and such middle-class

as existed at the time, had no power to buy peasants, but the latter could be put to absolutely any use by their aristocratic masters. Prince Yusuposff, who owned 21,421 serfs, produced among them a corps de ballet, and English visitors were amazed, and sometimes appalled, at the vast numbers of house-servants detailed to carry out every sort of duty. Catherine, with a wary eye to the interests of her nobly-born supporters, gave them power of life and death over their dependants. Furthermore, she consolidated her supremacy by making enormous gifts of lands and serfs to her court-favourites and other useful contributors to her power. As a result there was no Palace revolution during her reign. Unfortunately, the recipients of these honours often did not turn them to anything but personal account, and while the court of St Petersburg (the new capital, which Peter the Great had substituted for the old Muscovite city of Moscow) was the most prodigally magnificent in Europe, it abounded in pleasure-loving absentee landholders, whose slaves starved in an almost neglected countryside. In 1773, came the first revolt against this heartless regime. Emilian Pugachev, a Don Cossack, who had fought in Catherine’s campaigns but had spent subsequent periods in prison, escaped, and claimed to be the murdered Peter 111 (said to have miraculously survived the

attempt on his life) and had come to lead his people to a better way of existence. He gathered a considerable following, and for a year succeeded in “Pillaging, sacking and burning every noble estate . . . murdering every nobleman, raping every noblewoman . . ,” until he finally managed to capture Kazan. There fate, and Catherine’s armies, caught up with him, and he was taken in chains to Moscow and executed.

Yet this revolt sparked off a reaction which was to have its culmination nearly 150 years later. Under Catherine Russia’s trade-potential had increased, and a flourishing middle-class was growing up, as pretentious as its betters, but still unprivileged, and given to more cautious thinking. There was a “volte face” from the slavish Westernising of Russia, and the old virtues of the Muscovite began to be remembered and extolled. The revolution was, in fact, beginning to dawn, and gather a slow momentum.

There is no doubting the masculine strength of mind of Catherine the Great, and that she took no real interest in the serfs must be ascribed in part to the part played by Potemkin. An illustration shows her riding with him through “an apparently prosperous village” with its dark secrets of cruelly obvious poverty concealed in the background. The Russian temperament is fully illustrated by the revelations expounded in this book.