Great Catherine
Erickson, Carolly
GREAT CATHERINE: THE LIFE OF CATHERINE THE GREAT, EMPRESS OF RUSSIA Carolly Erickson Crown/392 pages / $25 reviewed by FLORENCE KING Would you want your sister to marry Grand Duke Peter of...
...She developed a sudden, obsessive interest in lunatics after seeing a servant go mad and foam at the mouth...
...She needed and craved love, but she was unwilling to let love tyrannize her or upset the balance and order of her life—at least, not for long...
...Peter, the 16-year-old future czar, accepted the passably pretty Sophie, but she was definitely not his type...
...Someone did, and the guards killed him: She had discovered first hand how government must assert its primacy over chaos by force alone...
...Someone actually asked Frederick the Great this question...
...She states flatly that Paul was the son of Sergei Saltykov, ignoring that both Paul and his son, Alexander I, displayed several of Peter's most arresting characteristics...
...All we know for sure is that he made her dress in a hussar's uniform and stand sentry all night at their bedroom door...
...Prone to sudden grimaces and twitches, he Florence King is a regular columnist for National Review...
...t's bracing to watch Catherine's liberalism fade...
...There are no notes, and she avoids discussion of the operation that may have been performed on Peter to enable him to father Paul...
...Her first book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, published in 1975, was recently reissued in paperback by St...
...n 1745, Sophie converted to Orthodox Christianity, changed her name to Catherine and married Peter, but whether their union was ever consummated is still debated...
...Martin's Press...
...all considerations of public good and individual liberty had to be secondary...
...Next a Cossack revolt led by Emelian Pugachev, who surged around the country wearing alace-trimmed red caftan and brandishing a silver axe...
...Catherine intended to change all this, but her plans to reign as a liberal philosopher-empress soon foundered on the shoals of Russian reality...
...Prussia needed stronger ties with Russia, and nubile princesses were the chief export of the many tiny German states that Frederick controlled...
...It occasionally reads like a novel, as when she turns passages from Catherine's memoirs into bodice-ripper dialogue...
...Sophie did not know what to make of this wildly eccentric empress, who terrified her one moment and overwhelmed her with smarmy affection the next...
...She liked to go to bed early, to read for a while, or do a bit of needlework, then settle down for the night...
...His answer was no, but his fastidious chivalry did not extend to other men's sisters...
...Catherine, who was nothing if not well-adjusted, recognized in the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot the same instinct for the rational that she herself possessed in such abundance...
...Erickson disputes the claims of some historians that Catherine went native and became more Russian than a Cossack...
...No sooner had she murdered her husband and assumed his throne than impostors claiming to be the dead Peter III sprouted like weeds, leaving millions of hysterical peasants writhing...
...bellowed obscenities accourt levees and laughed maniacally in church...
...The peasants] were not a docile and devoted collection of willing learners, waiting to be led into the light, but an ugly combustible mass of haters, seething with murderous rage, ready to avenge themselves on their betters...
...Absolute power demanded ironclad obduracy toward traitors...
...He also seems to have had Tourette's syndrome...
...It was a meeting of minds...
...Pregnant a second time, she gave birth to a son, Paul, but the empress took the baby away from her and raised him herself...
...It was not an honest piety, of the kind Catherine favored, but the darker sort of religion that led to intolerance, irrationality and mental aberrations...
...she refused to read state docu72 The American Spectator August 1994 ments if they happened to brush against one of the many holy relics on her desk...
...Where another woman might have gone mad or succumbed to illness or depression," writes Carolly Erickson, "Catherine retired to a small, chamber and began to read...
...Fifteenyear-old Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst seemed like the best bet, and so he tossed her to the Romanovs...
...A little voice in her head told her that this was no way to rule an empire, and gradually, almost without realizing it, she began to dream and plan...
...She turned part of her palace into a small private asylum and stocked it with inmates from her court, which, not surprisingly, yielded quite a few: a monk who castrated himself, an equerry who thought the Shah of Persia was God, and two guards officers who lost it...
...Her orderly Germanic nature shrank from the chaos on which Elizabeth thrived and her businesslike Lutheran soul was repelled by the spectacle of government by omen and portent...
...Still, she got pregnant, perhaps by Sergei Saltykov, but she miscarried when fire destroyed the imperial palace...
...Then came an attempt to overthrow Catherine and crown the imprisoned and by now ga-ga Ivan VI...
...The American Spectator August 1994 73...
...when a rat gnawed on one, he court-martialed the rodent and executed it on a makeshift gallows in the royal apartments...
...Meanwhile, Peter found a pockmarked mistress and Catherine was left to her own devices...
...On the contrary, she was repelled by eastern Slav mysticism...
...Her superstitiousness was the despair of her ministers...
...Carolly Erickson has written a highly readable biography, sometimes too readable...
...Unwavering sternness alone could protect her...
...Endless processions, day-long rituals, the mad ringing of the thousands of bells created an atmosphere, not so much of otherworldliness as of murky illogic, inhospitable to the concrete and the commonsensical...
...Insomnia joined paranoia when she found a barrel of gunpowder under her bed...
...Thereafter she thought to foil assassins by sleeping in a different room each night, but, too afraid to sleep, she made her ladies tickle her feet to keep her awake...
...Like today's conservatives who turn to Albert Jay Nock and Irving Babbitt as an antidote to Billary 'R' Us, she fought down the unnerving influences of Elizabeth and Peter with the philosophers of the French Enlightenment...
...Most commendably, however, she rescues Catherine from the charge of wantonness, arguing persuasively that she had only five lovers, and that the young men of her later life assuaged not her lust but her frustrated maternalism: With Catherine, work always came first . . . she arranged her life so that she greeted each morning with a clear head and, if possible, a serene mind...
...His aunt, Empress Elizabeth, was the daughter of Peter the Great by his second wife...
...GREAT CATHERINE: THE LIFE OF CATHERINE THE GREAT, EMPRESS OF RUSSIA Carolly Erickson Crown/392 pages / $25 reviewed by FLORENCE KING Would you want your sister to marry Grand Duke Peter of Russia...
...in Moscow, reason withered under the icy blast of the supernatural...
...He liked his women lame, scarred, or one-eyed, but what really turned him on were hunchbacks...
...Though puny and girlish, he imagined himself a great military commander and practiced heroic maneuvers with his vast collection of toy soldiers...
...The throne had originally passed to her infant cousin, Ivan VI, but Elizabeth overthrew him, imprisoned him in a remote fortress, and then spent the rest of her life worrying that someone would overthrow her...
...She gave orders to Ivan VI's guards to kill him if anyone tried to liberate him...
...and once, when a fly landed on a treaty, she refused to sign it...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
