August 11, 2010 • 22 mins
Katie and Sarah highlight some of the details of Catherine the Great's reign, from wars and rebellions to her Enlightenment ideals and desire to further Westernize Russia, in their continuing series on the influential female ruler.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katy Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we're
going to start with a quote from biographer Simon Dixon.
(00:21):
Only the most accomplished of actresses could have carried off
the part of the Virgin Queen when all present knew
her as an adulteress and as a usurper, and many
suspected her of regicide to boot. The woman we're talking
about is Catherine the Great, and when we left you
in our last episode, she had just deposed Peter the
Third and possibly had him murdered in her bejeweled crown.
(00:43):
She is now Empress of all the Russia's and convinced
that it is her god given destiny to rule. And
Catherine is an idealistic woman. She wants to westernize Russia,
and she wants to emancipate the serfs and give people
opportunities to receive education and apply all these ideals of
the Enlightenment that she holds so dear. But in the
(01:03):
end she betrays a lot of these principles that she
swears to live by. So was she great ultimately will
leave that up to you. We can't possibly fit all
of her life into only three podcasts. We'd probably need
about thirty episodes at least, So we're going to give
you an overview of her rule and just hit upon
some of the most important parts, some of the most
(01:25):
interesting parts of her life. So the situation in Russia
when she takes the throne isn't fantastic. They need money,
they're totally broke, the government is corrupt, the prisons are full,
and the legal system makes absolutely no sense. A lot
of these very archaic rules from the six hundreds. It's
impossible to navigate, and Russia was considered backward by the
(01:47):
rest of the world. Katherine wanted to change that and
and make her country a cultivated place. She's such a
cultivated woman, exactly, the place that has great cities and
great art and an admired government something like and stand
proudly alongside the other powers of Europe. So where do
you start if you're trying to radically change your country,
You start with administrative matter. So first things first, Katherine
(02:10):
is a hands on kind of ruler, so she investigates
the Senate, she sits in on meetings, and she insists
on being briefed on everything that's going on, and she
gets on people when they're not quick, not the apply,
She's not what they're used to. This is not how
government is supposed to be in their opinion, and in
her investigation she realizes that things are a mess. She
(02:33):
was asking about Russian towns and her senators had no
idea where they were, and then she realized they didn't
even have a map of Russia. And a lot of
these details are from Virginia Roundings biography of Katherine the Great,
we should add. So she has this huge empire, one
that could be powerful, but it's not being run well.
The people within the machinery don't even understand it, much
(02:56):
less outsiders. And if she wants to turn Russia around,
this is the first thing she has to tackle, this
administrative aspect, and she does. She gets the right people
in the right positions, even if they supported the previous ruler,
even though I think it was the tendency to sack
all the people who've been there before, and she institutes accountability.
She also draws up what's called the Great Instruction and
(03:20):
presents it to a legislative commission that she had put together.
Their job was to come up with ways to fix
Russia's legal system, and her instruction, which was clearly informed
by her Enlightenment reading, is impressive, Voltaire or thoughts. So
at least there's six D fifty articles and they're all
of her ideals laid out, but they're considered too progressive.
(03:40):
Their refuge to progressive even for France, little liberal, they
wouldn't p Russia. So these are thrown out and it's
a blow to Catherine. You can imagine, she's put so
much effort into this huge project early in her reign
and it's thrown out the door without a second thought.
But she has our ideals of what a Russian people
could be, and she can't quite get them into play.
(04:04):
She has dreams of establishing a school kind of like
sancyr which is the one we mentioned in the Madame
Lunenal podcast to educate young women and um we mentioned
when we were introducing the podcast that she was advocating
emancipating the serfs, even though, being a woman who would
think things through, she knew that this couldn't happen immediately.
(04:26):
If you say all the serfs are free, chaos, So
she realizes that it'll take a while. She's hoping that
it's something that will happen over the next hundred years
or so, because her belief about laws that in order
to introduce laws first you have to feel out the
sentiments of your pee, which is a wise idea, pretty
much exactly what Peter the third did not do. But
(04:46):
this would prove to be to the detriment of the
serfs later in her rule. But onward and upward and outward.
Let's talk foreign affairs. So the first of these big
foreign affairs is the Russo Turkish War. But before to
get into that a little background, Catherine gets a big
chance to extend Russia's power in seventeen sixty three when
(05:06):
the King of Poland dies. Catherine has the perfect replacement
for the her former lover, Poniatowski, and her diplomats managed
to threaten the Polish government into accepting this guy's their
new king. He becomes Stanis Last the second Augustus, and
is elected. So it doesn't last for that long though,
(05:30):
because in seventeen sixty eight we have rebellions in Poland,
and since Katherine has installed Pontowski there, she has a
vested interest in what's going on and keeping him there exactly,
and she sends in troops. So France gets involved and
it's like, how can you let this happen in Turkey?
You should probably get on this, And then the Cossacks
(05:50):
were causing murderous trouble in Turkey. At the same time,
we have all the ingredients for war, and this is
just one of the Russo Turkish wars to arified. They
began much earlier and they would continue for many years.
But in this particular bout Russia crushes its enemy. There's
this decisive battle at ches Me in seventeen seventy, which
(06:12):
brightened the spirits of the Russian people considerably, many of
whom suspected they would never see their conscripted men again.
But glory on the battlefield isn't everything, because disaster strikes
in the form of plague, and it originated in Turkey,
but the Russian government didn't understand its severity and they
underestimated it. For sure, certain cities are quarantined, but the
(06:34):
plague spreads and soon we have hundreds of people in
Moscow dying every day. Their bodies are in the streets,
and those who are still alive are rioting, and in
the frenzy the archbishop is even killed. It's finally Katherine's lover,
Gregory Orlov, who saves the day he arrives in Moscow,
organizes food and clothing drives, takes precaution against the spread
(06:59):
of disease, burning down old houses, keeping the couriers away
because they would obviously be spreading it in the city,
and fumigates the city too. But then the snow came
and the cold seemed to put a stop to the
epidemic where he could not, but not before it killed
one hundred and twenty thousand people in Russia. Shortly after this,
(07:21):
Katherine considered peace with Turkey and a treaty was signed,
but as we mentioned, it didn't end the series of wars.
Another began in seventy seven and continued almost until her death.
But by the end of all of these, the Black
Sea was opened up to the Russian fleet. Katherine's taken
over the Crimean Peninsula, and most of the Ukraine and
Poland has been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. So
(07:44):
they've got this big foothold in the Mediterranean, and also
a chance against the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, Russia expands over
two hundred thousand miles during Katherine's reign. Ultimately, but picking
up with Crimea once, Katherine has an X Crimea which
which comes during that Second War the seven to see
(08:05):
she wants to inspect this new place she owns, so
she resolves to visit, but does so in style, of course,
and her Crimean voyage was famously compared to Cleopatra's fleet.
So that's going to give you a good idea of
what this is like. Her entourage left in January sev seven,
and her own coach was like a house again according
(08:28):
to Rounding, it had its own bedroom, a sitting room,
a library, thirty horses had to pull it, and their
double but a classy one, Sarah. There are several of
these for all of the people in her entourage. So
picture this procession of sable hats and slaves, and they
make their sea journey from Kiev in April on this
(08:49):
impressive fleet of galleys and barges and munitions boats. And
this is where a famous myth about Catherine comes in
the Potempkan villages, and Potemkin was one of her lovers
but also her right hand man and her government basically
this all powerful minister. He'll come up in the next
episode come and the myth is that he built these
(09:12):
Potemkin villages, which were just fake storefronts, basically think of
like a Hollywood set, to make Russia look more developed
and prosperous than it actually was as people went by.
But Roundings Biography says that perhaps this was a misunderstanding
because as this grand procession passes the towns, the very
(09:32):
excited citizens put up triumphal arches and other decorations, and
maybe it was misinterpreted. I think we've talked about that
in almost every Monarch episode we've done. When the monarch
goes on the grand tour, people build a bunch of
temporary structures to be impressive and impress their king or queen.
And this was an exceptionally lavish journey. In one place
(09:54):
they landed Potemkin and I had an English garden created
for the Empress in a matter of days, and she
found her place very charming. But the contrast of this
journey to conditions in Russia's stark where they were suffering
from a food shortage and general unrest. So general unrest,
of course, leads to conspiracies and we have many a
(10:17):
foot throughout Katherine's reign, but we also have a rebellion.
So remember the baby Emperor who we talked about a
while ago in the six Yeah, he's always at the
back of people's minds as a possibility when things are bad,
if if you're tired of the current ruler, there's always
this baby in prison who is now, of course a
(10:37):
grown man. And there's only one real attempt to rescue him, though,
which we talked about in the last podcast, and we
ended it saying that some believed Lieutenant Mirovich really was
trying to help I have in the sixth escape, while
others believed he was just a pawn of Katherine's. According
to the biography I keep referring to, it was the
real thing, and no one knew what Ivan was like
(11:00):
after all of these years in solitary confinement. If he
was absolutely an idiot like the Earl of Buckingham speculated
in a letter from lack of human contact, or if
he was a perfectly normal man capable of rule. Mirovich
apparently believed in the latter, and as we know, Ivan
was killed in this attempt, and when she heard Catherine wrote,
(11:21):
I have read with great amazement your reports and all
the marvels which have taken place at Shlisselburgh. The divine
guidance is wonderful and inexhaustible, which that seems pretty cold,
considering it's this poor prison man who has been held
in captivity as whole life. Caverne initially wanted him to
become a monk because that would be pretty convenient to
(11:42):
He wouldn't have any airs, so that would be great.
Not quite as convenient as dead, though this worked out
just as well. But it's not just Ivan the Six
who people are interested in. There are also conspiracies to
put Catherine's own son, Paul, on the throne. Paul is
not a fan of his mother. Oh she doesn't like
him either. He very much like his probable father, Peter
(12:02):
the Third. And Catherine doesn't deal with these conspiracies lightly either.
Possible punishments included having your ears torn out or the
skin stripped from your back before you were sent to Siberia.
They all got sent to Siberia. She learned from her
own coup to be careful exactly. And then, of course
there is a third possible claimant to the throne, and
(12:25):
that's Peter the Third, but wait, he died in our
last podcast, so he doesn't seem like a very valid candidate.
That doesn't stop several people from claiming they are Peter
the Third, which we've seemed to have noticed in a
lot of Russian scenes that we've read. There was one
pretender in particular who threatened the Empress, and that brings
(12:48):
us to the Pugachev Rebellion. In seventeen seventy two, a
cossack named a Million Pugachev announces that he is Peter
the Third. No one. They're out, way far out the gurls,
although they weren't called the eels then they were renamed
after this to sort of disassociate exactly. No one there
had ever seen Peter, and the only thing they knew
(13:09):
about Catherine was that she forced them to fight in
these wars. They're not a fan, no, And some people
just wanted to rebel. They knew perfectly well that he
was not Peter the Third, but it was, you know,
good a cause, and some actually believed that he was
the czar. But either way, he had followers, and the
ranks grew quickly, and he made the types of promises
(13:29):
you can't really keep. It was reminding me when you
know this high school sophomore running for class president, and
there's always like free cokes from the vending machine if
you liked me, promises you can't keep in any way.
But he said they could have everything they ever wanted, food, clothing,
including their freedom, and he would depose Catherine and his
army steadily grew to three thousand men. They began taking villages,
(13:52):
raping women, mutilating the dead bodies of the officers they killed,
and then they were ten thousand, and they sacked the
city of Kazan and then sarah Top in seventeen seventy four.
And we should mention that Katherine hadn't interfered before this.
She surely would have squashed it before it got to
this extent, but it was difficult to get that far
(14:14):
away exactly, and so she again underestimated how just how
big this rebellion was. And of course her troops were
out fighting Russo Turkish wars. But fortunately for her, uh
Pugachev starts to lose some of the cities, and Katherine
sends men who are conveniently on the way home from
(14:34):
the Russo Turkish war, and Pugachev's own men betray him too,
so ultimately he's lost. She said of him, I think
that there has hardly been anyone so destructive to the
human race since tamer Lane. And yet she had a
certain measure of respect for this illiterate, slightly crazy Cossack.
He was brought to Moscow in a cage and then beheaded.
(14:56):
He was supposed to be quartered first, but Katherine had
se and gave the secret okay, to make it easier
on him. Just behead him. And she gave amnesty to
the people who participated in the revolt except his family. Yeah,
they were stuck in prison to prison. So Kevin gives
amnesty to restore the peace. Because after all, she has
a great empire to rule, and she focuses that greatness
(15:20):
on her cities, making them these amazing, spectacular places. She's
a great patron of the arts. The Hermitage collection in St.
Petersburg is huge, yeah that it houses millions of pieces
of art, from porcelain to paintings. And she started with
Rembrandts and Rubens and even by s. Voltaire's library. She
(15:41):
supported lots of painters and sculptors and writers. She even
did some writing herself and transformed St. Petersburg from a
city with wolves and bears wandering through the streets into
one that could stand beside the great cities of Europe proudly.
And to do this she expands trade. She builds that
school for young ladies that she had always dreamed of,
(16:03):
and a lot of other schools. She builds a medical
school too, and establishes safe place safe places for women
to bring unwanted babies, no questions asked, uh, even if
an alarming number of them died and they were there. Yeah.
And one of my favorite things, being a medical history lover,
she brought vaccines to Russia, being one of the first
(16:24):
to be inoculated against smallpox. And of course once the
royal family you know, goes under it and they turn
out fine, it became more acceptable. It's like our our
guy John Snow from the Ghost Map, who does either
for Queen Victoria while she's having her baby, and suddenly
it's okay. Exactly setting examples. Yeah, it's it's not just
(16:44):
wedding dresses. But there was a price to all of
this glory. And if you remember the surfs she wanted
to emancipate, things actually got much much worse for them,
as they were considered property and part of the lands
that they were associated with. They were of course highly
desired by nobles, and if she freed the serfs as
she had planned, she would lose the nobles, the people
(17:06):
who largely kept her in power. By the end of
her reign, she made the Ukrainians serfs as well as
all of the Russian peasants. So it's not just things
got worse for the serfs there already were. They were
many many more, don't her. If you're going to have
a great Russia, you've got to have this surf economy
supporting it and happy nobles to back you up. So
(17:27):
it does improve the economy, and it builds the cities
and the great buildings that she's dreamed of, and it
brings all of these really impressive projects to life, but
obviously at the expense of the common people. She also
secularized the property of the clergy to get a lot
of those serfs, putting more cracks in the Orthodox Church.
(17:50):
And according to Britannica, the clergy had held a third
of the land and serfs in Russia. So those are
big taking and just in case you get it confused
with the last episode. Her husband Peter the Third, had
already secularized the monastic property, but not the not the clergy,
so you might wonder how she got so far from
where she began and her principles. After a certain point
(18:14):
governing the people, Catherine realized or decided that the Enlightenment
wouldn't work on the Russian people, that they were too backward,
and she would have to say goodbye to some of
her old ideas and concentrate instead on the glory of
Russia instead of enlightening the people. And the French Revolution,
which comes late in her life, only serves to harden
that conviction, because, after all, look, this is where the
(18:37):
Enlightenment got the French monarchy. She doesn't want to lose
her head, the French radicals in the revolutionaries, all of that.
She never thought that those ideas would come to such
violence against anointed monarch, so even it was based on
things she professed to believe in, she repudiated it couldn't
like the results. By that time. These concerns preoccupied her
(19:02):
later years of life, and her own death came not
long after that November five s and despite other reports
of her death, this is how it went she had
gone to the bathroom. She stayed too long and one
of her servants came to check on her. She'd collapsed,
so she was brought to her bedroom and died there
(19:23):
the next night. She did not die in the bathroom,
as people keep saying, so the cause of death as
a stroke. And Paul assents to the throne, even though
Catherine had hoped that her beloved grandson Alexander would take over.
We already know Paul and Catherine don't get along very well.
And Paul becomes emperor immediately, has Peter's remains brought up
(19:46):
in his coffin displayed next to Catherine like they're these
pious husband and wife. Is a huge slap in the face,
a lot of disrespect towards his mother because of course
she despised her husband, and that makes them look like
co rulers when that wasn't the case at all, And
they're buried next to each other um at the cathedrals
of St. Peter's and Paul. So Paul the First does
(20:08):
not last very long because he is so much like
his father Peter the third. He's assassinated five years later,
and Alexander, the beloved grandson finally becomes emperor at age
twenty three. So Catherine brought Europe to Russia and forever
changed the balance of power in Europe. We can definitely
say that about her. If you'd like to let us
(20:29):
know your opinions, you can email us at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. And next up in
our Catherine series is Catherine's lovers, none of which are
at Quine. I would like to add, and will end
with a quote from a letter she wrote to her lover,
but Temkin, the trouble is that my heart is loath
to remain even one hour without love. If that gives
(20:51):
you an idea of where we're going, and that brings
us to listener mail. So we received a card from
Kate in Ohio and really cool card. I know. I
have to say, I have finally been quoted on a
greeting card, Thank god, from our from our art Heist episode.
Kate's card has a really cool watercolor of me empty
(21:15):
frame and also my quote sometimes art is too hot
to unload. But she's she's captained it, So why do
people put on big mustaches and steal it? Which we
just love this, It's really funny, And she wrote that
I listened to you when I'm traveling, but also in
painting and drawing and put my favorite quotes and names
like Thursday, October Fletcher in my sketch book. So thanks
(21:38):
for your card, Katie. We think it's really cool and
we'll maybe take a picture for you guys and put
it up on Twitter and Facebook. Follow us on Twitter
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For more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit
(22:00):
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out this stuff you missed in History class flogged on
the how staff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katy Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we're
going to start with a quote from biographer Simon Dixon.
(00:21):
Only the most accomplished of actresses could have carried off
the part of the Virgin Queen when all present knew
her as an adulteress and as a usurper, and many
suspected her of regicide to boot. The woman we're talking
about is Catherine the Great, and when we left you
in our last episode, she had just deposed Peter the
Third and possibly had him murdered in her bejeweled crown.
(00:43):
She is now Empress of all the Russia's and convinced
that it is her god given destiny to rule. And
Catherine is an idealistic woman. She wants to westernize Russia,
and she wants to emancipate the serfs and give people
opportunities to receive education and apply all these ideals of
the Enlightenment that she holds so dear. But in the
(01:03):
end she betrays a lot of these principles that she
swears to live by. So was she great ultimately will
leave that up to you. We can't possibly fit all
of her life into only three podcasts. We'd probably need
about thirty episodes at least, So we're going to give
you an overview of her rule and just hit upon
some of the most important parts, some of the most
(01:25):
interesting parts of her life. So the situation in Russia
when she takes the throne isn't fantastic. They need money,
they're totally broke, the government is corrupt, the prisons are full,
and the legal system makes absolutely no sense. A lot
of these very archaic rules from the six hundreds. It's
impossible to navigate, and Russia was considered backward by the
(01:47):
rest of the world. Katherine wanted to change that and
and make her country a cultivated place. She's such a
cultivated woman, exactly, the place that has great cities and
great art and an admired government something like and stand
proudly alongside the other powers of Europe. So where do
you start if you're trying to radically change your country,
You start with administrative matter. So first things first, Katherine
(02:10):
is a hands on kind of ruler, so she investigates
the Senate, she sits in on meetings, and she insists
on being briefed on everything that's going on, and she
gets on people when they're not quick, not the apply,
She's not what they're used to. This is not how
government is supposed to be in their opinion, and in
her investigation she realizes that things are a mess. She
(02:33):
was asking about Russian towns and her senators had no
idea where they were, and then she realized they didn't
even have a map of Russia. And a lot of
these details are from Virginia Roundings biography of Katherine the Great,
we should add. So she has this huge empire, one
that could be powerful, but it's not being run well.
The people within the machinery don't even understand it, much
(02:56):
less outsiders. And if she wants to turn Russia around,
this is the first thing she has to tackle, this
administrative aspect, and she does. She gets the right people
in the right positions, even if they supported the previous ruler,
even though I think it was the tendency to sack
all the people who've been there before, and she institutes accountability.
She also draws up what's called the Great Instruction and
(03:20):
presents it to a legislative commission that she had put together.
Their job was to come up with ways to fix
Russia's legal system, and her instruction, which was clearly informed
by her Enlightenment reading, is impressive, Voltaire or thoughts. So
at least there's six D fifty articles and they're all
of her ideals laid out, but they're considered too progressive.
(03:40):
Their refuge to progressive even for France, little liberal, they
wouldn't p Russia. So these are thrown out and it's
a blow to Catherine. You can imagine, she's put so
much effort into this huge project early in her reign
and it's thrown out the door without a second thought.
But she has our ideals of what a Russian people
could be, and she can't quite get them into play.
(04:04):
She has dreams of establishing a school kind of like
sancyr which is the one we mentioned in the Madame
Lunenal podcast to educate young women and um we mentioned
when we were introducing the podcast that she was advocating
emancipating the serfs, even though, being a woman who would
think things through, she knew that this couldn't happen immediately.
(04:26):
If you say all the serfs are free, chaos, So
she realizes that it'll take a while. She's hoping that
it's something that will happen over the next hundred years
or so, because her belief about laws that in order
to introduce laws first you have to feel out the
sentiments of your pee, which is a wise idea, pretty
much exactly what Peter the third did not do. But
(04:46):
this would prove to be to the detriment of the
serfs later in her rule. But onward and upward and outward.
Let's talk foreign affairs. So the first of these big
foreign affairs is the Russo Turkish War. But before to
get into that a little background, Catherine gets a big
chance to extend Russia's power in seventeen sixty three when
(05:06):
the King of Poland dies. Catherine has the perfect replacement
for the her former lover, Poniatowski, and her diplomats managed
to threaten the Polish government into accepting this guy's their
new king. He becomes Stanis Last the second Augustus, and
is elected. So it doesn't last for that long though,
(05:30):
because in seventeen sixty eight we have rebellions in Poland,
and since Katherine has installed Pontowski there, she has a
vested interest in what's going on and keeping him there exactly,
and she sends in troops. So France gets involved and
it's like, how can you let this happen in Turkey?
You should probably get on this, And then the Cossacks
(05:50):
were causing murderous trouble in Turkey. At the same time,
we have all the ingredients for war, and this is
just one of the Russo Turkish wars to arified. They
began much earlier and they would continue for many years.
But in this particular bout Russia crushes its enemy. There's
this decisive battle at ches Me in seventeen seventy, which
(06:12):
brightened the spirits of the Russian people considerably, many of
whom suspected they would never see their conscripted men again.
But glory on the battlefield isn't everything, because disaster strikes
in the form of plague, and it originated in Turkey,
but the Russian government didn't understand its severity and they
underestimated it. For sure, certain cities are quarantined, but the
(06:34):
plague spreads and soon we have hundreds of people in
Moscow dying every day. Their bodies are in the streets,
and those who are still alive are rioting, and in
the frenzy the archbishop is even killed. It's finally Katherine's lover,
Gregory Orlov, who saves the day he arrives in Moscow,
organizes food and clothing drives, takes precaution against the spread
(06:59):
of disease, burning down old houses, keeping the couriers away
because they would obviously be spreading it in the city,
and fumigates the city too. But then the snow came
and the cold seemed to put a stop to the
epidemic where he could not, but not before it killed
one hundred and twenty thousand people in Russia. Shortly after this,
(07:21):
Katherine considered peace with Turkey and a treaty was signed,
but as we mentioned, it didn't end the series of wars.
Another began in seventy seven and continued almost until her death.
But by the end of all of these, the Black
Sea was opened up to the Russian fleet. Katherine's taken
over the Crimean Peninsula, and most of the Ukraine and
Poland has been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. So
(07:44):
they've got this big foothold in the Mediterranean, and also
a chance against the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, Russia expands over
two hundred thousand miles during Katherine's reign. Ultimately, but picking
up with Crimea once, Katherine has an X Crimea which
which comes during that Second War the seven to see
(08:05):
she wants to inspect this new place she owns, so
she resolves to visit, but does so in style, of course,
and her Crimean voyage was famously compared to Cleopatra's fleet.
So that's going to give you a good idea of
what this is like. Her entourage left in January sev seven,
and her own coach was like a house again according
(08:28):
to Rounding, it had its own bedroom, a sitting room,
a library, thirty horses had to pull it, and their
double but a classy one, Sarah. There are several of
these for all of the people in her entourage. So
picture this procession of sable hats and slaves, and they
make their sea journey from Kiev in April on this
(08:49):
impressive fleet of galleys and barges and munitions boats. And
this is where a famous myth about Catherine comes in
the Potempkan villages, and Potemkin was one of her lovers
but also her right hand man and her government basically
this all powerful minister. He'll come up in the next
episode come and the myth is that he built these
(09:12):
Potemkin villages, which were just fake storefronts, basically think of
like a Hollywood set, to make Russia look more developed
and prosperous than it actually was as people went by.
But Roundings Biography says that perhaps this was a misunderstanding
because as this grand procession passes the towns, the very
(09:32):
excited citizens put up triumphal arches and other decorations, and
maybe it was misinterpreted. I think we've talked about that
in almost every Monarch episode we've done. When the monarch
goes on the grand tour, people build a bunch of
temporary structures to be impressive and impress their king or queen.
And this was an exceptionally lavish journey. In one place
(09:54):
they landed Potemkin and I had an English garden created
for the Empress in a matter of days, and she
found her place very charming. But the contrast of this
journey to conditions in Russia's stark where they were suffering
from a food shortage and general unrest. So general unrest,
of course, leads to conspiracies and we have many a
(10:17):
foot throughout Katherine's reign, but we also have a rebellion.
So remember the baby Emperor who we talked about a
while ago in the six Yeah, he's always at the
back of people's minds as a possibility when things are bad,
if if you're tired of the current ruler, there's always
this baby in prison who is now, of course a
(10:37):
grown man. And there's only one real attempt to rescue him, though,
which we talked about in the last podcast, and we
ended it saying that some believed Lieutenant Mirovich really was
trying to help I have in the sixth escape, while
others believed he was just a pawn of Katherine's. According
to the biography I keep referring to, it was the
real thing, and no one knew what Ivan was like
(11:00):
after all of these years in solitary confinement. If he
was absolutely an idiot like the Earl of Buckingham speculated
in a letter from lack of human contact, or if
he was a perfectly normal man capable of rule. Mirovich
apparently believed in the latter, and as we know, Ivan
was killed in this attempt, and when she heard Catherine wrote,
(11:21):
I have read with great amazement your reports and all
the marvels which have taken place at Shlisselburgh. The divine
guidance is wonderful and inexhaustible, which that seems pretty cold,
considering it's this poor prison man who has been held
in captivity as whole life. Caverne initially wanted him to
become a monk because that would be pretty convenient to
(11:42):
He wouldn't have any airs, so that would be great.
Not quite as convenient as dead, though this worked out
just as well. But it's not just Ivan the Six
who people are interested in. There are also conspiracies to
put Catherine's own son, Paul, on the throne. Paul is
not a fan of his mother. Oh she doesn't like
him either. He very much like his probable father, Peter
(12:02):
the Third. And Catherine doesn't deal with these conspiracies lightly either.
Possible punishments included having your ears torn out or the
skin stripped from your back before you were sent to Siberia.
They all got sent to Siberia. She learned from her
own coup to be careful exactly. And then, of course
there is a third possible claimant to the throne, and
(12:25):
that's Peter the Third, but wait, he died in our
last podcast, so he doesn't seem like a very valid candidate.
That doesn't stop several people from claiming they are Peter
the Third, which we've seemed to have noticed in a
lot of Russian scenes that we've read. There was one
pretender in particular who threatened the Empress, and that brings
(12:48):
us to the Pugachev Rebellion. In seventeen seventy two, a
cossack named a Million Pugachev announces that he is Peter
the Third. No one. They're out, way far out the gurls,
although they weren't called the eels then they were renamed
after this to sort of disassociate exactly. No one there
had ever seen Peter, and the only thing they knew
(13:09):
about Catherine was that she forced them to fight in
these wars. They're not a fan, no, And some people
just wanted to rebel. They knew perfectly well that he
was not Peter the Third, but it was, you know,
good a cause, and some actually believed that he was
the czar. But either way, he had followers, and the
ranks grew quickly, and he made the types of promises
(13:29):
you can't really keep. It was reminding me when you
know this high school sophomore running for class president, and
there's always like free cokes from the vending machine if
you liked me, promises you can't keep in any way.
But he said they could have everything they ever wanted, food, clothing,
including their freedom, and he would depose Catherine and his
army steadily grew to three thousand men. They began taking villages,
(13:52):
raping women, mutilating the dead bodies of the officers they killed,
and then they were ten thousand, and they sacked the
city of Kazan and then sarah Top in seventeen seventy four.
And we should mention that Katherine hadn't interfered before this.
She surely would have squashed it before it got to
this extent, but it was difficult to get that far
(14:14):
away exactly, and so she again underestimated how just how
big this rebellion was. And of course her troops were
out fighting Russo Turkish wars. But fortunately for her, uh
Pugachev starts to lose some of the cities, and Katherine
sends men who are conveniently on the way home from
(14:34):
the Russo Turkish war, and Pugachev's own men betray him too,
so ultimately he's lost. She said of him, I think
that there has hardly been anyone so destructive to the
human race since tamer Lane. And yet she had a
certain measure of respect for this illiterate, slightly crazy Cossack.
He was brought to Moscow in a cage and then beheaded.
(14:56):
He was supposed to be quartered first, but Katherine had
se and gave the secret okay, to make it easier
on him. Just behead him. And she gave amnesty to
the people who participated in the revolt except his family. Yeah,
they were stuck in prison to prison. So Kevin gives
amnesty to restore the peace. Because after all, she has
a great empire to rule, and she focuses that greatness
(15:20):
on her cities, making them these amazing, spectacular places. She's
a great patron of the arts. The Hermitage collection in St.
Petersburg is huge, yeah that it houses millions of pieces
of art, from porcelain to paintings. And she started with
Rembrandts and Rubens and even by s. Voltaire's library. She
(15:41):
supported lots of painters and sculptors and writers. She even
did some writing herself and transformed St. Petersburg from a
city with wolves and bears wandering through the streets into
one that could stand beside the great cities of Europe proudly.
And to do this she expands trade. She builds that
school for young ladies that she had always dreamed of,
(16:03):
and a lot of other schools. She builds a medical
school too, and establishes safe place safe places for women
to bring unwanted babies, no questions asked, uh, even if
an alarming number of them died and they were there. Yeah.
And one of my favorite things, being a medical history lover,
she brought vaccines to Russia, being one of the first
(16:24):
to be inoculated against smallpox. And of course once the
royal family you know, goes under it and they turn
out fine, it became more acceptable. It's like our our
guy John Snow from the Ghost Map, who does either
for Queen Victoria while she's having her baby, and suddenly
it's okay. Exactly setting examples. Yeah, it's it's not just
(16:44):
wedding dresses. But there was a price to all of
this glory. And if you remember the surfs she wanted
to emancipate, things actually got much much worse for them,
as they were considered property and part of the lands
that they were associated with. They were of course highly
desired by nobles, and if she freed the serfs as
she had planned, she would lose the nobles, the people
(17:06):
who largely kept her in power. By the end of
her reign, she made the Ukrainians serfs as well as
all of the Russian peasants. So it's not just things
got worse for the serfs there already were. They were
many many more, don't her. If you're going to have
a great Russia, you've got to have this surf economy
supporting it and happy nobles to back you up. So
(17:27):
it does improve the economy, and it builds the cities
and the great buildings that she's dreamed of, and it
brings all of these really impressive projects to life, but
obviously at the expense of the common people. She also
secularized the property of the clergy to get a lot
of those serfs, putting more cracks in the Orthodox Church.
(17:50):
And according to Britannica, the clergy had held a third
of the land and serfs in Russia. So those are
big taking and just in case you get it confused
with the last episode. Her husband Peter the Third, had
already secularized the monastic property, but not the not the clergy,
so you might wonder how she got so far from
where she began and her principles. After a certain point
(18:14):
governing the people, Catherine realized or decided that the Enlightenment
wouldn't work on the Russian people, that they were too backward,
and she would have to say goodbye to some of
her old ideas and concentrate instead on the glory of
Russia instead of enlightening the people. And the French Revolution,
which comes late in her life, only serves to harden
that conviction, because, after all, look, this is where the
(18:37):
Enlightenment got the French monarchy. She doesn't want to lose
her head, the French radicals in the revolutionaries, all of that.
She never thought that those ideas would come to such
violence against anointed monarch, so even it was based on
things she professed to believe in, she repudiated it couldn't
like the results. By that time. These concerns preoccupied her
(19:02):
later years of life, and her own death came not
long after that November five s and despite other reports
of her death, this is how it went she had
gone to the bathroom. She stayed too long and one
of her servants came to check on her. She'd collapsed,
so she was brought to her bedroom and died there
(19:23):
the next night. She did not die in the bathroom,
as people keep saying, so the cause of death as
a stroke. And Paul assents to the throne, even though
Catherine had hoped that her beloved grandson Alexander would take over.
We already know Paul and Catherine don't get along very well.
And Paul becomes emperor immediately, has Peter's remains brought up
(19:46):
in his coffin displayed next to Catherine like they're these
pious husband and wife. Is a huge slap in the face,
a lot of disrespect towards his mother because of course
she despised her husband, and that makes them look like
co rulers when that wasn't the case at all, And
they're buried next to each other um at the cathedrals
of St. Peter's and Paul. So Paul the First does
(20:08):
not last very long because he is so much like
his father Peter the third. He's assassinated five years later,
and Alexander, the beloved grandson finally becomes emperor at age
twenty three. So Catherine brought Europe to Russia and forever
changed the balance of power in Europe. We can definitely
say that about her. If you'd like to let us
(20:29):
know your opinions, you can email us at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. And next up in
our Catherine series is Catherine's lovers, none of which are
at Quine. I would like to add, and will end
with a quote from a letter she wrote to her lover,
but Temkin, the trouble is that my heart is loath
to remain even one hour without love. If that gives
(20:51):
you an idea of where we're going, and that brings
us to listener mail. So we received a card from
Kate in Ohio and really cool card. I know. I
have to say, I have finally been quoted on a
greeting card, Thank god, from our from our art Heist episode.
Kate's card has a really cool watercolor of me empty
(21:15):
frame and also my quote sometimes art is too hot
to unload. But she's she's captained it, So why do
people put on big mustaches and steal it? Which we
just love this, It's really funny, And she wrote that
I listened to you when I'm traveling, but also in
painting and drawing and put my favorite quotes and names
like Thursday, October Fletcher in my sketch book. So thanks
(21:38):
for your card, Katie. We think it's really cool and
we'll maybe take a picture for you guys and put
it up on Twitter and Facebook. Follow us on Twitter
at missed in History or join our Facebook fan page
and see what we're up to. And please check out
our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit
(22:00):
how staff works dot com and be sure to check
out this stuff you missed in History class flogged on
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