Equestrian portrait of Catherine in the Preobrazhensky Regiment‘s uniform, by Vigilius Eriksen
Catherine the Great ruled Russia for the final third of the
eighteenth century. She earned her sobriquet “the Great” through
relentless and successful territorial aggrandizement. Her career perfectly
illustrates the opportunities and costs of foreign policy in an era of amoral
balance-of-power politics. Contrary to theories that suggest balance-of-power
politics produce stability, the eighteenth century in fact displays a ruthless
and relentless struggle for military advantage and territorial expansion, with
the only alternative decline and destruction. In that arena, Catherine employed
Russia’s immense human resources well. Her reign demonstrated a mastery of
effective and rational absolute rule. She took advantage of the increasing
sophistication of Russia’s administrative machinery to extract resources and
turn them efficiently to achieve foreign policy ends. Her power, and Russia’s
power, were based on serfdom, but that was no hindrance. Before the Industrial
Revolution, a servile labor force and an army drawn from unwilling and
illiterate serfs was no handicap. Indeed, under Catherine Russia suffered fewer
military consequences from its economic and social gap with western Europe than
at any time in its history. Catherine suffered, during her lifetime and after,
from lurid allegations about her notoriously immoral and disordered personal
life. In fact, her personal life was quite ordered: temporary but passionate
monogamous relationships with a series of court favorites. In that sense, she
was as restrained as most European monarchs and more upright than many. Her
personal conduct was noteworthy only because she was a woman. Had she been a
man, no one would have noticed or cared. The true amorality (not immorality) of
Catherine’s life was her conduct of foreign policy. She played the game by the
rules of her time and played it very well.
Peter III ruled Russia only six months. He fell to a coup organized by and on behalf of his wife Catherine, with whom he shared only mutual detestation. Pregnant with another man’s child when Peter took the throne, Catherine knew herself to be extremely vulnerable. Peter’s German sympathies and withdrawal from the Seven Years’ War were highly unpopular with segments of the Russian elite, as was his confiscation of vast land holdings from the Orthodox Church. He moved Russia toward war with Denmark not in defense of Russian interests, but those of his ancestral home Holstein. Though Catherine later attempted to paint her husband as unstable, even insane, the contemporary evidence is more complex. All this was not itself enough to bring a coup. That required Catherine’s active intervention in the personal and factional politics at court. Catherine relied above all on contacts and friends among the officers of the guard’s regiments, with whom she seized power in St. Petersburg on 28 June/8 July 1762 before Peter, outside the city, even knew what was happening. After a brief attempt to flee, Peter meekly surrendered. Catherine’s co-conspirators then murdered him.
Peter’s brief reign produced a major change in the status of
the Russian nobility, all of whom in principle were lifelong servants of the
state, generally as military officers. In 1736, Tsar Anna Ivanovna had granted
the right to retire after 25 years in service and had allowed noble families to
keep one son home as estate manager. All tsars had in practice granted lengthy
leaves to allow nobles to tend to their estates and families. Peter III went
beyond that. On 18 February/1 March 1762, his emancipation of the nobility
granted a host of rights that had before only been gifts of the tsar. No noble
was obliged to serve, and nobles in service could generally retire whenever
they wished. Peter’s goals were professionalizing the officer corps and
improving estate management and local government through the greater physical
presence of the nobility in the countryside. His emancipation ably served those
goals and lasted much longer than Peter himself. As military service still
brought prestige and social advancement, large numbers of nobles continued to
serve, while the Russian army supplemented them as before with foreign professionals.
Peter’s action was immensely popular among the nobility; the Senate voted to
erect a golden statue in his honor.
Despite Catherine’s systematic effort to blacken her late
husband’s name and character, she reversed none of his policies. She kept the
lucrative church lands he confiscated, kept noble military service optional,
and formally confirmed this right in her own Charter of the Nobility in 1785.
Moreover, Catherine was in no hurry to bring Russia back into the Seven Years’
War. The war’s expense and her empty treasury led Catherine to embark on
conservative consolidation. Catherine gracefully and delicately solidified her
position on the throne while repairing the worst damage done by Peter’s
arbitrary foreign policies.
Catherine retained oversight of foreign affairs, but gave
its management to Nikita Ivanovich Panin. Panin’s foreign policy in the early
years of Catherine’s reign was a “northern system.” This alliance
with Prussia and Denmark was intended to counter the French-Austrian alliance
in southern Europe, influence events in Poland, and prevent any attack by
Sweden. Centered around a 1764 alliance with Prussia, Panin’s system functioned
rather well. It protected Prussia against war with Austria, while providing
both countries valuable time to recover from the Seven Years’ War. The system’s
chief weakness, aside from British hostility, was the paradoxical nature of
Catherine’s interests in Poland. On the one hand, as Russian tsars before her,
she wanted a stable and weak Polish buffer state, a view shared by her new ally
Frederick the Great. A number of Polish elites, however, recognized how
vulnerable Poland’s weak central government made it and jockeyed to rewrite the
Polish constitution to make Poland stronger and more capable. The harder
Catherine worked to prevent constitutional reform in Poland and plant a
reliably pro-Russian candidate on the Polish throne-through bribery,
intimidation, and military intervention-the more she generated Polish
resentment and efforts to eliminate Russian influence entirely.
The Russo-Turkish
War, 1768-1774
The turmoil generated by Catherine’s meddling in Poland led
to her first war, against the Ottoman Turks. An internal Polish dispute about
the rights of Protestants and Orthodox in that predominantly Catholic country
exploded into violence in volatile right-bank Ukraine. The combination of a
Russian troop presence in Poland, the spillover of violence by Orthodox
Cossacks into Crimean and Ottoman territory, and substantial support from
France led the Ottoman Turks to demand full evacuation of Russian troops from
Poland in October 1768. When Russia refused, the Turks declared war.
Catherine took an active and personal interest in the war,
unlike her predecessors. She made a priority of territorial expansion; though
the Turks started the war, the security and economic development of southern
Russia depended on finishing it on Russian terms. Catherine was central to the
war’s strategy and decision making, consulting regularly with key military and
political advisors. Though Russia’s intervention in Poland left few troops for
active operations in 1768, Russia was fundamentally in good shape for war. Army
strength was roughly equivalent to that available to Peter the Great at his
death in 1725: 200,000 regulars, plus irregular, militia, and Cossack units.
Catherine expanded this by additional conscription from peasant households for
lifetime service in the army. Despite Russia’s immense armed forces,
maintaining troops in the distant theaters of the Turkish wars required
repeated and painful levies of new peasant soldiers. Long marches through the
war-ravaged and desolate territories of western Ukraine and the Balkans meant
that a substantial proportion of any Russian army was lost well before reaching
the theater of war.
The Russian and Turkish armies were both in the midst of
long and difficult reforms to bring themselves up to modern standards. As the
war’s campaigns demonstrated, the Russians were much further along. Enormous
Turkish forces, greatly outnumbering their Russian opponents, were brittle and
undisciplined, unable to sustain heavy combat. Part of this had to do with the
high proportion of cavalry in Turkish armies, making flight from battle too
easy while hindering positional defense. Furthermore, much of the Turkish
cavalry consisted of a feudal levy, something the Russians had been gradually
abandoning for over a century. The Russian officer corps had been hardened by
the Seven Years’ War against the best army in Europe; the Turks were no match.
Count Pyotr Alexandrovich Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky
In particular, Peter Rumiantsev, Catherine’s most successful
commander, was highly innovative and adaptable. In the wake of the Seven Years’
War, the Russian army had dramatically expanded its jäger light infantry, which
Rumiantsev used to counter the maneuverable Tatar cavalry. He also emphasized
discipline, organization, and shock, particularly night and bayonet attacks, to
take advantage of poorly managed Turkish troops. His specific tactical
innovation was the use of divisional squares in both defense and attack. These
hollow squares, each consisting of several regiments of infantry and studded
with field artillery, were used for both defense and attack. Their all-around
defense protected them from circling multitudes of Turkish and Tatar cavalry,
but allowed sufficient firepower and shock for attack. The firepower lost in
forming squares as opposed to lines was a price worth paying against the Turks,
though it would have been suicide against a Western army. In battle,
Rumiantsev’s squares maintained open space between them to allow for
maneuverability, while remaining close enough for mutual support. The gaps
between squares were covered by cavalry or light infantry, which could if
necessary take refuge inside the larger divisional squares. Given the brittle
and relatively undisciplined Turkish troops, Rumiantsev disdained heavy cavalry
as unwieldy, trusting instead in firepower and infantry attacks to break enemy
will. Strategically, Rumiantsev avoided the crippling loss of time and
resources involved in annual treks from winter quarters to the front by maintaining
his forces as far forward as possible year-round.
Initial Russian operations in 1769 were extremely
successful, so successful that Russian forces found themselves overextended.
Over the course of 1769, a Russian army, under first Aleksandr Mikhailovich
Golitsyn and then Rumiantsev, who replaced Golitsyn that autumn, swept south in
a wide arc around the western edge of the Black Sea, crossing the series of
rivers that ran into it: the Bug, the Dnestr, and the Prut. This left intact a
series of major Turkish fortresses along the Black Sea coast: Ochakov,
Akkerman, Izmail, and especially Bender on the Dnestr River. Failing to screen
or reduce those fortresses left Russian armies vulnerable to being cut off deep
in Turkish territory. As a result, Catherine’s government devised a new plan of
campaign for 1770. The two Russian armies were to move in parallel, with
Rumiantsev’s First Army moving slowly south farther inland, while the Second
Army (led by Nikita Panin’s younger brother Peter) concentrated on clearing
Turkish fortresses along the Black Sea coast.
Outnumbered by the Turks, Rumiantsev moved quickly to defeat
separate Turkish contingents before they could unite into an overwhelming
force. Russian aggressiveness also prevented the Turks from taking advantage of
their superior manpower. Confident in the organization and discipline of his
troops, Rumiantsev used rapid and night maneuvers to catch the Turks unawares.
Rumiantsev’s tactics during this campaign, particularly his use of squares and clever
employment of flanking attacks, were inspired. Rumiantsev’s 40,000 troops
caught a Turkish army of 75,000 at Riabaia Mogila on 17/28 June 1770. Despite
being outnumbered nearly two to one by Turkish troops in a strong position,
Rumiantsev coordinated a multipronged attack. He led the bulk of Russian forces
himself in a frontal assault, while a smaller detachment under Grigorii
Aleksandrovich Potemkin crossed the Prut River shielding the Turkish left flank
to place itself across the Turkish line of retreat. At the same time, a
stronger detachment, including most of the Russian cavalry, attacked the
Turkish right. Confronted by Russian firepower and attacked from three
directions, the Turkish position dissolved into disordered flight. Rumiantsev
maintained his aggressive tempo, moving down the Prut and catching a second
Ottoman army where the Larga River flows into it. Behind the Larga 80,000
Turkish and Tatar soldiers were dug in. Using the cover of darkness, Rumiantsev
crossed the Larga upstream with most of his forces to launch a surprise attack
on the Turkish right flank. As the Turks shifted troops to their right, a
smaller detachment Rumiantsev had left behind pushed directly across the Larga
River, seizing the heart of the Turkish position. The Turkish army
disintegrated in confusion. In both battles, Rumiantsev was so successful that
he inflicted very few casualties on the Turkish forces. They broke and ran
before Russian firepower could inflict significant damage.
While Panin’s army besieged Bender, Rumiantsev met the
Turkish main forces on the Kagul (Kartal) River, north of the Danube River, on
21 July/ 1 August 1770. With only 40,000 troops to the Turkish grand vizier’s
150,000, Rumiantsev continued his offensive tactics, hoping to beat the Turkish
main forces before the arrival of additional Tatar cavalry. Launching a frontal
attack on the Turkish camp early in the morning, Rumiantsev’s strengthened
right wing drove back the Turkish left, but a counterattack by the Turks’
fearsome janissary infantry smashed the center of the Russian line and
temporarily tore a wide hole into the Russian formation. Rumiantsev himself
joined the reserves hastily thrown in to plug the gap. Once the janissaries had
been blasted into oblivion by Russian firepower, the rest of the Turkish army
again broke and fled, leaving supplies and artillery behind them. Rumiantsev
detached forces for an energetic pursuit, which caught the fleeing Turks at the
Danube. Only a tiny fraction escaped to safety on the far side. From this point,
the Turks were forced to remain entirely on the defensive, hoping for outside
intervention to rescue them from the war they started.
The Turkish catastrophe was not finished. The Ottoman
fortresses along the Black Sea fell rapidly into Russian hands after the Kagul
victory: Izmail, Akkerman, and Bender. To make matters worse, Catherine’s lover
Grigorii Orlov hatched an ambitious plan to bring a Russian fleet into the
Mediterranean to attack the Turks from the south. This meant repairing and
rebuilding the Russian fleet, dilapidated from decades of neglect, but
Catherine threw immense financial and diplomatic resources into the project.
When the Russian fleet arrived in Turkish waters in spring 1770, it attempted
unsuccessfully to stir Greece into rebellion against Turkish rule. It finally
brought the Turkish Aegean fleet to battle on 24 June/5 July 1770 at the fort
of Chesme off the Anatolian coast. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, the
Russians’ attack threw the Turkish ships into confusion and disarray, and the
Turks withdrew into Chesme harbor. A night raid into the harbor with fireboats
torched the Turkish fleet, destroying it completely.
The overwhelming successes of 1770 were followed by a
historic triumph in 1771. Rumiantsev’s First Army consolidated its position and
continued to capture Turkish fortresses, but did not push decisively south
across the Danube. Instead, the Russian Second Army, now commanded by Vasilii
Mikhailovich Dolgorukii, pushed into the Crimea in June 1771 against scattered
resistance and conquered it, a feat that had escaped every previous Russian
army. Catherine set up a puppet khan and a treaty granting the Crimea formal
independence, but committing it to eternal friendship and permitting Russian
garrisons. Instead of a base for raids on southern Russia, the Crimea had
become a de facto Russian possession.
Despite Catherine’s staggering run of successes, she was
increasingly anxious for peace. Even victories were costly. Bubonic plague
raged west of the Black Sea and even in Russia itself, where it killed hundreds
of thousands. The conscription and taxes to maintain her army were increasingly
unpopular. In addition, Austria and Prussia submerged their differences in
common alarm over the extent of Russian victories and were eager to limit
Russia’s gains. The Ottomans asked for Austrian and Prussian mediation in 1770;
both governments moved with alacrity to assist, but peace negotiations went
nowhere. Though Catherine wanted peace, she would not settle for less than her
battlefield successes had earned.
