In 1745, a German princess named Sophie Augusta Fredrika, from Anhalt-Zerbst, married the 17-year-old grandson of Peter the Great. Seventeen years later her husband became Sultan and russian wife III. In those seventeen years, Sophie converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
She endured the philandering of her husband, their alienation and abject subordination to her mother-in-law. Sophie read many books, and she had love affairs of her own. And a few months after her husband inherited the throne, she joined a revolt against him led by one of her lovers. Her husband, Peter III, conveniently died in prison in mid-July 1662, and in November Sophie was crowned in an elaborate ceremony in Moscow and became Catherine II.
She corresponded with learned men, including Voltaire. She wished to be a “defender of oppressed innocence,” to spread education and to otherwise reform Russia. Russia’s agricultural land and one-third of its serfs. Catherine confiscated much of its lands and left the church’s clergy as state paid functionaries. Catherine gave up wanting to create an “enlightened” constitution and political reforms. Russian society appeared to her too chaotic for any sharing of power. She opposed educating common people, believing that if they were educated they would stop obeying.
Catherine knew that to rule she had to have the support of a segment of society, and to this end she tried to please the nobility. She released them from the obligation to serve the state that had been imposed on the nobility by Ivan the Terrible. She extended the nobility’s power over the people living on and working their lands. Under her rule, serfdom was extended to over a million people who had previously been freed. Catherine was opposed to educating common people, believing that if the uneducated were educated they would stop obeying. Failing at reform that benefited common people, Catherine sought distraction for her subjects in the grandeur of imperial expansion.
In 1768, Catherine’s army pushed southwest from the Dnieper River into the Balkans. They scored victories and called on Christians under Ottoman rule to rebel. Another Russian force invaded and captured the Crimea. The Russian fleet was unable to do more for the Russian effort following this victory. The war on land was bogged down, and the Christians in Ottoman lands had failed to join the Russians.
Austria was concerned about Russian expansion into the Balkans. To allay the hostility of the Habsburgs, Frederick the Great organized an agreement with Joseph II of Austria in 1772 that involved Catherine’s Russia. The three heads of state were to acquire Polish territory. After the death of the Ottoman Sultan, Mustafa in July 1774, Ottoman resistance to the Russians weakened and the Ottomans were ready to settle with the Russians. Catherine was facing a peasant uprising that had begun among Cossacks in the Ural River region, led by Emelian Pugachev.
The rising spread to serfs, miners in the Urals, factory workers, Bashkirs, Tatars and other minorities within Russia, and it had spread to those Christians called Old Believers. After settling with the Ottomans, Catherine sent troops released from the war against the peasant revolt. In 1783 Catherine annexed the Crimea, and many of the Crimea’s Tatars fled to Ottoman territory. That year, Irakli II of Georgia allied his multi-national state with Russia, Irakli acknowledging Russian suzerainty and Russia guaranteeing Georgian independence. Mozart’s comic opera about oppression, The Marriage of Figaro, appeared. Three years later came the French Revolution. And two years after that, in the year of his death at age thirty-five, came Mozart’s other comic opera about oppression: The Magic Flute.
