The Icon and the Axe

Rather than come to grips with the concrete problems of her realm, Catherine became infatuated in her declining years with her "grand design" for taking Constantinople and dividing the Balkans with the Hapsburg emperor. She named her second grandson Constantine, placed the image of the Santa "Sophia on her coins, and wrote a dramatic extravaganza, The First Government of Oleg, which ends with this early Russian conqueror-prince leaving his shield behind in Constantinople for future generations to reclaim.38

Having subdued at last the entire northern coast of the Black Sea, Catherine adorned it with a string of new cities-often on the site of old Greek settlements-Azov, Taganrog, Nikolaev, Odessa, and Sevastopol. The latter, built as a fortress on the southwest corner of the Crimean peninsula, was given the Greek version of the Roman imperial title Augusta. Built by an English naval engineer, Samuel Bentham, the "august city" (sevaste polis) inspired nothing original except for the eerie plan of Samuel's famous brother Jeremy for a panopticon: a prison in which a central observer could peer into all cells.39 Sevastopol is remembered not for the awe it inspired but for the humiliation it brought to Russia when captured by British and French invaders during the Crimean War. More than any other single event, the fall of the "august city" in 1855 dispelled illusion and forced Russia to turn from external glory to internal reform.

But external glory preoccupied Catherine during the latter part of her reign. Her world of illusion is. symbolized by the famed legend that portable "Potemkin villages" were devised by her most famous courtier to camouflage the misery of the people from her eyes during triumphal tours. She spent her last years (and almost her last rubles) building pretentious palaces for her favorites, foreign advisers and relatives: Tauride in St. Petersburg and nearby Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo (which she intended to name Constantingorod). The costumes and sets were more impressive than the actual plays in Catherine's theater. She expressed a preference for extended divertissements, and insisted that serious operas be cut from three acts to two. It seems strangely appropriate that four different versions of the Pygmalion story were staged during the reign of Catherine. This minor German princess had been transformed into a northern goddess by the sages of the eighteenth century; but in this case the reality was less impressive than the figure on the pedestal. Even today the monument to her in front of the former imperial (now Saltykov-Shchedrin) library in Leningrad still is usually seen rising up from a sea of mud. Her every movement was surrounded with cosmetic camouflage and rococo frills. In an age when cutout

silhouettes and surface flourishes were in vogue throughout Europe, Catherine brought the silhouette without the substance of reform to Russia.40 As a final monument to her vanity, she left behind five feast days consecrated to her alone on the church calendar: her birthday, day of succession to the throne, day of coronation, name day, and the day of her smallpox vaccination, November 21.41

Catherine's turn from inner reform to external aggrandizement is dramatically illustrated by the three-sided and three-staged dismemberment of Poland. Having helped place her youthful friend and lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the Polish throne in 1764, Catherine participated in the first partition of Poland in 1772; then took the lead in the last two, which followed Stanisfaw's adoption in 1791 of a reform constitution not dissimilar to those which Catherine had considered in earlier days.42 The absorption of Poland had, however, the ironic effect of helping to perpetuate the very tradition that Catherine was rejecting. For Stanislaw promptly moved to St. Petersburg along with his relatives, the Czartoryski family, and many other reform-minded survivors of the old Polish republic.