On 23 June 1794 Empress Catherine II of Russia, known historically as Catherine the Great, formally granted permission for Jews to move into Kyiv, which is now the Ukrainian city of Kiev.
This was an unpopular move on Catherine’s part, since the Orthodox Christians of Kiev insisted that their community was “profaned” by Jewish residency. Nonetheless, Catherine insisted on making a place for the Jewish community because it was better for Russia to have the skilled tradesmen operating within the borders.
Empress Catherine had already established in 1772 that Jewish people from Poland and the Ukrainian region could colonize the recently annexed Turkish lands, although they were forbidden from trading within the inner regions of Mother Russia. She even gave Jewish Russians the same rights and protection under the laws of the Charter of the Towns of 1782. Even more impressively, in 1792 she had expanded Jewish-allowed territories into what would become known as the Pale of Settlement. While she cannot be said to have been free from Antisemitism — she taxed Jews more heavily than Christians — she certainly prevented the state-sponsored persecution the Jews faced in many other European countries at the time and gave Jewish communities the ability to form schools and cultural centres to maintain their heritage.
But is Catherine the Great remembered for her forward-thinking decisions regarding the Russian Jewish community? Nope. No more than she is remembered for her other achievements, like instituting the Charters of the Nobility and the Townspeople in 1785, an Enlightenment credo about the duties and RIGHTS of a Russian citizen. Even though it was limited to the upper and middle classes, this was a huge deal. But no, like her anti-pogrom stance on Russia’s Jews, her progressive policies are elided in favour of her sex life.
Do people care that Catherine the Great was one of the strongest and most capable rulers Russia, and the world, has ever known? That she dragged Russia — kicking and screaming in some cases — into its place as a modern European state? That she rationalised and reformed Russian law and government? Ha! Of course not! Most people know her as the chick who supposedly died while having sex with a horse.
The empress made Russia one of the first countries in the world to inoculate its populace. To prove its safety she allowed Dr. Thomas Dimsdale to inoculate her and her son — her only heir — with the smallpox vaccine in 1764. The whole of Russia waited to see what would happen, and after two weeks, when Catherine and her son did not contract smallpox, she ordered the church bells of Russia to ring and the priests to announce the inoculation’s success from every pulpit. Thus, almost the whole of Russia agreed to be vaccinated as well, to follow her brave example. Catherine’s courageous efforts to popularise inoculations against smallpox saved countless lives.
She was also profoundly concerned with child health and life expectancy among her subjects. She wrote, “If you go to a village and ask a peasant how many children he has he will say ten, twelve, and sometimes even twenty. If you ask how many of them are alive, he will say, one, two, three, rarely four. This mortality should be fought against” (Massie, 2011). To combat this problem Catherine exponentially increased the number of schools and hospitals in her country, and introduced institutional orphanages in Moscow and St. Petersburg. She founded Russia’s first College of Medicine in 1763 and attempted to lure European doctors to the country by offering them lavish salaries and benefits.
She was also an able military strategist. Her armies trounced the Ottoman Empire twice, subjugated the Cossacks, and took the Ukraine as well as huge swathes of Poland. Catherine’s able minister, Potemkin, negotiated so well with Turkey that Russia was able annex the Crimea without firing a shot. There, with Catherine’s blessings, Potemkin created prosperous villages and fortified cities. Although these would be mocked by his enemies as “Potemkin Villages” painted on cardboard, the settlements were very real. Russian land acquisitions gave the country easy access to the Black Sea; Catherine financed Potemkin’s yen for a naval force, thereby enabling Slavic domination of the area for decades. Russian ships did well in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea as well, beating the Swedish navy like a drum. During the Russian-Swedish war, Catherine could hear the guns of the advancing Swedish troops, but continued to work calmly, demonstrating her conviction that Russia would prevail.
Catherine the Great was the also arguably the greatest collector and patron of art in the history of Europe, with a collection of thousands of paintings, statues, and other objets d’art . She built the Hermitage Museum and multiple other public works to house these precious pieces, as well as founding libraries to share the literary output of Europe. Moreover, the empress not only supported the arts, she made them. Catherine found time to write neoclassical comedies and French dramas — winning the respect of Voltaire himself — all while fulfilling her role as the autocrat of Russia.
The empress also supported the sciences, as well as the arts. She talked famous European scientists — including Leonhard Euler, Peter Simon Pallas, and Anders Johan Lexell — into moving to Russia and working in St Petersburg. She even started academic journals to spread their findings.
In short, Catherine the Great kicked off (and paid for) the Russian Enlightenment.
Yet what is this remarkable woman most remembered for? Her lovers. What a shame that her accomplishments outside the bedroom – which were legion – cannot be celebrated the way the lies about her multitudes of man-toys have been.