Catherine the Great -- The Enlightened Despot of 18th Century Russia [45min]
...Afterwards Simon Dixon said that it was the first time he had been interviewed about Catherine the Great and not been asked about the horse. Immediately after the programme I had to scoot off to Middle Temple, the smoking room, an instant antique in that glitteringly polished sepulchre of law. I went there to discuss the Magna Carta, or rather to interview Lord Woolf about the significance of Magna Carta, not only in this country but around the world. His clear, beautifully balanced description of the necessary and civilising supremacy of a law which puts rights before power could scarcely have been more at odds with the methods of Catherine the Great. For all the affection and understanding borne by Janet Hartley, Tony Lentin and Simon Dixon, there is another, though perhaps a cruder appraisal of Catherine. Magna Carta was instigated by the behaviour of King John, once called “the worst king England ever had”. That sort of yah-boo judgement was once a joy but is now, perhaps rightly, relegated to infancy. Sometimes, though, I think it is worth reviving. Catherine was not a Stalin but she was a terrible despot. Her fibbing and self-aggrandising exchanges with Voltaire only make it worse. She draped herself in the veils of Enlightenment respectability while destroying her enemies, heading up plots, including one which led to the assassination of her husband and her own elevation to the throne. She did abolish torture -- though it is impossible to believe that she quenched it in the deep vastnesses of the Russian Steppes where most of her subjects lived serf subsistence lives. But she waged cruel wars. She spent 13% of the national income on her palace and only 2% on the educational schemes she boasted of to her Enlightenment friends in Western Europe. Her attempts to relieve the condition of the serfs, who were sold and inherited like slaves, resulted in the doubling of their number by the end of her reign and no improvement in their conditions. She was, undoubtedly, dramatically successful in the provision of spectacle and in the dubious art of making Russia more important in the European context. She fought the good fight of an upwardly mobile achiever and she mastered men in a way to make all feminists cheer. But she was no snowflake. I am, at the moment, also working on a project called “Twelve Books That Changed the World” and one of these is “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” by Mary Wollstonecraft. Now there, I think, is a woman wholly to be admired. A true empress of thought. I’m writing this newsletter in a café in Paris, feeling mightily existentialist. Mary spent the most exhilarating period of her short and difficult life here in the 1790s and was taken up by Tom Paine and others as a true heroine of the Revolution. She was also taken up by an American adventurer whose illegitimate child she bore, a child which was to mark the first step of the descent of her reputation back in London, where she became known as a scandalous woman. Her early death, second illegitimate child and revelations by a well-meaning husband meant that her reputation got in the way of her intellectual achievements for generations to follow. It was only really in the mid 20th century that her true greatness was rediscovered. Poor Mary, scorned for honest passion. Lucky Catherine, hailed for major villainies. Then Simon Dixon told us about the horse.