As Catherine and her ministers were reordering Russian government they did not lose sight of the situation on the southern border. The Ottomans were reluctant to ignore Russian gains, and the “autonomy” of Crimea under Russian stewardship proved an unstable arrangement. In 1783 Catherine annexed the territory to Russia, adding it to the vast areas of New Russia under the firm hand of Potemkin. Catherine and Potemkin began to develop larger plans of conquest in the south, tempting Austria to join them with the “Greek project,” a proposal for the partition of the Balkans and restoration of a Greek monarchy with Russian princes on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Finally in 1787 Turkey declared war. Russian troops began to advance into the Balkans, but elsewhere the situation deteriorated. The Austrian Emperor Joseph II honored his treaty with Russia and his army began to move south too, but he was rapidly defeated by the Turks. King Gustavus III of Sweden attacked Russia as well, hoping for revenge for earlier losses and to strengthen his hand at home. Catherine had hoped for Polish troops to support the Russian effort, but when Stanislaw Poniatowski called the diet to discuss the issue, it swiftly turned into a revolutionary assembly that proceeded to throw off Russian domination and elaborate a reformed constitution. To make matters worse, Prussia cynically supported the Polish effort with a view to its own future aggrandizement in Poland. Catherine had no one to rely upon but Potemkin and her army and navy.
Catherine showed the steel nerves that had brought her to the throne thirty years before. Hearing the guns of the Swedish fleet from her palace windows, she continued to work without giving them any notice. Progress in the south was slow, especially at first, but the new Black Sea fleet (with some help from the American naval hero John Paul Jones) was victorious and the army relentlessly pushed the Turks into the Rumanian principalities. Gustav III made little progress and found himself the object of a conspiracy of Finnish officers discontented with Swedish absolutism. His resources exhausted in spite of modest success on the sea, Gustav made peace in 1790. Turkey remained in the war.
To complicate Russia’s situation still further, Britain, with its own imperial ambitions rapidly growing, began to worry about Russian movement toward the Mediterranean and adopted a hostile stance. Catherine needed success, and at the end of December 1790, general Alexander Suvorov gave it to her, taking the fortress of Izmail near the mouth of the Danube. He took the fort by frontal assault with great casualties, but he took it. In the next spring the Russians moved south toward Bulgaria, and by the end of the summer the Turks capitulated. Russia’s borders now extended to the Dniestr River, including the site of future city of Odessa. Catherine had played her cards with great skill, and she had won. At that moment, Potemkin died. Catherine continued to have lovers and favorites, but none of them ever had the love and trust that Potemkin had inspired.
The wars with Turkey and Sweden had required the complete attention and resources of the Russian government, but they were aware that Europe was increasingly in crisis. The French Revolution was transforming European politics daily, and closer to home the Polish diet’s reformed constitution of May 3, 1791, meant that Russia would soon have a hostile and more powerful neighbor. There was little Catherine could do about France, but Poland was a different case. She intrigued with aristocratic opponents of the new constitution, and as soon as the Turkish war ended she and her Polish allies moved against Poniatowski and the new government. The small Polish army was easily swept away, and Catherine arranged with Prussia to make a new partition. This was not her preferred option, for all along she wanted a united compliant Poland, but she realized that the new order was too popular among Polish nobles to be reversed, and that she had to conciliate Prussia and Austria.
Thus a much reduced Poland acquired a conservative constitution supported by Russian bayonets, but it did not last. In 1794 Tadeusz Kosciuszko led a rebellion in southern Poland that quickly spread to Warsaw and scored a few modest successes. Catherine was convinced that French Jacobinism was behind it, and sent in Suvorov at the head of a Russian army. Suvorov took Warsaw with great slaughter, and the partitioning powers agreed to put an end to Poland’s existence. Prussia and Austria carved up the areas with predominantly Polish populations, while Russia took the Western Ukraine, the rest of Belorussia, and Lithuania.
Russia now had become a truly multi-national empire. The five-and-onehalf million new subjects brought the proportion of Russians in the state from some eighty-five percent down to perhaps seventy. Catherine did not fight the war to reunite the Eastern Slavs, but she had in fact brought into her empire virtually the whole territory of the medieval Kiev Rus.
If Catherine could do little to affect the progress of the French Revolution, she was no less frightened by its increasing radicalism, and the Russian nobility shared her fears. The policy of toleration and enlightenment gradually came to an end. Especially after the proclamation of the republic and execution of Louis XVI, the importation and circulation of new French books and even long-familiar Enlightenment writers now faced serious restrictions. In 1792 Novikov was arrested after investigation but there was no trial and he was ordered to be confined in prison indefinitely. The Masons were shut down and fell under increasing suspicion as potential supporters of the French revolutionaries. In 1796, only a few weeks before her death, Catherine established the first Russian system of state censorship, no longer depending on the Academy of Sciences or the local police to do the work.
The most spectacular case of dissent and its repression, however, had already come in 1790. In that year Alexander Radishchev, a nobleman and minor civil servant, published a book called A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Using the then-popular genre of the fictitious journey, he described the villages and towns of Russia and interspersed his own reflections on society and politics. His portrait of serfdom was unflattering to the extreme – in his view a system that corrupted master and serf alike was morally indefensible and economically ruinous. His political ruminations were vaguer, but they clearly suggested that autocracy was not the best way to govern Russia. Catherine read the book herself and made many marginal notes, and ultimately had Radishchev arrested. Interrogated in the Secret Department of the Senate, Radishchev was convicted in the St. Petersburg criminal court of sedition and lèse majesté and was condemned to death. Catherine commuted the punishment to exile in a remote Siberian fort, and Radishchev went off, though with a substantial stipend from one of Catherine’s grandees, who interceded with the empress on his behalf.
The French Revolution and Catherine’s death in 1796 brought Russia’s eighteenth century to a close. For a century the state, or more accurately the monarchs and their courts, had labored to transform the country along European lines and bring European culture to Russia. In this task they had largely succeeded. Russia had institutions and laws copied from European models, and Western diplomats, merchants, and travelers felt at home in St. Petersburg, if not everywhere else in Russia. The new state structure had provided the basis for the rise of Russia to the place of a great power, and helped the growth of commerce and industry, education and science. Settlement of new areas in the south contributed to an ongoing population explosion that was rapidly making Russia the largest country in Europe, even without newly annexed territory.
The cultural transformation was profound. By the end of the century educated Russians, most of them still nobles, had absorbed most of the major ideas and artistic achievements of modern Europe and they were beginning to offer their own still modest contributions. Russian political thought had the same elements and was based on the same writings as that farther west. If Russian noblemen did not admire Rousseau’s democratic musings, they did absorb the teachings of Puffendorf and Montesquieu as well as those of a host of minor writers. Monarchy in Russia was understood in much the same way as in France or Prussia, Austria or Sweden.