The Memoirs of Catherine the Great by Catherine the Great Page B

period she wrote her second memoir, of which parts 1 and 2 begin with cheerful dedications to friends. With much the same deceptively light tone, she wrote many letters to Voltaire concerning these problems, and in 1772 she wrote her first plays, five social comedies, beginning with O These Times!, where only the title hints at the situation in Moscow, where the play is set.
    To implement her administrative reforms of the 1770s and 1780s and create more qualified civil servants and useful citizens, Catherine, with Ivan Betskoi (1704–95), promoted universal general education. They published the
General Plan for the Education of Young People of Both Sexes
(1764) abroad in French with Diderot’s help, and the
Statute of National
Schools
(1786). Her own pedagogical writings for young people included a Russian primer for reading, which was a bestseller and the first Russian work translated into English (1781); the first Russian children’s literature, written for her grandsons, translated into German, French, and English (1781, 1783), one tale of which she then made into an opera (
Fevei,
1786); a collection of Russian proverbs (many of which she composed) for children (1783); her
Notes Concerning Russian History
(1783–84); and her
In
struction to Prince Saltykov on educating her grandsons (1784). 70
    Catherine inherited a country exhausted by the Seven Years’ War against Prussia (1756–63), which forms the background to the conclusion of her final memoir. She took control of foreign policy from the outset of her reign, dispensing with a chancellor for foreign affairs, and built on Peter the Great’s military legacy. She centralized the financial administration, which allowed for budgetary planning and a national debt to pay for the costs of wars. In pursuit of a Prussophile foreign policy, Peter III had ended the war by ceding Russia’s gains back to Prussia, which Catherine used against him to justify her coup; nevertheless, she then maintained the alliance. Russia won new territories in two wars with Turkey (1768–74 and 1787–91), which, after her victory over Prussia in the Seven Years’ War, cemented her reputation in Europe as a major power. Russia had long guarded itself in the north through alliances first with Austria (1746), then briefly with France while fighting Prussia (1756), and then with Prussia (1764), in the so-called Northern Alliance. But southern acquisitions played into Catherine’s wish to regain Constantinople from Islam for Eastern Christianity, and she turned again secretly to Austria (1781).
    The last expansion of Russia on this scope had happened in the sixteenth century, under the first Czar, Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (1530–84). Catherine expanded the Russian Empire to the south, adding Walachia and Moldavia (1770–74), and the Crimea (1783) and other lands north of the Black Sea, where she continued Peter the Great’s priority of building a naval fleet. As part of the spoils of war, Catherine shared out Poland in three successive partitions (1772, 1793, 1795), and the rest of Ukraine, White Russia, and Lithuania. Catherine handed out conquered lands with serfs as rewards and she encouraged immigration because she believed that agriculture and an adequate farming population formed the basis of a successful economy. When she died, in 1796, her armies were poised to take over Georgia and Armenia, and she had ordered up 60,000 troops to join with Britain in an attack on France. Though Catherine was called “Great” during her reign in recognition of the above achievements, she always refused honorific titles in her lifetime. 71
    CATHERINE’S CULTURAL OFFENSIVE
    It is hard to overestimate Catherine’s attention and sensitivity to what was written abroad about Russia and herself, and her ceaseless work to influence foreign opinion through her writings and emissaries. Her middle and final memoirs certainly belong in this context, a genre of foreign writings that Russian scholars term