The “Magnificent Age” - Catherine II TL
- Thread starter alexmilman
- Start date
Where is a guarantee that the horses will do what you want? And putting a bunch of horses on fire also involves technical difficulties and requires money and a thorough planning. You can’t just bring numerous horses with the straw or firewood tied to their tails on a crowded street and then start putting these materials on fire. People, who live in a predominantly wooden city may misinterpret your intentions and take them as a personal offense. Besides, you’ll need a precise timing: you can’t just have a herd of horses staying on a street with a peculiar stuff tied to their tails. 😜
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So when Catherine dies will the story end or will we see a more story more centered around Paul.
His Peter one did continue way past the Tsar's death but it wasnt intended to last that long so it depends on how much good ol' Alex is willing to push it
42. Domestic Affairs. #6. Catherine goes frugal
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42. Domestic Affairs. #6. Catherine goes frugal
As was mentioned in the previous chapter, after the glorious Ottoman War and less glorious but still profitable partition of the PLC Catherine found out that the Russian finances are not in a good shape and something has to be done on this account. There were two ways of doing so:
Manifesto was printed in a form that later became the official tradition: the meaningless words were printed by the big letters and the meaningful part in a small font [6].
In its practical part the manifesto was regulating the carriages and numbers of horses permitted to each group within the Table and dress code for their lackeys. The local administrators were put in charge of the enforcement.
Intermission. This may look silly but it was not: the manifesto was once more underscoring the main principle of the Russian Empire: person’s place in it was defined (at least formally) not by ancestry or wealth but by his place on the service ladder. No matter how aristocratic or rich one was but if he was just a junior officer, he could use carriages and sledges with to horses while the people of the higher service ranks had been entitled to 4 or 6 (the top being entitled to 6 horses with two postilions). And if a noble did not have an officer rank or its civic equivalent, he was entitled to a single horse carriage with no adornments on a harness. The same for the livery.
With the well-being of her (noble) subjects being attended to, it would be reasonable for Catherine to start taking care about her household and administration.
At home. To give a general idea of the situation in the imperial household, here are some historical anecdotes:
”Walking through the garden, Empress [Catherine II] replaced that the lackeys carry peaches, pineapples and grapes from the palace on porcelain trays. In order not to meet them, Ekaterina turned to the side, telling others:
- I wish they would at least left to me the trays!”
“And another time, faced, so to speak, with these trays, she said to those who carried them:
- Well, you'll be in trouble if Torsukov [Hoff-Marshal] sees it!
- He's still sleeping, Mother Tsarina! - was their answer.”
On some occasions she even was helping the thieves to escape being caught. Tendency to play a good master extended to her never ordering to punish any of the servants or even to fire the incompetent ones: one of her cooks was very bad and when it was his turn to prepare the imperial dishes there was a “diet time” but he never was fired.
The basic principle of the court employees was to steal everything that could be defined as a petty theft (aka, not jewelry, pieces of furniture, certain pieces of a table service, etc.). There was a joke about a person who asked to find him any place at the palace staff explaining that even position of a care taker of Empress’ canary bird will provide food for him, his wife and his children. One of very few cases when Catherine did something was when she found in the palace documents that every day a poud (16 kilograms) of a hair powder was allocated for her. “Did something” meant that she let it be known that she is unhappy. Nobody was punished but the practice stopped. But role of a good master was too appealing to abandon it and Hoff-Master was doomed to play a bad cop or at least a scarecrow. The palaces, and especially their personnel, remained a big money-sucking black hole.
Which was rather funny because her personal life style was rather modest. The decor of her interior rooms in the Winter Palace was much more modest than the situation of the rooms of many nobles of that time. She usually woke up at seven o'clock in the morning and, without disturbing anyone, put on her own clothes, dressed and ignited the fireplace, in which they put firewood in the evening. After washing herself in a small bathroom and putting on a house dress the empress went to the office, where she was immediately served a cup of the strongest Levantine coffee and a plate of toasts. Slowly sipping coffee, Catherine studied the papers, wrote letters and in moments of rest fed her favorite dogs with toasts [7]. At nine o'clock she moved into the bedroom, which by that time was hastily put in order. There were two tables. Catherine was taking a seatbehind one of them and then the capital’s chief of police and state secretaries with the reports had been admitted one by one. When the state secretaries done with their reports, the rest of the persons to whom the reception was appointed had been invited. At twelve o'clock, the reception stopped, and her senior hairdresser Kozlov would come to the empress to comb her hair. Then Catherine went to the ceremonial dressing room, where everyone who reported on that day and some close friends were gathering for the morning greeting. Here she was putting on an official dress.
Before lunch, which was appointed at two o'clock, the empress studied again. Only the closest persons were invited to lunch on weekdays; it lasted no more than an hour. The empress was distinguished by her abstinence in food and drink: she never had breakfast or dinner, and at lunch she took small portions of three or four dishes; from wine she drank a glass of rhine wine or Hungarian.
At 6pm there were social meetings officially defined as small ( for the inner circle), medium (bigger number but still reasonably “inner”) and big ones (all high-ranking people, and foreign diplomats; opera, dances, supper) . Catherine had to maintain reputation of the imperial court as the most luxurious court in Europe. A mandatory feature of the entertainment was a card game. For the small and medium parties the empress had permanent partners but in the big ones she may invite somebody else as a token of her favor. With the high stakes games being forbidden, she and her partners had been using the “modest” ones, one imperial (gold coin of 10 rubles; for comparison, the annual poll tax was 70-80 kopeks).
In May, Catherine moved to Tsarskoye Selo, where she remained until late autumn. All court ceremonies and receptions were canceled here, reports and invitations were shortened. On a painting above Catherine is painted with one of her favorite Italian greyhounds, which in 1770, the English doctor Dimsdale (who introduced smallpox inoculation in Russia) presented her, Sir Tom Anderson (died in 1784) and Duches (died in 1782). These dogs became the ancestors of a large family. Tom Anderson lived for 16 years and left many descendants. Catherine loved her dogs very much and gave puppies - "young people", as she called them, to the Volkonsky, Naryshkin, Orlov families; two puppies were sent to Versailles. “At the head is the ancestor, Sir Tom Anderson, his wife, Duchess Anderson, their children: the young Duchess of Anderson, Mr. Anderson and Tom Thomson; this one settled in Moscow under the care of Prince Volkonsky, the Moscow Governor General. In addition to them, who have already won a position in the world, there are four or five young people who promise infinitely much: they are brought up in the best houses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as, for example, Prince Orlov, Mr. Naryshkins, at Prince Tyufyakin.”
Catherine's personal servants consisted of one chamber-frau, four chamber-medchen and five valets, two of which were with her person and two at the Hermitage. The duties of each were precisely defined; for example, one valet was in charge of the wardrobe and received an order from the Empress what exactly and on what day should be prepared for her; another supervised the inner rooms; the third, Catherine's favorite old Popov, was in charge of her office and "pantry", where precious things, brocades, velvets, matter, canvases, etc. were stored. It was his duty every Saturday to submit to her a statement of handouts made from the pantry during the week, not excluding even trifles, such as ribbons and ribbons, and the empress herself noted on the statements: "Write down in the expense". But the total staff of the imperial court amounted to over 3,000, including a personal of the palaces which she rarely visited but expenses on which had been billed on a “full scale”. Obviously, nothing could be saved there and nobody even tried seriously. Expenses of the court kept growing and if in 1730 they amounted to 360,000, now they were over 2,000,000 and kept growing. Income of the “cabinet” (an office serving the imperial family) had been formed by salt tax (a guaranteed million), gold and silver production in the state lands of Altai and Nerchinsk, fixed allocations from the Treasury, fixed allocations from the custom dues, yasak (furs) from the Siberian tribes and some smaller items like salary as a colonel of the Guards regiments.
But expenses also kept growing including, besides the mandatory items, pensions and various gifts of money and jewelry. The last category was important because it was a demonstrable sign of the sovereign’ personal benevolence and their cost varied in a wide range. For example, the most popular gift, a snuffbox, could cost anywhere between 150 and 6,000 rubles, gold watch with the diamonds - 150 - 3,000, female jewelry - 150 - 5,000, diamond rings - 200 - 4,000. And in the case of, God forbid, a war, the expenses grew to include the bejeweled and gold swords and various types of the non-standard military awards. To cut significantly on these expenses would hurt Catherine’s image as “gift-giving mother” and while she was not anymore “sitting” on the Guards’ bayonets, she still cared greatly about being surrounded by the happy faces.
Getting back to the subject, of course she found how to save money: when her son asked for 20,000 to cover his debts, he eventually got 5,000 and a valuable lecture on importance to be frugal. And as a birthday gift he got a cheap watch.
Administration was not much better: Catherine strongly believed in a force of the moral factors ignoring …er… historical realities of the Russian culture by which any official considered himself entitled to a piece of the state pie size and specifics of which depended on his position. As a result, the ongoing administrative reform, which moved most of the functionality and reporting down to the gubernia level, made the “historical practices” easier because the increased part of the collected taxes of all types had been now officially consumed on that level without going to the government.
Catherine’s usual approach was pretty much the same as with the thieving servants, try to appeal to what neither them nor the state officials typically did not have, the conscientiousness. Her predecessor in “Greatness”, Peter I, tried all methods of a persuasion, from delivering beating personally and all the way through knout, and rack to the gallows. Well, presumably the last item on the list was at least a temporary deterrent [8] but in general his pedagogical attempts failed. So, what chance Catherine had without these tools? An assumption that separation of powers within gubernia will solve the fiscal problems proved to be optimistic as well: representatives of each branch of the provincial government just had been “operating” each within his own sector. However, while her system of governing may sound a little bit naive, it was based upon the solid traditional Russian assumption that it does not make sense to replace one thief …oops… administrator with another because the new one will be stealing even more expecting that his tenure will be short.
The military and naval administration probably could introduce some money saving practices but the Military Collegium now did not have a President and its Vice-President, Saltykov, besides being incompetent in the military affairs, had a full time job administering the household of Cesarevich Paul and acting as intermediary between him and his mother so Catherine was looking for a suitable replacement.
In the Navy, Paul started to assert himself with the increasing authority and competence at the expense of his VP, Chernyshov but, besides being very (and sometimes annoyingly) honest himself, he was seemingly trying, with a competent help of the Vice-Admiral Greig, to introduce the style of a discipline and efficiency throughout the whole Russian Navy. Taking into an account that the new Black Sea fleet and the needed infrastructure had to be built almost from the scratch and that so far cooperation of the Admiralty with the regional naval commanders had been going smoothly, Catherine did not mind this burden being taken off her shoulders.
Fortunately, the newly-incorporated territories started adding income to the state coffers, replacement of the poll tax with the income tax for the merchants proved to be a good idea and the increasing exports also were providing growing surplus. Annual extraction of silver in Netchinsk region reached 629 pouds, metallurgical plants on Altai based mostly on Zmeinogorsk mine were producing over 1,000 pouds of silver annually and annual extraction of gold in Ural reached 2,000 pouds [9]. So, in an absence of some drastic expenses on a level of a major war [10] , what was passing for the Russian budget (officially, there still was none) was going to produce a steady and growing surplus even on the existing level of thievery and inefficiency.
Then there were relatively small (comparing to the total) but not negligible future savings by the Foreign Collegium. With the demise of Panin’s “System” the enormous amounts regularly spent on the bribes and subsidies came down to a pure minimum.
In Sweden an attempt to maintain the existing form of a government (absolutist Russian Empire fighting against the absolutist party in Sweden sounds rather strange) cost, within couple years, close to a million and ended up being a waste of money when King Gustav III in 1772 staged a coup and became an absolute monarch thus ending the Age of Liberty, which was quite costly for Russia without producing any visible benefits. The goal of the Russian policy, as per Panin, was to keep Sweden weak thus preventing its attack on Russia. The key element in this scenario were the French subsidies to Sweden because France was the Ottoman ally and, as a result, anti-Russian. But, being a theoretical construction, the “System” was not reacting to the changed geopolitical landscape: even before 1772 France run out of money and the end of the Ottoman war made the whole “stabbing at the back” scenario a mute point, anyway. Panin could keep pontificating but Catherine decided that, at least for a time being, maintaining friendly relations with a fellow absolute monarch is going to be cheaper than keep wasting huge some of money on now powerless opposition. She offered to sell Sweden a big amount of grain at the discount price, which was accepted with a gratitude, and relations had been patched. Anyway, with Denmark, after the land swap and removing the Queen from a political scene, being a firm Russian ally and Russian Empire having at its disposal a naval base in Kiel (and quite a few experienced local sailors willing to serve in the Russian navy) and Prussia as an ally as well, Sweden probably would not risk a military confrontation unless Gustav starts getting some mental problems.
The second money pit of the “System”, the PLC, became almost insignificantly cheap. Catherine kept giving small amounts of money to Stanislaw-August but the big expenses for promoting a now unimportant earlier agenda had been gone. In the newly acquired territories most of the lands which belonged to the active members of the Bar Confederacy had been confiscated and, after distribution of the awards, the rest had been turned into the state lands: being personally free, the state peasants had been paying a higher poll tax.
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[1] Leo the Deacon writes that in 945 the unhappy subjects captured Prince Igor and executed him by tying to the tops of bent trees and tore his body apart.
[2] The source of money is night-table, the source of electricity is a socket and of a gas is fueling station.
[3] Don’t remember which top family it was but when a son returned from a travel still in a possession of some money, the angry father told him: “I see that you did not learn how to behave as a prince” and threw the purse with the remaining money out of the window.
[4] Highly idealized picture. In OTL she was printing paper money and borrowing abroad as if there was no tomorrow saddling her successor with a devaluated paper currency and huge foreign debt.
[5] This decree was accompanied by the raise of the bureaucrats’ salaries in a somewhat idealistic expectation that this would remove a need foe stealing and taking bribes. Contrary to the expectations, this did not work out as expected. Personally, I can’ imagine why. Perhaps the part emphasizing the moral side of the issue contained words which the intended audience was not familiar with, like “honesty”.
[6] Unfortunately, I could not find the contemporary document. Below is the recent replica with the modern orthography but presumably in the same format.
[7] Not a very good food. I mean, for a dog.
[8] It can be argued that if those subjected to this educational method did not have a tendency to die in a process of being hanged, they would continue their practices. With an absence of the necessary data, this theory can’t be convincingly proved or disproved.
[9] I did not quite get how the whole system worked. These plants were on the lands which belonged to the imperial family. Gold, silver and part of copper had been going to the Mint to make coinage. Was all that coinage going to the “cabinet” to cover the court expenses (unlikely) or was there some kind of a more complicated arrangement? So far, I found nothing on that account. Anyway, until Nicholas I created Ministry of the Imperial Court with its own budget, a line between the sovereign’s own money and state money was somewhat murky.
[10] In OTL activities of Grigory Potemkin probably amounted to a very big war. “Probably” because he did not bother himself with a paper work. When auditing the 55 million rubles allocated to him for the army, he found very difficult to “justify” (with a very lenient attitude of the auditors) spending 41 million, and the report on the rest dragged on to infinity and were forgiven. And the expenses for ”civilizing” Novorossia, as I understand, never were audited. Grigory Orlov never was asked how exactly he spent 20 millions assigned to the Mediterranean expedition and he seemingly “appropriated” a big part of the trophies. Well, at least he was a bona fide war hero, which Potemkin was not.
“There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.”
Calvin Coolidge
“Industry is fortune’s right hand, and frugality its left.”
John Ray
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”
Woody Allen
“The safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it in your pocket.”
Kin Hubbard
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
Oscar Wilde
"The only way to get people in Russia to comply with the laws is to legalize theft."
M. N. Zadornov
“But in theft, they find a lot of subtlety that would not shame even London scammers.”
I.A. Goncharov, ‘Frigate Pallada’
“Almost every day they caught him in theft, but since the thefts were small, and moreover the Russian man does not like to sue at all, it rarely came to police and ended with beating.”
”If I fall asleep and wake up in a hundred years and I am asked what is happening in Russia now, I will answer: they drink and steal...”
”When and which bureaucrat was not convinced that Russia is a pie that can be freely approached and eaten?”
”The Russian government must keep its people in a state of constant amazement.”
”In order to steal with success, you only need to have agety and greed. Greed is especially necessary, because you can get on trial for a small theft.”
”.... Words that were completely insignificant were printed in large letters, and everything essential was depicted in the smallest print.”
”Enlightenment must be implemented with moderation, avoiding bloodshed as much as possible.”
A.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin
“Children, write down the conditions of the task. Ignat had five apples. According to the documents. In fact, three, and seven under the contract. Question: how many apples will the one who checks Ignat's business activities have?”
Modern Russian joke
Calvin Coolidge
“Industry is fortune’s right hand, and frugality its left.”
John Ray
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”
Woody Allen
“The safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it in your pocket.”
Kin Hubbard
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
Oscar Wilde
"The only way to get people in Russia to comply with the laws is to legalize theft."
M. N. Zadornov
“But in theft, they find a lot of subtlety that would not shame even London scammers.”
I.A. Goncharov, ‘Frigate Pallada’
“Almost every day they caught him in theft, but since the thefts were small, and moreover the Russian man does not like to sue at all, it rarely came to police and ended with beating.”
”If I fall asleep and wake up in a hundred years and I am asked what is happening in Russia now, I will answer: they drink and steal...”
”When and which bureaucrat was not convinced that Russia is a pie that can be freely approached and eaten?”
”The Russian government must keep its people in a state of constant amazement.”
”In order to steal with success, you only need to have agety and greed. Greed is especially necessary, because you can get on trial for a small theft.”
”.... Words that were completely insignificant were printed in large letters, and everything essential was depicted in the smallest print.”
”Enlightenment must be implemented with moderation, avoiding bloodshed as much as possible.”
A.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin
“Children, write down the conditions of the task. Ignat had five apples. According to the documents. In fact, three, and seven under the contract. Question: how many apples will the one who checks Ignat's business activities have?”
Modern Russian joke
As was mentioned in the previous chapter, after the glorious Ottoman War and less glorious but still profitable partition of the PLC Catherine found out that the Russian finances are not in a good shape and something has to be done on this account. There were two ways of doing so:
- Get more money. Traditional implementation of this solution was just to raise more revenues by raising the taxes. The method was as old as the first Russian principalities and, with the few unfortunate exceptions, like one of Prince Igor of Kiev [1], it worked quite well. However, within the existing reality the government could not fully collect even existing direct taxes and, as far as indirect ones were involved, while even greater drinking would raise amount of the collected excise taxes in a short run, there were certain disadvantages in having all subjects of the Russian Empire permanently drunk (who would be carrying food and other necessities to the noble houses and imperial residences?). Another way to get more money was to make more of them but resources of silver copper were not unlimited and both had other important use (silver for making tableware and copper for the artillery) so Catherine chose a modern way and started printing the paper money. But a number of people who had at least some idea on the subject beyond a “night-table” paradigm [2] started warning her that the more money you are printing, the less they worth. The most irritating thing was that even her own son had been blabbing something to this effect. Did this mean that he is more intelligent than herself? Anyway, she decided to proceed with a moderation. The third was was to borrow and actually she was borrowing the small amounts from the Swiss bankers but “you are borrowing other people money and returning yours” and after all she came not from the Versailles but from an impoverished minor German princely family with no proper background in “behaving as the princes” [3]. So these sums were too small to make a difference. [4]
- Spend less. The idea definitely had merits but the question was “how?”. Well, a less responsible and more egotistical person would start with her own household (which, in this case included all state apparatus) but Catherine was officially declared “Mother of the country” so she started with taking care of her subjects who, by all accounts, were not frugal at all. This was nothing new, she was always considering care about well-being of her subjects as the top priority. She already issued decree ordering the state officials to be honest [5] and another degree forbidding high stakes card games so now it was a time to regulate the frugality. It did not her too much time to write a manifesto against excessive luxury. Of course, principle of defining what is and what is not “excessive” in each specific case had to be formulated but what in other European countries could be a problem, in the Russian Empire was a piece of cake: everybody's status within it was clearly defined by the Table of the Ranks.
Manifesto was printed in a form that later became the official tradition: the meaningless words were printed by the big letters and the meaningful part in a small font [6].
In its practical part the manifesto was regulating the carriages and numbers of horses permitted to each group within the Table and dress code for their lackeys. The local administrators were put in charge of the enforcement.
Intermission. This may look silly but it was not: the manifesto was once more underscoring the main principle of the Russian Empire: person’s place in it was defined (at least formally) not by ancestry or wealth but by his place on the service ladder. No matter how aristocratic or rich one was but if he was just a junior officer, he could use carriages and sledges with to horses while the people of the higher service ranks had been entitled to 4 or 6 (the top being entitled to 6 horses with two postilions). And if a noble did not have an officer rank or its civic equivalent, he was entitled to a single horse carriage with no adornments on a harness. The same for the livery.
With the well-being of her (noble) subjects being attended to, it would be reasonable for Catherine to start taking care about her household and administration.
At home. To give a general idea of the situation in the imperial household, here are some historical anecdotes:
”Walking through the garden, Empress [Catherine II] replaced that the lackeys carry peaches, pineapples and grapes from the palace on porcelain trays. In order not to meet them, Ekaterina turned to the side, telling others:
- I wish they would at least left to me the trays!”
“And another time, faced, so to speak, with these trays, she said to those who carried them:
- Well, you'll be in trouble if Torsukov [Hoff-Marshal] sees it!
- He's still sleeping, Mother Tsarina! - was their answer.”
On some occasions she even was helping the thieves to escape being caught. Tendency to play a good master extended to her never ordering to punish any of the servants or even to fire the incompetent ones: one of her cooks was very bad and when it was his turn to prepare the imperial dishes there was a “diet time” but he never was fired.
The basic principle of the court employees was to steal everything that could be defined as a petty theft (aka, not jewelry, pieces of furniture, certain pieces of a table service, etc.). There was a joke about a person who asked to find him any place at the palace staff explaining that even position of a care taker of Empress’ canary bird will provide food for him, his wife and his children. One of very few cases when Catherine did something was when she found in the palace documents that every day a poud (16 kilograms) of a hair powder was allocated for her. “Did something” meant that she let it be known that she is unhappy. Nobody was punished but the practice stopped. But role of a good master was too appealing to abandon it and Hoff-Master was doomed to play a bad cop or at least a scarecrow. The palaces, and especially their personnel, remained a big money-sucking black hole.
Which was rather funny because her personal life style was rather modest. The decor of her interior rooms in the Winter Palace was much more modest than the situation of the rooms of many nobles of that time. She usually woke up at seven o'clock in the morning and, without disturbing anyone, put on her own clothes, dressed and ignited the fireplace, in which they put firewood in the evening. After washing herself in a small bathroom and putting on a house dress the empress went to the office, where she was immediately served a cup of the strongest Levantine coffee and a plate of toasts. Slowly sipping coffee, Catherine studied the papers, wrote letters and in moments of rest fed her favorite dogs with toasts [7]. At nine o'clock she moved into the bedroom, which by that time was hastily put in order. There were two tables. Catherine was taking a seatbehind one of them and then the capital’s chief of police and state secretaries with the reports had been admitted one by one. When the state secretaries done with their reports, the rest of the persons to whom the reception was appointed had been invited. At twelve o'clock, the reception stopped, and her senior hairdresser Kozlov would come to the empress to comb her hair. Then Catherine went to the ceremonial dressing room, where everyone who reported on that day and some close friends were gathering for the morning greeting. Here she was putting on an official dress.
Before lunch, which was appointed at two o'clock, the empress studied again. Only the closest persons were invited to lunch on weekdays; it lasted no more than an hour. The empress was distinguished by her abstinence in food and drink: she never had breakfast or dinner, and at lunch she took small portions of three or four dishes; from wine she drank a glass of rhine wine or Hungarian.
At 6pm there were social meetings officially defined as small ( for the inner circle), medium (bigger number but still reasonably “inner”) and big ones (all high-ranking people, and foreign diplomats; opera, dances, supper) . Catherine had to maintain reputation of the imperial court as the most luxurious court in Europe. A mandatory feature of the entertainment was a card game. For the small and medium parties the empress had permanent partners but in the big ones she may invite somebody else as a token of her favor. With the high stakes games being forbidden, she and her partners had been using the “modest” ones, one imperial (gold coin of 10 rubles; for comparison, the annual poll tax was 70-80 kopeks).
In May, Catherine moved to Tsarskoye Selo, where she remained until late autumn. All court ceremonies and receptions were canceled here, reports and invitations were shortened. On a painting above Catherine is painted with one of her favorite Italian greyhounds, which in 1770, the English doctor Dimsdale (who introduced smallpox inoculation in Russia) presented her, Sir Tom Anderson (died in 1784) and Duches (died in 1782). These dogs became the ancestors of a large family. Tom Anderson lived for 16 years and left many descendants. Catherine loved her dogs very much and gave puppies - "young people", as she called them, to the Volkonsky, Naryshkin, Orlov families; two puppies were sent to Versailles. “At the head is the ancestor, Sir Tom Anderson, his wife, Duchess Anderson, their children: the young Duchess of Anderson, Mr. Anderson and Tom Thomson; this one settled in Moscow under the care of Prince Volkonsky, the Moscow Governor General. In addition to them, who have already won a position in the world, there are four or five young people who promise infinitely much: they are brought up in the best houses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as, for example, Prince Orlov, Mr. Naryshkins, at Prince Tyufyakin.”
Catherine's personal servants consisted of one chamber-frau, four chamber-medchen and five valets, two of which were with her person and two at the Hermitage. The duties of each were precisely defined; for example, one valet was in charge of the wardrobe and received an order from the Empress what exactly and on what day should be prepared for her; another supervised the inner rooms; the third, Catherine's favorite old Popov, was in charge of her office and "pantry", where precious things, brocades, velvets, matter, canvases, etc. were stored. It was his duty every Saturday to submit to her a statement of handouts made from the pantry during the week, not excluding even trifles, such as ribbons and ribbons, and the empress herself noted on the statements: "Write down in the expense". But the total staff of the imperial court amounted to over 3,000, including a personal of the palaces which she rarely visited but expenses on which had been billed on a “full scale”. Obviously, nothing could be saved there and nobody even tried seriously. Expenses of the court kept growing and if in 1730 they amounted to 360,000, now they were over 2,000,000 and kept growing. Income of the “cabinet” (an office serving the imperial family) had been formed by salt tax (a guaranteed million), gold and silver production in the state lands of Altai and Nerchinsk, fixed allocations from the Treasury, fixed allocations from the custom dues, yasak (furs) from the Siberian tribes and some smaller items like salary as a colonel of the Guards regiments.
But expenses also kept growing including, besides the mandatory items, pensions and various gifts of money and jewelry. The last category was important because it was a demonstrable sign of the sovereign’ personal benevolence and their cost varied in a wide range. For example, the most popular gift, a snuffbox, could cost anywhere between 150 and 6,000 rubles, gold watch with the diamonds - 150 - 3,000, female jewelry - 150 - 5,000, diamond rings - 200 - 4,000. And in the case of, God forbid, a war, the expenses grew to include the bejeweled and gold swords and various types of the non-standard military awards. To cut significantly on these expenses would hurt Catherine’s image as “gift-giving mother” and while she was not anymore “sitting” on the Guards’ bayonets, she still cared greatly about being surrounded by the happy faces.
Getting back to the subject, of course she found how to save money: when her son asked for 20,000 to cover his debts, he eventually got 5,000 and a valuable lecture on importance to be frugal. And as a birthday gift he got a cheap watch.
Administration was not much better: Catherine strongly believed in a force of the moral factors ignoring …er… historical realities of the Russian culture by which any official considered himself entitled to a piece of the state pie size and specifics of which depended on his position. As a result, the ongoing administrative reform, which moved most of the functionality and reporting down to the gubernia level, made the “historical practices” easier because the increased part of the collected taxes of all types had been now officially consumed on that level without going to the government.
Catherine’s usual approach was pretty much the same as with the thieving servants, try to appeal to what neither them nor the state officials typically did not have, the conscientiousness. Her predecessor in “Greatness”, Peter I, tried all methods of a persuasion, from delivering beating personally and all the way through knout, and rack to the gallows. Well, presumably the last item on the list was at least a temporary deterrent [8] but in general his pedagogical attempts failed. So, what chance Catherine had without these tools? An assumption that separation of powers within gubernia will solve the fiscal problems proved to be optimistic as well: representatives of each branch of the provincial government just had been “operating” each within his own sector. However, while her system of governing may sound a little bit naive, it was based upon the solid traditional Russian assumption that it does not make sense to replace one thief …oops… administrator with another because the new one will be stealing even more expecting that his tenure will be short.
The military and naval administration probably could introduce some money saving practices but the Military Collegium now did not have a President and its Vice-President, Saltykov, besides being incompetent in the military affairs, had a full time job administering the household of Cesarevich Paul and acting as intermediary between him and his mother so Catherine was looking for a suitable replacement.
In the Navy, Paul started to assert himself with the increasing authority and competence at the expense of his VP, Chernyshov but, besides being very (and sometimes annoyingly) honest himself, he was seemingly trying, with a competent help of the Vice-Admiral Greig, to introduce the style of a discipline and efficiency throughout the whole Russian Navy. Taking into an account that the new Black Sea fleet and the needed infrastructure had to be built almost from the scratch and that so far cooperation of the Admiralty with the regional naval commanders had been going smoothly, Catherine did not mind this burden being taken off her shoulders.
Fortunately, the newly-incorporated territories started adding income to the state coffers, replacement of the poll tax with the income tax for the merchants proved to be a good idea and the increasing exports also were providing growing surplus. Annual extraction of silver in Netchinsk region reached 629 pouds, metallurgical plants on Altai based mostly on Zmeinogorsk mine were producing over 1,000 pouds of silver annually and annual extraction of gold in Ural reached 2,000 pouds [9]. So, in an absence of some drastic expenses on a level of a major war [10] , what was passing for the Russian budget (officially, there still was none) was going to produce a steady and growing surplus even on the existing level of thievery and inefficiency.
Then there were relatively small (comparing to the total) but not negligible future savings by the Foreign Collegium. With the demise of Panin’s “System” the enormous amounts regularly spent on the bribes and subsidies came down to a pure minimum.
In Sweden an attempt to maintain the existing form of a government (absolutist Russian Empire fighting against the absolutist party in Sweden sounds rather strange) cost, within couple years, close to a million and ended up being a waste of money when King Gustav III in 1772 staged a coup and became an absolute monarch thus ending the Age of Liberty, which was quite costly for Russia without producing any visible benefits. The goal of the Russian policy, as per Panin, was to keep Sweden weak thus preventing its attack on Russia. The key element in this scenario were the French subsidies to Sweden because France was the Ottoman ally and, as a result, anti-Russian. But, being a theoretical construction, the “System” was not reacting to the changed geopolitical landscape: even before 1772 France run out of money and the end of the Ottoman war made the whole “stabbing at the back” scenario a mute point, anyway. Panin could keep pontificating but Catherine decided that, at least for a time being, maintaining friendly relations with a fellow absolute monarch is going to be cheaper than keep wasting huge some of money on now powerless opposition. She offered to sell Sweden a big amount of grain at the discount price, which was accepted with a gratitude, and relations had been patched. Anyway, with Denmark, after the land swap and removing the Queen from a political scene, being a firm Russian ally and Russian Empire having at its disposal a naval base in Kiel (and quite a few experienced local sailors willing to serve in the Russian navy) and Prussia as an ally as well, Sweden probably would not risk a military confrontation unless Gustav starts getting some mental problems.
The second money pit of the “System”, the PLC, became almost insignificantly cheap. Catherine kept giving small amounts of money to Stanislaw-August but the big expenses for promoting a now unimportant earlier agenda had been gone. In the newly acquired territories most of the lands which belonged to the active members of the Bar Confederacy had been confiscated and, after distribution of the awards, the rest had been turned into the state lands: being personally free, the state peasants had been paying a higher poll tax.
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[1] Leo the Deacon writes that in 945 the unhappy subjects captured Prince Igor and executed him by tying to the tops of bent trees and tore his body apart.
[2] The source of money is night-table, the source of electricity is a socket and of a gas is fueling station.
[3] Don’t remember which top family it was but when a son returned from a travel still in a possession of some money, the angry father told him: “I see that you did not learn how to behave as a prince” and threw the purse with the remaining money out of the window.
[4] Highly idealized picture. In OTL she was printing paper money and borrowing abroad as if there was no tomorrow saddling her successor with a devaluated paper currency and huge foreign debt.
[5] This decree was accompanied by the raise of the bureaucrats’ salaries in a somewhat idealistic expectation that this would remove a need foe stealing and taking bribes. Contrary to the expectations, this did not work out as expected. Personally, I can’ imagine why. Perhaps the part emphasizing the moral side of the issue contained words which the intended audience was not familiar with, like “honesty”.
[6] Unfortunately, I could not find the contemporary document. Below is the recent replica with the modern orthography but presumably in the same format.
[7] Not a very good food. I mean, for a dog.
[8] It can be argued that if those subjected to this educational method did not have a tendency to die in a process of being hanged, they would continue their practices. With an absence of the necessary data, this theory can’t be convincingly proved or disproved.
[9] I did not quite get how the whole system worked. These plants were on the lands which belonged to the imperial family. Gold, silver and part of copper had been going to the Mint to make coinage. Was all that coinage going to the “cabinet” to cover the court expenses (unlikely) or was there some kind of a more complicated arrangement? So far, I found nothing on that account. Anyway, until Nicholas I created Ministry of the Imperial Court with its own budget, a line between the sovereign’s own money and state money was somewhat murky.
[10] In OTL activities of Grigory Potemkin probably amounted to a very big war. “Probably” because he did not bother himself with a paper work. When auditing the 55 million rubles allocated to him for the army, he found very difficult to “justify” (with a very lenient attitude of the auditors) spending 41 million, and the report on the rest dragged on to infinity and were forgiven. And the expenses for ”civilizing” Novorossia, as I understand, never were audited. Grigory Orlov never was asked how exactly he spent 20 millions assigned to the Mediterranean expedition and he seemingly “appropriated” a big part of the trophies. Well, at least he was a bona fide war hero, which Potemkin was not.
