Catherine II - The Great

The following information is summarized from Vincent Cronin's book, Catherine - Empress of All the Russias, 1978, primarily chapter 14. (Check your local library.)

Catherine II (born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerber, Germany) ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796 after a torturous marriage to Peter III (son of Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I). Empress Elizabeth had bankrupted the Russian economy such that Catherine II inherited an annual operating deficit of 7 million rubles out of revenues totaling 28 million rubles.

These accomplishments represent the initial "renaissance" of Russia, affecting the population at large and the State peasants in particular. They do not include her many other later accomplishments dealing with the enhancements to the arts and literature, treaty and warfare accomplishments, and her promotion of Russia's position in the European theater of political affairs.

• to immediately increase Russia's wealth, she sent experts to outlying regions to study soil and propose suitable crops
• she made grants to landowners to learn the improved crop-rotation farming techniques being developed in England
• gave them grants to buy the agricultural machines that were beginning to be invented there
• arranged for silkworms to be cultivated
• encouraged the cultivation of bees for honey
• extended the Ukraine tobacco plantations and offered bounties for high yields

• commissioned a descriptive catalog of Russian plants
• encouraged the introduction of modern methods of breeding sheep and cattle
• promoted scientific horse-breeding

• founded the Free Economic Society where landowners could meet to exchange information and discuss common problems
• paid for the publication of technical essays in the Free Economic Society journal and the Academy of Science bulletins
• established a board to encourage immigration to farm the land; it placed ads in foreign papers to invite settlers and offered attractive terms (free lodging; seed, livestock, ploughs; exemption from taxes for 5, 10, or 30 years depending on skills)

• sent geologists to collect and assess ores from Russia's remote hinterland
• sent Samuel Bentham, engineer, to Siberia who recommended extracting ores by pulverizing machinery rather than gunpowder
• allowed merchants (not merely the gentry) to own and work the mines
• founded Russia's first School of Mines in St. Petersburg to promote these new mining techniques; it included a simulated underground mine with shafts and tunnels for realistic training conditions
• sent prospectors to find important silver deposits in the frontier of Mongolia, 3000 miles away
• increased mining revenues from all varieties of metal by 50 percent to 13 million rubles annually

• encouraged the existing fur trade, mainly in Siberia, and promoted hunting expeditions to the newly-discovered Aleutian Islands
• eliminated the senatorial system of tight monopolies and trade controls
• decreed that anyone could start a manufactory (outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg -- due to their special problems/needs)
• decreed that anyone could set up a loom and weave for profit
• facilitated the growth of large textile businesses by state peasants in a variety of cottage industries -- linen, pottery, leather goods, furniture

• called on expert help from abroad to help promote more sophisticated enterprises -- for example, English admirals to help build warships and dockyards
• sent workmen from the Tula steelworks in Russia to England to study the latest methods of making barometers, thermometers, mathematical instruments and spectacles
• developed manufactories for textiles in the Moscow region; for linen in the Yaraslavl region; for leather, tallow, and candles along the Central Volga
• during her reign, increased the number of manufactories from 984 to 3,161
• brought in German, Austrian, and French craftsmen to improve the imperial porcelain works
• enlarged and improved the output of the imperial tapestry works

• abolished export duties in all foreign trade
• ended the special commercial privileges that English merchants had been granted which meant they had control over two-thirds of Russia's foreign trade
• signed a series of open trade treaties with Spain, Portugal, Denmark, the two Sicilies, and France
• increased foreign trade from an average of 13.8 million rubles in the 1760s to 43.2 million rubles in the early 1790s
• doubled Russia's favorable trade balance to 3.6 million rubles annually
• in response to China's seizure of the silver mine area of the Amur River district, she strengthened the army in Siberia, sent a special envoy to settle the dispute with the Treaty of Kyakhta (October 1768) which re-open major trade routes for Russia to China, Bengal, and Turkey
• Russia's exports to China rose from nothing to 1.8 million rubles in 1781 resulting in customs and excise revenues of 0.6 million rubles
• implemented tight cost controls and ended tax-farming
• tuned a budget deficit of 7 million rubles into a surplus of 5.5 million
• increased State revenue growth by 3 percent per annum

• found the division of Russia into 11 gubernii to be unwieldy -- divided up the largest and added 4 more governing districts to be more equally representative
• replaced the corruption-prone "military commander" of each unit with a "governor-general" reporting to a Little Russian Board
• brought to trial "military commanders" found guilty of bribery and running an illegal vodka distillery
• initiated the payment of fair and adequate salaries to all "governor-generals"
• issued orders in April 1764 to all "governor-generals" to rule in an enlightened and rational manner; to take an accurate census; to map their provinces and report on the people, their customs, agriculture and trade; to build and repair roads and bridges; to fight fires; and to ensure that orphanages and prisons were properly run
• doubled the number of provincial civil servants working for the provincial governments
• allocated nearly one-fourth of her total budget to support provincial government activities

• January to May 1977 -- wrote her Fundamental Law on the Administration of the Provinces, increasing the number of provincial administrative units from 15 to 42
• established a Board of Public Welfare in each province with an initial endowment of 15,000 rubles (to which local gentry added according to their means)
• the Board consisted of local representatives responsible for running the local schools and hospitals that she was having built and for the general administration of justice
• established a Commission on Building to draw up plans to rebuild the burned wooden town of Tver, plus any future towns -- a main street joined two big squares, one for administration and the other for shops and stalls; radiating side streets were built 71 feet wide to minimize the impact of a fire in any one area of the town

• created new towns as administrative centers for the 42 new administrative districts
• gave merchants priority in buying lots in the center of each new town
• promoted two-story brick or stone buildings in the center of town to reduce the risk of wood fire
• arranged for interest-free loans to cover the cost of new buildings
• exempted owners from taxes for 5 years
• promoted widely-spaced one-story stuccoed wood houses on stone foundations in the zone next to the center
• allowed wooden house built on straight streets in the outer zones
• restricted manufactories to the suburbs (including air- and water-polluting tanneries) away from residences
• between 1775 and 1783, she created a total of 216 new towns

• March 1764 - wrote A General Statute for the Education of the Youth of Both Sexes, stating that:
  • education is the responsibility of the State
  • education must begin at age 5 or 6
  • that it must consist not only of book-learning, but of character-training
  • it must provide for girls as well as boys
• converted a St. Petersburg convent into the Smolny Institute, a boarding-school for girls aged 5 or 6 to 18 years, modeled on Madame de Maintenon's Saint-Cyr's school
• established two "streams" of educational training - one for daughters of gentry to learn religion, Russian, foreign languages, arithmetic, geography, history, heraldry, the elements of law, drawing, music, knitting and sewing, dancing and society manners; the second for daughters of burghers, replacing foreign languages with domestic skills
• established a 5 member Educational Commission, staffed by Russian and English educational advisors, which recommended that every provincial town have a secondary school
• founded a Teacher's Training School on the Austrian model, importing and translating their textbooks.

• December 1786 -- wrote A Statute for Schools -- the first educational act covering all of Russia:
  • every district town would establish a minor school with two teachers
  • every provincial town would establish a major school with six teachers - teaching mathematics, physics, science, geography, history and religion
  • higher classes pupils going onto gymnasia and university would learn Latin and foreign languages
  • schools were free but attendance was not compulsory
• opened 25 major schools in 25 provinces; by 1792 every province except the Caucasus had a major school
• from 1781 to 1796 -- increased the number of State schools from 6 to 316; increased the number of teachers from 27 to 744; increased the enrollment from 474 boys and 12 girls to 16,200 boys and 1,121 girls
• after 1796, 22 percent of the pupils were middle class; 30 percent were State peasants
• while Russia lacked the teachers to staff prestigious universities, she considerably increase the number of grants for study abroad

• October 1768 -- had herself and her son inoculated against smallpox and promoted its adoption by the St. Petersburg gentry
• in Moscow and St. Petersburg, established Inoculation Hospitals and published a Russian-language booklet on the importance of inoculations
• 1763 -- founded Russia' first College of Medicine to train Russian doctors, surgeons and apothecaries to serve all the provinces; added the provision that the College submit plans to her for establishing hospitals in all the provinces
• 1778 -- the College published the first Pharmacopoeia Russica; 1789 - rules for apothecaries and midwives and a scale of charges for medical treatment
• 1775 -- decreed that each provincial capital must have a hospital, each county (20-30,000 inhabitants) must have a doctor, a surgeon, an assistant surgeon, and a student doctor; salaries were higher in remote provinces; State doctors were allowed to treat paying patients; attracted German doctors with an 800-ruble retirement pension

• founded a small model hospital in Moscow
• in 1783, founded a hospital in St. Petersburg exclusively for venereal disease patients; half of the 60 beds for men, half for women; registration was completely anonymous
• established a 5-story Foundling Home in Moscow which included a lying-in hospital, a church, and a dairy farm of 80 cows; took in 2,000 infants anonymously each year; this became the model for similar homes established in St. Petersburg, Tula, Kaluga, Yaraslavl, and Kazan.