The “Magnificent Age” - Catherine II TL
- Thread starter alexmilman
- Start date
15. “…from the ashes, grow the roses of success!”
15. “…from the ashes, grow the roses of success!”
“Each abysmal failure makes a point!” [1]
The ongoing situation in Poland, of which Panin was rather jealously in charge, was, rather predictably, moving from bad to worse. While Catherine was already ready to backpedal on the most touchy dissidents’ issue, which the Poles considered as a matter of a national survival, Panin still was for a full support of the Stanislaw’s unpopular reforms which he considered a key to pushing the dissidents issue down a collective throat of the Polish nobility. Of course, strictly objectively, practical effect of giving the equal rights to the Orthodox PLC subjects would be minimal because due to the decades of the active polonization an Orthodox nobility was pretty much extinct. The peasants did not count and the whole thing boiled down to few Orthodox bishops getting the seats in the Senate thus becoming equal to their Catholic counterparts. However, the very thought of the equality of these lowly creatures with the Catholic bishops was producing a national hysteria even without an assumption that they would constitute a powerful pro-Russian lobby. Such a lobby always existed, consisting of the bona fide good Catholics, and it did not even cost too much. But the logic or reason had been irrelevant and even the Russian partisans like “Familia” had been asking to drop the subject because it was killing everything else. But Panin knew better what should be done for everybody’s good and kept moving in a chosen direction with a slowness and determination of a self-respected glacier. Repnin’s warnings had been ignored but he did not get permission to apply military force either. The Russian troops remained in the PLC to no obvious purpose irritating everybody and generating a lot of guesses. Were they staying to protect the King and his reforms? Were they staying to prevent these reforms? Were they staying to protect the dissidents? Were they a part of a Russian plan to grab a piece of the PLC territory? The only thing that happened in this area was the troops slow relocation into the Duchy were supplies had been cheeper but wasn’t this also because there was a big number of the Orthodox people there?
Then, the crisis came. The Poles, with their usual wisdom and timing. raised the custom dues on the Prussian goods. Soon afterwards the news came that workers were gathered in Marienwerder by the Prussian government to erect fortifications on the bank of the Vistula and that they were carrying artillery there: they want to arrange a new customs here and force all passing Polish ships to pay ten percent of all their goods. By the interesting fit of logic King Stanislaw declared to Repnin, “It is obvious that he Prussian king is trying to quarrel me with Russia“, while Prussian Resident was complaining to Repnin that the Polish court, especially Chancellor of Lithuania, shows hostility to Prussia and getting closer to the court of Vienna. Repnin, caught between two “allies”, was assuring the Prussian resident that Poland was not looking for an alliance with the Vienna court at all, that all the suggestions about it were false, malicious attempt to quarrel with Poland with Prussia; and to Stanislav-August he was telling that it would be better to deal with the Prussian king, who would not make hard demands.
Meanwhile, the Marienwerder Customs has already begun its activities. One river bank was Prussian and the other was Polish; the Prussians by force pulled the ships that sailed off the Polish coast and forced them to pay the toll, even took the tenth log from the firewood. Repnin has never caught Stanislav-August in such a grief close to despair. With tears in his eyes, the king said: "If I were given the choice to give up the throne or tolerate the Marienwerder customs, which would keep the whole of Poland under the yoke, I would not hesitate to leave the throne; I now consider myself more unhappy than the last of my subjects…. The Prussian king will extract from his customs about 3,600,000 Prussian guilders, i.e. about 900,000 rubles, which is equal to income from the entire Brandenburg Prussia. I believe that all my hope is only for the mediation of the Empress.”
Panin’s reaction was “…The sovereigns no longer cause each other to fight: so is the need for the powerless to revere the strong more.” The problem was that by “respecting” the most powerful the king was expecting a protection against the less powerful and Catherine had neither realistic tool nor a desire to get into confrontation with Frederick. To make things worse, Stanislaw wrote a very hostile letter to Frederick. After reading the copy Catherine reacted: “I confess that I was frightened by the heat with which the first paragraph of this letter was written. It's, of course, full of intelligence, but not decent at all. Oh! How would you take me away if I wrote such a brilliant and harmful letter to my business.” Eventually, after a personal letter from Catherine, Frederick agreed to stop activities of the custom until the issue is settled but she was forced to waste her influence on the issues of no relevance to the Russian interests. The funny part in all that commotion was that, when the dust settled, the Prussian ambassador to Warsaw acknowledged that the new Polish custom system is actually beneficial for the Prussian merchants but he has to follow his king’s orders. To get his way, Frederick offered bribe to Stanislaw and ordered Solms to distribute some money in Russia but the issue was postponed until the next Sejm.
An extra problem was growing within PLC: the Czartoryski brothers, who used the funds supplied by Russia to increase their clientele, were getting more and more ambitious and started getting ideas of their own while still expecting the Russian subsidies.
In Sweden there was nothing to brag about either: Panin ordered not to make any moves in support of the constitutional party until situation becomes clear.
Negotiations with Britain also were not moving anywhere both because a proposed military alliance was against the British interests and because Panin’s style of procrastination was driving the Brits crazy.
A false premise upon which the whole Panin’s “system” had been built made that system a purely cabinet fantasy, of which Catherine was getting more and more aware. An assumption that Prussia would be putting the Polish interests above its own was just as laughable as an idea that Russia would respect the Saxon (one more member of the non-existent “system”) interests in the Courland case.
“Roses of success”. With the Polish affair looking as a very questionable international engagement and probably even a complete disaster, Catherine was eager to score a clear international success, preferably something that could be linked to the policies of Peter I, confirming her as a true successor of the Great One and thus adding at least some legitimacy to her rule. Such an opportunity was right there and the issue was just how to handle it properly. Peter I was, at the peak of his success, planning to turn the Baltic Sea into the Russian lake (which was a rather fanciful idea, all things considering). He failed miserably, thanks to the resistance of his Prussian and Danish allies and his own feeling of being an underdog, but the Mecklenburg and Holstein marriages were there and the Grand Duke Paul was a lucky heir of what was referenced as “Gottorp Question”. During the Great Northern War Denmark seized the territory of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp in Schleswig and ended Sweden's patronage of Holstein-Gottorp with the 1720 Treaty of Frederiksborg. In 1762 Duke of Holstein ascended the throne as Peter III of Russia.
With the resources of Russia now backing his claims, Peter III dispatched his Holsteinian minister Caspar von Saldern to the Danish court to demand the recovery of his former ducal territory in Schleswig, as well as the concession of the royal portion of Holstein, under threat of war.
The Danish government under Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff refused to relinquish Schleswig, and Russian and Danish troops came face to face in Mecklenburg; but, on 9 July 1762, before fighting began or any agreement could be reached, Peter was overthrown by his wife, who took control of Russia as Empress Catherine II. Catherine rather hastily withdrew the Russian troops from Pomerania but instructed her representative, von Saldern, to negotiate on behalf of the Duke of Holstein (Grand Duke Paul) a peaceful solution to the Schleswig-Holstein conflict with his Danish counterpart, Foreign Minister Andreas Peter Bernstorff.
Of course, removal of the troops from Pomerania was foolish because it deprived the Russian side of a powerful bargaining tool but, OTOH, recently signed Russian-Prussian military alliance fully compensated for it: it was obvious to both sides that Frederick II would be just happy to get involved and, whatever the Danish-Russian result of this process could be, a chance for Denmark to lose its Oldenburg possessions to Prussia would be quite high, either by a mediation process or by Russia-Prussia vs. Demark war, which the Old Fritz would be happy to trigger. So, neither side wanted his “help” and both sides were ready to be practical. The negotiations were conducted in Tsarskoe Selo and ended up with a treaty named after it [2]:
Color schema for post-agreement map on the right (courtesy of @Jürgen) :
Light orange shows Kingdom of Denmark
Dark Orange shows the Danish possesions in Germany
Purple is the Duchy of Schleswig
Light purple is the Duchy of Holstein
Light yellow is the Duchy of Plön (Oldenburg sideline)
Green is the County of Rantzau (sovereign county under a Holsteinian knightly house)
Holstein territory still included numerous estates of the Reichsritter’s and other small imperial entities, but this was not considered to be a major problem: with the duchy now being firmly linked to the Russian Imperial House, the old games of playing independence or being excessively vocal regarding the “imperial rights and liberties” and appealing to the imperial courts did not make too much sense on two accounts.
Administrator was easy to choose, Friedrich August von Oldenburg, a prince-bishop of Lubeck, brother of Adolf Fredrik, the King of Sweden and Catherine’s uncle (brother of her mother) was pretty much an ideal figure by the family connections and geography of his own territory. He was awarded Order of St. Andrew (on the portrait above) and put in charge for an unidentified period: it was up to Paul, when he becomes an adult, to reconfirm or replace him or up to Catherine to replace him at her whim.
Now, Catherine could brag a considerable success of her own (Panin was pretty much kept out being busy with other issues):
And there was a BIG problem related to a naval base. To make use of a naval base one has to have a functional navy and the Baltic Fleet, which had 24 ships of the line and 7 frigates, was in absolutely pathetic condition. Catherine was writing after the fleet’s review:
“The minute I raised the standard and the ships began to pass and salute, two of them were killed by the mistake of their captains, one of whom got the stern into the equipment of the other, and this is in the stack, maybe, of the tuaz from my yacht; a good hour they were tinkering to free their sides, which they finally succeeded, to the great damage of their masts and equipment. Then the admiral wanted them to line up; but no ship could do it, although the weather was excellent. Finally, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, we approached the shore to bomb the so-called city. One bomber boat was placed in front and when they wanted to put another one near it, they had a hard time to find one, because no one stayed in line. Until 9 p.m., they fired bombs and balls that did not hit the target. The admiral himself was extremely upset by such insignificance and admits that everything put up for review was bad. I have to confess that the ships looked like a fleet coming out of Holland every year to catch herring, not a military one."
Being a complete profane in the subject, Catherine made a wrong conclusion about “excess” of the ships: most of the available ships had been built badly and in a very bad condition so actually she had too few ships as well and building the new ships along the same lines was not a solution. One of the fundamental problems was an absence of the leadership. After rather messy period of Elizabeth I, Catherine restored organization of Admiralteistv-Collegium but starting from 1740 it did not have a chairman. In 1764 Catherine appointed a new one, who was also Admiral-General of the Russian Navy. The problem was that the appointee was only 10 years old (Grand Duke Paul) and by any stretch of imagination did not have a needed administrative or naval experience.
Which meant that an efficient Vice-Chairman was required and, by somewhat peculiar logic, Catherine made as her pick I.G.Chernyshov who so far was engaged mostly in diplomatic and, a little bit, military service and had nothing to do with the navy. His most important exercise in other areas was acquisition in 1757 the state-owned Copper smelters on the Ural. He built higher melting furnaces and significantly increased production. In the early 1760s, Chernyshev illegally seized about 500 thousand poods of copper ore harvested by private industrialists, which led to failures in ore supplies. By the time in question he was in a classic situation of the Elizabethan aristocrats who bought the state enterprises: run them into a nearly catastrophic condition, got in debt and was planning to sell them back to the state. What was moving Catherine is an enigma [3] and even a greater enigma is how he ended up being quite good in his position. Of course, it was physically impossible to fix all the problems overnight and even within few years but at least some visible progress was achieved.
Another important development was a review of the situation with the Russian Baltic ports with a resulting decision to stop wasting money on the failing (since the time of Peter I) attempt to build a port in Rågervik (Estonia) and instead concentrate on Kronstadt and Revel.
________
[1] Yes, it does. The point is that you are incompetent and, perhaps, an idiot.
[2] In OTL this happened in 1773 and CII forced Paul to cede territory to Denmark in exchange to County of Oldenburg and other hereditary Oldenburg lands in the Holy Roman Empire which he had to give to Friedrich August von Oldenburg.
[3] Well, not too much of enigma because his brother was favored by Catherine and made Vice-Chairman and then Chairman of the Military collegium.
“Every bursted bubble has a glory!
Each abysmal failure makes a point!
Every glowing path that goes astray,
Shows you how to find a better way.
So every time you stumble never grumble.
Next time you'll bumble even less!
For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!”
‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’
“He will die if he ever hurries.”
Catherine II about Panin
“Good nature, great vanity and extraordinary immobility.”
British Ambassador about Panin
“Don't let the Poles scare yourself; believe that without showing them your teeth, you can't achieve anything.”
von Solms to Panin
“We have an excess of ships and people, but we have neither a fleet nor sailors”
Catherine II, 1764
Each abysmal failure makes a point!
Every glowing path that goes astray,
Shows you how to find a better way.
So every time you stumble never grumble.
Next time you'll bumble even less!
For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!”
‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’
“He will die if he ever hurries.”
Catherine II about Panin
“Good nature, great vanity and extraordinary immobility.”
British Ambassador about Panin
“Don't let the Poles scare yourself; believe that without showing them your teeth, you can't achieve anything.”
von Solms to Panin
“We have an excess of ships and people, but we have neither a fleet nor sailors”
Catherine II, 1764
“Each abysmal failure makes a point!” [1]
The ongoing situation in Poland, of which Panin was rather jealously in charge, was, rather predictably, moving from bad to worse. While Catherine was already ready to backpedal on the most touchy dissidents’ issue, which the Poles considered as a matter of a national survival, Panin still was for a full support of the Stanislaw’s unpopular reforms which he considered a key to pushing the dissidents issue down a collective throat of the Polish nobility. Of course, strictly objectively, practical effect of giving the equal rights to the Orthodox PLC subjects would be minimal because due to the decades of the active polonization an Orthodox nobility was pretty much extinct. The peasants did not count and the whole thing boiled down to few Orthodox bishops getting the seats in the Senate thus becoming equal to their Catholic counterparts. However, the very thought of the equality of these lowly creatures with the Catholic bishops was producing a national hysteria even without an assumption that they would constitute a powerful pro-Russian lobby. Such a lobby always existed, consisting of the bona fide good Catholics, and it did not even cost too much. But the logic or reason had been irrelevant and even the Russian partisans like “Familia” had been asking to drop the subject because it was killing everything else. But Panin knew better what should be done for everybody’s good and kept moving in a chosen direction with a slowness and determination of a self-respected glacier. Repnin’s warnings had been ignored but he did not get permission to apply military force either. The Russian troops remained in the PLC to no obvious purpose irritating everybody and generating a lot of guesses. Were they staying to protect the King and his reforms? Were they staying to prevent these reforms? Were they staying to protect the dissidents? Were they a part of a Russian plan to grab a piece of the PLC territory? The only thing that happened in this area was the troops slow relocation into the Duchy were supplies had been cheeper but wasn’t this also because there was a big number of the Orthodox people there?
Then, the crisis came. The Poles, with their usual wisdom and timing. raised the custom dues on the Prussian goods. Soon afterwards the news came that workers were gathered in Marienwerder by the Prussian government to erect fortifications on the bank of the Vistula and that they were carrying artillery there: they want to arrange a new customs here and force all passing Polish ships to pay ten percent of all their goods. By the interesting fit of logic King Stanislaw declared to Repnin, “It is obvious that he Prussian king is trying to quarrel me with Russia“, while Prussian Resident was complaining to Repnin that the Polish court, especially Chancellor of Lithuania, shows hostility to Prussia and getting closer to the court of Vienna. Repnin, caught between two “allies”, was assuring the Prussian resident that Poland was not looking for an alliance with the Vienna court at all, that all the suggestions about it were false, malicious attempt to quarrel with Poland with Prussia; and to Stanislav-August he was telling that it would be better to deal with the Prussian king, who would not make hard demands.
Meanwhile, the Marienwerder Customs has already begun its activities. One river bank was Prussian and the other was Polish; the Prussians by force pulled the ships that sailed off the Polish coast and forced them to pay the toll, even took the tenth log from the firewood. Repnin has never caught Stanislav-August in such a grief close to despair. With tears in his eyes, the king said: "If I were given the choice to give up the throne or tolerate the Marienwerder customs, which would keep the whole of Poland under the yoke, I would not hesitate to leave the throne; I now consider myself more unhappy than the last of my subjects…. The Prussian king will extract from his customs about 3,600,000 Prussian guilders, i.e. about 900,000 rubles, which is equal to income from the entire Brandenburg Prussia. I believe that all my hope is only for the mediation of the Empress.”
Panin’s reaction was “…The sovereigns no longer cause each other to fight: so is the need for the powerless to revere the strong more.” The problem was that by “respecting” the most powerful the king was expecting a protection against the less powerful and Catherine had neither realistic tool nor a desire to get into confrontation with Frederick. To make things worse, Stanislaw wrote a very hostile letter to Frederick. After reading the copy Catherine reacted: “I confess that I was frightened by the heat with which the first paragraph of this letter was written. It's, of course, full of intelligence, but not decent at all. Oh! How would you take me away if I wrote such a brilliant and harmful letter to my business.” Eventually, after a personal letter from Catherine, Frederick agreed to stop activities of the custom until the issue is settled but she was forced to waste her influence on the issues of no relevance to the Russian interests. The funny part in all that commotion was that, when the dust settled, the Prussian ambassador to Warsaw acknowledged that the new Polish custom system is actually beneficial for the Prussian merchants but he has to follow his king’s orders. To get his way, Frederick offered bribe to Stanislaw and ordered Solms to distribute some money in Russia but the issue was postponed until the next Sejm.
An extra problem was growing within PLC: the Czartoryski brothers, who used the funds supplied by Russia to increase their clientele, were getting more and more ambitious and started getting ideas of their own while still expecting the Russian subsidies.
In Sweden there was nothing to brag about either: Panin ordered not to make any moves in support of the constitutional party until situation becomes clear.
Negotiations with Britain also were not moving anywhere both because a proposed military alliance was against the British interests and because Panin’s style of procrastination was driving the Brits crazy.
A false premise upon which the whole Panin’s “system” had been built made that system a purely cabinet fantasy, of which Catherine was getting more and more aware. An assumption that Prussia would be putting the Polish interests above its own was just as laughable as an idea that Russia would respect the Saxon (one more member of the non-existent “system”) interests in the Courland case.
“Roses of success”. With the Polish affair looking as a very questionable international engagement and probably even a complete disaster, Catherine was eager to score a clear international success, preferably something that could be linked to the policies of Peter I, confirming her as a true successor of the Great One and thus adding at least some legitimacy to her rule. Such an opportunity was right there and the issue was just how to handle it properly. Peter I was, at the peak of his success, planning to turn the Baltic Sea into the Russian lake (which was a rather fanciful idea, all things considering). He failed miserably, thanks to the resistance of his Prussian and Danish allies and his own feeling of being an underdog, but the Mecklenburg and Holstein marriages were there and the Grand Duke Paul was a lucky heir of what was referenced as “Gottorp Question”. During the Great Northern War Denmark seized the territory of the duke of Holstein-Gottorp in Schleswig and ended Sweden's patronage of Holstein-Gottorp with the 1720 Treaty of Frederiksborg. In 1762 Duke of Holstein ascended the throne as Peter III of Russia.
With the resources of Russia now backing his claims, Peter III dispatched his Holsteinian minister Caspar von Saldern to the Danish court to demand the recovery of his former ducal territory in Schleswig, as well as the concession of the royal portion of Holstein, under threat of war.
The Danish government under Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff refused to relinquish Schleswig, and Russian and Danish troops came face to face in Mecklenburg; but, on 9 July 1762, before fighting began or any agreement could be reached, Peter was overthrown by his wife, who took control of Russia as Empress Catherine II. Catherine rather hastily withdrew the Russian troops from Pomerania but instructed her representative, von Saldern, to negotiate on behalf of the Duke of Holstein (Grand Duke Paul) a peaceful solution to the Schleswig-Holstein conflict with his Danish counterpart, Foreign Minister Andreas Peter Bernstorff.
Of course, removal of the troops from Pomerania was foolish because it deprived the Russian side of a powerful bargaining tool but, OTOH, recently signed Russian-Prussian military alliance fully compensated for it: it was obvious to both sides that Frederick II would be just happy to get involved and, whatever the Danish-Russian result of this process could be, a chance for Denmark to lose its Oldenburg possessions to Prussia would be quite high, either by a mediation process or by Russia-Prussia vs. Demark war, which the Old Fritz would be happy to trigger. So, neither side wanted his “help” and both sides were ready to be practical. The negotiations were conducted in Tsarskoe Selo and ended up with a treaty named after it [2]:
- Disputed Duchy of Schleswig was split with its northern part (“Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Glückstadt”) remaining with Denmark while the Southern part (“the Duchy of Schleswig”) became fully independent from Denmark and was in a personal union with the Duchy of Holstein.
- The “fruit salad” of Holstein (the Danish territories, the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp, “jointly administered territories”, possessions of the imperial entities) had been sorted out with some exchanges as a result of which each side consolidated (within the “reasonable limits”) its possessions, loosing something and getting something but generally gaining in the terms of an easier management.
- Russia and Denmark signed an alliance treaty.
Color schema for post-agreement map on the right (courtesy of @Jürgen) :
Light orange shows Kingdom of Denmark
Dark Orange shows the Danish possesions in Germany
Purple is the Duchy of Schleswig
Light purple is the Duchy of Holstein
Light yellow is the Duchy of Plön (Oldenburg sideline)
Green is the County of Rantzau (sovereign county under a Holsteinian knightly house)
Holstein territory still included numerous estates of the Reichsritter’s and other small imperial entities, but this was not considered to be a major problem: with the duchy now being firmly linked to the Russian Imperial House, the old games of playing independence or being excessively vocal regarding the “imperial rights and liberties” and appealing to the imperial courts did not make too much sense on two accounts.
- First, the noisy ones would be deprived of a great market of the employment opportunities for their family members;
- Second, administration of the Duchy would feel itself pretty much free to ignore the fact that formally these entities were the direct subjects of the HRE because the Hapsburgs would be very, very, very reluctant to challenge the Russian Empire on behalf of an obscure Reichsritter and the Russian record with the dukes of Courland was not very encouraging for the lesser figures.
Administrator was easy to choose, Friedrich August von Oldenburg, a prince-bishop of Lubeck, brother of Adolf Fredrik, the King of Sweden and Catherine’s uncle (brother of her mother) was pretty much an ideal figure by the family connections and geography of his own territory. He was awarded Order of St. Andrew (on the portrait above) and put in charge for an unidentified period: it was up to Paul, when he becomes an adult, to reconfirm or replace him or up to Catherine to replace him at her whim.
Now, Catherine could brag a considerable success of her own (Panin was pretty much kept out being busy with other issues):
- There was a sizable pool of the people competent in various areas who, notwithstanding a sad fate of the Holstein regiment of Peter III, had been quite eager to serve in Russia;
- Russian Empire got, what Peter I failed to get, a secured naval base in Kiel.
- While under Peter III awarding Order of St. Anna to the Russian subjects was a rare occasion, now it became a common place. But, it being a Holsteinian award, Catherine could not award it so she was “recommending” recipients to the Duke (Paul) who had to sign the papers. Being herself (aka, incurable bitch) she quite often was “recommending” the people whom Paul personally disliked.
And there was a BIG problem related to a naval base. To make use of a naval base one has to have a functional navy and the Baltic Fleet, which had 24 ships of the line and 7 frigates, was in absolutely pathetic condition. Catherine was writing after the fleet’s review:
“The minute I raised the standard and the ships began to pass and salute, two of them were killed by the mistake of their captains, one of whom got the stern into the equipment of the other, and this is in the stack, maybe, of the tuaz from my yacht; a good hour they were tinkering to free their sides, which they finally succeeded, to the great damage of their masts and equipment. Then the admiral wanted them to line up; but no ship could do it, although the weather was excellent. Finally, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, we approached the shore to bomb the so-called city. One bomber boat was placed in front and when they wanted to put another one near it, they had a hard time to find one, because no one stayed in line. Until 9 p.m., they fired bombs and balls that did not hit the target. The admiral himself was extremely upset by such insignificance and admits that everything put up for review was bad. I have to confess that the ships looked like a fleet coming out of Holland every year to catch herring, not a military one."
Being a complete profane in the subject, Catherine made a wrong conclusion about “excess” of the ships: most of the available ships had been built badly and in a very bad condition so actually she had too few ships as well and building the new ships along the same lines was not a solution. One of the fundamental problems was an absence of the leadership. After rather messy period of Elizabeth I, Catherine restored organization of Admiralteistv-Collegium but starting from 1740 it did not have a chairman. In 1764 Catherine appointed a new one, who was also Admiral-General of the Russian Navy. The problem was that the appointee was only 10 years old (Grand Duke Paul) and by any stretch of imagination did not have a needed administrative or naval experience.
Which meant that an efficient Vice-Chairman was required and, by somewhat peculiar logic, Catherine made as her pick I.G.Chernyshov who so far was engaged mostly in diplomatic and, a little bit, military service and had nothing to do with the navy. His most important exercise in other areas was acquisition in 1757 the state-owned Copper smelters on the Ural. He built higher melting furnaces and significantly increased production. In the early 1760s, Chernyshev illegally seized about 500 thousand poods of copper ore harvested by private industrialists, which led to failures in ore supplies. By the time in question he was in a classic situation of the Elizabethan aristocrats who bought the state enterprises: run them into a nearly catastrophic condition, got in debt and was planning to sell them back to the state. What was moving Catherine is an enigma [3] and even a greater enigma is how he ended up being quite good in his position. Of course, it was physically impossible to fix all the problems overnight and even within few years but at least some visible progress was achieved.
Another important development was a review of the situation with the Russian Baltic ports with a resulting decision to stop wasting money on the failing (since the time of Peter I) attempt to build a port in Rågervik (Estonia) and instead concentrate on Kronstadt and Revel.
________
[1] Yes, it does. The point is that you are incompetent and, perhaps, an idiot.
[2] In OTL this happened in 1773 and CII forced Paul to cede territory to Denmark in exchange to County of Oldenburg and other hereditary Oldenburg lands in the Holy Roman Empire which he had to give to Friedrich August von Oldenburg.
[3] Well, not too much of enigma because his brother was favored by Catherine and made Vice-Chairman and then Chairman of the Military collegium.
Paul, even after he grew up, was scared sh—less of her. And she took a good care of not providing him with any degree of a popularity at and near the court and in the army. I’m still trying to figure out up to which degree this can be changed realistically.
Comparing to Genghis Khan being a fanatic Christian and converting China and Central Asia … 😂
I’m trying to keep insanity of TTL within a sanity realm so:
- There will be no Russian conquest of the universe or even India (this is Brazil’s problem).
- Catherine is not going to marry Marquis Pugachev: they had philosophic differences.
- Feijolada will not become the Russian national dish (AFAIK, there was shortage of beans in the Central Russia).
- Catherine is not going to get a Nobel Prize for discovery of electrolysis.
- Britain is NOT going underwater no matter how tempting is the idea: the nuclear weapons of a needed power were not available in the XVIII century.
- The females will be not be wearing pantaloons, pantalets, panties, g-strings, briefs, bikinis, thongs, etc. Sorry. If there is an intensive public pressure, I may introduce the Directorate fashions few decades ahead of the schedule. Not sure if there will be illustrative material or even the link to the, shall we say, “educational movies” relevant to the subject.
- However, it is possible that certain Corsican artillery officer will be admitted to the Russian service.
Jokes aside, Pugachev of all people becoming a favorite of CII would be quite ironic.
Yep. Within a proper framework there would be a non-zero chance (Elizabeth and Razumovski) but she seemingly had a higher social standard. OTOH, Pugachev was a Cossack officer…
Cossack officers, except for the top ranks, did not count for too much at that time and he was, in one document, mentioned as «хорунжий», the lowest officer rank more or less equal to cornet of the regular cavalry but, him not being a noble, treated as other cossacks, which means “like dirt”.
Anyway, he was not handsome enough to qualify for Catherine’s stable.
Of course. The Cossacks were not treated well and it seems that the peripheral ones, like those of Yaik, were seriously unhappy and needed just an excuse for the rebellion. Ditto for the Bashkirs.
India keep independence please, or at least my peoples?
so sad
So I say the we expand Frederick's Interests in people to the rest of society