With the war in Europe settled and the Church
finally under her control,
Catherine could at last focus on her great project:
The Law.
In her spare time, while not getting distracted by things like
getting an ex-lover elected the puppet king of Poland
or corresponding with Voltaire,
Catherine focused on writing the Nakaz,
a massive set of guidelines
for how to rewrite the laws of the land.
These weren't laws, mind you, but rather guidelines on how to make laws,
because Catherine had a novel idea:
she would bring together representatives of her people
and ask them what problems they faced
that needed fixing before she actually went about making new laws.
And so she assembled representatives
from every free class,
region and religion in her Empire,
to come together and discuss what laws needed to be made.
And in some ways this was incredibly inclusive.
She had representatives who were Cossacks,
representatives who were Muslims,
even representatives who were Buddhists.
But there was one group that was left out.
That whole "free" part in free class
meant that there would be no serfs.
After all, the serfs' owners could look after their interests,
right?
But no serfs meant that nine tenths of the Empire went unrepresented.
And as for the representatives of the one tenth who did show up for her great assembly on laws,
they were utterly unprepared for it.
There really hadn't been much involvement in government in Russia up to this point.
And truth be told,
many of the people involved
held at least some suspicion that this was a trick, or some sort of loyalty test.
For the first of many meetings,
they debated what honorific to award Catherine.
If you are wondering,
"the Great" just narrowly beat out
"All Wise Mother of the Fatherland."
Catherine found this infuriating.
Did they not understand that she had called them here to help her figure out what laws to make?
Not to just give her titles?
Well, no.
In fact a fair number of them couldn't even read the guidelines she gave them.
And even fewer really understood the heavy enlightenment philosophy
which formed the basis of the Nakaz.
Which meant that getting anything useful from them would like pulling teeth.
The merchants wanted the rights of nobles.
The nobles wanted to be able to engage in commerce as merchants.
And the peasants mostly gave very specific complaints about how that jerk Boris from the next village over
keeps letting his cows trample my fence.
Can we make a law about that?
Catherine was an autocrat at heart.
She believed in absolutism,
but she wanted data.
She felt that an autocrat should rule with knowledge and understanding.
But knowledge and understanding were in short supply in these meetings.
Finally, after much frustration,
the whole affair was called off.
Foreign events had become more pressing.
Remember when I mentioned that Catherine had put a puppet on the Polish throne?
Well, she had been having that puppet do things that were more and more clearly
against the best interest of the Poles.
The Polish people finally rebelled,
and the Russian army was sent in to put the rebellion down.
But in doing so,
a Russian regiment chased fleeing Polish insurgents
into Ottoman territory.
The French had been leaning on the Ottomans to get into the Polish conflict for some time.
And this seemed like just the excuse.
So, the Ottomans locked up the Russian ambassador
and went to war.
This turned out to be a poor decision on the Ottoman's part.
Once seen as near equals, the Russians belied expectations
and delivered the Ottomans a series of crushing defeats.
On land, the Russian forces, led in small part by one Grigory Potemkin,
seemed invincible.
And that sea, where the Turks thought themselves to be unopposed
because the Russians had no port on the Black Sea,
The Russians conceived of a bold plan to take the Baltic Fleet,
sail it all the way around Europe and surprise the Ottoman fleet from the rear.
The plan worked.
The Ottoman navy suffered massive losses at little cost to the Russians.
But the Russians didn't get quite as much from the war as might first have been supposed.
Partly because of pressure from other foreign entities who didn't want to upset the balance of power too greatly,
and partly because something curious was happening back home in the Eurals.
But first we must talk of the treaty that ended the war.
The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca.
It gave the Russians a fair swath of territory,
but most importantly,
it gave Russia ports on the Black Sea.
Which had been one of their strategic goals for a very long time.
It also provided war reparations
which helped with the ongoing problem of Russia being kind of broke.
Lastly, it made Russia the protector of Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire.
Something that will absolutely come up if we ever cover the Crimean War.
Alright so, with the war against the Ottomans thus concluded,
Catherine can turn to another niggling issue: the fact that half of her country was up in arms.
At first it seems like a small revolt. A little nothing out in the boonies.
But then when Catherine sent a force to pacify it, that force was defeated.
So she sent another force out to pacify it, and the commander lost his head. Literally.
This was getting to be a problem. In fact it was a huge problem.
One that would require the help of some of those troops that had been tied up fighting the Ottomans to solve.
Because what had started out as a small group of discontented Cossacks
had grown into the largest peasant rebellion Russia had ever seen.
The horrible conditions of serfdom, the increase in tax collectors and government officials messing with Kasich affairs,
and discontent of the Old Believers with the orthodox hierarchy,
meant that these groups have become dry tinder just waiting for a lit match.
And a man named Pugachev had fanned that discontent into a firestorm.
Pugachev claimed that he was Peter the Third, that he had escaped the attempt on his life,
and that his wife and the evil nobles had deposed him because he was about to sign into law a decree freeing all the serfs.
He was also offering freedom of religion, and a tax free return to the traditional way of life for the Cossacks.
To a lot of people, that sounded like a pretty good deal.
And for a year they held sway over vast parts of Russia,
often dealing savagely with any nobles unlucky enough to cross their path.
But at last, as the troops began to pour back from Ottoman lands,
Catherine sent out and overwhelming force to snuff out the rebellion.
But even as this fire was being put out, a much worse specter flared up: smallpox.
Smallpox was still the bane of Europe. No one was safe from it.
Noble or commoner. King or priest.
It had just burned through the Austrian royal family destroying their line of succession,
and here Catherine was, never having contracted it.
Perhaps worse still, here her son was, with whispers all around court of the uncertainty of his ever ascending the throne,
because he had not yet suffered and survived the disease.
Catherine herself said that she lived in fear of the disease every day.
Too many people she had known had been claimed by it.
So at last, student of the Enlightenment that she was, she took a bold step.
She summoned the doctor from Britain to inoculate her.
This science was fairly new at the time, and though the doctor she brought in was one of the experts in the field,
everyone thought her mad. Many were convinced that she would die. But she lived.
After a few small pustules and some aches, she was fit and forever inured against the disease.
Soon she had her son inoculated too, but she didn't just do this for herself.
She knew that her people were a wary suspicious people, especially when it came to disease.
She hoped that, by her example, she could convince others to get inoculated too, and it worked.
Soon much of the court followed her example.
In fact she had inoculation stations set up in most of the provinces.
And a large number of Russians benefited from this, one of the true wonders of modern medicine.
There would be other plagues during her tenure as Empress, some unthinkably terrible.
But this one great lingering fear, this one tragedy that once fell on almost every house,
this, she was able to do something about.
By the end of her reign, nearly two million Russians would be inoculated
But with the homefront quiet and her efforts on medicine and childcare taking root,
It was time again to look beyond the borders of Russia.
Or perhaps more accurately, to the borders of Russia and how they might be expanded.
Join us next time for changing alliances, brawling wars, and the partition of Poland.