During her lifetime, the woman at the centre of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Masterpieces from the Hermitage exhibition was known for her scandalous personal reputation, but Catherine the Great was a formidable politician. Nowhere was this more evident than in her handling of religious questions.
Catherine’s policy of religious toleration was just one of the ways she engaged in social reform. She also brought the world of learning and the arts to the elites of Russia.
Particularly after she conquered the Crimea and the Caucuses, there were many Muslims in the border regions. These Muslim subjects’ natural religious loyalties lay with the Ottoman Empire—Russia’s imperial rival. In order to prevent sedition and retain strong defences, Catherine was obliged to establish herself as a protector of religious freedom.
Under her policy of religious toleration, which forbade the demolition of mosques and the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity, Muslims came to accept the empire as the ‘House of Islam’ (dar al Islam), allowing them to fulfil their religious obligations.
‘By the early 20th Century, the Muslim population of the Romanov Empire was larger than under the Ottoman sultan,’ notes Robert Crews, author of The Prophet and the Tsar.
Catherine’s policy of religious tolerance was not only a matter of expedience, but arose out of her genuine interest in the European Enlightenment.
‘She was especially drawn to German thinkers,’ says Crews, ‘who counselled rulers throughout Europe to imagine religion as a mechanism of social control, of social discipline. And in this Enlightenment universe they imagined that most religions had universal features that could be useful to states.’
While the monotheism of Islam, Christianity and Judaism was seen as a potential basis for a shared moral culture, Catherine also believed that the price for religious toleration was the loyalty of her subjects, something she formalised by convincing Muslim elites to introduce prayers for the Tsar into Friday prayers.
‘So the idea here,’ says Crews, ‘is that … that they owed her loyalty as a religious obligation. Because she allowed mosque construction and allowed clerics to function, she effectively gave Islam a legal standing for the first time in the Russian Empire, and for that she expected loyalty.’
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Despite being an enthusiastic reader of Enlightenment thinkers, Catherine was not always in agreement with their views. French philosopher Voltaire, whose library Catherine purchased for the Winter Palace, expressed characteristic anti-religious sentiments in correspondence with her, saying he hoped she would rid the world of the two scourges, the plague and Islam.
Her greatest critic, however, was closer to home and harder to ignore: the Russian Orthodox Church. After all, the Muscovite state had emerged victorious in the mid-16th century over its Muslim enemies, the so-called ‘Golden Horde’. The state celebrated the victory (which it believed was enabled by miraculous Christian icons), with the construction of St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square and by the demolition of mosques along the Volga River.
To the Muscovites, Catherine’s policy of tolerating Islam seemed like an act of betrayal.
Nonetheless, the Romanov dynasty, of which Catherine was a part, did draw on Church support and Christian symbols to re-enforce her authority. The Tsarina’s own Lutheran German background was quickly effaced and replaced with a new, officially-sanctioned Russian Orthodox identity sealed with a conversion and outward acts of piety.
Part of the success of the religious toleration policy was that it also functioned as a form of control and policing. The unorganised and ethnically diverse Muslim population, which owed loyalties to various imams and religious traditions, was brought under a hierarchical system that attempted to emulate Christian ecclesial practices.
In contrast to today, when religion is often seen as a divisive social issue, during the 300 years reign of the Romanovs religion was considered a vehicle of respect for order—which ultimately led up to the Tsar. Therefore, all subjects were required to belong to a confessional group and submit to its authority, even if their religion was held in suspicion, as Judaism and Islam sometimes were.
Catherine’s policy of religious toleration was just one of the ways she engaged in social reform. She also brought the world of learning and the arts to the elites of Russia. She amassed huge collections of paintings from the Renaissance, as well as the Flemish and British schools of art. She also purchased the libraries of both Voltaire and Denis Diderot. Overall it was an undertaking that might normally have taken hundreds of years, but Catherine accomplished it in 30.
With extravagant purchases that Voltaire deemed ‘wasteful’, but Diderot helped to facilitate, Catherine was personally responsible for the creation one of the greatest cultural icons in the world, the Hermitage Museum.
Ironically, the woman who wanted to bring the world’s riches to the Hermitage ‘retreat’ she built next to the 1000 room Winter Palace as a way of introducing her country’s elites to high culture, now plays host in spirit to masses of western visitors for whom these marvellous pieces of art and are fading reminders of a lost grand age.
Rather than the artefacts, however, perhaps it is the lessons to be learned from her policy of religious toleration, which grounded state authority in a mutual respect for religion, that is the most valuable inheritance for our age, a policy that allowed a regime to govern a potentially explosive situation with less violence and more co-operation than might have otherwise been the case.
Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at the NGV closes November 8.
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