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Catherine the Great - IV: Reforms, Rebellion, and Greatness - Extra History (Patreon)

Published:
2017-02-17 18:00:00
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

 Now that she ruled Russia, Catherine set out to reform it according to her grandest ideals. This proved...difficult. 

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Catherine the Great - IV: Reforms, Rebellion, and Greatness - Extra History

Catherine had great ambitions to reform Russia according to her own highest ideals, but she soon found that the reality of governance made those ideals difficult to achieve. She also found herself tangled in war, rebellion, and (scandalously) smallpox. Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon (--More below) Grab your Extra Credits gear at the store! http://bit.ly/ExtraStore Subscribe for new episodes every Saturday! http://bit.ly/SubToEC Play games with us on Extra Play! http://bit.ly/WatchEXP Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): http://bit.ly/ECTweet Follow us on Facebook: http://bit.ly/ECFBPage Get our list of recommended games on Steam: http://bit.ly/ECCurator ____________ ♪ Get the intro music here! http://bit.ly/1EQA5N7 *Music by Demetori: http://bit.ly/1AaJG4H ♪ Get the outro music here! http://bit.ly/23isQfx *Music by Sean and Dean Kiner: http://bit.ly/1WdBhnm

Comments

Martin Verran

At last, First Comment and Like!

Timothy McLean

So THAT'S why she's called "the Great"! I wonder what we'd call her if they went with that whole mother-of-the-fatherland thing. (Would that make her the grandmother of her people?) Catherine seems ahead of her time. I wonder what she'd have done if she was born today.

RMS Oceanic

History of Medicine Lesson: Inoculation is the practice of deliberate exposure to disease with the intent of getting it, surviving it and becoming immune, as most of the great plagues of human history can only affect you once. It differs from the later science of Vaccination, which is about introducing a neutralised strain of the disease to mimise risk. Have you heard of parents deliberately exposing their children to chickenpox? That is an attempt at inoculation. And smallpox was "inoculated" in the same way, hanging out near someone with the disease, sometimes even being deliberately scratched as seen in the video. The Doctor who inoculated Catherine, Thomas Dimsdale, took discharge from someone with mild symptoms and scratched her with it. It's kind of a crazy thing to do when you think about it, but it paid off. Had it not paid off, Catherine had arranged a relay station of fast horses so he could leave Russia quickly before he was set upon by an angry mob, and the operation was held in secret. The next big breakthrough would be in the 1790s when another doctor, Edward Jenner, collated other studies that showed farmhands who contracted Cowpox, a much milder but genetically similar relative to Smallpox, would never contract Smallpox, and experimented with inoculations using the much safer Cowpox rather than play Russian Roulette with Smallpox itself, and this was wildly successful. It's considered the first vaccine (the name taken from the Latin name for Cowpox, "Variolae Vaccinae") as it is exposing the patient to a weaker disease to protect them from a stronger one. Sidenote, there was opposition to vaccination for a whole host of reasons, ranging from not wanting to harm children to them being unnatural to suspicion of the science behind it, and there's a famous cartoon showing "victims" sprouting cows out of their bodies. The more things change.

Jim McGeehin

This protector of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire is a thing that existed throughout history. The Byzantine Empire had made a similar arrangement with the Fatimids earlier in history, and in exchange, the Caliph of the Fatimids was seen as the guardian of Muslims living within the Byzantine Empire. Coincidentally, I just wrote something about the religious aspects of the Crimean War as part of the next episode of my podcast, hopefully to be finished this week. Catherine the Great's rule was plagued with pretenders. These went from those claiming to be Peter III, which included the leader of a sect who practiced castration and mastectomy to cure the ills of human lust. This pretender claimed that he was both Peter III and Jesus. This one wasn't as large as Pugachev's rebellion, though it definitely was more lurid.

Farzad Mansouri

Just can't stop laughing at Catherine Dreed. LOL!

Michael Jebbett

Get your kids vaccinated. So sayeth Catherine the Great.

Tyler McMann

I loved the way you present history. It is really captivating and the references are very humorous.

Stephen

Ah, the good old near perpetual Russia/Poland conflict, if we keep going back to Eastern Europe, I'm sure we'll be seeing that again. Or before. Or both.

Stephen

Loving the way arm injections look in this art style, by the by :D

Martin Verran

2:32 So Catherine wanted Data, did she? Did she Travel Forwards in Time Seven Centuries to get it?

Joo-Hwan Jun

"If we ever..." ......... *squints eyes and smiles* "If we ever....." huh?.......

ExtraCredits
>>3971549

I mean, I love Data, so I know I would. Would try not to behead him in the process, though.

ExtraCredits
>>3970161

I did wonder how Lil was going to handle that. ;) I love that she just threw herself into it.

ExtraCredits
>>3969160

And she leads by example! She even let some of her own blood be used for future innoculations, because she knew that nobles would be willing to overcome their squick factor if it meant having some weird connection to the Empress.

ExtraCredits
>>3967541

I do find it kind of funny that they bestowed "the Great" on her before she'd really done anything; luckily she lived up to it. I will say though that one of the more interesting facets of Catherine's personality was that, while she in some way had and pursued high ideals, she could also be pretty darn dismissive of Enlightnment ideals that she feared would threaten her powerbase too much. We'll see that side of her come out more after the French Revolution...

Tempestfury

It's a shame you didn't go into more detail about the Peasent Rebellions... you need to cover both the glory and the faults of a ruler, and just like you said. Serfs were her greatest flaw.

Richard Fejdasz

The shy girl continues her descent into cartoonish super villainy. Also: why are the French in Blue in pre-Revolutionary France?

ExtraCredits
>>3976174

I think by the end of the series, we'll see a few more of Catherine's faults, but EH is always intended to be an introduction to a history rather than a comprehensive guide. We simply don't have time to cover every detail, and the Peasant Rebellions wound up getting the cut in favor of, say, the way she treated Poland.

ExtraCredits
>>3979522

Interesting that you think she's starting to become a super villain and the comment below you thinks we're not giving any attention to her faults at all. ;) As for the French, they did have blue uniforms prior to the Revolution, at least according to my research: <a href="http://www.histomin.com/linehis/hiscol/Historex%20Card%20862%20French%20Infantry%201750%20-%201760.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.histomin.com/linehis/hiscol/Historex%20Card%20862%20French%20Infantry%201750%20-%201760.jpg</a>

Alex Kyriacou

This video shows why Catherine was so interesting. She was very much a woman of the Enlightenment, but she was presiding over a very unenlightened system. Writing 'liberty, the soul of everything, without you all is dead' while ruling an empire where 90 % of the population were virtual slaves is something of a contradiction. Yet, Catherine, while being an absolute ruler, knew that her position depended on the loyalty of the nobles, whose fortunes depended on their serfs. She wasn't going to make the same mistake as her husband in alienating the people who kept her in power. For Catherine, human rights were nice, but they ended as soon as they threatened her power.

ExtraCredits
>>3982515

She had some pretty interesting conversations with Voltaire about how he got to live in the land of hypotheticals, where implementing these ideals was easy, but she had to live in the real world where the quirks and reservations of real people sometimes got in the way. Mind you, she was also totally using Voltaire to win herself good PR in Europe, so it did benefit her to say she shared his principles and justify her reasons for not always upholding them, but it's still fascinating to read her discussions about it.

Alex Kyriacou
>>3982515

She wasn't the only one to live uncomfortably with Enlightenment ideals and absolute power. When her grandson, Alexander I (who like her had also seized power in a coup, this time against his father) met Napoleon at Tilsit, he told Napoleon how he felt that monarchies were inherently irrational and inferior to elected republics... except in Russia, where the conditions made monarchy necessary. On the other hand Napoleon (who supposedly represented republican ideals) countered by defending the rights of Kings 'Who is fit to be elected? A Caesar, an Alexander comes along only once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance'.

SparkyDJM1

It's a shame you couldn't go into more detail, but I can already tell that the Lies Episode is going to be a good one :) Voltaire is an awesome character because he was talking to Catherine and Frederick as well as writing 2,000 books and pamphlets on civil liberties that we now take for granted. It's also interesting how difficult it was to implement Enlightenment ideas, especially since most of Russia couldn't read and even fewer could understand the theories. Maybe if she'd had more time and more people willing to spread the ideas, but then again the history and culture of Russia and the East has always been at least slightly different to Western Europe.

RMS Oceanic
>>3968034

Maybe if they hurry up and give us jetpacks Or large scale atmospheric carbon scrubbing, I'd be down with that

Richard Fejdasz
>>3979522

Maybe. The thing with drummers is that in many nations at this time is that they often wore colors to stand out, like the inverse of their unit's colors.

Richard Fejdasz
>>3979522

The super villainy line comes more from the whole coup, countless rebellions, lust as a major character trait and beating up on poor defenseless Poland. Of course that doesn't excuse the nasty lies that the French made up that seem to consist of all popular knowledge of Catherine.

Herkles
>>3979522

as for the Blue Uniforms it is complicated. They used blue uniforms for a while then at some point IIRC around the reign of the Sun King, they switched to white. Then later around the time of the revolution they switched back to blue.

Bill Lemmond

Good grief. Russia was a mess, and it still is. I feel sorry for them. They've gone from one control-freaking, unaccountable government to another. And it's all because the people in power don't see that they could have even more power, if they'd share the pie better. The pie would grow much faster, with freer people. But some people care more about having "more than" than they care about simply having more.