Grand duchess Catherine and the catholic missionaries in southern Russia: the future empress in search of paths to power (the second half of the 1750s)

For the first time in Russian historiography the author analyzes the relations between Catherine II and Catholics at the start of her political biography as she was a Grand Duchess. The future empress’s contacts with Catholic circles are studied on the basis of unpublished documents of Russian and foreign origin collected by the Collegium of Foreign Affairs. Special attention is paid to the Catholic missionaries’ efforts to gain support from Grand Duchess Catherine for expanding missionary work in Southern Russia and neighbouring Caucasus. Catherine’s Catholic ties are seen in the political and diplomatic context, with Austrian diplomacy and the papacy involved. The author shows how the missionaries’ activities, largely due to the union between Russia and the Austrian monarchy, caused local religious conflicts, e.g. between the Catholics and Grigorian Armenians. It took the Russian central and local authorities a lot of efforts to settle them. The involvement of crowned members in religious policy was possible due to the presence of European Catholic environment in the capital and at the Court as well as in the Russian province, particularly, in the south of the country. The author concludes that Catherine’s ties with the Catholics had a permanent character. The closer ties between Catherine and the Catholics signaled her political independence and her search for foreign support before she took decisive steps in her struggle for power.