by Will Durant
I swear by Providence to stamp these words into my heart.46
She informed herself assiduously on every relevant subject, and wrote detailed instructions on a thousand topics from army training and industrial operations to the toilette of her court and the production of operas and plays. Said one of her earliest and least friendly biographers:
Ambition extinguished not in Catherine’s soul an ardent relish for pleasure. But she knew how to renounce pleasure, and to make the transition to employments the most serious, and application the most indefatigable to the affairs of government. She assisted at all the deliberations of the Council, read the dispatches of her ambassadors, and dictated, or indicated … the answers to be returned. She entrusted her ministers with only the details of business, and still kept her eye on the execution.47
The task of governing her vast area was made almost impossible by the number (ten thousand), diversity, contradictions, and chaos of existing laws. Hoping to play Justinian to Russia, and to consolidate her power, Catherine, on December 14, 1766, summoned to Moscow administrative agents and legal experts from every part of the empire, to undertake a thorough revision and codification of Russian law. In preparation for their coming she personally prepared a Nakaz , or Instructions , describing the principles upon which the new code should be formed. These reflected her reading of Montesquieu, Beccaria, Blackstone, and Voltaire. She began by declaring that Russia must be thought of as a European state, and should have a constitution based upon “European principles.” This did not, in her understanding, mean a “constitutional government” subordinating the sovereign to a legislature chosen by the people; the educational level of Russia would not permit even so limited an electoral franchise as existed in Britain. It meant a government in which the ruler, though ultimately the sole source of law, ruled in obedience to law. Catherine upheld the feudal system—i.e., the system of mutual loyalty and services between peasant and vassal, vassal and liege lord, lord and sovereign—as indispensable to economic, political, and military order in the Russia of 1766 (a land of communities almost isolated from one another, and from the center of government, by difficulties of communication and transport); but she urged that the rights of masters over their serfs should be defined and limited by law, that serfs should be allowed to own property, and that the trial and punishment of serfs should be transferred from the feudal lord to a public magistrate responsible to a provincial court responsible to the sovereign.48 All trial should be open, torture should not be used, capital punishment should be abolished in law as well as in fact. Religious worship should be free; “amongst so many different creeds the most injurious error would be intolerance.”49 The Nakaz , before being printed, was submitted by her to her advisers; they warned her that any sudden change from existing custom would plunge Russia into disorder; and she allowed them to modify her proposals, especially those for the gradual emancipation of the serfs.50
Even as so bowdlerized the Instructions , published in Holland in 1767, stirred the European intelligentsia to enthusiastic praise. The Empress sent a copy direct to Voltaire, who made his usual obeisance. “Madame, last night I received one of the guarantees of your immortality—your code in a German translation. Today I have begun to translate it into French. It will appear in Chinese, in every tongue; it will be a gospel for all mankind.”51 And he added in later letters: “Legislators have the first place in the temple of glory; conquerors come behind them.... I regard the Instructions as the finest monument of the century.”52 The French government forbade the sale of the Instructions in France.
The modified Nakaz was presented to the “Committee for Drafting a New Code,” which met on August 10, 1767. It was composed of 564 members elected by various groups: 161 from the nobility, 208 from the towns, 79 from the free peasantry, 54 from the Cossacks, 34 from non-Russian tribes (Christian or not), and 28 from the government. The clergy was not represented as a class, and the serfs were not represented at all. In some ways the Committee corresponded to the States-General that was to meet in Paris in 1789; and, as in that more famous assembly, the delegates brought to the government lists of grievances and proposals for reform from their constituents. These documents were transmitted to the Empress, and they offered her and her aides a valuable survey of the condition of the realm.
The Committee was empowered not to pass laws, but to advise the sovereign on the state and needs of each class or district, and to offer suggestions for legislation. The delegates were guaranteed freedom of speech and inviolability of person. Some of them proposed the emancipation of all serfs, some asked that the right to own serfs be more widely extended. In December, 1767, the Committee recessed; in February, 1768, it moved to St. Petersburg; altogether it held 203 sessions; on December 18, 1768, it was adjourned sine die because the outbreak of war with Turkey called many delegates to the front. The task of drafting proposed legislation was deputed to subcommittees, some of which continued to meet till 1775; but no code of laws was formulated. Catherine was not altogether displeased with this inconclusive result. “The Committee,” she said, “. . . has given me light and knowledge for all the Empire. I know now what is necessary, and with what I should occupy myself. It has elaborated all parts of the law, and has distributed the affairs under heads. I should have done more had it not been for the war with Turkey, but a unity hitherto unknown in the principles and methods of discussion has been introduced.”53 Meanwhile she had shown the nobles on how broad a base her power rested. The Committee, before adjourning, proposed to confer upon her the appellation “Great”; she refused, but consented to be called “Mother of the Country.”
Two of Catherine’s recommendations became law: the abolition of torture and the establishment of religious toleration. This was widely extended: it allowed the Roman Catholic Church to compete with the Greek Orthodox; it protected the Jesuits even after the dissolution of their order by Pope Clement XIV (1773); it permitted the Volga Tatars to rebuild their mosques. Catherine admitted the Jews into Russia, but she subjected them to special taxes, and (possibly for their safety) confined them to specific areas. She left the Raskolniki—religious dissenters—free to practice their rites unhindered; “we have indeed,” she wrote to Voltaire, “fanatics who, as they are no longer persecuted by others, burn themselves; but if those of other countries did the same, no great harm would result.”54
The philosophes were especially pleased by Catherine’s subordination of the Russian Church to the state. Some of them complained that she still attended religious services (so did Voltaire); the older of them recognized that her attendance was indispensable to retaining the allegiance of the people. By a decree of February 26, 1764, she turned into state property all the lands of the Church. The salaries of the Orthodox clergy were henceforth paid by the state—so ensuring their support of the government. Many monasteries and nunneries were closed; those that remained were forbidden to accept more than a prescribed number of novices, and the legal age for taking vows was raised. The surplus revenues from ecclesiastical institutions were applied to the foundation of schools, asylums, and hospitals.55
Both the clergy and the nobility opposed the extension of popular education, fearing that the spread of knowledge among the masses would lead to heresy, unbelief, and factionalism, and would imperil social order. Here, as elsewhere, Catherine began with liberal aspirations. She appealed to Grimm:
Listen a moment, my philosophical friends: you would be charming, adorable, if you would have the charity to map out a plan for young people, from ABC to university.... I, who have not studied and lived in Paris, have neither knowledge nor insight in the matter.... I am very much concerned about an idea for a university and its management, a gymnasium [secondary school] and an elementary school. … Until you accede to my request I shall hunt through the Encyclopédie. Oh, I shall be certain to draw out what I want!56
Meanwhile she was moved by the pedagogical enthusiasm of Ivan Betsky, who had traveled in Sweden, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Fra
nce, had frequented the salon of Mme. Geoffrin, had studied the Encyclopédie , and had met Rousseau. In 1763 she organized at Moscow a school for foundlings, which by 1796 had graduated forty thousand students; in 1764 a school for boys was opened in St. Petersburg, and in 1765 a school for girls; in 1764 the Smolny Monastery was transformed into the Smolny Institute for girls of the nobility—an echo of Mme. de Maintenon’s St.-Cyr; Catherine was the first Russian ruler to do anything for the education of women. Baffled by the dearth of qualified teachers, she sent Russian students to study pedagogy in England, Germany, Austria, and Italy. A teachers’ college was founded in 1786.
She admired Joseph II’s reforms of education in Austria, and asked him to lend her someone familiar with his procedure. He sent her Theodor Yankovich, who drew up for her a plan which she promulgated as a “Statute of Popular Schools” (August 5, 1786). An elementary school was established in the chief town of each county, and a high school in each of the principal cities of twenty-six provinces. These schools were open to all children of any class; corporal punishment was not allowed in them; teachers and textbooks were provided by the state. The project was largely frustrated by the reluctance of the parents to send their children to school rather than use them for labor at home. In the ten years between their foundation and Catherine’s death the “popular schools” grew slowly from forty to 316; the teachers from 136 to 744; the pupils from 4,398 to 17,341. In 1796 Russia was still far behind the West in public instruction.
Higher education was scantily provided by the University of Moscow, and by special academies. A School of Commerce was founded in 1772, an Academy of Mines in 1773. The old Academy of Sciences was enlarged and was provided with ample funds. In 1783, on urging by Princess Dashkova, and under her presidency, a Russian Academy was organized for the improvement of the language, the encouragement of literature, and the study of history; it issued translations, published periodicals, and compiled a dictionary which appeared in six installments between 1789 and 1799.
Appalled by the high death rate in Russia, and the primitive character of public sanitation and personal hygiene, Catherine brought in foreign physicians, established a College of Pharmacy at Moscow, and provided funds for the production of surgical instruments. She opened in Moscow three new hospitals, a foundling asylum, and an insane asylum, and in St. Petersburg three new hospitals, including a “Secret Hospital” for venereal diseases.57 In 1768 she introduced into Russia inoculation for smallpox, and quieted public fears by serving, aged forty, as the second Russian subject of the treatment; soon Catherine reported to Voltaire that “more people had been inoculated here in one month than in Vienna in a year.”58 (In 1772 Naples had its first inoculation, and in 1774 Louis XV, un inoculated, died of smallpox.)
V. THE ECONOMIST
One of Catherine’s basic measures (1765) provided for a survey of all Russian land. The operation met with much resistance from landlords; by the end of the reign it had covered twenty out of fifty provinces, but it was not completed till the middle of the nineteenth century. As it proceeded the Empress realized with discouraging clarity how the economy of Russia rested upon the organization of agriculture by a feudal system of lords and serfs. In 1766 she offered a prize of a thousand ducats for the best essay on the emancipation of the serfs. The winner was Béardé de l’Abbaye of Aix-la-Chapelle, who argued that “the whole universe demands of sovereigns that they should emancipate the peasants,” and predicted that agricultural production would be immensely increased by “making the farmers the owners of the land they cultivate.”59 The noble landowners, however, warned Catherine that unless the peasant was bound to the land and his landlord he would migrate to the towns or, more irresponsibly, from village to village, creating chaos, disrupting production, and interfering with the conscription of sturdy peasant sons for the army or the fleet.
The puzzled Czarina proceeded cautiously, for the nobles had the money and the arms to overthrow her, and in such an attempt they could rely upon the support of a clergy resenting the loss of their lands and their serfs. She feared the disorder that might come from a wholesale movement of liberated peasants to towns unprepared to house or feed or employ them. She made moves toward emancipation. She renewed the edict of Peter III forbidding the purchase of serfs for factory labor, and she required employers to pay their workers in cash and to maintain conditions of work as determined by the officials of the town or the mir;60 even so, the status of industrial serfs remained one of heartless and stupefying slavery. Catherine forbade serfdom in the towns that she founded,61 and, on their payment of a small fee, she freed the serfs on lands taken over from the Church.62 These improvements, however, were outweighed by her repeated grants of state lands to men who had served her well as generals, statesmen, or lovers; in this way over 800,000 free peasants became serfs. The proportion of serfs in the rural population rose from 52.4 per cent at the outset of the reign to 55.5 per cent at its close, and the number of serfs rose from 7,600,000 to 20,000,000.63 By her “Letters of Grace to the Nobility” (1785) Catherine completed her surrender to the nobles: she reaffirmed their exemption from the poll tax, corporal punishment, and military service, and their right to be tried only by their peers, to mine their lands, to own industrial enterprises, and to travel abroad at will. She forbade the landlords to be tyrannical or cruel, but she nullified this prohibition by forbidding the serfs to send her their complaints.
The peasants, so silenced, resorted to flight, rebellion, or assassination. Between 1760 and 1769 thirty landlords were killed by their peasants; between 1762 and 1773 there were forty peasant revolts.64 These were quickly suppressed until a rebel leader arose who knew how to turn resentment into organization, and peasant arms into victories. Emelyan Pugachev was a Don Cossack who had fought in Russian ranks against the Prussians and the Turks. He asked for discharge, was refused, deserted, was captured, deserted again, and accepted the life of an outlaw. In November, 1772, encouraged by discontented monks, he proclaimed that he was Peter III, who had miraculously survived all attempts to kill him. He attracted peasants and brigands to his standard, until he felt strong enough to declare open rebellion against the usurper Catherine (September, 1773). Cossacks of the Urals, the Volga, and the Don; thousands of men who had been condemned to force-labor in the mines and smelters of the Urals; hundreds of Old Believers eager to overthrow the Orthodox Church; local Tatar, Kirghiz, and Bashkir tribes who had not forgiven Elizabeth’s dragooning of them into Christianity; serfs who had fled from their masters, and prisoners who had escaped from jail: these flocked to Pugachev’s standard, until he had twenty thousand men under his command. They moved triumphantly from town to town, defeated the forces sent against them by local governors, captured important cities like Kazan and Saratov; they conscripted supplies, killed landlords, forced reluctant peasants to join them, and marched up the Volga basin toward Moscow. Pugachev announced that there he would place not himself but Grand Duke Paul on the throne. But—probably with grim humor—he called his peasant wife queen, and named his chief lieutenants after Catherine’s: Count Orlov, Count Panin, Count Vorontsov.
Catherine at first made fun of “le marquis Pugachev,” but when she learned that the rebels had taken Kazan, she sent a substantial force under General Piotr Ivanovich Panin to suppress the rebellion. The nobles, seeing the whole feudal structure endangered, came to her aid; soon General Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov joined Panin with cavalry freed by peace with the Turks; the insurgents were thrown into disorder by their encounter with disciplined troops under imperial officers; they retreated from one position to another, exhausted their provisions, and began to starve. Some of their leaders, hoping to earn bread and pardon, made Pugachev their prisoner and delivered him to the victors. He was brought to Moscow in an iron cage, was tried in the Kremlin, was beheaded and then quartered, and his head was exhibited on a pole in four sections of the city, pour décourager les autres . Five of his captains were executed, others were knouted this side of death, and we
re sent to Siberia. One result of the revolt was to strengthen the alliance of the Empress with the nobility.
In some measure she challenged the nobility by favoring the growth of a business class. Convinced by the arguments of the physiocrats, she established free trade in agricultural products (1762), later in everything; she put an end (1775) to government-sanctioned monopolies by ruling that any man should be free to undertake and operate an industrial enterprise. The growth of a middle class was retarded by the predominance of cottage and manorial industry, and the participation of nobles in industrial and commercial ventures. Factories multiplied from 984 to 3,161 during Catherine’s reign, but these were mostly small shops employing only a few workers. Urban population increased from 328,000 in 1724 to 1,300,000 in 1796—still less than four per cent of the population.65
The busy Empress, with only grudging support from her noble entourage, did what she could to promote commerce. Roads were terrible, but rivers were many, and canals bound them into a beneficent web. Under Catherine a canal was begun between the Volga and the Neva to join the Baltic with the Caspian Sea, and she planned another to join the Caspian and Black Seas.66 By negotiation or by war she secured the unhindered passage of Russian commerce into the Black Sea and thence into the Mediterranean. She prodded her diplomats to arrange trade treaties with England (1766), Poland (1775), Denmark (1782), Turkey (1783), Austria (1785), and France (1787). Foreign commerce grew from 21,000,000 rubles in 1762 to 96,000,-000 in 1796.67
In such figures we must allow for the currency inflation with which governments pay for their wars. To finance her campaigns against Turkey Catherine borrowed, at home and abroad, 130,000,000 rubles; she issued paper money far beyond any gold collateral; during her reign the ruble lost thirty-two per cent of its value. In the same period, despite a rise of revenues from 17,000,000 to 78,000,000 rubles, the national debt rose to 215,000,-ooo.68 Most of this was due to the wars that broke the power of Turkey, and carried the borders of Russia to the Black Sea.