Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  She accepted from Montesquieu a qualification of her advocacy of absolutism; this was embodied in her acceptance of the limitation of the supreme power of the Russian autocrat by certain “fundamental laws.” These “laws” were defined as traditions, habits, and institutions so deeply rooted in the history and life of a society that no monarch, however absolute, could or would act in opposition to them. They included respect for the permanence of the nation’s dominant religion, for the law of succession to the throne, and for the existing rights and privileges of dominant social groups, such as the nobility. Montesquieu defined such a state with such a ruler as a “moderate monarchy.” In this sense, Catherine was defining and presenting Russia as a moderate autocracy.

  Turning to the role of laws in regulating the lives and relationships of people, Catherine wrote: “The laws ought to be so framed as to secure the safety of every citizen as much as possible.… Political liberty does not consist in the notion that a man may do whatever he pleases; liberty is the right to do whatsoever the laws allow.… The equality of the citizens consists in that they should all be subject to the same laws.” In confronting the great issue of crime and punishment, she wholeheartedly accepted the views of Montesquieu and Beccaria, agreeing that “it is much better to prevent than to punish crimes.” She insisted that capital punishment be inflicted only in cases involving political murder, sedition, treason, or civil war. “Experience shows,” she wrote, “that the frequent use of severe punishment has never rendered a people better. The death of a criminal is a less effective means of restraining crimes than the permanent example of a man deprived of his liberty during the whole of his life to make amends for the injury he has done to the public.” Even sedition and treason were given narrow definitions. She distinguished between sacrilege and lèse-majesté. A sovereign may be said to rule by divine right, but he or she is not divine, and therefore it is neither sacrilege nor treason to commit a nonphysical offense against him. Words cannot be called criminal unless accompanied by deeds. Satirical writings in monarchies, even those relating to the monarch—and here she may have had in mind Voltaire’s struggles in France—should be regarded as misdemeanors, not crimes. Even here, care should be taken, because censorship can be “productive of nothing but ignorance and must cramp the rising efforts of genius and destroy the very will for writing.”

  She rejected torture, traditionally used in extracting confessions, obtaining evidence, and determining guilt in Russia. “The use of torture is contrary to sound judgment and common sense,” she declared. “Humanity itself cries out against it, and demands it to be utterly abolished.” She gave the example of Great Britain, which had prohibited torture “without any sensible inconveniences.” She was particularly incensed by the use of torture to force a confession:

  What right can give anyone authority to inflict torture upon a citizen when it is still unknown whether he is innocent or guilty? By law, every person is innocent until his crime is proved.… The accused party on the rack, while in the agonies of torture, is not master enough of himself to be able to declare the truth.… The sensation of pain may rise to such a height, that it will leave him no longer the liberty of producing any proper act of will, except what at that very instant he believes may release him from that pain. In such an extremity, even an innocent person will cry out, ‘Guilty!’ provided they cease to torture him.… Then the judges will be uncertain whether they have an innocent or a guilty person before them. The rack, therefore, is a sure method of condemning an innocent person whose constitution is weak, and of acquitting the guilty who depends upon his bodily strength.

  Catherine also condemned torture on purely humanitarian grounds. “All punishments by which the human body might be maimed are barbarism,” she wrote.

  Catherine wanted punishments tailored to fit the crimes, and the Nakaz provided detailed analysis of different categories of crime and the appropriate punishments. Crimes against property, she said, should be punished by deprivation of property, although she understood that those guilty of stealing property were most often people who had none. She insisted that due process govern legal and courtroom procedures. She demanded that attention be paid to the role of judges, the truth of evidence, and the quality of proof required in reaching verdicts.

  Some judges should be of the same rank of citizenship as the defendant; that is, his equals, so that he will not think himself fallen into the hands of people who will automatically decide against him. Judges should not have the right to interpret the law; only the sovereign, who makes the law, can do that. Judges must judge according to the letter of the law because this is the only way of ensuring that the same crime is judged the same way in all places at all times. If adherence to the law leads to injustice, the sovereign, as lawgiver, will issue new laws.

  Catherine’s attempt to address the problems of serfdom was the least successful part of the Nakaz. She began chapter 11, her effort to deal with serfdom, by saying that “a civil society requires a certain established order; there ought to be some to govern and some to obey.” In that context, she believed that even the humblest man had the right to be treated as a human being, but here her words collided with the general Russian belief that serfs were property. Even a hint of freeing the serfs met with protest, sometimes from people who prided themselves on their liberalism. Princess Dashkova was so convinced of the right of the nobility to own serfs that she attempted to persuade Denis Diderot of the necessity of serfdom in Russia. Catherine rejected this morally, even if she was politically powerless to change it. When Diderot was in St. Petersburg and criticized the squalor of the Russian peasant, the empress replied bitterly, “Why should they bother to be clean when their souls are not their own?”

  Catherine wrote the Nakaz in French; her secretary translated her manuscript into Russian and other languages. She worked in private until September 1766, when she began to show drafts, first to Orlov, then to Panin. Orlov’s opinion, predictably, was flattering. Panin was cautious; he saw in the Nakaz a threat to the whole political, economic, and social order. “These are axioms which will bring down walls,” he warned. He worried about the impact that ideas taken from Montesquieu and Beccaria might have on uneducated delegates to the Legislative Commission. He was especially concerned because direct taxation of peasants and army recruitment were based on the institution of serfdom; he feared that without these two essential requirements, the state would wither economically and militarily. Beyond that, he wondered how freed serfs would live, since they possessed no land. He asked where the state would find the money to compensate landowners for the serfs taken from them and for the land the serfs must farm to survive.

  Catherine did not dismiss Panin’s reaction. He was not a large landowner who had many serfs to lose; he had spent twelve years in Sweden and he generally favored reforms. She also found that he was far from alone in his opposition. On completing the original draft of the Nakaz early in 1767, she submitted it for review to members of the Senate. “Every part of it evoked division,” she said later. “I let them erase what they pleased and they struck out more than half of what I had written.” Next, she submitted the draft to certain educated noblemen; they removed half of the remaining articles. With these excisions, the Nakaz as finally published amounted to only one-quarter of the text that Catherine had labored two years to produce. This was the limit of absolute monarchy: even an autocrat could not override the views of those whose support she needed to remain in power.

  In the version of the Nakaz ultimately printed, Catherine’s frustration regarding serfdom is apparent in the way she uses language. She writes tentatively, almost apologetically, and then quickly backtracks, contradicts herself, and smothers her message. Thus, her effort to say that serfdom should be a temporary institution, that a ruler should avoid reducing people to slavery, and that the civil laws should guard against the abuse of slaves comes out as a disorganized torrent of jumbled words:

  Since the Law of Nature commands Us to labor to th
e utmost of Our power for the happiness of all people, We are obliged to render the situation of those who are subjected as easy as sound reason will allow.… And therefore, to avoid reducing the people to a state of slavery, unless urgent occasion indispensably obliges us to do it; in that case it ought to be done for no private interest, but for the public benefit. However, such occasions seldom or never occur. Of whatever kind subjugation may be, the civil laws should prevent the abuse of slavery, and guard against the dangers which may arise from it.

  Two articles that Catherine had copied from Montesquieu were omitted in the final published document. One declared that serfs should be allowed to accumulate sufficient property to buy their freedom; the other that servitude should be limited to six years. To these Catherine had added her own belief that once a serf had been freed, he should never be returned to serfdom. This was also omitted, and neither the Legislative Commission nor Russians ever heard, read, discussed, or acted on any these words.

  Catherine made no claim to originality of authorship. When sending a copy of the Nakaz to Frederick of Prussia, she wrote frankly, “You will see that, like the crow in the fable, I have decked myself out in peacock’s feathers; in this work merely the arrangement of the material and here and there a line or a word belong to me.” To d’Alembert, she admitted, “For the sake of my empire, I have robbed Montesquieu without mentioning him by name. If he sees my work from the next world, I hope he will pardon me this plagiarism for the good of twenty million people. He loved humanity too well to take offense. His book is my ‘prayer book.’ ”

  The Nakaz was written in the hope that an updated legal code would lead to a more politically advanced, more culturally sophisticated, and more efficiently productive Russia. This did not happen. However, Catherine addressed the Nakaz not only to the Legislative Commission she intended to summon but to the educated public at home and abroad. And when translations appeared outside Russia, even with all the deletions, inconsistencies, and flagrant textual borrowing, it was still a sufficiently impressive document to earn Catherine wide approval. Translations in German, English, and Latin appeared almost immediately. In December 1768 she sent a version to Ferney. Voltaire pretended to believe that the Nakaz was a complete, detailed code of laws and declared that neither Lycurgus nor Solon “would have been capable of its creation.” His exaggerated praise soared into absurdity when he called the Nakaz “the finest monument of the age which will bring you more glory than ten battles because it is conceived by your own genius and written by your own fair little hand.”

  The government of France thought otherwise. The monarchy viewed the document as so dangerous that by order of the king, publication in France was banned, and two thousand copies on their way from St. Petersburg to Paris were held at the frontier. Voltaire mocked French censors for banning the work, a compliment, he assured Catherine, that would guarantee its popularity. Diderot wrote, “Justice and humanity have guided the pen of Catherine II. She has reformed everything.” Frederick of Prussia called the Nakaz “a masculine, nervous performance worthy of a great man,” and made the empress a member of the Berlin Academy.

  The Nakaz was not, as Voltaire rhapsodized, a code of laws; rather, it was a collection of principles on which Catherine believed that good government and an orderly society should be based. In a letter to Frederick, she suggested that she was well aware of the discrepancy between the Russia of reality and the nation she hoped it might become: “I must warn Your Majesty that you will find different places in the document which will perhaps seem strange. I beg that you remember that I have often accommodated myself to the present, without closing the path to a more favorable future.”

  52

  “All Free Estates of the Realm”

  CATHERINE HAD WRITTEN the Nakaz as a preliminary to summoning an assembly that would assist in creating a new code of laws for the empire. Once the document was published, even in its severely truncated form, in December 1766, she initiated this second stage by issuing an imperial manifesto calling on “all free estates of the realm”—this meant all Russians except serfs—to select delegates to a legislative commission. During the spring of 1767, delegates were chosen, representing the many creeds, ranks, occupations, and social classes of the Russian empire. They included government officials, members of the nobility, townspeople, merchants, free peasants, and the inhabitants of outlying parts of the empire whose people were neither Christian nor racially Russian. Their task would be to inform the empress of the grievances, needs, and hopes of the people they represented, thereby providing her with material to use in drafting a new code of laws.

  The basic electoral criteria were geographic territory and class. The central government offices sent 29 delegates. All noblemen living in a particular district were to elect a single delegate for their district; this produced 142 noble delegates (among them three Orlov brothers, including Gregory and Alexis). All property owners in a town were to choose one deputy to represent their town, regardless of the size of the town’s population; the result was that the towns, with 209 delegates, had the largest representation in the assembly. The state peasants, working on state lands but legally free, sent one delegate for each province for a total of 56. The Cossacks of the Don, the Volga, the Yaik, and Siberia were to send whatever number of delegates their own chieftains determined; they sent 44. Another 54 delegates came from the non-Russian tribes, Christian, Muslim, and even Buddhist; they sent one delegate for each tribe. Serfs, the overwhelming majority of the Russian population, were considered property and were not represented; they and their interests were presumed to be represented by their owners. When the elections were over, the Legislative Commission was to be composed of 564 delegates.

  It was understood that the assembly would limit itself to providing information and advice, and that all final decisions would continue to be made by the empress. Catherine never intended that the Legislative Commission should discuss how Russia was governed. She had no wish to create a body that would limit the absolute power of the Russian autocrat, and she had made clear in the Nakaz that she considered absolutism the only form of government workable in Russia; nor was the Legislative Commission to be permitted to aspire to a permanent political role. There was to be no restriction on the expression of general political views, and any grievance, local or national, could be discussed, but the commission was to be purely advisory. As it happened, the delegates in the Legislative Commission showed no inclination to extend their authority. The status and supreme powers of the sovereign were understood and accepted.

  Most of the delegates were confused as to exactly what was wanted from them. Any previous demand involving participation in the central government had been regarded with suspicion by the nobility, who considered a summons to the capital for state duty a form of service to be evaded if possible. Catherine endeavored to reverse this perception and make the role of delegate attractive by attaching rewards and privileges to the work. All expenses were to be paid by the state treasury. Delegates were also to receive a salary, ranging from 400 rubles a year for noblemen and 122 rubles a year for town delegates to 37 rubles a year for free peasants. All delegates were to be exempted for life from capital punishment, torture, and corporal punishment, and their property was to be protected from confiscation. Delegates were to wear a special badge of office, which was to be returned to the state when they died. Nobles were entitled to incorporate this badge in their coats of arms so that their descendants would know that they had taken part in this historic work. “By this institution,” Catherine’s manifesto concluded, “we give to our people an example of our sincerity, of our great belief in them, and of our true maternal love.”

  Catherine announced that the new Legislative Committee would meet in Moscow and that she would open the proceedings in person. By summoning the assembly to the ancient capital, she hoped to prove to the city’s large, conservative population that she, her Nakaz, and the new legal code intended to serve Old Russia as well as the new.
Before the delegates gathered, she strengthened this message by announcing that she would make a voyage down the Volga, cruising through the heartland of Old Russia. Beside adding to her personal knowledge of her empire, she meant by showing herself among her people to impress observers at home and abroad. In fact, she was excited by this prospective journey. On March 26, 1767, she wrote to Voltaire, “Perhaps at the moment when you least expect it, you will receive a letter from some corner of Asia.”

  The voyage was on a grand scale. More than a thousand people accompanying her boarded a flotilla of large riverboats at Tver, on the upper Volga, on April 28, 1767. The voyagers stopped at Yarolslavl and then at Kostrama, where, in 1613, a delegation representing “all the classes and all the towns of Russia” had come to petition the first of the Romanov dynasty, sixteen-year-old Michael, to accept the Russian throne. From Kostrama, she and they moved down the river to Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, and Simbirsk. Catherine delighted in this method of travel. “There can be nothing more pleasant than voyaging as an entire house without fatigue,” she wrote to Nikita Panin.

  In Kazan, where she stayed for a week, Catherine found herself in a different world. Surrounded by ethnic and cultural diversity, she considered the applicability to Russia of the principles she had inscribed in the Nakaz. On May 29, she wrote to Voltaire:

  These laws, about which so much has been said, are … not yet enacted, and who can answer for their usefulness? It is posterity, and not we, who will have to decide. Consider, if you will, that they must be applied to Asia as well as Europe, and what difference of climate, people, customs, and even ideas! … There are in this city twenty different peoples who do not resemble each other at all. We have, nevertheless, to design a garment to fit them all. They can agree on general principles well enough, but what about the details?