Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  These laws about which people talk so much are, in the final analysis, not yet made. And who can answer for their benefits? In truth, it is posterity, and not us, who will have to decide that question. Imagine, I beg you, that they must serve for Asia as well as Europe, and what a difference in climate, peoples, customs, and even ideas! Here I am in Asia; I wanted to see it with my own eyes. There are twenty people of various kinds in this town, who in no way resemble one another. And yet we have to make a coat that will fit them all. It may well be possible to discover general principles, but the details? And what details! I might say that there is almost a whole world to be created, united, preserved. I may never finish it!56

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  Although Catherine’s original intention had been to sail all the way to Astrakhan, the Geographical Description allowed for a shorter cruise ending further north, at Dmitrevsk. In the event, to speed her return to Moscow, the empress travelled only as far as Simbirsk, almost 700 miles downstream from Tver and ‘one hour eleven minutes and twenty seconds ahead of St Petersburg time’.57 Here she stayed on an estate belonging to Ivan Orlov. The beauty of the Volga lands was breathtaking. ‘These people are spoiled by God,’ she wrote to Panin, whose brother Peter owned an estate not far away. ‘Everything you can imagine is here in plenty and I do not know what else they could need: everything is available and everything is cheap.’58 Having taken seven weeks to reach her destination, she raced back to Moscow in seven days, travelling by night and sleeping through the heat of the steppe, pausing only to change horses. Hundreds of subjects who lined the roadside to pay homage were passed by in a blur. When she reached the Golovin Palace at 7 p.m. on Thursday 14 June, she needed two days’ rest to recover from the journey.59

  Though the Court was immediately plunged into mourning—first for Prince Frederick of Prussia and then for Joseph II’s unhappy second wife, Josepha, who had fallen victim to smallpox in May—there was nothing gloomy about the empress’s mood.60 While Vasily Maikov celebrated her return with verses hymning the usefulness of her enlightened voyage, the deputies converged on Moscow in readiness for the opening of the Legislative Commission. Once Catherine had put the finishing touches to the protocols, she took the opportunity to relax.61 Although she had to review the cavalry on exercise in the Petrovsky woods and there were the usual festivities in honour of her accession day and Paul’s name day on 28 and 29 June, she preferred the less formal entertainments to be found on the various imperial estates dotted around the old capital. As soon as she returned from the Volga, she inspected her new apartments and stables at Kolomenskoye. ‘There is no need for any sort of rich decorations inside,’ she had insisted the previous December, after six months of close involvement with the plans. Though the project had been scheduled for completion by the Feast of St Peter at the end of June, she eventually moved in on 11 July, greeted at the gates by the local clergy in full fig.62 While waiting for Prince Makulov to finish the work, she found time to play on the new sledging pavilion at Pokrovskoye, to drive to the Sparrow Hills on the far side of the city, and to watch the fishing at Tsar Boris’s Ponds.63 She also inspected the stallions brought up from the provinces for the annual sale at the imperial stud farms at Khoroshevo and Pakhrino, where a huge quadrangular stable for 532 horses, under construction since 1752, had been completed in 1764.64 Perhaps she saw Gardi, a black stallion bred from Lombard stock in 1766, whose exceptionally luxuriant tail made him one of the most celebrated animals of the age.65

  Hunting was by far Catherine’s most frequent leisure activity. Between 18 June and 15 October, the court journal (by no means necessarily a complete record) registered some thirty-seven separate outings. The detailed breakdown—two grouse shoots, three hare chases and no fewer than thirty-two hawking expeditions—gives a good sense of her personal preferences, already reflected in institutional changes over the previous five years, which had seen the animal hunt cut back while the staff of the bird hunt rose from thirty-nine to forty-nine. As in St Petersburg, the preferred time for hawking was after lunch, at four or five in the afternoon, when Catherine liked to ride out in her carriage with her falconers alongside her to while away the journey.66 They also accompanied her as far as the palace at Bratovshchina on her pilgrimage to worship at the remains of St Sergii on his feast day, 5 August. For all her reservations about monasticism, the empress had always found at the Trinity lavra a scholarly atmosphere quite different from the obscurantism she encountered at the Fëdorov monastery, and it was a pleasure to return to the library she had so admired in 1762.67

  All this, however, was but a prelude to the ceremonial opening of the Legislative Commission on 30 July. Whereas her predecessors’ abortive commissions had been dry, bureaucratic affairs, hidden away in the chancelleries of St Petersburg, Catherine wanted hers to begin in a blaze of publicity. It was launched in the manner of a major Court occasion with a glittering carriage procession from the Golovin Palace to the Kremlin. The deputies assembled in the Monastery of Miracles before processing with the empress to a liturgy at the Dormition Cathedral at which those who belonged to other faiths remained outside. Afterwards, Catherine, wearing the small crown, stood before the throne in the audience hall of the old Kremlin palace (it does not survive today) with copies of her Instruction on the table beside her. In a notable departure from earlier Muscovite assemblies, only one clerical deputy had been elected. The ubiquitous Archbishop Dimitry, elected on behalf of the Synod, made a speech comparing the empress with Justinian. Replying on her behalf, the vice chancellor Prince Alexander Golitsyn (Alexander Stroganov’s friend from their student days in Geneva) stressed her hopes that the deputies would confer glory on themselves and their age by contributing to ‘the common good, the happiness of mankind, and the introduction of good manners and humanity, tranquillity, security and happiness to your dear fatherland’. Those who had already gathered in Moscow (some 460 out of the eventual total of 564) were permitted to kiss her hand.68

  On the following morning, the Commission began its formal proceedings in the Palace of Facets. Once Bibikov had duly been chosen as its marshal, the deputies listened to a public reading of her Instruction by Grigory Orlov. Though Catherine had compiled her treatise in French, each deputy was presented with a copy of the Russian translation by her secretary, Grigory Kozitsky, published simultaneously with a German version on 30 July. ‘There is not a foreign word in it,’ the empress boasted in a characteristic effort to advertise the richness and subtlety of her adopted language. ‘However, the subject matter is not of the simplest, and I hope that no one will mistake one word for another.’69 Fond of listening to her friends read to her (and conscious of the illiteracy of a good proportion of the Russian elite), Catherine had written her text to be read aloud, giving it ‘an urgent rhythm’ by imitating Montesquieu’s series of ‘short, staccato chapters’ in 526 laconic paragraphs of her own.70 Even so, it took a full five sessions of the Commission to hear it out, as Yelagin and Volkov succeeded Orlov on the reader’s podium.71

  Catherine was not an original thinker and the Instruction was not a systematic work. Yet there was nothing conventional about her treatise. It set out her vision of a tolerant, educated society in which her subjects’ liberty and property would be protected by unambiguous laws, established by a virtuous absolute sovereign and implemented by judges who were to presume the accused innocent until proved guilty. The widespread nineteenth-century belief that she had suggested that it was better to release ten guilty people than convict a single blameless man prompted Solzhenitsyn to quip that Stalin had reversed the empress’s maxim by preferring to incarcerate 999 innocents rather than miss a single genuine spy. Although there is no such passage in the Instruction—it was Diderot, in his critical commentary on the text, who declared that ‘for humanity’s sake, we should allow a crime to escape unpunished rather than put innocence to death’—the legend says much about the Instruction’s reputation as a repository of Enlightened thought.72 Never had such radical ideas been pu
blicly proclaimed by a Russian ruler.

  ‘Russia is a European State.’ Catherine began her first chapter with one of her few original contributions to her treatise, a cultural rather than a geographical claim, designed to challenge the prevailing view of her empire as a slough of oriental backwardness. The same motive underlay her implicit argument that Montesquieu had been wrong to classify Russia as a despotism ruled by fear, the only form of government he thought workable in a very large state and the ultimate insult in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century politics. Catherine instead presented Russia as an absolute monarchy in which the sole ruler voluntarily accepted the limitations imposed by fundamental laws. Historians have argued ever since about the plausibility of this claim, resorting to precisely the sort of semantic debates that the empress hoped to avoid. Her intention was almost certainly not to distort Montesquieu, but rather to adapt the ideas of a writer she admired to Russian circumstances about which he knew little. Even so, there were obvious difficulties with her position. Although contemporary thinkers disagreed about the nature of the fundamental laws by which they set such store, an inviolable law of succession was generally taken to be central. We know from an incomplete draft, written in her own hand and dating from after 1767, that Catherine eventually contemplated such a law. But since it was impossible to promulgate one without admitting that she had taken the throne by force, there was no mention of the subject at the time of the Legislative Commission.73

  Serfdom was another controversial question on which the final version of the Instruction said little. Prompted partly by her experiences with Pastor Eisen, Catherine had initially been prepared to contemplate ways of ‘creating new citizens’ (that is, reducing the number of serfs), for example by allowing serfs to accumulate sufficient property to purchase their freedom. But these radical proposals were swiftly dropped after she showed drafts of her treatise to her confidants. Panin famously declared that they were ‘maxims to bring down walls’. Catherine was particularly astonished to discover that even Alexander Stroganov—‘a gentle and very humane person’ who was ‘kind to the point of weakness’—defended ‘the cause of slavery with fury and passion’: ‘There were not twenty people at that time, who thought on that subject like human beings.’ In the circumstances, the best that could be done was to condemn the mass enserfment of free men and to restrict abuses by exhorting masters to treat their serfs with humanity. Meanwhile, Chapter 11 of the Instruction left the deputies in no doubt of the virtues of social stability: ‘There ought to be some to govern, and others to obey.’74

  The empress was on surer ground when she turned her practical mind to matters of crime and punishment. Since it was a besetting problem of Russian justice that not even the judges could be sure what the laws actually said, her Instruction identified clarity, precision and uniformity as the key requirements for future legislation. Only if laws were written in plain language and imposed with predictable regularity could her subjects have confidence in the courts. Deterrence was no less important: ‘By making the penal laws always clearly intelligible, word by word, every one may calculate truly, and know exactly the inconveniences of a bad action; a knowledge which is absolutely necessary for restraining people from committing it.’75 Judges were to execute rather than interpret the laws since to interpret a law was almost always to corrupt it and only the sovereign had the right to interpret laws which she had made. Nothing could be so dangerous as the idea that the spirit of the law was more important than the letter. That way, ‘we should see the same crimes punished differently, at different times, by the very same court of judicature.’ Torture was firmly declared ‘contrary to all the dictates of nature and reason; even mankind itself cries out against it’. Catherine was equally opposed to the death penalty: ‘The most certain curb upon crimes, is not the severity of the punishment, but the absolute conviction in the people, that delinquents will inevitably be punished.’ Even so, it was better to prevent crimes than to punish them, and that made education a clear priority: ‘Would you prevent crimes? Order it so that the light of knowledge may be diffused among the people.’ But were there enough people? As we have seen, Catherine shared the widespread contemporary anxiety—particularly acute in the vast, empty spaces of the Russian empire—that the world’s population had fallen since classical times. The way to increase it was to make people happy: ‘The more happily people live under a government the more easily the number of the inhabitants increases.’76

  Such ideas may have been familiar to Enlightened circles in Western Europe, but to the majority of the empress’s humble provincial deputies they came as a bolt from the blue. The Commission itself was an equally stunning phenomenon. As Henry Shirley reported to Whitehall:

  The Russians think and talk of nothing else, and in seeing the representatives of several nations, so very different both as to dress, customs, and religion, such as the Samoiedes, Cossacks, Bulgarians, Tartars etc., and whom they suppose to be (perhaps not without foundation) entirely dependants of the Russian Empire, assemble in their capital, they are apt to conclude, that they are now the wisest, the happiest, and the most powerful nation in the universe.77

  The barely concealed note of sarcasm reflected Shirley’s disappointment that Catherine had failed to create an institution on the model of the Westminster Parliament. He was particularly offended by the secret gallery, originally built to allow female members of the Muscovite royal family to observe ambassadorial audiences, ‘from whence she can hear every thing that is said, without being seen’:

  The Russians instead of perceiving how much this takes from the freedom their deputies ought to enjoy, admire this very much, and think it an undoubted proof of their sovereign’s love and regard to them. But, to render the farce as complete as possible, the deputies went yesterday in a body to thank Her Imperial Majesty for the instructions she has been pleased to give them, and to offer her the new titles of the Great, the Wise, and the Mother of her country.78

  In a carefully choreographed performance at the Golovin Palace, Catherine formally refused the honour, saying that it should be left to posterity to judge. The episode nevertheless provided a gratifying ritual confirmation of her own dubious legitimacy—almost certainly the prime motive for convening the Legislative Commission in the first place.79

  Anxious to avoid debates among ‘the blind, the semi-educated, and the half-witted’, Catherine made it clear from the start that her own treatise was to be the sole intellectual guide to the Commission’s proceedings.80 Here was another apparent restriction on the deputies’ freedom. And yet to think in such terms is surely anachronistic. Since no tsar had ritually consulted his subjects since 1653, the very notion of public discussion in Russia lay beyond living memory. Lacking a tradition of civic responsibility, the deputies needed to learn not only to speak, but, no less importantly, to listen. Catherine, having sought their advice on the condition of the empire, more in the manner of a sixteenth-century Humanist than an eighteenth-century Parliamentarian, needed to provide the conditions in which they could be heard. That was why she paid such close attention to the rules governing behaviour: deputies were forbidden from interrupting one another (one noble was fined and forced to apologise to a non-noble deputy whom he had insulted), no swords were to be worn, and fighting was to be punishable by fines or exclusion from the chamber.81 Here was an even more fundamental conception of mutual tolerance than the one that the empress sought to convey in a letter to Voltaire:

  I think you would be pleased to attend this assembly, where orthodox sits alongside heretic and muslim, and all three listen calmly to a heathen; and all four often confer to make their opinions mutually acceptable. So well have they forgotten the habit of burning one another at the stake, that if anyone were sufficiently ill-advised to suggest to a deputy that he should burn his neighbour to please the supreme being, I can say on behalf of all of them that there is not one who would fail to reply: ‘He is a man, just as I am; and according to the first paragraph of her Imperial
Majesty’s Instruction, we must do one another all the good we can, and no harm.’82

  While Catherine was pleased to encourage measured discussion among Russia’s free population at the Legislative Commission, she was far less tolerant of unsolicited complaints from the serfs. Most of the 600 petitions with which she had been bombarded on the Volga cruise were submitted by soldier-farmers and newly baptised converts bemoaning a shortage of land. These led her to stress the need for the General Survey, begun in 1766, to be extended to this very area. However, as she told the Senate on her return, there were also ‘a few unfounded petitions from serfs complaining of their owners’ exactions, which were returned to them with the instruction not to submit such petitions in future’. Among them was a petition from serfs on an estate belonging to Adam Olsufyev’s family, who not only refused to return to work as she insisted, but paid for a representative to plead their case in Moscow. When an infantry regiment was sent to reward them for their disobedience, 130 peasants were arrested and some were flogged with the knout. Further rioting on estates where peasants had presented petitions to Catherine prompted her to attempt to limit the number of such petitions in future. Her edict of 22 August 1767, which confirmed a range of earlier laws limiting the right of serfs to denounce their masters to the authorities, stopped short of threatening the torture that the Senate had been prepared to contemplate. Nevertheless, it increased the penalty for wrongful petitioning by adding hard labour for life to the list of punishments already decreed in 1765: a month’s hard labour in the Siberian mines for the first offence, a year’s hard labour for a second offence, and public whipping and perpetual exile for a third. This menacing edict was intended merely as a stopgap until the Legislative Commission could formulate a suitable alternative. Since this was never done, and the edict of 22 August was never repealed, it served both to consolidate the landowners’ powers over their serfs for the remainder of the reign and to deter petitioners from all but the noble estate. Not long after becoming Holy Roman Emperor in 1765, Joseph II had rashly aspired to ‘give the whole universe freedom’ to bring him their complaints and he remained receptive to petitioners from all classes of the population. Catherine strongly disapproved, believing, as she told Baron Grimm after Joseph’s death, that he had ‘ruined his health with his eternal audiences’.83