A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

7 Catherine the Great

Catherine’s first task on ascending the throne was to secure her power and deal with the unfinished business of her husband’s reign. She quickly confirmed his decree abolishing compulsory service for the nobility, but she delayed the decree confiscating monastery lands. She had proclaimed herself the defender of Russian interests and of Orthodoxy, and she knew that the church was not happy with the move. Furthermore count Panin had plans to reorganize the central government around a state council that would have some sort of power alongside the monarch. The new empress, after a delay of more than a year, and after deposing the obstreperous and very rich bishop of Rostov, decreed the secularization of church lands in 1764. Nearly a fifth of the Russian peasantry ceased to be serfs. Regarding Panin’s plans she was more cautious, merely ignoring them and keeping him to head the College of Foreign Affairs and supervise the education of her son and heir Paul.

Foreign policy demanded Catherine’s attention for much of the first decade of her reign, even though she had been preoccupied with notions of reform of state and society from the time of her reading of Montesquieu and others in the 1750s. Unfortunately, Catherine could not control events and in the autumn of 1763 the king of Poland died. His death created a serious problem and Catherine had to act. From the last years of the Northern War, Poland, the onetime great power of Eastern Europe, had succumbed to a declining economy and population and an anarchic constitution. It had a weak elected king, all-powerful magnates, and a diet of nobles whose main aim was the conservation of traditional law and privileges above all else. Its neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and especially Russia liked this situation, and however absolute at home, their rulers were intent on preserving the “Golden Freedom” of the Polish nobility. A weak Poland with a tiny army suited them all and their ambassadors directed the Polish state.

The death of the king in 1763 came at a time of slowly returning prosperity and calls for modest constitutional reform. Catherine decided to support some of these calls, and with the aid of Polish allies, intimidation of their opponents, and simple bribery, placed her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the throne of Poland. Poniatowski and his allies were able to enact some of their very modest proposals, but Catherine wanted a practical guarantee of continued Russian influence, and she found it in the issue of political rights of dissidents (non-Catholics) in Poland. Poland possessed a sizable Protestant minority (who mostly spoke German) in the northwest and a more numerous Orthodox minority in the east and southeast. The Protestants included a number of noble families as well as townsmen, but were excluded from political representation and most offices. The Orthodox were mostly Ukrainian peasants, and had no spokesman but the one Orthodox bishop, a Ukrainian from the Russian side of the border. Both groups, but especially the Orthodox peasants, were subject to continuous harassment from Catholic clergy and nobles. Catherine, through her ambassador, ordered Poniatowski and his allies to enact legal toleration of the religious dissidents. The ultimate result in 1768 was a revolt of Catholic nobles against the Russians and the king, and this involved the Russian army in the internal dissensions of Poland. Catherine knew that her intervention in Poland could have dangerous consequences, but she had formed a firm alliance with Prussia and hoped for the best. Unfortunately the Ottomans, prompted by France and understandably disturbed by the specter of even greater Russian influence in Poland, declared war on Russia at the end of the year. Russia was again at war with a major power possessing a huge – if sometimes unwieldy – army; this was a war that would have to be fought across vast and largely empty steppes very far from Russia’s home bases.

The war with Turkey also put an end to one of Catherine’s pet projects, the Legislative Commission. For decades the government had been aware of the confused state of Russian law, based as it was on the 1649 law code, Peter’s legislation, and hundreds of decrees on particular issues that often contradicted more general statutes. Catherine saw the opportunity to carry out a thorough review and revision and to establish some general principles. To this end in January 1765, she began to compile an Instruction, a guideline for reform. The result was a volume of several hundred pages, compiled (as she freely admitted) of passages translated from her beloved Montesquieu; the Italian law reformer Cesare Beccaria; and German writers on finance and economics, such as the now forgotten Baron J. F. von Bielfeld. In the text she began with the principle that Russia was a European state, and it was a monarchy, not a despotism. That is, its government was based on law, not the arbitrary will of the monarch. At the same time, following Montesquieu, she argued that a state the size of Russia required an absolute monarch who would have the necessary vigor and power to rule effectively. Without that, lawlessness and chaos would ensue. The Instruction was not a series of specific recommendations about particular issues but a description of general principles for laws regulating social status, law courts, and the encouragement of population growth, agriculture, commerce, and industry. It concluded with a series of principles for what was then called “police” in Europe. These principles were ordinances not concerned so much with crime as they were with cleanliness, communication, fire prevention, and general good order in town and country. The text was remarkable enough, but even more remarkable was the use to which she put it.

At the end of 1766 she issued a manifesto that announced that various local communities were to choose representatives to come to Moscow to discuss the reform of the law, and a few months later she published her Instruction and ordered it distributed throughout the country. Thus an extensive compilation of Enlightenment political thought was to be distributed openly to the population at large, and this was to be the basis for the deliberations of the Legislative Commission in Moscow.

The Commission opened on July 30, 1767, with 428 of the 564 delegates already present. The most important group comprised the 142 deputies from the nobility and the 209 deputies from the cities (many of them also noblemen). There were also 29 delegates from the free peasants and 44 Cossack deputies. From the various Volga peoples, Tatars and others came 54 deputies – 22 deputies represented the Ukrainian Cossack nobility of the Hetmanate, and the Baltic provinces had their deputies among the nobles. Even the free Finnish peasants of the Vyborg area had their representatives. Some nobles tried to challenge their presence, but Catherine upheld them on the basis of the Swedish law of this conquered territory. The only group that was not represented consisted of the serf peasants of Russia and the Baltic provinces, who together made up more than fifty percent of the population of the state.

The process of choosing representatives was hardly a modern ideal election, for in many remote areas the nobles simply failed to show up or did so in very small numbers. In the towns it was hard to achieve consensus, and the free peasants also seem to have seen the process as a chance to petition the monarch rather than to suggest law. Nevertheless, they all did show up in Moscow and with some prompting from the empress, got down to work assembling and examining existing legislation and compiling proposals that would serve as the basis of general statutes for regularizing the status of the various groups in society in judicial institutions. The delegates were not a parliament and were not there to pass laws – they had assembled to make proposals to Catherine that she could choose to follow or not. They were also supposed to follow the guidelines of her instruction, and they generally did, but not without considerable discussion. Opinions were exchanged remarkably freely, and some of the more conservative nobles rejected the implications of the Instruction that were favorable to peasants and townspeople. As time passed, the various subcommissions deliberated slowly and Catherine decided to move them to St. Petersburg. By the summer of 1768, the nobles were ready with a proposal, itself the object of considerable wrangling, especially over issues like the conditions for promotion of commoners to noble rank and crimes against nobles by serfs. Catherine was getting a very rapid lesson in the values and ideas of the various classes of Russian society, and it was fairly clear that reform of state and society would meet considerable obstacles among a large part of the nobility. The Turkish declaration of war intervened before she had to make difficult decisions. Most of the noble deputies were also army officers, and now full mobilization was necessary to deal with both Turkey and the Polish situation. The Commission was dissolved. Its work, however, was not in vain, as later events would prove.

The war with Turkey was the first serious test of Catherine’s government, for the Ottoman Empire was still a formidable opponent and the Russians would have to cross vast expanses of southern steppe even to engage the enemy. In the end, the Russian army proved itself capable of the task, slowly but systematically advancing into Crimea and the Balkan Peninsula. The Russian navy sailed from St. Petersburg around Europe under the command of Aleksei Orlov and the British Admiral John Elphinstone, destroying the Turkish fleet in the harbor of Chesme in 1770. In spite of the distraction of the Polish conflict, Catherine’s forces made their way into Bulgaria and forced the Ottomans to make peace on her terms at the small village of Kuchuk Kainardzha in 1774.

The treaty came just two years after a seemingly permanent settlement of the Polish situation. With Russia fighting two wars at once, Frederick the Great of Prussia saw his chance and proposed to Catherine that they both solve the problem by taking Polish territory. Austria would have to be conciliated as well, and the result would be a smaller Poland that would be less threatening, should reform succeed. Catherine agreed to this proposal after some hesitation, for she still hoped to maintain influence over the whole of Poland, but eventually she gave in. The result was the partition treaty of 1772, which gave large and valuable districts to Austria and Prussia. Catherine took a large but thinly populated slice of eastern Belorussia that provided better Russian river communications with Riga. A byproduct of the new border was the inclusion of Jews in the Russian state for the first time. For Catherine the outcome was a qualified success, as Poniatowski remained king and made modest reforms that strengthened the state and Polish prosperity while ultimately remaining subservient to Russian interests.

Two years later Catherine was ecstatic with joy to learn of the peace with the Ottomans, for it came at a difficult moment. The victory itself was reason enough to celebrate, for it brought great prestige and power to Russia and to its empress, but there was more. Russia received huge territories in the south all the way to the Black Sea coast and Crimea ceased to be a Turkish dependency, instead becoming nominally independent under Russian control. Russia’s ministers and Catherine herself had been aware for decades of the economic potential of the area both as a site for new commercial ports and for agricultural settlement. The treaty not only gave the area to Russia, but also granted the right to commerce in the Black Sea and to build a navy there. Russia’s position on the southern border had changed radically: there were no more Tatar slave raids and a vast territory was ready for development. The legislation for the new lands, to be called Novorossia, or “New Russia,” was carefully worked out to encourage settlement but discourage the spread of serf agriculture. The new lands were to be a settler colony with flourishing cities and ports, not just an extension of the backward agriculture of the serf estates of Central Russia. Catherine had not read her Enlightenment writers for nothing.

Her right arm in transforming the new lands was to be her new lover, general Grigorii Potemkin, whose instant rise to favor took place in the first months of 1774. Potemkin was the only one of Catherine’s many lovers who was her mental and political equal. If less intellectual, he was well enough educated to understand her and had the political skills to work with her. It was a great partnership and lasted long after the passion had cooled, until Potemkin’s death in October 1791.

For the time being both the empress and her favorite faced daunting challenges. Ever since Catherine’s coup of 1762, there had been symptoms of discontent. The first had been the Mirovich affair. The former baby Tsar Ivan VI of 1740–1741 had grown up, and Elizabeth had confined him in the fortress of Schlüsselburg in the hope that he might some day enter a monastery, and if not, he would be politically harmless. Peter III had confirmed her decisions, including the secret order to kill him if an attempt to free him was made, and Catherine confirmed these orders as well, though the codicil with the order to kill bore only Panin’s signature. In July 1764, a restless and probably somewhat unstable Ukrainian guards officer named Vasilii Mirovich made a mad attempt to free Ivan and proclaim him emperor, and the soldiers guarding the ex-tsar carried out their standing orders. Mirovich’s execution put an end to the affair, but it was not a good sign. Over the years there were a series of incidents, all involving small numbers of officers and nobles who spoke of replacing Catherine, but they were quickly exiled and their talk came to nothing. The background to these incidents, however, was the worrisome issue of the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Paul. Paul was nineteen in 1773, and thus in principle old enough to reign, but his mother had no intention of giving up power. Part of her reason was her increasing disappointment with her son and his association with the Panin party at court, whose cautious foreign policy had not provided the expected dividends. Catherine proclaimed her son an adult and began marriage negotiations, but kept the throne. This step terminated Panin’s role as the heir’s tutor, and the count gradually withdrew from the court in disfavor.

The new star, Potemkin, came at just the right time, for Russia was now in the grips of the greatest popular upheaval it would experience before the twentieth century. The source of the uprising lay in the Cossack frontier of the southeast, as it had so often before. This time it did not begin on the Don but on the Iaik, the smaller river flowing from the Ural Mountains into the Caspian Sea to east of the Volga. In these decades the Russian government was trying to establish greater control over the Cossacks, restricting their privileges and particularly their custom of electing their officers. Recent measures to this end seemed successful, until Emelian Pugachev appeared in the settlements near the provincial capital of Orenburg early in 1773. He had served in the wars, deserted, and had various adventures when he arrived and told the people that he was actually Catherine’s husband Peter III. He had come to restore justice to the Cossacks and protect the Old Belief. The Cossacks believed, or professed to believe him and he quickly assembled a band of several thousand men, reinforced by the neighboring Bashkirs and Tatars as well as the peasants attached to the Urals iron works. They laid siege to Orenburg and other larger forts without success, but they overran the lesser stations and massacred all who refused to join them. A huge area, most of the Urals and the Volga basin, was now in rebel hands. The reaction was swift. An army came from Moscow to suppress the revolt, and by the end of the year it was largely successful, though Pugachev himself had eluded the army. Then the next year he made a comeback and even managed to seize the important town of Kazan’ for a few days. This was the high point of the rebellion, for Russian regular troops reached the town after a desperate forced march and crushed the rebel army. Pugachev now turned south toward the Don, and to reach it he passed through areas of serf agriculture. Here the region exploded; the serfs with rebel help exterminated the local nobility, including women and children. Unfortunately for Pugachev, the Don Cossacks did not move, and he recrossed the Volga, escaping to his base among the Bashkirs. There the troops finally caught up with the rebels and crushed them. Some of the Bashkirs remained loyal to Pugachev to the end, but the Cossacks eventually betrayed him. The revolt was over, and in 1775 Pugachev was executed in Moscow. Peace had finally come, at home and abroad.

Figure 6. Bashkirs, from Atkinson, Picturesque View.

Catherine’s reading not only gave her a series of ideas about justice and administration but also about economic development and social status. The Enlightenment writers believed that society required a civilized population to flourish, and that came from education and culture. The new empress came to the throne at a propitious time, for the efforts of the Cadet Corps, the Academy, and Moscow University were beginning to show results. The generation that came to maturity with Catherine was the first to have absorbed European culture in full, and the first to include many men and even women who had also been abroad long enough to begin to understand European society.

Catherine was determined to speed this process along. Though by birth and culture she was German, for most of her reign she was at the center of Russian culture, unlike any monarch after her and more so than even Peter himself. She was not merely a reader, but an active participant in Europe’s cultural life. She corresponded with Voltaire from 1763 until his death in 1778. She also had correspondents among the French Encyclopedists, Denis Diderot, and Jean d’Alembert, as well as the German Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Grimm was a sort of literary journalist reporting from Paris, and after a visit to St. Petersburg in 1773–74 he was Catherine’s chief correspondent and epistolary confidant until her death. Catherine did not merely correspond with the great men of the Enlightenment. When she heard of Diderot’s financial problems she bought his library, granted him the use of it for life and paid him a salary as her librarian.

Catherine’s cultural projects were numerous. Behind the scenes she was the instigator of the Free Economic Society, a group of noblemen moved by reading Enlightenment literature to form a society for the discussion of economic (especially agricultural) topics. This was an association independent of state institutions although it enjoyed the favor of the empress. The society sponsored an essay contest on the issue of peasant land ownership that inevitably raised the issue of serfdom, and it awarded a prize to a Frenchman’s essay that unambiguously stated that prosperity could only flow from the full property of the peasant in his land. By implication serfdom could not create prosperity. The essay was published in Russian and French for all to read. She continued to support the university, the academies, and the schools with money and encouragement. The first Russian girls’ school, the Smol’nyi Institute in St. Petersburg for young noblewomen was planned by Empress Elizabeth and came into being in 1764, and the empress reorganized and expanded the Cadet Corps. These were elite schools, but with the 1775 provincial reform came a system of schools in the provinces, which was expanded again in 1786 by a decree establishing secondary schools in all provincial capitals and a network of primary schools. Progress was slow, but by 1800 there were already over 300 schools, twice the number in existence in 1786. Later Russian secondary schools had their origin in these laws.

Even the church had its role in the process of enlightenment. At Catherine’s accession most of the bishops were still Ukrainians with a strong, almost Catholic, sense of the importance of the clergy. Empress Elizabeth had begun the process of replacing them with Russians, and under Catherine a whole new generation came into power in the church. Catherine also put into law the secularization of monastic lands formulated under Elizabeth in opposition to the views of the older Ukrainian bishops. The new generation, like Platon Levshin, Metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 to 1812, had been educated on Lutheran religious scholarship and with a strong orientation toward preaching. Their goal was to bring the truths of Orthodox Christianity to the people rather than cultivating an ideal asceticism. This emphasis coincided with Catherine’s, for she saw religion as the foundation of good citizenship, which was another Enlightenment precept.

Figure 7. Catherine the Great with the Goddess Athena. Engraving by Francis Bartolozzi after Michele Benedetti. From a painting by Alexander Roslin.

Catherine’s court kept up the theaters founded by her predecessors, and those theaters remained at the center of the performing arts in Russia. She eased Araya into retirement and replaced him with a series of distinguished musicians starting with the Venetian Baldassare Galuppi. Sumarokov continued to direct the stage and provide plays, and Catherine and the court usually attended one of the theaters several times a week. In 1768 she founded a society for the translation of foreign books, which sponsored a whole series of important translations, learned works, and works of entertainment for the Russian public. She also published her own magazine, Vsiakaia vsiachina (All Sorts of Things), in 1769. The idea was to imitate Addison and Steele’s Spectator, something Sumarokov had tried a few years earlier with mixed success. The journal, like its prototype, was to combine entertainment with edification without heavy-handed moralizing – a type of publication wildly popular in Catherine’s native Germany and other parts of Europe. Catherine kept her role secret, though it was widely known in St. Petersburg.

The most lively response to her journal came from Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), who launched a series of journals of his own, establishing the first important private publishing enterprise in Russia. Better written and bolder than the empress’s journal, Novikov’s publications acquired considerable popularity but not enough to provide much of an income, and he soon turned to publishing books for Moscow University, which assured him an indirect subsidy from the state. In Moscow, Novikov also increasingly joined in with the Freemasons, a group with a wide network and considerable impact on Russian culture at the time. The Masons were not just a social club, but a movement of ideas with defined, if nebulous, aims. Most of them had been reading the European mystical literature that was increasingly popular in the later eighteenth century, and they saw themselves as committed to self-improvement, contemplation of God and his works, and most of all, active philanthropy and the encouragement of progress in the world. Unfortunately for them, the Masons aroused all sorts of suspicions. Conservative churchmen saw them as the propagators of an alternative and pernicious religion, while many enlightened nobles took them for obscurantists. Catherine herself saw them in this way and wrote several short comedies satirizing them. The Masons were also an international society with ties to foreign dynasties in Prussia and Sweden that were unfriendly to Russia, and most serious of all, the Masons had recruited the heir, Tsarevich Paul, as a patron. This last element made them deeply suspect in the mind of Catherine, for Paul was unhappy with his marginal role in court and government and increasingly hostile to his mother as the years passed.

In spite of setbacks, Catherine did not give up sponsoring Russian literature, and in 1782–1783 she appointed her old friend Princess Dashkova to head both the Academy of Sciences and the new Academy of Letters. Dashkova, who had met Benjamin Franklin in Paris, was the first woman member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. From these positions Dashkova was able to publish another series of literary journals and other publications and organize a committee to produce the first Russian dictionary. A decree of 1783 explicitly authorized private printing and publication, subject to censorship of the chiefs of police in the capitals.

The main problem for private publishers was not censorship or the attitude of the state but the lack of a broad audience. Only the gentry and a small body of teachers and scholars had the education to be interested in books and journals, and many of the gentry either lived on remote estates or in provincial towns and preferred French literature to Russian. The writers were less affected by this situation than the publishers, for most of the important writers were noblemen employed in state service of one sort or another, and were not therefore dependent on the sales of their work for their income. Many nobles even looked down on Novikov for trying to live from the profits of literature. State service, however, involved writers in the court factions and in a complex relationship to the empress herself.

Thus the two most important writers of the time, the playwright Denis Fonvizin (1744–1792) and the poet Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) were both enmeshed in a network of personal and political loyalties at the court. Fonvizin spent his early career as a client of count Panin, which meant that toward the end of his life he was part of the patronage network centered on Paul, the heir to the throne. This affiliation made him unpopular with Catherine, but it was she who ordered the first performance of his best play, The Adolescent, at the court theater in 1782. Nevertheless the final resignation of Panin from all offices in 1781 contributed to Fonvizin’s failure to get authorization for a journal in later years.

Fonvizin and Novikov were both graduates of Moscow University, while the poet Derzhavin came from a provincial gentry family and had only finished the Gymnasium in Kazan’. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he never properly learned French, his only foreign language being the German he learned in Kazan’. His early career was in the army, and he played a minor and somewhat inglorious role in fighting Pugachev’s rebels. At that time he came to the attention of Potemkin, and remained the favorite’s client as he pursued a career in civil administration, both in St. Petersburg and the provinces, living long enough to briefly occupy the post of minister of justice under Alexander I. Derzhavin’s poetry made him famous in the 1780s, as he produced odes in honor of Catherine and her victories as well as satires of courtiers and their foibles, following the model of Horace and European classicism. Like Fonvizin, he had a command of language that allowed his work to survive for Russian readers in spite of the eclipse of the eighteenth century genres that he employed.

In Russian literature, drama, poetry, and prose, a public independent of the court was just barely coming into existence at the end of Catherine’s reign. Other art forms remained closely tied to the patronage of court and nobility. The court musical theater and orchestra was largely the preserve of imported musicians, and the centrality of the court in cultural life meant that the nobility heard an extensive range of European music. Native traditions remained in church music, a particular specialty of Ukrainians associated with the choirs in the imperial chapels. The most successful of these Ukrainians was Dmitrii Bortnyanskii (1751–1825), Russia’s first composer, who was equally comfortable with European concerti and Russian choral singing. None of the musicians were noblemen, a fact that hampered their acceptance as serious artists. A similar situation obtained in the visual arts, where the Academy of Art dominated the scene. Catherine reorganized the Academy to give it more autonomy and better financing while retaining its mainly French instructors, and she secured for the artists a more privileged social status to fit their profession. The Russian students were all of non-noble and sometimes even serf origin, who were intended to go on to provide art for the palaces of the empress and the nobility as well as the church. The Academy also provided stipends for the students to spend time in Paris and Rome, enormously broadening the training and experience of its students. In retrospect its worst defect, other than its very “official” character, was its precise copying of European models that accorded ill with Russian possibilities and traditions. As in the European art academies, the most prestigious genre was historical painting in the style of classicism. Attempts to depict Russian history in this style found praise at the time but produced pictures that to later taste were wooden at best and often comic. Ancient Russians appeared in fantastic armor more reminiscent of the Romans than medieval Russia. More attractive to later taste were the portrait painters, who ironically had little or no ties to the Academy. The first to gain a name was Ivan Argunov (1727–1802), a serf of the extremely wealthy Sheremetev family. His successors included Fyodor Rokotov, a serf of the Repnins, and two Ukrainians, Dmitrii Levitskii (Argunov’s pupil), and Vladimir Borovikovskii, the only nobleman among them. Their charming portraits of noble men and women as well as of Catherine herself filled Russian palaces and country houses and were comparable in quality to many of the French and English portraits of the time, if less inventive than the latter.

Catherine’s time marked the beginning of Russian classicist architecture, which transformed St. Petersburg into the city familiar today. She was firmly against the Baroque exuberance of her predecessor Elizabeth’s chief architect Rastrelli. Catherine and her contemporaries built with unmistakable Roman allusions, a proper architecture for a great imperial capital and its elites. Strict symmetry, Roman columns and triumphal arches were the order of the day. The crowning achievement of the age was the monument to Peter the Great, the “Bronze Horseman” in Pushkin’s immortal phrase. The work of the French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet and his wife, it displayed Peter in the garb of a Roman emperor on horseback standing on a giant rock with the simple inscription “Catherine the Second to Peter the First” in Latin and Russian. Unveiled in 1782 to great ceremony, the statue remains Catherine’s most powerful contribution to the city of St. Petersburg.

The years after Pugachev were not just filled with artistic projects and court entertainments, for these were the years of extensive reform of Russian government and society. Finally the Legislative Commission bore fruit, albeit indirectly: Catherine knew how the nobility thought about the issues and what might prove useful while not antagonizing them. The first task was to reorder the administration of the provinces and the towns, which involved creating a new court system. Catherine’s 1775 decrees broke up the large administrative units into some forty new provinces, which in turn divided into five or six smaller units. At the level of these smaller units government essentially stopped, leaving the countryside to the nobility and the peasant communities. The most powerful local figure was the provincial governor appointed by the empress. These were invariably noblemen, sometimes including great aristocrats but more often military men. In the same decree Catherine established courts for the nobility that were to combine appointed judges with local noblemen elected to assist them. These were courts for nobility only. In areas where free peasants predominated there were also to be courts with peasants elected alongside officials to provide justice. As ever, it was the village level that was weakest and where state power often existed only on paper. In the towns, Catherine also established courts, for the townspeople alone, that consisted of appointed judges and elected assessors. Thus justice was divided among special courts for each social group and combined state-appointed judges with elected assessors.

The new legislation implied greater responsibility on the part of the nobility and the elite of the townspeople, yet many basic aspects of their status and relationship to the state remained undefined. The answers to this problem were the 1785 Charters of the Nobility and of the Townspeople. The Charter of the Nobility confirmed and broadened the rights already in practice from Peter’s time and added others, including the 1762 decree on freedom from obligatory state service. Nobles could not be deprived of life and property without a trial by a court that was composed of their peers. Their nobility was hereditary, and could not be terminated without a conviction in court of specified crimes like murder or treason. They were not subject to corporal punishment, and the right to own land and serfs was guaranteed to them alone. Nobles in each province were to come together to form a provincial Assembly of Nobility, electing its own marshal and determining its own membership. The marshal was to act as the leader of the local gentry, conveying its wishes to the capital and the government’s orders to the nobility. The marshals had little formal power, but as the chief representatives of the local nobility, and often with powerful connections in St. Petersburg, they were formidable figures. Provincial governors, in spite of their formal power, found it wise to cultivate the marshals of the nobility. In the towns Catherine’s decrees divided the town population by simple wealth, and put most of the administration, like the courts, in the hands of the town elites. The population was to elect a governing body from among the wealthier citizens to manage the business side of town life, leaving the courts and police as specified in the 1775 provincial reform. Townspeople were also not to be deprived of life and property without conviction in a court of their peers. Lesser townsfolk were subject to corporal punishment. There was also elaborate sumptuary legislation that specified limits to ostentatious display by the lower orders. Though restricted to the upper and middle classes, the Charters were the first fruit of Enlightenment thought about the rights and duties of the citizen to be enacted into Russian law.

As Catherine and her ministers were reordering Russian government they did not lose sight of the situation on the southern border. The Ottomans were reluctant to ignore Russian gains, and the “autonomy” of Crimea under Russian stewardship proved an unstable arrangement. In 1783 Catherine annexed the territory to Russia, adding it to the vast areas of New Russia under the firm hand of Potemkin. Catherine and Potemkin began to develop larger plans of conquest in the south, tempting Austria to join them with the “Greek project,” a proposal for the partition of the Balkans and restoration of a Greek monarchy with Russian princes on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Finally in 1787 Turkey declared war. Russian troops began to advance into the Balkans, but elsewhere the situation deteriorated. The Austrian Emperor Joseph II honored his treaty with Russia and his army began to move south too, but he was rapidly defeated by the Turks. King Gustavus III of Sweden attacked Russia as well, hoping for revenge for earlier losses and to strengthen his hand at home. Catherine had hoped for Polish troops to support the Russian effort, but when Stanislaw Poniatowski called the diet to discuss the issue, it swiftly turned into a revolutionary assembly that proceeded to throw off Russian domination and elaborate a reformed constitution. To make matters worse, Prussia cynically supported the Polish effort with a view to its own future aggrandizement in Poland. Catherine had no one to rely upon but Potemkin and her army and navy.

Catherine showed the steel nerves that had brought her to the throne thirty years before. Hearing the guns of the Swedish fleet from her palace windows, she continued to work without giving them any notice. Progress in the south was slow, especially at first, but the new Black Sea fleet (with some help from the American naval hero John Paul Jones) was victorious and the army relentlessly pushed the Turks into the Rumanian principalities. Gustav III made little progress and found himself the object of a conspiracy of Finnish officers discontented with Swedish absolutism. His resources exhausted in spite of modest success on the sea, Gustav made peace in 1790. Turkey remained in the war.

To complicate Russia’s situation still further, Britain, with its own imperial ambitions rapidly growing, began to worry about Russian movement toward the Mediterranean and adopted a hostile stance. Catherine needed success, and at the end of December 1790, general Alexander Suvorov gave it to her, taking the fortress of Izmail near the mouth of the Danube. He took the fort by frontal assault with great casualties, but he took it. In the next spring the Russians moved south toward Bulgaria, and by the end of the summer the Turks capitulated. Russia’s borders now extended to the Dniestr River, including the site of future city of Odessa. Catherine had played her cards with great skill, and she had won. At that moment, Potemkin died. Catherine continued to have lovers and favorites, but none of them ever had the love and trust that Potemkin had inspired.

The wars with Turkey and Sweden had required the complete attention and resources of the Russian government, but they were aware that Europe was increasingly in crisis. The French Revolution was transforming European politics daily, and closer to home the Polish diet’s reformed constitution of May 3, 1791, meant that Russia would soon have a hostile and more powerful neighbor. There was little Catherine could do about France, but Poland was a different case. She intrigued with aristocratic opponents of the new constitution, and as soon as the Turkish war ended she and her Polish allies moved against Poniatowski and the new government. The small Polish army was easily swept away, and Catherine arranged with Prussia to make a new partition. This was not her preferred option, for all along she wanted a united compliant Poland, but she realized that the new order was too popular among Polish nobles to be reversed, and that she had to conciliate Prussia and Austria.

Thus a much reduced Poland acquired a conservative constitution supported by Russian bayonets, but it did not last. In 1794 Tadeusz Kosciuszko led a rebellion in southern Poland that quickly spread to Warsaw and scored a few modest successes. Catherine was convinced that French Jacobinism was behind it, and sent in Suvorov at the head of a Russian army. Suvorov took Warsaw with great slaughter, and the partitioning powers agreed to put an end to Poland’s existence. Prussia and Austria carved up the areas with predominantly Polish populations, while Russia took the Western Ukraine, the rest of Belorussia, and Lithuania.

Russia now had become a truly multi-national empire. The five-and-onehalf million new subjects brought the proportion of Russians in the state from some eighty-five percent down to perhaps seventy. Catherine did not fight the war to reunite the Eastern Slavs, but she had in fact brought into her empire virtually the whole territory of the medieval Kiev Rus.

If Catherine could do little to affect the progress of the French Revolution, she was no less frightened by its increasing radicalism, and the Russian nobility shared her fears. The policy of toleration and enlightenment gradually came to an end. Especially after the proclamation of the republic and execution of Louis XVI, the importation and circulation of new French books and even long-familiar Enlightenment writers now faced serious restrictions. In 1792 Novikov was arrested after investigation but there was no trial and he was ordered to be confined in prison indefinitely. The Masons were shut down and fell under increasing suspicion as potential supporters of the French revolutionaries. In 1796, only a few weeks before her death, Catherine established the first Russian system of state censorship, no longer depending on the Academy of Sciences or the local police to do the work.

The most spectacular case of dissent and its repression, however, had already come in 1790. In that year Alexander Radishchev, a nobleman and minor civil servant, published a book called A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Using the then-popular genre of the fictitious journey, he described the villages and towns of Russia and interspersed his own reflections on society and politics. His portrait of serfdom was unflattering to the extreme – in his view a system that corrupted master and serf alike was morally indefensible and economically ruinous. His political ruminations were vaguer, but they clearly suggested that autocracy was not the best way to govern Russia. Catherine read the book herself and made many marginal notes, and ultimately had Radishchev arrested. Interrogated in the Secret Department of the Senate, Radishchev was convicted in the St. Petersburg criminal court of sedition and lèse majesté and was condemned to death. Catherine commuted the punishment to exile in a remote Siberian fort, and Radishchev went off, though with a substantial stipend from one of Catherine’s grandees, who interceded with the empress on his behalf.

The French Revolution and Catherine’s death in 1796 brought Russia’s eighteenth century to a close. For a century the state, or more accurately the monarchs and their courts, had labored to transform the country along European lines and bring European culture to Russia. In this task they had largely succeeded. Russia had institutions and laws copied from European models, and Western diplomats, merchants, and travelers felt at home in St. Petersburg, if not everywhere else in Russia. The new state structure had provided the basis for the rise of Russia to the place of a great power, and helped the growth of commerce and industry, education and science. Settlement of new areas in the south contributed to an ongoing population explosion that was rapidly making Russia the largest country in Europe, even without newly annexed territory.

The cultural transformation was profound. By the end of the century educated Russians, most of them still nobles, had absorbed most of the major ideas and artistic achievements of modern Europe and they were beginning to offer their own still modest contributions. Russian political thought had the same elements and was based on the same writings as that farther west. If Russian noblemen did not admire Rousseau’s democratic musings, they did absorb the teachings of Puffendorf and Montesquieu as well as those of a host of minor writers. Monarchy in Russia was understood in much the same way as in France or Prussia, Austria or Sweden.

Russian reality imposed limits to both state-building and cultural progress. Russia was still too poor to support an extensive education system and all local government suffered from chronic lack of funds and staff. Outside of the capitals, large towns, and aristocratic country estates, life remained much as it had before, a round of rural labor punctuated by Orthodox liturgy. Areas of economic progress existed in the Urals and the trading villages and towns of central Russia, but it was still an overwhelmingly agrarian society.

Moreover, it was an agrarian society, half of whose peasant farmers were serfs. This was an issue Catherine and her enlightened friends could neither change nor even confront. She disliked the system and knew it was pernicious, not least to agricultural progress, but was aware that virtually all noblemen, on whom her throne depended, saw it as the basis of their wealth and position in society, as indeed it was. Russia was not alone in the serf system at the end of the century, it persisted in Poland and Prussia, and Joseph II had only just begun to dismantle it in Austria.

Just at the moment when Russia seemed to have achieved a stable and European order, the French Revolution changed all the rules of the game. It would now have to try to respond to a whole series of new challenges, international and domestic, cultural and political. Eventually its very survival would be at stake. It was a new and dangerous era.