Catherine the Great (26 page)

Catherine realised very early on in their correspondence that it would be ‘very difficult’ to reduce Voltaire’s sparkling shafts of wisdom to a practical programme of reform.
Philosophes
who disagreed among themselves never offered a blueprint for government.
¹¹⁹
Nevertheless, the Enlightenment was an important influence on Catherine’s legislation right from the start. Motivated primarily by the need for money, her secularisation of the monasteries was greeted with
acclaim by
philosophes
who condemned the contemplative life as useless. Celibate monks and nuns were an obvious liability in a world which believed, quite wrongly, that the population had declined since classical times. Sharing the widespread perception that Russia was under-populated, Catherine sent the colonists recruited by the College of Guardianship to a huge new province of New Russia, stretching from the Polish border in the west to the Don Cossack territory in the east. Appointing Count Peter Rumyantsev as its Governor General in November 1764, the empress gave him characteristically explicit instructions in the sort of rational administration she expected:

It was almost certainly the empress who initiated the essay competition set up by the Free Economic Society in November 1766 in the manner of the earlier one sponsored by the Academy of Dijon, which had prompted Rousseau’s first
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts
. The topic she set was squarely linked to the Enlightened utility she had claimed as her watchword in a letter to Voltaire: ‘What is most useful for society–that the peasant should own land or only moveable property, and how far should his rights over the one or the other extend?’ It was the first public discussion in Russia of the question of serfdom. Of the 164 anonymous entries to the competition, only seven were in Russian. One was in Dutch, another in Swedish; the great majority were in German. Of the twenty French entries, one was by the
philosophe
Le Mercier de la Rivière, who made an unsuccessful visit to Russia, and another by Voltaire himself, under the motto ‘
si populus dives, rex dives
’ (if the people are rich, the king is rich). Voltaire also revealed to Catherine that he was the author of one of three essays submitted in Latin, under the motto ‘
ex tellure omnia
’ (everything from the land). Emancipation was the talk of the French salons. But it was all in vain. When the result of the competition was announced in April 1768, the prize-winning entry, duly published in Russian translation, was by the Frenchman Beardé de l’Abbaye, who was critical of serfdom, but advocated only a very gradual liberation of the serfs.
¹²¹

As the choice of Beardé’s essay signalled, Catherine was gradually beginning to realise the difficulties raised by her early reforms. When she first encouraged Eisen to contemplate a property-owning peasantry, she can hardly have grasped the extent to which Russia’s imperial expansion had been underwritten by the exploitation of unfree labour since the time of Peter the Great. Her other initiatives were scarcely less ambitious ventures, whose impact could only be judged over the long term. Many of their immediate results were questionable. More than four-fifths of the children admitted to the Moscow Foundling Home in 1764 were dead within a year, and in 1767 the mortality rate reached almost 99 per cent.
¹²²
Not surprisingly, Catherine lost confidence in the more extravagant of Betskoy’s schemes, leaving herself open to the charge that she failed to complete what she had begun, and invested only in her personal glory.
¹²³
That accusation was false. Having overcome two serious challenges to her authority–a plot among the Guards to restore Ivan VI to the throne in 1763, and a much more menacing attempt by the guardsman Mirovich to release Ivan from captivity while Catherine and her Court were at Reval in 1764–she embarked on her most ambitious project of all. ‘For the last two months,’ she told Madame Geoffrin at the end of March 1765, ‘I have spent three hours every morning working on the laws of this empire. It is an immense task.’
¹²⁴
This was the origin of the great treatise which she intended to present to a new Legislative Commission in Moscow. By the time she was ready to convene it, there was nothing insecure about Catherine’s position on the throne. As if to prove it, while the greater part of the Russian political nation gathered in the old capital to prepare for the commission’s opening, she herself set sail on a voyage down the Volga to Kazan, a Muslim city 500 miles east of Moscow, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 as his ‘gateway to Siberia’.

A
s news of Catherine’s travel plans leaked out in the summer of 1766, the foreign ambassadors were consumed with curiosity about her motives. ‘There has been no other question here for some time,’ reported Rossignol, Louis XV’s secret envoy, on 13 May. Since the journey would oblige her to exchange her fine Petersburg palaces for ‘an old house made of wood’, as the king’s official ambassador put it, she could hardly be travelling for pleasure. The notion that the journey was intended to quell growing turbulence in Moscow seemed equally improbable. Even if Princess Dashkova was stirring up trouble there, ‘distant storms’ were unlikely to threaten Catherine and she would scarcely be wise to move closer to a centre of unrest. Rossignol was prepared to believe that the whole expedition might be no more than a stunt on the part of the pretentious Orlovs. But he gave little credence to rumours that the empress intended to marry Grigory: ‘I doubt that she still has that idea, if it ever existed, especially since the Synod has come out against this union, which would surely revolt all the great men of this empire.’ In the end, he was driven to the reluctant conclusion that Catherine must indeed be intent on the bold experiment that Russians had begun to talk about: ‘It is said that the Empress will promulgate a code which she wishes to substitute for the multitude of contradictory edicts which are the only laws of this empire and which serve merely as a resource for the dishonesty of litigants, and even more often for that of judges.’
¹

Despite the title
Code russe
, given to the third French edition in 1775, the Great Instruction (
Bolshoy Nakaz
) on which Catherine had been slaving away since the beginning of 1765 was never intended as a law code. ‘Don’t let the title frighten
you as if it anticipated us,’ Jeremy Bentham reassured his brother while working on his own
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
: ‘It is only a plan for putting the Courts of Justice upon a regular establishment.’
²
In fact, the empress’s Instruction was much more than that. She intended it partly as a statement of the theoretical foundations of her own regime, and partly as a guide to the Enlightened principles on which a better government and society might ultimately rest. When she had finished, she told Frederick the Great how hard it had been to take account of present needs without ‘closing off the way forward to a more favourable future’.
³
Joking that she hoped she might be forgiven for plagiarism, she made no attempt to disguise her debt to two of the most advanced works of Western political thought: Montesquieu’s
On the Spirit of the Laws
(1748) and
On Crimes and Punishments
(1764) by the Milanese jurist Cesare Beccaria. Yet even filleting their books into a slimmer treatise of her own was ‘an immense task’ in itself, as she told Madame Geoffrin, and it occupied most of her mornings for the best part of eighteen months: ‘If providence allows, I hope to put everything in a more natural order, acknowledged by humanity and founded on public and private utility.’
⁴
Such labours took their toll. When Catherine came to complete a medical questionnaire in advance of her inoculation against smallpox in 1768, she complained of unbearable headaches over the previous two years, caused by tired eyes, ‘overwork, and the fact that for three years running I got up at between four and five in the morning’.
⁵

The ultimate task of codification could scarcely have been more ambitious. The comprehensive code envisaged by Peter the Great in 1700 had been completed only after his death and was never promulgated. Since then, four further attempts had come to grief. The most recent, inspired by Peter Shuvalov in 1754, had collapsed during the Seven Years’ War, though it remained formally in existence in 1766. Although Catherine admired the direct style of the last complete Russian Law Code, issued as long ago as 1649–‘We listen with pleasure when extracts are quoted from it; no one can mistake the meaning of what he hears; the words in it are understood even by persons of middling capacities’
⁶
–the catalogue of brutal punishments approved by Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich scarcely matched her own views on the subject. And since many of the thousands of edicts promulgated in the intervening period remained unpublished, and some were mutually contradictory, there was much to do to bring order out of chaos. This task was to be left to a new Legislative Commission, a consultative body at which elected deputies from the free estates of the Russian empire–nobles, merchants, townsmen and state peasants–were to be encouraged to reveal the needs of
provincial society ‘from below’. Meanwhile, as her subjects launched themselves into elections set in motion in December 1766, the empress planned to see Russian provincial life for herself.
⁷
As she explained to Voltaire the following March:

Since no imperial journey was undertaken without elaborate preparation, plans for the Volga expedition developed alongside those for the Legislative Commission. They were already well advanced by the time of Catherine’s trip to the Ladoga Canal in summer 1765, when Paul was excited to hear from Ivan Chernyshëv of the special vessels being designed for the cruise.
⁹
To build these boats, at an eventual cost of almost 40,000 roubles, Captain P. I. Pushchin was sent out in December to Tver, the empress’s favourite provincial capital, where the adventure was to begin. While a new neoclassical town was rebuilt around him following the great fire of 1763, he oversaw the construction of a luxurious galley for Catherine–in effect, a small floating palace–and a further twenty-four large vessels, including one for a detachment of the imperial hunt. This was the fleet which eventually set sail in April 1767 with Pushchin in command of 23 officers, 779 sailors, and a guard of 345. Further downstream, numberless churches and monasteries were spruced up in anticipation of Catherine’s arrival. At every calling point on the river, she moored at a newly built quayside covered with green or red cloth; miles of canvas sheeting kept her feet dry as she walked ashore. While three detachments of Cossacks had been dispatched to ward off the bandit gangs reported to be gathering along the Volga’s tributaries in Penza province in the summer of 1766, soldiers were sent in December to all the major towns along the route, partly to maintain order and partly to manage the complex logistics for the return journey overland. Half of the 350 horses required at each of the thirty-three staging posts were to be provided by the Postal Chancellery; the remainder had to be prised out of a less than willing merchantry.
¹⁰

At first, the merchants of Tver proved equally reluctant to pay for the triumphal arch that the provincial governor, Count Villem Fermor, had determined to build as early as November 1765. However, there was no deterring a man who had headed Elizabeth’s Construction Chancellery in the heyday of Rastrelli
before briefly assuming command of the Russian troops during the Seven Years’ War. Having collected the necessary funds by the summer of 1766, Fermor ordered four columns to be driven into the ground before the frost set in for the winter, later sending an extravagantly gilded frame for the empress’s monogram and decreeing that Her Majesty’s portrait should be placed over the archway, facing her as she entered the town.
¹¹
Similar triumphal arches were built all along the route, where provincial governors competed to stage receptions, each more magnificent than the last, at the expense of local dignitaries gathered for the elections to the Legislative Commission.

While the populace made ready to greet their sovereign, Catherine was doing her homework about the provinces. To prepare her for the journey, the Academy of Sciences drew up a short
Geographical Description of the River Volga
, which also allowed her to chart her progress once the cruise had begun. Great care was taken to ensure the accuracy of this attractive publication, whose first edition was pulped when it turned out to contain significant errors. Dividing the course of the river into sections, it illustrated each one with an engraved map accompanied by four readily referenced columns of text. Here Catherine could look up lists of the churches and principal economic activity of the towns along the route, the distances travelled from Tver, the distances between tributaries (faithfully marked on each bank of the Volga), and the position and direction of bends in the river. Full of the sorts of detail the empress admired, this pamphlet gave a good sense of the variety in store for her along the way. For example, whereas Nizhny Novgorod, at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka, could boast thirty-nine churches, four cathedrals, three monasteries, two convents and a trade in grain and handicrafts, there was but a single church at Kokshaisk, the last sizeable settlement before the old Tatar capital at Kazan, where ‘the inhabitants feed themselves entirely from agriculture and cattle-breeding’.
¹²

Catherine made her final preparations for the journey in Moscow, chosen as the seat of the Legislative Commission in memory of the ad hoc gatherings, later known as Assemblies of the Land, at which the Muscovite tsars had ritually consulted their leading subjects.
¹³
‘I prefer Petersburg,’ she admitted, rehearsing all her frustrations with the unruly old capital that seemed to represent ‘a nasty autumn’ by comparison with the new one’s ‘onset of spring’.
¹⁴
If her palace was lacking in comfort, she had only herself to blame. ‘The Construction Chancellery has asked me for more than 60,000 roubles for repairing and cleaning the Golovin and Kremlin palaces,’ she had complained to the Governor General the previous summer. ‘And most of it, as you will see, is purely for decoration and
furniture. But since I am going to Moscow not for magnificence but for the good of the state, I have not the slightest need for luxury.’ In the end, in one of her first clear rejections of Baroque extravagance, she spent only 7000 roubles on safety measures at the Golovin Palace, where she arrived on 13 February to celebrate the beginning of Lent with typically irreverent gusto.
¹⁵
As she explained to the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet:

Lent nevertheless had its uses. It gave her an excuse to keep out of the public eye until she had taken the political temperature of a city where she had delayed elections for the Legislative Commission until after her arrival. Occasional Court reception days were held during the Great Fast, shorn of the customary musical accompaniment, and Catherine celebrated the feast of the Annunciation with her cavalry officers. Otherwise, Moscow saw little of its empress until 5 April, when she travelled in state to the Kremlin to take her annual communion at the Cathedral of the Dormition and watch as Archbishop Dimitry performed the Maundy Thursday ritual of the washing of the feet. That weekend, cannon salutes signalled the progress of her nocturnal drives back and forth across the city for the Easter vigil services.
¹⁷
Alarmed by the decrepitude of all three Kremlin cathedrals, Catherine ordered Field Marshal Saltykov to call a meeting of all the city’s architects to decide how to make them safe. ‘PS There’s no time to lose with the Archangel cathedral.’
¹⁸

On 21 April, the atmosphere was once again more intimate, as the empress celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday at the little wooden palace at Taininskoye in the company of Alexander Stroganov and other friends.
¹⁹
She did not attend the public lecture given two days later at Moscow University by Professor Johann Schaden, who looked forward to the Legislative Commission by discoursing ‘On the Spirit of the Laws’.
²⁰
By then, she was almost ready to depart for the Volga. On the evening of 29 April, Fermor and Ivan Chernyshëv were on hand to greet her at Tver with the usual barrage of fireworks. ‘We are all well,’ she reported to
Panin, who had remained in Moscow with his mistress and Grand Duke Paul: ‘the journey was average, the weather very good.’
²¹

It stayed fine for the next two days, as Catherine was treated to the sorts of gala reception that were to be repeated again and again over the coming weeks: whole regiments stood on parade, awaiting her inspection; nobles and merchants queued to offer her hospitality; seminarians dressed all in white chanted Russian and Latin verses written expressly for the occasion; hundreds of subjects were permitted to kiss her hand. Braving the cold on 1 May, she spent a couple of hours with Archbishop Gavriil (Petrov) in the garden of his new cathedral. Only after that did the clouds burst. But since the following day was mid-Pentecost, the empress and her suite processed through the rain for almost a mile to a sanctification service at a Jordan on the Volga. Once Grigory Orlov had passed her the customary glass of holy water, they returned to the cathedral where Gavriil had given ‘a very good sermon’ earlier that morning, and the empress lunched with him before finally boarding her galley, the
Tver
. Thousands thronged the streets in the hope of catching a glimpse of the procession of the cross and Catherine declared it ‘impossible to count the people and carriages’ blocking the route as she made her way to the quayside. Some women in the crowd rowed out to the
Tver
, at anchor in the river, while other cheering well-wishers sailed in her wake or scampered along the riverbank as the colourful flotilla at last set sail at three in the afternoon.
²²