Catherine the Great (29 page)
Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
‘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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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Her own main personal concern that autumn was the health of Aleksey Orlov. Rendered immobile by a bad back (the result of too many jolting carriage rides), he was believed to be at death’s door from chronic stomach pains and jaundice. From an account of his symptoms sent on behalf of the anxious empress, doctors in Vienna, Leiden and Leipzig diagnosed gallstones, recommended a less gargantuan diet and advised their patient to take the waters. But since he was too ill to travel abroad, and unable even to join his four brothers for a private lunch with Catherine on her name day, she and Panin went to visit him after Christmas.
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If she needed a further
memento mori
, it had come on 18 December, birthday of the late Empress Elizabeth, when Catherine donned mourning dress for a memorial service at the Chrysostom monastery before going on to Andrey Shuvalov’s mansion to watch for almost an hour as Archbishop Dimitry’s funeral procession crawled along Myasnitskaya Street. To dispel the gloom, she took coffee with her host and his family before returning to the Golovin Palace for a game of billiards.
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The discomforts of life in that draughty wooden building had long since exhausted its minimal charms. Already on 12 October she had told Falconet of her intention to return to St Petersburg.
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Irritated by slow progress in the Legislative Commission, which had laboriously worked through each social estate’s submissions without reaching any resolutions, she announced in November that its sessions would be suspended in the middle of the following month. The deputies were to reconvene in St Petersburg in February.
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She travelled north earlier, setting off through streets lined with cheering subjects after attending the consecration of a new church on the Solyanka on Saturday 19 January. At the end of a fifty-three-hour journey via a sequence of ‘nasty’ roadside palaces, it was a relief
to be home in time to celebrate Grigory Orlov’s name day, 25 January. ‘You can’t believe how good Tsarskoye Selo is,’ she told Panin. Town seemed even better: ‘Petersburg is paradise by comparison with Ispahan, and especially the palace.’
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Catherine was particularly delighted by the large turnout at her first Court reception day and the celebratory mood continued in the festivities surrounding her thirty-ninth birthday. Galuppi pulled out all the stops for his last opera in Russia. When they met shortly after the composer’s return to Venice, the renowned Dr Burney thought him still ‘full of genius and fire’ and later noted that he seemed ‘to have constantly kept pace with all the improvements and refinements of the times, and to have been as modern in his dramatic music, to the last year of his life, as ever’.
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Iphigenia in Tauride
, premiered on 27 April after Catherine’s private audience with the Austrian ambassador, Prince Lobkowitz, was promptly acclaimed in Russia as ‘the strongest of his compositions’. It had a more vigorous plot than most
opera seria
, and the ten basses, thirteen tenors, thirteen altos and fifteen trebles of the chapel choir gave an ‘outstanding performance’ of its innovative, integral choruses.
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Catherine had spent the birthday itself at Tsarskoye Selo. After church, she invested Aleksey Orlov with the Order of St Andrew and gave him 200,000 roubles (fifty times Galuppi’s annual salary) to pay for his convalescence.
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