Catherine the Great

Catherine knew Grimm by his reputation and through his newsletter. Six years older than Catherine, he shared many of her characteristics: German origin, French education, ambition, cosmopolitan interests, love of literature, passion for gossip. Beyond these, Grimm may also have appealed to Catherine because of his sound common sense, his discretion combined with wit, and his quiet charm. From September 1773 to April 1774, he was frequently received in private by Catherine in the same kind of setting as Diderot. She invited him to remain in St. Petersburg and go into her service, but he declined, citing his age, ignorance of the Russian language, and unfamiliarity with the Russian court. Nevertheless, when he left for Italy in April, they began a correspondence that continued until Catherine’s last letter in 1796, a month before her death. He returned to St. Petersburg in September 1776 and stayed almost a year, during which time she asked him to head a new commission on public schools. Again, he declined, although he later agreed to serve as her official cultural agent in Paris, managing her artistic and intellectual interests and contacts.

Catherine’s friendship with Grimm became one of the most important relationships in her life. He functioned as a confidant and a sounding board—even a safety valve—in whom she had complete trust. She wrote to him with freedom; she could speak frankly of her personal life, including her thoughts about her lovers. Except for her son, Paul, and, later, her grandchildren, she had no family, and to Grimm alone she could pour out her thoughts and feelings as she might have done with a fond uncle or an older brother.

51

The Nakaz

IN 1766, CATHERINE WROTE to Voltaire that she was working on a special project. This was her Nakaz, or Instruction, intended to be a guideline for a complete rewriting of the Russian legal code. If all went well, Catherine believed, it would raise the levels of government administration, of justice, and of tolerance within her empire. She also hoped that it would announce to Europe that a new era, informed by the principles of the Enlightenment, was beginning in Russia.

When Catherine took the throne, the Russian legal code, promulgated in 1649 by Tsar Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, was chaotically obsolete. Since the code had first been issued, thousands of new laws had appeared, often without reference to previous laws on the same subject. There was no complete set of statute books. Imperial decrees by successive rulers conflicted, and ministers and officials issued new laws that contradicted earlier laws without the latter being annulled. The result was that government departments were disorganized, administration throughout the empire was inefficient and corrupt, and failure to define the authority of local officials had led to landowners taking ever greater powers at the expense of the peasantry.

Peter the Great’s long reign (1689–1725) had aggravated this chaos. Peter’s emphasis had been on reform by action; half of his decrees had never been recorded. No successor could have had more respect for the great reforming tsar than Catherine. Peter had made Russia into a European power; he had created a Western capital with access to Europe, launched a navy, mobilized a victorious army, brought women into society, demanded religious tolerance, and promoted the nation’s industry and commerce. But he had died at fifty-two, and in the forty years since his death, lazy and incompetent rulers had made the confusion in Russian law worse. Catherine saw it as her task to clarify and complete what Peter had begun. Having absorbed liberal eighteenth-century political theory, which stressed the power of good laws to change society, Catherine concluded that the remedy for the flaws in her empire would be a new legal code. Because she had reached the throne steeped in the ideas of an enlightened European, she decided that these new laws should be based on Enlightenment principles.

Her plan was to summon a national assembly elected from all of the free social classes and ethnic groups of the empire. She would listen to their complaints and invite them to propose new laws to correct these flaws. Before this assembly gathered, however, Catherine decided that she must provide its members with a set of guiding principles upon which she wished the new laws to be founded. The result was her Nakaz, published under the full title Instruction of Her Imperial Majesty Catherine the Second for the Commission Charged with Preparing a Project of a New Code of Laws. It was the work that Catherine considered the most significant intellectual achievement of her life and her greatest contribution to Russia.