Catherine the Great

She began working on the Nakaz in January 1765 and devoted two to three hours a day to it for two years. The document was published on July 30, 1767, and is, in the view of Isabel de Madariaga, the preeminent historian of Catherine’s Russia, “one of the most remarkable political treatises ever compiled and published by a reigning sovereign.” In 526 articles, grouped into twenty chapters, she presented her view of the nature of the Russian state and how it should be governed. She began with Locke’s belief that in an ordered society, law and freedom were necessary to one another, since the latter could not exist without the former. She drew heavily from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Law, published in 1748, which analyzed the structure of societies and the political rights of men in their relationship to the state. Of the total of 526 articles, 294 were taken or adapted from Montesquieu. She also drew 108 articles from the Italian jurist and legal scholar Cesare Beccaria, whose Essay on Crimes and Punishment had just been published in 1764. This work was a passionate attack on the relationship between crime and punishment in most states of contemporary Europe. Beccaria declared that the reform of the criminal, rather than his punishment, should be the purpose of laws, justice, and penal incarceration. Above all, Beccaria was revolted by the near-universal use of torture. Catherine, impressed by this work, immediately invited the author to come to Russia. Beccaria chose to stay in Milan.

Catherine’s Nakaz deals with an immense range of political, judicial, social, and economic questions. It discusses what Russia was at that moment, and what it should be; how society ought to be organized, and how government and the administration of justice ought to be conducted. Her tone was that of a teacher rather than an autocrat. Her preamble reminded delegates and readers that the Christian religion teaches people to do good to one another whenever possible. She expressed the belief that every man wished to see his country happy, glorious, tranquil, and safe, and that people wished to live under laws that protected but did not oppress them. From these opinions and principles, she proceeded to what she believed were the basic facts about her own empire. “Russia is a European state,” she declared, meaning with this statement to eliminate the Russian’s traditional sense of geographical and cultural isolation, as well as the disdain of Europeans who believed that Russia was only a remote, primitive backwater. From there, she moved directly to an explanation of the need for absolutism in Russia. The sovereign was absolute, she said, “for there is no authority but that which centers in his single person that can act with a vigor proportionate to such a vast dominion.” Any other form of government risked weakness.

She accepted from Montesquieu a qualification of her advocacy of absolutism; this was embodied in her acceptance of the limitation of the supreme power of the Russian autocrat by certain “fundamental laws.” These “laws” were defined as traditions, habits, and institutions so deeply rooted in the history and life of a society that no monarch, however absolute, could or would act in opposition to them. They included respect for the permanence of the nation’s dominant religion, for the law of succession to the throne, and for the existing rights and privileges of dominant social groups, such as the nobility. Montesquieu defined such a state with such a ruler as a “moderate monarchy.” In this sense, Catherine was defining and presenting Russia as a moderate autocracy.