Catherine the Great

In Kazan, where she stayed for a week, Catherine found herself in a different world. Surrounded by ethnic and cultural diversity, she considered the applicability to Russia of the principles she had inscribed in the Nakaz. On May 29, she wrote to Voltaire:

These laws, about which so much has been said, are … not yet enacted, and who can answer for their usefulness? It is posterity, and not we, who will have to decide. Consider, if you will, that they must be applied to Asia as well as Europe, and what difference of climate, people, customs, and even ideas! … There are in this city twenty different peoples who do not resemble each other at all. We have, nevertheless, to design a garment to fit them all. They can agree on general principles well enough, but what about the details?

Two days later, in another letter to Ferney, she returned to this theme:

There are so many objects worthy of a glance, one could collect enough ideas here for ten years. This is an empire to itself and only here can one see what an immense enterprise it is as concerns our laws, and how little these conform to the situation of the empire in general.

Traveling south down the great river, Catherine marveled at the wealth of nature along its banks. To Nikita Panin, she wrote:

Here, the people along the Volga are rich and extremely well fed. The grain of every kind is so good here and the wood is nothing other than oak and linden. The earth is such dark stuff as is seen nowhere else. In a word, these people are spoiled by God. Since birth I have not eaten such tasty fish as here, and everything is in such abundance that one cannot imagine, and I do not know anything they might need; everything is here.

She and her party disembarked in Simbirsk to return to Moscow. A century and a half later, Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister of the 1917 Russian provisional government, described Simbirsk, which was his birthplace:

The town rose high on a hill overlooking the river and the meadowlands of rich, fragrant grass stretching to the eastern horizon. From the summit right down to the water stretched luxuriant apple and cherry orchards. In the spring the whole mountainside was white with blossoms, fragrant, and at night, breathless with the songs of nightingales.

Back in Moscow, Catherine prepared for the opening of the Legislative Commission. With the delegates arriving in the city, Catherine decided to impress them with the importance of the work they were about to undertake. On the morning of Sunday, July 30, she drove though the streets to the Kremlin, sitting alone in a gilded carriage. After a religious ceremony in the Assumption Cathedral, she walked to the Palace of Facets, where the delegates were presented to her as she sat above them on a raised throne. On her right, a table draped in red velvet displayed copies of the Nakaz bound in red leather; on her left stood Grand Duke Paul, the ministers of the government, members of the court, and foreign ambassadors. A welcoming speech compared Catherine to Justinian. She responded by telling the delegates that they had a unique opportunity “to glorify yourselves and your country, and to acquire for yourselves the respect and gratitude of future centuries.” She presented each delegate with a copy of the Nakaz and a gold medal on a chain. The medal was stamped with an image of the empress. Its inscription read: “For the welfare of one and all.” The medals were popular and many were promptly sold.

The following morning, the commission began its work. Over several days, the vice-chancellor, Prince Alexander Golitsyn, read Catherine’s Nakaz aloud. This was the first of many readings, necessary because many delegates could not read. The impact of this document on moderately educated noblemen, town merchants, peasants whose horizons were limited to their own province, if not their own village, not to mention tribesmen from beyond the Volga, can only be guessed. The difficulty lay in knowing what a Cossack from the Don, or a Kalmuck from the steppes, would make of principles largely borrowed from Montesquieu, and selected and arranged by a German-born princess. Aphorisms such as “Liberty is the right to do all that is not forbidden by law” were ideas so alien to the majority of Russians as to be almost incomprehensible.