Catherine the Great

No new code of Russian laws was produced. The distance stretching between an Enlightenment philosopher’s definition of an ideal monarchy and the immediate problems of everyday life in rural Russia was simply too great. Catherine looked to Montesquieu, but the nobles wanted confirmation and extension of status and privileges, and the peasants wanted restitution for broken fences, trampled crops, and illegally felled timber. Nevertheless, eighteen months and 203 sessions of effort were not entirely wasted. The documents submitted and discussed by delegates in the full assembly and the subcommissions contained a wealth of valuable information. Studying this mass of detail—these hundreds of grievances and competing claims—reinforced Catherine’s conviction that the stability of Russia depended on maintaining the absolute authority of the autocracy.

Along with strengthening Catherine’s belief in absolutism, something else had happened. Under the stimulus and protective cover of the Nakaz, the discussions in the full assembly and the various subcommissions had furnished delegates with new ideas that had never before been publicly discussed in Russia. In some cases, delegates actually quoted from a specific paragraph of Catherine’s Nakaz, using the authority of the empress to introduce and support their own ideas. Ultimately, despite the failure of the Legislative Commission to create a new law code, it made a contribution to the nation’s history. Taken together, the summons, the elections, and the 203 assembly sessions established a precedent for popular participation in government. It was the first attempt in imperial Russia to give the people a voice in their own political destiny.

Some have believed that the Legislative Commission achieved nothing, and that from the beginning both the Nakaz and the Legislative Commission were created simply for show, as no more than propaganda to impress Catherine’s Enlightenment friends abroad. This judgment is shallow. Naturally, Catherine welcomed Voltaire’s overheated praise for the Nakaz, but it does not follow that she wrote it simply to catch Voltaire’s eye and win his blessing. Indeed, the Catherine scholar Isabel de Madariaga says:

The idea that the principal purpose of such an expensive and time-consuming operation … was only to throw dust in the eyes of Western intellectuals … is difficult to accept. It was possible for Catherine to win their golden opinions by corresponding with them as she did with Voltaire; by buying Diderot’s library and leaving it in his possession; by inviting d’Alembert and Beccaria to come to Russia [although both refused]; by appointing Grimm as her personal agent in Paris.… This was sufficient evidence of Enlightenment credentials.… There was no need for her to embark on an enterprise of such major and time-consuming dimensions as the Legislative Commission.

It is worth noting that Catherine’s writing of the Nakaz and summons to the Legislative Commission took place nine years before Thomas Jefferson wrote, and the Continental Congress voted to approve, the American Declaration of Independence. It preceded by twenty-two years Louis XVI’s summons to the Estates-General. None of Catherine’s successors on the Russian throne dared to summon such an assembly again until 1905, when Nicholas II was forced by revolution to sign a document transforming Russia from an absolute autocracy to a semiconstitutional monarchy—and then, in 1906, to summon Russia’s first elected parliament, the State Duma.

53

“The King We Have Made”

ANEW LEGAL CODE adapted to the needs of contemporary Russia was important to Catherine, but conduct of foreign policy ranked first among her concerns. From the beginning of her reign, Catherine pursued an active, forward strategy in the tradition of Peter the Great. As soon as she took the throne, she assumed absolute control of Russia’s relations with foreign states. It was to inform her use of autocratic authority that she immediately demanded that she be shown all diplomatic dispatches arriving at the College of Foreign Affairs.