The Icon and the Axe

imperial authority by an aristocratic Imperial Council, Catherine turned in 1763 to the drawing up of a comprehensive defense of absolute monarchy. After three separate drafts, she submitted it to a specially convened legislative commission of 1766-7 which had a majority of non-aristocratic elements subject to her bidding. The commission unanimously awarded Catherine the title "Catherine the Great, Wise, Mother of the Fatherland" and arranged for the publication in Russian, German, French, and Latin of the final draft of her flowery philosophic defense of monarchy, generally known as the Instruction, or JVakaz.1*

Catherine and her successors paid a severe price, however, for this curious method of legitimizing usurpation. By undercutting the Panin proposals for bringing the aristocracy into the business of government, Catherine added to the already substantial sense of rootlessness which beset this class. The fact that she subsequently granted the aristocracy vast compensatory economic authority over their serfs and exemptions from government service only increased their capacity for idleness without increasing their sense of participation in affairs of state.

Even more important was the unsettling effect of justifying one's right to power on the totally new grounds of natural philosophy. Though the legislative commission did not in fact codify any laws, its detailed discussion and formal approval of Catherine's treatise helped put a large number of new and potentially subversive political ideas in circulation. According to the Nqkqz,Russja_was a Euroj3ejm__state, its subjects "citizens," and its proper laws those of the rational, natural order rather than the traditional historical one. Although th£uA£fl amp;zz~was not widely distributed within Russia, the legislative commission was broad enough in its representation to carry its ideas to every social group in Russia except the bonded peasantry. With four out of 18 million Russians represented by the 564 deputies, the commission was the first crude attempt at a genuinely national assembly since the zemsky sobers of the early seventeenth century;15 but it was strikingly different from all previous assemblies ever held on Russian soil in that it was totally secular. There was one deputy from the Synod, but none at all from the clerical estate.

Catherine's basic idea of the "good" and "natural" encouraged scepticism not only toward revealed religion but toward traditional natural philosophy as well. Her "Instruction" directed men's thinking not to ultimate truths or ideal prototypes but to a new relativistic and utilitarian perspective. It seems altogether appropriate that Jeremy Bentham, the father of English utilitarianism, was one of the most honored of foreign visitors to Catherine's Russia; and that translated books of and about Bentham in Russia soon began to outsell the original editions in England.16

Like a true utilitarian, Catherine defined legislation as "the Art of conducting People to the greatest Good," which is "whatever may be useful to mankind" in a given tradition and environment. Autocracy must rule through intermediary powers and clear laws, which require that the individual "be fully convinced that it was his Interest, as well as Duty, to preserve those Laws inviolable." The French monarchy rightly appraised the subversive implications of such an approach to the justification of authority, confiscating some two thousand copies en route to France in 1771, and preventing any of the twenty-four foreign versions of the work from being printed there.17

Catherine admired not only Bentham but his adversary, Blackstone, whose Commentaries she carefully studied and had translated in three volumes. She was widely admired not only in England but also in Italy, where a vast treatise was dedicated to her in 1778, celebrating the victorious alliance of power and reason in the eighteenth century.18 Nearly one sixth of the articles in Catherine's Nakaz were taken directly from the work of another Italian, Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishment, which armed Catherine with her conviction that crime comes from ignorance and poor laws, and punishment should be precise and pedagogic rather than arbitrary and vindictive.19

But it was always with the French that Catherine felt the greatest kinship. Commenting on the new alliance with France in 1756 just after it was concluded and well before her own accession to the throne, Catherine wrote that "if the gain is not great in commerce, we shall compensate ourselves with bales of intelligence."20

The bales had already begun to arrive with the first appearance of a French-language journal on Russian soil in 1755, and with the unprecedented sale of three thousand copies of Voltaire's Philosophy of History in St. Petersburg alone within a few days of its appearance in 1756.21