The Icon and the Axe

Nevertheless, Catherine was closer to the spirit of Montesquieu's politics than many who followed him more literally on specific points. Her effort to make monarchy unlimited yet fully rational; her sense of adjusting political forms to environmental necessities; her increasing recognition of the need for active aristocratic support so that the spirit of honor could be enlisted to support the rule of reason-all of this was clearly in the spirit of the man who did so much to turn men's eyes away from the letter to the spirit of law.

If the Spirit of the Laws provided Catherine with the image of rationally ordered politics, the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert, which began to appear three years later in 1751, provided the image of rationally ordered knowledge. Her enthusiasm for this work soon rivaled her passion for Montesquieu. D'Alembert declined Catherine's invitation to serve as tutor to her son; but Diderot considered transferring the editorial side of his work to Riga, and eventually sold his library to Catherine and came to St. Petersburg.30 Three volumes of the Encyclopedia had been translated almost immediately into Russian under the supervision of the director of Moscow University. A private translation was concurrently being made by the future historian Ivan Boltin, and many articles and sections were translated individually.

For the rational ordering of economic life, Catherine turned first (at Diderot's suggestion) to the French physiocrat, Lemercier de la Riviere; then, following his unhappy visit to Russia,31 she sent two professors from Moscow to study under Adam Smith in Glasgow. Her most original approach was the founding in 1765 of a Free Economic Society for the Encouragement in Russia of Agriculture and Household Management: a kind of extra-governmental advisory body. Two years later she offered one thousand gold pieces for the best set of recommendations on how to organize an agricultural economy "for the common good." The society received

164 entries in this remarkable Europe-wide contest, with the greatest response and the prize-winning essay coming from France.32

In practice, however, there was no reorganization of agriculture, just as there was no new law code or synthesis of knowledge. The shock caused by the Pugachev uprising put an end to the languishing legislative commission and to the various efforts to make the Encyclopedia the basis for widespread public enlightenment. Boltin's translation died at the letter "K"- the first of the host of uncompleted reference books with which Russian history is so tragically full.33

Yet even while Cathering was preparing Pugachev for quartering, she continued to correspond with the Corsican revolutionary Paoli (and another restless Corsican, the then obscure Napoleon Bonaparte considered entering her service).34

Only after the French Revolution did Catherine's thoughts turn away from reform altogether to a final assertion of unleavened despotism. Even 1 then she bequeathed the dilemma to Alexander J^ by assigning to him the «Swiss republican La Harpe as a tutor and by surrounding him with an aristocratic entourage of Anglophile liberals. Alexander I in turn willed to Alexander II some of this dangerous taste for partial reform when a friend from his own liberal days, Michael Speransky, became one of the tutors.

At the end of her long trail of literary and literal seductions, Catherine left aristocratic Russia stimulated, but in no way satisfied. By sending most of the aristocratic elite abroad for education, she imparted a vague sense of possibility, a determination to "overtake and surpass" the Enlightenment of the West. /{Vet the actual reforms accomplished in her reign were too meager even to provide clear guidance toward this goal. From Catherine, aristocratic thinkers received only their inclination to look Westward for answers. They learned to think in terms of sweeping reforms on abstract, rationalistic grounds rather than piecemeal changes rooted in concrete conditions and traditions.

Particularly popular under Catherine was the vague idea that newJy, conquered jegions to the south could provide virgin soil on which to raise out of nothing a new civilization. Voltaire told Catherine that he would come to Russia if Kiev were made the capital rather than St. Petersburg. Herder's earliest dream of earthly glory was to be "a new Luther and Solon" for the Ukraine: to make this unspoiled and fertile region into "a new Greece."36 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre believed that an egalitarian agricultural community, possibly even a new Pennsylvania, might be created in the region around the Aral Sea.36 Catherine herself dreamed of making her new city below Kiev on the Dnieper, Ekaterinoslav ("Praise Catherine"), a

monumental center for world culture and her newly conquered port on the Black Sea, Kherson, a new St. Petersburg.37