A history of Russia

Legislative Commission, was in fact, even in its final attenuated version, a strikingly liberal document. Composed by Catherine the Great herself over a period of eighteen months, the Instruction found its inspiration in the thought of the Enlightenment, particularly in the writings of Montesquieu and the jurist Beccaria. Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws the empress referred to as her prayer book, served as the chief guide in political theory. Yet it should be noted that the willful sovereign adapted rather than copied the French philosopher: she paid lip service to his ideas, but either left them conveniently vague or changed them drastically in application to Russian reality; for example, Montesquieu's celebrated admiration of the division of powers in England into the executive, the legislative, and the judicial became an administrative arrangement meant to improve the functioning of Russian autocracy. The empress continued to believe that autocracy was the only feasible form of government for holding enormous Russia together. And in fairness it should be added that here, too, she had some support in the thought of the Enlightenment. Serfdom, on the other hand, she was willing to condemn in theory, although again she largely avoided the issue: the final draft of the Instruction contained merely a pious

wish that masters would not abuse their serfs. As to the influence of Beccaria, Catherine the Great could afford to follow his views more closely, as they were expressed in his treatise Crimes and Punishments, and she did. Thus the Instruction denounced capital punishment - which had already been stopped in Russia by Elizabeth - as well as torture, argued for crime prevention, and in general was abreast of advanced Western thought in criminology. On the whole, the liberalism of the Instruction produced a strong impression in a number of European countries, and led to its being banned in France.

The Legislative Commission, which opened deliberations in the summer of 1767, consisted of 564 deputies, 28 appointed and 536 elected. The appointees represented the state institutions, such as the Senate. The elected deputies comprised delegates from different segments of the population of the empire: 161 from the landed gentry, 208 from the townspeople, 79 from the state peasants, and 88 from the cossacks and national minorities. Yet this numerous gathering - an 'all-Russian ethnographic exhibition,' to quote Kliuchevsky - excluded large bodies of the Russian people: the serfs, obviously, but also, in line with the secular tendency of the Enlightenment, the clerical class, although the Holy Synod was represented by a single appointed deputy. Delegates received written instructions or mandates from their electorates, including the state peasants, who, together with the cossacks and national minorities, supplied over a thousand such sets of instructions. Taken together, the instructions of 1767 offer the historian insight into the Russian society of the second half of the eighteenth century comparable to that obtainable for France in the famous cahiers of 1789. Kizevetter and other scholars have emphasized the following well-nigh universal characteristics of the instructions: a practical character; a definite acceptance of the existing regime; a desire for decentralization; complaints of unbearable financial demands and, in particular, requests to lower the taxes; and a wish to delineate clearly the rights and the obligations of all the classes of society.

The Legislative Commission met for a year and a half, holding 203 sessions; in addition, special committees were set up to prepare the ground for dealing with particular issues. But all this effort came to naught. The commission proved unwieldy, not enough preliminary work had been done, often there seemed to be little connection between the French philosophy of the empress's Instruction and Russian reality. Most important, however, the members of the commission split along class lines. For example, gentry delegates argued with merchant representatives over serf ownership and rights to engage in trade and industry. More ominously, gentry deputies clashed with those of the peasant class on the crucial issue of serfdom. No doubt Catherine the Great quickly realized the potential

danger of such confrontations. The outbreak of war against Turkey in 1768 provided a good occasion for disbanding the Legislative Commission. Some committees continued to meet for several more years until the Pugachev rebellion, but again without producing any practical results. Still, the abortive convocation of the Commission served some purpose: it gave Catherine the Great considerable information about the country and influenced both the general course of her subsequent policy and certain particular reforms.

Pugachev's Rebellion

Social antagonisms which simmered in the Legislative Commission exploded in the Pugachev rebellion. That great uprising followed the pattern of earlier lower-class insurrections, such as the ones led by Bolotnikov, Razin, and Bulavin, which strove to destroy the established order. A simple Don cossack, a veteran of several wars and a deserter, Emelian Pugachev capitalized on the grievances of the Ural cossacks to lead them in revolt against the authorities in the autumn of 1773. Before long the movement spread up and down the Ural river and also westward to the Volga basin. At its height the rebellion encompassed a huge territory in eastern European Russia, engulfing such important cities as Kazan and posing a threat to Moscow itself.

Pugachev profited from the fact that Russia was engaged at the time in a major war against Turkey, that few troops were stationed in the eastern part of the country, and that many local officials, as well as, to some extent, the central government itself, panicked when they belatedly realized the immediacy and extent of the danger. Yet his most important advantages stemmed from the nature and the injustice of the Russian social system. The local uprising of the Ural cossacks became a mass rebellion. Crowds of serfs, workers in the Ural mines and factories, Old Believers, Bashkirs, Tartars, and certain other minority peoples, joined Pugachev's original cossack following. Indeed, some specialists believe that Pugachev should have shown more daring and marched directly on Moscow in the heart of the serf area. As Pushkin's A Captain's Daughter illustrates, few, except officials, officers, and landlords, tried to stem the tide.

Pugachev acted in the grand manner. He proclaimed himself Emperor Peter III, alleging that he had fortunately escaped the plot of his wife Catherine; and he established a kind of imperial court in imitation of the one in St. Petersburg. He announced the extermination of officials and landlords, and freedom from serfdom, taxation, and military service for the people. Pugachev and his followers organized an active chancellery and engaged in systematic propaganda. Also, the leaders of the rebellion arranged elections for a new administration in the territory that they held,

and they tried to form a semblance of a regular army with a central staff and an artillery, for which Ural metal workers supplied some of the guns.

Although the extent and organization of the Pugachev uprising deservedly attract attention, it still suffered from the usual defects of such movements: a lack of preparation, co-ordination, and leadership. Small army detachments, when well commanded, could defeat peasant hordes. After government victories and severe reprisals, the raging sea of rebellion would vanish almost as rapidly as it had appeared. In late 1774, following the defeat of his troops and his escape back to the Ural area, Pugachev was handed over by his own men to the government forces. He was brought to Moscow, tried, and executed in an especially cruel manner. The great uprising had run its course.

The Pugachev rebellion served to point out again, forcefully and tragically, the chasm between French philosophy and Russian reality. Catherine the Great had in any case allied herself with the gentry from the time of the palace coup which gave her the throne, and it is highly doubtful that she had ever seriously intended to act against any essential interests of the landlords. The sharp division of her reign into the early liberal years and a later period of conservatism and reaction appears none too convincing. Still, the enormous shock of the revolt, following the milder one of the collapse of the work of the Legislative Commission because of social antagonisms, made the alliance between the crown and the gentry very close, explicit, and even militant. In the conditions of eighteenth-century Russia and as a logical result of the policies followed by the Russian government, the two had to sink or swim together. Yet Catherine the Great was too intelligent to become simply a reactionary. She intended instead to combine oppression and coercion with a measure of reform and a great deal of propaganda.

Reforms. The Gentry and the Serfs

The new system of local government introduced by Catherine the Great in 1775 was closely related to the Pugachev rebellion, although it also represented an attempt to bolster this perennially weak aspect of the administration and organization of Russia. Frightened by the collapse of authority at the time of the revolt, the empress meant to strengthen government in the provinces by means of decentralization, a clear distribution of powers and functions, and local gentry participation. She divided some fifteen major administrative units, through