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
Rather than come to grips with the concrete problems of her realm, Catherine became infatuated in her declining years with her 'grand design' for taking Constantinople and dividing the Balkans with the Hapsburg emperor. She named her second grandson Constantine, placed the image of the Santa 'Sophia on her coins, and wrote a dramatic extravaganza, The First Government of Oleg, which ends with this early Russian conqueror-prince leaving his shield behind in Constantinople for future generations to reclaim.38
Having subdued at last the entire northern coast of the Black Sea, Catherine adorned it with a string of new cities-often on the site of old Greek settlements-Azov, Taganrog, Nikolaev, Odessa, and Sevastopol. The latter, built as a fortress on the southwest corner of the Crimean peninsula, was given the Greek version of the Roman imperial title Augusta. Built by an English naval engineer, Samuel Bentham, the 'august city' (sevaste polis) inspired nothing original except for the eerie plan of Samuel's famous brother Jeremy for a panopticon: a prison in which a central observer could peer into all cells.39 Sevastopol is remembered not for the awe it inspired but for the humiliation it brought to Russia when captured by British and French invaders during the Crimean War. More than any other single event, the fall of the 'august city' in 1855 dispelled illusion and forced Russia to turn from external glory to internal reform.
But external glory preoccupied Catherine during the latter part of her reign. Her world of illusion is. symbolized by the famed legend that portable 'Potemkin villages' were devised by her most famous courtier to camouflage the misery of the people from her eyes during triumphal tours. She spent her last years (and almost her last rubles) building pretentious palaces for her favorites, foreign advisers and relatives: Tauride in St. Petersburg and nearby Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo (which she intended to name Constantingorod). The costumes and sets were more impressive than the actual plays in Catherine's theater. She expressed a preference for extended divertissements, and insisted that serious operas be cut from three acts to two. It seems strangely appropriate that four different versions of the Pygmalion story were staged during the reign of Catherine. This minor German princess had been transformed into a northern goddess by the sages of the eighteenth century; but in this case the reality was less impressive than the figure on the pedestal. Even today the monument to her in front of the former imperial (now Saltykov-Shchedrin) library in Leningrad still is usually seen rising up from a sea of mud. Her every movement was surrounded with cosmetic camouflage and rococo frills. In an age when cutout
silhouettes and surface flourishes were in vogue throughout Europe, Catherine brought the silhouette without the substance of reform to Russia.40 As a final monument to her vanity, she left behind five feast days consecrated to her alone on the church calendar: her birthday, day of succession to the throne, day of coronation, name day, and the day of her smallpox vaccination, November 21.41
Catherine's turn from inner reform to external aggrandizement is dramatically illustrated by the three-sided and three-staged dismemberment of Poland. Having helped place her youthful friend and lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the Polish throne in 1764, Catherine participated in the first partition of Poland in 1772; then took the lead in the last two, which followed Stanisfaw's adoption in 1791 of a reform constitution not dissimilar to those which Catherine had considered in earlier days.42 The absorption of Poland had, however, the ironic effect of helping to perpetuate the very tradition that Catherine was rejecting. For Stanislaw promptly moved to St. Petersburg along with his relatives, the Czartoryski family, and many other reform-minded survivors of the old Polish republic.
Catherine's first grandson, Alexander, resembled less the Macedonian conqueror for whom he was named than the Polish visionaries whom he met in his youth. Her second grandson, Constantine, became the rallying point for the reformist elements in the guards regiments who assembled in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 14, 1825, after Alexander's death. But these 'Decembrists' related the name Constantine not to Constantinople but to constitution-some of their illiterate followers even believing that the Russian word konstitutsiia was the name of his wife. The Decembrists were calling not for an imperial commander but for a man who had become the governor of Poland and was thought to provide some kind of link with its more moderate reformist traditions. To understand why these moderate constitutionalists were crushed, and the dilemma of the reforming despot firmly resolved in favor of despotism under Nicholas I, one must turn from symbols and omens to the crucial substantive changes which were effected in the direction of Russian thought under Catherine.
The Fruits of the Enlightenment
The concrete achievements of Catherine's domestic program seem strangely insignificant: the introduction of vaccination, paper money, and an improved system of regional administration. Yet her impact on Russian history went far deeper than the superficial statecraft and foreign conquest
for which she is justly renowned. More than any other single person prior * to the Leninist revolution, Catherine cut official culture loose from its religious roots, and changed both its physical setting and its philosophical preoccupations. Important changes in architecture and ideas must thus be analyzed if one is to understand the revolutionary nature and fateful consequences of Catherine's Enlightenment.
Catherine substituted the city for the monastery as the main center of Russian culture. She, and not Peter, closed down monasteries on a massive scale and tore down wooden symbols of Muscovy, such as the old summer
