palace of the tsars at Kolomenskoe. In some of the monasteries that remained open she placed pseudo-classical bell towers that clashed with everything else and demonstrated her inability to make even token gestures to the old religious culture of Muscovy.
Convinced that men have always honored 'the memory of the founders of cities equally with the memory of lawmakers,'43 she appointed a commission at the beginning of her reign to plan a systematic rebuilding of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and encouraged it to draw up plans for building or renovating some 416 other cities. St. Petersburg was soon transformed from an imitation Dutch naval base into a stately granite capital. New cities were built, and the over-all urban population, which had increased only slightly since the time of Peter the Great, nearly doubled between 1769 and 1782. In many of her rebuilt cities, from Tver to Tobol'sk, Catherine was able to realize her ideal of rational uniformity. Yaroslavl, second in size only to Moscow among cities of the interior, was beautifully transformed by superimposing a radiocentric grid of broad streets onto the jumbled city, and by subtly converting its ornate late-Muscovite churches into decorative terminal points for streets and promenades. The perfection and large-scale manufacture of uniform-sized bricks created new practical possibilities for rebuilding wooden provincial cities. Throughout the realm, architectural mass began to replace the florid decorative effects of both the high Muscovite style and the Elizabethan rococo, igimple, neo-classical shapes-semi-circular arches and domes and Doric columns-dominated the new urban architecture, where the design of the ensemble generally determined the proportions of the individual structure.
Of course, many of Catherine's plans for cities were completely impractical; many more were never acted on; and the percentage of total population in the cities remained minute and to a large extent seasonal. Those cities which were built conformed only to a prescribed pattern of roads and squares, and of design on important facing surfaces. Lesser streets and all block interiors were completely uncontrolled-testifying in their squalor to the superficiality of Catherine's accomplishment. Behind all
the facades and profiles lay an enserfed peasantry and a swollen, disease-ridden army distracted from their cohective misfortunes by a running tide of military conquest. Thousands of provincial figures-including many who were neither aristocratic nor literate-participated in building the new cities; and architecture proved in many ways as important as literature in spreading the new ideal of rational order and classical style.
Nevertheless, the majestic, artificial city of Catherine's era provided a new center and symbol for Russian culture. Catherine's new cities were not basically commercial centers, the traditional arenas for the development of a practical-minded bourgeois culture, but rather aristocratic cities: provincial showplaces for the newly acquired elegance and pro-consular power of the aristocracy. Town planners were more concerned with providing plazas for military reviews than places for trade and industry; architects devoted their ingenuity to convertible theater- ballrooms rather than convenient facilities for ordinary goods and services.
Because so many of her new cities were administrative centers for her newly created provincial governments, the city center was dominated by political rather than religious buildings. Horizontal lines replaced vertical ones as the narrow streets, tent roofs, and onion domes of the wooden cities were swept away. The required ratio of 2:1 between the width of major streets and the height of facing buildings became 4:1m many cases. Such artificially broadened promenades and the sprawling squares visible from pseudo-classical porches and exedras gave the ruling aristocracy an imposing sense of space.
Having just conquered the southern steppe and settled on a provincial estate, the officer-aristocrat in the late years of Catherine's reign was newly conscious of the land; and its vastness seemed both to mock and to menace his pretensions. In the new cities to which he repaired for the long winter, he could feel physically secure in a way that was never before possible in Russian cities. The danger of fire was greatly reduced by the progressive elimination of wooden buildings and narrow streets; the last great peasant uprising had been quelled; and the key bases of Tatar raiders in the south were finally captured.
Yet gone also was the psychological security of the old Muscovite cities with their outer walls and inner kremlins capped by the domes and spires that lifted eyes upward. The city was now dominated by the horizontal stretch of roads leading from a central space at the heart of the city to the greater spaces that lay all around. Into such cities, the ruling aristocrats brought an inner malaise not unrelated to the limitlessness and monotony of the steppe and to the artificiality of their own position on it.
A belief in the liberating and ennobling power of education was per-
haps the central article of faith in the European Enlightenment. But the practical problem of providing secular education for the relatively rootless and insecure Russian aristocracy proved profoundly vexing. Both the limited accomplishments and the deeper problems are illustrated in the career of Ivan Betskoy, Catherine's principal court adviser on educational matters. His long life spanned ninety-two years of the eighteenth century; and most of his many-sided reformist activities were dedicated to the central concern of that century, the spread of education and public enlightenment.
The ideal of an expanded, Western type of school system had been present for several decades in the more advanced Western sections of the Russian Empire. German-educated Ukrainian seminarians like Gregory Teplov drew up elaborate plans; Herder, while a young pastor in Riga, dreamed of installing a system of instruction modeled on Rousseau's Emile. Baltic German graduates of Tartu, in Esthonia, brought with them the ideas of the Enlightenment that had begun to permeate that institution. Officers like Andrew Bolotov returned from the Seven Years' War with plans for streamlining Russian aristocratic instruction along lines set down by the victorious Frederick the Great.44
At first glance, Catherine's educational projects appear to be nothing more than another example of high hopes and minimal accomplishment. Encouraged by Locke's On the Education of Children (translated into Russian in 1761) and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to think of man as a tabula rasa on which education is free to print any message, Catherine discussed plans for education with everyone from the encyclopedists to the Jesuits (to whom she offered shelter after the Pope abolished the Society in 1773). However, the statute for public schools in the empire, drawn up with the aid of Jankovich de Mirievo, a Serb who had reorganized public education within the Hapsburg empire, remained largely a paper proclamation. While she talked of sowing seeds of knowledge throughout the empire, she let the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences lapse into a relatively fallow period in which little serious work was published.45
Yet certain important developments did take place in education; and almost all of them were connected with Betskoy, who, like most eighteenth-century Russian aristocrats, was widely traveled, trained to think in abstract, universal terms, and almost totally without deep roots in his Russian homeland. Estrangement was built into his very name, for Betskoy was a contraction of the old aristocratic name of Trubetskoy, of the sort frequently assumed by the illegitimate children of noble families. The Vorontsovs gave birth to more than a few Rantsovs; Golitsyns, Litsyns; Rumiantsevs, Miantsovs; Griboedovs, Gribovs, and so on. Betskoy was not alone in bearing this constant reminder of aristocratic profligacy. Ivan Pnin, whose
1804 treatise, On Enlightenment in Russia, went even further in proposing education for the peasantry, was also the bastard offspring of an old aristocratic line. His father, Prince Nicholas Repnin, was a friend of Betskoy known as the 'Russian Aristides' for his enlightened administrative activities in western Russia.46 Herzen, whose publications abroad later helped revive interest in the reformist currents of Catherine's time, also bore the stamp of illegitimate aristocratic birth.
Betskoy was born in Stockholm, educated in Copenhagen, spent most of his early life in Paris, and had close if
