not intimate relations with a host of minor German princesses, including the mother of Catherine the Great. Thus, when Catherine ascended to the throne, Betskoy commended himself to the young empress as a man with excellent intellectual and physiological qualifications for the court. Like Catherine's special favorites, Orlov and Potemkin, Betskoy was drawn to the Empress and her projects for reform partly because of antagonism to the more established aristocracy. Whereas most older aristocrats sympathized with Panin's efforts to have an aristocratic council limit tsarist authority, Betskoy and his allies sought to expand that authority as a means of furthering their own relative position in the hierarchy. Whereas the older aristocrats tended to adopt the measured rationalism of Voltaire and Diderot, Catherine's less secure courtiers tended to prefer the visionary ideas of Rousseau. There was perhaps a certain sense of identity between these relative outsiders to the Russian aristocracy and the Genevan outsider to the aristocratic Paris of the philosophes. Basically, however, the Russian turn from Voltaire to Rousseau reflected a general turn in intellectual fashion among European reformist circles of the 1770's and 1780's. Orlov invited Rousseau to come to Russia and take up permanent residence on his estate; one of the Potemkins became Rousseau's principal Russian translator; Catherine retreated increasingly to her own Rousseauian 'Hermitage'; and the 'general plan of education' which Betskoy presented to her was partly based on Rousseau's Emile.47
Betskoy sought to create in Russia 'a new breed of man' freed from the artificiality of contemporary society for a more natural way of life. The government was to assume responsibility for this new type of education, seeking to develop the heart as well as the mind, to encourage physical as well as mental development, and to place the teaching of morality at the head of the curriculum. In his search for elements suitable for remolding through pedagogical experiment he had to look no further than his own origins. Bastards and orphans-the rejected material of society-were to become the cornerstones of his new temple of humanity. On the basis of a close study of secular philanthropic activities in England and France, Betskoy set up in Moscow and Petersburg foundling homes which were to
become major centers of initiation into the new Russian Enlightenment. Foundling homes are even now called 'educational' (vospitatel'nye) homes in Russia, and these first ones were set up
… to overcome the superstition of centuries, to give the people their new education and, so to speak, their new birth (porozhdenie).48
They were to remain totally removed from the outside world in these secular monasteries from age five or six to eighteen or twenty; but, in fact, many entered at two or three, and were neither bastards nor orphans.
Betskoy was Russia's first de facto minister of education, serving as president of the Academy of Arts, organizing planner for the Smolny Monastery for women (the only one of these 'monastic' schools to outlive him), and reorganizer of the curriculum for the infantry corps of cadets-as well as head of the foundling homes and an influential adviser to the Academy of Sciences and many private tutors. He was also a resourceful fund raiser, promoting special theatrical benefits and a lucrative tax for education on another favorite aristocratic recreation: playing cards. He died in 1795, just a year before his sovereign benefactor, and willed his substantial private fortune of 400,000 rubles to his educational projects. As he was lowered into the grave, the most honored poet of the age, Gabriel Derzhavin, read a specially written 'On the End of the Philanthropist' to this 'ray of goodness.' The poem was, as it were, the secular substitute for the 'Eternal Memory' of the Orthodox burial service. Now 'heaven, truth, saintliness' were made to 'cry out above the grave' that their 'light' was immortal even if their lives were only 'smoke.' 'Without good deeds,' Derzhavin concludes, 'there is no blessedness.'48
One can, of course, question what the real number of 'good deeds' or extent of civic 'blessedness' was under Catherine. Slje never shared her courtiers' fondness for Rousseau, and forbade-long before the Pugachev uprising- the circulation of many of his key works, including Emile. She viewed Rousseau as 'a new St. Bernard,' who was arming France and all of Europe for 'a spiritual crusade against me.'50 Nevertheless, the all-important fourth part of Emile, the 'Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,' readily slipped through the hands of the censors when it appeared in Russian translation in 1770 under the 'Aesopian' title 'Meditations on the Majesty of God, on His Providence and on Man.'
The historical importance of the Russian Enlightenment under Catherine cannot be denied. Russians had been introduced to a new world of thought that was neither theological nor technological, but involved the remaking of the whole man in accordance with a new secular ideal of ethical activism. Moreover, the idea was established that this moral educa-
tion was properly the responsibility of the government. Betskoy was thoroughly devoted to autocracy, and sought to enlist government support for his educational program on the grounds that it would serve to produce a select elite uniquely loyal to the imperial cause.
Like Montesquieu in politics, Betskoy in education set the tone for much subsequent discussion in Russia, without seeing many of his practical prescriptions adopted. Betskoy's interest in using the Russian language was disregarded by academies and tutors alike, who were expected to familiarize aristocratic youth with Western European rather than Russian or Byzantine tradition. His interest in a measure of practical training in trades was never able to modify the pronounced emphasis on non-technical and broadly philosophical subjects. Time spent in higher educational institutions generally counted as state service for noblemen or for those aspiring to a title. A leisurely and dilettantish education was better preparation for life among the aristocracy than industrious specialization.51 Betskoy's more earnest boarding schools were remembered mainly as the object of humorous barbs, usually aimed at the 'child-like Betskoy' {detskoy-Betskoy).
Betskoy's last important service to Catherine was supervising the embellishment of St. Petersburg. With characteristic thoroughness he organized expeditions to Siberia to bring back rare and decorative stones, arranged for importation of stone from Finland and the manufacture of bricks in St. Petersburg, and helped put in their final place a variety of statues, including Falconet's long-labored equestrian statue of Peter the Great in the Senate Square.52 This imposing memorial to Peter became, through Pushkin's famous poem 'The Bronze Horseman,' an enduring symbol of both the majestic power and the impersonal coldness of the new capital. Catherine's pretense in placing a monumental facade over widespread suffering seems in some ways anticipatory of the dostoprimechatel'nosti ('imposing sights') in the midst of terror in the Stalin era. Her city below Kiev on the Dnieper (Ekaterinoslav, now Dniepropetrovsk) became the site of the first and most celebrated mammoth construction project of the Soviet era: the hydroelectric dam of the 1920's.
The most important link between the Russia of Catherine and that of the revolutionary era lies, however, in the creation of a new class of secular intellectuals vaguely inclined toward sweeping reform. Betskoy had spoken of developing through education a 'third rank' of citizens along with the aristocracy and the peasantry.53 The educated intellectuals did indeed come to constitute a new rank in society outside the table of ranks created by Peter. They found their solidarity, however, not as a class of enlightened state servitors, as Betskoy had hoped, but as an 'intelligentsia' estranged from the state machine. This was the 'new race of men' to come out of
Catherine's cultural upheaval: the unofficial 'third rank' between the ruling aristocracy and the servile peasantry.
For Catherine's reign saw a profound and permanent change in the source of internal opposition to imperial authority. Whereas the first half was plagued by violent protest movements among the lower classes, climaxing in the Pugachev uprising, the latter half of her reign saw the first appearance of 'Pugachevs from the academies': a new kind of opposition from within the educated aristocracy. The estrangement of these intellectuals from their aristocratic background resulted not so much from any changes in the sovereign's attitude toward reform as from an inner ripening of ideas within the thinking community itself. Since this intellectual ferment was to play a vital role
