Catherine the Great

begun, and invested only in her personal glory.¹²³ That accusation was false. Having overcome two serious challenges to her authority—a plot among the Guards to restore Ivan VI to the throne in 1763, and a much more menacing attempt by the guardsman Mirovich to release Ivan from captivity while Catherine and her Court were at Reval in 1764—she embarked on her most ambitious project of all. ‘For the last two months,’ she told Madame Geoffrin at the end of March 1765, ‘I have spent three hours every morning working on the laws of this empire. It is an immense task.’¹²⁴ This was the origin of the great treatise which she intended to present to a new Legislative Commission in Moscow. By the time she was ready to convene it, there was nothing insecure about Catherine’s position on the throne. As if to prove it, while the greater part of the Russian political nation gathered in the old capital to prepare for the commission’s opening, she herself set sail on a voyage down the Volga to Kazan, a Muslim city 500 miles east of Moscow, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 as his ‘gateway to Siberia’.

CHAPTER SEVEN Philosopher on the Throne 1767–1768

As news of Catherine’s travel plans leaked out in the summer of 1766, the foreign ambassadors were consumed with curiosity about her motives. ‘There has been no other question here for some time,’ reported Rossignol, Louis XV’s secret envoy, on 13 May. Since the journey would oblige her to exchange her fine Petersburg palaces for ‘an old house made of wood’, as the king’s official ambassador put it, she could hardly be travelling for pleasure. The notion that the journey was intended to quell growing turbulence in Moscow seemed equally improbable. Even if Princess Dashkova was stirring up trouble there, ‘distant storms’ were unlikely to threaten Catherine and she would scarcely be wise to move closer to a centre of unrest. Rossignol was prepared to believe that the whole expedition might be no more than a stunt on the part of the pretentious Orlovs. But he gave little credence to rumours that the empress intended to marry Grigory: ‘I doubt that she still has that idea, if it ever existed, especially since the Synod has come out against this union, which would surely revolt all the great men of this empire.’ In the end, he was driven to the reluctant conclusion that Catherine must indeed be intent on the bold experiment that Russians had begun to talk about: ‘It is said that the Empress will promulgate a code which she wishes to substitute for the multitude of contradictory edicts which are the only laws of this empire and which serve merely as a resource for the dishonesty of litigants, and even more often for that of judges.’¹

Despite the title Code russe, given to the third French edition in 1775, the Great Instruction (Bolshoy Nakaz) on which Catherine had been slaving away since the beginning of 1765 was never intended as a law code. ‘Don’t let the title frighten you as if it anticipated us,’ Jeremy Bentham reassured his brother while working on his own Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: ‘It is only a plan for putting the Courts of Justice upon a regular establishment.’² In fact, the empress’s Instruction was much more than that. She intended it partly as a statement of the theoretical foundations of her own regime, and partly as a guide to the Enlightened principles on which a better government and society might ultimately rest. When she had finished, she told Frederick the Great how hard it had been to take account of present needs without ‘closing off the way forward to a more favourable future’.³ Joking that she hoped she might be forgiven for plagiarism, she made no attempt to disguise her debt to two of the most advanced works of Western political thought: Montesquieu’s On the Spirit of the Laws (1748) and On Crimes and Punishments (1764) by the Milanese jurist Cesare Beccaria. Yet even filleting their books into a slimmer treatise of her own was ‘an immense task’ in itself, as she told Madame Geoffrin, and it occupied most of her mornings for the best part of eighteen months: ‘If providence allows, I hope to put everything in a more natural order, acknowledged by humanity and founded on public and private utility.’⁴ Such labours took their toll. When Catherine came to complete a medical questionnaire in advance of her inoculation against smallpox in 1768, she complained of unbearable headaches over the previous two years, caused by tired eyes, ‘overwork, and the fact that for three years running I got up at between four and five in the morning’.⁵

The ultimate task of codification could scarcely have been more ambitious. The comprehensive code envisaged by Peter the Great in 1700 had been completed only after his death and was never promulgated. Since then, four further attempts had come to grief. The most recent, inspired by Peter Shuvalov in 1754, had collapsed during the Seven Years’ War, though it remained formally in existence in 1766. Although Catherine admired the direct style of the last complete Russian Law Code, issued as long ago as 1649—‘We listen with pleasure when extracts are quoted from it; no one can mistake the meaning of what he hears; the words in it are understood even by persons of middling capacities’⁶—the catalogue of brutal punishments approved by Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich scarcely matched her own views on the subject. And since many of the thousands of edicts promulgated in the intervening period remained unpublished, and some were mutually contradictory, there was much to do to bring order out of chaos. This task was to be left to a new Legislative Commission, a consultative body at which elected deputies from the free estates of the Russian empire—nobles, merchants, townsmen and state peasants—were to be encouraged to reveal the needs of provincial society ‘from below’. Meanwhile, as her subjects launched themselves into elections set in motion in December 1766, the empress planned to see Russian provincial life for herself.⁷ As she explained to Voltaire the following March:

In June this great assembly will begin its sessions, and it will tell us what it needs. After which we shall work on laws of which, I hope, humanity will not disapprove. From now until then, I shall be making a tour of various provinces the length of the Volga; and perhaps at the moment when you least expect it, you will receive a letter from some little hut in Asia.⁸

Since no imperial journey was undertaken without elaborate preparation, plans for the Volga expedition developed alongside those for the Legislative Commission. They were already well advanced by the time of Catherine’s trip to the Ladoga Canal in summer 1765, when Paul was excited to hear from Ivan Chernyshev of the special vessels being designed for the cruise.⁹ To build these boats, at an eventual cost of almost 40,000 roubles, Captain P. I. Pushchin was sent out in December to Tver, the empress’s favourite provincial capital, where the adventure was to begin. While a new neoclassical town was rebuilt around him following the great fire of 1763, he oversaw the construction of a luxurious galley for Catherine—in effect, a small floating palace—and a further twenty-four large vessels, including one for a detachment of the imperial hunt. This was the fleet which eventually set sail in April 1767 with Pushchin in command of 23 officers, 779 sailors, and a guard of 345. Further downstream, numberless churches and monasteries were spruced up in anticipation of Catherine’s arrival. At every calling point on the river, she moored at a newly built quayside covered with green or red cloth; miles of canvas sheeting kept her feet dry as she walked ashore. While three detachments of Cossacks had been dispatched to ward off the bandit gangs reported to be gathering along the Volga’s tributaries in Penza province in the summer of 1766, soldiers were sent in December to all the major towns along the route, partly to maintain order and partly to manage the complex logistics for the return journey overland. Half of the 350 horses required at each of the thirty- three staging posts were to be provided by the Postal Chancellery; the remainder had to be prised out of a less than willing merchantry.¹⁰

At first, the merchants of Tver proved equally reluctant to pay for the triumphal arch that the provincial governor, Count Villem Fermor, had determined to build as early as November 1765. However, there was no deterring a man who had headed Elizabeth’s Construction Chancellery in the heyday of Rastrelli before briefly assuming command of the Russian troops during the Seven Years’ War. Having collected the necessary funds by the summer of 1766, Fermor ordered four columns to be driven into the ground before the frost set in for the winter, later sending an extravagantly gilded frame for the empress’s monogram and decreeing that Her Majesty’s portrait should be placed over the archway, facing her as she entered the town.¹¹ Similar triumphal arches were built all along the route, where provincial governors competed to stage receptions, each more magnificent than the last, at the expense of local dignitaries gathered for the elections to the Legislative Commission.

While the populace made ready to greet their sovereign, Catherine was doing her homework about the provinces. To prepare her for the journey, the Academy of Sciences drew up a short Geographical