the plans. Though the project had been scheduled for completion by the Feast of St Peter at the end of June, she eventually moved in on 11 July, greeted at the gates by the local clergy in full fig.62 While waiting for Prince Makulov to finish the work, she found time to play on the new sledging pavilion at Pokrovskoye, to drive to the Sparrow Hills on the far side of the city, and to watch the fishing at Tsar Boris’s Ponds.63 She also inspected the stallions brought up from the provinces for the annual sale at the imperial stud farms at Khoroshevo and Pakhrino, where a huge quadrangular stable for 532 horses, under construction since 1752, had been completed in 1764.64 Perhaps she saw Gardi, a black stallion bred from Lombard stock in 1766, whose exceptionally luxuriant tail made him one of the most celebrated animals of the age.65
Hunting was by far Catherine’s most frequent leisure activity. Between 18 June and 15 October, the court journal (by no means necessarily a complete record) registered some thirty-seven separate outings. The detailed breakdown—two grouse shoots, three hare chases and no fewer than thirty-two hawking expeditions—gives a good sense of her personal preferences, already reflected in institutional changes over the previous five years, which had seen the animal hunt cut back while the staff of the bird hunt rose from thirty-nine to forty-nine. As in St Petersburg, the preferred time for hawking was after lunch, at four or five in the afternoon, when Catherine liked to ride out in her carriage with her falconers alongside her to while away the journey.66 They also accompanied her as far as the palace at Bratovshchina on her pilgrimage to worship at the remains of St Sergii on his feast day, 5 August. For all her reservations about monasticism, the empress had always found at the Trinity
All this, however, was but a prelude to the ceremonial opening of the Legislative Commission on 30 July. Whereas her predecessors’ abortive commissions had been dry, bureaucratic affairs, hidden away in the chancelleries of St Petersburg, Catherine wanted hers to begin in a blaze of publicity. It was launched in the manner of a major Court occasion with a glittering carriage procession from the Golovin Palace to the Kremlin. The deputies assembled in the Monastery of Miracles before processing with the empress to a liturgy at the Dormition Cathedral at which those who belonged to other faiths remained outside. Afterwards, Catherine, wearing the small crown, stood before the throne in the audience hall of the old Kremlin palace (it does not survive today) with copies of her Instruction on the table beside her. In a notable departure from earlier Muscovite assemblies, only one clerical deputy had been elected. The ubiquitous Archbishop Dimitry, elected on behalf of the Synod, made a speech comparing the empress with Justinian. Replying on her behalf, the vice chancellor Prince Alexander Golitsyn (Alexander Stroganov’s friend from their student days in Geneva) stressed her hopes that the deputies would confer glory on themselves and their age by contributing to ‘the common good, the happiness of mankind, and the introduction of good manners and humanity, tranquillity, security and happiness to your dear fatherland’. Those who had already gathered in Moscow (some 460 out of the eventual total of 564) were permitted to kiss her hand.68
On the following morning, the Commission began its formal proceedings in the Palace of Facets. Once Bibikov had duly been chosen as its marshal, the deputies listened to a public reading of her Instruction by Grigory Orlov. Though Catherine had compiled her treatise in French, each deputy was presented with a copy of the Russian translation by her secretary, Grigory Kozitsky, published simultaneously with a German version on 30 July. ‘There is not a foreign word in it,’ the empress boasted in a characteristic effort to advertise the richness and subtlety of her adopted language. ‘However, the subject matter is not of the simplest, and I hope that no one will mistake one word for another.’69 Fond of listening to her friends read to her (and conscious of the illiteracy of a good proportion of the Russian elite), Catherine had written her text to be read aloud, giving it ‘an urgent rhythm’ by imitating Montesquieu’s series of ‘short, staccato chapters’ in 526 laconic paragraphs of her own.70 Even so, it took a full five sessions of the Commission to hear it out, as Yelagin and Volkov succeeded Orlov on the reader’s podium.71
Catherine was not an original thinker and the Instruction was not a systematic work. Yet there was nothing conventional about her treatise. It set out her vision of a tolerant, educated society in which her subjects’ liberty and property would be protected by unambiguous laws, established by a virtuous absolute sovereign and implemented by judges who were to presume the accused innocent until proved guilty. The widespread nineteenth-century belief that she had suggested that it was better to release ten guilty people than convict a single blameless man prompted Solzhenitsyn to quip that Stalin had reversed the empress’s maxim by preferring to incarcerate 999 innocents rather than miss a single genuine spy. Although there is no such passage in the Instruction—it was Diderot, in his critical commentary on the text, who declared that ‘for humanity’s sake, we should allow a crime to escape unpunished rather than put innocence to death’—the legend says much about the Instruction’s reputation as a repository of Enlightened thought.72 Never had such radical ideas been publicly proclaimed by a Russian ruler.
‘Russia is a European State.’ Catherine began her first chapter with one of her few original contributions to her treatise, a cultural rather than a geographical claim, designed to challenge the prevailing view of her empire as a slough of oriental backwardness. The same motive underlay her implicit argument that Montesquieu had been wrong to classify Russia as a despotism ruled by fear, the only form of government he thought workable in a very large state and the ultimate insult in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century politics. Catherine instead presented Russia as an absolute monarchy in which the sole ruler voluntarily accepted the limitations imposed by fundamental laws. Historians have argued ever since about the plausibility of this claim, resorting to precisely the sort of semantic debates that the empress hoped to avoid. Her intention was almost certainly not to distort Montesquieu, but rather to adapt the ideas of a writer she admired to Russian circumstances about which he knew little. Even so, there were obvious difficulties with her position. Although contemporary thinkers disagreed about the nature of the fundamental laws by which they set such store, an inviolable law of succession was generally taken to be central. We know from an incomplete draft, written in her own hand and dating from after 1767, that Catherine eventually contemplated such a law. But since it was impossible to promulgate one without admitting that she had taken the throne by force, there was no mention of the subject at the time of the Legislative Commission.73
Serfdom was another controversial question on which the final version of the Instruction said little. Prompted partly by her experiences with Pastor Eisen, Catherine had initially been prepared to contemplate ways of ‘creating new citizens’ (that is, reducing the number of serfs), for example by allowing serfs to accumulate sufficient property to purchase their freedom. But these radical proposals were swiftly dropped after she showed drafts of her treatise to her confidants. Panin famously declared that they were ‘maxims to bring down walls’. Catherine was particularly astonished to discover that even Alexander Stroganov—‘a gentle and very humane person’ who was ‘kind to the point of weakness’—defended ‘the cause of slavery with fury and passion’: ‘There were not twenty people at that time, who thought on that subject like human beings.’ In the circumstances, the best that could be done was to condemn the mass enserfment of free men and to restrict abuses by exhorting masters to treat their serfs with humanity. Meanwhile, Chapter 11 of the Instruction left the deputies in no doubt of the virtues of social stability: ‘There ought to be some to govern, and others to obey.’74
The empress was on surer ground when she turned her practical mind to matters of crime and punishment. Since it was a besetting problem of Russian justice that not even the judges could be sure what the laws actually said, her Instruction identified clarity, precision and uniformity as the key requirements for future legislation. Only if laws were written in plain language and imposed with predictable regularity could her subjects have confidence in the courts. Deterrence was no less important: ‘By making the penal laws always clearly intelligible, word by word, every one may calculate truly, and know exactly the inconveniences of a bad action; a knowledge which is absolutely necessary for restraining people from committing it.’75 Judges were to execute rather than interpret the laws since to interpret a law was almost always to corrupt it and only the sovereign had the right to interpret laws which she had made. Nothing could be so dangerous as the idea that the spirit of the law was more important than the letter. That way, ‘we should see the same crimes punished differently, at different times, by the very same court of judicature.’ Torture was firmly declared ‘contrary to all the dictates of nature and reason; even mankind itself cries out against it’. Catherine was equally opposed to the death penalty: ‘The most certain curb upon crimes, is not the severity of the punishment, but the absolute conviction in the people, that delinquents will inevitably be punished.’ Even so, it was better to prevent crimes than to punish them, and that made education a clear priority: ‘Would you prevent crimes? Order it so that the light of knowledge may be diffused among the people.’ But were there enough people? As we have seen, Catherine shared the widespread contemporary anxiety
