—particularly acute in the vast, empty spaces of the Russian empire—that the world’s population had fallen since classical times. The way to increase it was to make people happy: ‘The more happily people live under a government the more easily the number of the inhabitants increases.’76
Such ideas may have been familiar to Enlightened circles in Western Europe, but to the majority of the empress’s humble provincial deputies they came as a bolt from the blue. The Commission itself was an equally stunning phenomenon. As Henry Shirley reported to Whitehall:
The Russians think and talk of nothing else, and in seeing the representatives of several nations, so very different both as to dress, customs, and religion, such as the Samoiedes, Cossacks, Bulgarians, Tartars etc., and whom they suppose to be (perhaps not without foundation) entirely dependants of the Russian Empire, assemble in their capital, they are apt to conclude, that they are now the wisest, the happiest, and the most powerful nation in the universe.77
The barely concealed note of sarcasm reflected Shirley’s disappointment that Catherine had failed to create an institution on the model of the Westminster Parliament. He was particularly offended by the secret gallery, originally built to allow female members of the Muscovite royal family to observe ambassadorial audiences, ‘from whence she can hear every thing that is said, without being seen’:
The Russians instead of perceiving how much this takes from the freedom their deputies ought to enjoy, admire this very much, and think it an undoubted proof of their sovereign’s love and regard to them. But, to render the farce as complete as possible, the deputies went yesterday in a body to thank Her Imperial Majesty for the instructions she has been pleased to give them, and to offer her the new titles of the Great, the Wise, and the Mother of her country.78
In a carefully choreographed performance at the Golovin Palace, Catherine formally refused the honour, saying that it should be left to posterity to judge. The episode nevertheless provided a gratifying ritual confirmation of her own dubious legitimacy—almost certainly the prime motive for convening the Legislative Commission in the first place.79
Anxious to avoid debates among ‘the blind, the semi-educated, and the half-witted’, Catherine made it clear from the start that her own treatise was to be the sole intellectual guide to the Commission’s proceedings.80 Here was another apparent restriction on the deputies’ freedom. And yet to think in such terms is surely anachronistic. Since no tsar had ritually consulted his subjects since 1653, the very notion of public discussion in Russia lay beyond living memory. Lacking a tradition of civic responsibility, the deputies needed to learn not only to speak, but, no less importantly, to listen. Catherine, having sought their advice on the condition of the empire, more in the manner of a sixteenth-century Humanist than an eighteenth-century Parliamentarian, needed to provide the conditions in which they could be heard. That was why she paid such close attention to the rules governing behaviour: deputies were forbidden from interrupting one another (one noble was fined and forced to apologise to a non-noble deputy whom he had insulted), no swords were to be worn, and fighting was to be punishable by fines or exclusion from the chamber.81 Here was an even more fundamental conception of mutual tolerance than the one that the empress sought to convey in a letter to Voltaire:
I think you would be pleased to attend this assembly, where orthodox sits alongside heretic and muslim, and all three listen calmly to a heathen; and all four often confer to make their opinions mutually acceptable. So well have they forgotten the habit of burning one another at the stake, that if anyone were sufficiently ill-advised to suggest to a deputy that he should burn his neighbour to please the supreme being, I can say on behalf of all of them that there is not one who would fail to reply: ‘He is a man, just as I am; and according to the first paragraph of her Imperial Majesty’s Instruction, we must do one another all the good we can, and no harm.’82
While Catherine was pleased to encourage measured discussion among Russia’s free population at the Legislative Commission, she was far less tolerant of unsolicited complaints from the serfs. Most of the 600 petitions with which she had been bombarded on the Volga cruise were submitted by soldier-farmers and newly baptised converts bemoaning a shortage of land. These led her to stress the need for the General Survey, begun in 1766, to be extended to this very area. However, as she told the Senate on her return, there were also ‘a few unfounded petitions from serfs complaining of their owners’ exactions, which were returned to them with the instruction not to submit such petitions in future’. Among them was a petition from serfs on an estate belonging to Adam Olsufyev’s family, who not only refused to return to work as she insisted, but paid for a representative to plead their case in Moscow. When an infantry regiment was sent to reward them for their disobedience, 130 peasants were arrested and some were flogged with the knout. Further rioting on estates where peasants had presented petitions to Catherine prompted her to attempt to limit the number of such petitions in future. Her edict of 22 August 1767, which confirmed a range of earlier laws limiting the right of serfs to denounce their masters to the authorities, stopped short of threatening the torture that the Senate had been prepared to contemplate. Nevertheless, it increased the penalty for wrongful petitioning by adding hard labour for life to the list of punishments already decreed in 1765: a month’s hard labour in the Siberian mines for the first offence, a year’s hard labour for a second offence, and public whipping and perpetual exile for a third. This menacing edict was intended merely as a stopgap until the Legislative Commission could formulate a suitable alternative. Since this was never done, and the edict of 22 August was never repealed, it served both to consolidate the landowners’ powers over their serfs for the remainder of the reign and to deter petitioners from all but the noble estate. Not long after becoming Holy Roman Emperor in 1765, Joseph II had rashly aspired to ‘give the whole universe freedom’ to bring him their complaints and he remained receptive to petitioners from all classes of the population. Catherine strongly disapproved, believing, as she told Baron Grimm after Joseph’s death, that he had ‘ruined his health with his eternal audiences’.83
Her own main personal concern that autumn was the health of Aleksey Orlov. Rendered immobile by a bad back (the result of too many jolting carriage rides), he was believed to be at death’s door from chronic stomach pains and jaundice. From an account of his symptoms sent on behalf of the anxious empress, doctors in Vienna, Leiden and Leipzig diagnosed gallstones, recommended a less gargantuan diet and advised their patient to take the waters. But since he was too ill to travel abroad, and unable even to join his four brothers for a private lunch with Catherine on her name day, she and Panin went to visit him after Christmas.84 If she needed a further
The discomforts of life in that draughty wooden building had long since exhausted its minimal charms. Already on 12 October she had told Falconet of her intention to return to St Petersburg.86 Irritated by slow progress in the Legislative Commission, which had laboriously worked through each social estate’s submissions without reaching any resolutions, she announced in November that its sessions would be suspended in the middle of the following month. The deputies were to reconvene in St Petersburg in February.87 She travelled north earlier, setting off through streets lined with cheering subjects after attending the consecration of a new church on the Solyanka on Saturday 19 January. At the end of a fifty-three-hour journey via a sequence of ‘nasty’ roadside palaces, it was a relief to be home in time to celebrate Grigory Orlov’s name day, 25 January. ‘You can’t believe how good Tsarskoye Selo is,’ she told Panin. Town seemed even better: ‘Petersburg is paradise by comparison with Ispahan, and especially the palace.’88
Catherine was particularly delighted by the large turnout at her first Court reception day and the celebratory mood continued in the festivities surrounding her thirty-ninth birthday. Galuppi pulled out all the stops for his last opera in Russia. When they met shortly after the composer’s return to Venice, the renowned Dr Burney thought him still ‘full of genius and fire’ and later noted that he seemed ‘to have constantly kept pace with all the improvements and refinements of the times, and to have been as modern in his dramatic music, to the last year of his life, as
