Catherine the Great

and, as you may imagine, a man does not seat himself opposite to Her Majesty unless he is so obliged.’⁴⁴ By the end of October, if not before, they were meeting daily at the Winter Palace. So bored was she with Vasilchikov that Diderot was received at the lover’s hour, after lunch, when he joined her to discuss the essays he presented to her in advance. Happy to borrow an occasional joke from Lev Naryshkin—‘A capital at the edge of an empire is like an animal with a heart at the tip of its finger’—he kept most of these essays short, out of a self-confessed antipathy to ‘purely systematic ideas on serious subjects’. Nevertheless, the empress had encouraged him to write at length and he had no intention of patronising her. Following their disillusion with Frederick the Great, Catherine was the monarch that the philosophes had been waiting for. It was for her, Diderot proclaimed, that Montesquieu has written his great book, The Spirit of the Laws. ‘Your Majesty has a strong mind, a great soul, extensive vision.’⁴⁵

A meeting of minds was nevertheless prevented by the recent radicalisation of Diderot’s political views. In 1765, when Catherine bought his library, he could still reconcile his materialism with his politics by trusting the superior abilities of the ‘great soul’—a wise, absolute ruler surrounded by equally enlightened advisers who could realise the general will by their unique capacity to incorporate in microcosm the social and physiological harmony of the whole species.⁴⁶ But that confidence had been severely undermined by Chancellor Maupeou’s abolition of the French parlements in January 1771. Though Diderot had little respect for these noble-dominated law courts, they played an important constitutional role in registering the king’s edicts and their abolition was widely interpreted as an act of tyranny. ‘We are on the brink of a crisis which will end in slavery or liberty,’ Diderot warned Princess Dashkova in an apocalyptic letter that April, ‘and if it is slavery, it will be slavery like that which exists at Morocco or Constantinople.’⁴⁷ By the time he arrived in Russia, he was already convinced that liberty could be preserved only by a shift of power away from the monarch and towards a representative national body. ‘All arbitrary government is bad,’ he insisted to Catherine, not excepting the ‘arbitrary government of a good, firm, just and enlightened master’. ‘One of the greatest misfortunes that could happen to a free nation,’ he continued, in an essay urging the creation of a permanent representative assembly, ‘would be two or three consecutive reigns of a just and enlightened despotism. Three sovereigns in a row like Elizabeth, and the English would have been imperceptibly led to a condition of servitude of which no one could predict the end.’⁴⁸

Few monarchs would have listened to such subversive talk. Yet the empress remained unperturbed as Diderot went on to inform her, in the space of that same essay, that resistance was ‘a natural right, inalienable and sacred’; that the sovereign was made for the nation and not the other way round; and that any impartial judge of the conflict between the English monarchs and their parliaments would conclude that the king was ‘almost always wrong’ because he attacked popular liberties.⁴⁹ ‘I am allowed to say everything that comes into my head,’ the astonished philosophe explained to Dashkova, ‘wise things, perhaps, when I’m feeling stupid, and perhaps very silly things when I’m feeling wise. Ideas transplanted from Paris to Petersburg certainly take on a very different colour.’⁵⁰ The most remarkable thing was that Catherine should be prepared to condescend so graciously to a mere writer. ‘I swear to you that the empress, this astonishing woman, does all in her power to come down to my level,’ Diderot wrote to his wife, ‘but it is at moments like these that I find her ten feet tall.’⁵¹

Catherine was quite right to tell a later French ambassador that if she had placed her faith in Diderot, ‘every institution in my empire would have been overturned’.⁵² Nevertheless, she was prepared to offer guarded responses to a questionnaire he gave her in search of information on the Russian economy. Since he frankly admitted that the French government hoped to profit from their acquaintance—‘I should be transported by joy to see my nation united with Russia’—it is hardly surprising that sensitive information was held back from the representative of a hostile power.⁵³ Some of his questions were deflected to officials; others were answered more frankly, particularly when they offered Catherine the opportunity to boast about the rich variety of her empire’s wildlife; still more received a curt ‘I don’t know’. The most delicate inquiries were brushed aside with a playfulness she knew he would appreciate:

Q. In which provinces are your woollen manufactories?

A. In every province where there are sheep.

Q. What is the public debt?

A. So modest that I could pay it off in twenty-four hours if I wanted to.⁵⁴

Diderot, it is now clear, took his visit to St Petersburg more seriously than once was thought. Conceiving of Russia as a tabula rasa on which an appropriately enlightened mind could create a new and glorious civilisation, he saw foreign settlement as a natural way to approach his goal. Though Catherine’s colonies on the Volga had been much discussed in the French salons in the 1760s, they had not passed without criticism. Diderot famously proposed that she should ‘plant’ the seeds of liberty in the form of a colony of Swiss people in Saratov.⁵⁵ While scholars have been able to demonstrate the connection between this idea and his broader social and political thought, the empress, who had nothing more than the evidence of their conversations to go on, could be forgiven for dismissing such sallies as utopian. As she became irritated by his impracticality, Diderot was conscious of the danger: ‘Nothing is easier than bringing an empire to order with one’s head on one’s pillow. That way, everything goes as one might wish.’⁵⁶ What he could not know, because Catherine did not tell him, was that his visit to Russia had coincided with the emergence of the gravest threat to the order of her empire that she ever faced.

* * *

Even as Grimm arrived in St Petersburg on 17 September 1773, an illiterate Don Cossack was issuing his first manifesto to the Yaik Cossack host almost a thousand miles to the south-east: ‘As your fathers and grandfathers served previous tsars to the last drop of their blood, so you, my friends, will serve me, the Great Sovereign Emperor Peter Fedaravich.’⁵⁷ When the thirty-one-year-old Yemelyan Pugachev set out to tempt all those who had ‘longed for him’ with the prospect of land, water, grasses, money, powder and bread, threatening them with his ‘just wrath’ if they refused to answer his call, the prospects for a rebellion in the territory between the Volga and the Urals could hardly have been more promising.⁵⁸ No matter that portraits of Pugachev made him look more like a lop-sided Peter the Great than Peter III. He had shown off the scrofulous scars on his chest as the authentic ‘marks of tsardom’ and the forts standing guard over those unruly borderlands were insufficiently manned to repel the heterogeneous band of Cossacks, Old Believers, fugitive serfs, Bashkir and Kazakh tribal leaders (eighteenth-century Russians called them Kirghizians to distinguish them from the Cossacks, kazaki) who responded to his appeal to defend their traditional freedoms against the advance of Catherine’s Enlightened administration. Not that her bureaucracy presented an indomitable force: Kazan province had only eighty permanent officials for a population of 2.5 million. Famine, plague and war had everywhere taken their toll (the latest levy of one recruit in every hundred souls, decreed on 23 August, was due to begin on 1 October, and by the time it was complete some 323,360 men had been drafted in the space of five years). Once the factory peasants in the metallurgical plants in the Urals had joined him, Pugachev had the additional advantage of a reliable supply of arms.⁵⁹

By the time General Kar was dispatched to quell the rebellion on 15 October, Catherine already knew of Pugachev’s seizure of Iletsk. A week later, she demanded to see the latest maps of Orenburg province, comprising most of Bashkiria, in order to follow the progress of events. At first she assumed that it was merely a matter of time before Kar sent news of his victory, but this was to underestimate the power of the insurgents. In an area where the Cossacks were in effect the imperial police force, their secession signalled a serious threat to security. Having laid siege to Orenburg on 5 October, Pugachev set up his own ‘College of War’ at nearby Berda, where his henchman Zarubin Chika called himself Field Marshal Count Chernyshev and others among his lieutenants adopted the names of Panin and Orlov. Kar’s poorly trained punitive battalion (all that could be spared when the crack troops were in Moldavia and Wallachia) was crushed in early November by a better-disciplined Cossack force more adroit than his own in the use of artillery. News of the disaster reached Tsarskoye Selo on the evening of Catherine’s name day, throwing the Court into alarm. The rebels, she was horrified to learn, now numbered several thousand. Suspecting a Turkish conspiracy, she appointed General Bibikov, the former Marshal of the Legislative Commission, to replace the disgraced Kar, whose arrival in Moscow set off a wave of rumours that forced the government to lift its veil of secrecy over the whole affair. ‘Probably it will all end on the gallows,’ Catherine wrote to Yakov Sievers on 10 December, as Bibikov departed for Kazan, ‘but what sort of expectation is that for me, Mr. Governor, who has no