Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (69 page)

She accepted from Montesquieu a qualification of her advocacy of absolutism; this was embodied in her acceptance of the limitation of
the supreme power of the Russian autocrat by certain “fundamental laws.” These “laws” were defined as traditions, habits, and institutions so deeply rooted in the history and life of a society that no monarch, however absolute, could or would act in opposition to them. They included respect for the permanence of the nation’s dominant religion, for the law of succession to the throne, and for the existing rights and privileges of dominant social groups, such as the nobility. Montesquieu defined such a state with such a ruler as a “moderate monarchy.” In this sense, Catherine was defining and presenting Russia as a moderate autocracy.

Turning to the role of laws in regulating the lives and relationships of people, Catherine wrote: “The laws ought to be so framed as to secure the safety of every citizen as much as possible.… Political liberty does not consist in the notion that a man may do whatever he pleases; liberty is the right to do whatsoever the laws allow.… The equality of the citizens consists in that they should all be subject to the same laws.” In confronting the great issue of crime and punishment, she wholeheartedly accepted the views of Montesquieu and Beccaria, agreeing that “
it is much better to prevent than to punish crimes.” She insisted that capital punishment be inflicted only in cases involving political murder, sedition, treason, or civil war. “Experience shows,” she wrote, “that the frequent use of severe punishment has never rendered a people better. The death of a criminal is a less effective means of restraining crimes than the permanent example of a man deprived of his liberty during the whole of his life to make amends for the injury he has done to the public.” Even sedition and treason were given narrow definitions. She distinguished between sacrilege and lèse-majesté. A sovereign may be said to rule by divine right, but he or she is not divine, and therefore it is neither sacrilege nor treason to commit a nonphysical offense against him. Words cannot be called criminal unless accompanied by deeds. Satirical writings in monarchies, even those relating to the monarch—and here she may have had in mind Voltaire’s struggles in France—should be regarded as misdemeanors, not crimes. Even here, care should be taken, because censorship can be “
productive of nothing but ignorance and must cramp the rising efforts of genius and destroy the very will for writing.”

She rejected torture, traditionally used in extracting confessions,
obtaining evidence, and determining guilt in Russia. “
The use of torture is contrary to sound judgment and common sense,” she declared. “Humanity itself cries out against it, and demands it to be utterly abolished.” She gave the example of Great Britain, which had prohibited torture “
without any sensible inconveniences.” She was particularly incensed by the use of torture to force a confession:

Catherine also condemned torture on purely humanitarian grounds. “
All punishments by which the human body might be maimed are barbarism,” she wrote.

Catherine wanted punishments tailored to fit the crimes, and the
Nakaz
provided detailed analysis of different categories of crime and the appropriate punishments. Crimes against property, she said, should be punished by deprivation of property, although she understood that those guilty of stealing property were most often people who had none. She insisted that due process govern legal and courtroom procedures. She demanded that attention be paid to the role of judges, the truth of evidence, and the quality of proof required in reaching verdicts.

Catherine’s attempt to address the problems of serfdom was the least successful part of the
Nakaz
. She began chapter 11, her effort to deal with serfdom, by saying that “
a civil society requires a certain established order; there ought to be some to govern and some to obey.” In that context, she believed that even the humblest man had the right to be treated as a human being, but here her words collided with the general Russian belief that serfs were property. Even a hint of freeing the serfs met with protest, sometimes from people who prided themselves on their liberalism. Princess Dashkova was so convinced of the right of the nobility to own serfs that she attempted to persuade Denis Diderot of the necessity of serfdom in Russia. Catherine rejected this morally, even if she was politically powerless to change it. When Diderot was in St. Petersburg and criticized the squalor of the Russian peasant, the empress replied bitterly, “
Why should they bother to be clean when their souls are not their own?”

Catherine wrote the
Nakaz
in French; her secretary translated her manuscript into Russian and other languages. She worked in private until September 1766, when she began to show drafts, first to Orlov, then to Panin. Orlov’s opinion, predictably, was flattering. Panin was cautious; he saw in the
Nakaz
a threat to the whole political, economic, and social order. “
These are axioms which will bring down walls,” he warned. He worried about the impact that ideas taken from Montesquieu and Beccaria might have on uneducated delegates to the Legislative Commission. He was especially concerned because direct taxation of peasants and army recruitment were based on the institution of serfdom; he feared that without these two essential requirements, the state would wither economically and militarily. Beyond that, he wondered how freed serfs would live, since they possessed no land. He asked where the
state would find the money to compensate landowners for the serfs taken from them and for the land the serfs must farm to survive.

Catherine did not dismiss Panin’s reaction. He was not a large landowner who had many serfs to lose; he had spent twelve years in Sweden and he generally favored reforms. She also found that he was far from alone in his opposition. On completing the original draft of the
Nakaz
early in 1767, she submitted it for review to members of the Senate. “Every part of it evoked division,” she said later. “
I let them erase what they pleased and they struck out more than half of what I had written.” Next, she submitted the draft to certain educated noblemen; they removed half of the remaining articles. With these excisions, the
Nakaz
as finally published amounted to only one-quarter of the text that Catherine had labored two years to produce. This was the limit of absolute monarchy: even an autocrat could not override the views of those whose support she needed to remain in power.

In the version of the
Nakaz
ultimately printed, Catherine’s frustration regarding serfdom is apparent in the way she uses language. She writes tentatively, almost apologetically, and then quickly backtracks, contradicts herself, and smothers her message. Thus, her effort to say that serfdom should be a temporary institution, that a ruler should avoid reducing people to slavery, and that the civil laws should guard against the abuse of slaves comes out as a disorganized torrent of jumbled words:

Two articles that Catherine had copied from Montesquieu were omitted in the final published document. One declared that serfs should be allowed to accumulate sufficient property to buy their freedom; the other that servitude should be limited to six years. To these
Catherine had added her own belief that once a serf had been freed, he should never be returned to serfdom. This was also omitted, and neither the Legislative Commission nor Russians ever heard, read, discussed, or acted on any these words.

Catherine made no claim to originality of authorship. When sending a copy of the
Nakaz
to Frederick of Prussia, she wrote frankly, “You will see that, like the crow in the fable,
I have decked myself out in peacock’s feathers; in this work merely the arrangement of the material and here and there a line or a word belong to me.” To d’Alembert, she admitted, “For the sake of my empire,
I have robbed Montesquieu without mentioning him by name. If he sees my work from the next world, I hope he will pardon me this plagiarism for the good of twenty million people. He loved humanity too well to take offense. His book is my ‘prayer book.’ ”

The
Nakaz
was written in the hope that an updated legal code would lead to a more politically advanced, more culturally sophisticated, and more efficiently productive Russia. This did not happen. However, Catherine addressed the
Nakaz
not only to the Legislative Commission she intended to summon but to the educated public at home and abroad. And when translations appeared outside Russia, even with all the deletions, inconsistencies, and flagrant textual borrowing, it was still a sufficiently impressive document to earn Catherine wide approval. Translations in German, English, and Latin appeared almost immediately. In December 1768 she sent a version to Ferney. Voltaire pretended to believe that the
Nakaz
was a complete, detailed code of laws and declared that neither Lycurgus nor Solon “
would have been capable of its creation.” His exaggerated praise soared into absurdity when he called the
Nakaz
“
the finest monument of the age which will bring you more glory than ten battles because it is conceived by your own genius and written by your own fair little hand.”

The government of France thought otherwise. The monarchy viewed the document as so dangerous that by order of the king, publication in France was banned, and two thousand copies on their way from St. Petersburg to Paris were held at the frontier. Voltaire mocked French censors for banning the work, a compliment, he assured Catherine,
that would guarantee its popularity. Diderot wrote, “Justice and humanity have guided the pen of Catherine II. She has reformed everything.” Frederick of Prussia called the
Nakaz
“
a masculine, nervous performance worthy of a great man,” and made the empress a member of the Berlin Academy.

The
Nakaz
was not, as Voltaire rhapsodized, a code of laws; rather, it was a collection of principles on which Catherine believed that good government and an orderly society should be based. In a letter to Frederick, she suggested that she was well aware of the discrepancy between the Russia of reality and the nation she hoped it might become: “
I must warn Your Majesty that you will find different places in the document which will perhaps seem strange. I beg that you remember that I have often accommodated myself to the present, without closing the path to a more favorable future.”

52
“All Free Estates of the Realm”