Citing the Christian principle of doing ‘all the Good we possibly can to each other’, she declared it ‘the Wish of every worthy Member of Society to see his Native Country raised to the highest degree of Prosperity, Glory, Happiness and Peace’, and ‘to see every Individual of his fellow-Citizens protected by Laws, which so far from injuring him, will shield him from every Attempt against his Welfare, and opposite to this Christian Precept’.4
Her version of law was a restricted and étatiste one compared with that of her Enlightenment mentors. In her eyes law was not an impersonal force adjudicating between autonomous and sometimes competing social institutions, but an instrument through which the ruler exercises his or her authority and through which moral precepts are put into practice. ‘In a State, that is in a Collection of People living in Society where Laws are established, Liberty can consist only in the Ability of doing what everyone ought to desire, and in not being forced to do what should not be desired.’5 This was the version of law and statehood propounded not by the French philosophes, but by the German cameralists, especially by Leibniz and Wolff. In this vision, the aim of law was to enable the authorities to provide for the well-being and security of their subjects. For the same purpose, subjects were to have their own functions, and would belong to social institutions which would enable them the better to fulfil those functions and to partake of the general well-being. There was no notion here of natural law, of inherent freedom or of a social contract.6
The members of Catherine’s Law Code Commission were elected in local gatherings of the relevant estates: the nobility, townsfolk, state peasants, Cossacks, odnodvortsy (descendants of the militarized peasants who had manned the frontier lines) and non-Russians. Conspicuous by their absence were the serfs and the clergy. One might argue that the serfs were represented by their landlords, but the absence of the clergy can only mean that Catherine did not regard them as members of secular society, an astonishing lapse in view of the fact that she had just deprived them of the means – their landed wealth – of maintaining a separate, spiritual arm of government. [See chapter on church, p. 231]
Catherine’s agenda was to draw up a law code along the lines indicated in her Nakaz. Now the deputies brought with them their own nakazy or ‘cahiers’, requests and statements of grievance originating from their electors. When the Commission first met in July 1767 to discuss them, it soon transpired that there was little meeting of minds. Each social estate concentrated in its presentation on its own narrowly conceived interests, insensitive to the broad vision of creative statesmanship laid before them by their monarch. The nobility wanted to restrict entry to its own estate, strengthen its property rights, secure its monopoly of higher civil and military posts and be freed from corporal punishment. Merchants requested a monopoly of trade in the towns and the right to own serfs. The peasants asked for relief from taxation and other burdens. Few deputies displayed an awareness of the overall structure of the state, which in any case most of them clearly expected to remain unchanged: their efforts were thus directed at obtaining what they could within the existing system rather than recommending fundamental reform.7 The contrast is striking with the French Estates-General, which, meeting only some twenty years later, came up with radical programmes of reform, while the ‘third estate’ projected a vision of itself as the bearer of popular sovereignty, as ‘the nation’.
For most of its sessions the Commission was divided into subcommittees, one of which was specifically charged to look into how a ‘third estate’ or ‘middle sort of people’ might be created. These sub-committees carried out some useful work in assimilating existing laws and drafting new ones. But the General Assembly ceased its sessions late in 1768, with the outbreak of war against Turkey: since many of the deputies belonged to the army, they had to report for service. Many of the sub-committees continued their work for a year or two longer, and some of them completed drafts on their sphere of legislation. Although there was now no General Assembly to refer these drafts to, they were not necessarily wasted, since Catherine later made use of them in elaborating laws. Furthermore, their materials were employed in a ‘Description of the Russian Empire and its Internal Administration and Legal Enactments’, drawn up by the Procurator-General and published in 1783: this was the closest thing Russia had to a law code for the next fifty years.8
Although the Turkish war genuinely precipitated the suspension of the Commission, it did not necessarily entail its abolition. Catherine let it fade away because she was disappointed by its work, especially perhaps by the fact that its members showed so little awareness of the needs of society as a whole and so little readiness to exercise self-restraint for the general good. She decided, probably rightly, that, before positing common interests which did not exist, she should put more backbone into a fragmented society by creating institutions which would enable citizens to work together at least within their own estates and orders. In a sense she was endeavouring actually to create social institutions which had hitherto been embryonic or non-existent.
With that in mind, during the rest of her reign she did much to impart substance to what had been an atomized society and polity, laying the foundation for what she herself called a ‘civil society’. Like Peter, she believed that the monarch should make laws, but unlike him that the monarch should also be bound by laws once made, supervising the general process of administration, but not interfering with it at every step, and intervening only if urgency or the complexity of the issues demanded it. She did something to stimulate a science of jurisprudence in Russia, so that law and administrative practice could become regular and stable, a permanent factor which citizens could rely on in their daily activity, especially in economic affairs where predictability is so important. She read and annotated Blackstone’s ‘Commentary on the Laws’: he saw the guarantee of legality as lying not so much in representative institutions as in having rational laws backed up by strong and stable authorities.9 She sent young nobles abroad, mainly to German universities, to study the theory and practice of jurisprudence there (among them, as it happened, was Alexander Radishchev, who derived from his studies much more than she bargained for – an indication of the ambiguous results of her initiative).
To the same end she strengthened the Senate’s role as supervisor of the administration and the law, though without going so far as to make it a ‘repository of law’ on the model of the French parlements, as she had once contemplated. Even more important was her strengthening of local government. European Russia was divided into gubernii (provinces), with a population of 200,000–300,000 and uezdy (districts) of 20,000–30,000. Each guberniia was to be overseen by a governor responsible to the Senate and having the right of personal report to the Emperor; he would be assisted by a provincial administrative board to handle matters like tax-collection, policing and trade monopolies. The higher administrative staff of these institutions was to come from the nobility, a provision intended to guarantee their probity and professional competence. To fortify the nobles’ pride and corporate identity she granted them a Charter freeing them from corporal punishment and giving them the right to organize in local associations at the provincial and district level: these associations would then elect key local government officials. [For other provisions of the Charter, see Part 3, Chapter 1.]
Catherine promulgated a similar City Charter [see Part 3, Chapter 5]. This was part of a complex of measures aimed at encouraging manufacture and trade, reducing their direct dependence on the state and facilitating their penetration throughout the empire. Before her accession internal tariffs had been abolished (in 1753), and Catherine followed this up by measures to improve the provision of credit through a law to introduce bills of exchange, improve roads and canals, ease passport restrictions and enable both nobles and peasants to trade