What is perhaps more surprising is that the Don Cossacks also failed to back Pugachev when he approached their region at the end of his campaign. The explanation may be that, since Pugachev was by origin a Don Cossack, they knew very well that he was not Peter III. Furthermore, they had been in revolt themselves a few years earlier, so that their energy had expended itself, and they were under particularly attentive official supervision.
It is significant that, although the Don Cossacks mostly withheld their support from Pugachev, they subsequently celebrated his memory no less than other Cossacks and peasants in songs and folklore.31 As Marc Raeff has commented: ‘They exemplified the discontent and rebelliousness of a traditional group in the face of transformations wrought (or threatened) by a centralised absolute monarchy. Like the feudal revolts and rebellions in the name of regional particularism and traditional privileges in Western Europe, the Cossacks opposed the title of rational modernisation and the institutionalisation of political authority. They regarded their relationship to the ruler as a special and personal one based on their voluntary service obligations; in return they expected the Tsar’s protection of their religion, traditional social organisation, and administrative autonomy. They followed the promises of a pretender and raised the standard of revolt in the hope of recapturing their previous special relationship and of securing the government’s respect for their social and religious traditions.32
The rebellion deeply troubled Catherine. She tried in her correspondence with foreign powers to belittle it by contemptuous references to ‘le. Marquis Pougatchev’, but actually she feared that, if the movement found a leader from among Russia’s elites, it might succeed in overthrowing her. From the way she had come to the throne she had good cause to know the fragility of her courtiers’ loyalty. She followed the progress of the rebellion closely and took an alert interest in the capture and interrogation of its leaders. In her manifestoes to the population, she displayed a shrewd sense of their psychology by using the old pre-Petrine alphabet.33 It is uncertain what effect the rebellion had on her later policies, since the reforms she carried out in the later 1770s and 1780s were already being planned before it erupted. It probably reinforced her determination to integrate the Cossacks thoroughly within army and administration, a process which she carried through systematically in the remaining years of her reign.
There can be not much doubt that the rebellion intensified her caution and her distrust of all possible sources of internal disaffection. It had the same effect on her successors too: fears of a possible pugachevshchina figured among the arguments advanced over a possible emancipation of the serfs right up to 1861, nearly a century later.
Perhaps unnecessarily: the evidence suggests that peasants cannot rebel without leaders from outside their ranks. With the Cossacks tamed, no other potential leaders offered themselves for nearly a century. Before Bakunin, no educated Russian, even those grimly opposed to the autocracy, advocated peasant revolution as a way of overthrowing it. Most would have concurred with Pushkin’s sentiment: ‘God preserve us from a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.’
Yet in another sense, Russia’s officials and nobles were right not to forget Pugachev. For he had revealed just how wafer-thin was the loyalty of some of the non-Russians, and above all of the Russian peasants, to the regime which ruled over them and to its agents, their own lords. The nobles would not lightly forget the image of burnt-out manor houses, with the corpses of their former occupants hanging from the gates. It was a sharp reminder of the gulf – now perhaps at its widest – which separated the ordinary people from their superiors.34
EDUCATION AND CULTURE It was natural that a ruler so conscious of the need to change society should be passionately interested in education. It was indeed one of Catherine’s constant preoccupations. She read a lot about it in the fashionable works of the time, but professed herself unimpressed with Rousseau’s Emile: probably its emphasis on the free formation of the personality clashed with her own greater interest in social order. On the other hand, she had a broader conception of education than did Peter I, wanting it to penetrate beyond the elites to the whole of society. She did her best to make the court a nursery and propagator of culture. In this she was continuing and broadening the initiative already taken by Elizabeth, who had established an excellent tradition of court theatre, music and ballet.
Perhaps her most remarkable initiative was the founding of a society journal, on the model of the London Spectator. Entitled This and That (Vsiakaia vsiachina), it was edited by Catherine’s secretary, G. Kozitskii, but contained frequent editorial contributions by a certain Babushka, who was widely known to be Catherine herself. Perhaps she wanted in its pages to revive the debate she felt she had not achieved through the Legislative Commission; perhaps she aimed through satire and pleasant reading to disseminate good moral principles and modern European cultural examples.
She pursued the same aim in her demonstrative promotion of links with some of the leading European thinkers of the time. She founded a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books into Russian, which she endowed with two thousand rubles. She corresponded with Voltaire, who applauded her resolute action against the Catholic Church (in Poland). She offered Diderot a press and publishing facilities for the Encyclopédie in Riga when he was having difficulties with the authorities in France and she invited him to St Petersburg, where they had long conversations in private. For an ambitious and politically committed thinker like Diderot, Russia, unencumbered by ancient institutions and privileges, appeared to offer enticing scope for an enlighted reformism which was continually frustrated in France. At any rate, he urged Catherine to issue a proper law on the succession, to keep the Legislative Commission in being as a ‘repository of the laws’ and to institute a free and compulsory system of primary education.35
She would have known that the last suggestion was impracticable (though Prussia attempted it in 1763), but she concurred with the sentiment, and did want to make a start on making general education more widely available than merely to the nobility. In 1786, after a commission under her ex-favourite, P.V. Zavadovskii, had examined the subject, she issued a National Statute of Education, which provided for a two-tier network of schools: secondary at the guberniia, and primary at the uezd level, free of charge, co-educational, and open to all classes of the population except serfs.
Not the least significant feature of the proposed new network was that it did not build in any way on the existing church schools, the only ones which were at all widespread. The new schools were to be secular, free of charge and co-educational, with the government providing the initial capital expenditure, and local boards of social welfare meeting the running costs. They were intended to instil ‘a clear and intelligent understanding of the Creator and His divine law, the basic rules of firm belief in the state, and true love for the fatherland and one’s fellow citizens’. Pupils were to be issued with a guidebook outlining the ‘Duties of Man and Citizen’, whose tone was that of the authoritarian secular state, as in the injunction to obey one’s superiors. Those who give orders know what is useful to the state, their subjects and all civil society in general, [and] they do not wish for anything but what is generally recognised as useful by society.36
In 1764 Catherine set up a Foundling Hospital in Moscow, under her personal supervision, the first of several. It was to take orphans – the children most dependent on the state – and fashion them