Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

After some gold coins had been consecrated by the clergy and laid in the chest, it was closed and raised by the pulley. The table disappeared through a trapdoor, so that the empress could lower the chest into place. Once she had cemented a marble brick on top of it, Paul and the bishops followed suit with trowel and mortar, along with some of the attendant notables and the foreign ambassadors. The ceremony was brought to a close with an oration by Archimandrite Platon. Richardson sensed his eloquence but, having no Russian, failed to understand the distinctly political address in which the preacher heralded a new temple of Solomon with Catherine in the role of King David. She was wise as the king of the Israelites, Platon proclaimed, only more peace-loving (a claim which stood at odds with her increasingly belligerent stance on the Polish question). Singling out the empress’s humanitarian Instruction for special praise, Platon portrayed the new cathedral as a monument to Russia’s greatness and the empress’s personal glory. 105Timofey Ivanov drove home the point with a commemorative medal, designed on the basis of Rinaldi’s model, which quoted from the gospel of St Matthew (22: 21): ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ 106

No less anxious to pander to the empress’s obsession with posterity was the Parisian sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet, a friend of Diderot and Prince Dimitry Golitsyn who had recommended him to Catherine as the ideal candidate for the statue of Peter the Great she had determined to commission as early as 1764. Falconet arrived in St Petersburg at the end of October 1766, working from a studio on the site of Elizabeth’s temporary wooden palace. ‘Diderot,’ he exclaimed just three months later, ‘you can’t imagine how this unusual woman can elevate one’s merits and talents.’ 107In June 1768 he told her of a drawing ‘that I shall show to no one until Your Majesty has seen it: Catherine the Second gives laws to her Empire. She deigns to lower her sceptre to propose to her subjects a means of rendering them happier. If this simple idea is not convenient, I know nothing better nor more glorious.’ 108Catherine agreed that it was a noble idea, ‘much better’ than his earlier plan to depict her with ‘tottering Russia’, a reference to the coup of 1762 that was judged ‘injurious to Peter III and to Russia’: ‘You will tell me when it is time for me to come to see the statue and the drawing.’ 109Knowing that she had never previously authorised a statue of herself, Falconet wondered why there should be a problem when it was proposed to strike medallions to commemorate the new law code. Only her own ‘ delicatesse ’ stood in its way, Catherine replied, ‘but perhaps the beauty of your drawing will make me forget my previous resolutions’. 110

Apparently it did not. Though the empress sat for at least two busts and two medallions by Falconet’s attractive young pupil Marie-Anne Collot, 111his own statue was never done, perhaps because Catherine had grown anxious about the progress of the Legislative Commission. Its sessions in the long Winter Palace gallery overlooking the river still seemed active enough, as Lord Cathcart discovered during a break in the proceedings on 18 August:

The room seemed so full, and the different groups so busy in conversation, that it was impossible to look down upon the assembly without thinking of a beehive. The empress’s throne fills one end of the room, the other end and both sides have benches as in the House of Commons; on the left side of the throne is a table of State. At the upper end there was a chair for the Marshal of the commission, and on one side two other chairs, one for the director who minutes the proceedings, and the other for the procureur-général who is there as commissioner for the empress and who has a right to interpose in her name, in case the standing orders should be attached. 112

Catherine, however, worried that all this activity seemed to be leading nowhere. In turning to discuss justice and judicial procedure when they reconvened in St Petersburg, the deputies had become lost in a morass of shapeless detail. Only a desperate attempt to revise their procedures had focused their attentions on a draft law on the rights of the nobility at the beginning of July, and even then, no decisions were reached. 113

The fundamental problem facing the Commission was the unbridgeable gap between Catherine’s expectations and the preoccupations of most deputies. Having written in one of her earliest notebooks that ‘The thing that is most subject to drawbacks is the making of a new law’, she was well aware of the restraining power of custom. 114Her Instruction followed Montesquieu in stressing the need to prepare people’s minds for new legislation—scarcely the philosophy of an intemperate despot. On the other hand, having once embarked on a project, the empress was always impatient for swift results. She had boasted to Voltaire during the Christmas recess that the Russian people were ‘an excellent ground in which a good seed will quickly grow’. 115But this turned out to be wishful thinking. She had misjudged both the amount of preparatory work required to ensure the smooth running of the Commission and the inherent conservatism of the deputies. ‘The number of ignorant noblemen,’ she later admitted, ‘was immeasurably larger than I could ever have supposed.’ 116Living in the company of sophisticated friends, Catherine had presumed that their views were widely shared. Many of them took some part in the Commission: Panin as the author of the submission by the Moscow nobility, Grigory Orlov as a noble deputy for St Petersburg, Andrey Shuvalov as director of the journals recording the proceedings. The young Count Semën Vorontsov read Beccaria just before the Commission convened. But while such men reflected the interests of Russia’s educated, Western-oriented elite, the overwhelming majority of the deputies had little interest in either philosophy or national politics. Their interests were selfish and parochial. 117

We can only guess what might have transpired had the Legislative Commission been allowed to run its course. Its proceedings generated a vast reservoir of information, much of which helped to inform Catherine’s subsequent legislation, and its sub-commissions continued to work until around 1774. The gold and silver tabernacle donated by the empress to the Dormition Cathedral on the Commission’s tenth anniversary depicted Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments as a reminder of her status as lawgiver. 118A skeletal secretariat was still employed at the end of her reign. By then, however, the whole project was little more than a memory. All through the empress’s time in Moscow, the international situation had been increasingly destabilised by her support for a group of Orthodox fanatics in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, a perverted stand in favour of religious toleration which resulted in civil war. When Cossack troops were sent to suppress it in June 1768, they crossed the border into the Ottoman Empire, sacking the little frontier town of Balta and massacring its Jews. In retaliation, the Turks declared war in October by imprisoning the Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Since most deputies were required for military service, Catherine announced the suspension of the Legislative Commission on 18 December. The 203rd and final plenary session was held on 12 January 1769. Now all Europe had another extraordinary prospect to occupy its attention. ‘An unsuccessful foreign war tends to impair the authority of all despots,’ warned William Richardson, ‘and this is the first foreign war she has ever waged.’ 119