Russian Enlightenment

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1791, one of the Russian Enlightenment's own playwrights, Yakov Knyazhnin, saw his drama about a popular uprising publicly burned. Russian authorities had declared it Jacobin. The movement that had nurtured his career had turned against one of its most ambitious works.

  The 18th-century intellectual and cultural movement known in Russian as prosveshcheniye transformed the Russian Empire in ways no one fully anticipated. It built Russia's first university, a public museum, a theatre, and a relatively independent press. It promoted piety, erudition, and the spread of learning as interconnected goals. Unlike its counterparts in France and England, it never called for the separation of church and state. Its aim was modernization directed from above.

  Denis Fonvizin, Mikhail Shcherbatov, Andrey Bolotov, Alexander Radishchev, and Ivan Boltin debated Russia's place in the world with a seriousness the country had not seen before. Their arguments seeded a lasting divide between radical, western, conservative, and Slavophile traditions of Russian thought.

  Catherine the Great stood at the movement's center. She came to power not through succession but by seizing the throne from her husband. She corresponded with Europe's leading philosophers, founded schools and academies, and passed laws drawn from the latest continental jurisprudence. Whether her Enlightenment principles were genuine or merely useful was contested during her lifetime and is debated still. The movement's founding impulse, however, predated Catherine by decades. Peter the Great had assembled around himself what was called a "learned druzhina." This fellowship of scholars was the first to carry these ideas into Russian life.

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• 2. The Learned Druzhina

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  Feofan Prokopovich, through his sermons, gave the first generation of the Russian Enlightenment its theological voice. Antiokh Kantemir channeled the same energy into satire. Vasily Tatishchev applied it to historiography, building the kind of rigorous historical scholarship that Russia had not yet produced. Together, these three figures shaped the intellectual character of the movement in its earliest phase.

  Ivan Shuvalov, the court favorite of Peter's daughter Elizaveta Petrovna, translated that energy into institutions. He was instrumental in founding Moscow University, which would shape the careers of most intellectuals active during the movement's mature years. He also helped establish the Imperial Academy of Arts.

  Shuvalov extended his patronage to Mikhail Lomonosov, the greatest Russian polymath of his age. Lomonosov left his mark across branches of science, religious philosophy, poetry, and the fine arts. His career illustrated the structural reality of the Russian Enlightenment: scholarship in Russia still depended on court support. The most fertile minds needed a patron to thrive. The Imperial Academy of Arts that Shuvalov helped found would launch the careers of most intellectuals active during the movement's final decades. Catherine's accession in 1762 brought a new patron to these institutions. She would take the movement further into European intellectual life than it had ever gone.

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• 3. Governing by Reason

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  In 1767, Catherine summoned a Legislative Commission to draft a new code of laws for Russia. She prepared the Nakaz, or "Instruction," to guide the commission's work. Representatives from all the free estates of the realm, government bodies, and non-Russian peoples considered the state of Russia's laws. Several advisers proposed a council to regulate legislation; Catherine rejected the idea and kept the authority to pass laws entirely to herself. The Senate she built possessed no legislative powers.

  Catherine reorganized Russia's provincial government on a more rational plan, creating fifty "gubernii" provinces. Each province held between 300,000 and 400,000 people. Each divided further into ten districts of 20,000 to 30,000 residents. A governor and officials separated their functions into executive, legislative, and judicial roles. Professor Semyon Desnitsky, a follower of Adam Smith, proposed elections every five years and a full separation of powers. Catherine did not act on his suggestion. She established a civil law code in January 1774 and worked on a criminal code through the second half of the 1770s. She never finished a unified code.

  Catherine invaded Poland three separate times, in 1772, 1793, and 1795, dividing the country with Austria and Prussia. The Second Turkish War, 1787-1792, ended with Russia gaining the fortress of Ochakov and the Black Sea coast to the Dniester river. The Ottoman Empire formally recognized Russia's annexation of Crimea. Catherine also contemplated the "Greek Project," which envisioned pushing the Turks out of Europe and reclaiming Constantinople for Orthodox Christian rule. This ambition, combined with the partition of Poland, made clear that her Enlightenment rhetoric did not prevent her from pursuing power with full directness.

  Peter the Great had broken from the older image of the Russian ruler as a "good tsar." From his reign onward, all Russian leaders were judged by whether they modernized the economy, expanded foreign influence, and led Russia toward secular European ideas. Catherine governed by that same standard. The "reform conservatism" it produced, maintaining state power while selectively adopting progressive reforms, would shape Russian leadership for the next 150 years. Securing intellectual support in Europe was essential to Catherine's claim to Enlightened governance. No such ally was more consequential than Voltaire.

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• 4. The Philosopher's Correspondent

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  On the 21st of September, 1762, Catherine wrote to Voltaire with a candor that could have ended her reign. "Every guardsman when he looks at me can say: I made that woman." Both Ivan VI and Paul I, armed with supporters, posed genuine threats to her rule. She needed the court, the public, and the major powers of Europe on her side.

  Catherine initiated the relationship through her Genevan secretary, Francois-Pierre Pictet, in the autumn of 1763. Pictet, an acquaintance of Voltaire, sent him a letter supposedly written by Catherine in which he praised her at great length. She offered to publish the Encyclopedie in Russia and arranged for several of Voltaire's plays to be produced at the Court of St. Petersburg. She also invited him to come to Russia. Their correspondence lasted until Voltaire's death fifteen years later.

  By 1763, Voltaire had already written the Histoire de l'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, published in 1759. He came to the relationship with genuine intellectual interest in Russia. He became, in one account's phrase, her "most distinguished western partisan, most enthusiastic devotee, and most indefatigable and eloquent propagandist." He wrote pamphlets supporting her policies and published her pronouncements in the western press. His targets included anti-Russian publications such as the Gazette de France, the Gazette de Cologne, and the Courrier d'Avignon. He also persuaded the French historian Claude-Carloman de Rulhiere not to publish a disparaging account of Catherine's rise to power.

  The Empress turned over 800,000 peasants to private proprietors. The 1763 law limiting freedom of movement required serfs to obtain a permit from their landlord before leaving the property. Catherine never mentioned the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-74 in her letters. When Voltaire raised the subject, she told him she had it under control. He accepted her word. For an essay contest of the Free Economic Society of St. Petersburg in 1767, Catherine chose the question of peasant land ownership as the subject. Voltaire entered; his submission received only an honorable mention.

  After Voltaire's death in 1778, Catherine wrote to her contemporaries urging them to study and memorize his works. She called him her "teacher," her "thinking instructor," and her "master of thought." She reportedly spent an average of 80,000 rubles annually on books and provided her palace staff with a library. She admitted to Prince de Ligne: "It was certainly Voltaire who brought me into fashion." Catherine's alignment with Voltaire was, as one account described it, an early indication of the Russian tsardom moving toward closer relations with Europe. The schools and academies she built were the institutional form that alignment took.

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• 5. Schools and Gentry

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  Ivan Betskoy campaigned throughout Catherine's reign for a comprehensive reform of education. His goal was the development of what he called "a new breed of citizens," achieved through schooling that would reshape individual character from childhood.

  Catherine established the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg for upper-class girls, modeling it on the French Maison royale de Saint Louis. The Smolny taught students not only dance, music, sewing, drawing, and household economy, but also law, mathematics, languages, geography, history, economy, architecture, science, and ethics. The institute drew on Fenelon's doctrine that girls' education was central to the moral regeneration of society.

  The Sub-Commission on Education began its work in May 1768. It drew on English universities, the Prussian national education system, and what it called "Irish school" as models. In 1786, the state established free, co-educational high schools and primary schools in provincial towns. Around 176,000 children passed through Russian public schools between 1786 and 1796. Rural schools did not come into existence during this period. Russia lacked the finances and teachers to run its school system properly.

  Yekaterina Dashkova, sometimes described as a precursor of feminism, led the Russian Academy of Sciences for many years. In 1783, she instituted the Russian Academy, modeled on the French Academy, with the aim of promoting study of the Russian language. Its first major contribution was the preparation of the first comprehensive dictionary of the Russian language.

  In 1777-59 percent of the gentry owned fewer than twenty serfs. In 1762, private serfs constituted 56 percent of the peasantry and were bound to their villages by tax obligations and military conscription. Their masters were legally responsible for feeding them in times of famine, caring for them in old age, and paying their poll-tax. The number of manufacturing enterprises rose from between 600 and 700 in 1762 to over 2,000 by the end of Catherine's reign. Catherine invited the German mineralogy expert Franz Ludwig von Cancrin to Russia and placed him in charge of a major salt mine at Staraya. His son Georg von Cancrin later rose to become Minister of Finance.

  Fyodor Volkov had established the first Russian theater group in Yaroslavl during the reign of Elizaveta Petrovna. The stage he created became the platform on which the next generation of playwrights and composers would work.

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• 6. Stage and Score

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  Opera reached Russia in 1731, when Empress Anna invited an Italian troupe to perform Calandro, by Giovanni Alberto Ristori, during her coronation celebrations in Moscow. Four years later, Francesco Araja led a second Italian troupe to St. Petersburg. Araja spent 25 years in Russia and composed 14 operas for the Russian Court. Among these was Tsefal i Prokris, performed in 1755 to a libretto by Alexander Sumarokov. It was the first opera written in the Russian language.

  The first public concert in Russia took place in 1746. For decades afterward, concert life was dominated by foreign musicians. Russian virtuosos did not appear in significant numbers until the 1780s and 1790s, when the violinist Ivan Khandoshkin and the singer Elizaveta Sandunova emerged. The senator Grigory Teplov, also an amateur musician, had printed a collection of his songs called Idle Hours Away from Work in 1751. The opera fragments of Ivan Kerzelli's Derevenskiy vorozheya were printed in Moscow in 1778, the first opera fragments to be printed anywhere in Russia.

  Catherine sent the domestic composers Berezovsky and Bortniansky abroad to study composition. On their return, they produced operas in Italian and French. Modest early attempts at Russian-language opera began in the early 1770s. A successful example was Anyuta, performed in 1772 to a text by Mikhail Popov. The opera Melnik, with music by Mikhail Sokolovsky to a text by Alexander Ablesimov, followed in 1779.

  Vasily Pashkevich contributed three major works to the Russian operatic stage. These were The Carriage Accident of 1779 and The Miser of 1782, with a text by Yakov Knyazhnin after Moliere. The third was Fevey of 1786, set to a libretto by Catherine herself. Yevstigney Fomin, trained in Italy, also contributed to the Russian stage. His works included The Coachmen at the Relay Station of 1787, Orfey i Evridika of 1792, and The Americans of 1800. At private theatres at Kuskovo and Ostankino, the operas of Andre Ernest Modeste Gretry were widely performed. The most celebrated singer there was Praskovya Zhemchugova, a serf-soprano who performed in the private opera of Count Nikolai Sheremetev.

  Denis Fonvizin's comedies targeted the rusticity of provincial gentry and their uncritical imitation of everything French. Vladislav Ozerov wrote Neoclassical tragedies with touches of sentimentalism. Gavrila Derzhavin, Catherine's favourite poet, sought to combine amusement with instruction in his odes. Some of his poems were banned from print during the last years of her reign.

  Galuppi and Sarti, Italian operatic composers, became involved in producing liturgies for the Russian church service. The choral concerto, a cycle of three to four contrasting movements, became a standard form in liturgical music. Composers including Degtyarev, Vedel, Bortnyansky, Berezovsky, Davydov, and Turchaninov worked within this tradition. The movement's most provocative intellectual networks, however, were not in the theatres or academies. They were in the private lodges that had spread across Russian cities, connecting the Enlightenment to currents Catherine would eventually move to suppress.

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• 7. Lodges and Legacy

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  Ivan Yelagin, Catherine the Great's secretary, reorganized Russian Freemasonry in the early 1770s. He united approximately 14 lodges and around 400 government officials under one structure. He secured English authorization for the first Russian Grand Lodge and became its Provincial Grand Master. Most Russian lodges were drawn to the Swedish Rite.

  In 1782, Ivan Schwarz, a philosophy professor from Moscow, represented Russia at the Wilhelmsbad conference. Russia was recognized there as the 8th province of the Rite of Strict Observance. Nikolay Novikov oversaw the Moscow lodges. The prosveshchenie that Novikov and his circle promoted combined religious piety, erudition, and commitment to the spread of learning. It bore little resemblance to the skeptical and critical spirit of the Western Enlightenment.

  Catherine clamped down on Novikov and other Freemasons in the late 1780s, alarmed by the French Revolution. Novikov was imprisoned. Her son Paul, on succeeding her, interdicted all Masonic assemblies in 1799. He also released Novikov and Alexander Radishchev, who had been imprisoned by his mother.

  By 1796, the Russian Enlightenment was very much on the wane. Ivan Krylov, a fabulist whose journalistic activity Catherine had earlier denounced, provided Paul's family with readings from his didactic fables.

  In 1801, Alexander I of Russia instituted the Informal Committee. It is sometimes seen as the last attempt to implement Enlightenment ideals in the Russian Empire. Mikhail Speransky outlined an ambitious program of political reform. Most of his chief proposals were not put into practice until the great reforms of Alexander II, half a century later.

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