Enlightened Despotism

Happy Thanksgiving! I sincerely hope that this weekend is relaxing and that you have a chance to spend time with your family and friends before the holiday season really gets in gear.

Last fall, I took Russia and the Soviet Union I with Dr. Black, and it was a wonderful class. Russian history seems to always take a back seat in European/world history courses in favor of Western Europe, China, and the United States, which is a shame, because Russia was formed from a variety of ethnic groups and throughout its history, there have been lots of colorful characters who overthrow rulers with startling regularity. The downside of having this many characters is that Russian history is pretty complicated. Especially in the Middle Ages, when there were a whole bunch of Russian princes running around. Our first textbook was a collection of primary source documents from the medieval period, and they were really challenging reading.

At about this time last year, we finished studying Catherine the Great, tsarina of Russia from 1762 to 1796. She is a really fascinating persona for more reasons than just her romantic life. During her life, she had an absurd number of lovers, which contributed even more to court politics, as you might imagine. However, anything you may have heard about a horse being involved in her death is absolutely not true and is urban legend, just as Marie Antoinette (a contemporary of Catherine, acutally) never said that the peasants should eat cake.

Catherine came to power after some of the court nobles wrote a manifesto dethroning Peter III and confirming her as tsarina. She was a hands-on ruler, and foreign relations were an important part of her reign. In order to keep neighboring Poland weak, she negotiated with the rulers of Prussia and Austria to partition Poland, effectively eliminating it as a territory by 1795. Catherine was also involved in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire and a war with Turkey in 1778.

What interests me the most about Catherine the Great is her intellecutal prowess. She was extremely well-read (she admired the works of Voltaire and Montesquieu and even corresponded with Voltaire) and believed in many Enlightenment ideas. She was an autocratic ruler but still accepted the rule of law, thinking that rulers should not be arbitrary. She provided for the protection of the rights of serfs and of nobles, disapproved of censorship, and created many intellectual institutions. Catherine promoted secular learning and believed in reason. In my last paper for class, I talked about how the ways in which Catherine adopted Enlightenment values. She wrote educational books and supported the standardization of the Russian language, believed in Adam Smith's free enterprise theories of economics, worked to open trade within Russia, formed a Legislative Commission to serve as her advisory body, and protected many of the rights that are found in our Bill of Rights and in our tradition, such as habeus corpus, protection from false imprisonment, and protection from torture.

Unfortunately, Catherine backed away from this Enlightened position in the last years of her reign, as the French Revolution caused her to fear a similar occurence in Russia. She is considered an Enlightened despot as a result of her firm rule and her openness to Western ideas. One can only wonder where she would have brought Russia if things had been different in France and in America and whether she would still be considered an enlightened ruler if she lived in a different world.