Catherine II of Russia: The Grand Instructions to the Commissioners

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Grand Instructions were aimed at a European audience as well as a Russian one and thus were translated into numerous European languages, including English, French, German, and Latin. They went far toward helping raise Catherine's standing and legitimacy in Europe as a reforming monarch. The Grand Instructions draw on Catherine's wide reading and familiarity with Enlightenment writers, particularly Montesquieu's work on comparative politics, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), and the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments (1764), a European best-seller in the years immediately preceding Catherine's Instructions. Other sources included the classic French Enlightenment compendium Encyclopedia; or, A Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts (1751–1772).

Catherine was concerned to assert Russia's European identity at a time when many Europeans saw the Russians as Asiatic barbarians. In doing so, she put her legislative project in the context of the assimilation of Russian culture to European norms begun by Peter the Great, although she claimed that the success of Peter's reforms showed that Russians were really already European. The Russian code of law current at the beginning of Catherine's reign dated from 1649, well before Peter I, and was increasingly archaic in a developing and westernizing Russia.

The question of legal reform, Catherine asserts, was to be answered in finding the laws most suited to an individual nation's situation and character. She justifies Russia's absolute monarchy by pointing to the enormous extent of the Russian Empire. Drawing from Montesquieu, Catherine declares that an empire so large could be ruled only by the decisiveness of a single individual. Monarchy is defined in the Enlightenment style as deriving its legitimacy from “the Glory of the Citizens, of the State and of the Sovereign” rather than in the pre-Enlightenment and traditional Russian style of deriving its authority from God. (Indeed, despite the opening reference to “Christian Law,” references to religion of any sort are few and far between.) Like Montesquieu, Catherine distinguishes between monarchy, in which a monarch accepts limits on his or her power, and unbounded despotism, which is a danger to the state.

Following the ideas of Beccaria and other Enlightenment thinkers, Catherine breaks with the Russian tradition of harsh punishment to endorse moderate punishment. She considers certainty of punishment as a more effective deterrent than harshness, and the primary goal of criminal justice, she states, is prevention rather than punishment of crime. Catherine also follows the Enlightenment consensus in rejecting judicial torture, claiming that “a People greatly renowned for the Excellence of their civil Polity,” referring to the English, did not use it. According to Catherine, in addition to its cruelty, torture is a danger to the judicial process, in producing false information and false convictions.

The Grand Instructions skirted the issue of serfdom, one of the most controversial questions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. Catherine personally disliked the institution whereby the majority of Russian peasants were the property of their landowners but thought it was impossible to abolish, given the very strong support serfdom received from the Russian landed nobility. Although free peasants were represented on Catherine's Legislative Commission, serfs were not.