28 Russian Expansion under Catherine the Greatand, "guided by his genius," conquered part of the Caspian coast.
There were still some obstacles to the realization of Peter's admirable
goal of increased trade with Iran and India, particularly the misgov-
ernment of Iran and Russia's unstable and tyrannical political system.
However, Raynal believed Catherine was on the way to remedying
Russia's problems.^10
The tsaritsa had a low opinion of Raynal, who was a vehement
critic of absolute monarchy, but she certainly knew his work. The
Histoire was a succes de scandale, having been put on the Catholic
Church's Index of condemned books and publicly burned in Paris. It
was increasingly popular among the Russian elite from 1780 on, es-
pecially after 1789. Catherine knew enough of Raynal to recognize
his influence on Alexander Radischchev's revolutionary Journey from
St. Petersburg to Moscow. However much she disliked his republican-
ism, she held views much like his on the matter of Russian trade and
expansion in Asia. She also devised her own solution to Iran's prob-
lems by advocating Russian tutelage of Iranian vassals and, later, di-
rect rule of at least part of that country.
St. Petersburg's knowledge of Iranian affairs from sources other
than Enlightenment theorists was limited and often inaccurate. For
example, Platon Zubov, Catherine's favorite in her last years and a
self-proclaimed expert on Iran, thought that the Iranian New Year's
Day, No Ruz, was May 14 although in reality it falls on the vernal
equinox.^11 As a voracious reader who took the responsibilities of her
office seriously, Catherine made herself better informed about west-
ern Asia than many of her advisers were. She knew about the major
events and personalities of eighteenth-century Iran, but, like the other
St. Petersburg officials, she had to make policy decisions hampered
by a dearth of reliable, detailed information.
12
Even in the early
nineteenth century, when Russia had already added parts of the east-
ern Caucasus to its domains, several members of the Academy of
Sciences expressed concern over the inadequacy of literature on that
region available in St. Petersburg. A few important books on the east-
ern Caucasus and other parts of the Iranian Empire could be found in
individual libraries, but it is difficult to judge who actually read them.
The best work on Iran known to have been available in St. Petersburg
was the Huguenot traveler Jean Chardin's massive study of Safavi Iran,
Voyages du Chevalier Chardin en Perse, et autres lieux de I'Orient,
first published in London in 1686. For information on the closing
years of the Safavi era, there was a Russian translation of the account
of John Bell, an Englishman who accompanied the 1717 Volynskii
mission to the court of Shah Soltan Hosein. The middle decades of