Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 303
acquired by service.”^30 Service meant the state service which had become an ob-
ligation for all classes.
With the Empress Catherine II there began to be significant changes. The hor-
rors of Pugachev’s rebellion, the worst servile uprising in generations, made her
realize her dependency on the landlords for the effective government of the em-
pire, and her expansionist foreign policy made it necessary for her to have a reliable
officer corps. She had reason also to know, more than a king of Sweden, the actual
dangers of assassination if noblemen became too disaffected. On the other hand
the nobility, or what corresponded to nobility in Russia, were the only people who
could effectively make their wishes heard. Catherine’s short- lived husband, Peter
III, had freed them from punishment by the knout in 1762, and at the Legislative
Commission which she assembled in 1767 there were nobles who asked for recog-
nition as an “order,” with corporate privileges and corporate guarantees. As the
nobility became more Westernized, and more familiar with the meaning of noble
status in Europe, they became more aware of their own disadvantages.
Catherine’s needs, and noble wishes, came together in the Charter of Nobility
which she issued in 1785. What this amounted to was an attempt, in an enormous
agrarian empire that rested on unfree labor and on military force, to map out an
area of personal status, liberty, and security for those persons without whom the
empire could not carry on. In effect, if not by design, the charter introduced nobil-
ity on the Western model into Russia. It is an instructive contrast between two
rulers often lumped together as enlightened despots, that at the very time when
Joseph II tried to turn the serfs of his empire into something like West European
peasants, Catherine II, called the “Great,” largely to hold down the serfs, moved to
convert her landlords into something like Western aristocrats.^31
The Charter of 1785 began by defining noble estate or status, which it said was
a superiority of rank, or of good birth, originating in service to the state, and trans-
missible to descendants. The word used most commonly in the charter was blago-
rodnyi, “high born” or “honorable.” It was to people thus born that the charter gave
guarantees. They could not lose their status, honor, property or life without judicial
proceedings, and could be judged only by judges of equal birth with themselves.
They were exempted from corporal punishment. Highborn persons in lower mili-
tary ranks were to be liable only to such punishments as were prescribed for the
higher. They received permission to leave state service at will, to take service with
foreign governments, and to travel outside the country. They were given the right
to sign their names (like European nobles) with territorial titles. They were recon-
firmed in their right to “buy villages” (that is serfs), and to engage in wholesale or
overseas trade in the agricultural or industrial products of their workers. Nobles, as
defined in the charter, were also exempted from personal taxes. In general, by Ar-
ticle 17: “We guarantee independence and liberty to the Russian nobility for all
time by inheritance in future generations.”
30 A. Leroy- Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, 3 vols. (London and New York,
1893), I, 391; Bruckner, Katharina die Zweite (Berlin, 1883), 473; W. Tooke, View of the Russian Em-
pire (London, 1799), 308. See also A. Goodwin, ed., The European Nobility in the 18th Century (Lon-
don, 1953), 172–89 for an account of the Russian nobility by Max Beloff.
31 For the charter, see Appendix III below.