304 Chapter XII
The charter, besides promising such individual and family guarantees, set up the
nobility as an organized and corporate estate. The nobles in each province were to
meet in an assembly, elect a marshal, have the right of collective petition, exercise
police powers, and name local officials, while enjoying, as an assembly, immunity
from molestation or arrest. According to one writer, Catherine hoped to create
bodies like the Provincial Estates of France. These rights the Russian nobility con-
tinued to enjoy throughout the nineteenth century.
Catherine also issued a charter of the cities, organizing them on paper like Eu-
ropean towns of the old regime, with various levels of inhabitants enjoying various
levels of burgher rights. Townsmen of merchant status, for example, were freed
from forced government service, and those of the first two merchant categories, or
higher, were exempted from corporal punishment. The towns, however, were of
very little importance in the empire. Growth of a Russian burgher class was held
down by the importance of foreign merchants on the one hand, and, on the other,
by the business activity of many landed nobles using servile labor.
Under Catherine, in short, whose reputation for enlightenment was due mainly
to Western intellectuals, the tsardom reached a great compromise with those
whom it recognized as nobles; indeed, in a sense, it created an aristocracy, the bet-
ter to govern, or rather to dominate, the mass of the people. For some to have a
sphere of rights due to special birth or rank was doubtless better than for no one to
have any assured rights at all. For some to have a certain independence in the face
of power was better than autocracy unmixed. Catherine doubtless believed, like
many Europeans (she was herself of German birth), that a stratified society in
general, and a hereditary and respected noble class in particular, were signs of an
advanced state of civilization. Governor Bernard argued as much in Massachu-
setts. But she systematized the institutions of hereditary nobility, and of peasant
subjection, at the very time when these were being questioned in Europe. While
the Austrian monarchs, and even the Prussian, emancipated the serfs on crown
estates, she not only did not do so but gave away state domains, peasants and all, to
her lovers and favorites. It is estimated that she thus simply handed over almost a
million “souls” to nobles.^32
Serfdom reached its low point in her reign.
The Kingdom of Prussia, a showpiece of enlightened despotism, was in the
eighteenth century a country of very marked aristocratic resurgence. This took two
forms: an actual come- back of the old landed nobility after 1740, and the develop-
ment of the newer civil service into a self- conscious governing group with an aris-
tocratic code of values. In Prussia, as in the Russia of Catherine, and in the Haps-
burg empire of Leopold, the monarchy made concessions to the groups that were
indispensable to its rule.^33
32 “Almost a million human beings were robbed of all personal rights by this princely generosity
of the Semiramis of the North,” V. Gitermann, Geschichte Russlands, 2 vols. (Zurich, 1945), II, 244.
33 Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1816
(Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 57–108, 175–201. My treatment of Prussia at this point draws heavily on
Professor Rosenberg. See also A. Goodwin on the Prussian nobility in European Nobility in the 18th
Century, 83–101.