Bolotov, and Catherine II herself, wrote didactic instructions on the upbringing of
their children, like counterparts in France, Poland, and elsewhere, but here more
focused on duty and service than on individual development. Catherine II pursued
at least two projects of educational reform. Early in her reign she entrusted
I. I. Betskoi with the design of various schools intended to create a thriving middle
class with a curriculum of humanities and Orthodoxy as well as practical skills.
Betskoi’s overly theoretical approach (children should be totally isolated from
parental influence in boarding schools from infancy) and his failure to follow
through led Catherine to promote, in the 1775 administrative reforms and the
1780s, a more instrumentalist curricular design (based on a Habsburg reform for
their Orthodox minorities). A modern European curriculum that included contem-
porary sciences and math, history and geography, religious instruction, it favored
German over French as more relevant to state service and included a handbook
outlining behavioral norms to create“citizens for the fatherland.”Here loyalty to the
state and to one’s social station were paramount. With the goal of inculcating
practical skills for state service, these reforms also included the teaching of foreign
languages needed around the empire: Greek in Novorossiia and Crimea, Chinese in
Irkutsk, Arabic and Tatar in Kazan and Astrakhan. These schools prepared petty
noblemen for state service; only the wealthiest nobles could afford the fully classical
curriculum enjoyed by those who traveled to Europe for university. Nevertheless,
the common thread of education for the nobility and educated elite in this century
was European standards mixed with an emphasis on duty, practicality, and religion.
The Charter to Nobility in 1785 defined many of the perquisites of the status for
the empire-wide nobility, regardless of ethnicity. The Charter affirmed previous
privileges: freedom from service, from corporal punishment, from taxation; inviol-
ability of property, the right of noblemen to serve foreign states who were not
hostile to Russia, the right to buy populated land, establish factories, and sell goods
wholesale. It also strengthened corporate solidarity by creating a noble assembly in
each gubernia and numerous elected offices for local nobles. Nobles were entrusted
with tasks such as overseeing recruiting, tax collection, law and order, and public
welfare works. New registers of nobles were to be compiled in each gubernia to
control admission into the status. It is important to note, however, the limitations
of this charter compared to European counterparts: Russia’s nobles did not win
legislative orfiscal power, representative institutions, a right to resist legally or
guarantees against arbitrary search and arrest, all of which the British and Hungar-
ian nobilities won in the thirteenth century and the Polish in thefifteenth. Still, this
charter provided affirmation of a cohesive and exclusive social estate, despite its
great internal diversity.
Paul I rolled back noble status somewhat in his short reign. He restored
mandatory service and amended the 1785 Noble Charter to reduce noble authority
in gubernia and district government and to restore corporal punishment; he
established a succession law to limit factional influence; he proposed taxation on
the nobility. His son and successor Alexander I canceled these moves, but also
proceeded on a path of government reorganization and professionalization that
shaped the experience of nobility in the nineteenth century.
434 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801