In the eyes of the Enlightenment philosophers, Russia seemed to have taken a big step towards Europe with its improved military technology and a rationalized organization of administration and finance. Thus, Montesquieu set aside his critique of despotism to hail Peter for giving ‘the manners of Europe to a European nation’. It was Diderot who in 1766 recommended to Catherine his protégé, the sculptor étienne-Maurice Falconet; the latter’s monument to Peter on the embankment of the Neva river, the Bronze Horseman, became the symbol of Westernizing Russia. Diderot himself came away from Russia marvelling at how quickly the Russians were becoming French.
Voltaire asserted in his very first encomium to Peter in 1731 that the latter civilized his benighted subjects, and carved a European-style city out of the wilderness. Russian noblemen spoke French, pulled on silk stockings, donned a wig, and wore a sword. ‘At present,’ Voltaire gushed, ‘there are in St Petersburg French actors and Italian operas. Magnificence and even taste have in everything succeeded barbarism.’
In his later hagiography of Peter, which Jean d’Alembert, Diderot’s colleague in the Encyclopédie, privately described as ‘vomit’, Voltaire perfected his style as a later apologist for Catherine’s imperialism. Peter may have been a warmonger, he argued, but war was always a means for him, not an end. He fought in order to remove impediments to commerce and manufacturing. He showed an admirable spirit of learning, curiosity and experimentation, whether in warfare or administration.
Rousseau, on the other hand, treated Russia’s Westernization with coruscating scorn. In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau accused Peter of having condemned Russians to painful self-division:
He wished to produce at once Germans or Englishmen, when he should have begun by making Russians; he prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might have been, by persuading them that they were what they were not. It is in this way that a French tutor trains his pupils to shine for a moment in childhood, and then to be forever a nonentity.
This was a devastating verdict on Peter’s pioneering venture; it went straight to the heart of the Russian dilemma, as experienced and articulated by Russia’s greatest writers and thinkers over the next two centuries. In the eighteenth century, however, Rousseau was alone in his vision of how the Enlightenment programme of willed, abstract social reform could cause deracination, self-hatred and vindictive rage. His colleagues, like later European and American supporters of authoritarian regimes, had invested their hopes in modernization from above; they made Rousseau suspect that intellectuals constituted another self-seeking priesthood.
The Intellectual as Networker
The mutually beneficial relationship between the philosophes and Russia’s despotic ruler, Catherine, verified Rousseau’s misgivings about the literati. In 1762, Catherine acceded to the Russian throne, and immediately started looking for respectability and legitimacy. It was common knowledge in Europe that she had attained power by deposing her husband Peter III and sidelining her son Paul from the succession; it was also rumoured that she had murdered her husband. But none of this mattered as she started to pose as Peter the Great’s intellectual heir, opening her court to the thinkers of enlightened Europe.
Catherine outpaced even Frederick of Prussia in her overtures to the philosophes. When the publication of the Encyclopédie was forbidden in Paris, she offered to move the entire operation to St Petersburg. She gave Diderot a lifetime sinecure by purchasing his library for a handsome sum. In the very first year of her reign, at the age of thirty-four, she asked D’Alembert to become the tutor of her heir, and opened a mutually flattering correspondence with Voltaire, who at nearly seventy was the patriarch of the European republic of letters.
Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine’s encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became her official ideology. Almost all of Voltaire was translated into Russian; no library was deemed complete if it did not contain a collection of Voltaire’s works in the original French. The high-backed easy chair on which Voltaire was often depicted sitting was much imitated among Russian aristocrats. (It is known even today as a ‘Vol’terovskoe kreslo’ or ‘Voltaire chair’.)
Another of Catherine’s regular correspondents was Frédéric-Melchior Grimm, who rephrased the Lord’s Prayer to read ‘Our mother, who art in Russia…’ and changed the Creed into ‘I believe in one Catherine.’ Catherine eventually repaid his attentions by appointing him as her minister in Hamburg. Grimm, faithful to the last, zealously endorsed Catherine’s plan to vivisect Poland, comparing the country to a ‘little slut’ who needed someone to ‘shorten her petticoats’.
Helvétius dedicated his work On Man, His Intellectual Faculties and His Education to Catherine, the ‘bulwark against Asiatic despotism’. Jeremy Bentham, whose brother had entered Russian service, was one of her fervid enthusiasts. Diderot actually travelled to St Petersburg in 1773, and was so carried away with enthusiasm by his role as counsellor to the Empress that he kept pinching Catherine’s thigh, prompting the latter to put a table between them.
But it was Voltaire who brought a truly religious ardour to the cult of Catherine. As the Empress entered into war with Poland and Turkey in 1768, Voltaire became her cheerleader. Catherine claimed to be protecting the rights of religious minorities residing in the territories of her opponents. The tactic, repeatedly deployed by later European imperialists in Asia and Africa, had the expected effect on Voltaire, who promptly declared Catherine’s imperialistic venture to be a crusade for the Enlightenment.
He had initially hoped for Frederick to give him the pleasure of seeing ‘the Muslims driven out of Europe’. Now he thought that ‘these barbarians deserve to be punished by a heroine … It is clear that people who neglect all the fine arts, and who shut up women, deserve to be exterminated.’ The Poles, like the Muslims in Voltaire’s view, were hopelessly backward. ‘I still give five hundred years to the Poles to make the fabrics of Lyon,’ he wrote. He reminded them of the benefits of modernization, such as Catherine’s acquisition of Diderot’s library: ‘My friends, begin by learning how to read and then someone will buy libraries for you.’