Catherine continued to encourage the ferment which she had generated after dissolving the Commission. The following year (1769), she launched Russia's first periodical, Vsiakaia Vsiachina {A Bit of Everything), a satirical journal to which she made pseudonymous contributions. She had emulators, and soon the small reading public was flooded with
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satirical publications. Most of the material in these journals was light-hearted nonsense meant to amuse, but on occasion satire assumed more earnest forms, turning into an instrument of social criticism. In Catherine's reign there appeared also various informative publications, including specialized periodicals for landowners and children. In the first decade after her accession, the number of book titles published in Russia increased fivefold. Towards the end of her reign, Catherine grew somewhat ambivalent towards the forces she had unleashed, and in the 1790s, frightened by the French Revolution, she tried to repress independent thinking. But this late reversal must not be allowed to obscure her lasting contribution. To Catherine belongs the credit for launching what Russians describe with the untranslatable obshchestvennoe dvizhenie (literally, 'social movement'), a broad current combining expressions of opinion with public activity, through which Russian society at long last asserted its right to an independent existence. The omnipotent Russian state brought into being even its own counterforce.
From its inception, public opinion in Russia flowed in two distinct channels from which in time branched out many forks. Both were critical of Russia as it then was, but for different reasons entirely. One can be described as conservative-nationalist, the other as liberal-radical.
The founder of the conservative-nationalist movement in Russia -and, incidentally, Russia's first clearly identifiable intelligent - was Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov. In his youth, he had served in the Guard regiment which put Catherine on the throne, a stroke of good fortune which assured him of the Empress's protection and favour. He participated in the Legislative Commission working with the 'middle estate', a fact which acquires special significance in view of his pronouncedly 'bourgeois' outlook. In 1769, responding to Catherine's journalistic challenge, he issued the first of three satirical journals, Truten' (The Drone), which he then followed with some serious didactic publications.
In the very first issue of The Drone, Novikov posed a question destined to be the central preoccupation of the whole intelligentsia movement in Russia. Confessing that he had no desire to serve in the army, civil service or at the court, he asked 'What can I do for society?', adding, by way of explanation, that 'to five on this earth without being of use is only to burden it'." His solution was to turn to publicistic and philanthropic work. Novikov's outlook falls wholly within the cultural tradition of the western European bourgeoisie, which is the more surprising since he had never been to the west and, according to his own admission, knew no foreign languages. In all his writings the principal target of attack was 'vice' which he identified with 'aristocratic' qualities of idleness, ostentatiousness, indifference to the sufferings of the poor, immorality, careerism, flattery, ignorance and contempt for knowledge.
THE INTELLIGENTSIA
'Virtue' was that which middle-class ideologists from Alberti to Benjamin Franklin had thought it it to be: industriousness, modesty, truthfulness, compassion, incorruptibility, studiousness. In his satirical publications, Novikov lashed out at life at the court and the estates of the rich in the name of these values. Catherine at first ignored his criticism, but his insistent harping on the dark sides of Russian life began eventually to annoy her, and she engaged him on the pages of her journal in literary polemics. That which Novikov lashed as 'vice' she preferred to treat as human 'weakness'. She called him intolerant and bilious. In one of their exchanges, Catherine charged Novikov with suffering from a 'fever', employing language which foreshadows some of the more bitter anti-intelligentsia polemics of the next century:
An individual begins to experience boredom and sadness, sometimes from idleness, sometimes from reading books. He begins to complain about everything around him, and in the end about the very universe. Having reached this phase, the disease comes to a head and overcomes reason. The afflicted person dreams of building castles in the air [complains] that everyone does everything wrongly, and that the government itself, try hard as it may, gives no satisfaction at all. In their minds, such people feel that they alone possess the ability to give advice and to arrange everything for the best.7 Novikov responded in more cautious language but without yielding an inch. On one occasion he even had the temerity to criticize the Empress's command of the Russian language.
This unprecedented exchange between sovereign and subject, unthinkable even one generation earlier, showed how rapidly the small fissure in the patrimonial structure had widened. In the reign of Elizabeth the emergence of belles lettres as an independent vocation represented a major constitutional change; in that of Catherine, the realm of independent thought came to extend to political controversy. Significantly, Novikov's disagreement with the Empress had for him no untoward consequences. Catherine continued to support him in a variety of ways, including subsidies. In the 1770s and 1780s, assisted by the Empress and wealthy friends, he initiated a programme of educational and philanthropic works of such grand scope that here one can do no more than list its peaks. His book publishing enterprises, designed to place informative rather than merely diverting literature in the hands of noble and burgher families, turned out over nine hundred titles. Through a Translators' Seminary, he made available to Russians many foreign works of a religious and literary nature. Part of the proceeds of his journalism and publishing went to support a school which he founded for orphans and indigent children, and a free hospital. During a famine, he organized relief. These would have been counted as good deeds anywhere in the world; but in Russia they were
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also a political innovation of revolutionary dimensions. Novikov broke with the tradition which held that the state and it alone had the right to act on behalf of'the land'. From him and his associates, society first learned it could take care of its own needs.