If the Spirit of the Laws provided Catherine with the image of rationally ordered politics, the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert, which began to appear three years later in 1751, provided the image of rationally ordered knowledge. Her enthusiasm for this work soon rivaled her passion for Montesquieu. D'Alembert declined Catherine's invitation to serve as tutor to her son; but Diderot considered transferring the editorial side of his work to Riga, and eventually sold his library to Catherine and came to St. Petersburg.30 Three volumes of the Encyclopedia had been translated almost immediately into Russian under the supervision of the director of Moscow University. A private translation was concurrently being made by the future historian Ivan Boltin, and many articles and sections were translated individually.
For the rational ordering of economic life, Catherine turned first (at Diderot's suggestion) to the French physiocrat, Lemercier de la Riviere; then, following his unhappy visit to Russia,31 she sent two professors from Moscow to study under Adam Smith in Glasgow. Her most original approach was the founding in 1765 of a Free Economic Society for the Encouragement in Russia of Agriculture and Household Management: a kind of extra-governmental advisory body. Two years later she offered one thousand gold pieces for the best set of recommendations on how to organize an agricultural economy "for the common good." The society received
164 entries in this remarkable Europe-wide contest, with the greatest response and the prize-winning essay coming from France.32
In practice, however, there was no reorganization of agriculture, just as there was no new law code or synthesis of knowledge. The shock caused by the Pugachev uprising put an end to the languishing legislative commission and to the various efforts to make the Encyclopedia the basis for widespread public enlightenment. Boltin's translation died at the letter "K"- the first of the host of uncompleted reference books with which Russian history is so tragically full.33
Yet even while Cathering was preparing Pugachev for quartering, she continued to correspond with the Corsican revolutionary Paoli (and another restless Corsican, the then obscure Napoleon Bonaparte considered entering her service).34
Only after the French Revolution did Catherine's thoughts turn away from reform altogether to a final assertion of unleavened despotism. Even 1 then she bequeathed the dilemma to Alexander J^ by assigning to him the «Swiss republican La Harpe as a tutor and by surrounding him with an aristocratic entourage of Anglophile liberals. Alexander I in turn willed to Alexander II some of this dangerous taste for partial reform when a friend from his own liberal days, Michael Speransky, became one of the tutors.
At the end of her long trail of literary and literal seductions, Catherine left aristocratic Russia stimulated, but in no way satisfied. By sending most of the aristocratic elite abroad for education, she imparted a vague sense of possibility, a determination to "overtake and surpass" the Enlightenment of the West. /{Vet the actual reforms accomplished in her reign were too meager even to provide clear guidance toward this goal. From Catherine, aristocratic thinkers received only their inclination to look Westward for answers. They learned to think in terms of sweeping reforms on abstract, rationalistic grounds rather than piecemeal changes rooted in concrete conditions and traditions.
Particularly popular under Catherine was the vague idea that newJy, conquered jegions to the south could provide virgin soil on which to raise out of nothing a new civilization. Voltaire told Catherine that he would come to Russia if Kiev were made the capital rather than St. Petersburg. Herder's earliest dream of earthly glory was to be "a new Luther and Solon" for the Ukraine: to make this unspoiled and fertile region into "a new Greece."36 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre believed that an egalitarian agricultural community, possibly even a new Pennsylvania, might be created in the region around the Aral Sea.36 Catherine herself dreamed of making her new city below Kiev on the Dnieper, Ekaterinoslav ("Praise Catherine"), a
monumental center for world culture and her newly conquered port on the Black Sea, Kherson, a new St. Petersburg.37
Rather than come to grips with the concrete problems of her realm, Catherine became infatuated in her declining years with her "grand design" for taking Constantinople and dividing the Balkans with the Hapsburg emperor. She named her second grandson Constantine, placed the image of the Santa "Sophia on her coins, and wrote a dramatic extravaganza, The First Government of Oleg, which ends with this early Russian conqueror-prince leaving his shield behind in Constantinople for future generations to reclaim.38
Having subdued at last the entire northern coast of the Black Sea, Catherine adorned it with a string of new cities-often on the site of old Greek settlements-Azov, Taganrog, Nikolaev, Odessa, and Sevastopol. The latter, built as a fortress on the southwest corner of the Crimean peninsula, was given the Greek version of the Roman imperial title Augusta. Built by an English naval engineer, Samuel Bentham, the "august city" (sevaste polis) inspired nothing original except for the eerie plan of Samuel's famous brother Jeremy for a panopticon: a prison in which a central observer could peer into all cells.39 Sevastopol is remembered not for the awe it inspired but for the humiliation it brought to Russia when captured by British and French invaders during the Crimean War. More than any other single event, the fall of the "august city" in 1855 dispelled illusion and forced Russia to turn from external glory to internal reform.
But external glory preoccupied Catherine during the latter part of her reign. Her world of illusion is. symbolized by the famed legend that portable "Potemkin villages" were devised by her most famous courtier to camouflage the misery of the people from her eyes during triumphal tours. She spent her last years (and almost her last rubles) building pretentious palaces for her favorites, foreign advisers and relatives: Tauride in St. Petersburg and nearby Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo (which she intended to name Constantingorod). The costumes and sets were more impressive than the actual plays in Catherine's theater. She expressed a preference for extended divertissements, and insisted that serious operas be cut from three acts to two. It seems strangely appropriate that four different versions of the Pygmalion story were staged during the reign of Catherine. This minor German princess had been transformed into a northern goddess by the sages of the eighteenth century; but in this case the reality was less impressive than the figure on the pedestal. Even today the monument to her in front of the former imperial (now Saltykov-Shchedrin) library in Leningrad still is usually seen rising up from a sea of mud. Her every movement was surrounded with cosmetic camouflage and rococo frills. In an age when cutout
silhouettes and surface flourishes were in vogue throughout Europe, Catherine brought the silhouette without the substance of reform to Russia.40 As a final monument to her vanity, she left behind five feast days consecrated to her alone on the church calendar: her birthday, day of succession to the throne, day of coronation, name day, and the day of her smallpox vaccination, November 21.41
Catherine's turn from inner reform to external aggrandizement is dramatically illustrated by the three-sided and three-staged dismemberment of Poland. Having helped place her youthful friend and lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the Polish throne in 1764, Catherine participated in the first partition of Poland in 1772; then took the lead in the last two, which followed Stanisfaw's adoption in 1791 of a reform constitution not dissimilar to those which Catherine had considered in earlier days.42 The absorption of Poland had, however, the ironic effect of helping to perpetuate the very tradition that Catherine was rejecting. For Stanislaw promptly moved to St. Petersburg along with his relatives, the Czartoryski family, and many other reform-minded survivors of the old Polish republic.