The ideal of an expanded, Western type of school system had been present for several decades in the more advanced Western sections of the Russian Empire. German-educated Ukrainian seminarians like Gregory Teplov drew up elaborate plans; Herder, while a young pastor in Riga, dreamed of installing a system of instruction modeled on Rousseau's Emile. Baltic German graduates of Tartu, in Esthonia, brought with them the ideas of the Enlightenment that had begun to permeate that institution. Officers like Andrew Bolotov returned from the Seven Years' War with plans for streamlining Russian aristocratic instruction along lines set down by the victorious Frederick the Great.44
At first glance, Catherine's educational projects appear to be nothing more than another example of high hopes and minimal accomplishment. Encouraged by Locke's On the Education of Children (translated into Russian in 1761) and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to think of man as a tabula rasa on which education is free to print any message, Catherine discussed plans for education with everyone from the encyclopedists to the Jesuits (to whom she offered shelter after the Pope abolished the Society in 1773). However, the statute for public schools in the empire, drawn up with the aid of Jankovich de Mirievo, a Serb who had reorganized public education within the Hapsburg empire, remained largely a paper proclamation. While she talked of sowing seeds of knowledge throughout the empire, she let the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences lapse into a relatively fallow period in which little serious work was published.45
Yet certain important developments did take place in education; and almost all of them were connected with Betskoy, who, like most eighteenth-century Russian aristocrats, was widely traveled, trained to think in abstract, universal terms, and almost totally without deep roots in his Russian homeland. Estrangement was built into his very name, for Betskoy was a contraction of the old aristocratic name of Trubetskoy, of the sort frequently assumed by the illegitimate children of noble families. The Vorontsovs gave birth to more than a few Rantsovs; Golitsyns, Litsyns; Rumiantsevs, Miantsovs; Griboedovs, Gribovs, and so on. Betskoy was not alone in bearing this constant reminder of aristocratic profligacy. Ivan Pnin, whose
1804 treatise, On Enlightenment in Russia, went even further in proposing education for the peasantry, was also the bastard offspring of an old aristocratic line. His father, Prince Nicholas Repnin, was a friend of Betskoy known as the "Russian Aristides" for his enlightened administrative activities in western Russia.46 Herzen, whose publications abroad later helped revive interest in the reformist currents of Catherine's time, also bore the stamp of illegitimate aristocratic birth.
Betskoy was born in Stockholm, educated in Copenhagen, spent most of his early life in Paris, and had close if not intimate relations with a host of minor German princesses, including the mother of Catherine the Great. Thus, when Catherine ascended to the throne, Betskoy commended himself to the young empress as a man with excellent intellectual and physiological qualifications for the court. Like Catherine's special favorites, Orlov and Potemkin, Betskoy was drawn to the Empress and her projects for reform partly because of antagonism to the more established aristocracy. Whereas most older aristocrats sympathized with Panin's efforts to have an aristocratic council limit tsarist authority, Betskoy and his allies sought to expand that authority as a means of furthering their own relative position in the hierarchy. Whereas the older aristocrats tended to adopt the measured rationalism of Voltaire and Diderot, Catherine's less secure courtiers tended to prefer the visionary ideas of Rousseau. There was perhaps a certain sense of identity between these relative outsiders to the Russian aristocracy and the Genevan outsider to the aristocratic Paris of the philosophes. Basically, however, the Russian turn from Voltaire to Rousseau reflected a general turn in intellectual fashion among European reformist circles of the 1770's and 1780's. Orlov invited Rousseau to come to Russia and take up permanent residence on his estate; one of the Potemkins became Rousseau's principal Russian translator; Catherine retreated increasingly to her own Rousseauian "Hermitage"; and the "general plan of education" which Betskoy presented to her was partly based on Rousseau's Emile.47
Betskoy sought to create in Russia "a new breed of man" freed from the artificiality of contemporary society for a more natural way of life. The government was to assume responsibility for this new type of education, seeking to develop the heart as well as the mind, to encourage physical as well as mental development, and to place the teaching of morality at the head of the curriculum. In his search for elements suitable for remolding through pedagogical experiment he had to look no further than his own origins. Bastards and orphans-the rejected material of society-were to become the cornerstones of his new temple of humanity. On the basis of a close study of secular philanthropic activities in England and France, Betskoy set up in Moscow and Petersburg foundling homes which were to
become major centers of initiation into the new Russian Enlightenment. Foundling homes are even now called "educational" (vospitatel'nye) homes in Russia, and these first ones were set up
… to overcome the superstition of centuries, to give the people their new education and, so to speak, their new birth (porozhdenie).48
They were to remain totally removed from the outside world in these secular monasteries from age five or six to eighteen or twenty; but, in fact, many entered at two or three, and were neither bastards nor orphans.
Betskoy was Russia's first de facto minister of education, serving as president of the Academy of Arts, organizing planner for the Smolny Monastery for women (the only one of these "monastic" schools to outlive him), and reorganizer of the curriculum for the infantry corps of cadets-as well as head of the foundling homes and an influential adviser to the Academy of Sciences and many private tutors. He was also a resourceful fund raiser, promoting special theatrical benefits and a lucrative tax for education on another favorite aristocratic recreation: playing cards. He died in 1795, just a year before his sovereign benefactor, and willed his substantial private fortune of 400,000 rubles to his educational projects. As he was lowered into the grave, the most honored poet of the age, Gabriel Derzhavin, read a specially written "On the End of the Philanthropist" to this "ray of goodness." The poem was, as it were, the secular substitute for the "Eternal Memory" of the Orthodox burial service. Now "heaven, truth, saintliness" were made to "cry out above the grave" that their "light" was immortal even if their lives were only "smoke." "Without good deeds," Derzhavin concludes, "there is no blessedness."48
One can, of course, question what the real number of "good deeds" or extent of civic "blessedness" was under Catherine. Slje never shared her courtiers' fondness for Rousseau, and forbade-long before the Pugachev uprising-the circulation of many of his key works, including Emile. She viewed Rousseau as "a new St. Bernard," who was arming France and all of Europe for "a spiritual crusade against me."50 Nevertheless, the all-important fourth part of Emile, the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar," readily slipped through the hands of the censors when it appeared in Russian translation in 1770 under the "Aesopian" title "Meditations on the Majesty of God, on His Providence and on Man."
The historical importance of the Russian Enlightenment under Catherine cannot be denied. Russians had been introduced to a new world of thought that was neither theological nor technological, but involved the remaking of the whole man in accordance with a new secular ideal of ethical activism. Moreover, the idea was established that this moral educa-