39 Catherine’s Domestic Policies
21.5.4: Catherine’s Domestic Policies
Catherine the Great enthusiastically supported the ideals of the Enlightenment, thus earning the status of an enlightened despot, although her reforms benefited a small number of her subjects and did not change the oppressive system of Russian serfdom.
Learning Objective
Evaluate Catherine the Great’s domestic policies and to what extent she can be considered an enlightened despot
Key Points
- The period of Catherine’s rule (1762-1796), the Catherinian Era, is often considered the Golden Age of the Russian Empire and Russian nobility. She enthusiastically supported the ideals of the Enlightenment, thus earning the status of an enlightened despot.
- An admirer of Peter the Great, Catherine continued to modernize Russia along Western European lines. However, military conscription and economy continued to depend on serfdom, and the increasing demands of the state and private landowners led to increased levels of reliance on serfs. Consequently, the unrest intensified and more than fifty peasant revolts occurred between 1762 and 1769. These culminated in Pugachev’s Rebellion, the largest peasant revolt in Russia’s history.
- Catherine believed a “new kind of person” could be created by inculcating Russian children with European education. However, despite the experts’ recommendations to establish a general system of education for all Russian Orthodox subjects from the age of 5 to 18, excluding serfs, only modest action was taken. An estimated 62,000 pupils were educated in some 549 state institutions near the end of Catherine’s reign, a minuscule number of people compared to the size of the Russian population.
- Catherine converted to the Russian Orthodoxy as part of her immersion in the Russian matters but personally remained largely indifferent to religion. Her religious policies aimed to control populations and religious institutions in the multi-religious empire and were not an expression of religious freedom.
- Catherine did not advocate democratic reforms but addressed some modernization trends, including dividing the country into provinces and districts, further increasing the power of the landed oligarchs, and issuing the Charter of the Towns, which distributed all people into six groups as a way to limit the power of nobles and create a middle estate.
- Catherine had a reputation as a patron of the arts, literature, and education. She cultivated and corresponded with French encyclopedists but did not support a free-thinking spirit among her own subjects as much as among famous French philosophers.
Key Terms
- enlightened despotism
- Also known as enlightened absolutism or benevolent absolutism, a form of absolute monarchy or despotism inspired by the Enlightenment. The monarchs who embraced it followed the participles of rationality. Some of them fostered education and allowed religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and the right to hold private property. They held that r