The war with Turkey also put an end to one of Catherine’s pet projects, the Legislative Commission. For decades the government had been aware of the confused state of Russian law, based as it was on the 1649 law code, Peter’s legislation, and hundreds of decrees on particular issues that often contradicted more general statutes. Catherine saw the opportunity to carry out a thorough review and revision and to establish some general principles. To this end in January 1765, she began to compile an Instruction, a guideline for reform. The result was a volume of several hundred pages, compiled (as she freely admitted) of passages translated from her beloved Montesquieu; the Italian law reformer Cesare Beccaria; and German writers on finance and economics, such as the now forgotten Baron J. F. von Bielfeld. In the text she began with the principle that Russia was a European state, and it was a monarchy, not a despotism. That is, its government was based on law, not the arbitrary will of the monarch. At the same time, following Montesquieu, she argued that a state the size of Russia required an absolute monarch who would have the necessary vigor and power to rule effectively. Without that, lawlessness and chaos would ensue. The Instruction was not a series of specific recommendations about particular issues but a description of general principles for laws regulating social status, law courts, and the encouragement of population growth, agriculture, commerce, and industry. It concluded with a series of principles for what was then called “police” in Europe. These principles were ordinances not concerned so much with crime as they were with cleanliness, communication, fire prevention, and general good order in town and country. The text was remarkable enough, but even more remarkable was the use to which she put it.
At the end of 1766 she issued a manifesto that announced that various local communities were to choose representatives to come to Moscow to discuss the reform of the law, and a few months later she published her Instruction and ordered it distributed throughout the country. Thus an extensive compilation of Enlightenment political thought was to be distributed openly to the population at large, and this was to be the basis for the deliberations of the Legislative Commission in Moscow.
The Commission opened on July 30, 1767, with 428 of the 564 delegates already present. The most important group comprised the 142 deputies from the nobility and the 209 deputies from the cities (many of them also noblemen). There were also 29 delegates from the free peasants and 44 Cossack deputies. From the various Volga peoples, Tatars and others came 54 deputies – 22 deputies represented the Ukrainian Cossack nobility of the Hetmanate, and the Baltic provinces had their deputies among the nobles. Even the free Finnish peasants of the Vyborg area had their representatives. Some nobles tried to challenge their presence, but Catherine upheld them on the basis of the Swedish law of this conquered territory. The only group that was not represented consisted of the serf peasants of Russia and the Baltic provinces, who together made up more than fifty percent of the population of the state.
The process of choosing representatives was hardly a modern ideal election, for in many remote areas the nobles simply failed to show up or did so in very small numbers. In the towns it was hard to achieve consensus, and the free peasants also seem to have seen the process as a chance to petition the monarch rather than to suggest law. Nevertheless, they all did show up in Moscow and with some prompting from the empress, got down to work assembling and examining existing legislation and compiling proposals that would serve as the basis of general statutes for regularizing the status of the various groups in society in judicial institutions. The delegates were not a parliament and were not there to pass laws – they had assembled to make proposals to Catherine that she could choose to follow or not. They were also supposed to follow the guidelines of her instruction, and they generally did, but not without considerable discussion. Opinions were exchanged remarkably freely, and some of the more conservative nobles rejected the implications of the Instruction that were favorable to peasants and townspeople. As time passed, the various subcommissions deliberated slowly and Catherine decided to move them to St. Petersburg. By the summer of 1768, the nobles were ready with a proposal, itself the object of considerable wrangling, especially over issues like the conditions for promotion of commoners to noble rank and crimes against nobles by serfs. Catherine was getting a very rapid lesson in the values and ideas of the various classes of Russian society, and it was fairly clear that reform of state and society would meet considerable obstacles among a large part of the nobility. The Turkish declaration of war intervened before she had to make difficult decisions. Most of the noble deputies were also army officers, and now full mobilization was necessary to deal with both Turkey and the Polish situation. The Commission was dissolved. Its work, however, was not in vain, as later events would prove.
The war with Turkey was the first serious test of Catherine’s government, for the Ottoman Empire was still a formidable opponent and the Russians would have to cross vast expanses of southern steppe even to engage the enemy. In the end, the Russian army proved itself capable of the task, slowly but systematically advancing into Crimea and the Balkan Peninsula. The Russian navy sailed from St. Petersburg around Europe under the command of Aleksei Orlov and the British Admiral John Elphinstone, destroying the Turkish fleet in the harbor of Chesme in 1770. In spite of the distraction of the Polish conflict, Catherine’s forces made their way into Bulgaria and forced the Ottomans to make peace on her terms at the small village of Kuchuk Kainardzha in 1774.
The treaty came just two years after a seemingly permanent settlement of the Polish situation. With Russia fighting two wars at once, Frederick the Great of Prussia saw his chance and proposed to Catherine that they both solve the problem by taking Polish territory. Austria would have to be conciliated as well, and the result would be a smaller Poland that would be less threatening, should reform succeed. Catherine agreed to this proposal after some hesitation, for she still hoped to maintain influence over the whole of Poland, but eventually she gave in. The result was the partition treaty of 1772, which gave large and valuable districts to Austria and Prussia. Catherine took a large but thinly populated slice of eastern Belorussia that provided better Russian river communications with Riga. A byproduct of the new border was the inclusion of Jews in the Russian state for the first time. For Catherine the outcome was a qualified success, as Poniatowski remained king and made modest reforms that strengthened the state and Polish prosperity while ultimately remaining subservient to Russian interests.