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Russia has always been, and still is, a very special country: first, because of its geographical size, and second, because of its history. Russia is huge. It covers the biggest landmass in the world. But this huge country is mostly landlocked and has only some sparse outlets to the sea—on the Baltic and the Barents Seas in the north, the Black Sea in the south, and the Pacific Ocean in the east. If the sea is a “window on the world” (as tsar Peter the Great thought, which was why he built his new capital in Saint Petersburg), then Russia resembles a huge bunker with high closed walls and only a few small apertures. Is this the reason for the “bunker mentality” that foreign visitors often observed and which led Russians to view their Western neighbors with mixed feelings of distrust and jealousy?: jealousy because of the economic progress and technical prowess of these neighbors (which Russia was eager to copy) and distrust because of the dangerous democratic ideas that were considered a contagious disease that should be stopped at the frontier. This country on the fringes of Europe was known for the despotism of its leaders, its lack of freedom, and its eternal drive for territorial expansion.

Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot: Early Critics of Russian Despotism

In the eighteenth century especially, when in Western Europe philosophers of the Enlightenment started to attack absolutist rule and formulated their first radical democratic projects, Russia became the counterexample to everything the philosophes stood for. Montesquieu, for instance, considered Russia a huge prison: “The Moscovites cannot leave the empire,” he wrote, “not even to travel.”^[1] The tsar, he continued, was “the absolute ruler over the life and the goods of his subjects, who, with the exception of four families, are all slaves.”^[2] In De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu wrote that despotic governments, like Russia’s, are exclusively based on fear: “One cannot speak without trembling about these monstrous governments.”^[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau was hardly more friendly in his assessment of the Russians, who were for him not only “cruel fellows,” but who “will always regard free people as they themselves should be regarded, that is to say as nobodies on whom only two instruments bear any influence, namely money and the knout.”^[4] Rousseau wrote these words in a recommendation for reform of the Polish government that he sent to his Polish interlocutors shortly before Poland’s first partition in 1772. It was not without foresight that he warned the Poles: “You will never be free as long as there remains one Russian soldier in Poland and your freedom will always be threatened as long as Russia interferes in your affairs.”^[5]

It is interesting to note that Rousseau wrote this text during the reign of tsarina Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 to 1796 and was a great admirer of the French encyclopaedists. She corresponded with Diderot and Voltaire, and she actually invited Diderot to Saint Petersburg for five months. Like Peter the Great before her, she displayed an energetic drive to modernize the country, and she herself wrote the 655 articles of the Nakaz, a radical law reform based on the works of Montesquieu. She even introduced some pseudo-democratic measures, such as convening an All-Russian Legislative Commission. But all this had no lasting consequences. Back in Paris, Diderot wrote his Observations, in which he expressed a sharp critique of the Nakaz. “There is no true sovereign except the nation,” he wrote. “There can be no true legislator except the people. It is rare that people submit sincerely to laws which have been imposed on them. But they will love the laws, respect, obey and protect them as their own achievement, if they are themselves the authors of them.”^[6] Diderot made no effort to flatter the tsarina. “The Empress of Russia,” he wrote, “is certainly a despot.”^[7] Catherine only saw Diderot’s critical Observations after the death of the philosopher, when his library was transferred to Saint Petersburg under a contractual agreement. When she finally read Diderot’s comments, wrote Jonathan Israel, “she flew into a rage and apparently destroyed the copy she received.”^[8]