Nakaz, or Instruction, of Catherine the Great (, transliteration: Nakaz Jekateriny II Komissiji o sostavleniji projekta novogo Uloženija) was a statement of legal principles written by Catherine II of Russia, and permeated with the ideas of the French Enlightenment. It was compiled as a guide for the All-Russian Legislative Commission convened in 1767 for the purpose of replacing the mid-17th-century Muscovite code of laws with a modern law code. Catherine believed that to strengthen law and institutions was above all else to strengthen the monarchy.
The Instruction proclaimed the equality of all men before the law and disapproved of the death penalty and torture, thus anticipating some of the issues raised by the later United States Constitution and the Polish Constitution. Although the ideas of absolutism were emphatically upheld, the stance towards serfdom is more blurry: the chapter about peasants was retouched a number of times.
Catherine worked on the Instruction for two years. In 1766, she showed the manuscript to her closest advisors, Nikita Panin and Grigory Orlov, asking them to make changes as they thought necessary. In its final version, the Instruction consists of 22 chapters and 655 articles, which embrace various spheres of state, criminal, and civil law and procedure. More than 400 articles are copied verbatim from the works of Montesquieu, Beccaria, and other contemporary thinkers.
In 1767, Catherine sent the German edition to Frederick II of Prussia and the French one to Voltaire. She wrote to one of her correspondents that
The extant manuscript of the Instruction was written by Catherine in French. There is also a Russian translation by herself. On 10 August 1767 the Russian and German editions were printed in Moscow. The Latin and French editions followed in 1770. In 1769 Duc de Choiseul had the Instruction officially prohibited in France as a "libertarian book".
The Instruction generated much discussion among Russian intellectuals and exerted considerable influence on the course of the Russian Enlightenment. It was in this document that the basic tenets of the French Enlightenment were articulated in Russian for the first time. Catherine's work had little practical value however: the Legislative Commission failed to outline the new code of laws and the Instruction never circulated in Russia outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Denis Diderot, who visited Russia in 1774, penned an extensive critique of the Nakaz — Observations sur le Nakaz — which opens with a famous contention: "There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people".
Background
Catherine’s Instruction to the Legislative Commission gave an in-depth description of the state of the nation at the time it was written (1764). Eighteen months in the making, the Nakaz was written with the intention of providing an unambiguous description of the existing laws. Though Catherine based her writing heavily on the Enlightenment of Western Europe, she merely utilized some of the broader ideas of the movement, such as equality under the law, to strengthen autocracy. Montesquieu, whose works heavily influenced Catherine, wrote of such things as a divided government (where the power is split between the executive and legislative bodies) and a monarchy made up of three estates. Catherine tactfully ignored these ideas in favor of an absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.
The Nakaz was written as a way to argue for the already existing system rather than bring about any serious change. Borrowing heavily from Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (“The Spirit of the Laws”) Catherine was careful to make small alterations of the original that brought it into conformity with her view of Russia as an absolutist bureaucratic monarchy that has offices to manage things like tax collection, police service, etc. It took several drafts and ample input from advisors before the final document was finished, by which time several more radical proposals were eliminated. Catherine continued to listen to criticism and make changes to her work up until 1767, at which time two supplementary chapters were written.
Organization
The Instruction is composed of a total of 22 chapters, 655 clauses, an introduction and a conclusion. The first three chapters discuss the current state of the Russian Empire. Chapters 4-10 discuss the existing code of laws as well as Catherine’s opinion of them. The rest of the chapters excluding the last two discuss the people of Russia as a whole. Chapters 21 and 22, the supplementary chapters, come after the conclusion and analyze the organization of the police and the state’s management of money, respectively.