Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

Peter spent most of this time in his own room, where his servants kept him supplied not only with military toys but with alcohol. During these days, the grand duke often found himself ignored and even flagrantly disobeyed by his servants, they being as drunk as he. Angry, Peter would strike about him with his stick or the flat of his sword, but his entourage dodged and laughed. After Catherine’s recovery, Peter asked her to make them behave. “When this happened,” she said, “I would go to his rooms and scold them, reminding them of their place and their duties. They always resumed their proper places. This made the grand duke say to me that he did not understand how I managed his servants; he flogged them, but could not make himself obeyed, while I obtained what I wanted with a single word.”

They sat and watched the fire until the heat became too great and the carriage was forced to move. Before leaving, however, Catherine saw an extraordinary sight: “An astonishing number of rats and mice were coming down the staircase in a single, orderly line without even appearing to hurry.”

Her last word on the matter was that it could be argued on behalf of the rat that it had been hanged without having been heard in its own defense.

Example of animal being tried as a human so should therefore have human rights

When three years of famine descended on Russia, peasants left the barren land and flocked to towns in search of food. To bind them, Boris decreed a permanent bondage to the land, to be vested in the landowners. In the years that followed, the legal binding of workers to the land was needed to curb the nomadic instincts of Russian peasants; many simply walked away from work they did not like.

Walking away is one of the basic freedoms

Flight had always been the Russian peasants’ principal defense against oppression; industrial serfs attempted escape to the little-populated regions and deserts beyond the lower Volga. Not all of these runaways escaped alive, but the number of those attempting to flee was rising.

From Grimm: “Thirty years of labor have not brought Diderot the slightest recompense. It has pleased the Empress of Russia to pay the debt of France.”

Catherine warmly welcomed the famous editor of the Encyclopedia. The man she saw before her possessed a “high brow receding on a half-bald head; large rustic ears and a big bent nose, firm mouth … [and] brown eyes, heavy and sad, as if recalling unrecallable errors, or realizing the indestructibility of superstition, or noting the high birth rate of simpletons.”