Catherine's reforms. I may recall his enthusiasm for Russia's great civilising task, an enthusiasm to which he gave free expression in his diary when journeying from Riga to Europe in 1769. He looked forward to a rejuvenescence of the hoary civilisation of Europe. Russia was to become the leader of culture and to make Europe happy with a second renaissance. Ukraine would become a new Greece. Herder was by no means blind to the errors and defects of the Russians, but he considered that they were animated by a sense of the good, which was notably manifest in their imitative capacity. Peter the Great and Catherine II were to him ideal figures; they were predestined to make a nation of elemental greatness out of the Russian barbarians—of course in accordance with the prescriptions of the works on political education which Herder intended to write in order to win the empress' favour.
Such flatteries, and others yet more gross, were customary at that epoch; but Catherine could make a very adroit use of fulsome praise, and was glad to pay for advertisements of the kind.[1]
§ 13.
PETER'S reforms were mainly of a practical character, but, since practice must be based on theory, practical needs necessitated a theoretical foundation. Nor was it sufficient to transplant individual Europeans to Russia and to send Russians to study in Europe; it was essential that schools and other means of culture should be provided at home. The plan for the foundation of the academy originated with Peter; and in the year 1726, shortly after his death, it was carried out by his widow. The Livonian peasant girl, unable to read or write, was a faithful patron of the new institution. The initial aims of the academy were of a practical nature, for it had a printing establishment and other workshops, but it tended more and more towards theoretical activities. The first university (1747), somewhat primitive, was an offshoot of the academy; the first academic gimnazija (higher school) was founded as early as 1726. The university
- ↑ The view of certain Russian historians that the modern history of Russia begins with Catherine is, in my opinion, erroneous.
