Portrait of Empress Catherine the Great by Russian painter Fyodor Rokotov, 1763.Catherine reformed the administration of Russian guberniyas and many new cities and towns were founded on her orders. The monarch taking responsibility for the subjects precluded their political participation. This philosophy of enlightened despotism implied that the sovereign knew the interests of his or her subjects better than they themselves did. As such, she believed that strengthening her authority had to occur by improving the lives of her subjects. She enthusiastically supported the ideals of the Enlightenment, thus earning the status of an enlightened despot. The period of Catherine’s rule (1762-1796), the Catherinian Era, is often considered the Golden Age of the Russian Empire and the Russian nobility. the Smolny Institute Russia’s first educational establishment for women, established under Catherine the Great’s rule, that continued to function under the personal patronage of the Russian Empress until just before the 1917 revolution. Cossacks A group of predominantly East Slavic-speaking people who became known as members of democratic, self-governing, semi-military communities, predominantly located in Ukraine and in Russia. They inhabited sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper, Don, Terek, and Ural river basins and played an important role in the historical and cultural development of both Russia and Ukraine. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise over three million items. One of the largest and oldest museums in the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. Hermitage Museum A museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was the largest peasant revolt in Russia’s history. It began as an organized insurrection of Cossacks against a background of profound peasant unrest and war with the Ottoman Empire. Pugachev’s Rebellion A 1773-75 revolt in a series of popular rebellions that took place in Russia after Catherine II seized power in 1762. They held that royal power emanated not from divine right but from a social contract whereby a despot was entrusted with the power to govern through a social contract in lieu of any other governments. Some of them fostered education and allowed religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and the right to hold private property. The monarchs who embraced it followed the participles of rationality. Key Terms enlightened despotism Also known as enlightened absolutism or benevolent absolutism, a form of absolute monarchy or despotism inspired by the Enlightenment. She cultivated and corresponded with French encyclopedists but did not support a free-thinking spirit among her own subjects as much as among famous French philosophers. Catherine had a reputation as a patron of the arts, literature, and education.Catherine did not advocate democratic reforms but addressed some modernization trends, including dividing the country into provinces and districts, further increasing the power of the landed oligarchs, and issuing the Charter of the Towns, which distributed all people into six groups as a way to limit the power of nobles and create a middle estate.Her religious policies aimed to control populations and religious institutions in the multi-religious empire and were not an expression of religious freedom. Catherine converted to the Russian Orthodoxy as part of her immersion in the Russian matters but personally remained largely indifferent to religion.An estimated 62,000 pupils were educated in some 549 state institutions near the end of Catherine’s reign, a minuscule number of people compared to the size of the Russian population. However, despite the experts’ recommendations to establish a general system of education for all Russian Orthodox subjects from the age of 5 to 18, excluding serfs, only modest action was taken.
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