ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the nature of the Russian government and its relation to society. It concerns the way in which the government dealt with social and administrative problems and deals with the relationship between Catherine II, Russian society, and the philosophes and their world of ideas. Historians of Russia have long been aware of the difficulty in translating, say, seventeenth-century Russian court ranks into an acceptable English or French terminology. Latin has been the mother tongue or the lingua franca of all non-Orthodox Christian Europe, and has provided a common vocabulary for political and liturgical use. A full history of penal policy, in theory and in practice, in eighteenth-century Russia, based on court records and judicial practice, remains to be written.
