So serfage became still more difficult to be
distinguished from slavery. As this base of hideous wrong was thus
widened and deepened the nobles built higher and stronger their
superstructure of arrogance and pretension. Not many years after Peter's
death, they so overawed the Empress Anne that she thrust into the codes
of the empire statutes which allowed the nobles to sell serfs apart from
the soil. So did serfage bloom fully into slavery.
But in the latter half of the eighteenth century Russia gained a ruler
from whom the world came to expect much. To mount the throne, Catharine
II had murdered her husband; to keep the throne she had murdered two
claimants whose title was better than her own. She then became, with her
agents in these horrors, a second Messalina. To set herself right in the
eyes of Europe, she paid eager court to that hierarchy of scepticism
which in that age made or marred European reputations. She flattered the
fierce deists by owning fealty to "_Le Roi_" Voltaire; she flattered the
mild deists by calling in La Harpe as the tutor of her grandson; she
flattered the atheists by calling in Diderot as a tutor for herself.
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