Diderot, “Observations,” 82. Another contemporary who expressed his doubts concerning
Catherine’s democratic credentials was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder.
“The monarch of Russia,” he wrote, “presupposes a motivating force that her language,
nation, and empire do not possess: honor. One should read Montesquieu on this and
the Russian nation and state of mind is exactly its opposite: one should read him
on despotism and fear, and both are exactly present.” (Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1976), 99.)
8.
Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 622.
9.
Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 626.
10.
Cf. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, I. The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 403. These special
rights of the nobility included that “they could not lose their status, honor, property
or life without judicial proceedings, and could be judged only by judges of equal
birth with themselves. . . . They received permission to leave state service at will,
to take service with foreign governments, and to travel outside the country. They
were given the right to sign their names (like European nobles) with territorial titles.
They were reconfirmed in their right to ‘buy villages’ (that is serfs), and to engage
in wholesale or overseas trade.”
11.
Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 404.
12.
It is still a subject of discussion whether the Cold War could be called a “war” that
ended in a defeat. This interpretation is defended by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote:
“The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This
reality cannot be denied.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Cold War and its Aftermath,”
Foreign Affairs 71, no. 4 (Fall 1992), 31.) Ernst-Otto Czempiel, on the other hand, stated: “It is
easy, but erroneous, to argue that NATO won the conflict, . . . that the NATO alliance
defeated the Warsaw Pact without firing a single round, so to speak. . . . The Warsaw
Pact remained a strong military alliance until the very end. It was in many respects
superior to NATO. No, a proper explanation lies elsewhere. It is more accurate to
view the end of the East-West conflict as having been produced not by the military
defeat of the Warsaw Pact.” (Ernst-Otto Czempiel, “Governance and Democratization,”
in Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, eds. James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 251.) Of course, Czempiel is right: it was not a military defeat. However, it certainly was an ideological, economic, political, and moral
defeat. It was this moral defeat, in particular, that led to the breakdown of the
empire and—ultimately—to the disestablishment of the Warsaw Pact.
13.
Cf. Walter Pintner, “Russian Military Thought: The Western Model and the Shadow of
Suvorov,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 360.
14.
