Ivan Betskoy

He was born in Stockholm, where Trubetskoy was held captive throughout the Great Northern War, and went to Copenhagen to get a military education before joining a Danish cavalry regiment.

In truth, Betskoy had been on friendly terms with Johanna Elisabeth for two decades previous, their intimacy giving rise to rumours that Catherine was his biological daughter.

After Johanna Elisabeth was expelled from Russia in 1747, Betskoy found it necessary to lay down his offices and settle in Paris, where he spent the following 15 years in commerce with the Encyclopédistes especially to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

He was introduced to the highest echelons of the French aristocracy by his half-sister Princess Anastasia Ivanovna, Landgravine von Hesse-Homburg (her first husband was Prince Demetre Cantemir, ruler of Moldavia).

It was at his suggestion that Étienne Maurice Falconet was commissioned to sculpt the Bronze Horseman; and it was he who engaged Georg von Veldten to design a magnificent iron fence for the Summer Garden.

The treatise contained a proposal to educate young Russians of both sexes in state boarding schools, aimed at creating "a new race of men".

Boarding schools were to be preferred to other institutions of education in accordance with Rousseau's notion that "isolating the pupils enabled their tutors to protect them from the vices of society.

Born out of wedlock himself and anxious to reduce the frequency of infanticide, Betskoy found in illegitimate children and orphans an ideal material for implementing his educational theories.

Betskoy deplored the fact that "we have only two classes of society, either peasants or noblemen" and sought to spur the development of middle-class consciousness by establishing a commercial school in Moscow.