Nakaz
Although the ideas of absolutism were emphatically upheld, the stance towards serfdom is more blurry: the chapter about peasants was retouched a number of times.
In its final version, the Instruction consists of 22 chapters and 655 articles, which embrace various spheres of state, criminal, and civil law and procedure.
Catherine's work had little practical value however: the Legislative Commission failed to outline the new code of laws and the Instruction never circulated in Russia outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Catherine's Instruction to the Legislative Commission gave an in-depth description of the state of the nation at the time it was written (1764).
Though Catherine based her writing heavily on the Enlightenment of Western Europe, she merely utilized some of the broader ideas of the movement, such as equality under the law, to strengthen autocracy.
[3] Montesquieu, whose works heavily influenced Catherine, wrote of such things as a divided government (where the power is split between the executive and legislative bodies) and a monarchy made up of three estates.
Borrowing heavily from Montesquieu's Esprit des lois ("The Spirit of the Laws") Catherine was careful to make small alterations of the original that brought it into conformity with her view of Russia as an absolutist bureaucratic monarchy that has offices to manage things like tax collection, police service, etc.
[8] The body of the document starts by stating that Russia is a European power, and that the nation owes this to the reforms of Peter the Great.
Her final argument for autocracy is that an absolute government does not deprive people of liberty, but directs them so that they can contribute to the overall society to make it better.
Catherine contradicts this notion later by saying that Russia is an absolute monarchy in which the leader voluntarily accepts limitations of the common law.
[13] Due to other arguments made on the issue of crime and punishment, it came to be widely believed that Catherine was of the school of thought that suggested it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to convict a single innocent man.
Police, in her opinion, were meant to uncover crime, not exact justice, and this issue was looked at more closely in supplements she added to the text later.
She went so far as to say that being arrested "ought not to be looked upon as a punishment, but rather as the means of preserving the person of the accused in safety, which assure him at the same time of his liberty, provided he is innocent.
Other areas she covers are marriage, taxes, trade and manufacture, education, the nobility, the middle class, the role of towns in the Russian infrastructure, and the practice of inheritance and will making.
