Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program

Hello in Moscow's Tretikov gallery hangs perhaps the most well-known picture of Russia's most well-known ruler

Metri Levitsky's 1780 portrait of Catherine the Great in the Justice Temple depicts Catherine in the temple burning poppies at an altar

symbolizing her sacrifice of self-interest for Russia law books and the scales of justice for her feet highlighting her respectful

Promotion of the rule of law, but menacingly in the background an eagle crouches suggesting the means to use brutal power

Where necessary this was on a many images that Catherine commissioned that demonstrated her skill at manipulation and

Reinvention for an obscure small town German princess her ambition was large the transformation of a semi-barbaric country

Into a model of the ideas of the French 18th century enlightenment

How far was Catherine able to lead her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe?

Was she able to liberate the surfs and should she be remembered as Russia's most civilized ruler or as a Megalamanical

Desperate with me to discuss Catherine the Great a Janet Hartley professor of international history at the London School of Economics

Simon Dixon professor of modern history at the University of Leeds and Tony Lenton a professor of history at the open university

Janet Hartley 50% of Russians in the 18th century were surfs

First of all what was a surf what was the state is a secondly highly that compare the rest of Europe?

Russia was an overwhelming the peasant society in the 18th century and of those peasants over 50% of those peasants were surfs

Surfs were peasants who lived on noble land rather than state land

That doesn't mean that their life was

Essentially very different from that of state peasants, but it meant that they had even fewer

rights than people who were not surfs and to our mind they would be

unfree if you compare this with the rest of Europe then of course most people were

unfree in some sense even if they weren't technically

...