Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

       Voltaire was so enchanted by the emerging Russian empire that he penned gushing letters to Catherine the Great. In the 1760s and 1770s the French Enlightenment thinker and the Russian empress exchanged 197 handwritten missives, all in French, a tongue favoured by the Russian nobility. Voltaire praised Catherine as an “enlightened despot", and told her: “If I were younger, I would become Russian." In 1773 she received Denis Diderot, another silk-stockinged philosophe, at the Court of St Petersburg. Thus Russia took its place in the French imagination as a like-minded haven of arts and letters, of the triumph of civilisation over chaos.

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