There is little doubt that Imperial Russia remained on the fringe of the Enlightenment experience however precisely the Enlightenment is defined. Russia's experience of the Enlightenment remains a subject of scholarly dispute. Analysis once focused upon the social and political implications of Enlightenment writings and their subsequent repression by the autocracy. The person overwhelmingly associated with the Russian Enlightenment is Empress Catherine the Great (r. 1762–95); it has been posited that the Enlightenment more or less arrived ex nihilo with her. In a discussion in Slavic Review in 1982, Columbia historian Marc Raeff proposed that the Enlightenment came to Russia in two waves. The first was German, involving cameralist ideas promoting the Polizeistaat. The second wave was that of the ‘radical’ French tradition of Rousseau, Mably and others. This view suggests that Montesquieu and the concepts of the Scottish Enlightenment that are the subject of this essay were passed over or never effectively found a foothold in Russia, save for Catherine's borrowing. A decade later, Raeff reviewed biographies of Peter III (r. 1761–2), Catherine the Great and Paul I (r. 1796–1801) and criticized them for their imprecision in discussing the Enlightenment. Fortunately, the study of Russia's eighteenth century has deepened in the subsequent decades. Nonetheless, the nature of Russia's Enlightenment experience remains to be more fully explored.