Charter to the Nobility promulgated

On 21 April 1785, Catherine the Great promulgated the Charter to the Nobility, a landmark legal document that formally codified the rights, privileges, and legal status of the Russian aristocracy. The charter confirmed nobles' exemption from personal taxation, corporal punishment, and compulsory state service, while granting them the right to organize provincial noble assemblies and to own and manage land — including serfs — with minimal state interference.

This charter represented the culmination of decades of gradual expansion of noble privilege that Catherine had pursued since her earliest years on the throne, building on the 1762 Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility and her own 1773 decree. It was part of a coordinated pair of reforms issued on the same day, alongside the Charter to the Towns, reflecting Catherine's broader project of creating a structured, estate-based society modeled loosely on Western European social hierarchies.

While framed in the language of Enlightenment legal rationalism, the Charter to the Nobility deepened the entrenchment of aristocratic power and, by extension, the institution of serfdom, since it strengthened noble control over their estates and the peasants bound to them. It remained a foundational document of Russian social and legal structure until the emancipation reforms of the mid-19th century, illustrating both the reformist ambitions and the deeply conservative social realities of Catherine's rule.