In the second half of the 18th century Russia was under the firm rule of Catherine the Great. She had been born a German princess, and combined an interest in the ideas of the European enlightenment with the conviction that Russia needed an absolute monarch.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva was one of the philosophers who caught her imagination, in particular his ideas on education. She even adopted his revolutionary teaching that babies - imperial babies at any rate - should not be swaddled.

Perhaps it was natural that Catherine should have chosen a Swiss as tutor for her beloved grandson, the future tsar Alexander I. Nevertheless, the political beliefs of Frédéric César de la Harpe could hardly have been more different from Catherine's own. He was a republican, whose revolutionary political activity in Switzerland was centred on liberating the territory of Vaud from the rule of the aristocrats in Bern; Catherine was a ruthless and autocratic ruler who, though she realised Russia had to be modernised, was only interested in reform on her own terms.

La Harpe came to Petersburg in 1783, originally to tutor Alexander and his little brother Konstantin in French. But the empress was so pleased with his educational ideas (derived from Rousseau) that she decided to hand over their whole education to him. La Harpe was 30, Alexander was 5 and Konstantin not quite 4.

La Harpe stayed in Petersburg until 1795, becoming very close to Alexander who absorbed many of his political ideals. On one occasion, the young prince told his tutor that his aim was "to make Russia happy by establishing a free constitution." The two kept up their friendship until Alexander's death in 1825.

Alexander always admitted that La Harpe had given him the discipline and energy with which he carried out his tasks as ruler, and which earned him the reputation of "liberator of Europe" after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. But as for the internal reforms which La Harpe preached, Alexander failed to push any of them through - and his brother and successor Nicholas (whom La Harpe never taught) had no sympathy for liberalism at all.

Catherine the Great was not the only person in Russia to believe in the virtues of Swiss teaching. Several Swiss headed educational establishments in Petersburg during her reign and afterwards. One was Auguste Weizmann, among whose pupils was the writer Alexander Radishchev, best remembered for his "Journey from Petersburg to Moscow", a passionate denunciation of corruption and the evils of serfdom, which earned him a period of exile in Siberia.

Even the prestigious lycée at Tsarskoye Selo founded for the sons of the nobility, had as its director for several years Yegor Engelhard (Engel'gardt), the descendant of a Zurich family which had first entered Russian service in the mid 17th century. The school's most illustrious pupil was the poet Alexander Pushkin, whose teacher of French literature was another Swiss, David de Boudry, who first came to Russia in 1784. This teacher's innocent name hid the fact that he was the brother of Jean-Paul Marat, who made his name as the leading journalist of the French Revolution (and who was famously murdered in his bath in 1793.)