In 1966, Dietrich Geyer published an article on the subject of state-society relations in eighteenth-century Russia, which appeared again in 1975 in an updated form. Geyer placed Catherine II’s reform policy in a European context and asked about the policy of absolute monarchies towards corporative structures and the conditions for the development of civil societies. In the Russian case, Catherine II created “societies” in the form of noble and urban corporations in order to expand provincial administration. According to Geyer’s thesis, both the statist origins of these corporate estates and the connection between noble societies and provincial administration hindered the emergence of a dualism between state and society in Russian history.