From Catherine the Great nakaz wiki:

Eighteen months in the making, the Nakaz was written with the intention of providing an unambiguous description of the existing laws. Though Catherine based her writing heavily on the Enlightenment of Western Europe, she merely utilized some of the broader ideas of the movement, such as equality under the law, to strengthen autocracy.[3] Montesquieu, whose works heavily influenced Catherine, wrote of such things as a divided government (where the power is split between the executive and legislative bodies) and a monarchy made up of three estates.[4] Catherine tactfully ignored these ideas in favor of an absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.[5]