13
Imperial Imaginary and
the Political Center
To stay viable, empires must stay dynamic. They must regularly renegotiate their
deals with subject peoples; they should adjustfiscal policy to pay for state building
and military reform in ways that do not undermine the crucial“hub and spokes”
verticality of imperial power. They must successfully integrate new peoples and new
practices without upsetting imperial structures. They must keep the center strong,
with regular administrative reform or growth, maintenance of revenue streams, and
vigilance over succession in the ruling family; they must prevent the development
of rival political centers. Finally, they should constantly refresh or alter their ruling
ideology to embrace new trends, new constituents, and/or new needs. The Russian
empire in the eighteenth century was strikingly successful in these challenges, not
least in the recasting of its imperial imaginary.
REFRESHING THE IMPERIAL IMAGINARY
A welcome aspect of the imperial imaginary in the eighteenth century is how
explicitly stated it was. As we saw in Chapter 6, Muscovy produced no political
philosophers and few explicit statements of political philosophy; its vision of the
purpose of the state and relationship of state and society must be extracted
implicitly from chronicles and sermons, court rituals and architecture. Only with
the arrival to Muscovy of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-educated clerics—the Zealots
of Piety early in the seventeenth century, and from the 1670s Semeon Polotskii,
Epifanii Slavinetskii, Sylvestr Medvedev, and others—did a written political dis-
course develop, taking the form of baroque panegyrics. These men constitute the
kernel of an intellectual elite, although there was little debate and dispute in their
literary community. Clerics in service to the state, they wrote to inspire and
celebrate the state. In so doing, they set the pattern for literary production for at
least thefirst two-thirds of the eighteenth century, when writers were closely
connected with the state (often state servitors) and perceived their tasks as cele-
brating the virtues and achievements of Russia and its autocratic rulers. In the
eighteenth century their genres (odes, epic poetry, panegyrics, and plays) and
identities (nobles, scholars) became more secular, but their activity and messages
perpetuated tropes shaped by the late seventeenth century.