ideology became the martial power of Mars and the tempering justice, wisdom, and
culture (as well as bravery) of Minerva; their statues and images appear in buildings,
parks, and rituals across Peter I’s new capital (Figure 13.2).
Peter I also abandoned much of the religious court ritual that had occupied
previous tsars (doing so, notably, only after his mother had died in 1694 in
deference to her), replacing it with secular events such as triumphal processions
through gates adorned with Roman gods and symbols. Court ritual followed a
European model of banquets, weddings, and dances staged for a newly European-
ized elite; engravings of such festivities were published in Russian and Dutch.
Famously, Peter I abandoned traditional Russian dress for him and his men in favor
of European coats, breeches, and boots, and mandated ball gowns with revealing
décolletage and the latest in coiffeurs for women of the court. Even more famously,
perhaps, with vicious parody and rituals of humiliation Peter undermined trad-
itional authorityfigures (clerics, boyars) and forged a comraderie of boon compan-
ions dedicated to his transforming project. Peter, in other words, used all possible
media to create his new state and elite.
In addition to statuary depicting Mars and Minerva, portraits of the ruler
projected new images (Figure 13.3). Peter commissioned dozens of portraits of
himself, some celebrating his imperial power or military victories, others depicting
love and affection, implicitly undermining clan-based practices of marriage politics
and foregrounding the individual. Like Tudor and Ottoman rulers a century
earlier, Peter lavishly distributed miniatures of himself, which noblemen and
women wore ostentatiously as brooches when they had their own portraits done.
Brashly emulating their European rivals, Peter and his advisors devised a new
terminology of rule—after his victory in the Great Northern War, in 1721 Peter
claimed Roman titles of“Father of the Fatherland”and“Emperor”; observing the
king of Prussia being called“the Great,”he had the Senate declare him the same.
New imperial regalia were designed on the European model—thrones, orbs,
scepters, and crowns.
Political practice in aPolizeistaatmode became less patrimonial: prohibitions
from petitioning the ruler directly, issued since 1649, were heightened to allow it
only for information of the highest crimes. The rhetoric used in court cases and
government documents changed from the self-deprecating formulae of Muscovite
petitions to more straightforward forms of address. The elite’s self-consciousness
was bolstered with the invention of ceremonial“Orders” (of Saints Andrew,
Catherine, and others) and European titles. Their new identities were to be shaped
in new physical spaces: Peter I mandated that his elite construct urban homes in
European style, with rooms for sociability (dancing, cards, reading, hobbies) and
self-development (studies, libraries) to create engaged partners of empire.
Peter and his men, as James Cracraft has described, also projected their new
image of power by creating St. Petersburg as the new“symbolic center”of the realm
(Figure 13.4). Here, instead of the Kremlin’s tightly packed, wall-enclosed ensem-
ble of cathedrals and palaces, St. Petersburg opened up from an expansive riverbank
studded with classical buildings into a city rationally planned around radial streets
and connecting canals. Itsfirst structures announced the values of Petrine ideology:
Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center 271