Official odists celebrating accessions, name days, and military victories clothed
Empresses Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine in a rhetoric of social harmony and
benevolence regardless of how turbulent the historical reality was. They found the
world of pagan mythology particularly fertile ground for positive images of female
rulers. Minerva, Astraea, and Dido, for their strong rulership, military feats, and
Edenic harmony, were all invoked as allegories for the three female empresses.
Importing European architects and landscapers as had Peter I, Empresses Anna,
Elizabeth, and Catherine adorned the realm with museums (Kunstkammer 1727),
Academies (Sciences 1789, Art 1788), and palace ensembles (Peterhof, the Cath-
erine Palace at Tsarskoe selo, Pavlovsk) that showcased not only the wealth of the
realm, but also its culture and refinement. Here they harked back to the paradise
image imbedded in religious thought and contemporary Enlightenment thinking,
creating extensive grounds, gardens, and parks for display and personal reflection.
Wealthy nobles similarly used their estates as planned gardens where orderly
perfection and cultivation of nature’s abundance depicted Eden on earth. The
Enlightenment specifics of this imagery of garden, abundance, and Eden might
have been lost on the laboring populace, but as an imperial imaginary it was a
skillful step. It provided continuity with Muscovite ideology (the realm was blessed
by God, the tsar’s power Christianized imperial space, the dynasty was continuous)
and identification with an Enlightenment cultural package that laid claim to parity
with the dominant powers of the day.
Legitimacy was a particular concern in this century when political succession was
notfixed (as we discuss in this chapter), and Russia’s rulers based claims to
legitimacy on touchstones of Muscovite ideology. Upon coming to power, they
issued manifestos (a novel step) justifying their succession in generally traditional
terms: kinship link to Peter the Great, the expectation of the people’s participation
expressed through oaths and acclamation, the assertion of the ruler as benevolent,
and fealty to his vision (which embraced change). Zhivov notes how the Church,
chafing under Petrine reforms, nevertheless readily assumed its role of defending
the ruler as godly and sacred.
Like Peter I, Catherine II was particularly attentive to self-presentation. Not
particularly religious herself, she played out the role of a traditional godly, Musco-
vite monarch: she patronized churches, visited monasteries, bestowed alms and
amnesties, and staged a central legitimizing ceremony, her coronation, in Moscow
in the Dormition Cathedral as required by Muscovite tradition. She also donned
other images: emulating Minerva, she fashioned herself as a giver of justice, issuing
a lawcode (theInstructionof 1767) that, as Viktor Zhivov rightly notes, was a
sweeping statement of Enlightenment values that bore no resemblance to Russian
reality and had no realistic chance of being implemented.
At the same time, she also cultivated her image as warrior and conqueror,
depicting herself in military uniform, staging recreations of her naval victories,
commissioning paintings that linked her victories over the Turks with Peter I’s
feats. She particularly celebrated her victories over the Turks, laying claim to the
classical heritage of Greece and Byzantium as well as reveling in defeating the
formidable Ottoman empire. Heinrich Buchholtz’s 1780s painting of Russia’s
Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center 275