naval victory at Chesme in 1770, for example, shows Peter I admiring from the
clouds while Turkish captives placeflags at the foot of the celebrated equestrian
statue of him erected by Catherine. Catherine commemorated the Chesme victory
in a church and palace in faux-Turkish style, and like Sofiia Alekseevna and Peter I
before her, distributed over 150,000 medals in honor of her victorious generals
(Aleksei Orlov at Chesme and Grigorii Potemkin at Ochakov) and herself, often
with inscriptions lauding her benevolence rather than her power.
One might regard all this ideological work as so much theory, removed from
reality. Certainly Viktor Zhivov declared that the eighteenth-century“mythology
of the state”ultimately“destroyed”the state by transferring cultural authority from
ruler to poet as state policy turned conservative and new spokesmen for Enlight-
enment emerged. Perhaps in the rhetoric of poetry and odes Zhivov is right. But at
the level of political practice, the new ideas, imagery, dress, and practices of power
created a new politics for new times. Eighteenth-century monarchs refreshed
Russia’s imperial imaginary in powerful ways. Deploying the language of European
Enlightenment and Roman classicism, they laid claim to a place among European
nations and developed a political vocabulary to define and mobilize Russia’s social
elites as never before. At the same time, like their European counterparts and true
to their Russian heritage, they continued to ground ideology in the overarching
legitimacy of religious justification, producing a powerful amalgam of sacred,
charismatic authority and secular mandates for action.
THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUALS
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of political legitimacy and power in Russia’s
eighteenth century was the dynamic role of individuals. This might be an accident of
the sources, inasmuch as we simply lack sources that would tell us how much
personal control was exerted by tsars such as Ivan IV and Aleksei Mikhailovich (to
name some of the most dynamic Muscovite tsars). But it is entirely possible that the
forcefulness of eighteenth-century rulers (Peter I, Catherine II) was new in Russian
sovereign power and that this was enabled by European theories of absolutism.
Not all eighteenth-century rulers were dynamic; the majority were not. It was a
century when the nobility waxed in power, winning concession after concession in
the economic realm. Autocrats did not always surround themselves with talented
individuals or exert force to curb their favorites from corruption and favoritism.
Two rulers of the eighteenth century in particular have come in for blistering
criticism, deserved but unfortunately gendered. Anna Ioannovna and Empress
Elizabeth were dismissed as frivolous, petty, or uninterested in power, even in
their own century, and with some justification. Neither was raised to rule or given
the proper education to do so, and neither seemed to have Catherine II’s inclination
to teach herself with voracious reading. Anna’s reign witnessed widespread corrup-
tion in her entourage and ruthless campaigns of arrests by her favorite Ernst Biron.
Elizabeth is criticized for her obsession with fashion (she owned thousands of
dresses) and with budget-breaking palace ensembles; in this she was excessive,
276 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801