to legality; they maintained the politics of difference towards imperial subjects and
continued to play the role of just judge. Like their Muscovite forebears, eighteenth-
century rulers distributed largesse to nobles and populace (lands, serfs, honors, gifts,
alms, pardons). They reformed but did not abandon Orthodoxy. They resisted
efforts by some nobles, notably in 1730, to formalize elite consultation into a
constitutional Supreme Council, but they ruled in consort with noble factions that
endured over decades as in Muscovite times. All in all, Peter and his successors
remained patrimonial and autocratic while updating Russia’s imperial imaginary
with European goals and symbolism to justify the intensive state building that
Russia’s geopolitical situation and goals in the eighteenth century demanded.
LEGITIMIZING SUCCESSION
Maintaining control of rivals for succession was as important in the eighteenth
century as it had been in Muscovite times, but it took on a decidedly different
shape. That succession was in theory appointive, not hereditary, complicated
things; a dearth of male heirs in the Petrine line ended up with several unmarried
empresses without direct male heirs. Those complications made for unruly mo-
ments of succession that in turn generated an unprecedented literature justifying
the appointments—political theory emerged for thefirst time in Russia. The
accidents of longevity stabilized the situation: only three rulers accounted for
sixty-five of the seventy-five years after Peter I’s death.
After a bitter conflict with his son Aleksei that resulted in the latter’s death in
prison in 1718, in 1722 Peter I declared that succession would follow by imperial
appointment, with no mention of either primogeniture or gender; this was thefirst
written statement of any principle of succession in Russian history. At the time,
Peter I hoped on the succession of his son Peter (b. 1719), but that child died in
1723, leaving only Peter’s two daughters: Anna (b. 1708), later married to the
Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (1725), and the never-married Elizabeth (b. 1709).
That they were born before Peter married their mother, his second wife and the
future Catherine I, in 1712 made them suspect to some. Peter also bolstered
Catherine I’s legitimacy, as Gary Marker has shown, by promoting the cult of
St. Catherine to associate her with this pious saint. After his son Peter’s death, Peter
I crowned Catherine as Empress (1724), although he did not formally appoint her
successor. She did indeed succeed him in 1725, perpetuating the Menshikov
faction in power and demonstrating that Russian political culture had neither
legal prohibition nor cultural aversion to women in power.
The groundwork for that tolerance had been laid in Muscovy, when royal
women were revered as intercessors for the state whose prayers were as crucial to
the proper ordering of the state as was the tsar’s political leadership. In Muscovite
times women in the ruling family had wielded power in several instances. As Isolde
Thyrêt has shown, whether issuing documents and attending receptions during a
spouse’s life (Irina Godunova 1584–98), de facto ruling Moscow during a plague
outbreak (Maria Miloslavskaia 1654–5), or serving as regent (Elena Glinskaia
Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center 279