1533 – 8, Sofiia Alekseevna 1682–9), dynastic women exercised real power. Even
during their husbands’lives, tsars’wives ruled over their own lands and staffs; they
connected factions at court and had intercessory authority. Sofiia Alekseevna’s
seven-year rule was a particularly salient lesson to Peter I; an adolescent during
his half-sister’s stable and successful reign, he watched warily as she maneuvered to
have herself crowned (which Peter thwarted). At least twice (1682, 1698), once
from the monastic confinement to which Peter sent her in 1689, Sofiia mobilized
musketeer rebellion against Peter. He feared and respected her, and had no doubt
that women could be effective, even ruthless leaders.
Catherine I came to the throne in 1725 through her tie with Peter I and a claim
of affirmation by elite and people. Not only was a lavish engraving surrounding her
with all previous Russian rulers issued, a coronation portrait (a genre that became
de rigueur for subsequent rulers) and a manifesto claiming broad consensus were
also commissioned. Furthermore, 22,000 copies of Feofan Prokopovich’s 1722
defense of appointive succession,The Right of the Monarch’s Will, were distributed
to be read aloud as the population was taking oaths of loyalty. After Catherine I
died in 1727, however, court factions struggled throughout the century tofind
consensus on a candidate, accomplishing several successions by coup; as John Le
Donne has shown, the factions behind the candidates perpetuated for several
decades the late seventeenth-century factional divide between the Miloslavskie
and Naryshkiny, even though the names of dominant families changed in a typical
circulation of elites. Factions legitimized their choices by a variety of claims:
genealogical link to Peter the Great or his half-brother Ioann, appointment by a
sovereign according to the 1722 manifesto, loyalty to the Petrine legacy, some form
of consent from the capital nobility, oath taking by the populace. The nobility
developed the expectation of a role in the“election”of the ruler, evoking Muscovite
traditions of the good tsar taking advice and of mass councils consulting on new
dynasties (Godunov 1598, Romanov 1613).
In 1727 the Menshikov-led faction selected (having Catherine affirm it on her
deathbed) a boy in the Naryshkin line, Peter’s 11-year-old grandson, son of Alexei,
Peter II and legitimized the choice in a manifesto citing both heredity and tsarist
selection; empire-wide oath taking followed. But Peter II died in 1730 of smallpox
at age 14 not having named a successor. Alexander Menshikov had betrothed the
young tsar to his own daughter, a power play that so exercised rivals in the Saltykov-
Dolgorukov faction that when he died, they exiled Menshikov and elevated a
descendant of Peter’s half-brother Ioann (of the Miloslavskii line). Ioann’s daughter
Anna (1730–40), who had married the Duke of Courland in 1710 and had been
widowed almost immediately, became empress.
Anna’s succession cemented the nobility’sroleof“electing”a monarch, for the
gentry that had assembled in the capital (over 1,000 strong) successfully overturned
the aristocracy’s attempt to force constitutionally limiting concessions on Anna. She
came to the throne celebrating her legitimacy based on such consent, and was
reminded of her duty to rule in concert with the nobility in Feofan Prokopovich’s
coronation sermon (1730). Anna and the Saltykov faction tried to maintain their
position by designating as her successor any future son of her 13-year-old niece,
280 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801