Catherine worked in the last decades of her reign to depict herself, and the Russia
she ruled, as a civilized, European state. The nobility welcomed the lively intellec-
tual ferment in poetry, novels, and particularly satirical plays and tragedies that she
fostered until the early 1790s. Fundamentally loyal to autocracy, Russia’s educated
elite believed in an autocracy shaped by law, tradition, and consent; echoing the
Muscovite expectation that the good tsar consults his boyars, Enlightenment-
educated elites expected that their rulers would rule with their welfare and that of
the realm in mind. When Catherine II was followed by her son Paul, the elite grew
wary. On his coronation day he pronounced a law of succession by male primo-
geniture (a somewhat ironic step since he is widely rumored, then and now, not to
have been a legitimate Romanov but offspring of one of Catherine’s early liaisons).
His intent was to raise the status of the dynasty vis-à-vis the nobility, evident also in
other policies, such as his European marriages (to German princesses; hisfirst wife
died in childbirth), strictures on the nobility (restoration of mandatory service,
limiting their rights of local government, limiting travel) and on the intellectual
freedoms they enjoyed (censoring foreign publications). The court nobility came
Figure 13.6Catherine II used this statue, known as“The Bronze Horseman,”to link her
legacy with that of Peter I; with studied modesty, the inscription reads“To Peter the First,
Catherine the Second.”Photo: Jack Kollmann.
Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center 283