never granting constitutional institutions or rights overfiscal, legislative, or execu-
tive power. The image of autocracy expanded from godly community to rationally
ordered universal community, but its practice remained a state governed by
personal relations of power.
*****
On political discourse at Sofiia Alekseevna’s court: Paul Bushkovitch,Religion and Society in
Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries(New York and Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992); Lindsey A. J. Hughes,Russia and the West: The Life of a Seventeenth-
Century Westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasil^0 evich Golitsyn (1643–1714)(Newtonville, Mass.:
Oriental Research Partners, 1984) and herSophia, Regent of Russia, 1657– 1704 (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990).
On the Edenic image: Stephen Lessing Baehr,The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century
Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture(Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1991); Andreas Schönle,“Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s
Appropriation of the Crimea,”Slavic Review60 (2001): 1–23; Kelly O’Neill,“Con-
structing Imperial Identity in the Borderland: Architecture, Islam and the Renovation of
the Crimean Landscape,”Ab Imperio2 (2006): 163–92.
Muscovite dynastic women: Isolde Thyrêt,Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and
the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia(DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press,
2001). On eighteenth-century succession and representations of legitimacy, see Cynthia
H. Whittaker,Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political
Dialogue(DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Elise Kimerling
Wirtschafter,The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater(DeKalb, Ill.: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2003); Luba Golburt,The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century
and the Russian Cultural Imagination(Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press,
2014); V. Iu. Proskurina,Creating the Empress: Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II
(Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011).
On Peter I: Lindsey A. J. Hughes,Russia in the Age of Peter the Great(New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1998) and herPeter the Great: A Biography(New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002); Paul Bushkovitch,Peter the Great(Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 2001) andPeter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671– 1725
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). V. O. Kliuchevskii’s late nineteenth-
century portrayal of Peter displays the fascinating detail that the great historian is known
for:Peter the Great, trans. Liliana Archibald (London: Macmillan, 1963).
On cultural transformations, see James Cracraft’s masterful trilogy:The Petrine Revolution
in Russian Architecture(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988);The Petrine
Revolution in Russian Imagery(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);The Petrine
Revolution in Russian Culture(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2004). HisThe Revolution of Peter the Great(Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003) highlights St. Petersburg as exemplar of“cultural
revolution.”
Authors who stress secular elements in Petrine ideology: Marc Raeff,Understanding
Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984) and hisThe Well-Ordered Police State: Social and
Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600– 1800 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983); Richard Wortman,Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony
in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000).Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center 293