This is clear in Catherine II’s quite conscious, pragmatic goal of defining an
“imperial Russian”identity inclusive of her many subject peoples. Like Muscovite
rulers embracing their peoples as God’s multifold providence, but in a secular
Enlightenment key, Catherine proudly showed off to foreign visitors her subject
peoples as cultured, orderly, and“civilized”citizens. In her frequent travels through
her realm Catherine pursued many agendas. By physically traversing the realm she
displayed her sense of imperial unity; she perpetuated the role of patrimonial tsar by
meeting with people, listening to their grievances, visiting churches and monaster-
ies, distributing alms and mercy. She used her travels to educate herself on issues of
concern to her. With an eye to urban planning and economic growth, for example,
she visited the new Ladoga Canal system in 1765; on all her travels she visited
factories and talked with merchants. On the eve of the Legislative Commission to
which she had summoned representatives of the entire empire, Catherine traveled
to Kazan in 1767 and met with local monks, merchants, and nobles, viewed native
Tatar, Chuvash, Mordva, and Votiak/Udmurt dancers, and received in audience
Tatars, Kazakhs, and Siberians. She interviewed Old Believers and Muslims. In
1780 she traveled across Belarus’an lands acquired in thefirst Polish partition,
greeted along the roads by peasants (quickly assembled) and meeting with Polish
nobles, Jews, Jesuits, and Dominicans.
By contrast, her celebrated six-month sojourn to the south in 1787 was mostly
about display. In the wake of her triumphant victories over the Ottoman empire,
the sojourn (which took four years in the planning) was intended to impress her
foreign guests and through them European public opinion with the empire’s power
and its harmony in diversity. In Smolensk, in Kyiv, as she sailed along the Dnieper
in a Roman-style galley, and in Crimea, she was met with spectacles, balls, and
banquets hosted by loyal nobles, re-enactments of battles (Potemkin restaged on
the Dnieper Catherine’s 1770 naval victory at Chesme and Peter I’s 1708 victory at
Poltava!), and festivities and audiences demonstrating her array of loyal ethnic
subjects. While Muscovite tsars had celebrated the realm’s diversity as evidence of
God’s blessing on the tsar, Catherine struck the same note in an Enlightenment
secular tone, affirming her power, might, and benevolent rule through the breadth
of the human community she ruled.
Catherine, like Peter I, also gathered ethnographic information and artefacts
from her subject lands and peoples. She energetically defended Russia against the
critique of French scientist Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche that Russia was
dreary and uniform; she celebrated the tremendous diversity of peoples, nature,
and wildlife in her vast dominion. Ethnographic and scientific expeditions dis-
patched by the Academy of Sciences included portrait artists who returned with
images of native peoples, their costumes and daily life. Foreign travelers, fascinated
by Russia’s exotic peoples, produced picture albums of the empire’s peoples to great
acclaim in Europe and Russia. Jean Baptiste Le Prince produced genre scenes, often
romanticized, of his travels in the Baltics, Siberia, and European Russia. The
German naturalists Johann Gottlieb Georgi and Peter Simon Pallas headed Academy
of Sciences expeditions (1768–74) to the Middle Volga, Urals, and Siberia,
collectingflora and fauna and producing ethnographic images (Figure C.1). Pallas’s
452 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801