expedition in the 1790s to Crimea and the south produced striking paintings of
native peoples (Kalmyks, Tatars, Cossacks), mountain vistas, and decidedly non-
European-looking cities. Based on such information Catherine II commissioned a
set of porcelain statues of national and Russian“types.”
All this gathering of information contributed to a vision of an empire in which
being“Russian”was not an issue of ethnicity but of living as a good subject—as
Elena Vishlenkova says,“livingpo-russkii(as a Russian).”Finns, Poles, Chuvash,
Tatars, and Russians could all be considered “Russian” (using the imperial
“Rossiiskii”that Peter I had introduced as a more inclusive term), leaving only
the nomadic, less“civilized”peoples outside that definition; by the end of the
century some authors were even idealizing nomads and Cossacks as noble savages.
Russia’s focus was on its individual subject peoples, not the physical space of
conquest. As Martina Winkler argues, Russians did not even develop rituals of
claiming territory per se until they encountered rival nations (the Spanish) in
America in the early nineteenth century. Until then, physical and ritual markers
of national conquest (flags, rituals) were not prominent in Russia’s consciousness.
Working with its subject peoples was. By the early nineteenth century Russia’s
official historian Nikolai Karamzin was extolling Russia’s glory in imperial, not
national terms, describing“Rossiia”as a proud amalgam of Russian control and a
vast, ethnically diverse and abundant realm.
Throughout this book we have found in architecture visual indication of how
Russia’s imperial presence was personified and dispersed. We saw in Chapter 13
how neoclassical architecture projected an Enlightenment vision of empire united
by rationality and order in the capitals of European Russia, while elsewhere in the
empire it had less impact. In some places classicism barely arrived by the end of
the century, with the ornate“Naryshkin baroque”enduring in Siberia and the
Middle Volga in jarring contrast to indigenous mosques and temples. As Russia
expanded to the west, where European architectural styles had been native for
centuries, Russian imperial style blended in with or complemented local archi-
tecture. Rich merchants and guilds, municipalities, Lutheran and Catholic
churches, wealthy Orthodox monasteries, Cossack nobles, and other corporate
groups on the western borderlands matched the baroque or classicism of the
emperor’s buildings. The imperial style’s rationality found common ground in its
new acquisitions.
Only with rising nationalism in the nineteenth century did the imperial center
attempt to spread around the realm grand architectural statements that unambigu-
ously announced Russian power. As Richard Wortman has chronicled, an early
attempt at this occurred in the 1830s when an architectural style combining
neoclassicism with Byzantine/Muscovite motifs was elaborated—a grand Alexander
Nevskii Cathedral in this style marked the intensification of Russian presence in
Crimea in that decade. With conscious Russification of the empire in the 1880s the
court sponsored a much more overtly “Russian folk” style on a grand scale,
incorporating the bulbous domes and external decorativeness of seventeenth-
century Moscow and Iaroslavl’. Immense neo-Russian Orthodox cathedrals arose
in St. Petersburg (Figure C.2), in stark contrast to the city’s European baroque and
454 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801