Returning to Russia's imperial imaginary: Russia's eighteenth-century rulers did not transform the imperial imaginary, but refreshed it. They blended Muscovite political practice with sweeping claims to absolute power and Enlightenment nods to legality; they maintained the politics of difference towards imperial subjects and continued to play the role of just judge. Like their Muscovite forebears, eighteenth- century rulers distributed largesse to nobles and populace (lands, serfs, honors, gifts, alms, pardons). They reformed but did not abandon Orthodoxy. They resisted efforts by some nobles, notably in 1730, to formalize elite consultation into a constitutional Supreme Council, but they ruled in consort with noble factions that endured over decades as in Muscovite times. All in all, Peter and his successors remained patrimonial and autocratic while updating Russia's imperial imaginary with European goals and symbolism to justify the intensive state building that Russia's geopolitical situation and goals in the eighteenth century demanded.
LEGITIMIZING SUCCESSION
Maintaining control of rivals for succession was as important in the eighteenth century as it had been in Muscovite times, but it took on a decidedly different shape. That succession was in theory appointive, not hereditary, complicated things; a dearth of male heirs in the Petrine line ended up with several unmarried empresses without direct male heirs. Those complications made for unruly moments of succession that in turn generated an unprecedented literature justifying the appointments—political theory emerged for the first time in Russia. The accidents of longevity stabilized the situation: only three rulers accounted for sixty-five of the seventy-five years after Peter I's death.
After a bitter conflict with his son Aleksei that resulted in the latter's death in prison in 1718, in 1722 Peter I declared that succession would follow by imperial appointment, with no mention of either primogeniture or gender; this was the first written statement of any principle of succession in Russian history. At the time, Peter I hoped on the succession of his son Peter (b. 1719), but that child died in 1723, leaving only Peter's two daughters: Anna (b. 1708), later married to the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (1725), and the never-married Elizabeth (b. 1709). That they were born before Peter married their mother, his second wife and the future Catherine I, in 1712 made them suspect to some. Peter also bolstered Catherine I's legitimacy, as Gary Marker has shown, by promoting the cult of St. Catherine to associate her with this pious saint. After his son Peter's death, Peter I crowned Catherine as Empress (1724), although he did not formally appoint her successor. She did indeed succeed him in 1725, perpetuating the Menshikov faction in power and demonstrating that Russian political culture had neither legal prohibition nor cultural aversion to women in power.
The groundwork for that tolerance had been laid in Muscovy, when royal women were revered as intercessors for the state whose prayers were as crucial to the proper ordering of the state as was the tsar's political leadership. In Muscovite times women in the ruling family had wielded power in several instances. As Isolde Thyret has shown, whether issuing documents and attending receptions during a spouse's life (Irina Godunova 1584-98), de facto ruling Moscow during a plague outbreak (Maria Miloslavskaia 1654-5), or serving as regent (Elena Glinskaia 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 to find 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 ofPeter's half-brother Ioann (ofthe 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's role of "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, granddaughter of Ioann, Anna Leopoldovna of Mecklenburg, who was not even engaged or married at the time. When Empress Anna died in 1740, Anna Leopol- dovna, by that time wife of the Duke of Brunswick, had had a child; a mere two months old, he succeeded to the Russian throne as Ivan VI with his mother as regent, with celebratory manifestos and engravings announcing his legitimacy by appointment. But Anna Ioannovna had ruled with a tight oligarchical faction renowned for corruption but unsuccessful in diplomacy (Evgenii Anisimov calls the territorial gains in the Turkish War of 1735-7 "squandered") and support was strong for a change of factions. In November 1741 the current incarnation of the old Naryshkin faction ousted Ivan VI in favor of Peter I's daughter Elizabeth. The baby Ivan VI was imprisoned, where he languished during Elizabeth's twenty-year rule (1741-61).
This is a rare moment of violence in eighteenth-century succession; there were two, in 1741 and 1762. They paralleled the moments of violence in Muscovite succession when boyar clans struggled for primacy: Ivan IVs minority (1533-47), Time of Troubles (1605-13), and the disputed succession in 1682 and 1689. But, echoing Muscovite tradition, they were similarly followed by equilibrium: Elizabeth, and later Catherine II, coming to power by coup, promptly distributed lavish benefits to all groups to reconcile the factions and proceeded to rule with consensus and solicitation for the nobility.