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In manifestos and odes, particularly by her favored odist Mikhail Lomonosov, Elizabeth and her supporters constructed her claims to legitimacy on familiar grounds: direct Petrine descent, commitment to Peter's reforms, "election" by the nobility, and popular consent. Throughout her reign panegyrics praised her wise rule, her educational reforms, her success at war and peace, all in her father's image. Elizabeth also immediately appointed a successor, in 1742 securing oaths of the people and support of the nobility for her sister Anna's son, the future Peter III (1761-2), then prince in Holstein-Gottorp. In 1743 she brought him to St. Petersburg, following in 1744 with a fiancee, also from lesser German princes, the future Catherine II, Princess Sophie from Anhalt-Zerbst. Peter and Sophie (converted and renamed Catherine) married in St. Petersburg in 1745.

Peter III succeeded Elizabeth in December 1761 and should have been accepted as legitimate. A far more competent ruler than his historical reputation (shaped and sullied by his wife's later memoirs), he initiated a program of reform. He inaugurated confiscation of church lands, released the nobility from mandatory service, adopted physiocratic policies to reduce an immense debt—all sound moves that his successor Catherine II quietly continued. But Peter III ignored crucial pillars of political support: he ruled by command and alienated the nobility, particularly the officer corps, with his single-minded intent to attack Denmark in pursuit of Holstein regional interests. A Guards coup to which Catherine was privy deposed him in June 1762. Catherine II (1762-96) succeeded, while her supporters assassinated Peter III in July 1762 and in 1764 the unfortunate Ivan VI (age 22), still in prison, to secure her position.

Catherine II had no blood tie to the Romanovs, but she worked assiduously on her self-representation throughout her reign. Initially she underscored themes of Orthodoxy, filial piety to the Petrine legacy, and military valor, issuing multiple manifestos justifying her accession as a choice of the people over her husband's tyranny and oligarchy; she declared herself heir to Peter I's reform program that Peter III had disdained. She proceeded to act out the role of traditional Orthodox autocrat: like Catherine I, she had herself elaborately crowned in Moscow's Dor- mition Cathedral; she traveled around the realm visiting monasteries, distributing alms, and hearing petitions from her people. Vowing to rule "legally," in 1766 she invited all of society (save serfs) to consult on a new legal codex. In the first decade or so ofher reign, her odists seconded these themes. Her favored odist Vasilii Petrov praised her as infused with Peter I's spirit and Lomonosov declared that God himself had granted Catherine her scepter of power. Petrov and others likened her to Amazon queens, to Astraea and Dido, even to Caesar Augustus. Odes praising her victories over the Turks were particularly full of antique references.

Over her long reign, Catherine consciously shifted her self-image, particularly in the long era of peace and administrative reform from about 1774 into the late 1780s. Victorious in Turkish wars, confident of her international and domestic power, inspired by Enlightenment themes of harmony and the pursuit of happiness, she encouraged her painters and odists to depict a more human, accessible sovereign. Dmitrii Levitskii's 1783 portrait of her in the "Temple of Justice," for example puts the emphasis on her benevolent rule, and law-giving and the cornucopia of bounty that they produced. Later he depicted her as an elderly lady strolling with her dog in the garden, while panegyrics began to downplay the theme of powerful pagan goddesses, emphasizing the joy and harmony she brings to her people. Gavrila Derzhavin's cycle of "Felitsa" poems to Catherine (1782-9) even shifted the linguistic register of the ode from high vocabulary and syntax to a middle register and a conceit of dialogic interchange between the wise ruler Felitsa and her loyal subject Murza, all to embody Catherine's engagements with her people.

Most interesting perhaps is the degree to which Catherine dared to shift the traditional hero-worship of Peter I. She is famous for erecting the Bronze Horseman, Falconet's dramatic statue of a mounted Peter I bounding towards Sweden (Figure 13.6). Catherine advised on the design of the statue, insisting that it not be fussed up with plaques of episodes from Peter's life and statues of his devoted comrades, but rather that it exemplify the elemental force he represented by placing horse and rider on a rough-hewn boulder called "wild" in its day. In doing so, she subtly contrasted the order and civilization that she brought to Russia with Peter's frenzy of creation. She frequently made reference to Augustus Caesar's comment that he encountered a Rome constructed in brick and left it made of marble, bringing beauty and civilization; she pursued this goal literally in urban renewal around the realm, the impressive sheathing of St. Petersburg's canals in granite, and particularly in her classical building projects at the Winter Palace, Marble Palace, Hermitage Theater, Catherine Palace, and Pavlovsk. Furthermore, she herself wrote a tale in French that criticized Empress Anna for her cruelties and Empress Elizabeth for her frivolity, all the better to contrast to her hard-working devotion to the state; she even allowed Ekaterina Dashkova to publish some mild criticism of Peter in 1783.

Figure 13.6 Catherine 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.

 

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 intellectual 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 primogeniture (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-a-vis the nobility, evident also in other policies, such as his European marriages (to German princesses; his first 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 to fear him as unpredictable, prone to irrational fits of rage, and capable of undermining traditional privileges and status of the nobility. Simmering discontent gelled into a coup: with the knowledge of his son Alexander (who expected only that Paul would be forced to abdicate), conspirators assassinated the emperor in 1801 in the Mikhailovskii Castle that he had specially constructed with a moat for protection. So relieved was the elite that the explanation that he had died of apoplexy was readily believed and his son Alexander succeeded, promising to rule in the moderate, reforming, and inclusive spirit of Catherine II, the grandmother who had raised him. Male succession (usually from father to son, sometimes brother to brother) ensued thereafter until Nicholas II (1892-1917).