Russia did not make an architectural statement in Livland and Estland until late in the eighteenth century, restrained in part by the prohibition (1714-41) of stone building when St. Petersburg was being constructed and by a laissez-faire policy towards the Baltics. Russian presence was more evident in Riga and its environs in the eighteenth century than in Reval, but in neither area was the essentially German look of the cities and countryside displaced. Russian-sponsored buildings adopted the restrained baroque and early classicism of the era and were matched by active building by local urban and provincial German elites. Peter I, for example, commissioned a charming summer palace outside of Reval for his wife in 1718 (Figure 13.10), with a restrained baroque exterior and exuberant Italianate interior, designed by Italian architect Nicolo Michetti. In similar early Petersburg baroque, in the 1730s St. Peterburg's court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli designed two residences for Empress Anna's minister Biron in Courland, not then formally part of the Russian empire, but in its circle of influence. In Riga, an early stage of Russian building
Figure 13.10 Peter I's charming "Ekaterinthal" palace (1718-23), designed for his wife Catherine outside of Reval (contemporary Tallinn), evoked a restrained baroque. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
included suburban gardens commissioned by Peter I in French style and the transformation of a Lutheran church in the city fortress into an Orthodox church (1725-6). In the 1740s and 1750s St. Petersburg baroque appeared in palaces and Orthodox churches. But at the same time in both areas local merchants and elites were building in St. Petersburg style as well, such as a new Riga City Hall (1765) and new churches and merchant homes in the Old Town. In none of this did Russian churches or palaces make a specifically Russian stamp.
Russia's most prominent public buildings came at the end of the century, coinciding with the introduction of Russianizing reforms, such as integrating Estland and Livland into the Russian gubernia system and their elites into the systems mandated by the Charters to Nobility and Towns. As part of classicizing urban renewal the "official architect of Livland" appointed by St. Petersburg (1781-5) redesigned Riga's Citadel, the locus of government, around a new square edged with a grandiose neoclassical church of Sts. Peter and Paul and a governor's palace. In Reval a new governor's palace (1773) was built in a restrained baroque presaging the classicism that became dominant in subsequent decades.
Imperial architecture in Kyiv made a similarly muted statement, although in this century Russia established a stronger physical presence here. Peter I razed the Cossack capital at Baturin and built a fortress in Kyiv after Mazepa's apostasy (1709); over the century the town's Pechersk neighborhood became the Russian administrative and military center. Russian official buildings ran parallel architecturally with construction by wealthy monasteries, burgers, Cossack elites, demonstrating various shades of baroque across the century. In Pechersk the Trinity-over-the-Gate Church in the Caves Monastery (1722-9) displayed an effusive baroque, while by mid-century the monastery was adopting a more orderly but still magnificent baroque for bell towers and churches at its various campuses. Empress Elizabeth's court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli constructed a tsarist palace in restrained baroque here in 1755. In Podil a Town Hall featured rococo style in the 1690s, while Rastrelli brought there a decorative Petersburg baroque with the St. Andrew church, orderly but energetic in its bright blue color, defining pilasters and sinuous gilded detail (Figure 13.11). Similarly ornate pilasters and decoration characterized the remodeled bell tower (1788) of the Sophia Cathedral in the Old Town. Outside of town, Kyrylo Rozumovsky, a quintessential imperial noble, commissioned the St. Petersburg Palladian architect, Charles Cameron, for a neoclassical mansion in Baturin in 1799. There was much interaction between Kyiv and Russia in this realm, with the St. Petersburg architect Johann Gottfried Schadel designing buildings here and Ukrainian craftsmen filling churches in St. Petersburg, Smolensk, and Moscow with florid icons and ornate carved iconostases for which they were celebrated. Such cultural interchange meant that Russia hardly overwhelmed the city skyline with an imperial statement of power.
When Catherine II annexed Crimea in 1783, however, literate and artistic Russia took it as a canvas on which to paint Russia's vision ofempire. For Catherine and her ideologues—governor-general of the south Grigorii Potemkin, odists, and poets—Crimea represented all things: a garden paradise of abundant orchards and vineyards redolent of Eden, an exotic Oriental playground of beauty and leisure, a demonstration of Russia's multi-ethnic richness, a link to "civilization" through the antique grandeur of Greek and Roman ruins (evidenced by Russia's naming and renaming Crimean landmarks with Greek names), and an untamed wilderness of mountain vistas and uncivilized Muslim Tatars. All these currents were played out in political discourse and in the visual.
As Andreas Schonle suggests, some indication of Catherine's complex vision of Crimea can be derived from her celebrated visit to New Russia and Crimea in 1787. Her goals were both political and cultural. Founding new harbors, cities, and a capital, she celebrated her imperial possession of this strategically important territory and her defeat ofthe Ottoman empire. She also aimed to impress the European public as well, at a time when she was engaging in brisk disputes with French intellectuals about whether Russia was uncivilized and despotic. (In 1770 she had published in French a refutation of the scientist and Siberian traveler Jean Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche's scathing critique of Russia.) For the European dignitaries who accompanied her (the incognito Joseph II of Austria, the French envoy Count Louis Philippe de Segur, and others), she and Potemkin staged spectacles that demonstrated Russia's ancient ties with Greek civilization through Byzantium (rebuffing French assertions of its superior "civilization") and paraded before them troops and tableaux representing all her subject peoples—Cossacks, Tatars, Kalmyks, Bashkirs—as harmonious and civilized.
Figure 13.11 St Petersburg's imperial baroque is exemplified in this graceful Church of St. Andrew (built 1747-54) in Kyiv, by Bartolomo Rastrelli. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
In its building policy towards Crimea, envisioned together by Catherine and Potemkin, the garden was a dominant motif, as it was for much thinking about the empire in this century. A malleable symbol, a garden can represent heavenly Edenic blessing, connote a space in which subjects can be free and or in which they can be transformed and controlled by design. Catherine envisioned Crimea as a garden that demonstrated the bounty of nature (orchards were to be planted, gardens crafted) and a landscape that showcased the multiplicity of her peoples. Crimea's rich landscape of cultural edifices was to be respected. There was no overt policy of dismantling Muslim structures, although many were destroyed in the brutal conquest campaign before 1783 and in plundering for building materials after that. On the contrary, Russian rulers identified and preserved buildings considered of historic or community value, whether of Christian or Muslim, Greek, Armenian, Tatar, or other communities.