Russia put its imperial stamp on the built environment in Crimea in two major building complexes. On the site of a fishing village Russia built the port city of Sevastopol in European style. Russian plans for a new capital of Simferopol on the site of a thriving Tatar city and khan's palace produced more ambiguous results. Although plans called for an orderly neoclassical urban blueprint, with a central square and classical cathedral, it did not supplant the Tatar parts of the city. Simferopol became bifurcated into separate Russian and native neighborhoods. The Russian city featured classical Orthodox churches, government buildings, and radial arteries connecting planned squares and urban townhouses of European design, while the Tatar part of town retained winding streets, walled home ensembles oriented towards courtyards, mosques in traditional design, and thriving market culture. As Kelly O'Neill pointed out, the Kebir mosque "dominated the visual space of the city" until the 1830s, when a grand Alexander Nevskii Cathedral with rational classical lines was erected. Elsewhere, the Tatar religious and political center of Bakhchisarai was preserved in all its oriental splendor, continuing on as the heart of Tatar Crimea for decades.
The eighteenth century, in sum, displayed a more complex imperial imaginary than did Muscovite times. Imperial architecture across the realm announced the ruler's European cultural turn, but complemented local styles as often as it contrasted. Less religious and pietistic, this century's vision of power was action oriented. Rulers were to serve their state for the common good and energize their elites to do the same. In Peter I's time, such service took the form of warfare, conquest, and domestic reform. As the century developed, mercantilist economic policies played a more important role. Rulers were to develop their empire's resources by encouraging trade and manufacturing, immigration, and settlement. As French Enlightenment ideas joined German cameralism, a universalist vision of the empire as harmonious community of God's great creation took hold. Although Russian religion and culture remained dominant in the rulers' self-presentation, other creeds (save for splinter Orthodox sects) were allowed and ethnicities embraced. At their core, however, Russia's eighteenth-century emperors remained patrimonial rulers in the Muscovite mold. They ruled autocratically—welcoming advice, cultivating their elites, defining the law, but never yielding sovereignty, never granting constitutional institutions or rights over fiscal, legislative, or executive power. The image of autocracy expanded from godly community to rationally ordered universal community, but its practice remained a state governed by personal relations of power.
On political discourse at Sofiia Alekseevna's court: Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Lindsey A. J. Hughes, Russia and the West: The Life of a Seventeenth- Century Westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Golitsyn (1643—1714) (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1984) and her Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657-1704 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990). On the Edenic image: Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); Andreas Schonle, "Garden of the Empire: Catherine's Appropriation of the Crimea," Slavic Review 60 (2001): 1-23; Kelly O'Neill, "Constructing Imperial Identity in the Borderland: Architecture, Islam and the Renovation of the Crimean Landscape," Ab Imperio 2 (2006): 163-92. Muscovite dynastic women: Isolde Thyret, Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). On eighteenth-century succession and representations of legitimacy, see Cynthia H. Whittaker, Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play ofIdeas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Luba Golburt, The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014); V. Iu. Proskurina, Creating the Empress: Politics and Poetry in the Age of Catherine II (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011). On Peter I: Lindsey A. J. Hughes, Russia in the Age ofPeter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) and her Peter the Great: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001) and Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). V. O. Kliuchevskii's late nineteenth- century portrayal of Peter displays the fascinating detail that the great historian is known for: Peter the Great, trans. Liliana Archibald (London: Macmillan, 1963). On cultural transformations, see James Cracraft's masterful trilogy: The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). His The Revolution of Peter the Great (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003) highlights St. Petersburg as exemplar of "cultural revolution."
Authors who stress secular elements in Petrine ideology: Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) and his The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995-2000).
Citing the endurance of sacred foundations of legitimacy: V. M. Zhivov, "The Myth of the State in the Age of Enlightenment and its Destruction in Late Eighteenth-Century Russia," in Boris Uspenskij and Viktor Zhivov, "Tsar and God" and Other Essays in Russian Cultural Semiotics, ed. Marcus C. Levitt (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 239-58; Gary J. Marker, Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007); Ernest A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). On Peter's use of parody, see Zitser, Transfigured Kingdom and V. M. Zhivov, "Cultural Reforms in Peter I's System of Transformations," in Uspenskij and Zhivov, "Tsar and God," 191-238.