E. V. Anisimov has written extensively on reigns between Peter I and Catherine II: Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and her Russia, 1741—1761, ed. and trans. John T. Alexander (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1995) and Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004). Emphasis on Anna and Elizabeth as frivolous is discussed in Proskurina, Creating the Empress and reflected in Anisimov's two cited works and Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
On Peter III, see Carol Scott Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). On Paul I, see Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 1754-1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). On continuities of elites, see John Le Donne, "Ruling Families in the Russian Political Order, 1689-1825," Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique 28 (1987): 233-322.
On Catherine II, Isabel de Madariaga's Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) is encyclopedic, while her Catherine the Great: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) is a chronological biography. See also A. B. Kamenskii, The Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Searchingfor a Place in the World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); John P. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762-1796 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and his Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Simon Dixon's excellent study of Catherine the Great in a series entitled "Profiles in Power" focuses on her strategies for ruling: Catherine the Great (Harlow: Longman, 2001). He is helpful on the issue of Catherine's sexuality, as are Brenda Meehan-Waters, "Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule," Russian Review 34 (1975): 293-307 and John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On Krylov's erotic critiques, see Proskurina, Creating the Empress. Ernest Zitser dates a set of pornographic images of eighteenth-century Russian rulers to the first half of the nineteenth century: "A Full-Frontal History of the Romanov Dynasty: Pictorial 'Political Pornography' in Pre-Reform Russia," Russian Review 70 (2011): 557-83. M. M. Shcherbatov's memoir: On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, trans. A. Lentin (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
On pornography as political critique in the Enlightenment, see Lynn Hunt, Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Larry Wolff, "The Fantasy of Catherine in the Fiction of the Enlightenment: From Baron Munchausen to the Marquis de Sade," in M. Leavitt and A. Toporkov, eds., Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture (Moscow: Ladomir, 1999), 249-61; Lynn Hunt, "The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine," in Dena Goodman, ed., Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York: Routledge, 2003), 117-38; Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of
Marie-Antoinette (New York: Zone Books, 1999). On sexual rumors and slander on Elizabeth I: Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, 2nd edn. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
On visual imagery of political power: Lindsey Hughes, "From Tsar to Emperor: Portraits of Peter the Great," in Gyula Szvak, ed., The Place of Russia in Eurasia (Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai Intezet, 2001), 221-32; Isabella Forbes and William Underhill, Catherine the Great: Treasures of Imperial Russia from the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1990). For Russia through foreign eyes, see Elena V. Barkhatova, "Visual Russia: Catherine II's Russia through the Eyes of Foreign Graphic Artists," in Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ed., Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 72-89.
On Catherine's building projects, see Dmitri Shvidkovskii, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and his "Catherine the Great's Field of Dreams: Architecture and Landscape in the Russian Enlightenment," in James Cracraft and Daniel B. Rowland, Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 51-65.
For architecture in Kazan, Reval, Riga, and Kyiv, see works cited in Chapter 6. On Siberia, see Brumfield's series on northern and Siberian towns, cited in Chapter 6. For a modern travelogue of Siberia with a keen eye towards surviving architecture, see A. J. Haywood, Siberia: A Cultural History (Oxford: Signal Books, 2010).
14
Army and Administration
Expansion of the administration and army captured most of the attention of eighteenth-century rulers. They struggled to balance central structures with local and to coordinate the many offices needed to finance and oversee an expanding society, economy, and army. Reforms were informed by Enlightenment ideas, combining the German Enlightenment's emphasis on orderliness and duty with a French preoccupation on rational thinking, rule by law, and individual self- development (Kant famously said that Enlightenment meant "dare to know"). In their prodigious programs of institutional change, both Peter I and Catherine II declared their intent not only to maximize state income but also to improve social welfare. Both were committed to drawing the nobility into civil service to create an officialdom equal in prestige to the military officer corps. These goals proved elusive but progress was made.
MILITARY REFORMS
One of the century's most fundamental preoccupations was military reform. Peter I devoted prodigious energies to creating a navy out of whole cloth and transforming Russia's army in one generation. Although military reforms towards a "new model" army had been well under way since the mid-seventeenth century, Peter's efforts dwarfed them—in scale (he created a massive infantry army), speed (in a decade), and success in battle (he defeated the best army and navy in eastern and central Europe in the Great Northern War, namely Sweden). Peter's youthful experiences shaped his commitment to military might. Exiled from the Kremlin from ages 10 to 17, living in the suburban enclave of Preobrazhenskoe near the German Quarter, Peter met foreign officers and created "play" regiments of European-style troops that carried out real military exercises. They became the core of the future Semeonovskii and Preobrazhenskii Guards regiments. He was fascinated by sailing and began as early as 1690-2 to have ships constructed at Lake Pereiaslavl', most likely (as had been done in his father's time) to produce ships to guard Caspian shipping.
Peter deposed regent Sofiia Alekseevna in 1689 and returned to the Kremlin, but he actively took the reins of leadership around 1698. His initial focus was, following Muscovite priorities, towards the Black Sea. In 1695-6 a new fleet of galleys assembled at Voronezh to campaign against Azov; Peter won the port from the Ottoman empire in 1697, but was forced to destroy his ships and yield the city after his defeat on the Prut River in 1711. He immediately set off on the Grand Embassy of 1697-8 where, along with diplomatic meetings, Peter learned shipbuilding in London and Amsterdam and recruited primarily English engineers for a planned Baltic fleet. Its construction began at Lake Ladoga and shifted to St. Petersburg soon after 1703. Peter I defeated the Swedes at Hango in July 1714 with a fleet of galleys; by the end of his reign he had a Baltic fleet comprising impressive ships of the line and frigates as well as multitudes of galleys.