This is clear in Catherine II's quite conscious, pragmatic goal of defining an "imperial Russian" identity inclusive of her many subject peoples. Like Muscovite rulers embracing their peoples as God's multifold providence, but in a secular Enlightenment key, Catherine proudly showed off to foreign visitors her subject peoples as cultured, orderly, and "civilized" citizens. In her frequent travels through her realm Catherine pursued many agendas. By physically traversing the realm she displayed her sense of imperial unity; she perpetuated the role of patrimonial tsar by meeting with people, listening to their grievances, visiting churches and monasteries, distributing alms and mercy. She used her travels to educate herself on issues of concern to her. With an eye to urban planning and economic growth, for example, she visited the new Ladoga Canal system in 1765; on all her travels she visited factories and talked with merchants. On the eve of the Legislative Commission to which she had summoned representatives of the entire empire, Catherine traveled to Kazan in 1767 and met with local monks, merchants, and nobles, viewed native Tatar, Chuvash, Mordva, and Votiak/Udmurt dancers, and received in audience Tatars, Kazakhs, and Siberians. She interviewed Old Believers and Muslims. In 1780 she traveled across Belarus'an lands acquired in the first Polish partition, greeted along the roads by peasants (quickly assembled) and meeting with Polish nobles, Jews, Jesuits, and Dominicans.
By contrast, her celebrated six-month sojourn to the south in 1787 was mostly about display. In the wake of her triumphant victories over the Ottoman empire, the sojourn (which took four years in the planning) was intended to impress her foreign guests and through them European public opinion with the empire's power and its harmony in diversity. In Smolensk, in Kyiv, as she sailed along the Dnieper in a Roman-style galley, and in Crimea, she was met with spectacles, balls, and banquets hosted by loyal nobles, re-enactments of battles (Potemkin restaged on the Dnieper Catherine's 1770 naval victory at Chesme and Peter I's 1708 victory at Poltava!), and festivities and audiences demonstrating her array of loyal ethnic subjects. While Muscovite tsars had celebrated the realm's diversity as evidence of God's blessing on the tsar, Catherine struck the same note in an Enlightenment secular tone, affirming her power, might, and benevolent rule through the breadth of the human community she ruled.
Catherine, like Peter I, also gathered ethnographic information and artefacts from her subject lands and peoples. She energetically defended Russia against the critique of French scientist Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche that Russia was dreary and uniform; she celebrated the tremendous diversity of peoples, nature, and wildlife in her vast dominion. Ethnographic and scientific expeditions dispatched by the Academy of Sciences included portrait artists who returned with images of native peoples, their costumes and daily life. Foreign travelers, fascinated by Russia's exotic peoples, produced picture albums of the empire's peoples to great acclaim in Europe and Russia. Jean Baptiste Le Prince produced genre scenes, often romanticized, of his travels in the Baltics, Siberia, and European Russia. The German naturalists Johann Gottlieb Georgi and Peter Simon Pallas headed Academy of Sciences expeditions (1768-74) to the Middle Volga, Urals, and Siberia, collecting flora and fauna and producing ethnographic images (Figure C.1). Pallas's
Figure C.1 Academician Johann Gottlieb Georgi's sketches of ethnic types, based on his travels in the 1770s, became one of many such publications that fueled popular fascination in the peoples of empire; his images, such as this Iakut hunter, were nonetheless stylized and often touched up in later editions (here the 1799 Academy edition). General Research Division, The New York Public Library.
expedition in the 1790s to Crimea and the south produced striking paintings of native peoples (Kalmyks, Tatars, Cossacks), mountain vistas, and decidedly non- European-looking cities. Based on such information Catherine II commissioned a set of porcelain statues of national and Russian "types."
All this gathering of information contributed to a vision of an empire in which being "Russian" was not an issue of ethnicity but of living as a good subject—as Elena Vishlenkova says, "livingpo-russkii (as a Russian)." Finns, Poles, Chuvash, Tatars, and Russians could all be considered "Russian" (using the imperial "Rossiiskii" that Peter I had introduced as a more inclusive term), leaving only the nomadic, less "civilized" peoples outside that definition; by the end of the century some authors were even idealizing nomads and Cossacks as noble savages. Russia's focus was on its individual subject peoples, not the physical space of conquest. As Martina Winkler argues, Russians did not even develop rituals of claiming territory per se until they encountered rival nations (the Spanish) in America in the early nineteenth century. Until then, physical and ritual markers of national conquest (flags, rituals) were not prominent in Russia's consciousness. Working with its subject peoples was. By the early nineteenth century Russia's official historian Nikolai Karamzin was extolling Russia's glory in imperial, not national terms, describing "Rossiia" as a proud amalgam of Russian control and a vast, ethnically diverse and abundant realm.
Throughout this book we have found in architecture visual indication of how Russia's imperial presence was personified and dispersed. We saw in Chapter 13 how neoclassical architecture projected an Enlightenment vision of empire united by rationality and order in the capitals of European Russia, while elsewhere in the empire it had less impact. In some places classicism barely arrived by the end of the century, with the ornate "Naryshkin baroque" enduring in Siberia and the Middle Volga in jarring contrast to indigenous mosques and temples. As Russia expanded to the west, where European architectural styles had been native for centuries, Russian imperial style blended in with or complemented local architecture. Rich merchants and guilds, municipalities, Lutheran and Catholic churches, wealthy Orthodox monasteries, Cossack nobles, and other corporate groups on the western borderlands matched the baroque or classicism of the emperor's buildings. The imperial style's rationality found common ground in its new acquisitions.
Only with rising nationalism in the nineteenth century did the imperial center attempt to spread around the realm grand architectural statements that unambiguously announced Russian power. As Richard Wortman has chronicled, an early attempt at this occurred in the 1830s when an architectural style combining neoclassicism with Byzantine/Muscovite motifs was elaborated—a grand Alexander Nevskii Cathedral in this style marked the intensification of Russian presence in Crimea in that decade. With conscious Russification of the empire in the 1880s the court sponsored a much more overtly "Russian folk" style on a grand scale, incorporating the bulbous domes and external decorativeness of seventeenth- century Moscow and Iaroslavl'. Immense neo-Russian Orthodox cathedrals arose in St. Petersburg (Figure C.2), in stark contrast to the city's European baroque and
Figure C.2 The Cathedral of the Resurrection in St. Petersburg (built 1883-1907), popularly known as "Church on the Spilled Blood" because it sits on the site where Alexander II was mortally wounded in 1881, exemplifies the Russian Revival architecture that accompanied the emergence of Russification as imperial policy in the late nineteenth century. Its lavish ornament and onion domes contrast sharply with the capital's European classicism. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
classical look; nobles and the imperial family erected similar churches on their estates, as did factory owners in industrial and manufacturing centers—St. Petersburg, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Gusev in Vladimir gubernia—surrounding the proletariat with images of regime and faith.