Eighteenth-century Russia Research Articles

Peter III’s Relatives at Petersbourg Сourt

The author examines the political history of the eighteenth-century Russian Empire and its relations with members of the royal family from the Holy Roman Empire. Based on the study of unpublished sources, mainly in Austrian and Russian archives, as well as published Russian, British, and French sources, he presents a new interpretation of Peter III’s relations with members of the House of Holstein. The research aims to answer the following questions: What role did Peter III’s “German kinsmen” play at the St. Petersburg court and in the administrative system of the state? What impact did their actions have on the Russian elite’s perception of the Tsar’s rule? Did Peter III’s personnel policy, which favoured the Holstein dynasty members for key positions in the state apparatus, differ from the previous practice of Russian monarchs? A detailed analysis of the sources eads to the following conclusions: Peter III’s Holstein relatives exerted considerable influence on the policy of the St. Petersburg court, occupying key positions in the military and political establishment of the Russian Empire in the early 1760s. At the same time, most of them did not speak Russian and did not try to adapt to their new cultural environment. The behaviour of some “Holsteinites”, as well as the preferential treatment they received at the expense of members of the royal family and St. Petersburg nobles, caused an extremely negative reaction in Russian society, contributing to the growth of hatred towards the Germans. Peter III’s decision to surround himself with relatives from Central Europe was reminiscent of the reign of Anna Ivanovna, whose closest confidants were of non-Russian origin. On the other hand, Anna Ivanovna’s cronies came from different parts of the Holy Roman Empire.

Strategies of Women’s Behaviour in Eighteenth-Century Courts (as Reflected in the Materials of the Investigative Chancellery)

This article analyses the main ways of acquittal and defence of women in Russian courts in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Women’s experiences of the investigative and judicial process in eighteenth-century Russia have not been the subject of specific research in historiography, nor have the discursive practices of male and female investigators. The paper focuses on two main questions: Were the accused able to construct their own narratives and thus influence the course of the trial? Were the female perpetrators able to exploit the existing gender order and turn it to their advantage? The aim of this article is to examine what opportunities for self-defence the modern Russian legal system offered, what limitations it imposed, how sensitive it was to the gender of the accused, and how women on trial were able to influence the course of the trial. The study is based on a series of investigative materials produced by the Investigative Chancellery between 1730 and 1750. By analysing the speeches of the accused, their typology and comparing the information they contain with other testimonies, laws and judgements, it is possible to identify the main ways in which women were acquitted. The most common of these were “word and deed”, in the hope of being transferred to another institution or of delaying the sentence for the main offence; the inclusion of third parties in their testimony, referring to subornation or rape; false statements, including those concerning their social status; and the declaration of insanity. However, the only way of obtaining an acquittal that had any chance of success was for the accused to declare that she was pregnant. In general, the criminal process in modern Russia was structured in such a way that no strategies or tricks were taken into account. In the end, the only thing that mattered was the testimony of witnesses and the testimony of the accused under torture.

The Ceremony of Receiving Ambassadresses at the Russian Court of the Eighteenth Century

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European system of international relations underwent significant changes, marked by the institutional development of diplomatic services and the establishment of more coherent diplomatic ceremonials. Resident embassies became common, introducing the presence of female relatives of diplomats who actively participated in the life of the diplomatic corps. The growing presence of ambassadresses played a transformative role in early modern diplomatic culture, contributing to the development of gendered diplomatic ceremonials. Drawing on relevant approaches to the study of the ‘new diplomatic history’ and using archival material from the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, this article examines the diplomatic ceremonial of ambassadorial spouses at the eighteenth-century Russian court. It examines the presentation of ambassadors’ wives at court, the implementation of protocol, and issues of etiquette that became sources of contention between ‘ambassadresses’ and the St Petersburg court, as well as methods of conflict resolution. The study of the reception ceremony for ‘foreign ladies’ reveals that, although it was governed by legal norms, it depended heavily on the Russian monarch’s personal attitude towards the ambassador and ambassadress, as well as the country they represented.

Гравированный автопортрет и портрет гравера. К вопросу о самосознании и социальном статусе граверов в России второй половины XVIII века

This paper examines the unique self-portrait prints which provide rich material for raising a number of previously overlooked questions related to Russian art in the age of Catherine the Great. It reveals why self-portrait prints were so rare in eighteenth-century Russia; what were the motives of those few printmakers who decided to turn to such an unpopular type of portrait at the time; what was the social position of printmakers; how they viewed themselves and their profession and what are the specifics of self-portraiture in printmaking in comparison with self-portraits in other media. As is shown in this work, the printed self-portrait allowed a printmaker to freely express himself in the way he wanted and also claimed a privileged social position for the depicted, reflecting the desire of the author-model to fit his image into the social hierarchy. The phenomenon was set somewhat apart from the official strategy for the development of Russian art in the eighteenth century, for it presumed a higher status for the artist as individual than was usual at the time, and anticipated, however unconsciously, the depths that would be discovered in artist’s self-portraits in the era of romanticism.

Inside the Linguistic Laboratory: The New Languages of Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia and their Craftsmen

Review of: S. V. Pol’skoi & V. S. Rzheutskii, eds., Laboratoriia poniatii. Perevod i iazyki politiki v Rossii XVIII veka. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2022.

“Общество” как государственное установление. Социально-исторические аспекты российской государственной власти в XVIII веке

In 1966, Dietrich Geyer published an article on the subject of state-society relations in eighteenth-century Russia, which appeared again in 1975 in an updated form. Geyer placed Catherine II’s reform policy in a European context and asked about the policy of absolute monarchies towards corporative structures and the conditions for the development of civil societies. In the Russian case, Catherine II created “societies” in the form of noble and urban corporations in order to expand provincial administration. According to Geyer’s thesis, both the statist origins of these corporate estates and the connection between noble societies and provincial administration hindered the emergence of a dualism between state and society in Russian history.

Andrei Matveev: Painting Allegory from Antwerp to Russia

In 1725, artist Andrei Matveev sent his Allegory of Painting to Catherine I from Antwerp, where Peter the Great had sent him to study. Matveev’s Allegory remains the earliest known easel painting on an allegorical subject by a Russian painter. This article examines the circumstances surrounding the painting’s creation in Antwerp and explores its iconography and sources. It then considers the place of Matveev’s work amid the allegorical imagery produced in early eighteenth-century Russia. This study offers a possible new interpretation of the painting and sheds light on the role Antwerp and its artistic legacy played in fostering Russia’s emerging artistic culture.

Civilizing Russia's “Barbarous Kingdom”

Abstract The Hulu series The Great, an ahistorical satire of the eighteenth-century Russian Empire, set at the courts of Peter III and Catherine II, doubles as a critique of contemporary politics and culture. Created for Anglophone audiences with little knowledge of history, but aware of stereotypes of Russia as a despotic, dysfunctional backwater, the show's appeal rests on the love-hate relationship between Peter the bro-emperor and the “girlboss” empress Catherine, as well as the expectation that Catherine, ultimately, will “have-it-all.” This article examines the gender dynamics structuring Peter's and Catherine's narrative arcs and argues that Catherine's trajectory from naïve, self-declared enlightened European princess to skilled, pragmatic ruler undermines Peter's attempt to liberate himself from an outdated model of masculinity.

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

‶Don’t Say Neigh, Say Yay”

Paints, paper, and the “scissors” of prices: On economic backwardness of eighteenth-century Russia

The author of this article systematizes archival data on the prices of paper and paints in Russia between the 1710s and 1780s and consider the development of their production in the country. We use more than 160 archival sources, which allows to construct time series. The resulting numbers make the author doubt the “price revolution” in eighteenth-century Russia. The price jump was observed in the agricultural market, the prices of the considered industrial goods remained stable. Thus we can talk about the “scissors” of prices, the socioeconomic consequences of which are studied in the article. The author aims to explain the reasons for the success of replacing foreign products with domestically produced goods in Petrine Russia, as well as the reasons for the technological lag at the end of the century

Addressing the Public in Eighteenth-Century Russian Printed Letter Collections

Abstract: This article offers the first scholarly overview of original and translated letter collections printed in eighteenth-century Russia. Through a close reading of the publication history, structure and paratexts of correspondence editions, it argues that the proliferation of such collections under Catherine the Great (1762–96) reflects an expanding definition of publicness and a related eagerness on the part of editors and translators to reconfigure relationships within the public. Editors widened state- and church-centred concepts of publicness to encompass an array of letter writers from cultural figures to ordinary citizens. Simultaneously, horizontal relationships of exchange between writers, editors, texts and readers came to rival vertical hierarchies in motivating and shaping epistolary publicity. A previously overlooked element in Catherinian print culture, letter collections provide unique insights into late eighteenth-century Russian thinking about what it meant to be (a) public.

A Reader and Reading in ‘Long’ Eighteenth-Century Russia

[Rev. of: Reading Russia. A History of Reading in Modern Russia. Volume 1. Edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena. Milano: Università degli Studi di Milano, 2020] The first volume of the collective monograph “Reading Russia. The History of Reading in Modern Russia”, is focused on the ‘long’ eighteenth century. It includes a preface by D. Rebecchini and R. Wassena to the entire three-volume edition and eight chapters written by famous researchers of Russian culture, literature and history. In the first chapters, D. Waugh considers the history of reading in the pre-Petrine period, G. Marker problematizes key issues of studying the history of reading in eighteenth-century Russia, K. Ospovat traces the dynamics of reading policy from Peter I to Elizabeth I. R. Bodin discusses the main changes in the reading habits in the second half of the century, A. Zorin demonstrates the «revolutionary» changes among the nobility due to the sentimentalism literature, E. Kislova researches the reading habits of the educated clergy, and B. Grigoryan studies the reader's image development in the Russian magazines of 1760–1830-ies. S. Franklin's chapter discusses the urban graphosphere in three different centuries: from the triumphal arches of Peter the Great, through the commercial signs of the mid-nineteenth century, he arrives at the inscriptions of the Soviet city. Overall, like the entire publication, the reviewed volume is the first major study of the history of reading in Russia, covering a long period and summarizing results of individual studies.

About “Ivans of Oblivious Origin”: One of the Strategies of Social Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Russia

In the Russian legal system, the phenomenon of persons of oblivious origin emerged in the early eighteenth century. During population censuses, enumerators discovered a number of people, unaware of their parents and places of domicile, who subsequently did not belong to any social stratum. Despite its realization that many persons of oblivious origin were in fact runaway peasants and deserters, the government decided to use them to increase its population in different parts of the country instead of returning them to their official localities. At the same time, some runaways independently managed to be added to the census rolls in towns and villages, thereby changing their social status. As a result, the examination of the issue of people of oblivious origin as one of the strategies of deception improves our understanding of adaptation tools and everyday practices, employed by the inhabitants of the Russian Empire.

Dynamics of Administration Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Issues of Social Contradictions

Dynamics of Administration Sphere in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Issues of Social Contradictions

Female Criminality in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Formulating a Research Problem

Historians argue that the Modern Era was a turning point for the female population of European countries. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and other major events and processes changed gender roles and social customs. To trace the qualitative characteristics of these changes, scholars examine different areas and aspects of women's lives in the past: family, sexuality, work, religion, and crime. The history of female criminality in Europe is now a well-developed and highly relevant field of research. In this article the author analyses Western historiography on the subject, identifies peculiarities of the historical context, sources and methods of processing them, and outlines possible approaches to the study of female criminality in modern Russia. The study of female criminality in eighteenth-century Russia is not only possible but also very promising. Nevertheless, scholars need to take into account the difference between the Russian and European historical contexts, as well as the nature of the sources. If properly approached, the study of female criminal behaviour in Russia and its comparison with European experience offers the historian an opportunity to look at Russian society and government in the period in question through new perspectives.

Bestiality in the Everyday Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia: an Archival Study

Following in the footsteps of M. Muravyeva and A. Kamensky the paper offers a close examination of 25 cases of real, alleged, or implied sex of a human male with a non-human animal in eighteenth-century Russia discovered in the collections of local administrations in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA). In analyzing these cases I address the issues of their representativeness, the motives of the defendants and the peculiarities of their psychology, and the factors facilitating such activities. I also seek to trace the link between involvement in bestiality and church calendar (fasts and holidays), consumption of alcohol, contacts with human females leading to possible sexual arousal, and social background.

“… Imprimi sicut nationi russicae decori & utilitati foret …”: The role of German Pietists’ educational activities in the early eighteenth-century Russia and their contribution to the formation of Russian professional terminology

The movement of Pietism, which emerged in Germany in the progressive Protestant milieu in the late 17th century, called for a reform of the Reformation. In order to make the idea of ?true Christianity? and ?true piety? accessible and understandable to every ordinary believer, it set as its primary goal the universal enlightenment of the nations necessary for every Christian to read and understand the full text of the Holy Scriptures. The realization of this goal included the translation of the full text of the Bible into the national languages and its distribution in the form of printed editions. The quote in the title of this article is from the preface to the very first grammar of the Russian language (LUDOLF 1696, see [3 (A)]), showing that the ?printing? of ?good books? in Russian was not only envisioned by the Pietists, but should, in their opinion, serve ?for the beauty and benefit of the Russian nation?. In addition to the creation of the first grammars of the Russian language, which had not existed until then, the enlightenment activities of the Pietists in Russia encompassed the production of translations of Western European literature into Russian from various fields of knowledge - pedagogy, history, theology, etc., which led to the creation of a new vocabulary in Russian, including the field of naming professions and specialized terminology. In the proposed article these processes are shown, on the one hand, on the example of a brief analysis of the first grammars of the Russian language, created by German Pietists; on the other hand, on the example of translation of the statutes of Lutheran churches and schools in Russia, the formation of a special Russian ecclesiastical terminology in the field of religious life of Lutherans is considered.

Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic by Catherine Gibson (review)

Reviewed by: Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Balticby Catherine Gibson Charlotte Henze Gibson, Catherine. Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2022. xvii + 267 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75.00: $100.00. W ithinthe vibrant field of scholarship that has explored East Central European imperial borderlands and their transition to nation-states, the history of what were known in the nineteenth century as the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces (Estonia, Livland, Kurland) has languished in comparative obscurity. While these provinces remain only tangentially discussed in the broader literature on European history, historians of Russia in the post-Soviet period, much informed by historiographical trends of the twentieth century, have placed renewed emphasis on national perspectives for studying the region's history, as it emerged as the independent state of Estonia and part of present-day western Latvia. Primarily concerned with construing the historical development of these two states as distinct from the rest of the Russian Empire, scholarship to date has in effect tended to overlook the complex entanglements between imperial Russia's Baltic provinces and their eastern neighbour, thus obfuscating the region's status as an Eastern European imperial borderland. Catherine Gibson takes on the great challenge of rethinking the history of the Baltic littoral and does so with aplomb. Equipped with formidable linguistic skills (in addition to English, Russian and German the Tartu-based historian also commands Estonian and Latvian), she presents a sophisticated, state-of-the-art book, which makes a compelling case for repositioning the Baltic provinces at the crossroads of several imperial and nation-building projects by telling the region's history through the lens of ethnographic cartography and mapmaking. Untroubled by the sheer breadth of her research, which took her across libraries, archives and map collections from Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Belarus, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, to Germany and Britain, Gibson builds up her argument with admirable conceptual clarity in five case studies, structuring each around successive moments of political crisis, when ideas of belonging and territory were challenged. As she gradually reveals the shifting international, imperial and local influences, changing socioeconomic circumstances, motivations, purposes, as well as means and ways that led and enabled ethnographic mapmakers to explore vastly divergent and often conflicting possibilities of imagining human collectives and organizing space, she uncovers a region of dazzling complexity, questioning many of our assumptions about the role and place of the Baltic provinces both within the Russian Empire and in Eastern Europe. [End Page 175] It is impossible to do justice to all five chapters within the scope of this review. Gibson opens her study with a fine analysis of the first major ethnographic map of the western part of the Russian Empire, the Ethnographic Map of European Russia(published in 1851). Tracing the biography, career and work of its main protagonist, Peter von Köppen, she reveals a small circle of leading academicians in the Empire's central scientific institutions (the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the Imperial Geographical Society), who were, not least by their own German background, tightly embedded into a closely-knit network of scholars, writers and philologists, which spanned the territories of the German Confederation and the Habsburg and Russian Empires. While in conversation with the ideas about ethnographic mapmaking circulating across Central Europe at the time, Köppen's approach to ethnographic mapping, Gibson shows, was deeply rooted in a distinct eighteenth-century Russian ethnographic tradition with its primary focus on studying the Empire's Finno-Ugric populations in the Grand Duchy of Finland and the Baltic provinces in order to depict and understand multidiversity. Moving away from the imperial metropole, Gibson then takes a detailed look at the Ethnographic Map of Vitebsk Province(1869–72), a map that was commissioned by the Governor-General of the North-Western territory himself in order to provide him with sufficient statistical and cartographic knowledge for the very purpose of governing. Scrutinizing in detail the processes of mapmaking, from gathering, recording and managing vast amounts of data and knowledge, to counting, categorizing, mapping...

My Encounter with Early Modern Ukraine

DOI: 10.47632/2786-717X-2022-1-77-88 УДК 94(=161.2)(71)“19/20”(092) Як цитувати: Zenon Kohut, My Encounter with Early Modern Ukraine, Ukrainian Historical Review / Український історичний огляд, I | 2022, 77-88. Zenon Kohut My Encounter with Early Modern Ukraine In this article Canadian historian reflects on his intellectual biography and on the changes in the field of early modern Ukrainian history during the last fifty years. He emphasizes the role of academic communities of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University in his formation as a historian of early modern Ukraine. His affiliation with the Ukrainian chairs at Harvard and intellectual guidance of Oleksander Ohloblyn and Omeljan Pritsak played an especially important role in this regard. Having completed a thesis on the abolition of the Hetmanate’s autonomy in the late eighteenth-century Russia Empire, in the early 1990s he became a director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies where in cooperation with Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy he founded an informal laboratory of early modern Ukrainian history. Zenon Kohut’s research in the 1990s and 2000s has been focused on the Russo-Ukrainian unity myth on the one hand and on the preconditions of the Ukrainian distinctiveness in the early modern period – on the other. It led him to the examination of the early modern Ukrainian history writing and identity-building. He was one of the first who demonstrated Ukrainian contribution to the emergence of the “traditional scheme of Russian history” – an imperial narrative in which Ukrainians and Russians are treated as offshoots of the same people sharing a common historical legacy, a common Orthodox faith, and, therefore, a common national destiny. Kohut’s studies of the early modern Ukrainian historiography and political thought focused on the evolution of such concepts as fatherland and nation. His pioneering works on the emergence and evolution of the Little-Russian identity in the Hetmanate conceptualized these developments as an important stage in the early modern Ukrainian nation-building. The article concludes with the presentation of Kohut’s ongoing project – a monograph on the political culture of Cossack Ukraine from 1569 to 1714 – which aims to synthesize his semicentennial research into the early modern Ukrainian history. References Chynczewska-Hennel Teresa. Świadomość narodowa szlachty ukraińskiej i kozaczyzny od schyłku XVI do połowy XVII w. Warsaw 1985. [In Polish.] Gat Azar. Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. Cambridge 2012. Hen-Konarski Tomasz. No Longer Just Peasants and Priests: The Most Recent Studies on Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Ukraine // European History Quarterly 45/4 (2015) 727–728. Kappeler Andreas. The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. Abingdon 2013. Kas’ianov Heorhiy. Teorii natsii ta natsionalizmu. Kyiv 1999. [In Ukrainian.] Kohut E. Zenon. Korinnia identychnosti: studii z rann'omodernoi ta modernoi istorii Ukrainy. Kyiv 2004. [In Ukrainian.] Kohut E. Zenon. Making Ukraine: Studies on Political Culture, Historical Narrative, and Identity. Toronto 2010. [In Ukrainian.] Kohut E. Zenon. Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s – 1830s. Cambridge 1988. [In Ukrainian.] Кohut E. Zenon. The Question of Russo-Ukrainian Unity and Ukrainian Distinctiveness in Early Modern Ukrainian Thought and Culture // Culture, Nation, and Identity. The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600–1945) / ed. A. Kappeler et al. Edmonton – Toronto 2003, p. 57–86. Portnov Andrii et al. Whose Language Do We Speak? Some Reflections on the Master Narrative of Ukrainian History Writing // Ab Imperio 4 (2020) 88–129. Yakovenko Natalia. Dzerkala identychnosti: doslidzhennia z istorii uiavlen’ ta idei v Ukraini XVI – pochatku XVIII stolittia. Kyiv 2012. [In Ukrainian.] Yakovenko Natalia. Paralel’nyi svit: doslidzhennia z istorii uiavlen’ ta idei v Ukraini XVI–XVII st. Kyiv 2002. [In Ukrainian.] Yakovenko Natalia. Ukrains’ka shliakhta z kintsia XIV do seredyny XVII st. Volyn’ i Tsentral’na Ukraina. Kyiv 2008. [In Ukrainian.]

«Никакие сих развратных умов намерения нималейше успеть не могут»: российские власти и французские учителя в 1795 г.

The article investigates an archival file concerning a project submitted by French teachers to the Director of Elementary Schools in Moscow Guberniia in 1795. The project’s authors aimed at creating a trade union and a platform for legally authorized socializing and mutual aid. Fourteen individuals signed the project, about whom the archival file contains brief dossiers from the Secret Investigation Office (the administrative body in charge of domestic intelligence). The teachers’ initiative gave rise to correspondence between the Governor of Moscow and the Prosecutor General, as well as a direct personal appeal of the latter to the empress. All in all, the documents show the circumspect attitude of the Russian authorities toward the French community in Russia in the time of the French Revolution. The authors analyze this particular episode in the context of the history of the French community, and especially of French teachers, in eighteenth century Russia. The text of the Project for the Union of Teachers is published in the appendix.