Nation and Empire

The reforms of Peter I took the Russian state and its elites an impres­sive distance along the road to modernization and Westernization. They also sowed the seeds of resentment against the West, and, as Rogger has convincingly shown, created preconditions for the rise of Russian national sentiment and self-assertiveness.

Expressions of support for the empress articulated in terms of anti­Western and Russian patriotic discourse were soon to follow. Repre­sentatives of the church hierarchy were especially active: their ranks were swelled by Ukrainian recruits who adopted a new all-Russian identity and felt deep animosity towards Westerners in the Russian service. Archbishop Amvrosii Iushkevych of Novgorod, a native of Ukraine, accused foreigners of discriminating against native Russians and causing the country's decline. He stated in a sermon that foreign­ers 'spared no means to convict a Russian experienced in the arts, as engineer, as architect, or soldier... to remove him by exile or execu­tion, simply because he was an engineer or architect, a student of Peter the Great.'⁷ Archbishop Amvrosii knew what he was talking about. He was close to one of the Ukrainian 'students of Peter I,' Teofilakt Lopatynsky, who was stripped of his archepiscopal status, imprisoned, and tortured on the orders of Biron.

It has long been argued by students of the period that in terms of the presence and influence of foreigners at court, Anna Ioannovna's reign was little different from those of her immediate predecessors or succes­sors on the Russian throne. Why, then, was the change of rulers in 1740-1 accompanied by so much talk about foreigners? Something had clearly changed in Russian society, predisposing it to make the national factor supreme in public discourse. In order to fight foreign influences in the capital, the Russian elites availed themselves of Western instruments - the ideas of nation, the common good, and loyalty to the fatherland. Elizabeth's reign abounded in statements bolstering Russian pride. Her direct descent from Peter I was stressed on numerous occasions, giving a new twist to the interpretation of her father's role in Russian politics and culture. Now Peter was seen not as a Westernizer of Russia but as a pro­tector of Russia against foreign encroachments.⁹ It was hoped that the link to Peter and the new anti-Western interpretation of his rule would help Elizabeth overcome the dubious circumstances of her accession to power (a coup d'etat, accompanied by the arrest of the child emperor Ivan VI) and mobilize broad support for her.¹⁰ Anti-Western sentiments were further bolstered by wars with the European powers.

The construction of Russian identity took on new characteristics during the reign of Catherine II, the longest-ruling Russian monarch of the eighteenth century. Born Sophia Augusta Frederika Anhalt-Zerbst in Germany, and implicated in the murder of her husband, Emperor Peter III, Catherine also took the throne by means of a coup d'etat. Unexpectedly, given her background, but quite logically, given the dominant trends in Russian society of the time, Catherine found sup­port in Russia's growing self-awareness and its acute sense of danger from the West.¹¹ The manifesto announcing her ascension to the throne read: 'Our Orthodox Church is being menaced by the adoption of for­eign rites: our military prestige, raised so high by our victorious army, is being degraded by the conclusion of dishonorable peace.

At the same time, Catherine's 'official' nationalism was quite differ­ent from that of Elizabeth's day. The favouring of 'native' Russians and hatred of foreigners that were so much a part of official discourse in the 1740s and 1750s were replaced in the 1760s with a policy that pro­moted not the ethnic but the imperial Russian nation. The impressive non-Orthodox churches built on Nevskii prospekt in St Petersburg during Catherine's reign perfectly exemplify the court's toleration of foreign cultures. The government commissioned geographical and eth­nographic surveys of the Russian Empire, recognizing if not celeb­rating its multiethnic character. Andrew Swinton, a British visitor to St Petersburg in 1789, reflected on both features of Russian life in the following note on his voyage to Russia's northern capital: 'In Peters­burg there is no need of this compliance: let foreigners be dressed ever so oddly, they will find, in every lane, subjects of the Russian Empire to keep them in countenance. She brings into this ball her various swarms, from the snowy mountains of Kamschatka, to the fertile plains of the Ukraine - a space of 4,000 miles! Siberians, Tongusians, Calmucs, and an endless train of Tatar nations, the Fins, the Cossacs, etc.'¹⁵ On the other hand, the tolerance extended to foreigners and their cultures coexisted in Russian records of the time with a growing sense of Russian pride and superiority manifested even in the writings of Catherine herself.

Pride in Russia as a state and as the imperial homeland of a variety of ethnic groups was promoted in numerous writings and declarations of the era. The voices of such individuals as Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, who favoured native Russian rulers, were more the exception than the rule.¹⁸ Anti-Western feeling was directed not against foreigners in Rus­sia but against the Western powers and other enemies of Russia, such as the Catholic Poles. There can be little doubt that the foreign-born empress felt much more comfortable with a discourse exalting the imperial nation than with 'nativist' rhetoric, but Catherine's personal background was only partly responsible for that change in the empha­sis of Russian national discourse. Another factor was the penetration into Russia of ideas and vocabulary that advanced the construction of 'civic' or imperial nationalism. These were the ideas of the French phi- losophes, whose works Catherine II admired and with whom she was in constant correspondence. During her reign, special consideration was given to the ideas of the common good and the fatherland, which had first appeared in Russian official discourse in the times of Peter I. Prom­ising young Cossack officers like Oleksander Bezborodko and Petro Zavadovsky were brought to St Petersburg to serve the empire instead of their Little Russian patria.

Western ideas embodied in the terms 'citizen,' 'society,' and 'liberty' aroused opposition from Russians who wanted to undo the damage they were inflicting on authoritarian rule. In 1797 Catherine's son and successor, Paul I, sought to obliterate the memory of his mother 's rule and curb the penetration of French revolutionary ideas by prohibiting the use of the word 'society' in print and ordering 'fatherland' to be replaced with 'state' and 'citizens' with 'inhabitants' or 'dwellers.'¹⁹ But it proved impossible to turn back the clock.