UC Berkeley

Historians of Russian monarchy have avoided the concept of sovereignty, choosing instead to describe how monarchs sought power, authority, or legitimacy. This dissertation, which centers on Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia between 1762 and 1796, takes on the concept of sovereignty as the exercise of supreme and untrammeled power, considered legitimate, and shows why sovereignty was itself the major desideratum. Sovereignty expressed parity with Western rulers, but it would allow Russian monarchs to bring order to their vast domain and to meaningfully govern the lives of their multitudinous subjects. This dissertation argues that Catherine the Great was a crucial figure in this process. Perceiving the confusion and disorder in how her predecessors exercised power, she recognized that sovereignty required both strong and consistent procedures as well as substantial collaboration with the broadest possible number of stakeholders. This was a modern conception of sovereignty, designed to regulate the swelling mechanisms of the Russian state. Catherine established her system through careful management of both her own activities and the institutions and servitors that she saw as integral to the system. She used a variety of management strategies that included imposing laws, issuing instructions, and routinizing interactions with administrators. While Catherine’s system, which was noble oriented, had limited purchase in the vast Russian countryside, it established clear expectations about the legitimate exercise of power. After her death, the system would not tolerate lightly any violation of its principles. Catherine’s successors, Alexander I and Nicholas I, largely adhered to these arrangements, allowing the Russian monarchy to remain a robust and viable form of government in the first half of the nineteenth century.