Muscovites almost universally regarded the grand prince as anointed by God and thus as deserving obedience. The most consequential thinker of the Russian Enlightenment was Catherine the Great, whose Nakaz treated liberty as a crucial ingredient of just rule. Between 1789 and the early 1830s a distinctively Russian variant of conservatism began to emerge. After the turn of the century but especially between 1826 and 1855 Russian intellectuals focused on the historical, religious and philosophical problem of Russian national identity. The Slavophiles' chief adversaries were the so-called Westernisers, a loose knit network of intellectuals usually thought to include the literary critic Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky. The Great Reforms so altered Russian social and civil life as to radically affect subsequent political debates. Dostoevsky's conservatism was predicated on opposition to Western liberalism and socialism, on hostility to individualism and capitalism, on rejection of Catholicism and religious authoritarianism.

Several edicts issued within a few weeks of each other offer a foretaste of the trajectory of Russian culture in the eighteenth century. With this in mind and with a focus on high culture, this chapter examines developments in architecture, the figurative arts, theatre, music and literature from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Elite Russian culture at the beginning of the eighteenth century developed in a peculiar hot-house environment, show-cased in St Petersburg. The new capital's creator, Peter I, summoned foreign architects to construct palaces, and foreign artists to fill them with pictures. Historians once neglected the period between Peter I's death and the accession to the throne of his self-styled 'spiritual daughter' Catherine II. The Academy of Arts would remain the virtually unchallenged centre and arbiter of the figurative arts in Russia until the middle of the nineteenth century. Theatre made a substantial contribution to the 'civilising' mission of the Russian Enlightenment.