Abstracts
A Cold Empire: Taming Frost in the Eighteenth Century
The winter of 1739–40 was particularly severe, with the whole of Europe caught in its icy grasp. This winter also unleashed its full fury on Russia and, unsurprisingly it was noted in eyewitness accounts and memoirs of the time. However, these authors who wrote about their time in St. Petersburg rarely mentioned any problems or fears that they experienced. They did not report either precautionary measures taken in advance or difficulties in obtaining supplies. Their attention was focused instead on an ice palace which shone resplendent on the Neva river between January and March 1740.
The ice palace was part of the festivities put on by Empress Anna Ivanovna to celebrate the victory over the Turks. The unusual attraction also became the scene of an unusual event when its main protagonist, Prince Mikhail A. Golitsyn, was forced to perform serving duties. Golitsyn had fallen out of favour after marrying a Catholic Italian and converting to her religious faith. Upon his return from Italy, the Empress demanded that he remarry and chose a Kalmyk woman to be his wife. The preparations for this wedding were elaborate and were by no means exhausted with the construction of the ice palace. The Empress had a couple from every province of her empire accompany the wedding procession in traditional tribal dress. Following the end of the wedding ball, there was a procession to the ice palace, where the newly-weds were presented with their bed of ice for their first night together.
It was particularly those not personally present at the festivities who described the ice palace and the fool's wedding as an event which demonstrated blatantly the sadistic tendencies of the Empress and the arbitrary nature of the autocracy. Historians have also used the episode of the ice palace to portray Anna Ivanovna as a figure who frivolously indulged her cruel fancies and pleasures. Simon Werrett and the literary scholar Jelena Pogosjan are the only academics so far to have offered interpretations that contradict this one-sided view. But neither the construction material of the ice palace nor its location upon the Neva river have played a significant role in the analysis of the incident to date, with the context of the severe cold also largely overlooked.
My analysis instead suggests that the frost and ice were essential conditions of the celebration. The events surrounding the ice palace were different from other baroque festivals in that the cold became a means with which autocratic rule could legitimised and power represented. All of the festive symbols involved a reference to Anna. She – according to the official message – was portrayed as the only one who could guarantee order, welfare and stability. This comprehensive claim to Anna’s authority was clearly made visible through three key relationships: with her subjects; with space; and with the climate.
The aristocracy – which, at the beginning of Anna's rule, had attempted to catch her off guard and force her to accept a form of oligarchic, shared rule – was firmly put in its place by this festival. It also provided a confirmation of the validity of the social norms that the aristocracy had attempted to sidestep. The public disciplining of the aristocracy was carried out in exemplary fashion upon Prince Golitsyn. He was publicly humiliated with no way of shielding himself from the eyes of all spectators. The degradation of the prince constituted a message from Anna to her subjects, and particularly to the nobility: she alone had the power to dispense prestige and shame.
This demonstration of power by the Empress was not only concerned with internal affairs and the relations with her subjects, but also the size of her realm. The festivities represented a spatial restructuring of the city and the empire, with that which was unknown and foreign being appropriated by the autocracy. This applies primarily to the river Neva which, according to the theories of Marc Augé, can be described – particularly in its liquid state – as a non-place. A river, in its materiality, is an entity that enables movement. Even in winter, when the water of the river solidifies, the Neva is not a place where one spends time, but rather is a location of transit. Through the ice palace, which rose up in the middle of the frozen river, this non-place was annexed as a territory in its own right. This appropriation corresponded with the founding of the city of St. Petersburg in 1703 in a swampy region. The ice palace symbolically extrapolated the shift of the centre of power in Imperial Russia northwards from Moscow to St Petersburg, rhetorically into a cold and uninhabited region. This subordination of unknown regions was also symbolised by the parade of the representatives of Russia’s tribal groups. The presentation of these various peoples as subjects of Anna was done in a manner that displayed their foreignness to its full extent. This was a clear reference to the vastness of the empire and the success of ‘internal colonisation’. Such a reference corresponded to the efforts of the Academy of Sciences in the same period to produce a map of the whole empire and so to appropriate distant regions of the Empire through visualisation.
Finally, the winter too, and even the climate in general, underwent a metamorphosis from a virtually insurmountable danger to a risk that could be brought under control. The scientific experiments carried out in connection with the ice palace enabled a shifting of emphasis in the evaluation of severe cold, which was traditionally associated with doom and crises in Russia, just as in other countries. The Empress’s ice palace was an attempt to domesticate the climate by making its most extreme feature – severe cold – into an object of artistic appropriation and scientific study.
In conclusion, through the fool's wedding and the ice palace, the Empress was successful in presenting herself as a powerful and enlightened ruler. In eyewitness accounts, there were no indications that the presentation of power and authority during the festival of 1740 was unsuccessful in any way. While she used the fool's wedding to display the extent of her power, which was not restricted by the aristocracy or by the vastness of her empire, Anna made use of the ice palace and its connection with experiments to present herself as a supporter of the sciences who was able to measure and tame frost. Subsequent interpretations of the ice palace episode show that it was precisely the medium of ice, which cannot defy warmth and sun indefinitely that undermined a successful and lasting presentation of power. The ice palace lost its symbolic power as a representation of good and enlightened rule through its transience, and particularly the fact that the exact timing of its downfall could not be predicted. While it still remained connected with power and authority, the ice palace along with the fool's wedding soon came to be seen as symbols for the cruel arbitrariness of the autocracy.
- Julia Herzberg, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg
julia.herzberg@geschichte.uni-freiburg.de
Back to the contents page.
