The idea that Westernization or modernization took a back seat between the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II is not a particularly accurate view of imperial Russia's development under the early Romanovs. While the internal power struggles between 1725 and 1741 did ensure that some Russian emperors were unable to cast as long a shadow as Peter I, there were many attempts by Peter I's successors to continue his policies.

The two most notable examples of pre-Catherine II modernization were her two predecessors Anna I and Elizabeth I. Both these Empresses used the powers of autocracy to embellish their own court and to strengthen the state. Anna I, whose reign lasted about a decade, introduced key educational reforms such as the Academy of Sciences. This latter institution continued the funding for Bering's Siberian expeditions and helped bring in a small number of Russian elites into contact with Western ideas and other modern thinking. The Academy itself was rather small, but it was in the spirit of Peter I's approach to modernization and was arguably a more practical way to achieve it through the creation of social institutions rather than ramrodding modernization schemes.

Anna I was also instrumental in modernizing the Russian court by bringing in more Western artists and performers. By the mid-1730s, the Russian Empress was sponsoring European musicians to tour the elite theaters such as Francesco Araja and she had laid down the foundations for an indigenous Russian ballet school. The "culture of power," to use the phrasing of T. C. Blanning, helped to further cement the Romanov dynasty as the epicenter of cultural patronage and civilization within Russia. Drawing in cultural elites sent a clear message about the nature of autocracy and how it was the gatekeeper for modernization and civilization. Elizabeth I would continue these trends of attracting and holding various cultural figures and Catherine II's own self-stylings as an enlightened despot were possible because of the intense work her predecessors had done to build up the Russian arts scene.

But Anna I and Elizabeth I's building up of Romanov power was not just limited to cultural projects. These Empresses did much to create Russian military power as well as a fairly robust bureaucratic state than their male counterparts (and arguably Peter I). Anna I instituted the first systematic review of Russia's armed forces in 1730 and she promoted the able German adventurer Burkhard Christoph von Münnich. This latter figure had already made a name for himself as a technical expert on fortifications and von Münnich put his stamp on Russia's military in the decades after 1730. He helped spearhead a modernization and professionalization of the officer corps and supervised the establishment of the Cadet Corps. This educational institution not only trained officers in technical matters, but a broad panoply of Western subjects ranging from mathematics to dance. Von Münnich was not entirely successful in some of his reforms, but he did leave a positive legacy for Elizabeth I even though von Münnich that brought Elizabeth to the throne.

Both contemporaries and other commentators threw a great deal of shade against Elizabeth's military acumen in the Seven Years' War. The noted misogynist Frederick II (and contemporaries noted the Prussian king was a woman-hater by the standards of the time) was quite critical of Elizabeth's rule as he was of his fellow female dynasts Maria Theresa and Catherine II. And a number of imperial and Soviet historians would castigate Elizabeth's favoritism as interfering with Russian high command. While there is some merit to these later charges, Elizabeth was a fairly effective war leaders. She navigated coalition politics fairly effectively, at least by the standards of the era, and had a consistent grand strategic goal that Prussia was to be reduced in power. Her pursuit of this goal almost worked too; the weight of Russian arms, which had been modernized under both von Münnich and Elizabeth's servitor Shuvalov, did put Frederick II on the defensive. Elizabeth's death became the "second miracle of the house of Brandenburg" in that the Prussophile Peter III negotiated a peace with Prussia that imparted to Russia very little gains. While a number of pop history accounts emphasize Peter III's mania for militarism, the expense of the Seven Years' War did give the peace factions in the court a degree of power.

The sheer expense of the Seven Years' War though does underscore the extent of the progress Russia had made since Peter I. The Russian army was by the close of the Seven Years' War a modern institution that not only had large numbers, but also an increasingly professional artillery park and a structure not unlike that of its Western counterparts. This demonstrates the extent to which the state-building prerogatives of Peter I remained in place through his problematic successors. Although both Catherine II and her grandson Alexander I liked to portray themselves as enlightened despots in touch with the great intellectual currents of Europe, their focus of worship was arguably more étatisme than the Enlightenment. Catherine II famously did not feel the Enlightenment applied to serfdom and the Empress perceived the French Revolution as part of a larger process of the Enlightenment going too far. In both her writings and actions, Catherine II tended to lump affairs in France in both with the American Revolution and the Pugachev Revolt. The Russian interventions against France came with a larger clamping down on radical ideas and censorship within the empire. Autocracy depended on the Enlightenment only so much as it enhanced state power for the Romanovs, including Peter I. Areas of the Enlightenment that did not enhance the glory of the state and its monarch were largely ignored by the Romanovs, or in some cases, treated as a threat antithetical to Russian conditions.

Sources

Blanning, T. C. W. Frederick the Great King of Prussia. New York: Random House, 2016.

Duffy, Christopher. Russia's Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power 1700-1800. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Lipski, Alexander. "Some Aspects of Russia's Westernization during the Reign of Anna Ioannovna, 1730-1740." American Slavic and East European Review 18, no. 1 (1959): 1-11.

Lohr, Eric, and Marshall Poe. The Military and Society in Russia: 1450-1917. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

Wortman, Richard. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol. 1. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.