“Greek Project” in Terms of Political Practice and Russian Imperial Ideology during the Reign of Catherine II

The author gives an expanded interpretation of the “Greek Project” as not only a foreign policy undertaking, but also as an internal political project used in order to buttress state authority with specific ideological components. The source base for the project, in addition to the letter of Catherine II to Joseph II, are the papers of G.A. Potemkin, A.V. Khrapovitsky, the letters of Alexei and Grigory Orlov, and correspondence of the Russian Empress with Voltaire and other ideologists of the European Enlightenment. In addition, the writings of Greeks, in particular Eugenios Voulgaris, along various documents of foreign and domestic policy, and Russian cultural monuments are important to the project. It is shown that a characteristic feature of the imperial ideology of the reign of Catherine II was philhellenism, which included, above all, the noble elite’s awareness of the heritage of ancient Hellas as the source of pan-European civilization. On one hand, this ideology also included sympathy for the descendants of the great Hellenes, co-religionists who fell under the foreign Ottoman yoke, and on the other hand, the authorities and Russian society unanimously positioned the Russian Empire as the legitimate successor of Byzantium, which could and should return fellow Greeks to European civilization.