The Academy and the Kunstkamera: The first experiences in self-knowledge of the Empire

The experience of creating and exploring the Russian Empire belongs to Peter I, who had the qualities of a researcher and experimenter, and all institutions involved in the study of Russia, including the Kunstkamera and the Academy of Sciences, were his projects (the word “project” entered the Russian lexicon under Peter). At the end of the Northern War, Russia, in the person of its emperor, became interested in itself at a new geopolitical level, sending expeditions to explore and cartograph the southern, northern and eastern borders of the country. The continuation of the self-knowledge of the empire was the unprecedented Second Kamchatka, or Great Northern Expedition (1733–1743). Among its results was not only the compilation of maps (more than 60) of the empire and a description of its remote regions (Siberia, Kamchatka), but also the birth of a secular “fashion for peoples”, expressed in the “procession of peoples” during the amusing “Ice Wedding” (1740), in the preparation of which the Academy and the Kunstkamera took an active part. A breakthrough in self-research of Russia during the Enlightenment era was the Physical (Academic) expeditions of 1768–1774, which brought the birth of the science of ethnography (narodovedenie, Völkerkunde) and the formation of the national (imperial) idea of Russia as a country abundant and rich in peoples.