Green is the Colour: St. Petersburg's Chemical Laboratories and Competing Visions of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century

Histories of chemistry in eighteenth-century Russia have often ignored or downplayed the scientific character of chemical sites, treating the chemical laboratory of M.V. Lomonosov in St. Petersburg's Imperial Academy of Sciences as the definitive site of Russian chemistry. This essay surveys a variety of Russian medical, military, and academic institutions as chemical sites, and suggests that dividing them up as scientific or non-scientific sites, as Lomonosov sought to, is unhelpful, as many were integrated and engaged in connected enterprises. A case study then shows how the setting of Russian court society provoked competition within the network of Russian chemical sites. Competition led Lomonosov to urge a sharp division of labour between chemical artisanry and chemical science, forging a distinction that historians of Russian chemical sites have often reproduced subsequently.