Upon examining the list of Russian rulers from the time of Kiev to the Russian Federation, one finds nine women who ruled the Russian state: Olga (tenth century), Elena Glinskaya (sixteenth century), Natalia Naryshkina and Sofia Alekseyevna (seventeenth century), and Catherine I, Anna, Anna Leopoldovna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II (eighteenth century). Although regnant queens and female rulers were not uncommon in the medieval era, alternation between male and female rulers, as demonstrated in eighteenthcentury Russia, is quite rare.

While the list of works written on various Russian Tsars, both males and females (ranging from relatively neglected Catherine I and Anna to thoroughly studied Peter the Great and Catherine the Great), is long and impressive, the characteristics, particularities, and types of queenship in the Russian Empire, or any other era in the development of east Slavic statehood, have rarely received any treatment, beyond the context of a specific reign or a specific theme in the history of the early empire.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a historical sketch of the reigns of the four empresses of eighteenth-century Russia in an attempt to enhance our understanding of female rule in Imperial Russia. In her classic paper “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Joan Scott argues for the adoption of a prism of gender to the writing of history in order to develop “new perspectives on old questions,” “redefine old questions in new terms,” “make women more visible as active participants” in history and “create analytic distance between the seemingly fixed language of the past and our own terminology.”3 Although it yielded mostly negative reactions right after its release, Scott's argument has had wide-reaching implications and served as a catalyst in a wave of gendered history. While it is tempting, in line with a rising trend in historical studies in recent years, to view any rule by a female as “female rule” and to study it using methodology devised specifically for the study of women in history, such as queenship studies, I argue that the rise, rule, and demise of a series of female emperors in eighteenth-century Russia were prompted by factors not directly related to gender, and therefore the prism of gender— albeit important— must be complemented by a wider view of the evolution of Russian law and society.