“Dream of Empire” is the film about half forgotten relic of the past that can tell us a lot if we take some pains to study it.
The film “Dream of the Empire” form the series“The Mysticism of Power” is based on the guess of the historian S.A. Ekshtut about the surprising (from the modern point of view) methods the power used to associate with the society when it had no mass propaganda instruments.
The rise to this investigation was given by the little known full dress portrait of Ekaterina the Second painted by the artist D.G. Levitsky. Ekshtut can see in it the figuratively encoded message of the empress to her contemporaries and progeny, that has its mysterious effect on our history almost till the present days.
The portrait is full of antique and Byzantine motifs that in the eyes of the average man look like the collection of absolutely unimportant decorations that are hard to understand. Each epoch has to be talked to in its own language and we suggest that a spectator should look at the symbols encoded in this picture from the point of view of the educated man of the epoch of Ekaterina the Second.
It is quite evident that the canvas was nothing else but the ideological appeal, the signal to realize the so called “The Greek project”, that stipulated no less than proscription of the Greeks from Europe, the liberation of Constantinople with its orthodox objects of worship and the establishment of the Greek state vassal to Russia. It is amazing that the ideology expressed in the form of the portrait could be easily understood by almost all slightly educated people.
Ekaterina won the Crimea and the North coast of the Black Sea, but the more ambitious aims of “The Greek Project” were inherited by the next rulers.
Almost all of them right up to Stalin matured the plans of invasions of the Black sea straits and Constantinople. It has used to be the biggest dream of the empire for the two centuries. |
