Object

The Imperial Crown of Russia, more precisely the Great Imperial Crown, in Russian Bolshaya imperatorskaya korona, was made in 1762 for the coronation of Catherine II by the court jewellers Jrmie Pauzi and Georg-Friedrich Eckart. It served at every subsequent Romanov coronation, including those of Paul I, Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III and the final coronation of Nicholas II in 1896. After the 1917 Revolution it passed into the custody of the Soviet state and is today displayed in the Diamond Fund, the Almazny Fond, of the Moscow Kremlin Armoury.

Form and engineering

The crown is constructed in two open hemispheres of silver, gilt only on the inner surfaces. The choice of silver as the structural metal, unusual for an imperial crown, was made to minimise weight while permitting an unusually high gemstone density. The two hemispheres represent, in the symbolic programme, the eastern and western halves of the empire, joined by a central band that runs from forehead to nape. The total weight is approximately two thousand grams, light by the standards of European imperial crowns despite the gemstone count.

The hemispheres are pierced in scrolling laurel-leaf patterns, each leaf set with diamonds. The central band is set with thirty-eight large diamonds, a Mughal-style large pearl-bordered cluster, and culminates above the brow in a large red spinel surmounted by a diamond cross. Pearls, all sizable, ring the lower edge of each hemisphere and form a row along the central band.

Gemstones

The crown contains approximately four thousand nine hundred and thirty-six diamonds totalling around two thousand eight hundred and fifty eight carats, plus seventy-five large white pearls. The crowning gemstone is the spinel above the cross, weighing approximately three hundred and ninety-eight and seventy-two carats. This stone, traditionally referred to in Russian inventories as a ruby, was definitively identified as a red spinel by gemmological examination in the late twentieth century. Its provenance traces to the Tajik Pamirs, the Kuh-i-Lal mines, and was acquired in 1676 by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich from envoys of the Chinese Kangxi Emperor.

The diamonds are predominantly Indian Golconda stones acquired through European intermediaries during the eighteenth century. Their cutting is consistent with mid-eighteenth-century practice: rose-cut, table-cut and old-mine-cut, with limited brilliant-cut work. The pearls are saltwater, large and well-matched, and traditionally identified as Persian Gulf in origin.

Use across the dynasty

The crown was used in the actual liturgical coronation ceremony, the venchanie na tsarstvo, conducted at the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin. The ceremony, derived from Byzantine practice, included the placing of the Great Imperial Crown by the Tsar upon his own head, followed by a smaller secondary crown on the head of his consort. This self-coronation, distinct from Western practice, was understood as a refusal to acknowledge the spiritual authority of any earthly bishop over the Tsar.

The crown was used last in 1896 at the coronation of Nicholas II, the ceremony marred by the Khodynka Field stampede during the public celebrations, in which over a thousand people were killed in a crowd surge.

1917 and after

Following the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, the imperial regalia were sequestered. Unlike the Romanov private jewels, much of which was sold in the international market in the 1920s and 1930s through the Christie's London sale of 1927 and others, the state regalia were preserved by political decision. The Diamond Fund was formally constituted in 1922 as a state collection of regalia and exceptional gemstones. The crown remained in the Kremlin throughout the Soviet period and was never sold or melted.

The Diamond Fund has displayed the crown publicly at intervals from 1967 onward. It is now part of the permanent display in the Armoury complex.

The replica question

In 2012 a precise replica of the Great Imperial Crown was commissioned for the four hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, executed by Russian jewellery firms with state authorisation. The replica uses comparable, modern-cut diamonds and is intended for ceremonial display, not as a substitute for the original. It is held separately and does not appear in the Diamond Fund displays alongside the original.

Significance for the trade

For the modern coloured-stone trade, the principal interest in the Imperial Crown of Russia is the spinel above the cross. The Kuh-i-Lal mines that produced it, in present-day Tajikistan, are the historical source of nearly all major large red spinels in European royal regalia, including the Black Prince's Ruby and the Timur Ruby in the British Crown Jewels. The reattribution of these stones from ruby to spinel, completed gemmologically in the late twentieth century, recalibrated the whole understanding of large historical red gemstones in royal collections globally.

The diamond content, although enormous in carat weight, is of historical-cutting interest more than modern-cutting interest. The mid-eighteenth-century cutting practice does not produce the light return of modern brilliants, and the value of the crown is overwhelmingly cultural and historical rather than melted-and-recut potential.