The 1762 commission

The crown known formally as the Great Imperial Crown of Russia was commissioned by Catherine II almost immediately upon her accession in June 1762 and completed in time for her coronation on 22 September 1762, an unusually compressed timeline for a piece of this scale. The principal makers were Jrmie Pauzi, the court diamond setter, and Georg-Friedrich Eckart, who designed the structural form. Both worked in the Imperial Court Workshops in Saint Petersburg.

Why a new crown was needed

Catherine had seized power from her husband Peter III in a palace coup. Her legitimacy was contested. The earlier crown of Empress Elizabeth, made in 1742, had been associated with the deposed Peter, and Catherine wanted a piece visibly her own. The new crown was therefore not merely a regalia replacement but a political object intended to mark a dynastic break and assert the new reign's character. Its success in this role is reflected in the fact that no later Romanov sovereign found it necessary to commission a replacement.

The two-month build

Pauzi and Eckart drew on the existing inventory of court diamonds, including stones held in the Imperial Treasury that had been collected over the preceding century. The piercing and chasing of the silver hemispheres was distributed across multiple workshops to compress the timeline. The setting of the diamonds, the most labour-intensive phase, was executed by Pauzi himself with assistants in the final weeks before the coronation. Contemporary court records note that the crown was completed only days before the ceremony.

The structural choice

The decision to use silver rather than gold for the structural frame was driven by weight considerations. A gold crown of comparable gemstone density would have weighed roughly three kilograms, beyond the practical limit for a sovereign to wear during a multi-hour liturgical ceremony. The silver frame, gilt only internally, kept the wearable weight near two kilograms. This engineering choice, unusual for European imperial regalia, distinguishes the Russian crown from the Austrian, British and French equivalents.

The inventory at completion

The original 1762 inventory describes approximately four thousand nine hundred and thirty six diamonds totalling some two thousand eight hundred and fifty eight carats, seventy-five large pearls, and the great spinel of the Kuh-i-Lal mines surmounting the cross. The diamonds were predominantly Indian Golconda stones in mid-eighteenth-century cutting styles, including rose, table and old-mine cuts. The total was therefore in excess of three thousand carats, an exceptional concentration even by the standards of European imperial regalia.

The spinel

The large red stone above the cross, identified in the 1762 inventory as a ruby, was reidentified in the late twentieth century as a red spinel of approximately three hundred and ninety eight and seventy two carats. It had been acquired in 1676 by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich from Chinese envoys, and ultimately traces to the Kuh-i-Lal mines in the Pamir mountains, the same source as the Black Prince's Ruby. Its translucency and saturated red colour were exceptional for an unfaceted historical stone, and it remains one of the most important historical spinels in any institutional collection.

Use, 1762 to 1896

The 1762 crown served at every Romanov coronation from Catherine II onward through the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896. It was not used between coronations and was held in the Imperial Treasury when not on ceremony.

Survival

Following 1917, the crown passed into Soviet state custody and was preserved as part of the Diamond Fund, formally constituted in 1922. Unlike many Romanov private jewels, which were sold internationally in the 1920s and 1930s, the state regalia were kept intact. The crown is now displayed in the Diamond Fund of the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow.

The 2012 replica

For the four hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 2013, a state-authorised precise replica was commissioned, executed by Russian workshops including the Smolensk Diamond Trade firm. The replica uses modern stones and is held separately from the original.