ABSTRACT
Public celebrations became the occasion for the expression of the loyal feelings. They provided the tsar with a symbolic mandate that answered the formal mandate of the election processes. At the tsar's public appearances, invisible threads became visible. In the absence of such accommodation, historical celebrations can instead become the occasion for conflicting accounts of a nation's past and open political struggle over its legacy. Metaphors of love and merger reflected the break from the historical imagery of eighteenth and nineteenth century autocracy. The circumstances surrounding the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913 were hardly auspicious. Sergei Platonov, the foremost authority on the seventeenth century, presented what can be described as a conservative constitutionalist view of 1613 in an article he contributed to a tercentenary commemorative collection. In the army, as in church, the tsar shared the lot of his compatriots.
