“A building circular... The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference. The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed... from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence. The whole circuit reviewable with little, or... without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.”^[1]

If in 1952 Baumgart could dismiss Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as «not of basic ethical interest,» by the 1990s, it had become the focus of numerous studies.^[2] Historians traced the development of the institution in the context of British politics and prison reform, while philosophers and critical theorists took the Panopticon as the model of an increasingly pervasive system of state surveillance in modern society.^[3] In Bentham’s Prison, Janet Semple followed the progress of the Panopticon within the political context of early nineteenth-century England, while Ignatieff, Foucault, and others examined the place of Bentham’s establishment in British penal history. «Panopticism» also became a central issue for the new discipline of «surveillance studies» in the 1990s, while new media theorists took the Panopticon as a foil against which to judge the novel politics of electronic «capture.»^[4] These analysts differed in the values they afforded to the Panopticon, but most agreed that the Panopticon afforded a new form of power at the end of the eighteenth century. Semple identified the Panopticon with the growth of representative democracy, or at least its Benthamite variety. As a penitentiary, the Panopticon represented the inverse of Bentham’s plans for a new and positive «democratic» system of power, in which government would be made public and accountable to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number. By means of the inspection principle, applied through public tribunals, «panoptic» government offices, and freedom of the press, power would at all times remain under the scrutiny of the populace. In contrast, Foucault viewed the Panopticon as a «cage, cruelle et savante,» an idealized microcosm of nineteenth-century society, where discipline had become institutionalized in schools, hospitals, prisons, and asylums, operating through internalized subjection imbued through surveillance. Foucault posited a radical discontinuity between this «disciplinary society» and the ancien régime, where power was articulated through theatrical displays of sovereign authority, exemplified in the spectacular politics of the public execution. According to Foucault, these two forms of «sovereign» and «disciplinary» power were «absolutely incompatible.»^[5]
It might seem that little remains to be said concerning Bentham’s Panopticon. But there are problems with these readings. Primarily, the Panopticon has been studied only as Jeremy Bentham’s penitentiary, and hence as a project that failed: while Bentham spent some twenty years attempting to build the establishment in London, he was finally forced to abandon the scheme in 1809 under pressure from the British government. Consequently, commentators tend to view the Panopticon more as a philosophical exercise or idealized invention of Jeremy Bentham than as a practicable project with its own development and history. By ignoring this history, there has also been a tendency to equate the Panopticon with Jeremy Bentham’s mature utilitarian philosophy and the radical antimonarchy, democratic standpoint he took up toward the end of his life. Gertrude Himmelfarb pointed this out as long ago as 1965, suggesting that in its earlier forms, «the Panopticon seems to bear out the judgment of non-Radicals more than that of Radicals» so that «it may be necessary to re-examine the conventional image of Bentham as the father of reform and of Philosophical Radicalism as the fount of reform.»^[6]
Himmelfarb’s point is suggestive. By considering the Panopticon in its various historical manifestations, she demonstrated the changing nature of the establishment in relation to Bentham’s thought. This essay argues that indeed, the Panopticon owed much more to the «sovereign power» of theatrical politics than Foucault and others have suggested, by situating the institution in its original context and by asking how local conditions may have been reflected in the Panopticon’s design. In fact, the Panopticon was not Jeremy Bentham’s idea, but his brother’s. Samuel Bentham devised the institution as a manufactory for the estate of Prince Grigorii Potemkin, in White Russia in 1786. Situating the Panopticon in this, its original context, troubles accounts associating it with disciplinary mechanisms of social control in the nineteenth century, and the incompatibility between the politics of the ancien régime and the modernity that the Panopticon is alleged to embody. In Russia, Samuel Bentham’s Panopticon was intimately entangled with absolutism.

SAMUEL BENTHAM IN RUSSIA

The Panopticon or «Inspection House» was first designed during the autumn of 1786 on the estate of Krichev in the southern Mogilev province of White Russia, partitioned from Poland in 1772.^[7] Jeremy Bentham had arrived at the estate earlier that year, occupying himself writing The Defense of Usury at a retreat in the village of Zadobrast. Jeremy was also busy designing a new form of penitentiary to submit to a competition being held by the St. James Chronicle to design a new prison for Middlesex. Struck by «the plan of a building, lately contrived by my brother, under the name of the Inspection House or Elaboratory» Jeremy incorporated this plan into his prison design and dispatched the result to his father for printing in London. A series of letters printed for limited circulation followed in December 1786, published five years later as Panopticon; or, The Inspection House.^[8]
The estate of Krichev belonged to Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the most influential of Catherine II’s favorites during the 1780s. It comprised approximately a thousand square miles, with five towns and numerous hamlets, home to a mixed population of Russians, Poles, Polish Jews, and Cossacks. By 1784, Potemkin had built up numerous manufactories there for his own profit, including a glass factory, copperworks, tannery, and leatherworks. In the central town of Krichev, a textile mill and ropewalk produced materials for shipbuilding at the port of Kherson on the Black Sea.
Potemkin’s estate manager was Samuel Bentham. Bentham had made his career in Russia.^[9] After training in London as a naval engineer, he had journeyed to St. Petersburg in 1780 seeking employment from the British Factory. Government commissions to study Russian mines and manufacturies led Bentham on a tour of the Urals for the next two years, before his return to St. Petersburg and entry into Potemkin’s service in 1784. Bentham served Potemkin’s imperial adventures. Sent to Krichev to manage manufacturies belonging to the prince, Bentham oversaw the construction of vessels for transporting shipbuilding materials down the Dnepr to Kherson. Here the Russian fleet was being established to fight the Ottoman Turks and protect Russia’s territorial acquisitions north of the Black Sea. In return for his services, the prince gave Bentham a house, servants, and a large serf labor force, as well as unlimited funds to improve the estate, and freedom to conduct experiments. The Inspection House was among the numerous innovations Bentham subsequently planned or introduced to the estate. However, while plans were made to construct the Panopticon at Krichev, the project never materialized. Prince Potemkin sold Krichev in May 1787, and Bentham was forced to leave to take part in imminent naval engagements with Turkey.
Although many studies note the origins of the Panopticon in Russia, none give more than cursory attention to the reasons why it was designed. In his book-length study of The Benthams in Russia, Ian Christie is typically brief. «Samuel’s preoccupation with the general problem of the supervision of unskilled labor gave birth during 1786 to the famous scheme of ‘central observation.’... Samuel conceived that the training and supervision of large numbers of unskilled Russian workmen... might be best carried out in an ‘Inspection House.’»^[10] Similarly, Semple writes «It was in an attempt to employ ignorant... peasants effectively in manufacturing that Samuel devised a circular inspection house that would enable each workman to be supervised from a central observation post.»^[11] Such explanations conflate what in fact were two distinctive problems facing Bentham on his Krichev estate. Problems of skill were distinct from problems of discipline among his workforce. Shortage of skills was a problem facing Bentham from the beginning of his time at Krichev, as he attempted to train peasants in shipbuilding crafts. This was not unusual, and numerous foreigners serving the empire complained of difficulties finding skilled artisans for their projects in engineering and manufactures. John Phillips, recruited to build a canal uniting the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, complained that after nineteen months of work no skilled artificers could be found, so that «he returned to Petersburg, without doing anything but cutting down a few thousand timber trees.»^[12]
Bentham’s solution to the shortage of skills was to import foreign expertise. In June 1784, with the financial support of Potemkin, Samuel began recruiting English masters from London. Over the winter of 1785, he built up a core of approximately twenty skilled workmen. In addition to a sailmaker, joiner, and bricklayers, the group included one James Love, recruited as a model builder, Anthony Young, a millwright, John Bell, the ship’s master, and Robert Beaty, who took charge of Potemkin’s hemp factory. Their task was to supervise the various activities on the estate and to train peasant workers in shipbuilding and manufacturing.
At no time, however, did unskilled peasants offer Bentham problems of discipline. On the contrary, on at least one occasion Bentham found himself subservient to peasants’ disciplinary skills, grudgingly accepting instruction from a battalion of serf infantry placed in his charge by Potemkin, whose battalion sergeants explained methods to keep his men in order.^[13] Bentham’s English supervisors, however, proved increasingly difficult to control. Bentham gave charge of his English workmen to one John Debraw, formerly physician and apothecary at Addenbroke’s Hospital, Cambridge. In September 1786, Debraw submitted a report to Bentham, damning repeated disorders and a lack of discipline among the English supervisors. A «Journal of Transactions» accused them of «laziness, thievery, quarreling, drinking.» They were «a Newcastle election mob» no better than «hirelings from that rabble town.»^[14] Bentham lamented the discord. «I have so few assistants on whom I can put the least dependence.... Morning after morning I am taken up chiefly with disputes amongst my Officers.»^[15] Chief among the offenders was George Benson, taken on as a chemical projector only to antagonize the other parties in Bentham’s workforce. After «he had his quarrels with most of the English and had well nigh drove a very able work man out of the service,» Bentham reproached the troublesome chemist, prompting Benson to threaten letters of complaint to Potemkin, Empress Catherine and William Pitt.^[16] It was in the midst of this turmoil that Jeremy Bentham wrote the Panopticon letters, discussing the new institution in his correspondence alongside accounts of Benson, the «two legged tormentor.»^[17]
Thus it was not Russian peasants who threatened the discipline of Bentham’s estate, but the English supervisors supposedly entrusted to oversee them. Samuel Bentham’s Panopticon was perhaps designed as a solution to this problem. Certainly the institution was supposed to provide means for supervising the training of unskilled peasants, but training entailed supervisors moving around among peasant workers to oversee their work at close hand. This was no different from any other workshop’s practice. «With regard to instruction, in cases where it cannot... be given without the instructor’s being close to the work, or without setting his hand to it by way of example before the learner’s face, the instructor must indeed, here as elsewhere, shift his station as often as there is occasion to visit different workmen.»^[18] Rather, the distinctive problem the Panopticon solved concerned the need to discipline supervisors. The Panopticon was less an effort to employ «ignorant Russian peasants effectively» than a solution to the real problem of «who will guard the guards?»
If the Inspection House did not discipline peasant workers, it nevertheless offered the solution to another problem posed on the Krichev estate. It would be a mistake to imagine that Krichev’s workers consisted solely of Russian peasants and English guards. Situated on the imperial borderland, in a new province recently annexed from Poland, Krichev was home to a diverse mix of ethnicities and religions, including Catholic Poles, Orthodox Russians, Polish Jews, and Don Cossacks. This diverse composition of the community at Krichev suggests another reason for Bentham’s technical solution to the problem of power, his situation of surveillance in an architectural space rather than in individual oversight. Prior to Bentham’s tenancy, Krichev had become a site commonly associated with ethnic and religious tensions. From 1740 to 1744, Krichev witnessed a significant peasant revolt under the leadership of Vassily Vaschila. Between the 1730s and 1750s, two Jewish brothers, Schmu’el and Gedaliah Ickowicz, managed the estates of Krichev on behalf of the noble Radziwill family, but contended with laws restricting Jewish actions against Christians. The partition of Poland in 1772 brought Poles and Jews under Russian governance, and new terms of subjection. Potemkin, eager to cultivate trade in White Russia, invited Jews to settle in the region, an unprecedented act. Jewish settlers, many in Krichev, engaged in brickmaking, distilling, and commerce, no doubt providing skills for Samuel Bentham’s establishments. Jews were permitted to build synagogues, joining the Catholic and wooden Orthodox churches and monasteries found across the region.^[19]
Amid this diverse community, the language of words and the language of power were often confused. Even those English overseers who best pleased the Benthams found their labors hindered by the babel of Krichev’s diverse community. «One of the greatest difficulties I have found here,» wrote Robert Beaty, Krichev’s English sailcloth maker,

“was my Ignorance of the Language.... I have... in my Dealings with the Jews, got some German words, and likewise some French ones from my own Grammar, to know Russ is hardly enough here; for though the Jews speak it they speak it very badly and are always blabbering out Their own Lingo. The heterogeneous mixture of People here is surprising consisting of Poles, Jews, Russians, Germans, Don Cossacs [sic] and English.”^[20]

Beaty identified the confusion of languages as a general problem, «I beleive [sic] it has been so with the rest.» Perhaps the Inspection House was also a solution to this problem of comprehension, spatializing, and embedding in architecture processes of oversight otherwise demanding more personal interactions and spoken exchanges. In the Panopticon, the Benthams made architecture the generalized language of power. As Jeremy Bentham wrote in the Panopticon letters, one should «lose no occasion of speaking to the eye» in this institution.^[21]

THE PANOPTICON IN THE GARDEN

The Panopticon thus solved immediate troubles for Samuel Bentham, but its design was connected with larger issues at play on Potemkin’s estate. If Samuel Bentham was not immune to the Russian imperial context in which he worked, further understanding of that context elucidates the particular mechanisms of the Panopticon that Bentham devised as a means to control his unruly supervisors. That is, the peculiar features of the Panoptic space, its distinctive «architecture of power,» may also be seen as responses to other particular demands and resources placed at Bentham’s disposal during his time on the Russian estate. Such issues begin with Bentham’s patron in Russia, Prince Grigorii Potemkin.
In the reign of Empress Catherine II, two opposing parties, one surrounding the Orlov brothers and another led by Nikita Panin, vied for authority at the Russian court.^[22] By 1780, the Panin party had largely superseded the Orlovs in influence. Potemkin also sought to consolidate his power. In 1776, he had been charged with developing southern territories recently annexed from Poland and Turkey. Vast expenditure on the enterprise raised the suspicions of Panin’s party that Potemkin sought to impress Catherine to their own detriment. Consequently, while Potemkin labored in the south, numerous intrigues developed against him in St. Petersburg. Potemkin responded by inviting Catherine on a tour of the southern provinces and Crimea, to survey his development of the territories and as a demonstration of Catherine’s sovereignty over the new regions of the empire. Removing Catherine from the capital would stifle the influence of Potemkin’s enemies, while dazzling the empress with «the grandest spectacle of her reign,» a 6,000-mile procession passing through Kiev to the port of Kherson and on to the Crimea.^[23]
The tour would amount to an elaborate court spectacle. The royal procession was a common ritual in European courts, and Potemkin’s development of the southern territories effectively constructed them according to established traditions of royal spectacle in Russia. These hinged on what Stephen Lessing Baehr has termed a mythology of the «happy garden state.» Following precedents in Muscovite culture, the Russian imperial family were commonly associated with the image of God as the divine creator of Eden. Russia was cast in court poetry, allegory, and symbolic literature as a paradisical garden, whose «gardener» or «planter» was the tsar or tsarina. Such rhetoric shaped court spectacle, as theatrical fireworks and allegorical dramas depicting gardens, palm trees, flowers, and fruits became a routine element of Russia’s courtly entertainments.^[24] The myth of the happy garden state also extended to imperial policy. Catherine’s annexation and «civilization» of new territories was likened to the establishment of a paradisical new Eden in Russia.^[25] It was as such that Potemkin developed the new southern territories, intending to demonstrate to Catherine the Russian Eden that imperial policy was creating. By the 1780s, however, this was no longer an Eden of Genesis, but an «Enlightenment garden» where «people are encouraged (rather than forbidden) to partake of the tree of knowledge and rewarded with a paradise of perpetual progress.»^[26] This was a moment of industrious development in Russia, as nobles turned to their estates to increase agriculture and manufactures following their liberation from state service in 1762. Such improvements were reflected in state mythology. Adopting enlightened reason, the poets proclaimed, would recreate Russia as a «garden of the sciences» [sad nauk].^[27]
Potemkin’s «garden» thus mixed imperial splendor, philosophical enterprise, and economic improvement. The whole of the south was Potemkin’s estate, and he transformed it into a «production utopia,» where the real fruits of a Russian Eden would be the products of manufacture and the sciences. New establishments mixed garden mythology, natural philosophy, and industry. As Bentham noted, Potemkin planned «a Botanical Garden in the Crimea in which if possible all the vegetable productions of the world are to be collected» and a model dairy for the production of «as many different kinds of cheese as possible.» Potemkin also planned to «introduce the use of Beer in his governments and permit the sale of it without any excise.»^[28] At Sevastopol and Bakhchisaray, manufacturies and palaces sprang up, enhanced with the paradisical surroundings of English gardens. Potemkin recruited foreign expertise to help build this new happy garden state. Admiral Thomas Mackenzie was ordered to construct a new port, dairy, vineyards, and botanical gardens in Sevastopol.^[29] Samuel Bentham was dispatched to Krichev with similar orders.
From the beginning of his stay at Krichev, Bentham’s activities thus took on a distinctly utopian slant. His principal commission was to assist in the construction of vessels for the Black Sea fleet, and many manufacturies he established at Krichev served this end. But he also recruited personnel for Potemkin’s model dairy and botanical garden, and established a brewery and distillery at Krichev.^[30] Horticulture featured prominently in Bentham’s labors. He experimented in agriculture at nearby Zadobrast, introduced an English strain of potatoes to the estate, planned a model hoggery, and cultivated new grasses. Imported literature included Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary and Young’s Annals of Agriculture. John Aiton, nephew of George III’s gardener at Kew, came to Krichev to oversee Bentham’s experimental cultivations. Accounts of this work carried strong utopian overtones. These were not merely novel manufacturies, but «more complete than any in England»^[31] and brought «to a degree of perfection.»^[32] Bentham knew that Krichev was on the itinerary for Empress Catherine’s tour of the south. She would visit the estate at the end of May 1787, and Bentham built a luxurious royal barge to take her further on her journey.

THEATRICALITY IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

Potemkin’s creation of this vast theatrical garden utopia for Catherine was characteristic of eighteenth-century Russian noble culture. The Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman has observed that theatricality constituted a fundamental component of the eighteenth-century nobility’s life, whereby «the dividing line between art and the everyday behavior of the audience was expunged. The theater invaded life.»^[33] Richard Sennett has argued that the interweaving of everyday conduct with theater formed a common characteristic of eighteenth-century European society.^[34] However, Lotman argues that if, as in Europe, the division between theater and reality was deleted for the Russian nobility, it was complemented by a unique distinction between what was Russian and what was foreign.^[35] After the introduction of Western manners and styles into Russia by Peter the Great, «The alien and the foreign became the norm.»^[36] Consequently, «to conduct oneself correctly was to behave like a foreigner, that is to act in an artificial way according to the norms of an alien lifestyle.»^[37] Lotman observes that this role-playing served a political function. Theatricality enhanced a noble’s reputation with the sovereign, to the degree that theatrical performance identified that noble with the West. «Theatricality was an attribute of power.... ^[38]oblemen... displayed their standing by imitating Europeans while remaining Russians.»^[39] In particular, enlightened Westerners like Bentham provided role models for the nobility, evinced by an increasingly avid consumption of French, German, Italian, and English books on enlightened culture and conduct.^[40]
The nobility paraded their knowledge of the West in the fashionable quarters of St. Petersburg, the Frenchified fop and amateur philosopher becoming regular elements of the social milieu by the 1760s. But as Priscilla Roosevelt has argued, the key site for these Western theatricals was the noble estate.^[41] Since political and social reputation was dependent on the successful fashioning of a «foreign» identity, the estate provided the only space for such fashioning entirely under the nobility’s control. Consequently, estates were frequently used for extravagant spectacles to impress the sovereign. Many were completely transformed into idealized or imaginary foreign landscapes. When Potemkin celebrated the capture of Ismail in 1791, his estate was transformed into a southern landscape, with Caucasian mountain ranges, reenacted sea battles, and guests dressed as Turks, Indians, and Italians, who walked through gardens decorated as arcadian groves and elysian fields.^[42] Count Semion Gavrilovich Zorich, another noble granted lands in the new province of Mogilev, established his estate at Shklov, close to Krichev, where he created a «fantasy world» hosting French operas, Italian ballet, a German orchestra, and serf theater.^[43]
Potemkin’s imperial tour belonged precisely to this tradition of theatricality in Russian culture. Seeking to maintain prestige and influence with the empress, Potemkin transformed territories captured from the Poles and Turks into a vast stage for his utopian visions. This stage was divided into a series of estates, to be filled with the scenery of an idealized «Eden» of enlightened manufactures, agriculture, science and splendor. Potemkin then took Catherine on a tour through these spaces, which amounted to a series of dramas wherein the empress and her noble entourage could act out their roles as enlightened foreigners. The tour was a grand example of theater invading life. It was also a theme with which Potemkin consciously played throughout the tour. Russian theatricality lay behind his famous «Potemkin villages,» rows of wooden building frontage constructed for the tour, set up to give the impression that one was passing through a «real» estate. The villages were stage scenery on a grand scale. During the tour, foreign guests in the royal entourage ridiculed them as «sets,» constructed to make the empress believe Potemkin had built more than he claimed in the south. But they failed to appreciate that the villages, like the mythic gardens and landscapes of the noble estate, were part of the natural theatricality of Russian life. Potemkin’s stage sets impressed Catherine just as much as real estates.
Bentham’s activities at Krichev were a part of this theatrical culture. Krichev was a key site for the development and demonstration of Potemkin’s enlightened Russian garden, destined to be viewed by the empress. Bentham’s efforts to discipline his supervisors took place amid furious work to build a theater of model factories, palaces, and gardens in the south, and utopian shows of horticulture, manufactures, botany, and farming at Krichev. This was the context in which Bentham’s ideal factory, the Panopticon, was to be built. The Panopticon would be part of Potemkin’s theatrical display.
The Panopticon deserves to be read as a form of theater. In fact, Jeremy Bentham was quite explicit that theatricality was critical to its functioning. In its later prison form, devised by the Benthams and the architect William Reveley in 1791, an inspection gallery for visitors was situated above the inspector’s office. Prisoners would wear masks before this audience, so that Bentham described the institution as «a Masquerade,» a theater «serious, affecting and instructive.» He even praised the Inquisition for its «stage effect» and suggested «in a well composed committee of penal law, I know not a more essential personage than the manager of a theatre.»^[44] The Krichev Panopticon predated this arrangement. Instead of an inspection gallery, Bentham’s first plans included an inspector’s lodge, or «a complete and constant habitation for the principal inspector... and his family» at the center of the establishment.^[45] To live in this lodge was presented as a form of theater, since inhabitants would be provided with a «great and constant fund of entertainment» as they stared out of the windows onto the cells around them. «The scene, though... confined, would be a very various, and therefore, perhaps, not altogether an unamusing one.»^[46] At Krichev, this «amusing» scene would consist of Bentham’s serfs, employed on a series of wood-working machines he planned to install in the establishment.
These machines were among the most advanced in Russia, and would have made the Krichev Panopticon an ideal instance of the kind of production utopia that Potemkin sought to demonstrate on Catherine’s tour. Noble visitors would have recognized the scene. In effect, the Panopticon subsumed the spatial structure of the Russian estate into a single building, with the family house at the center, surrounded by the visible labor of the serfs of the estate. Russians were well known for putting serfs on display, a contrast to the upstairs-downstairs world of hidden servants in the English country house. Many nobles organized serf theaters, dressing their slaves in foreign garb to perform elaborate spectacles and dramas.^[47] In the Panopticon, Bentham made a similar gesture, only his drama was industrial. Instead of their traditional work in farming, Bentham’s peasants labored on enlightened manufactures. The Panopticon made an ideal theater of the estate, just as the estate made an ideal theater of the southern territories. The inspector’s lodge fitted this theater too. For it offered a place which Russian noble visitors, perhaps even the empress, might occupy. In the inspector’s lodge, Russian visitors could thus act out the role of the enlightened foreigner, a role-play of inspection. The inspector’s lodge embodied exactly the logic of Potemkin’s tour, where Russia’s nobles might pass in and out of spaces to act at being foreigners in an enlightened utopia. The Panopticon, like Potemkin’s villages or the stage sets of the nobility, played on the theatricality of the Russian estate.

RELIGION AND THE PLACE OF POWER

If the Panopticon was intended to demonstrate the ideal of an enlightened estate to the noble placed at its center, what was the significance of surveillance in this, which was, after all, the primary function of the establishment? For Bentham, surveillance offered a means to control the troublesome English overseers on his estate and the confusion of languages among his workers. But on what resources did Bentham draw to create his new «inspection principle,» and what did this new technique mean for the Russian nobility?
Historians have identified many precedents for the system of centralized observation in the Panopticon. Semple suggests that Jeremy Bentham found the inspiration for the Panopticon in a description of Pope Clement XI’s St. Michele reformatory, built in Rome in 1703, which Bentham may have seen in Howard’s State of the Prisons in England and Wales. Foucault hinted that Bentham’s model was Louis le Vau’s late seventeenth-century octagonal Menagerie surrounded by animal cages in the gardens of Versailles.^[48] Clearly the «inspection principle» emerged from a culture increasingly taken up with the instrumentalization of surveillance. Yet none of these authors note that it was Samuel Bentham, not Jeremy, who developed the structure of the Inspection House, or that he did so in the Russian Empire.
The abstraction of power and its embodiment in architecture were already concerns at the estate of Krichev. Traditionally at Krichev, power resided in local Polish government and in the diverse churches, Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox, scattered over the estates. By the 1780s, Krichev was already a site where secular governance was taking over from local religious oversight, thanks to the district’s peculiar ethnic mix. Before the partition, Catholic Polish-Lithuanian officials stepped in to manage tensions between Catholics and Jews at Krichev, decreeing «no Jewish hand shall be raised against a Christian.»^[49]
Churches also offered models for panoptic surveillance. Although Samuel’s inspiration for the Inspection House is not recorded, Jeremy Bentham was quite explicit that the power of surveillance in the Panopticon could be likened to the action of an omniscient God. Bentham referred to «the apparent omnipresence of the inspector... combined with the extreme facility of his real presence» as the fundamental principle of the institution.^[50] The frontispiece of the first edition of the Panopticon Letters was to have been a quotation from Psalm 139:

“Though art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out all my ways.
If I say, peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned into day.
Even there also shall thy hand lead me; and thy right hand shall hold me.”^[51]

At Krichev, Orthodox churches may have offered salient lessons to the Benthams in the architectural manifestation of omniscience. Orthodox churches, in contrast to synagogues and Catholic churches, constitute an extension of the Incarnation, making manifest the body of Christ on Earth. «The Church is one and the same with the Lord – of His Body, of His Flesh and of His Bones.»^[52] This is not a metaphorical relationship: the church is the body of Christ, constituting «a continuation and extension of His power.»^[53] Architecture manifested this presence, most churches following the ninth-century pattern of a cross within a square, surmounted by a dome.^[54] Representing «an earthly heaven in which the heavenly God dwells and moves» the dome often carried the image of Christ Pantokrator, «Ruler of All,» a vision recalling the omniscient character of God.^[55] In contrast, the architecture of Catholic churches pointed to Man’s distance from God, the spire a sign of how far men needed to travel to reach salvation, how low they were before heaven.^[56] Whereas Catholic churches symbolized the future possibility of experiencing God, the Orthodox church actualized that experience in the here and now, locating humans in the omniscient presence of God on earth.
Within this presence, the source of power remained invisible. God’s actions were mysterious, and the divine power transforming the sacraments was deemed ultimately unknowable. While Catholic priests performed the sacraments before the eyes of the laity, Orthodox priests expressed this mystery in the architecture of the church. Between the nave, where the laity stood, and the sanctuary, where the sacraments were performed, stood the templon or iconostasis, a tall screen of icons.^[57] During the liturgy of the Eucharist, priests moved behind the holy doors in the iconostasis, becoming invisible at the moment of metabollo, the change of the sacraments. The church thus manifested God’s power in space, while mystical doctrine was articulated through an asymmetry of visibility. The spatial structure of the church acted as the physical extension and demonstration of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, at the same time obscuring the source of His power through the intersection of the iconostasis.
The Orthodox church had long been a central constituent of social order and hierarchy in the Russian Empire. Its asymmetrical visibility divided the passive and visible laity from the active and hidden clergy. Icons and mosaics in the dome asserted divine surveillance and judgment over all. This does not suggest any direct relation between the Orthodox church and the Panopticon, and undoubtedly increasing demand for the surveillance of labor was a European-wide phenomenon. But what was central to both the Panopticon and to the church was that apparent omniscience was expressed through architecture. In both structures, an asymmetry of power was articulated through an asymmetry of visibility, the notion of «seeing without being seen» via a screen between those who watched and those under surveillance.
The Inspection House might thus be seen as another intervention of secular power into the religious order at Krichev, and one that fitted the aspirations of Catherine and Potemkin’s vision of the south. It may seem unlikely for Samuel Bentham to have devised a «secularized church» at Krichev. Yet the designs that he prepared with Jeremy in 1786 bear a resemblance to the church architecture of the time, and Bentham was well informed about Orthodoxy. During a tour of Siberia in 1781, Samuel had collected information for the government on the activities of the raskolniki or Old Believers: a surveillance operation undertaken to exert power over a section of the Orthodox community.^[58]
Furthermore, if Bentham was presenting a «secularized church» to his audience, this would not have been extraordinary in the context of Catherinian Russia. Since the reign of Peter the Great, church land, property, and privileges had been continuously diminishing, in a long process of secularization. This process culminated in 1764 when Catherine decreed that all church property had to be handed over to the state.^[59] Secularization was at its height in White Russia at the time that the Benthams designed the Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham made playful allusions to Russian secularization in the Panopticon letters, «we are dissolving monasteries as you would lumps of sugar. A lump... we got the other day at Kieff, enough to feed a brace of regiments.»^[60] While large monasteries were being dissolved completely, smaller ones were ordered to convert their property to state uses. The 1770s and 1780s witnessed a large-scale conversion of ecclesiastical buildings into hospitals, prisons, schools, and asylums, that is, the same kinds of institutions that Jeremy would claim the panoptic design ideally served. Secularized churches became commonplace in the Russian landscape.^[61] In 1780, Count Zorich opened the first non-ecclesiastical school in White Russia at Shklov, near Krichev. The school’s director, a Frenchman, divided his time between experimental natural philosophy and the composition of comedies for Zorich’s theater.^[62]
Russian culture also changed through this process of secularization. As the autocracy consolidated an ideology based on the absolute monarchies of Europe, the Russian court increasingly appropriated the iconography of the Orthodox Church to create what Baehr has called a «religion of state.»^[63] Hence Catherine’s image as the «planter of Eden.» The transition was also apparent in noble theater, which manifested an opposition between the religious and the secular complementary to that between the Russian and the foreign described by Lotman. In the course of time, religious culture became equated with the old and the Russian, and consequently became the object of scorn and ridicule. But religion was not rejected outright. As the nobility took increasingly to the role-playing that their taste for the foreign implied, they turned first to the traditional, «official» rituals of the Orthodox Church as a source for the construction of new identities. Peter the Great’s Drunken Synod exemplified this process. A blasphemous parody of the Synod, the governing body of the Orthodox Church, Peter and his cohorts marched through the streets of St. Petersburg, parodying Orthodox ritual while drinking heavily. On one occasion, a «Prince Priest» had his guests kneel down to be crossed with tobacco pipes in a play on Orthodox ministers’ ritual of crossing congregations with double-branched candelabra.^[64]
Thus the nobility did not simply discard traditional forms of religious behavior or construct completely secular ones borrowed from the West. Rather, the forms of Orthodox culture were retained while their content was altered, secularized, and subverted. This was inevitable when the forms of Orthodox ritual provided the traditional foundations of autocratic power. The same dynamic is evident in the conception of Catherine’s Crimean tour. If the south was to be a garden, it was also to be a revivification of ancient Orthodoxy. The tour was planned as the apex of what Catherine and Potemkin referred to as «the Greek Project,» a plan, formulated in 1780, proposing «the complete destruction of Turkey and the re-establishment of the ancient Greek empire,» that is, the Byzantine Orthodox Empire, with Constantinople at its center.^[65] Potemkin would be at its head, to be followed by the empress’s grandson, named Constantine in preparation for his destined role. It was this plan which drove Russian aggression in the south and the Crimea. When towns were captured, they were given their ancient Greek names to evoke the return of the empire: Kherson, after the Byzantine port of Chersonus, Odessa after Odysseus. The Crimea was referred to as Tauris, its ancient name, and Potemkin was titled «the Prince of Tauride.»^[66]
The tour, then, took the empress on the «Road to Byzantium,» as an inscription proclaimed on a triumphal arch at Kherson.^[67] If the empress planned nothing less than the reestablishment of an Orthodox Empire, then Potemkin’s tour would show her what this empire might look like. Simultaneously, Potemkin’s new towns and institutions were not those of an ancient Byzantine empire. Potemkin built botanic gardens and model dairies, not churches. In fact, the Greek Project constituted another fiction, another mythology for the tour. No one actually intended to recreate Byzantium. As Richard Wortman notes, a «Byzantine» mythology would establish the German Princess Catherine’s continuity with the House of Romanov, but its actualization would amount to an undesirable return to the theological culture of the pre-Petrine era.^[68]
The Greek project was another example of the intensified theatricality of Russian culture. If it was not intended as a real process, the project was nevertheless deeply informative as a dramatic element on Catherine’s tour. The southern territories were a stage, on which Potemkin could demonstrate his Edenic utopia to Catherine, and on which Catherine could play the role of the restorer of an Orthodox Empire. Like the Drunken Synod, the tour rehearsed the forms of Orthodoxy but simultaneously subverted their content, a grand mocking gesture of religious fiction underscored by an enlightened reality. This makes it clearer why Bentham might build a «secular church.» The Panopticon parodied the Orthodox church for a tour in which such parody constituted the central organizing theme. It presented the Russian nobility with a secular means to control the peasantry, simultaneously an enlightened, productive space, secularizing traditional Orthodox architecture. Where the sanctuary became the Lodge, the Russian noble, rather than the clergy, might occupy the privileged space of power. Simultaneously, the Orthodox church provided a model of discipline for Samuel Bentham. He was all too aware of the contrast in behavior between the English supervisors and his unskilled Russian peasants. Replicating the church structure that kept the peasantry obedient might bring his supervisors to order.

Conclusion: The Panopticon in the Theater of Absolutism

The history of the Panopticon has been typified by an approach that reads the institution out of context, treating it as the idealized and unrealized invention of Jeremy Bentham. However, the Panopticon devised by Samuel Bentham was deeply embedded in a specific context, and that context was absolutist Russia. No «simple idea in architecture,» the Panopticon made reference to the standard themes and concerns that organized the environment for which it was designed. Besides offering a solution to the immediate problem of «who will guard the guards,» the establishment evoked the objectives of Potemkin’s tour and a series of dualisms, between the Russian and the foreign, the old and the new, and the sacred and the secular, which typified enlightened Russian culture. In so doing, the Panopticon, like Russia itself, was a theater of absolutism, not the reified model of a modern society.
At the very least, absolutism provided the material conditions needed for the development of the Panopticon. It was only with the resources made available by Potemkin that constructing the establishment became a possibility. Writing from Russia to William Pitt in 1787, Samuel Bentham claimed «Inventions in the mechanical line... are my chief amusement here; and the opportunities, which my situation affords me, of carrying them into practice, form one of the principal ties which attach me to this country.»^[69] In contrast to the fate of the Panopticon in England, where lack of resources and political ill will denied Jeremy the opportunity of seeing his penitentiary built, it was only chance that stopped Samuel from building his Inspection House, when he was forced to leave Krichev for the war with the Turks. But the land, labor, and finance needed for the project were all available in abundance. In fact, when Samuel Bentham returned to Russia in 1806, he did succeed in building a Panopticon. The «Panopticon School of Arts» was raised on the banks of the river Okhta in St. Petersburg.^[70] The project was commissioned by Alexander I, Catherine’s grandson and heir to her enlightened beliefs. Soon after its construction, the tsar appears to have built further Panopticons, since the Okhta School of Arts was «copied in several other private as well as Government establishments in that Empire.»^[71] So Bentham’s institution flourished in an absolutist state. From the tsar’s point of view, the Panopticon was by no means emblematic of a new form of power, discontinuous with that of the old regime, as Foucault, Semple, or Ignatieff maintain.
Examining the historical context for the creation of the Panopticon reveals it to be immersed in a culture of absolutism. But historians have largely ignored the Panopticon’s Russian origins. It remains to be explained why this might be the case, why the institution has so often been viewed as an abstract architecture. The description of Foucault suggests an answer,

“The Panopticon is... the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle... must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system; it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.”^[72]

The Panopticon, in other words, was intended to be separable from its specific context of use. This was Jeremy Bentham’s contribution to his brother’s project – to make the Panopticon applicable, «without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which... a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection.»^[73] Jeremy divested the Panopticon of its context, in order to put it to his own uses. Universal applicability was, of course, a central theme in Bentham’s legal and political philosophy. Throughout his life, Jeremy struggled to create constitutional and criminal codes universally applicable to any country at any time. In a world where human nature and human needs were essentially homogeneous, he argued, «in comparison of the universally-applying, the extent of the exclusively-applying circumstances [is] found very inconsiderable» in law.^[74] He rejected context-specific rules and customs and attempted to codify them into an abstract, context-free form. The problem of how to achieve this had perplexed Jeremy Bentham since the 1780s, when he had written an Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation. Here, he defined principles to guide the legislator in the process of decontextualizing laws. It seems he applied these same principles to the Panopticon. To make the establishment universally applicable, Jeremy took the «plan of a building, lately contrived by his brother,» and transformed it. The result, as Foucault notes, was a political technology of a generalized form. But this was not a new political technology. Rather it presented the scheme of power generated in Samuel’s spectacular absolutist establishment. Jeremy Bentham’s achievement was to make «universally applicable» the «exclusively applying circumstances» embodied in the Krichev Panopticon.
The Benthams adapted spaces, like laws, to local circumstances. Samuel shared in this activity. After his return to England in 1791, new designs for the Panopticon made with the architect Samuel Bunce stripped the establishment of its original form even further. Their 1797 «House of Industry» eliminated the dome and classical decorations of the Krichev Panopticon, making a minimal building as attractive to England’s commercial utilitarians as the Krichev church was to Russian nobles. The Benthams’ reifications shaped interpretation of the Panopticon thereafter. Commentators might celebrate or criticize the institution, but the novelty of the Panopticon was not questioned. Hence in 1840 the Gothic revivalist architect Augustus Pugin, presaging Foucault, contrasted scenes of modern and medieval towns to show the incompatibility of medieval society with the inhumanity of the present. Pugin’s Contrasts (1836; second edition 1841) thus presented the figure of a modern town of 1840, with a Panopticon prominent in the foreground, above the figure of a «Catholic town in 1440» filled with medieval churches.^[75] These views might be taken to show a consciousness of the Panopticon as a secular church. They equally identified an incommensurability between the Panopticon and the past, which historians have continued to assume without considering the local context that gave rise to Bentham’s institution.