The dissertation focuses on the history of Russian chemistry between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Present scholarship contends that the growth and maturation of chemistry in Russia was a straitlaced process, state imposed and directed, and critically tied to the founding of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (1724-1725). Within this generally accepted school of thought, the infrastructure, codes of conduct, and ways of thinking that are the precursors of a vibrant chemical culture had no precedent in Russia, and historians portray them as having sprung up overnight by the founding of this institution. This dissertation refutes this seemingly immaculate conception of chemistry on Russia soil. Through a detailed examination of primary sources, including manuscript collections of artisanal recipes, legal contracts, tsarist decrees and acts (Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov), canon codes (Stoglav), synodal correspondence, printed annual calendars (Kalendar' ili Mesiatsoslov Khristianskii) and almanacs (Brius Calendars), as well as academic papers, chemical journals, public lectures, odes, correspondence, and artifacts of Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov (1711-1765), this study details how chemical practices, practitioners, and ideas across a multiplicity of sites grew, diversified, and entered the scholarly and courtly domains in the course of the eighteenth century in Russia. By uncovering a vibrant chemical culture that existed before the founding of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and continued to thrive alongside it, this dissertation shows not only that Early Modern Russia hosted a robust knowledge-generating culture, but also that practical chemistry was endemic to Russia’s material and cultural landscape. In doing so, it lays to rest the enduring but erroneous scholarly assumption that the natural sciences, including chemistry, had no indigenous roots in Russia and were forcibly and belatedly transplanted onto Russian soil only in the eighteenth century. Such assertions imply that Russia was not only a docile recipient of scientific disciplines and thus played no role in their formation but also that scientific disciplines arrived on Russian shores as fully mature sciences with stable disciplinary identities and practices agreed upon by an international community of practitioners. This dissertation makes two central claims. First, it argues that the entry of chemistry into the Academy was a dynamic process, negotiated by a confluence of actors, historical contingencies, and private interests, and not imposed by the state from above. To do so, it broadens the category of “science” and “scientific” to include pre-industrial processes and technologies, while outlining the essential preconditions for the development of a scientific culture. Second, it underscores the centrality of projects and projecting strategies to the crystallization of Russia’s popular scientific culture and discourse, and the development of chemistry as an academic discipline and a courtly science. This forces us to look at projecting not only as a hobbyhorse of adventurers, parvenus, and profit-seekers, but as a meaningful and epistemologically generative activity. In the middle of the eighteenth century, there were still many ways of doing academic chemistry, including Lomonosov’s Wolffian synthesis of “Physical Chymistry” (chymiae physicae or физическая химия), which had crystallized in the course of his projecting. Despite being grounded in corpuscular philosophy, Lomonosov’s “Physical Chymistry” offered a promising experimental framework for the study of chemical principles (first order constituents of mixed bodies), which was still mostly considered beyond the reach of chymical inquiry.