Download PDF | (Oxford History of Early Modern Europe) Nancy Shields Kollmann - The Russian Empire, 1450-1801-Oxford University Press (2017).
512 Pages
Preface
This book is dedicated to my graduate mentor, Edward L. Keenan (1935–2015). This book hardly approaches what he could have done with this material—few could match his originality, insight and depth of knowledge about the early modern past. He was always able to look afresh at familiar things, going against the grain to suggest an interpretation that fit the real grain of the historical times (rather than received opinion).
I cannot aspire to his erudition, but I know this book takes the tack that he would have. He and another great mentor at Harvard in the 1970s, Omeljan Pritsak, taught us to be Eurasianists—to take Russian history out of a narrow, and ultimately ahistorical, national context and set it in its international setting. While everyone had been comparing Russian history to Europe since the nineteenth century (usually to Russia’s detriment), Keenan and Pritsak urged us to look east and south—to Russia’s connections with Asia as well as Europe; they introduced us to the great rhythms of forest and steppe and the Silk Roads connecting peoples, cultures, and trade.
Keenan loved the fluidity of the historical past, the way you cannot fit it into modern day national bounds. He loved to explore the day-to-day reality of how cultures interacted, asking where were the trade routes, who could talk with whom, who had incentive to connect, what cultural, linguistic, and religious barriers or commonalities shaped encounters. He drew our attention to the great legacy of Chinggisid rule in the Eurasian world in which Russia interacted and to the many cultural worlds that Orthodoxy provided to Russia over the early modern centuries; he was particularly fascinated with the cultural and political ferment that blossomed in seventeenth-century Moscow with the influence of Greeks, Ukrainians, Belarus’ans, Poles, and northern Europeans. Keenan saw Russian history as a kaleidoscope of peoples, languages, and cultures interacting on a human scale; he made history come alive. And he did it by working from the sources on up; he was the most rigorous scholar of primary sources that I have encountered—always, always asking, “How do you know what you think you know?”
This book is a modest homage to what he taught us about Russia as an empire—it seeks to get at more than government, more than Moscow, bringing the diversity of peoples and cultures in. It’s a gargantuan and difficult task, of course—more than three centuries, more than ten modern time zones, scores of different cultures. I have tried to explore how the empire was governed and how people experienced Russian rule, whether in the East Slavic, Orthodox heartland or the many non-Russian borderlands. It is difficult to escape a Moscow-centric approach, particularly since I have spent my career studying “court politics” at the center and since so many sources stem from the center. And giving the peoples of empire a “voice” for these early centuries is difficult. But I have tried to do more than scratch the surface of imperial diversity.
This work is based on a career’s worth of writing and teaching, starting with graduate work at Harvard with Keenan and Pritsak. In addition to a big Eurasianist picture, Professor Pritsak introduced me to the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ukrainian history within it, an essential adjunct to anyone wanting to understand early modern Russia. I also had the tremendous opportunity to study with Joseph Fletcher, whose lecture course on Eurasia ranged wide from Islam to Buddhism, Kalmyks to Qing and waxed eloquent on the ecological genius of nomadic society. I was also cemented in a more complex approach to Russian history by my association with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where fellow graduate students and a bi-weekly seminar in Ukrainian history very broadly defined (from archeological beginnings to modern day) opened up unknown new vistas.
In teaching at Stanford and working with graduate students who have gone on to become colleagues (Val Kivelson, Erika Monahan, Alexandra Haugh, Lindsey Martin), I have learned a lot about Russia’s empire, particularly Siberia; I have come to appreciate visual sources as exemplars of political values from a cheerful collegial cooperation with Val, Michael Flier, and Daniel Rowland. Dear friend and colleague Jane Burbank always provided great ideas, and her book with Frederick Cooper deepened my understanding of empire. So also did the scholars and ideas I have been encountering in recent years at Stanford in our Humanities Center’s “Eurasian Empires” workshop. Here I was able to test out the idea of Russia as a “Eurasian empire,” and actually meet some of the authors whose views shape this work—Karen Barkey, Peter Golden, André Wink, and most of all to work with my colleague Ali Yaycioglu and to benefit from his effervescent knowledge of Ottoman history. Other scholars—Alexander Kamenskii, Mikhail Krom, Robert Crews, Aron Rodrigue, Laura Stokes, Richard Roberts, Norman Naimark—provided great insights as well. Of course the shortcomings of this work are mine, not theirs, but to all these scholars I owe tremendous thanks.
I began work in earnest on this project with a residential fellowship from Stanford’s Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011–12), which provided long hours of immersion in reading and splendid lunch hours of vibrant conversation. Stanford’s History Department and Dean of Humanities and Sciences have also provided generous research funds to make broad reading possible, and I finish up the work on this book at another wonderful research institute, the Stanford Humanities Center. Again, I am truly grateful for all the collegial and scholarly resources I have been given. It is often predictable to end a preface with thanks to one’s family, and I am true to form. But this is a very, very big thanks to my husband Jack Kollmann— throughout the many years of my work, on this and preceding books and courses and research, he has been at my side. His knowledge of Russian art and religion is boundless, as is his generosity in teaching me and helping me track things down or work things out. His unstinting support, love, and constancy are humbling; I am truly blessed.
Introduction
The Russian Empire 1450–1801
How to describe an early modern empire over more than three centuries? So many regions, so many economies, so many ethnicities and so much change over time. By 1801 the Russian empire stretched from Poland to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Caspian and Black Seas, encompassing dozens of subject peoples with vastly different cultures and histories. The task for Russia’s rulers centered in Moscow—“grand princes” until 1547, “tsars” until 1721, “emperors” thereafter— was to expand in search of productive resources (human and material) and to maintain local stability sufficient to mobilize those resources once conquered. They faced challenges to their rule of all sorts, ranging from the fundamental problem of distance (“the enemy of empire,” in Fernand Braudel’s pithy phrase), to violent uprisings, to constant flight of the taxpaying population, to resistance by elites in previously sovereign states. But they accomplished their task of imperial expansion, mobilization and governance nonetheless, rising from a forested outpost on Europe’s and Eurasia’s fringe in 1450 to a major geopolitical player in both arenas by 1801. Our goal is to track how Moscow’s rulers accomplished that feat while giving appropriate attention to the empire’s great diversity—ethnic, religious, social, and political. We explore not only how the empire rose to power and was governed, but also who its many subjects were and how, if at all, the realm constituted a social and political unity. Finding an organizational framework for such a large project, spanning more than three centuries and thousands of square miles, is tricky, since one runs the risk of reifying a constantly changing historical reality or imposing modern categories on the past. Russian history has certainly seen plenty of that—early modern Russia since the sixteenth century has been labeled a despotism and its people uncivilized, primarily in comparison to Europe. Not only normative, this trope is either teleological, suggesting a European path of development on which Russia is, at best, lagging, if not entirely left out, or essentialist, suggesting that Russians can never assimilate western values. Happily, recent scholarship has provided the foundations for thinking more complexly about early modern Russia as state and society. Since the 1970s scholars (primarily in America) have been exploring “how autocracy worked,” overturning images of a literally all-powerful tsar in favor of a politics where the great men of the realm and their clans upon whom governance relied were consulted and engaged in decision making; new work has seen implicit limitation on the autocratic power of the ruler in Russia’s religiously based ideology and in the realities of geography, distance, and sparse demography. Furthermore, research on the Russian empire was energized by the collapse of the Soviet Union, producing valuable studies of the constituent communities of the empire by scholars in Europe, America, and post-Soviet republics. Some of the useful tacks in new work on the Russian empire include resisting a teleology that assumes that empire moves into nation, resisting normative disapproval of empire, and placing the Russian empire in its Eurasian context. Without at all suggesting that a more complex “consensus-based” politics diluted the tsar’s undivided sovereignty, this research forces us to look pragmatically at the forces through which the autocratic center governed the realm. Particularly influential for this study is the model of an “empire of difference,” developed by scholars including the Russianist Jane Burbank, the Africanist Frederick Cooper, and the Ottomanist Karen Barkey. Such empires rule from the center but allow the diverse languages, ethnicities, and religions of their subject peoples to remain in place as anchors of social stability. Such an analytical framework is not new, of course. In 1532 none other than Niccolò Machiavelli outlined three choices available to a conquering state to govern states that “have been accustomed to live in freedom under their own laws.” Conquerors could “destroy” the vanquished; they could “go and live therein” by sending in administrators trained from the center; or they could “allow them to continue to live under their own laws, taking a tribute from them and creating within them a new government of a few which will keep the state friendly to you.”
The Russian, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Chinese empires, all of which arose in the wake of the Mongol empire, demonstrate such an approach. Vast, continental, and highly diverse in ethnicities, confessions, and languages, these Eurasian empires calculated central control against the advantages of maintaining stable communities. They synthetically drew on the Chinggisid heritage of the Mongol empire (founded by Chinggis or Genghis Khan) and other cultural influences (in Russia, Byzantium; in the Ottoman empire, Byzantium and Islamic thought; in China, Confucianism and Buddhism; in Mughal India, indigenous Hindu practice) to construct ruling ideologies and governing strategies.
Thomas Allsen reminds us that such an early modern empire was a “huge catchment basin channeling, accumulating, and storing the innovations of diverse peoples and cultures,” while Alfred Rieber identifies common strategies of governance and ideology across “Eurasian borderlands” from Hungary to China. Connected by trade, warfare, and conquest, early modern empires shared military technologies, bureaucratic record-keeping skills, languages, communications networks, and ideologies and approaches to governance through “difference.” The Russian empire evolved in a part of Eurasia that acquainted it with multiple examples of politics of difference and empire. The territory that the Russian empire came to occupy traversed a geological and historical triad of east–west swaths of lands and cultures connecting Europe and Asia and north to south. Southernmost, stretching from the Mediterranean and Black Sea to the Middle East and points east, was a band of relatively commercialized societies, with large and densely populated cities and thick trade networks. Their needs—for food, luxury goods, and particularly for slave labor—were met by age-old maritime and overland trade routes, most notably the Silk Road that traversed the steppe as an east–west highway (with north–south offshoots) transferring people, goods, and ideas. Steppe prairieland constituted the middle of these three swaths of territory, north of the “civilized” urban world and linking it to the third swath, northern forests full of valuable resources such as slaves and furs. Riverine routes north–south linked forest, steppe, and urban emporia as long ago as Homer’s time, when amber from the Baltic Sea made its way to the Mediterranean and Black Sea. The lands that Russia came to control enter the picture among the Eurasian empires with the construction of trade networks from the Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas in the ninth century, resulting in the emergence of a grand principality that called itself “Rus’,” centered at Kyiv. It rose politically into the eleventh century on the great Dnieper River trade route to Byzantium and, in a fashion typical for medieval states, dissolved into multiple principalities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as trade routes shifted. Those principalities heir to Kyiv gravitated to trade opportunities in the west, the Baltic coast, and the upper Volga, which is where the princes of Moscow rose as a regional power in the fifteenth century. To some extent the Russian empire’s rise marks a new stage in Eurasian empire building. Historically, empires had flourished in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Eurasia, and Far East, but they were difficult to maintain over time. Rome, the Mongols, and various Chinese dynasties historically were great successes in expanse and longevity, while more typical of Eurasia, particularly in the steppe, were constantly changing coalitions asserting control in segments of steppe or in smaller regions. From the fifteenth century onward, large continental empires became able to establish more enduring power and to control the steppe, because of improvements in communications, bureaucracy, and military. From the fifteenth to eighteenth century settled agrarian empires gradually took over the steppe—the Ottoman, Habsburg, Safavid, Mughal, Russian, and Qing empires—and Russia’s role in that historical turning point is our story here. Assertive central control established empire; what kept it together were flexible policies of governance, policies that ran along a continuum from coercion to co-optation to ideology, with a large middle embracing many forms of mobilization by rulers and accommodation by subjects. Charles Tilly calls this triad “coercion, capital and commitment.” The various pieces of this continuum, which will provide a structuring principle for our work, had to be kept in balance. Coercion was essential and constant; it was used liberally to win control (brutal conquest, suppression of opposition) and to maintain it (hostage taking, corporal and capital punishment, constant threat). But early modern empires lacked the manpower to control by coercion alone, so they deployed other strategies to assert legitimacy and govern. Central to creating imperial legitimacy was the bravado of declaring that one held it. Empires “broadcast” their power, asserting control far more categorically than their on-the-ground power could achieve. Imperial centers set forth a supranational ideology, usually associated with the dominant religion of the rulers and their closest elite, trying to inspire what Tilly calls “commitment.” As Karen Barkey elaborated regarding the Ottoman empire and Geoffrey Hosking noted in the Russian case, such a supranational ideology does not exclusively identify itself with the hierarchs and institutions of the dominant religion, or does so at its peril. It honors those leaders and constructs its rituals and symbolic vocabulary from the dominant faith, but it keeps ideological control in its own hands. It often leavens its identification of the rulers as religious with other qualities as well, perhaps depicting the dynasty as heroic and charismatic, extolling the rulers’ ability to protect the realm from enemies and its subjects from injustice. Providing good justice and mercy—in courts and in alms giving—were central attributes of imperial rulers in the Eurasian tradition, and we will explore all these elements of legitimizing ideology and practice in Russia. Beyond ideology, a crucial element of maintaining imperial power is the delicate balancing of cohesion and control, what Tilly calls “capital.” The state creates institutions to organize the market, collect taxes, control population, staff the army and bureaucracy, and otherwise collect resources that it then disburses among the dominant classes to reward and enlist. It creates cohesion among the elite by offering tax, land, and other privileges. It constructs institutions such as judiciary and bureaucracy that serve the populace as well as control them. Subject populations can choose to “accommodate,” in Alfred Rieber’s phrase, by joining the imperial military or civil service or even culturally assimilating. But the imperial center also avoids too much cohesion, in the form of too much integration of communities on the local level. As true in the Russian empire as it was for the Ottoman case that Barkey explored, imperial rulers operationalize this middle ground of co-optation by maintaining direct, vertical chains of connection to individual communities; they keep those communities and their elites relatively isolated from each other. In what Barkey calls a “hub and spoke” pattern and Jane Burbank calls an “imperial regime of rights,” imperial rulers make separate “deals” (the phrase is Brian Boeck’s) for packages of duties and rights with constituent groups. In this way, a “politics of difference” approach directly benefits the center. In the Russian case, separate deals defined different tax rates and military obligations, maintenance of religious practices, local government and elites for groups as various as Russian cavalrymen and their serfs, Don and Ukrainian Cossacks, Siberian reindeer herders, steppe nomads, and Baltic German Junkers. Everyone related to the tsar vertically in personal appeal through the tsar’s officialdom; in theory subjects had no reason to connect horizontally across class or geographical affinities for self-help, governance, or, most significantly, for opposition to the regime. This kept the realm loosely unified around the center and stable. To be particularly effective in this, however, a regime had to be flexible, constantly reassessing and renegotiating its relationships with subject peoples in changing times. Early modern Russia developed its governing patterns from multiple sources, combining a strong acquaintance with Mongol politics and governing institutions with the powerful package of political, legal, cultural, ideological, ritual, and symbolic concepts and practices that Byzantium and other Orthodox centers offered in the centuries after Kyiv Rus’ princes accepted Christianity in 988. Its rulers governed over great diversity—ethnic, religious, linguistic, and local— curbed by central authority deftly applied.
A final issue in introducing this work is the question of why Russia created empire. It is unfashionable these days for historians to pose the question, because answers have been so politically charged and continue to be so. Russia did expand very far and very fast, galloping across the continent of Asia to claim authority over all Siberia in the single seventeenth century, pushing across the Far East and Pacific to Alaska in the eighteenth century while also winning the Black Sea littoral from the Ottoman empire and gobbling up (with two European partners) the sovereign state of Poland-Lithuania. Historiography born of the Cold War saw this expansionism as messianic, bent on ruling the world.
Some scholars linked seeming rampant expansionism to Russia’s “Byzantine heritage” (in a misguided reading of Byzantine ideology); others cited Karl Marx’s call for universal socialism or followed up on his cautious discussion of an Asiatic path to socialism to develop the concept of “Asiatic Despotism.” Some cited the “Third Rome Theory”—that Moscow was a “Third Rome” and a “Fourth shall never be”—as proof that Moscow intended to rule the world, while that text actually had minimal influence on the court (being embraced only in the seventeenth century by religious conservatives).
Such a normative approach ignores the fact that when Moscow was building empire, so were all its neighbors– the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid empires, European colonial empires in the New World, South and Southeast Asia, land grabs in Europe itself. In Europe such expansion was legitimized in religious terms in the sixteenth century, to which was added mercantilism in the seventeenth and a rich mix of realpolitik and emerging national and racial discourses in the eighteenth. Where improvements in seafaring, in military technology, in bureaucratic control, and fiscal mobilization made it possible, states expanded. Russia pursued empire for the same reasons that its neighbors did, namely, to gain profit for rulers and elite and to earn resources for the state building that was one of the quintessential characteristics of the early modern era in Europe and Eurasia.
For Russia, this meant capturing or opening lucrative river and overland trade routes, cities, and ports, conquering populations in resource-rich areas such as Siberia, and pushing south into fertile steppe pasture land that could be converted to farming and south and west towards Silk Road and Baltic ports. Russia’s campaigns of conquest were clothed in various rhetorics—recapturing lands alleged to have been ancient patrimony, fighting infidel Islam (in the sixteenth century) or pursuing glory (in the eighteenth)—but the chronology and directions of Russia’s expansion reveal economic and political goals behind each direction of conquest. While tropes of Russia as a despotism might have faded, many scholars would counter the approach taken here with a related argument that Russia was a “unitary” state, ruled from the center with no significant political autonomies limiting its actions. Particularly scholars of the empire’s nationalities, now free to explore their own national history in the wake of Soviet demise, put the emphasis on the Russian center’s coercive power.
They are most mindful of the constraints on their national and regional autonomies imposed by the Russian empire, rather than of its toleration of regional differences. Some scholars in post-Soviet Russia, similarly, focus on the power of the ruler, giving less credence to recent scholarship on kinship-based, affinitive relationships in court politics. These interpretations balance the available evidence differently than in this book, which argues that for early modern conditions, strong centers cannot control without significant buy-in from elites and they cannot control with force all the time. They simply lack the communications and manpower to do it. This book, therefore, argues that Russia’s power and stability as an empire derived from the synergy of strong central and selectively laissez-faire local power. This was indeed a state of undivided sovereignty that claimed control over key issues of rule—criminal law, taxation, military mobilization, and defense.
In fact the Russian empire, as we shall argue, was doggedly insistent on that degree of control, imposing a single law, single bureaucracy, single administration over its vast realm at a time when some of its European and Eurasian counterparts were de facto allowing local nobilities and power bases to form. But, balancing that infrastructure of ideology and bureaucracy, the empire tolerated and depended upon local communities to accomplish many tasks of daily life. If one wants to talk in contemporary terms about Russia as a “great power,” it was one historically precisely because of its strong center supported by controlled diversity. Such, then, is our theoretical approach—to analyze the Russian empire as it constructed an empire “of difference.” Such an approach requires a great deal of attention to governance by Moscow, but also invites discussion of the diversity of the realm and its peoples.
It also requires flexibility: as we explore how Moscow ruled and how subjects experienced that power, we try to look for mutual interchange, assuming different state policies for different regions and appraising the state’s constant adjustments of policies towards subjects in response to new economies, new geopolitical exigencies, new ideologies. Eurasian empire is also inextricable from the global context of trade routes and geopolitical interactions, and we will keep that larger context in mind. As we recount how Moscow’s sovereigns amassed regional power, we combine descriptive and thematic treatment in overall chronological progression.
Although historiography is rich in Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages of the post-Soviet space, the bibliography here includes by and large English-language material as most accessible to our readership. A few important works in Russian that are discussed in the text are recognized; translations of major Russian historians into English are included where appropriate. Part I describes the lands and peoples of empire as Russia assembled its vast expanse from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. In Part II, we start from the center, examining structures of governance in the formative sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; here we look thematically at such key institutions and practices as ideology, bureaucracy, economy and trade, religion, society. Part III on Russia’s great century of empire, the eighteenth, replicates a classic divide in Russian history. Peter I (ruled 1682–1725) is often taken to have revolutionized Russia.
This is not our argument—he maintained continuity with his predecessors in fundamental elements of state building, such as imperial expansion, institutions of governance and resource mobilization, toleration of difference. But the century stands out for its dynamism—demographic growth was both indigenous and also boosted by territorial expansion; the economy boomed; the Enlightenment provided new discourses and models of governing and cultural life. We explore how the official discourse of empire was renewed, how governing strategies adjusted to new conquests and new ideas, how social categories and roles proliferated. We end with the imaginings of rulers and writers about what empire and identity meant in Russia by 1801.
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