The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671

Afterword

206 Afterword The mode of men and women, rich and poor, are all one, all over the Empire, from the highest to the lowest, and their Language one, yea and Religion too, which certainly must hugely tend to their peace and preservation. Samuel Collins, The Present State of Russia, 1671 Considering the vast Extent of the Russian Empire and that many parts of it are almost inaccessible, it was no wonder that so many of those Heathen Nations remain unconverted: However that his Czarish Majesty had made already a Beginning of their Conversion, and was resolved to continue in his Zeal for propagating the Christian Religion all over his Dominions. Friedrich Christian Weber, The Present State of Russia, 1723 Most of the colonies which originated in the center and extended like radii to the periphery of the empire were formerly spontaneous undertakings brought about by the natural instincts of the people and the interests of the seigneurs. They were carried out privately and the government simply allowed them. . . . But by no means did the government plan or supervise the entire enterprise. Prior to Peter I the government was, moreover, not organized in such a manner that it could have carried out a large and systematic economic project of this nature. August von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, 1847 In European Russia the struggle between agriculture and nomadic barbarism is now a thing of the past, and the fertile Steppe, which was for centuries a battle-ground of the Aryan and Turanian races, has been incorporated into the dominions of the Tsar. The nomadic tribes have been partly driven out and partly pacified and parked in “reserves,” and the territory which they so long and so stubbornly defended is now studded with peaceful villages and tilled by laborious agriculturists. Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia, 1886 Contemporary foreign observers habitually observed and considered Russia’s expansion and tsarist rule in only one dimension. Not surprisingly, many viewed Russia through the lens of “orientalist” ideas.1 They assessed it to contrast its ways with the more familiar traditions of their own countries; viewed it as an Asiatic monolith, uniform and ruled absolutely by the tsar; or imposed on it systems and schemes resembling the ideas of utopian socialists or other theoreticians. They were confounded. The state was too large, too empty, too “foreign” to be easily categorized, especially given the distinction drawn between “Western” and “Eastern” Europe during the Enlightenment, which only added to the sense of estrangement for foreign arrivals in Moscow.2 Even the most dedicated scholars studying Russia did not complicate their view of Russia with discussions of its regional particularisms, even though they were undoubtedly familiar with those of their own countries. Nor were Russian scholars immune to these intellectual traps. When V. O. Kluichevksii rather infamously wrote in the nineteenth century that the history of Russia was “the history of a country colonizing itself,” an empire delineated by the footsteps of Russians expanding across empty lands, he was as much reacting to foreign observations as he was expressing nationalist pride.3 The reality, as the previous chapters indicate, was messy, unsystematic, and not dissimilar to the history of other early-modern empires. The Muscovite Empire gave birth to modern Russia by integrating diverse lands and peoples through a system best described as “composite sovereignty.” Due to the limitations of time and distance, coupled with a lack of population, wealth, and other resources, innumerable administrative variations based on adaptations to local conditions dotted the landscape of the tsar’s territory. Different regions developed very different methods to maintain military, economic, or social systems. Imposing uniformity was tremendously difficult, and until the eighteenth century served no great purpose compared to the trouble it took to accomplish. The various imperial networks connecting the frontier to the metropole, particularly the Russian 207 Afterword Orthodox Church’s apparatus, allowed the state to manage these many interests and adapt its machinery to defend, exploit, and control different populations without the expense associated with imposing a bureaucracy onto unsettled territory. The benefit of this lack of a single system was that given sufficient time, incremental steps toward increasing the tsar’s authority over his people could work. This is not to imply that there were not significant leaps toward greater centralization, breakthroughs such as the Ulozhenie of 1649, but these unquestionably built on the smaller accomplishments of...