Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (review)

"'Here we are, Caroline!' [Pa] said. 'Right here we'll build our house.' Laura and Mary scrambled over the feed-box. . . . All around them there was nothing but grassy prairie spreading to the edge of the sky." So wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder in her classic children's book about the American myth in the nineteenth century.

The difficulty—and necessity—of imposing human boundaries on vast expanses of unmarked wilderness plains, deserts, and forests has been an experience shared across several continents and at least four centuries. Ephraim Ballard, husband of Maine's most famous eighteenth-century midwife Martha Ballard, was often out traipsing the Maine forests in his capacity as a surveyor. And the mapping, delineating, and claiming did not stop in the nineteenth century, but continued up to the modern era. On December 15th, 1949, one C. A. Morgan claimed whatever undiscovered riches might be found in a patch of the California Mojave Desert by placing this written claim description in a tobacco can under a rock: "Notice is hereby given, That the undersigned citizen of the United States . . . has this day located and claims the following . . . commencing at a stone monument, which is placed near a ledge . . . about eight miles south-south-east of the Spangler Siding on the Trona Rail-Road . . . situated in Christmas (I guess) [sic] mining district . . . and contains Twenty acres, more or less."

In the seventeenth century, one of the greatest continental expansions of the modern age took place as Russian peasants spread into Siberia to displace the native pastoralists. Valerie Kivelson's study of maps in the expansion of the early modern Russian empire is a major and important new work for the comparative social history of empires and migrations, and offers a multitude of fascinating comparison points with American and European colonial history.

Kivelson demonstrates three big points that are important not only for Russian history but for comparative social history. First, the argument that maps are an instrument of power (since they embody the control of centralizing states and empires) is too simplistic. Local residents also made maps, as shown through her astonishing discovery of scores of locally-produced maps in the Russian archives, carefully held there as testaments of boundaries and claims for three centuries and more. These maps were claims (both in the philosophical sense and in the usage of the California gold rush claims) and testify to the entrepreneurship, individual initiative, and strong defense of private property in frontier Russia, a place and culture elsewhere assumed to be collective, passive, and backward. "As the court records demonstrate, maps not only provided the state with a way to track its population and resources and to keep all under surveillance," Kivelson insightfully and surprisingly writes. "They also armed local litigants with new and creative ways to lie, falsify, and misrepresent the lay of the land and to turn the state's own regulation to their own purposes." (Those familiar with peasant studies and empire studies will find irony in the way James C. Scott's Weapons of the Weak [1985] and Seeing Like a State [1998] thus become delightfully conflated and turned upside-down.)

Second, religion played a major role in conceptualizing Russian imperial expansion into Siberia, and maps reflected that Christian influence, but there was a crucial caveat. "Orthodoxy did indeed constitute the very heart of [the colonizers'] concept of Russia's imperial mission," but that mission was both ineffective and in many ways indifferent to actual missionary work: their program was Christianization without conversion (p. 150)—that is, the land became "Christian" when it was brought into the realm of the Christian tsar, and the religion of its inhabitants was not as important. Russian cartographers recorded, and apparently relished, the ethnic diversity they found in Siberia and Central Asia, and the diversity of peoples became a proud boast of the Tsar. "Eschewing the flattening 'god's eye view,' the aerial perspective adopted...