The Emperor's Men at the Empire's Edges

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin. xiv + 634 pp. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2000. ISBN 0312278152. $45.00.

Ol´ga Igorevna Eliseeva, Geopoliticheskie proekty G. A. Potemkina [The Geopolitical Projects of G. A. Potemkin]. 341 pp. Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000. ISBN 5805500450.

Oksana Iur´evna Zakharova, Generaly svoikh sudeb: M. S. Vorontsov, general-gubernator Novorossiiskogo kraia [Master of His Own Fate: M. S. Vorontsov, Governor-General of New Russia]. 117 pp. Moscow: O. Zakharova, 1998. ISBN 5858680976.

Natal´ia Petrovna Matkhanova, General-gubernatory vostochnoi Sibiri serediny XIX veka: V. Ia. Rupert, N. N. Murav´ev-Amurskii, M. S. Korsakov [The Governor-Generals of Eastern Siberia in the Mid-19th Century: V. Ia. Rupert, N. N. Murav´ev-Amurskii, and M. S. Korsakov]. 425 pp. Novosibirsk: Institut istorii RAN, Sibirskoe otdelenie, 1998. ISBN 5769201800.

Evgenii Aleksandrovich Glushchenko, Stroiteli imperii: Portrety kolonial´nykh deiatelei [Empire-Builders: Portraits of Colonialists]. 379 pp. Moscow: XXI vek—Soglasie, 2000. ISBN 52010468.

The post of the borderland governor in the tsarist empire was fraught with contradictions. On one hand, there was the high title, the immense prestige, the ready chance for personal enrichment, the virtual certainty that a job well done would lead to further promotions up the imperial ladder, and the simple thrill of ruling as a de facto emperor over huge territories on the state's sensitive frontiers. On the other hand, there was cultural isolation and the material discomforts of life on the periphery, the likelihood that a job poorly done or even just the great distance from St. Petersburg could precipitate a permanent fall from grace, and the practical challenges of the job itself. After all, being a de facto emperor of the borderlands was rarely easy, especially since many of the territories in question had almost no economic infrastructure, few towns, few officials, even fewer officials who were honest or well-trained, and diverse populations that usually included a good number of "troublesome" or "hostile" "sectarians," exiles, and non-Russian "aliens" (inorodtsy). The invitation to the governor's mansion could thus be seen as either an honor or a sentence. As a result, it is hardly surprising that the men who took the assignment tended to be the most venal, dutiful, energetic, or careerist of the tsar's leading imperialists. In fact, many of them appear to have been all these things at once.

The works reviewed here—most of them biographies or biographical sketches—in one way or another address the fundamental predicament of being a borderland governor. As such, they join a long list of studies going back to the late tsarist era, when Russian historians like Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov and Vladimir Nikolaevich Vitevskii first began to examine borderland government and local "men of power" in professional terms.¹ Because scholars have been working on these issues for some time, much of what appears in these books is not terribly new. Some of the scholarship is also short on imagination and the detail can be numbing, at least for anyone who is not passionately moved by the minutiae of running the governor's house in Odessa or Irkutsk. But there are interesting things to discern in these books nonetheless, not least of which is an appreciation for the new standing that the "tsar's viceroys" have acquired in contemporary Russia. From disdain or at best neglect in the Soviet era, Russia's men of empire have now returned to acceptability, even prominence, their commitment to Crown and Country dusted off and ready to shine as part of a new "usable past." In today's post-Soviet age of personality and imperial nostalgia, the life stories of great tsarist administrators have become as grand and appealing as the empire-building...