Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire by Steven Seegel (review)

When life came in three dimensions, power was asserted in two. Not so very long ago, most people, even people who mattered, spent most of their time outside. Whether seen or unseen, death like life came through the air or water, as projectile but more likely as microbe. The sources of death were either visible in three dimensions or invisible, but never in two-dimensional images, as they are today, when we can see a tumor on a screen. Making war was a matter of getting human beings across and through natural and artificial barriers without too many of them dying first of disease. Maps of the places one wished to reach were useful, as was discovered relatively recently: the Ottomans on their marches to Vienna did not use them, choosing instead to ask for directions. Now that maps exist, it is no longer manly to do so. Maps reduce three dimensions to two, with the side effect that all of the actual problems of exerting and exercising power seem, if not soluble, then at least visible. Maps also reduce the five senses to one, namely sight. A forest is no longer the buzz of flies, the smell of leaves, the shape of an edible mushroom, and the aching of muscles, but a bit of ink that recalls a leaf. None of the other senses lend themselves to abstraction and compression in the same way as sight. Some scholars of our own day confuse abstraction with mastery and the assertion of power with its presence, dwelling on the projects, gardens, and utopias of the “modern” state. These interpretations are copacetic because we ourselves deal in similar reductions. Seegel is more careful and more interesting, perhaps because the region of his very considerable expertise, Eastern Europe, can be presented neither as an overpoweringly “modern” state nor as an intellectually supine colonial possession of such. In the Russian and Habsburg empires of the nineteenth centuries, rulers knew all too well that their imperial maps were in competition with other imperial maps, not to mention with national maps. No one has taken up the subject of maps and power in Eastern Europe with as much energy and erudition as Seegel, and it is unlikely that anyone who reads his book will believe they can do better.