The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650-1831 (review)

Patterned after Edward Luttwak's work on the Roman Empire, John P. LeDonne has written a detailed survey of Russian grand strategy at the height of the Imperial period. The title is precise, as LeDonne's focus is on the integrated military, geopolitical, economic, and cultural vision of the Romanovs and the warrior nobility who carried it out. Based on extensive use of archival and foreign secondary sources, LeDonne's approach is refreshingly straightforward, with clear language and a minimum of jargon.

The book is divided into three sections. In part one (1650-1743), LeDonne borrows a theme from Fernand Braudel and details geographic determinants in the rise and fall of taiga/steppe polities. He also describes the formation of a Russian grand strategy based on mobile armies, deep operations, and the Muscovite heritage of absolutism at home and client states abroad. Part two (1743-1796) covers hegemonic expansion, with Russian power destroying Swedish, Polish, and Turkish presence in Eurasia, as well as the full development of the eighteenth-century military-industrial state (militärstaat). Part three begins with the Napoleonic Wars, details the culmination of 150 years of expansion and finishes with the creation of a sated, fortress empire, awesome in reputation but already rotten in comparison to the industrialized Atlantic powers.

LeDonne usefully reminds us that strategic geography is crucial to understanding the formation of grand strategy. In the case of Russia, the vast forests and plains—broken only by rivers flowing into the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Sea basins—are unhindered by mountain ranges or chokepoints. Bound only by the dense civilizations beyond the Danube and the Araks of the Russian-Persian borderlands, this open geography encouraged limitless expansion in the quest for security. LeDonne adopts Sir Halford John Mackinder's "Heartland thesis" to explain this dynamic, arguing that Muscovite Russia faced Swedish, Polish, and Ottoman/Persian power in a zero-sum struggle for hegemony in this Eurasian "heartland."

Ensconsed in what LeDonne calls the "Volga-Oka mesopotamia," Muscovite (and later Petrine) Russia used an impenetrable forest base to build a centralized, absolutist military-oriented state; create a command economy to extract the maximum resources possible from a subservient population; spread a cultural and imperial vision of unlimited ethnic Russian-Orthodox expansion across all of Eurasia; and forge a constantly modernizing army intent on waging wars characterized by deep penetration of territory and the annihilation of the enemy. LeDonne carefully tracks the spread of Russian hegemony over the steppe, with deep strikes in wartime complementing a slow, patient expansion of forts and colonists (settlers followed the flag, not vice versa) into the steppe. LeDonne's description of the evolving frontier is particularly useful for his analysis of client states (Cossacks, Bashkirs, etc.) and their role in protecting the empire.

The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650-1831, is a masterful retelling of this story of Russian expansion. Indeed, in a reformulation of the classic debate over whether or not Russia is a "western or eastern country," LeDonne persuasively argues Russia is neither. In his eyes Russia is not a European power, but instead an autonomous heartland power, founded on a dynamic of space and arbitrary power, with military interests defining political and economic objectives and a messianic vision carrying the banner of eastern Orthodoxy against both Latin Christianity and Islam. Full of illuminating detail as well as the broad strokes of meta-history, the work is worth reading for anyone interested in early modern Russian history.