Asiatic Russia

Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts

Tomohiko Uyama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415615372
• eBook ISBN: 9781136620140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Although the Russian Empire has traditionally been viewed as a European borderland, most of its territory was actually situated in Asia. Imperial power was huge but often suffered from a lack of enough information and resources to rule its culturally diverse subjects, and asymmetric relations between state and society combined with flexible strategies of local actors sometimes produced unexpected results.

In Asiatic Russia, an international team of scholars explores the interactions between power and people in Central Asia, Siberia, the Volga-Urals, and the Caucasus from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, drawing on a wealth of Russian archival materials and Turkic, Persian, and Tibetan sources. The variety of topics discussed in the book includes the Russian idea of a "civilizing mission, " the system of governor-generalships, imperial geography and demography, roles of Muslim and Buddhist networks in imperial rule and foreign policy, social change in the Russian Protectorate of Bukhara, Muslim reformist and national movements.

The book is essential reading for students and scholars of Russian, Central Eurasian, and comparative imperial history, as well as imperial and colonial studies and nationalism studies. It may also provide some hints for understanding today's world, where "empire" has again become a key word in international and domestic power relations.

Part I

Russia's eastern expansion

Its “mission” and the Tatars’
intermediary role

1 The Russian Empire's
civilizing mission in
the eighteenth century

A comparative perspective

Ricarda VULPIUS

Research on Russian history has experienced a boost from the concept of empire and an enriching interest in the complexities of its multinational and multiconfessional character. However, while the focus has mostly been on the empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Russian eighteenth century as an imperial century, framed by the shadows of Peter I and Catherine II, is still often neglected. The eighteenth century has traditionally been seen first and foremost in terms of the “Westernization” of the Russian state and society; the changes in status and behavior of Russia as an empire and its underlying ideology have only recently become an important topic of research.¹

This chapter aims to profit from the methods of cultural history and to look for Russian perceptions and expressions of imperial identity in this crucial period from a comparative perspective. More precisely, I intend to explore Russian imperial politics and notions as they developed, from the very moment when Russia embarked on a new journey, that is when the country consciously took its place on the global stage. The secondary literature leaves no doubt that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the fundamentals of Russia's imperial status and conception had been established. However, the decisive stage for the formation of the imperial consciousness that was so evident at the beginning of the nineteenth century has scarcely been studied.² Excellent books and articles have been written by Andreas Kappeler, Michael Khodarkovsky, Willard Sunderland, Yuri Slezkine, and Nicholas Breyfogle.³ They are the pioneers in this field. However, their focus lies more on Russia's behavior in a certain periphery or on its relation with certain ethnic groups. It is my larger project on the imperial identity of the Russian elite in the eighteenth century that frames this chapter, which aims to focus exclusively on the Russian side of encounters with other ethnicities and to answer the general questions of when, why, and above all, how thinking in imperial categories came into being and in what relation those categories stood to imperial concepts and notions in other European countries.

The lack of natural borders among the imperial center and the peripheries of the Russian Empire marks the decisive difference between continental and maritime empires, and brings forward the two central questions of my study: How and why were the Russian elite able to develop a feeling of superiority towards non-Russian ethnic groups when they had known many of them for centuries as a consequence of fluid borders? And how much did the notion of a “civilizing mission” apply to eighteenth-century Russia? Significant scholars such as Jörg Baberowski, a specialist on late Imperial Russia and on the Soviet Union, and Jürgen Osterhammel, a scholar writing on civilizing missions in global history, stated that Russia did not develop a civilizing mission until the nineteenth century.⁴ In the following, I try to show another perspective and draw the attention of scholars of late imperial Russia to the eighteenth century.

Generally speaking, the search for Russian expressions of imperial identity touches upon the fundamental question of when Russia became an empire. Was it with the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan in the middle of the sixteenth century, and thus with the rule of Ivan IV over a non-Slavic and non-Christian ethnic group? Or was it not until the establishment of what is known in German as a herrschaftskolonie (a colony in the classic sense) in Central Asia, in the late nineteenth century?⁵ It is problematic to use the term “empire” to describe the early modern period in Russia, because the very notion of empire hardly existed before the early eighteenth century. There are also no indications showing tsars or elites to have been conscious of ruling an “empire” as understood to mean a state that could be subdivided into a center and peripheries. It seems that distinctions between different ethnic groups of subjects did not play a great role. Instead, documents show the tsarist government as referring to the country, with its very diverse population, as one united patrimony (votchina). According to the principles of a patrimonial state that stem from the time of the Kievan Rus’, all subjects appear to have been roughly equal in their relation to the tsar. While the conquest of Siberia down to the border of China and the incorporation of Left-bank Ukraine had further enlarged the imperial body in terms of different peoples, religions, and even semi-independent political units, the state had not yet adopted an imperial language. The Russian historian Aleksandr Filiushkin therefore proposed to speak of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Russia as a “neonatal'naia Imperiia” – an empire in its infancy.⁶

It is only against this background that the turning point of the eighteenth century for the development of Russia as an empire becomes fully understandable. It was not until this century, as I see it, that the gap between “empire” as a category of academic analysis and “empire” as a category of contemporary sources was closed. Only in the eighteenth century, forced by interaction with other European empires and by competition with their imperial politics and ambitions, did the Russian Empire start to develop an identity that was imperial in the modern sense of the word. So far, the debate on empires has not resulted in a generally accepted definition of the notion. Only recently, John LeDonne has proposed that we avoid calling Russia an empire before its expansion to those regions where less fertile soil prevented Russian peasants from settling.⁷ Only then, that is in the nineteenth century, did the Russian settlements, and thereby the endeavor to build a unitary state, come to an end and – according to him – the building of an empire (with clearly separated territories) begin. This idea seems to connect the notion of empire with the imperial elites’ political visions for the future rather than with their perception of their state entity at the time. It neglects to take into account the given imperial character of their politics in the eighteenth century regardless of how integrative their measures were.

In contrast, and in analogy to the study of nation-building, I would like to use contemporaneous perspectives, the language of self-description, as a yardstick for the definition of modern empires. In what terms and according to what notions did the ruling elites of the eighteenth century describe and perceive their state, the Russians and the non-Russians? Did the “Westernization” brought about by Peter and his entourage have any impact on imperial identity, and if so, what were the changes like? The focus on imperial elites results naturally from the history of empires. As Jürgen Osterhammel put it, “Empires have always been the creatures of elites.”⁸ Empire-building and empire-maintenance were provided by limited groups within the political, military and administrative apparatus in the center as well as at the periphery. In Russia, they tried to entice elites from indigenous ethnic groups to enter tsarist service by granting them all kinds of privileges.⁹ The “change of sides” was frequently achieved within a single generation. That is why the notion of “imperial elites” is here applied to all those who represented the empire and served the tsar. This could include a minister in St. Petersburg as well as a commander of the Imperial Army in Warsaw, a governor in Orenburg or a geographer sent out on expeditions to the Far East. The notion of “imperial elites” will be applied as well to those who wrote in the sciences or in public life on the Russian Empire and who shared the Russian imperial identity.

The formation of an imperial discourse

The impact of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the Spanish discovery and conquest of the “New World,” and the experience of Europe's thirty-year war in the seventeenth century had led to a certain set of rules in war and peace that were shared by most Western European statesmen and lawyers of international law and were based on the concepts of so-called natural law. The Muscovite state remained isolated from these experiences and influences. In seventeenth-century Russia there were no lawyers able to work with the terms of international moral philosophy and law, and, needless to say, they could not develop them any further. Iurii Gasparovich Krizhanich (1618–83), a historian and philosopher with Croatian roots, was able at least to introduce the phrase “international law” (jus gentium or narodnaia pravda) into seventeenth-century Russian vocabulary.¹⁰ However, the widespread distrust towards any foreign influences hindered the transfer of Western writings and the adoption of Western ideas. The most significant texts of early international law were not translated until the reign of Peter I, but then they were translated rapidly. Here one has to mention the fundamental work of the Dutch lawyer and statesman Hugo Grotius (“De jure belli ac pacis libri res,” 1625), the writings of the German lawyer and historian Samuel von Pufendorf (“Juris naturae et gentium,” 1672) and the introduction to diplomacy by Abraham de Wicquefort (“The Ambassador and His Functions”). From then on, thanks to a new tsar who was searching for acceptance of Russia's new status by the powerful states of Europe, European notions of law entered the Russian legislative and diplomatic lexicon.¹¹

A book by Petr Shafirov (1669–1739) serves as an example of the transformation of Russian political discourse as a direct consequence of increased European influences. Shafirov had accompanied Tsar Peter as a translator on his journey to Western Europe, and because of his talents he remained in close contact with the tsar afterwards. In 1717, he was appointed vice-chancellor of the College of Foreign Affairs. In the same year, Shafirov paved the way for a completely new culture in Russian politics: he composed a historical justification to legitimize the Russian war against Sweden. Not only did he address, at length, the diplomatic history of both states, but he also demonstrated Russia's “natural” involvement with European diplomacy. He also, from the Russian point of view, elaborated on Sweden's violations of international law, thus leaving seemingly no chance for the Russians to avoid war. He suggested that Russia had fully complied with international law and had done nothing but follow the international code of behavior. In the text, requested and revised by the tsar himself, European notions of law were consciously applied, and the designation for Russia even in the sixteenth century was frequently “the Russian Empire” (Rossiiskaia Imperiia).¹²

As a matter of course, Shafirov counts his own country among the circle of the so-called politichnye narody. This new notion imported from the Polish at the beginning of the eighteenth century was significant. It not only quickly found broad acceptance among Russia's elite, but it also was a symbol in miniature for the new way of thinking. A German–Latin–Russian Dictionary published in 1731 translated politichnyi as “learned, civilized”; other works defined it mo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Asiatic Russia
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Maps
• Introduction: Asiatic Russia as a space for asymmetric interaction
• PART I Russia’s eastern expansion: its “mission” and the Tatars’intermediary role
• PART II Taming space and people Institutions and demography
• PART III Russian power projected beyond its borders
• PART IV Asiatic Russia as a space for national movements
• Index