Daniel Naroditsky

03.17.2019
History 120
Professor Kollmann

The Road Not Taken: Toward a Fuller Conception of the Mechanisms of

Russian State-Building, 1450-1801
If the-23-year-old Emperor Alexander I, upon his coronation on 23 March 1801, were to

receive a visit from the Tsar Vasily I, as the Grand Prince of Moscow lay on his deathbed almost

exactly 375 years earlier, the two would find it difficult to have a substantive conversation. In the

three centuries between their coronations, the land known to Vasily as the Grand Duchy of

Moscow and to Alexander as Rossiyskaya Imperiya — The Russian Empire — transformed so

drastically and in so many ways, that Vasily would likely chuckle at this bizarre instance of

divine humor. He would recognize neither the vast expanses of the empire that lay before him —

which now stretched from Novgorod to Magadan, from a port city named after a mysterious St.

Peter to the vast Siberian plateau — nor the style of buildings that lined the streets of Moscow

and the garb in which their occupants were attired, nor even the language in which the young

Tsar recounted this transformation to his predecessor. Yet there was a method to the madness. I

contend that a modern scholar can tease out the political, military, economic, and cultural

transformations that undergirded Russia’s furious expansion. In this paper, I argue that these

transformations can be sublimated into a conceptual framework that draws its explanatory weight

from two overlapping historical processes. In the first place, Russia evolved because antediluvian

military policies and dogmatic political strategy were abandoned in favor of a sounder and more

elastic model of expansion on whose strength Russia became, in Karen Barkey’s formulation, a

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full-fledged “empire of difference.”1 In the second place, the turn of the centuries heralded not

only a theoretical shift in the Tsar’s self-perception, but also a drastic evolution of the Tsar’s

relationship to the people, whose implications were legion. Taken together, these processes lend

credence to the notion that a set of identifiable and relatively well-defined patterns, rather than an

opaque sequence of historical coincidences, stood behind Russia’s transformation from obscure

principality to fearsome empire.

To properly understand the arc of Russia’s expansion, it seems prudent to begin by

delineating the sociopolitical and cultural milieu that prevailed in the first half-millennium of

Russia’s existence. Three concepts formed the core of this milieu. Firstly, the Tsar’s relationship

to the people resembled that of a pious and benevolent host, in whose residence the eternally

thankful Russian populace was allowed to lodge. The Tsar, then, ruled by divine appointment

and owned the land. His subjects, in the words of eminent historian Valerie Kivelson,

“unselfconsciously, uncomplainingly, and even proudly styled themselves slaves of the tsar.”2 A

1648 document containing instructions for delegates of an upcoming convocation of the Zemsky

Sobor (Assembly of the Land) bears out this observation. The summons refers to Tsar Alexei

Mikhailovich as the “Sovereign, Tsar, and Grand Prince…of all Rus’”, and concludes by

affirming that “all would be his realm, so that he would be the awesome and dread sovereign to

all and would be autocrat forever.”3 The nature of this relationship meant that the notion of

freedom — in the sense of possessing the ability to spontaneously leave one’s place of residence

1
Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008). Note that the concept of a difference model is not new, but
Barkey’s terminology is aptly chosen and, in the author’s opinion, exceptionally well-developed.
2
Valerie Kivelson, “Muscovite ‘Citizenship’: Rights Without Freedom,” The Journal of Modern
History 74, no.3 (Sept. 2002): 488.
3
Anonymous, “Sobranie A.I. Artem’eva, no. 2”, June 28 1648, trans. Valerie Kivelson.
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and Go West, so to speak — was “closely associated in the Muscovite mind with disruptive,

selfish passions.”4 To continue the aforementioned metaphor, the act of disrupting the societal

order, whether through an imposition of one’s selfish intentions or through the dissemination of

rebellious sentiment, was the equivalent of behaving as a detestable lodger in the Tsar’s peaceful

dwelling. Few Muscovite citizens wished to carry this label around.

The implications of this relationship extended far beyond the sociocultural realm. To this

end, the Tsar’s authority and public perception was not contingent upon the leader’s military

record. That is not to imply that early Muscovite Tsars were uninterested in territorial expansion;

they most certainly were. It would suffice to reference Ivan III’s capture of Novgorod in 1478

and the rapid conquest of Siberia in the late sixteenth century to see that Muscovite Tsars would

brook no trespass in their quest for landd. At the same time, these two centuries saw plenty of

military fiascos, such as Ivan the Terrible’s failed Livonian campaign. Not only did Polish-

Lithuanian and Swedish forces handily maintain their territory, but the economic and military

costs attendant to the protracted conflict shook Russia’s very foundation to the core, contributing

to a trend of burgeoning societal discontent that would come to a head during the Time of

Troubles. Furthermore, Donald Ostrowski points out that in 1462, the Grand Prince of Muscovy

“had no standing army to speak of...his armies had to be gathered anew for each campaign, and

demobilized after that campaign was over.”5 In the case of Ivan, his Livonian debacle certainly

did not singlehandedly sow the seeds of grassroots rebellion. Nor did it dilute Ivan’s reputation,

which remained that of a fearsome tyrant. He solidifed this reputation by establishing the

Oprichnina, a murderous and motley group of hardliners (ranging from Boyars to delinquents)

4
Kivelson, “Muscovite Citizenship,” 485.
5
Donald Ostrowskii, “The Growth of Muscovy (1462-1533),” in The Cambridge History of
Russia vol. 2, ed. Maureen Perrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 218.
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that carried out purges of real and perceived enemies of the state across all societal strata. At any

rate, it is evident that Russia’s expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — impressive

though it was — was somewhat held in check by a paucity of intrinsic motivation for large-scale

expansion and modernization, as well as by the absence of a ruler who dared to problematize

Russia’s ossified sociocultural landscape.

With that being said, these two centuries heralded the formulation and application of

several crucial substrates of the imperial model that would ultimately come to undergird Russia’s

development under Peter the Great and his predecessors. Most prominently, Tsars displayed a

willingness to be flexible in their policies. As Karen Barkey contends in Empire of Difference,

“successful empires demonstrate over time that they can exploit these conditions to remain

resilient in the face of change.”6 The nature of the conditions to which Barkey refers will be

examined in the second half of the paper; for the sake of the present discussion, it will suffice to

adopt a broad definition that takes the essential feature of political flexibility to be a willingness

on the part of the leadership to make decisions not on the basis of a dogmatic political ideology,

but on the strength of a concrete situational analysis that does not rule out religious and ethnic

tolerance.

Fifteenth and sixteenth century Muscovy furnishes numerous examples of this sober

pragmatism in action. One such instance centers on the yasak, an onerous tax that the

government imposed upon native Siberian tribes. That such a tax was instituted and assiduously

collected speaks, of course, to the Tsar’s avarice and to Muscovy’s desire to establish “a tangible

manifestation of the natives’ subject status vis-à-vis the Russian suzerain.”7 However, as

6
Barkey, 14.
7
Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-
1800 (Indianaoplis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 61.
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Michael Khodarkovsky astutely recognizes, it is myopic to assume that yasak — as well as other

frontier policies such amanat (hostage-taking) and shert’ (an oath of allegiance) — could be

“equated with the subject status of the indigenous people.”8 In return for their stated allegiance,

natives were given a degree of cultural and political autonomy that was generally divested only

when the government doubted the veracity of the tribe’s allegiance. Furthermore, Khodarkovsky

points out that as early as the 1470s, the Tsar instructed his envoys to ingratiate native tribes with

regular presents and payments, which “was critical to the local ruler’s ability to maintain an

elaborate network of patronage and loyalty by receiving and distributing valuable items among

the ranks of the influential native nobles.”9 This measured policy formed an important cog in

Russia’s political system, by which its sociocultural fabric retained a dynamism that enabled the

burgeoning state to withstand the influx of diverse ethnicities. Centuries later, this dynamism

became the conditio sine qua non of the Petrine and Catherinian revolutions, without which the

deluge of European influence would not have found so welcoming a home in the hearts and

minds of the Russian populace.

Russia’s attitude toward foreign tribes and groups whom it conquered is perhaps best

construed through the paradigm of the “middle ground,” developed by historian Richard White

in reference to the complex interactions between Iroquois Natives and European settlers that took

place in the Great Lakes region through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.10 In broad

terms, the middle ground refers to the pursuit of a mutually agreeable relationship between two

parties with irreconcilable social and cultural differences. The middle ground itself is a frontier

8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50-93.
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zone where the government has not yet established — and may never establish — full control.

There were plenty of such middle grounds in Siberia. As small groups of Russian envoys and

bureaucrats traveled from tribe to tribe, the fact that these tribes had technically been brought

under Russian control could not be further from their minds. It was through universally-

understandable techniques such as gift-giving and oath-swearing that Russia was able to lend

significance and stability to its Siberian conquest. Tprocess of finding a middle ground was far

from smooth — blood was frequently spilled by both parties after a perceived slight or

misunderstanding11— but it was a crucial tool in Russia’s arsenal of expansionary strategies.

A second instantiation of political precocity came in the form of the Zemsky Sobor

(Council of the Land; henceforth unitalicized), a convocation of representatives from various

strata of Russian society first held by Ivan the Terrible in 1549. As an institution, the Sobor

attained neither longevity nor prominence. It quickly lost its representational integrity and, by the

time of its final convocations in the 1680s, had warped into an opaque gathering whose principal

purpose was to imbue the Tsar’s military decisions with an air of public legitimacy. However,

the Sobor’s golden age, so to speak, came during the Time of Troubles, a period of profound

social and political upheaval which stemmed from the death of Ivan the Terrible’s last remaining

son Fedor in 1598, and which ushered in a dynastic imbroglio of epic proportions. The Sobor

was convened several times throughout the Troubles, giving the populace the unprecedented —

and, to some, outright inconceivable — ability to elect the Tsar. As Kivelson and Suny observe,

the merciful ascension of Michael Romanov to the throne in 1613, which put an end to the

Troubles, “enshrined this practice of enacting the vox populi in Muscovite tradition.”12 In light of

11
Khodarkovsky, 63.
12
Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, Russia’s Empires (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 98.
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these considerations, I cannot agree with the authors in praising Liah Greenfeld’s claim that

Peter the Great and Catherine the Great “can be held directly responsible for instilling the idea of

the nation in the Russian elite and awakening it to the potent and stimulating sense of national

pride.”13 The Zemsky Sobor was breathing its final breaths at the time of Peter’s birth, but

political ideas that only a century before appeared metaphysically impossible had firmly

ensconced themselves within Russia’s sociopolitical milieu.

Upon ascending the throne in 1696, Peter had at his disposal a populace that was more

receptive than ever to the radical transformations the young ruler had in store. To this end, it is

myopic to contend that Peter, by dint of these transformations, radically altered the Tsar’s

relationship to the people. At the time of his ascension, the masses already harbored a

relationship to the Tsar that was far removed from the host-lodger archetype that prevailed until

the Time of Troubles. The dynastic entanglement which succeeded Fedor’s death inseminated

widespread doubt among the population about the Tsar’s divine provenance and his ownership of

the land. This doubt was irrevocable; the rise of Michael Romanov may have tempered this

skepticism, but the specter of an elected Tsar, a concept equal parts shocking and terrifying, left

an ineluctable mark upon Russia’s political destiny.

To be sure, Peter and Peter alone merits the credit for capitalizing on this doubt by

effecting the cultural and political refashioning known as the Petrine revolution. Peter, of course,

took to unprecedented lengths the strategy of rule that Karen Barkey terms politics of difference.

He did not merely acknowledge diversity and foreign influence; Russia, primarily in a cultural

sense, became foreign by devoting itself to Europeanization. As Cracraft observes, Peter

redefined the essential substructures of Russian culture: wooden villages, for centuries cowering

13
Liah Greenfeld in Kivelson and Suny, 89.
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under the Promethean whim, were rebuilt according to strict instructions. Moscow itself was not

immune, its sinuous wooden alleyways replaced with expansive boulevards and modern

buildings designed by European experts. “In sum,” Cracraft concludes, “the Petrine revolution

affected every aspect of the building art and sooner or later reached into every part of the

Russian Empire.”14 Nor was the cultural revolution limited to the sphere of architecture: the

Russian language and the military witnessed analogously radical metamorphoses.

In fact, it would be misleading to speak of a Petrine expansion in the conventional sense

of the word. To be sure, Kivelson and Suny affirm that “nearly his entire reign saw Russia

engaged in warfare”, but the concrete territorial gains that stemmed from Russia’s never-ending

military skirmishes with Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Khanate were modest at

best.15 Insofar as one can associate Peter the Great with a kind of expansion, then it is an internal

expansion, a loosening of the ossified sociocultural and economic structure that had weathered

the passage of countless centuries. Apart from the cultural transformation, Peter sowed the seeds

of economic change with his 1722 introduction of the Table of Ranks, as well as with several

lesser known reforms that improved and expanded Russia’s fiscal bureaucracy.16

Before embarking on an analysis of the second half of the eighteenth century, it seems

worthwhile to briefly summarize the arc of Russian state-building from approximately 1450 to

Peter’s death in 1725. To do so, we can observe the way in which Russia transformed from a

provincial state to a full-fledged empire whose polity can be faithfully represented with Barkey’s

“hub-and-spoke network structure”, in which “an empire is a large composite and differentiated

14
James Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2003),
87.
15
Kivelson and Suny, Russia’s Empires, 94.
16
Ibid, 95.
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polity linked to a central power by a variety of direct and indirect relations, where the center

exercises political control through hierarchical and quasi-monopolistic relations over groups

ethnically different from itself.”17 This hub-and-spoke structure derives its potency from two

properties. The first is the lack of communication between the individual spokes on the wheel,

rendering unlikely the possibility of a multi-group insurrection or organized coup. The second is

the government’s imposition of a strategy that fulfills three mandatory conditions: the

embodiment of a supranational ideology, a flexible attitude toward ethnic and religious diversity,

and a societal policy whereby the elites are kept separate from, and dependent on, the central

state.

Even a cursory examination of Russia’s geography yields the conclusion that a hub-and-

spoke model is inherent in its geopolitical fabric. Th presence of numerous types of terrain and

climate, each with its own distinct economy and livelihood, coupled with the vast distances

between them, ensures that the connection between individual spokes is heavily circumscribed.18

This brings us to the three conditions of longstanding imperial rule, the first two of which — the

foundational ethos on whose strength the leader derives power and galvanizes the populace to

obey his rule, and the consistent implementation of politics of difference — we have already

discussed. The third condition — the development of a suitable framework for checking the

power of the elite class — is far less easily observable in the time period under discussion. If one

extends this condition to encompass the development of a functional and dynamic class structure,

then its absence becomes especially striking. Between the Boyar Council, whose relationship

with each Tsar was different and fraught with nefarious intentions, the elites, and serfdom —

17
Barkey, 9.
18
Nancy Kollman, in lecture 01/07/19.
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which even Peter did not dare touch — Russia’s societal landscape appeared during Peter’s reign

to be permanently characterized by dysfunctionality and injustice.

The missing piece of the puzzle, without which Russia’s expansion cannot be fully

understood, is supplied by Catherine the Great, who ruled for virtually the entire second half of

the eighteenth century. Catherine’s epithet can be explained in several ways, one of which is to

emphasize her role as a “devoted servant of her people”, a “demonic worker” who “patronized

the arts” and “selected excellent, qualified military and administrative leaders to guide her

ambitious reforms.”19 In the context of the present discussion, however, Catherine’s greatness is

most usefully construed within the framework of Barkey’s three conditions. To this end, a single

diplomatic maneuver — The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, signed on 21 July 1774 by the Russian

Empire and Ottoman Empire, whom Catherine’s forces vanquished in a six-year conflict —

demonstrates her total command of the proper way to apply the first two conditions. The treaty

represents the very pinnacle of Russian military might, formalizing the defeat of a fearsome

polity which only two centuries previously would have demolished its opponent using but a

fraction of their army. Yet the treaty’s 38 articles offer a textbook application of politics of

difference. Catherine could have easily twisted the knife into the Sultan’s throat with punishing

territorial and financial demands, yet many of the articles evince an attempt to blast flat the

landscape of enmity, to maintain a basis for cooperation and mutual understanding. Article 3, for

instance, stipulates that “All Tartar people…without exception should be recognized by both

Empires as free and completely independent from any outside power, and living under the

19
Nancy Kollmann, The Russian Empire, 1450-1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017),
277.
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autocratic rule of their own khan of the line of Ghenghis Khan.”20 Rather than punishing the

Tatars for their centuries-long loyalty to their Turkish overlords, their knew overlord grants them

no small measure of autonomy, smoothing out the process of military transition.

Catherine’s accomplishments did not stop there. Whereas Peter did not fully tackle the

question of nobility, Catherine set her Empire on a path that held out the promise of healing

societal wounds sustained over centuries and affecting nobility and peasantry alike. As Nancy

Kollmann aptly observes, Catherine’s cultural largesse endeared her to many nobles who pined

for the spirit of the Enlightenment to reach Russia as swiftly as possible. Indeed, Catherine

herself participated in the fomenting of this spirit, authoring “didactic instructions on the

upbringing of children, like counterparts in France, Poland, and elsewhere, but more focused on

duty and service than on individual development.”21 More concretely, she oversaw the

introduction of “laws in the 1760s [that] explicitly prescribed that nobles be given preference in

civil and military appointments”, and made the legal underpinnings of the nobility more clear by

issuing the Charter to Nobility in 1785.22 Serfdom, it is true, remained firmly entrenched within

the societal fabric, but it, too, was the subject of harsh opprobrium by enlightenment thinkers,

whose critiques almost certainly accelerated the pace at which it fell out of favor, ultimately to

be abolished in 1861. On 17 November 1796, the day that the indefatigable empress was felled

by a stroke, Russia was a full-fledged empire in the purest sense of the term.

Ultimately, foolish is the scholar attempts to trace a neat and deterministic path by which

Russia transformed from insignificant duchy to a massive imperial entity that doubled as an

20
“The Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardzhi, July 21, 1774”, in Basil Dmytryshyn, ed., Imperial
Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990), 108.
21
Kollmann, 434.
22
Ibid.
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intellectual and military powerhouse. In the words of great Russian historian V.O. Kliuchevskii,

history itself is “an endless series of facts in an endless variety of combinations”,23 and nowhere

is the impenetrability of this chronological broth more evident than in Russia. To make a serious

attempt at cataloguing and characterizing its strategies of governance and conquest, one must

first accept that the vicissitudes of its historical narrative engender an environment averse to rigid

categorization. It is only at the broadest of theoretical levels, that a general narrative of Russian

state-building can be constructed; it is my hope that I have at least partially teased out the

contours of this arc. It will be up to a scholar altogether more erudite and courageous to delve

past the comforting vagueness of the longue durée in an attempt to more concretely tailor the

theoretical strategies and processes of expansion and processes I have outlined in this paper to

Russia’s sinuous historical record.

23
V.O. Kliuchevskii in Robert F. Byrnes, “Kliuchevskii’s View of the Flow of Russian History,”
The Review of Politics 55, no. 4 (Autumn 1993), 41.
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 Works Cited
Anonymous. “Sobranie A.I. Artem’eva no. 2.” 21 June 1648. Translated by Valerie Kivelson.
Barkey, Karen. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Byrnes, Robert F. “Kliuchevskii’s View of Russian History.” The Review of Politics 55, no.4
(Autumn 1993): 239-261.
Cracraft, James. The Revolution of Peter the Great. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
“The Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardzhi, July 21, 1774”. In Dmytryshyn, Basil, editor. Imperial
Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990.
Khodarkovsky, Michael. Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire. Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 2004.
Kivelson, Valerie. “Muscovite ‘Citizenship’: Rights Without Freedom.” The Journal of Modern
History 74, no.3 (Sept. 2002): 465-489.
Kivelson, Valerie and Suny, Ronald Grigor. Russia’s Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017.
Kollmann, Nancy. The Russian Empire, 1450-1801. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Ostrowskii, Donald. “The Growth of Muscovy (1462-1533).” In Perrie, Maureen, editor. The
Cambridge History of Russia vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
White, Richard. The Middle The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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