Turner explored the modern developments on the frontier, while Soloviev restricted his use of the concept of Russia's self-colonization to its "ancient," i.e. early medieval, history. This difference is not as serious as it sounds because there is nothing in the concept of colonization that prevents using it for the modern Russian period; indeed, as we will see shortly, Kliuchevsky made this move, but Soloviev did not. While Turner focused on the characteristic culture of the western frontier and explored the mechanisms of its impact on the eastern states, Soloviev did not produce a comparable portrait of the external line of colonization. However, historians have produced remarkable studies of various parts of the Russian frontier.[5] The pioneers of the frontline - the hunter, the trader, and the sectarian - were similar, but the second and third lines of colonization were vastly different. In America, as Turner saw it, lands behind the frontier were cultivated in a regular "four-stages order" by ranchers, farmers, and industrialists. The frontier was pushing the cultivated space to the west. In Russia throughout centuries, the movement of the colonization line to the east left huge lands behind it as virginal as they had been. Later, these empty spaces had to be colonized again, and then again. America's frontier and Russia's colonization had different topologies, the former relatively continuous, the latter leaving in its wake holes, pockets, and folds.
Mapping these internal lands was tough; exploring the peoples who populated them was no easier (Widdis 2004; Tolz 2005). Although in various segments of the immense frontline of Russia's external colonization, "middle grounds" were created that hybridized the colonized and the colonizers, these synthetic cultures were local, variegated, and dispersed over huge stretches of time and space. It is all but impossible to describe them all in one ethno-sociological portrait, as Turner did in his work on the American frontier. Developing centrifugally, these local formations were crucial to the economic development of Russian centers, from Novgorod to Moscow to St.
Petersburg. With gunpowder, alcohol, and germs on their side, the Russians exterminated, absorbed, or displaced many of their neighbors. But these processes took centuries. Multiple waves of adventure, violence, labor, and breeding rolled between Russia's centers and the moving frontline of colonization. Culturally thin, Russia's frontier was geographically broad. However much it changed with time, it always covered huge areas of space. Within these areas, there was no regular transition from hunting to herding or from planting to industrial development. Sometimes trapping remained the only profitable business for centuries; huge cities were sometimes built on land that had never been ploughed. Even Russian capitals were established on territories that were foreign to their founders. Indeed, the lands of Novgorod and Kiev were as foreign to the Varangians who ruled there as the land of St. Petersburg was for the Muscovites. From the borders to the capitals, the space of internal colonization extended throughout Russia.
Shchapov and Zoological Economy
A significant influence on the further development of the self- colonization idea was the historian Afanasii Shchapov, who wrote most of his works not when he was a university professor, but when he was either a state official or a political exile. He was the first who actually thought of Russian colonization not as a vigorous adventure but as a bloody, genuinely political process. It had its victims as well as victors, and the task of a historian was to see both. Teaching history at Kazan Imperial University in the late 1850s, Shchapov sorted out an ecclesiastical archive of the Solovetsky monastery in the far north, which was evacuated to land-locked Kazan as Russia was preparing for the Crimean War (the monastery, thousands of miles from the Crimea, was nonetheless bombed by the British navy in 1854). It was in this remote archive that the leading historian of the next generation, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, wrote his first monograph about "the monastery colonization" of northern Russia; his first critical review was also on Shchapov, of whom he had a "very high opinion" (Nechkina 1974: 434). But by then Shchapov was no longer in Kazan. In 1861, he was accused of fomenting unrest, was arrested, brought to Petersburg, pardoned by the Tsar, and, in a sensational move, was appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Later, exiled to his native Siberia, he still published his revisionist articles in the mainstream Russian journals.
Agreeing with Soloviev that the history of Russia was the history of colonization, Shchapov described the process as a "millennium of colonization and cultivation of woods and swamps, the fight with Finnish, Mongol, and Turkish tribes" (1906: 2/182). An ethnic Creole - son of a Russian deacon and a Siberian Buriat - Shchapov emphasized racial mixing more than any other Russian historian. He was also the true pioneer of ecological history. Two methods of colonization were primary: "fur colonization," with hunters harvesting and depleting the habitats of fur animals and moving further and further across Siberia all the way to Alaska; and "fishing colonization," which supplied Russian centers with fresh- or salt-water fish and caviar. In this attempt at ecological history, Shchapov made an important step forward from Soloviev.
From Rurik the Varangian to Ivan the Terrible, Russia's wealth was measured in fur. Coining the concept of "zoological economy," Shchapov understood fur as the clue to Russia's colonization (1906: 2/280-93, 309-37). Beaver led the Russians to the place where they founded Novgorod; grey squirrel secured them the wealth of Moscow; sable led them to the place that became mapped as Siberia; sea otter brought them to Alaska and California. Throughout the Middle Ages and what elsewhere was known as the Renaissance, man-made migrations of small, wild, furry animals defined the expansion of Russia. Winter roads, trade stations, and militarized storehouses for fur spanned across Eurasia, playing roles that were not dissimilar from the Great Silk Route in medieval Asia. Ecologically, colonization also meant deforestation. "Agricultural colonization" followed "fur colonization" and gradually replaced it. It was not a sword but an axe that moved Russia's colonization, said Shchapov, with the plough following the axe. But the bow and the trap preceded them all. For Shchapov, colonization was an easy and positive concept, which he used on almost every page of his wordy and warm writings. It meant the multi-edged process of exploring, populating, cultivating, and depleting new lands. Russia's colonization had to be understood as parallel histories of peoples moved, animals exterminated, and plants cultivated. It was an unprecedented vision, multidimensional, environmental, and human.
Kliuchevsky and Modernity
Decades later, Kliuchevsky repeated the motto of his teacher, Soloviev, and revised it in one significant respect, which I attribute to the influence of Shchapov: "The history of Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself. . . . [T]his centuries-long movement has continued until the current moment" (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/31). If for Soloviev, Russia's self-colonization started in ancient times and stopped in the Middle Ages, Kliuchevsky extended this concept well into the modern age. When he revised his work in 1907, he added a long passage about the early twentieth-century state-sponsored migrations to Siberia, Central Asia, and the Pacific Coast, in which he saw the newest manifestations of the "centuries-long movement of Russia's colonization." It was the only significant change that Kliuchevsky made in his multi-volume Course of Russian History for its new edition. Covering Russia's long history from ancient to modern times, he wished to apply the concept of colonization to his era as well.
Talking about the ancient Russians, Soloviev gave a description of the Russian national character that was widely quoted: