The Siberians of the 17th and 18th centuries were part of the movement in which they were caught . . . yet we are expected to fall on our knees and bow to heroes. As a matter of fact they were, at best, very ordinary men and some of them were vicious and depraved. . . . In every seaport town and in every frontier community one will find [similar] men. (Quoted from Lantzeff and Pierce 1973: 224)
Two Californian historians, Harold Fisher (who was Golder's associate in the ARA) and George V. Lantzeff, continued Golder's work (Dubie 1989; Emmons and Patenaude 1992). Writing in the 1950s, Lantzeff (in his introduction to Lantzeff and Pierce 1973) stated that "no search for any single commodity has ever resulted in the acquisition of as huge an area as the one acquired by Russia in this quest." One could add that no other quest for any single commodity has been so well forgotten in the history of human suffering. We know a thing or two about Cortez or Kurtz; but looking at the splendid portraits of British kings, nobody thinks about those little peoples in the Arctic who exchanged these furs for "protection."
Space Through Time
Catherine the Great justified monarchical rule in Russia by its unusually large territory. But how was this territory acquired in the first place? She asserted that the Russian Empire appropriated a big part of the world, "from the Irtysh River to the Kuril Islands," because of the Russians' "proclivity for adventure" (Ekaterina II 1869: 256). Catherine misrepresented a crude economic reality: this land was taken in the quest for fur. However, the Russian Empire retained its hold on the colonized land even after the fur was depleted. With the one big exception of Alaska, the areas of the fur trade were all held under Russian sovereignty even after this trade was discontinued and the lands had no mercantile value. In the nineteenth century, these lands were used mainly as penal colonies. Even Soviet military- industrial sites did not change this large picture. A huge expanse of northern Eurasia, of a size much larger than Europe, remains underdeveloped and underpopulated (Hill and Gaddy 2003).
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these lands of the fur trade have played a new and precious role, which feels uncannily similar to the old one. The same geographical areas that fed the fur trade of medieval Novgorod and Moscow have provided the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia with their means for existence. The oil and gas fields of western Siberia have been found in those very spaces that the greedy sons of Novgorod colonized for the fur trade with the Iugra, Hanty, Mansi, and others. Like then, with the exhaustion of older sites, the drillers are moving eastwards, to the coasts and islands of the Pacific. The main consumers of Russian gas and oil are also located in many of those same places, from Hamburg to London, which consumed Russian fur. The large pipelines of Gazprom run along the terrestrial route, from Moscow through Poland to Leipzig and further to the west, which was used for the export of fur. The future North Stream, the underwater pipeline that will provide northern and Western Europe with gas from western Siberia, runs almost precisely along the routes of the ancient Hanseatic trade.
Geographically, this resemblance is accidental. Aesthetically, fur and oil could not be more different. Ecologically, there is no correlation either: people drill for oil and gas in forests as well as in deserts, but fur animals are to be found only in forests. But politically, there is much in common between an economy that relies on the export of fur and an economy that relies on the export of gas. Both economies are victims of the resource curse, the one-sided development of a highly profitable extraction industry that leaves the rest of the economy uncompetitive and undeveloped. In the longue duree of Russian history, taxing the trade in these commodities has become the source of income for the state; organizing their extraction, its preoccupation; securing the lines of transportation that stretch across Eurasia, its responsibility. The extraction takes highly specialized skills that have little to do with the occupations of other parts of the population. Very few people take part in business, with the result that the state does not care about the population and the population does not care about the state. A caste-like society emerges in these conditions. The security apparatus becomes identical to the state.
This is the political economy of what Arendt called "the mass man's superfluousness," a situation that she believed to be foundational for totalitarian rule (1966: 311). More recently, institutional economics has described two modes of relations between resources, the state, and the subjects (North et al. 2009). In the "natural state," a dominant group limits access to valuable resources, creates rents out of these resources, and rules over the population by applying suppression and bribery. A different social order is "the open access state," which controls internal violence by providing equal opportunities to its citizens. In such a society, there is no legal or metaphysical difference between the elite and the populus. Historically, the lack of natural resources leads to the development of human capital and the creation of the open-access system, while the abundance of such resources keeps a state in its resource-bound condition. However, there are many exceptions from this rule of thumb. Norway and Canada remain balanced economies despite the abundance of oil. Holland overcame its mid-twentieth-century "Dutch disease." In Russia, Trotsky's "unevenness of development" meant that while some regions in some periods were entirely dependent on raw commodities such as fur, other regions developed crafts, processing industries, and labor shortages. Politically, resource-dependence can be dealt with. Historically, it can come and go.
There have been two resource-bound periods of Russian history: the era of fur and the era of gas. Historically discontinuous, these two periods feature uncanny similarities - structural and geographic, essential and accidental. Processing these commodities is unusually messy. The state's dependence on them makes the population superfluous. Extracting, storing, and delivering these resources makes security more important than liberty. Reliance on these resources destroys the environment, natural and cultural. And as fur was centuries ago, so oil too is counted in barrels.
We know how the first period ended. The depletion of the key resource, fur, drove the state into a major crisis. It forced a radical change in Muscovite mores, which included the election of a new dynasty by vote, the import of the European Enlightenment, and the institution of the formal empire. The state redirected its colonization activities from the fur-rich eastern forests to the grain-rich southern steppes, and later to the silk-rich Transcaucasia and cotton-rich Central Asia. However, nothing in this later history would be comparable in profitability, duration, and scale of expansion to the fur trade. Consumers also changed, though it is amusing to notice how long it took the west to kick its fur habit.
Part III
Empire of the Tsars
Occult Instability
In 1849, an organizer of settlements in New Zealand blamed British colonial administrators for being "deeply convinced of the inferiority or nothingness of the other classes." To strengthen the argument, he said that these people had already been "more privileged than any class in any European country at present, excepting Russia perhaps" (Wakefield 1849: 59). In New Zealand and other British colonies, the distance between the privileged and the underprivileged was structured by race, defined primarily as the color of the skin. Visible race marked the total sum of differences between human groups and had a particular kind of metrics. It squeezed the variety of humanity into a few categories, white, black, and everything in between (Gates 1985). But in a society of internal colonization that had annexed, absorbed, and exterminated its others, almost everyone was of one and the same color. To play the function of race, this society created estates, a legal category that was also similar in function to caste. Like race, estate defined people's roles and regulated their relations. Like caste, it was inherited and for many practical purposes, unchangeable. Like race and caste, estate clashed with capitalism and the early attempts at democratic politics. Race was supposedly biological and estate was supposedly legal, but both constructs belonged to culture. The cultural construction of race naturalized power; the cultural construction of estate legalized it. The larger the distances these constructions created, the less stable they were. Low estates, races, or castes were particularly unsteady. It was, as the Caribbean psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote about the colonial situation, "the zone of occult instability where the people dwell" (1967: 183).