empire of the tsars Terra Nullius
British colonists applied English law to any territory that they found lawless; they called this foundational principle of imperialism terra nullius. A land was construed as empty even though it was inhabited. This claim terminated all existing customs, property rights, and lines of inheritance in the land. In practice, this principle was followed a long time before it was codified by the British (Gosden 2004). For the eighteenth-century physiocrats, terra nullius justified imperial domination by claiming the duty to cultivate the land: those who did not do it in the way that was considered proper were not recognized by law (Nelson 2009; Boucher 2010). The principle of terra nullius was metaphorically connected to the biblical idea of creation ex nihilo and to Locke's idea of tabula rasa, creating a comfortable unity of imperial politics, theology, and epistemology (Arneil 1996; Bauman 2009).
Terra nullius probably was an intuitive strategy of Peter I, but this idea is more evident in the writings of those imperial intellectuals who glorified his rule throughout the nineteenth century. Peter presented himself as the creator not only of the Russian Empire, but of the land, of the people, and even of himself. He did change many laws and institutions, but he wished to exaggerate their novelty even more; he played a foreign conqueror, suggests Richard Wortman (1995: 1/44). One hundred years after Peter's death, the imperial Minister of Finances, Egor Kankrin, said that Peter had changed the Russians so much that they had better stop calling themselves Russians and start calling themselves Petrovians, and their land Petrovia (Riasanovsky 1985: 109). The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky developed the analogy between Russian history and the book of Genesis even further: "With his powerful 'Let there be . . . !' Peter dispelled the chaos, separated the light from the darkness, and called the country to its great, global destiny" (Belinsky 1954: 5/117). Belinsky called upon the Russian historians to terminate their debates about Rurik and to focus on Peter, who was "incomparably more important" for the creation of the state (Belinsky 1954: 5/94). Piotr Chaadaev wrote that "in his hand Peter the Great found only a blank sheet of paper"; he "swept away all our old institutions; he dug out an abyss between our past and our present" (Ermichev and Zlatopol'skaia 1989: 205, 225). Completed in 1782, the Bronze Horseman, the monument to Peter in the center of St. Petersburg, showed Peter and his horse jumping to the present over an abyss.
Both Chaadaev and Pushkin were eager to call Peter's period a "revolution" (Riasanovsky 1985: 104; Etkind 2001b: 32). If it was a "revolution," as some historians also believe (Kagarlitsky 2003: 222; Cracraft 2004), it followed the Dutch and English revolutions but preceded those in America, France, and Haiti. Working on his unfinished novel, Peter the Great's Negro, Pushkin presented the story of his ancestor, the black African Abram Gannibal, as an exemplary case of reshaping humankind:
With grief, Peter saw that his subjects resisted the Enlightenment and in the interest of proving the changes that could be wrought on a perfectly foreign breed of man, asked his envoy to send him a talented little Arab. . . . The Emperor was very satisfied with the boy and educated him diligently, always with this goal in mind. (Pushkin 1995: 67)
Having refashioned his valet from a harem boy into an artillery officer, Peter failed with larger tasks, said Pushkin: his subjects "persisted with their beards," and "Asian ignorance reigned over the tsar's court" (1995: 64). This was reversed orientalism in action: while a black African was fully accepted as an individualized, powerful figure, Russian subjects were orientalized in a non-differentiated, anonymous way. Pushkin's ancestor, the black builder of a fort in Siberia and a port in Estonia, was an admirably imperial figure (Barnes 2005). However, for the idea of terra nullius he was rather a counterexample. Gannibal did not downplay his black origins but, instead, publicly celebrated them, and Pushkin followed his example. As a Russian noble, Gannibal chose a coat of arms with an elephant in the center. He built a manor house near Pskov in a Southern style that was unknown to the Russian province. Still, "Fortuna vitam meam mutavit optime" was his motto ("Chance changed my life entirely") (Leetz 1980: 117; Teletova 1989).
"Immobility and petrification belong to Asia like the soul belongs to the body," wrote Belinsky, an extreme orientalist, as Said defined the term. Drawing a picture of the pre-Petrine Russia as the land of ignorance and torture, Belinsky saw it "Asian, barbarian, Tartar" (Belinsky 1954: 5/103). He applied terra nullius to a period of history rather than a piece of land. In Chaadaev's philosophy of history, "the starting point defines destiny," and this starting point for Russians was either Rurik, or Peter, or both (for more details, see Etkind 2001b: 21-34). In 1836, Chaadaev's essay in the journal Telescope caused a scandal. Nicholas I exiled the editor of Telescope, the philosopher Nikolai Nadezhdin, and put Chaadaev under house arrest.
Figure 8: The coat of arms of Abram Gannibal (c. 1742). Source: Grigiorii Fridman, Gipotezy i legendy o proiskhozhdenii Abrama Gannibala, Zametki po evreiskoj istorii, 2/63, 2006
A military doctor, Ivan Iastrebtsov, was sent to visit him daily to check his state of mind. He became one of Chaadaev's disciples. Under the pressure, all three men articulated a new idea. Russia's freedom from historical legacies was not a liability but an advantage. Precisely because of their innocence, Russia and the Russians were ideal objects for imperial transformation. Iastrebtsov wrote with a reference to his patient and friend Chaadaev: "Russia is free of prejudice. . . . It is as if the past does not exist for Russia. . . . Its people are white paper, write on them" (1833: 197). From his exile, Nadezhdin formulated emphatically and almost comically:
We are children, and our childhood makes our happiness. . . . With our simple, virgin nature, unspoiled by any prejudice, one can do what is needed without labor and without violence. It is possible to shape us into perfection as if we are a pure, soft wax. Oh, what an unimaginable advantage before the Europeans we have with our saintly, blissful childhood! (1998: 96)