After Chaadaev's scandal, this idea of Russian civic infantilism became common. The critic Belinsky wrote that the Russian people were "fresh, young, and virgin" (1954: 5/119). The historian Soloviev wrote more specifically that the Russian man in the eighteenth century was "perfectly clean and ready to perceive the new ways - in a word, he was a child" (1856: 500). Changing its metaphors from white paper to pure wax and from barbarity to infancy to virginity, the idea of terra nullius affirmed the transformative energy of the imperial power.
Point of Rule
In one of the first Russian victories of the Northern War (1700-21), Peter I took the delta of the Neva. With a fort there, he restored control over the strategic river route from the Baltic Sea to the great Russian lakes and Novgorod. In 1712, Peter transferred a part of his administration, military and civil, to St. Petersburg (many offices remained in Moscow for another 50 years). By the right of conquest, the land was his. But the right of conquest functioned in the colonies; in eighteenth-century Europe, international treaties transferred land from one state to another. According to these treaties, Swedish rule over this territory was confirmed in 1617 and remained valid until 1721. "In Russia, the center is at the periphery," wrote Kliuchevsky (2001). Even more, the imperial capital was established on foreign land. Peter "needed a land entirely new, without tradition, where the Russians would find themselves in an entirely new space and could not help but change their mores and habits," explained Belinsky (1954: 5/145).
The new land was called Ingria. Under Russian rule, it kept its name and identity for a number of years. Peter even created the Duchy of Ingria there, but the land was treated as terra nullius, with no legacy or identity apart from the idea that it should be Russian. Sparsely populated by dispersed Finnish people, Ingria was not very appealing. The low land, the barely passable harbor, and regular flooding precluded urban development. But Peter loved his place on the Neva. It was deceptively similar to Amsterdam, where the young tsar spent his apprenticeship. The memory of the Hansa was still alive on these banks. In order to shape Russia as if it was an empty land, Peter needed an external point of leverage from whence to push the project.
The historian Nikolai Karamzin in 1811 mocked Peter's project as "turning Russia into Holland" (1991: 36). Having spent four months with the East India Company in Amsterdam, Peter was aware of Dutch colonial practices, mercantilist theories, and Calvinist energy. A mercenary from Geneva, Franz Lefort, a major influence on Peter who accompanied him on the European tour, had introduced him to his adventurous Calvinism even before their trip to Holland in 1697. Late seventeenth-century Holland was the commercial leader of Europe and the cradle of the radical Enlightenment. No less importantly, Holland was the center of the world's largest empire, whose sources of wealth spread as far away from Amsterdam as Russia's did from St. Petersburg.
There were (and are) no two countries more different in Europe than Russia and Holland. However, Russia was not alone in choosing to follow this model. Prussia was also reshaping itself after Holland, with huge success. Historical sociologists generalize that, for changes of this scale, the alliance between an enthusiastic sovereign and a popular religious awakening was always crucial (Gorski 2003). Frederick William of Prussia counted on Pietism, but Peter ostracized the Russian religious activism in which he saw just another expression of barbarity. His reform of Russian Orthodoxy submitted the church to the state and left no place for popular enthusiasm.
Historians have variously described Petrine policies as "reforms," "modernization," or "revolution." Arguably, they were a decisive move in Russia's internal colonization, with a Calvinist touch. This colonization was mainly about the population rather than about the territory. While the resource-bound Muscovite economy largely left the people to themselves, the emerging Empire was dependent upon its population. Peter's subjects "are his only mines of gold and silver," wrote a foreign observer (Hughes 1998: 135). Starting with Peter, taxation, draft, disciplinary innovations, and grassroot resistance marked the history of the Empire. To transform a tribute-based domain into a bureaucratic, tax-collecting, law-abiding state was a task that Peter started and nobody completed (Raeff 1983). His economic ideas are mostly understood as an authoritarian version of Dutch and British mercantilism. For these competing empires, mercantilism was a strategy of maximizing the income of the mother countries by monopolizing their dealings with their daughter colonies. From his apprenticeship in old and new imperial centers,
Konigsberg, Amsterdam, and London, Peter learned the rules of this game. But he also knew what some historians still find it hard to comprehend: that in Russia, the mother and the daughter were the same and the Emperor was their master. Practiced though never theorized by Peter, this incestuous idea revised the calculus of mercantilism. Having its colonies inside itself, Peter's Empire did not bother about tariffs, piracy, and trade surplus, the concerns of the mercantilist Europe. Most importantly, the Empire did not bother about the incomes in the mother country. Having imposed a poll tax and other duties on the Russian population, Peter's financiers could ignore the imperial shareholders, because, apart from the crown, there were none. They extracted smart colonial profits without being concerned with the greedy rentiers of the metropolitan lands. It was a good deal for the Empire.
As built by Peter and his heirs, the new Russian capital embodied the universalist imaginary of ancient Rome. The results were magnificent and disruptive. They erased not only the vague memory of the native semi-Christian, semi-shamanistic tribes of Ingria, but also the traditional culture of Russia. There was no resemblance between the imperial St. Petersburg and the medieval Moscow or Novgorod. Struggling to over-compensate for its self-perceived backwardness, the Empire amassed huge collections of European art, purchased Europe's best architects and sculptors, and trained Russian artists in European academies (Cracraft 1997). Russian museums document a full break between the imperial culture and the pre- Petrine past. Leaving the rooms of "icons" and entering the wing of "Russian art," one feels the same rupture as when moving from a section of native art into the imperial section in any colonial museum in America, Australia, or India. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the imperial arts became increasingly similar all over the world, with the result that there is more resemblance between the imperial art of India and the imperial art of Russia than there is between either of them and their own folk arts.
Founded by a great warrior, St. Petersburg was first and foremost a military capital. Peter and Paul Fortress was its focal point and many of its spectacular squares, parks, and edifices were the living and training quarters of the Imperial Guard. The Guard was the supreme master of the city and the Empire. It started and ended wars, ran balls and duels, enthroned and dethroned emperors and empresses, and glorified or killed romantic poets. Officers of the Guard were partially European and largely bilingual; soldiers were overwhelmingly Russian. Until 1762, the gentry was obliged to serve. Peter III abolished this regime, but a career in the Guard and, later in life, in a provincial administration remained the typical path for a gentleman. Disseminating the ways and manners of the imperial capital throughout the provinces, these careers helped to colonize the Empire.
A diplomat from Hanover wrote in 1714 that the new capital was still "a heap of villages linked together, like some plantation in the West Indies" (Hughes 1998: 215). Forcing the court and government to move to St. Petersburg meant that this time not only the peasants but also the gentry were subject to a mass resettlement. Reportedly, families lost about two-thirds of their capital in the move (Rogger 1960: 12). The new capital emulated Amsterdam not only in its islands and channels, but also by being very far from the vital sources of the imperial economy. Grain, timber, and even stone for the new city were delivered from the heartlands. The gentry had to abandon the old way of living off their estates; accustomed to getting their supplies for free, they had to buy them for prices that were five times higher than in the central provinces.