There is no American in the United States . . . who speaks the language of the red-skinned. .. . In his colonies, a fat, phlegmatic Hollander looks at the natives as a tribe that God created for service and slavery, as cattle and not as human. . . . The Russian looks at the dwellers of the enormous Northern land as his brothers. The Siberians often use the language of their neighbors, the Yakuts and the Buriats. A dashing Cossack marries a Chechen, a peasant marries a Tartar or Mordovian, and Russia finds its joy and glory in the great-grandson of the Negro whom the American proselytes of equality would have refused to consider a citizen. (Khomiakov 1871: 1/107)
Fireworks
Domination can be effective with or without shared language, beliefs, and schooling; but hegemony presupposes a common culture. Throughout two centuries, the Empire experimented with various combinations of these factors. Gunpowder was a major factor that made it possible for the Empire to acquire and control its enormous space. The early drivers of Russian industrialization, canons and rifles figured in every confrontation between the Empire and its subjects from the Time of Troubles. It was only because of two unique features of firearms, their killing power and the ease of controlling their proliferation, that the state could monopolize violence on its territory. The sail created Britain's Empire, the canon created Russia's.
But of course the gun was important for all modern empires. In Russia, gunpowder, the universal substance of domination, also provided a means of hegemony over the hearts and minds of the imperial subjects. In rare moments of unity, salutes and fireworks provided an official language that integrated the sophisticated and the illiterate, those who understood the changing assortment of languages of the Empire and those who did not. In its ability to emulate the acts of God, fireworks affirmed and allowed the Empire to speak with its subjects in a language of light, movement, and explosion that was uniquely free of culture.
Starting with Peter I and through a large part of the High Imperial Period, fireworks demonstrated the might and beauty of the Empire. The actual fireworks were over-saturated with allegorical meanings;
they impressed everyone, but only the culturally literate deciphered their subtle messages. Emblems and verses literally shone, whirled, and exploded in the heavens, emulating the acts of God via the rituals of the Empire. Peter saw the connection between fireworks and firearms: those subjects who were used to the fun of fireworks would withstand the fire of cannons, he asserted. To celebrate the victory over the Swedes in 1710, a flaming Russian eagle launched a rocket into a burning Swedish lion. The scale was truly modern: in 1732 on the Neva, 30,000 torches could be ignited in two minutes (Sarieva 2000: 89). Creating fireworks in St. Petersburg was one of the main functions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, a way in which it proved its utility to the state. These regular events were among the few festivities in imperial Russia which involved both the masses and the elite, the first means of mass communications. Fireworks represented battles, landscapes, maps, and other images of colonial conquest - Turkish forts, Swedish ships, and once in 1748, even a Siberian pine tree (Werrett 2010). The coronation of Catherine the Great included a firework with "an allegorical figure of Russia" accompanied by a 101-gun salute (Wortman 1995: 1/118). In 1789, there appeared a do-it-yourself instruction for those gentlemen who wished to impress their families and serfs with fireworks on their estates (Sarieva 2000). In 1857, Nikolai Ignatiev was traveling through Central Asia with a group of Cossacks. Attacked by hundreds of Turkomans, he dispersed them with fireworks. Allegedly, they were so impressed by "the Devil's fire" that they "craved forgiveness" (Stead 1888: 272). Andrei Bolotov, a Russian officer who studied philosophy in Konigsberg, subtly interpreted the function of fireworks as "blinding the common people with [their] very splendor" (1986: 448).
Man-made images of paradise, fireworks illustrated the most difficult tenet of imperial philosophy, the power to transform nature and sublimate culture by the sheer will of the sovereign. For those few who understood the Russian technology of manufacturing gunpowder from manure, ashes, and filth, the process of sublimation seemed even more impressive. There was a universalist energy in these performances that could, if but for a moment, integrate the free and the bound, the rich and the poor, in one awesome climax. No other experience was as inter-estate, cross-ethnic and therefore multicultural as were fireworks. Firearms were means of domination; fireworks were means of hegemony.
But as the enterprising subjects of the empire eroded the state monopolies on both firearms and fireworks, the High Imperial Period was coming to its end. "Gunpowder in Russia is no more precious than sand," quipped a Danish envoy to the court of Peter I (Juel 1899: 257), and there was a predictive power in his observation. The same black powder that was employed for defeating enemies and celebrating victories was also used for assassinating emperors and overthrowing the Empire.
Disciplinary Gears
Serfdom has become an increasingly unpopular subject in post-Soviet historiography; the contrast between the non-existent Serfdom Studies in Russia and the booming Slavery and African American Studies in the USA could not be stronger. In what remains the best study of serfdom, the American historian Stephen Hoch researched the archive of a large estate near Tambov, a black-soil region of European Russia and a proverbial territory of the Russian interior. In the early nineteenth century, the peasants' productivity and diet on this estate were equal to or better than what was common in Germany or France. The difference lay in their motivation, property rights, and principles of management. Since neither the land nor a major share of the product belonged to the peasants, they worked under the threat of corporal punishment, which was used routinely. In Hoch's data, in about 1826, 79 percent of males were flogged at least once, and 24 percent twice a year. For more serious misdemeanors, peasants were also shaved on one side of the head (Hoch 1989: 162).