The mechanism of land grants to the state servitors was not different from what went on, during approximately the same period, in many parts of the colonized world, from the American South to New Zealand. To make money on these lands, servitors needed labor. This labor could be found locally or had to come from afar. In either case, the new masters of the land had to employ various regimes of coercion. The choice was narrow, from slavery to serfdom, with hired labor as a distant possibility. Already, Soloviev and Kliuchevsky understood the low density of the population as the cause of serfdom, and contemporary economists agree (Domar 1970; Millward 1982). In the newly colonized lands, labor was brought from afar, as in the British colonies. In central Russia, it was already there, but the peasants had to be guarded so that they would not leave their native land. In its original form, serfdom was an institution of the internal colonization of the Russian heartland.
But external colonization also required peasant labor. Masters could resettle their serfs to new lands or buy serfs and transport them to a new settlement. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these forced resettlements of serfs were massive operations; they were also expensive (Sunderland 1993). Since nobody would move, guard, and feed hundreds of families without expecting a profit, these colonial resettlements changed the nature of serfdom. The leading Marxist historian of the 1920s, Mikhail Pokrovsky, acknowledged the development of "plantation serfdom" in Russia only in the early nineteenth century (2001: 10; also Kagarlitsky 2003). It is meaningful that the most important Russian novel about serfdom, Gogol's Dead Souls, is a story of the resettlement project.
In his major work of 1885, The Origins of Serfdom in Russia, Kliuchevsky argued that early serfdom was not introduced by the state, but grew as a result of multiple deals in which peasants could not pay back rents and other debts to landowners (1956: 7/245). Instead, they accepted lifelong contracts that deprived them of personal freedom. Later, these contracts were codified by the state. As a model for this speculation, Kliuchevsky used the study of the Roman "colonate" by the French classicist, Fustel de Coulanges, whose books were later translated by Kliuchevsky's friends. Coulanges argued that the colonate, an institution of bondage in the late Roman Empire and Byzantium that acted as a gray zone between slavery and free farming, grew from the debts of peasants. When free peasants became "colons," their lords owned them and their descendants; their freedom was restrained (Coulanges 1908). Like the Russian serfs, the Roman colons were used both in the new Roman colonies and in the Italian heartland. Etymologically and historically, these Roman colons rested at the very origins of the idea of colony and colonialism (Morris 1900: 1/6).
The enserfment of Russians by Russians was a mechanism of internal colonization, a regime of population management, and an institution of production. Order rather than profit was its utility function; coercion rather than investment was its method; the reproduction of the population and the colonization of land rather than the production of goods was its purpose.
German Colonies
In 1763, after taking the Russian throne by force, Catherine the Great issued the Manifesto that invited foreign colonists to settle in Russia and promised substantial benefits to the immigrants, such as free agricultural land, exemption from military service, relocation subsidies, free loans, and tax immunity for 30 years (Bartlett 1979: 3). They were guaranteed freedom of faith. Those newcomers who would like to establish factories (the Manifesto called them "capitalists") would be able to purchase serfs. Attached was a long list of available lands, from western Russia to Siberia. The official name for the future immigrants was "colonists." Catherine created a special chancellery to take care of the colonists and commissioned her favorite, a hero of the Seven Years War, Grigorii Orlov, to head this agency. As Orlov explained in his report to the Imperial Senate in 1764, with the accommodation of the large numbers of colonists, "Russia will seem no longer to be as strange and wild as it has seemed until now, and the firm prejudice against it will inconspicuously disappear" (Svod 1818: 5/128). The idea of the civilizing mission was redirected from the margins of the Empire to this empire's exotic interior. Ideologically, internal colonies were also connected to Catherine's vague desire to abolish serfdom, with foreign or native colonists replacing serfs in some sectors of the economy. But this experiment was realized only in a few estates belonging to the royal family (Bartlett 1979: 92).
In the post-Westphalian world, moving Germans around the world was a business. Prussia moved large groups of colonists into the reclaimed territories on the Rhine and settled large numbers of Calvinists from France, a success that Catherine II tried to repeat in Russia. England used German conscripts to suppress the rebellion in America, a plan that Catherine rejected when the Brits offered her a profitable deal. Lured by the riches of Russia, foreign advisers came to help its enlightened Amazonian Empress. A French adventurist and later famous writer, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, arrived in Russia in 1762 with a plan to establish a "European colony" to the east of the Caspian Sea. This colony would pacify the natives "with the power of example or arms." It would cultivate the desert and open trade with India. Bernardin asked Catherine II for a loan of 150,000 rubles but did not receive this huge sum of money. He became famous for his novel, Paul and Virginie, set in the French Mauritius, but before he died in 1814, he was working on a major novel that was set in Siberia. The story was set in 1762, when Bernardin was in Russia, and Catherine's coup d'etat is repeatedly referred to as a "revolution" (Cook 1994, 2006). Another adventurous Frenchman, Abbe Raynal, in his History of Two Indies explained:
The best method [for Russia] would be to choose out one of the most fertile provinces of the empire and . . . to invite free men from civilized countries. . . . From thence the seeds of liberty would spread all over the empire. .. . We are not to bid them [Russians] to be free; but we are to lay before their eyes the sweets of liberty. (Raynal 1777: 248)
Later, Raynal visited St. Petersburg and met Catherine, but his History was not welcome there. In 1765, Catherine invited a trustworthy German, the pastor Johann Reinhold Forster, to promote the first steps of colonization on the Volga. He came along with his adolescent son, George, mapped the new colonies and took part in the efforts to create a legal code for them (Bartlett 1979: 100). There were rumors in St. Petersburg that Forster wished to create his own colony (Dettelbach 1996: lx). He was never paid for his service, but the publication of his maps with the Royal Society was his first scholarly achievement (Forster 1768). As for his son, George Forster, then aged 11, his first work was a translation of Lomonosov. Both Forsters became famous later, when they took part in James Cook's second expedition.
For the media-savvy Catherine, it seemed perfectly correct to call the organized immigration of Europeans into Russia "colonization," the newly cultivated areas, "colonies," and the new subjects, "colonists." The colonization of what? The Russian Empire. Colonization by whom? European settlers. Under whose authority and in whose interest? The Russian Empire. While many newcomers took money and perished in the open steppe, one particular category of settlers redeemed the project. The successful colonists were the heirs of the radical Reformation and supporters of very special ways of life, some of the strangest people who ever lived in Europe. Persecuted in many countries, these non-violent people found in Russia what they wanted, i.e. virgin land and exemption from military service. Catherine and her favorite, Orlov, found their model in Frederick's colonizing activities on the Rhine (Blackbourn 2007), the success of which Orlov could observe, or at least hear about, while he was fighting with Frederick a few years earlier.