The Reversed Gradient
The maritime empires made a clear, sharp distinction between their citizens and the subjects in their colonies. While citizens in the metropolitan areas enjoyed a progressively growing number of political rights, the subjects in the colonies were deprived of them. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, metropolitan territories were developing into nation-states while preventing their colonies from doing the same. The difference between the political rights of the citizens of the metropolitan states and those of their colonized subjects translated into perceived and, often, real differences in their economic freedoms, educational access, and, finally, their life standards and prosperity. One could call this complex sum of inequalities, which was constitutive for western empires, the imperial gradient. Its consequences were simple: the centers of empires enjoyed a better life than their colonies.
In a way that was unusual for "traditional empires" but probably typical for terrestrial ones, the Russian Empire demonstrated a reversed imperial gradient.[6] Only Russians and some other eastern Slavs were subject to serfdom. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the majority of the nobles in the Empire were non-Russian, though this situation changed later (Kappeler 2001). In about 1861, education and income were higher among Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Siberian settlers, and, arguably, even among Tartars and Jews, than among the Russians of the central provinces. The Emancipation began with reforms at the periphery of the Empire and from there moved to the heartland. After Emancipation, Russians were still subjected to heavier economic exploitation than non-Russians. In the 1880s, an administrator in the Caucasus reported to the Ministry of Finances that while the local population in the Caucasus was "much richer" than the "hungry dwellers" of the central Russian provinces, the taxes on the former were four times lower than those on the latter (Pravilova 2006: 265- 8). At the end of the nineteenth century, the average resident of the 31 provinces with a predominantly Russian population paid twice as much tax as a resident of the 39 provinces with a predominantly non-Russian population (Mironov 1999). Financially and demographically, colonization of the Caucasus and Central Asia throughout the nineteenth century produced losses for the central provinces: their population was decreasing, while taxation was increasing. In Siberia, the natives paid 2 - 10 times less to the state than the Russian peasants of the same region; in addition, they were exempted from the draft (Znamenski 2007: 117). The life expectancy of Russians was lower than that of the Baltic peoples, the Jews, Ukrainians, Tartars, and the Bashkirs. The internal oppression of the imperial nation was a "remarkable feature of the socioethnic structure" of Russia (Kappeler 2001: 125; Hosking 1997). On the eve of the revolution, "the impoverishment of the center" became a popular topic in political debates. Even the Jews, who were oppressed by the special regime of the Pale, recognized that their condition was better than that of the Russian peasants in the central provinces (Nathans 2002: 71).
Indirect Rule
In Russia, colonization often meant collectivization. Subordinating large ethnic communities, the Empire divided them into smaller, collective units of indirect rule that mediated between the sovereign and individual families. On vital issues such as taxation, draft, and even crime, the sovereign dealt not with the individual or his family, but with the community. Created as socio-spatial units, these communities were imagined like cells in a healthy organism, separate but connected. Such a cell could be led by a noble who owned the land and the peasants, or by an administrator who was appointed by the state, or by an elder who was elected by the community. Most of their duties before the sovereign were the same. Much smaller than the Ottoman millets, Russian territorial communities were endowed with some rights of self-government and self-taxation. In exchange for tribute, taxes, and recruits, they received non-interference into their religious and cultural life. As scholars of colonialism know well, indirect rule prevented the development of national sentiments and outbursts of violence (Hechter 2001); but it had its limits. The advance of modernity brings the individual subject, and his family, into immediate contact with the state. Intermediary levels, apart from the temporary and voluntary ones, tend to lose their power (Gellner 1998; Slezkine 2004). Individual freedom and mobility provide the economy and culture with the vibrancy that is characteristic of modern societies. Competing with European powers, the Russian Empire could not escape the same process. However, leveling the boundaries between the estates and destroying the particularity of the communes had its dark side (Mann 2005). The advance of modern nationalism, the universal draft, and a uniform educational system increased the chances of ethnic discrimination, forced migration and emigration, pogroms, and other forms of ethnic cleansing.
Having developed within various national traditions, liberal theory presented voluntary associations as the primary institution of civil society. On the contrary, "involuntary association is the most immediate cause of inequality" (Walzer 2004: 2). For the Russian Empire, the idea of free entry and exit was entirely foreign. The subjects did not create their groups and did not choose among them. The enforced, territorial character of their communities meant their members were bonded twice: to the land where they lived and to the group to which they belonged. These groups contained the whole life cycle of their members. Born within these groups, most of them worked and married within them, had children who stayed within these groups, and died as their members. Therefore these groups were strong, their meanings thick, and their boundaries barely passable. While the ruling elite structured itself as a solar network of individuals and institutions with the Emperor at the center, the subjects of the Empire were organized as a cellular structure, like the body or, perhaps, a beehive.
The sovereign gave the land not to individual settlers, but to the entire collective as a whole. This land could not be sold or mortgaged. Individuals and their families did not own the land they used; in the case of the Russian peasantry, the land was repartitioned with every new generation - or even more often. People were settlers on this land, not masters of it. Various obstacles hampered departure from these communities. Until its very end, the Empire did not encourage the development of a market in land, particularly of agricultural land. It did not wish to deal with individual agents, only with nobles, administrators, or elders, who managed hundreds of peasants each. Communes did not communicate amongst themselves; all transactions were vertical, between each commune and the hierarchy leading to the sovereign. For a long period, starting from the mid-eighteenth through the turn of the twentieth century, this beehive system organized the enormous space of the Empire. Throughout the imperial period, this system emerged among peoples with very different traditions. A system of indirect rule, it had to be neutral in terms of culture and ethnicity.