As a codified law, the cellular system of settlers' colonization was first written for the German colonies on the Volga. Moving from one province to another, a group of top imperial administrators introduced this system elsewhere, though the practical results were different. Trying to create a uniform imperial pattern that could be applied to all ethnic cases, they compared their policies across the Empire and exchanged good practices among themselves: "We permit a mufti for the Islamic peoples, and so why not a leader among the Jews?" asked Gavriil Derzhavin; in his project of reforming the Jewry, he used the model of the German colonies on the Volga (Klier 1986: 107). Among the Tartars, the Empire applied the same template and created the magistrates in the Muslim environment (Lowe 2000). In western Siberia, Mikhail Speransky divided the Kazakhs into districts, with the elders collecting taxes from the communities on the basis of customary law, "adat" (Martin 2001). One of the most seasoned Russian bureaucrats, Speransky, came to Siberia from St. Petersburg after he helped to codify the innovations into serfdom and drafted the Charter of Military Colonies. The imperial Minister of Finances who oversaw many of these developments, Egor Kankrin, started his career as the inspector of the German colonies near St. Petersburg.
The Pale of Settlement was the Jewish colony of the Empire (Rogger 1993). Though overall restrictions on the migration of Jews were unusual, in many other ways their treatment was not unique; in fact, the policy toward the Jews did not much depart from governmental actions toward other religious minorities. In the 1830s, the Jews of the Pale were treated by law in the same way as the minor Polish nobles, whom the Empire downgraded to a taxable estate. Having colonized the Jewish part of Poland, the Empire found in operation there the ancient Jewish unit of self-governance and tax collection, the Kahal. In 1844, the Empire issued a decree that forbade the Kahal, forcing the Jewish settlements to conform to the structure of the Russian commune, which was then in the process of codification. In fact, the Empire failed to change the structure of Jewish self- government, but it did undermine its traditional authority (Dubnow 1920: 227; Stanislawski 1983: 48, 124). This story has usually been told as the unsuccessful application of the institutional norms of the Russian commune to the Jewish Kahal. However, the reverse was also true: known to Russian administrators since the eighteenth century and much debated in the 1840s, the collectivist structure of the Kahal was transposed onto the peasant commune. In fact, indirect rule helped to reduce violence and other expenses of the Empire. The abolition of the Kahal reflected the imperial pattern toward the uniform, cellular regulation of all populations, Russian and non- Russian alike. Like serfdom, the Pale was an instrument of imperial domination, with communes and Kahals as parallel structures of indirect rule. Imperial administrators explained their resistance to the emancipation of serfs and the desegregation of the Jews in similar terms, referring to their immaturity or backwardness. As Hans Rogger demonstrated, governmental anti-Semitism corresponded to a similar complex of sentiments and prejudices about the Russians. While the imperial "elites shared a genuine and deep-seated fear of the destructive, anarchic power of the Russian mob," imperial administrators agreed on "a pessimistic assessment of their own ability to control popular violence" (Rogger 1993: 1219). Much earlier, Vasilii Kliuchevsky characterized this state of affairs, which he felt was typical for the nineteenth-century Russian gentry, as "complete moral confusion: nothing can be done and nothing needs to be done" (1990: 100). This self-fulfilling pessimism helped the managers of the
Empire to avoid their responsibility: when a peasant rebellion, a Jewish pogrom, or an abuse of their own power occurred, the authorities did little because they felt they could do nothing.
Though the advance of imperial rule was everywhere different, its unwinding was more uniform. Like a boomerang, the Empire's increasingly violent methods of domination spread centripetally from the periphery inwards. Massive migrations, forced or voluntary, accompanied the process. In the spirit of "imperial revisionism" (Mann 2005: 31), the new, organic ideology translated into attempts to make the draft, taxation, and official language universal across the Empire. While the active introduction of indirect rule began with the German colonies, the unwinding of this mechanism began with the Jewish Pale. Forbidding the Kahal while preserving the Pale meant introducing direct rule over an enormous ghetto. East European Jews under the Russian yoke responded with two protest movements that defined the twentieth century, Zionism and Communism (Slezkine 2004).
The bet on the Russian land commune was equally fateful. Started as a cultural myth, the commune materialized into a disciplinary mechanism that organized life and work in an enormous space, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Closer to the end of the nineteenth century, the economic liberals in the imperial government wished to dismantle the commune, to bring land to the market, and to emancipate labor. To replace the commune, they created new, larger and relatively democratic institutions of indirect rule in the countryside, zemstva. Further legislation allowed many thousands of peasants to start their own farms. Despite the economic success of these reforms, they met resistance from an unusual source, the armed intelligentsia. Inspired by the intelligentsia's populist beliefs, its terrorist underground tried to force the leap from the commune to communism. This confrontation between the fans and foes of the commune was a major factor leading up to the Russian revolution. Finally, the collectivization of 1928 resuscitated the communal myth in a new and pernicious form.
With the end of the High Imperial Period, Russia approached its age of reforms, but in the final account, things went wrong. Despite the emancipation of serfs and many other changes, the Empire failed to escape its collapse and the waves of violence that followed it. This lesson has been discussed myriad times, but it is still pertinent for the twenty-first century globalization, which confronts some of those very problems that Russia's rulers faced in the nineteenth century. Direct rule over a segregated society - a collection of estates, ghettos, and state-patrolled borders - is not viable. The last Romanovs successfully dismantled the old imperial order that kept different communities under an indirect rule, which prevented violence but was economically inefficient. But in this Empire, the undoing of indirect rule was followed by massive outbursts of violence. Polish rebellions and Caucasian wars marked the first half of the nineteenth century. The massacres of the sectarian villages in the 1870s, the Jewish pogroms of the 1880s, and the populist terror marked its second half. Culminating in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, these events responded to the innovations in imperial unification, such as equal taxes for different estates, the universal draft, the destruction of the commune, and mandatory primary education. Steps on the ladder of modernity, these innovations had their dark side, which was "the ladder of violence" (Mann 2005). In good conscience, the imperial reformers built the shining ladder of progress, but they misjudged the danger of its dark side, the ladder of violence. Or it was one and the same ladder.
The dismantling of the old order of collective, territorial subjects should have gone hand-in-hand with the cultural neutralization of the state and universal access to education and careers (North et al. 2009). If the Russian imperial experience can teach us anything, the image of the interconnected but antithetical, light and dark vectors of modernity is the lesson. To avoid a Russian-style collapse, the transition from indirect to direct rule should provide an equal chance for prosperity to every individual citizen. The metaphor of progress is not a single, vertical ladder but a free-standing, folding one. The two parts of the ladder of modernity, global unification and universal access must be of equal height or they will collapse.