THE
RUSSIAN EMPIRE
I450-l80I
NANCY SHIELDS KOLLMANN
OXFORD HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE
General Editor. R. J. W. EVANS
The Russian Empire
1450-1801
NANCY SHIELDS KOLLMANN
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Nancy Shields Kollmann 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1
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Dedicated to Edward L. Keenan (1935-2015)
Preface
This book is dedicated to my graduate mentor, Edward L. Keenan (1935-2015). This book hardly approaches what he could have done with this material—few could match his originality, insight and depth of knowledge about the early modern past. He was always able to look afresh at familiar things, going against the grain to suggest an interpretation that fit the real grain of the historical times (rather than received opinion). I cannot aspire to his erudition, but I know this book takes the tack that he would have. He and another great mentor at Harvard in the 1970s, Omeljan Pritsak, taught us to be Eurasianists—to take Russian history out of a narrow, and ultimately ahistorical, national context and set it in its international setting. While everyone had been comparing Russian history to Europe since the nineteenth century (usually to Russia's detriment), Keenan and Pritsak urged us to look east and south—to Russia's connections with Asia as well as Europe; they introduced us to the great rhythms of forest and steppe and the Silk Roads connecting peoples, cultures, and trade.
Keenan loved the fluidity of the historical past, the way you cannot fit it into modern day national bounds. He loved to explore the day-to-day reality of how cultures interacted, asking where were the trade routes, who could talk with whom, who had incentive to connect, what cultural, linguistic, and religious barriers or commonalities shaped encounters. He drew our attention to the great legacy of Chinggisid rule in the Eurasian world in which Russia interacted and to the many cultural worlds that Orthodoxy provided to Russia over the early modern centuries; he was particularly fascinated with the cultural and political ferment that blossomed in seventeenth-century Moscow with the influence of Greeks, Ukrainians, Belarus'ans, Poles, and northern Europeans. Keenan saw Russian history as a kaleidoscope of peoples, languages, and cultures interacting on a human scale; he made history come alive. And he did it by working from the sources on up; he was the most rigorous scholar of primary sources that I have encountered—always, always asking, "How do you know what you think you know?" This book is a modest homage to what he taught us about Russia as an empire—it seeks to get at more than government, more than Moscow, bringing the diversity of peoples and cultures in.
It's a gargantuan and difficult task, of course—more than three centuries, more than ten modern time zones, scores ofdifferent cultures. I have tried to explore how the empire was governed and how people experienced Russian rule, whether in the East Slavic, Orthodox heartland or the many non-Russian borderlands. It is difficult to escape a Moscow-centric approach, particularly since I have spent my career studying "court politics" at the center and since so many sources stem from the center. And giving the peoples of empire a "voice" for these early centuries is difficult. But I have tried to do more than scratch the surface of imperial diversity.
This work is based on a career's worth of writing and teaching, starting with graduate work at Harvard with Keenan and Pritsak. In addition to a big Eurasianist picture, Professor Pritsak introduced me to the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ukrainian history within it, an essential adjunct to anyone wanting to understand early modern Russia. I also had the tremendous opportunity to study with Joseph Fletcher, whose lecture course on Eurasia ranged wide from Islam to Buddhism, Kalmyks to Qing and waxed eloquent on the ecological genius of nomadic society. I was also cemented in a more complex approach to Russian history by my association with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where fellow graduate students and a bi-weekly seminar in Ukrainian history very broadly defined (from archeological beginnings to modern day) opened up unknown new vistas.
In teaching at Stanford and working with graduate students who have gone on to become colleagues (Val Kivelson, Erika Monahan, Alexandra Haugh, Lindsey Martin), I have learned a lot about Russia's empire, particularly Siberia; I have come to appreciate visual sources as exemplars of political values from a cheerful collegial cooperation with Val, Michael Flier, and Daniel Rowland. Dear friend and colleague Jane Burbank always provided great ideas, and her book with Frederick Cooper deepened my understanding of empire. So also did the scholars and ideas I have been encountering in recent years at Stanford in our Humanities Center's "Eurasian Empires" workshop. Here I was able to test out the idea of Russia as a "Eurasian empire," and actually meet some of the authors whose views shape this work—Karen Barkey, Peter Golden, Andre Wink, and most of all to work with my colleague Ali Yaycioglu and to benefit from his effervescent knowledge of Ottoman history. Other scholars—Alexander Kamenskii, Mikhail Krom, Robert Crews, Aron Rodrigue, Laura Stokes, Richard Roberts, Norman Naimark—provided great insights as well. Of course the shortcomings of this work are mine, not theirs, but to all these scholars I owe tremendous thanks.
I began work in earnest on this project with a residential fellowship from Stanford's Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-12), which provided long hours of immersion in reading and splendid lunch hours of vibrant conversation. Stanford's History Department and Dean ofHumanities and Sciences have also provided generous research funds to make broad reading possible, and I finish up the work on this book at another wonderful research institute, the Stanford Humanities Center. Again, I am truly grateful for all the collegial and scholarly resources I have been given.
It is often predictable to end a preface with thanks to one's family, and I am true to form. But this is a very, very big thanks to my husband Jack Kollmann— throughout the many years of my work, on this and preceding books and courses and research, he has been at my side. His knowledge of Russian art and religion is boundless, as is his generosity in teaching me and helping me track things down or work things out. His unstinting support, love, and constancy are humbling; I am truly blessed.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Maps xiii
Introduction: The Russian Empire 1450—1801 1