In non-Russian capitals, grand neo-Russian cathedrals dominated city skylines in Helsinki (Cathedral of the Dormition 1868), Vilnius (Cathedral of Mother of God 1860s), Riga (Cathedral of the Nativity 1876-84), and Reval/Tallinn (Cathedral of Alexander Nevskii 1894-1900; Figure C.3), some named after Alexander III's patron saint Alexander Nevskii. Across Estland modest parish churches were built in neo-Russian style in the 1880s; in Warsaw almost twenty such edifices were built in the 1890s, embodying Russian dominance. In the south and farther afield, such Russianate churches were built alongside mosques in Astrakhan (1904), at Kremenets (1912) in Ukraine near the Austrian border, and at the tsar's sea resort in Crimean Yalta (1902). Urban planning projects transformed non-Russian cities, as in Tashkent where the town was essentially split into Muslim and Russian sections, the latter anchored by the grand neo-Byzantine Church of the Transfiguration (1888), Russian administrative buildings, and rationally planned boulevards and
Figure C.3 The neo-Russian Cathedral of Alexander Nevskii (built 1894-1900) in Reval (modern day Tallinn) stands in contrast to the eighteenth-century baroque bell tower of one of the city's most important and ancient churches, the Lutheran Church of St. Mary, or "Dome Church," built on the foundations of a thirteenth-century Catholic church. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
open spaces. Even in foreign centers—Carlsbad, Vienna, and Copenhagen in Europe, Port Arthur in the Far East, the holy city of Jerusalem—neo-Russian Orthodox churches proclaimed the national uniqueness of the Russian empire at the turn of the century.
But such efforts to blend empire with Russian nationalism were decades away from the eighteenth-century consciousness of empire with which we end our work. By 1801 rulers and elites shared a cosmopolitan sense of identity—rather than casting Russianness as a binary in opposition to their non-civilized subjects, they embraced the entirety of the realm's peoples, as yet still confident in the Enlightenment's validation of all human experience. When confronted with a more exclusive sense of nationalism, such as Ukrainian and Polish struggles for regional autonomy, Russian rulers had no problem quashing such movements to maintain hardball control behind this rosy vision. It was, of course, an "imaginary," a useful fiction for asserting the cohesion of a realm of tremendous diversity, a cohesion kept together by coercion and co-optation as well as ideology. But that vision also provided Russia's multi-ethnic elites and educated populaces with a means of understanding, identifying with, and participating in Russia's "empire of difference."
Russia's rise to geopolitical power between 1450 and 1801 might be said to have defied expectations. In the fifteenth century the grand principality of Muscovy was a forested backwater far from urbanized central Europe and from the richly commercialized band, home to ancient and early modern empires, from the Mediterranean to Eurasia to China. Moscow rose to power at a crucial historical turning point of state building and empire building. Settled agrarian empires were assembling the capabilities not only to conquer each other, but in Russia's part of the world to control the steppe. Doing so meant that principalities in the forest that had previously participated in the global economy as hosts of transit trade could now enrich themselves directly at trade junctures and ports all along transit routes. For Russia that meant the Volga, ports on the Black and Caspian Seas, and Siberian junctions of eastern trade. Controlling the steppe also offered fertile lands that could be farmed, after centuries of nomadic pastoralism, to produce surplus grain and spirits distilled from it, cattle, and other goods to export to its own burgeoning population or to Europe. Controlling the steppe required doing a good job in the tasks of early modern state building—military reform, bureaucratic control, political centralization, fiscal mobilization. From that, the capability of expanding westward towards the Baltic also followed.
The story of Russia's rise as an empire is one of strong state building. With limited resources, Russia kept up with its neighbors in military reform, bureaucracy, and centralization, eventually surpassing them. Like its powerful peers in Europe and the Ottomans, Russia also in these centuries was able to expand in whatever directions opportunity presented, to the east into Siberia, westward into the Commonwealth. In the seventeenth century its formidable rival the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth had weakened from lack of military reform and strong central control, and by the eighteenth century the same problems—a lag in military reform and decentralization of political power—also made the Ottoman empire vulnerable. How was Russia able to amass such state-building energy? Surely it was a combination of geographical and geopolitical setting and dogged determination to make much out of few resources.
If one compares the challenges that the grand princes of Moscow faced in the fifteenth century when they amassed significant regional power with those faced by the Osmanli dynasty in Istanbul at about the same time, it might be argued that Russia had an easier playing field. The Ottomans were taking control over lands that were productive in agrarian and manufactured goods, highly commercialized, densely settled in many places, and socially diverse. Of course all this redounded to the prosperity and power of the state, but also posed challenges—moving into the Balkans, Anatolia, Egypt, and the Arab lands, the Ottomans encountered social classes that often had the economic means and territorial integrity to pose opposition to the center. By the eighteenth century, those centrifugal forces undermined central authority; the empire was de facto divided up among networks of powerful notables, whose power was grounded in wealth. They were tax farmers, creditors, and supporters of their local economies—in vast stretches of Anatolia, Egypt, the Balkans. The Ottoman empire had to deal with a much more complicated landscape in its rise to power, and by the eighteenth century struggled to maintain the center.
Moscow's rulers might have wished for the wealth of the Ottoman empire's commercial centers and their merchant and notable families, but they at least avoided some of the attendant headaches. Russian grand princes and tsars were forced to create empire on the cheap, supporting the army with pomest'e and serfdom, defining the tasks of government minimally, leaning on communities for basic services, tolerating difference to avoid investing in local government, neglecting social welfare services even when they paid lip service to the concept of the common good in the eighteenth century. Relative poverty made for skeletal government, but it also gave the center great leverage.
The lands Russia conquered in the center, in Siberia, and the steppe from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries had few indigenous elites with the organization and resources to resist effectively. Certainly conquest was not without opposition: Siberian tribes and steppe nomads constantly attacked Russian fortresses. To the west it took constant warfare from the sixteenth century and ultimately the force of three empires with superior military technology to subdue Poland-Lithuania. But persistently Russia accumulated the military and naval technology to expand. Its leverage was felt perhaps even more importantly in its ability to co-opt the elites it needed to control the realm. In this area of limited agrarian productivity, the tsar was the only source of wealth. Claiming the land and its resources as patrimonial possessions, constantly expanding to increase the reservoir of land, population, and largesse that they could distribute to followers, the tsars attracted ambitious political elites. They were able to enforce the expectation that all elites served, in the military or civil service, since there were few other professions, occupations, or investment opportunities upon which elites could build self- sufficient bases of power.