Most of the people on whom Russia depended for local control (Russian gentry, bands of Cossacks, co-opted Siberian elites) did not share a European expectation of constitutional, institutional participation in power. They were willing participants in a culture of autocracy where the tsar's "slaves" were actually the most highly rewarded social stratum. When elites who might have chafed under the absence of more western style legal rights and institutions to which they were used came under Russian control (Baltic German nobles, Ukrainian Cossacks, Polish nobility, Magdeburg Law cities), the center by and large allowed them to maintain their autonomies (laws, self-government, language, religion); Catherine II's attempt at social and political homogenization in the western borderlands was overturned by her successor.
To support its elites, Russia's rulers used force to control peasant labor (serfdom) and assiduously kept to a program of devoting minimal resources to the bare infrastructure that mattered. They assembled a powerful enough army to conquer territory that in turn produced income; they paid for the army initially with service- tenure land and peasant labor. They assembled a sufficient bureaucracy to control the population and collect taxes, but begrudged resources for it. Through most of the eighteenth century, while the military went on salary basis, the bureaucracy lived off fees, not salary, and was understaffed. Only in the late eighteenth century did reforms help the empire approach the capability to support army and administration with salary through enhanced fiscal control.
Meanwhile, local government per se was skeletal; the empire's "politics of difference" approach put responsibility for conflict resolution, social welfare, public works, law and order, and many other challenges of daily life in the hands of private groups—state peasant and serf communes, landlords, native communities, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and other legal and welfare institutions, special deals given to communities as diverse as Don Cossacks, Armenian and Indian traders, and German Mennonites in Novorossia. Communities ruled themselves to one degree or another: Muslim elites and courts in the Middle Volga, Tatar communities in Crimea, tribal organizations in Siberia, Cossack regimental governing structures in the Hetmanate, Junker noble institutions in the Baltics, landlords' estates and state peasant communes in East Slavic territories.
Moscow demanded unpaid service from lesser social groups by leaning on age- old customs of collective responsibility and by granting enough mercy and largess in judicial proceedings and public interaction to sustain the myth of a just tsar. Moscow constantly had to deal with the agency of the people it conquered and controlled. Building the empire was a gradual, eclectic process; it took decades to move frontiers forward or to consolidate local power. It required putting down recurrent native rebellions, co-opting elites, and getting locals to accommodate to imperial power. It meant constructing relationships with locals, enlisting locals as translators, bureaucrats, and Cossacks. Crucially, it depended upon minimalism of "a politics of difference." It required providing an overarching ideological model of the tsar as benevolent, patrimonial leader for all his people. Most energetically after Peter I's reforms, empire building offered, at least for most elites, a model of imperial identity shaped by European culture, education, dress, and habits. Each "Eurasian empire" was different, each "empire of difference" was different, but this approach to political control worked well for Russia.
In narrating Russia as empire, we have bypassed other common paradigms, such as that of Russia as a despotism. We have portrayed it as an autocracy—a state with undivided sovereignty by a single ruler—and have explored how autocracy worked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russia was able to maintain control over far-flung acquisitions to the Pacific and to weather a near-fatal dynastic crisis in the early seventeenth century. It grew rich on Siberian furs, and inched its way into the steppe, establishing stable if minimal government across the realm. By the eighteenth century Russia was a wealthy and militarily dominant empire, keeping pace in important ways with its peers. Alexander Martin and Dominic Lieven both remark that many of Catherine's reforms—communications, urban development, military reform, economic diversification—matched her European counterparts in her day. They also note, as does Aleksei Miller, however, that we should not exaggerate this success. Russia's achievements soon stalled in comparison to the meteoric rise of European industrialization in the nineteenth century; Russia was saddled with a serf-based economy, inadequate infrastructure, and increasingly inflexible autocratic rule. In many ways, Russia's success as an empire—in geopolitical achievements, domestic institutional organization, and economic dynamics— reached its peak at the turn into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, we cannot fail to note that Russia's creation and endurance as an empire came at the cost of coercive conquest, the brutality of serfdom, impoverishment and deprival of freedom for the mass of the population. That this statement also applies to some degree to its contemporaries across the world—to America with its slavery, to European slave-based colonial empires, to the Ottomans with their devsirme system of enslaving Christians for court service and supporting a lively slave trade for domestic economy—does not negate the point.
One phenomenon in the eighteenth-century empire, however, might be brought to the fore in conclusion. Much of the political, intellectual, and social change engendered in the eighteenth century worked to provide Russia with skilled experts and infrastructure within which they might govern effectively. Scientific training in history, ethnography, cartography, and natural theoretical sciences was being established. Literacy was expanding and the Russian language honed for modern expression. Practical skills were being mandated—fiscal record keeping, census taking, mapping, urban planning, infrastructure such as roads, canals, and sewage systems—in every gubernia in the 1775 reforms. More middle-level administrative personnel were getting experience in administration, even if the 1775 reforms favored retired noble army officers over professional bureaucrats. Literacy was expanding, and under Paul I the professional training of bureaucrats was enhanced.
These changes paved the way for a remarkable first half of the nineteenth century, an underappreciated "saddle" era in Russian history flanking old and new. Some aspects have received attention—the educated intelligentsia's frustration with its inability to effect political change; Nicholas I's harsh autocracy, epitomized by the Secret Police, enhanced censorship and crackdowns on religious dissidents. But these decades also saw steady administrative reorganization, professionalization of the bureaucracy, and codification of the realm. Mikhail Speranskii and successors led a monumental codification of law, resulting not only in a chronological "complete collection" of laws from 1649 to 1825 (in over 40 volumes published simultaneously in 1830), but also in codices (svody) on civil and criminal law and compendia of law for many of the empire's subject peoples (Baltic Germans, German colonizers, Jews, non- Christian inorodtsy). Mapping and scientific exploration continued. From the 1830s and 1840s the state worked out more formal infrastructure and agreements to define the tsar's interactions with his "foreign faiths." Under government patronage myriad scholarly societies were founded. Natural history museums and ethnographic societies to study the empire's peoples, particularly the Russians, were founded in the 1830s. Historical sources were collected and published in voluminous collections by branches of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Vilnius, and provincial capitals; Russian historians (Nikolai Karamzin, M. P. Pogodin, S. M. Solov'ev, and others) wrote the national past to modern European standards. The literary language was being formalized and academic dictionaries published. All this work nurtured the development of skilled experts who might generate change towards more integrated and pluralistic governance. Laying the groundwork for such social energy is one ofthe more salutary continuities that the early modern period contributed to modern Russia.