Prologue: The Chronological Arc 9
PART I. ASSEMBLING THE EMPIRE
Land, People, and Global Context 21
De Facto Empire: The Rise of Moscow 41
Assembling Empire: The First Centuries 55
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 84
Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 103
PART II. THE MUSCOVITE EMPIRE THROUGH THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Broadcasting Legitimacy 129
The State Wields its Power 160
Trade, Tax, and Production 187
Co-optation: Creating an Elite 207
Rural Taxpayers: Peasants and Beyond 222
Towns and Townsmen 235
Varieties of Orthodoxy 244
PART III. THE CENTURY OF EMPIRE: RUSSIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center 267
Army and Administration 296
Fiscal Policy and Trade 316
Surveillance and Control in Imperial Expansion 335
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 355
Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 375Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire 396
Maintaining Orthodoxy 410
463
Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life 427 Conclusion: Constructing and Envisioning Empire 450
Index
List of Illustrations
1.1 1853 statue of Grand Prince and St. Vladimir, Kyiv 24
Novgorod's Sofiia Cathedral 43
Novgorod's Church of the Transfiguration 47 3.1 Statue of Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelytsky, Kyiv 76 4.1 Tal'tsy Architectural-Ethnographic Museum at Lake Baikal 85
Bell tower of the town hall, Reval (Tallinn) 117
Estonian peasant farms 119
The Illuminated Chronicle 134
Leaders of Novgorod prostrate themselves before Ivan III
(Illuminated Chronicle) 138
Tsar and patriarch re-enacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem as in Meyerberg 140
Moscow Kremlin ensemble 142
Moscow's St. Nicholas Church 144
Solikamsk's Trinity Church 145
Trinity "Over-the-Gate" Church, Kyiv 147
Election and coronation of the Romanov dynasty 152
Muddy road conditions, Novgorod 161
Five types of flogging as judicial punishment as in Olearius 171
Sofiia Cathedral, Vologda 190
Lake Baikal wooden chapel 196 9.1 Tsar Michael Romanov consulting with his boyars 209
Augustin von Meyerberg's Album of his embassy to Russia 226
Chapel of St. Nicholas, Novgorod 228 11.1 Adam Olearius' map of Moscow 237
Mosaic and fresco interior of Kyiv's Sofiia Cathedral 246
Trinity-St. Sergii Monastery 251
Frontispiece to Lazar Baranovych's Blagodat'i istina (1689) 268
Peter I's Summer Garden statuary, St. Petersburg 272
Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his son Peter I 273
Academy of Sciences and Kunstkammer, St. Petersburg 274
Catherine II by Erichsen 278
"The Bronze Horseman" 283
Estate of the Sheremetev family, Kuskovo 285
Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, Kazan 286
Church of the Elevation of the Cross, Irkutsk 287
"Ekaterinthal" palace, Reval (Tallinn) 289
Church of St. Andrew, Kyiv 291 15.1 Arcaded "merchants' quarters" in Kostroma 322 16.1 Trial of Shemiaka 350 18.1 Church of Elijah, Iaroslavl' 392 19.1 Church of the Transfiguration, Buriatiia 402
P. A. Demidov by Levitskii 441
Prince A. B. Kurakin by Borovikovskii 442 C.1 Johann Gottlieb Georgi's sketches of ethnic types (1799) 453 C.2 "Church on Spilled Blood," St. Petersburg 455 C.3 Cathedral of Alexander Nevskii, Reval (Tallinn) 456
List of Maps
Vegetation zones, Russian empire c. 1790. Modeled on a map from Allen F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing
Borders, rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), map 35. 22
European Russia c. 1750. Modeled on maps from Allen F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders,
rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), maps 13, 15, and 19. 49
Russian conquest of Siberia in the seventeenth century. Modeled on
a map from Allen F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries
of Changing Borders, rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970),
map 34. 61
Urals fortified lines and western Siberia postal roads, mid-eighteenth century. Modeled on a map from James H. Bater and R. A. French, Studies in Russian Historical Geography (London: Academic Press, 1983),
figure 7.4. 87
Provinces of European Russia, Black Sea conquests, partitions
of Poland, c. 1795. Modeled on a map from Paul R. Magocsi and
Geoffrey J. Matthews, Ukraine: A Historical Atlas (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1985), map 16. 104
Introduction
The Russian Empire 1450-1801
How to describe an early modern empire over more than three centuries? So many regions, so many economies, so many ethnicities and so much change over time. By 1801 the Russian empire stretched from Poland to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Caspian and Black Seas, encompassing dozens of subject peoples with vastly different cultures and histories. The task for Russia's rulers centered in Moscow—"grand princes" until 1547, "tsars" until 1721, "emperors" thereafter— was to expand in search of productive resources (human and material) and to maintain local stability sufficient to mobilize those resources once conquered. They faced challenges to their rule of all sorts, ranging from the fundamental problem of distance ("the enemy of empire," in Fernand Braudel's pithy phrase), to violent uprisings, to constant flight of the taxpaying population, to resistance by elites in previously sovereign states. But they accomplished their task of imperial expansion, mobilization and governance nonetheless, rising from a forested outpost on Europe's and Eurasia's fringe in 1450 to a major geopolitical player in both arenas by 1801. Our goal is to track how Moscow's rulers accomplished that feat while giving appropriate attention to the empire's great diversity—ethnic, religious, social, and political. We explore not only how the empire rose to power and was governed, but also who its many subjects were and how, if at all, the realm constituted a social and political unity.
Finding an organizational framework for such a large project, spanning more than three centuries and thousands of square miles, is tricky, since one runs the risk of reifying a constantly changing historical reality or imposing modern categories on the past. Russian history has certainly seen plenty of that—early modern Russia since the sixteenth century has been labeled a despotism and its people uncivilized, primarily in comparison to Europe. Not only normative, this trope is either teleological, suggesting a European path of development on which Russia is, at best, lagging, if not entirely left out, or essentialist, suggesting that Russians can never assimilate western values. Happily, recent scholarship has provided the foundations for thinking more complexly about early modern Russia as state and society. Since the 1970s scholars (primarily in America) have been exploring "how autocracy worked," overturning images of a literally all-powerful tsar in favor of a politics where the great men of the realm and their clans upon whom governance relied were consulted and engaged in decision making; new work has seen implicit limitation on the autocratic power of the ruler in Russia's religiously based ideology and in the realities of geography, distance, and sparse demography. Furthermore, research on the Russian empire was energized by the collapse of the Soviet Union, producing valuable studies of the constituent communities of the empire by scholars in Europe, America, and post-Soviet republics. Some of the useful tacks in new work on the Russian empire include resisting a teleology that assumes that empire moves into nation, resisting normative disapproval of empire, and placing the Russian empire in its Eurasian context. Without at all suggesting that a more complex "consensus-based" politics diluted the tsar's undivided sovereignty, this research forces us to look pragmatically at the forces through which the autocratic center governed the realm.