In its first 150 years of empire, Russia expanded fantastically. Russian scholar Ia. E. Vodarskii estimates that from the first quarter of the sixteenth century to 1700, the area of European Russia (west of the Urals) had risen from 2.8 to 4 million square kilometers, and Siberia constituted another 12 million square kilometers. In the process the empire assembled a host of dependent peoples in various degrees of subjugation. Cossacks on the borderlands were free-wheeling and hard to control; Kazan and the Middle Volga were becoming Russianized with in-migration. Different subject peoples enjoyed "separate deals" according to a laissez-faire colonial policy. Taxes were collected in furs or cash, rebellions put down brutally, corporal and capital punishment for felonies and political crime meted out. But otherwise, communities maintained their own institutions, languages and religions, elites and institutions. This was an "empire of difference."
It was also a state on the move, expanding into lands of new cultures and peoples. Classically, in early modern comparative perspective, the flip side of imperial expansion is colonization. States send administrations to control subject peoples and they send populations to bring the standards and cultures ofthe dominant center. We end by reflecting on these issues in the Russian context. Historians have waxed eloquent on Russia's historical expansion but much of their attention has been focused on the restless movement of the Russian peasant himself. Early modern East Slavs were a population in constant mobility, even after serfdom was imposed by the mid- seventeenth century. The great Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii (1841-1911), following his teacher S. M. Solov'ev (1820-79), famously said that Russia "colonized itself," referring to agrarian practice in the northern forests whereby peasants would exhaust the soil and move a few miles to clear forest and start the process over again. Or they trapped their way across the taiga, forging ahead as they exhausted supplies of squirrels, beavers, and sables. Or peasants moved when land became tight in the overpopulated and enserfed center and more fertile black earth lands became available in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, peasants constantly fled enserf- ment and built lives on the borders. Solov'ev and Kliuchevskii disparaged such restless activity, attributing to it a perceived lack of national spirit and attachment to land and country.
Modern scholars have asked whether this peripatetic movement constituted colonization in the sense of closed communities of subject peoples directly controlled by the state in a way distinct from the state's overall administrative system. Many argue against this concept, noting that, as Willard Sunderland points out, Russians considered the continental, contiguous expanse of Russian power a single space within which they "moved"; they did not have a word for "colonize" and did not express sharp distinctions between themselves and natives. Rather, new settlers took up a wide array of relationships to the state. Some carried with them their previous status, such as taxpaying, recruit-providing serfs, while others morphed into new roles (peasants took up garrison duty on borderlands). Communities of new settlers or natives brought under Russian control usually enjoyed administrative and fiscal autonomies that set them apart from others. There was no single, consistent state policy of colonizing the borderland; particularly in the eighteenth century, the steppes from the Black to Caspian Seas were teeming with variety. Since Russian peasant migration was so constant, and Russian and native populations alike so sparsely settled in the new territories, some, harking back to Solov'ev and Kliuchevskii, argue that Russians have historically had a hard time defining themselves as a nation. Or, one can say they embraced the multi-ethnic imperial empire as Russian space.
A related discussion has recently stirred around this theme. Some scholars use the concept of "internal colonization" to condemn the Russia state's predatory attitude towards its own peoples. Alexander Etkind writes of the historical irony that the state laid the heaviest burdens—serfdom, poll tax, recruitment into the army—by and large on Russian and eventually other East Slavic peasants (Belarus'an, Ukrainian), asking less in taxation (iasak) and military service from borderland, non-Slavic peoples. They evoke sociologist Michael Hechter's study of Britain's "internal colonization" of Celtic peripheries (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, by which he meant the ways in which a central authority makes peripheral peoples in its own contiguous territories into distinct, subordinate, and separate populations, controlled coercively from the center. Etkind argues that the Russian government treated its peasantry in these ways, condescending to their rude culture, keeping them trapped in an antiquated agrarian economy.
Etkind and others, in highlighting the irony of the added burden of the Russian peasantry compared to the non-Russians, point to the fundamental amorality of imperial policy. The center did not rule in a way that was intended to protect the Russians and exploit non-Russians; Russians were readily exploited. In the early modern centuries, nationalism did not yet shape policy. Russia's rulers and elite ruled in a way that kept their power stable and funded their privileges. They taxed and recruited the people they could most control, the people with a common language, religion, and historical experience, who lived readily at hand in the center. These were indeed primarily Orthodox Christians, and training in the Russian field army included mandatory church services. For the field armies Russia avoided recruiting border populations where distance was an obstacle (recruiting Siberian natives from eastern Siberia to campaigns on the Polish border was probably not worth the effort). It did recruit border natives into local garrison service across Siberia and formed irregular units of native elites, such as Bashkirs, to serve in the tsar's army. Other empires did this differently—the Ottoman empire imposed heavier taxes on non-Muslims than on Muslims, for example—but in all cases, early modern empires made the decisions that sustained the existing power structure, not a (still to be born) nation.
As Russia concluded the seventeenth century, the outline of its imperial imprint had been laid down. Expansion moved towards the Pacific, the Black Sea, western Europe. The eighteenth century was Russia's great century of empire, when these aspirations were fully fulfilled.
General introductions to imperial expansion are D. J. B. Shaw, "Southern Frontiers in Muscovy, 1550-1700," in James H. Bater and R. A. French, eds., Studies in Russian Historical Geography, 2 vols. (London: Academic Press, 1983), 1: 117-42; Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow, England: Longman, 2001); Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002). Richard White's concept of "middle ground" was introduced in The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On slavery: Christoph Witzenrath, ed., Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200-1860 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Alan W. Fisher, "Muscovy and the Black Sea Trade," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 6, no. 4 (1972): 575-94; Liubov Kurtynova-D'Herlugnan, The Tsar's Abolitionists: The Slave Trade in the Caucasus and its Suppression (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Halil Inalcik with Daniel Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).