Defining borders: Peter C. Perdue, "Boundaries, Maps and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia," The International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 253-86; Boeck, Imperial Boundaries.
4
Eighteenth-Century Expansion
Siberia and Steppe
Russia's great century of empire was transformative in size and diversity. From about 16 million square kilometers around 1700, in the eighteenth century the empire added another million square kilometers in European Russia and over a million square kilometers in northern Kazakhstan; it grew to encompass over twenty-five different ethnicities. A brief summary suggests the dramatic scale of this century's explorations. In Siberia, Russia pushed into the peninsulas of the Far East and across the Bering Strait to Alaska (where only a few hundred Russian and emigre Siberians lived as late as 1818). Russia's long-time Baltic aspirations came to fruition with Peter I's founding of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland in 1703; in the Great Northern War (1700-21) he won Livonia with trade centers at Riga and Reval. The partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) brought into the empire the rest of modern day Belarus' and Ukraine, the Duchy of Courland, and some ethnic Lithuanian territory. In the Black Sea zone, Peter I won but Russia failed to hold ports and territory on the Azov and Caspian Seas (relinquishing Derbent and Baku in 1735), but Catherine II enjoyed tremendous success. In three Turkish wars (1735-9, 1768-74, 1787-91) Russia secured Crimea and the Black Sea coast from the Dniester (where the port of Odessa was promptly founded in 1794) to the northern Caucasus. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century Russia continued to push against Ottoman and Persian Transcaucasus and Caucasus, but this highly complex territory, with dozens of separate ethnic and political subdivisions, resisted takeover. Russia succeeded only in winning the voluntary annexation of the kingdom of Georgia in 1801; it took through the mid-nineteenth century for Russia to complete expansion into the Caucasus and to Central Asia; it also acquired much of the former Poland (1815) and Finland (1810). All these territories were strategic and productive. Russia's eighteenth-century acquisitions (Baltics, Right and Left Bank Ukraine, Black Sea steppe) by 1826 were providing almost 29 percent of total government revenues for the empire. In this chapter we survey policies of conquest and control towards the east, the Caspian steppe, and northern Caucasus.
SIBERIA
At the start of the eighteenth century Russia claimed lands to the Pacific and had established its Amur River border with China. Cossacks in the name of Russia kept pushing north and east, following sables and other luxury furs. In addition, Peter I commissioned exploration into Kamchatka, along the coast and to Alaska. In 1725 Vitus Bering sailed to Alaska, but made no landfall; in 1741 he returned and claimed it for Russia, inaugurating a ruthless process ofsubjugating Aleut tribes and decimating the otter, seal, and other sea mammal populations. Peter I and his successors also intensified exploitation in Siberia proper, particularly once luxury furs were greatly depleted by the end of the seventeenth century. Settlement for agriculture, securing trade routes with China, and metallurgy became new focuses. Peter I sent the German scientist Daniel Messerschmidt to explore for minerals across Siberia. Productive mining began with iron and copper mines in the Urals, where hundreds of serfs were transported to work in horrible conditions. As with the sixteenth-century Stroganovs, initially monopolies were granted to private entrepreneurs, here the Demidov family, who turned the southeast flank of the Urals into the most important mining and metallurgy center in the empire by the 1730s. Around Nerchinsk silver was mined from about 1704 and copper from the 1730s, worked by exile labor, while the Demidovs were given monopolies to Altai mines from the 1720s that yielded iron, copper, zinc, lead, silver, and gold. The state claimed direct control of the Altai mines in 1744, the Nerchinsk silver mines somewhat later. Trade relations with China were regulated (Russian state caravans were permitted to Beijing once every three years) and borders affirmed in the Treaty of Kiakhta, 1727.
Across Siberia there were a line of major fortresses, protected by Cossacks and native units (Figure 4.1). Irkutsk was guarded by locally recruited Irkutsk Cossacks; in the 1720s, similarly, Tunguz and Buriat regiments of Cossacks were formed for eastern Siberia, led by Buriat elites and by the 1760s recruited by a system of
Figure 4.1 The Tal'tsy Architectural-Ethnographic Museum at Lake Baikal preserves the Spasskaia tower (1667) of the Russian fort at Ilimsk. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
conscription among the Buriats. While Russia continued to apply a politics of difference model here, leaving most native institutions and practices intact, across the eighteenth century it did attempt to eliminate slavery among native peoples, not only for humanitarian reasons but also to bring ex-slaves into taxpaying status. As a rule, central administration sat lightly on the vast Siberian lands; Siberia was ruled as one gubernia from Tobolsk with five provinces (Viatka, Solikamsk, Tobolsk, Eniseisk, and Irkutsk) until Irkutsk was made a gubernia in 1764. The vast territory had limited oversight from the center and notorious corruption. The 1775 administrative reforms were introduced into Siberia in 1783 in truncated form. In European Russia, the reform created more gubernii of standardized size by population and relied on local nobles to staff the new offices. In Siberia, a governor- general was assigned (as in European Russia) for better oversight and a third gubernia was created at Kolyvan for the demographically expanding Altai mine region. In the absence oflocal noblemen and with a dearth ofpopulation in general, however, in Siberia the 1775 reform's judicial and fiscal agencies were simplified. Heads of panels had to be appointed from a variety of officials, but the reform's lower level courts with native assessors and traditional legal practice were instituted. All of Siberia encompassed only thirty-three districts (uezdy). Furthermore, six regions at the underpopulated margins were labeled oblasti, maintaining traditional native patterns of self-government. Siberia, then, became somewhat better integrated into Russian control but local differences were respected.
This was a century of in-migration into Siberia. By 1795 East Slavic peasants and other European settlers numbered 819,000, while the native population remained an estimated 360,000 (half Buriats and Iakuts). But settlement was unevenly dispersed. The taiga forest, particularly in the east, was particularly difficult to settle. There Russian settlements were modest in size: the Lena valley in the beginning of the eighteenth century recorded only 164 Russian peasant households, while on the lower Yenisei in 1702 there were 130 Russian households. The entire Iakutsk province had an adult male Russian population of 1,222 in 1697 and 1,932 in 1775. A last major settlement effort focused on the Russo-Chinese border in the 1790s, but failed to bring more than several hundred people to this far outpost. Many more exiles were sent east than in the previous century as Peter I and his successors increasingly avoided the death penalty in favor offorced labor. Exiles were a varied group: criminals were sent generally to eastern Siberia to settle and work mines; large groups of Old Believers (sent to the Irkutsk region in the 1750s- 70s) were allowed to settle; prisoners of war provided skilled knowledge and expertise, most famously the approximately 1,100 Swedish officers, soldiers, and sailors exiled to Siberia after the 1709 battle of Poltava who helped in urban development and cartography. Famed political prisoners such as Peter I's compatriot Alexander Menshikov (exiled to Berezov in 1728) and Alexander Radishchev (exiled to Ilimsk in 1790) also made their way east. But exiles were not so numerous as to greatly add to the population, and their numbers paled compared with what followed in the nineteenth century.