In this way, a "politics of difference" approach directly benefits the center. In the Russian case, separate deals defined different tax rates and military obligations, maintenance of religious practices, local government and elites for groups as various as Russian cavalrymen and their serfs, Don and Ukrainian Cossacks, Siberian reindeer herders, steppe nomads, and Baltic German Junkers. Everyone related to the tsar vertically in personal appeal through the tsar's officialdom; in theory subjects had no reason to connect horizontally across class or geographical affinities for self-help, governance, or, most significantly, for opposition to the regime. This kept the realm loosely unified around the center and stable. To be particularly effective in this, however, a regime had to be flexible, constantly reassessing and renegotiating its relationships with subject peoples in changing times.
Early modern Russia developed its governing patterns from multiple sources, combining a strong acquaintance with Mongol politics and governing institutions with the powerful package of political, legal, cultural, ideological, ritual, and symbolic concepts and practices that Byzantium and other Orthodox centers offered in the centuries after Kyiv Rus' princes accepted Christianity in 988. Its rulers governed over great diversity—ethnic, religious, linguistic, and local— curbed by central authority deftly applied.
A final issue in introducing this work is the question of why Russia created empire. It is unfashionable these days for historians to pose the question, because answers have been so politically charged and continue to be so. Russia did expand very far and very fast, galloping across the continent of Asia to claim authority over all Siberia in the single seventeenth century, pushing across the Far East and Pacific to Alaska in the eighteenth century while also winning the Black Sea littoral from the Ottoman empire and gobbling up (with two European partners) the sovereign state of Poland-Lithuania. Historiography born of the Cold War saw this expansionism as messianic, bent on ruling the world. Some scholars linked seeming rampant expansionism to Russia's "Byzantine heritage" (in a misguided reading of Byzantine ideology); others cited Karl Marx's call for universal socialism or followed up on his cautious discussion of an Asiatic path to socialism to develop the concept of "Asiatic Despotism." Some cited the "Third Rome Theory"—that Moscow was a "Third Rome" and a "Fourth shall never be"—as proof that Moscow intended to rule the world, while that text actually had minimal influence on the court (being embraced only in the seventeenth century by religious conservatives).
Such a normative approach ignores the fact that when Moscow was building empire, so were all its neighbors- the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid empires, European colonial empires in the New World, South and Southeast Asia, land grabs in Europe itself. In Europe such expansion was legitimized in religious terms in the sixteenth century, to which was added mercantilism in the seventeenth and a rich mix of realpolitik and emerging national and racial discourses in the eighteenth. Where improvements in seafaring, in military technology, in bureaucratic control, and fiscal mobilization made it possible, states expanded.
Russia pursued empire for the same reasons that its neighbors did, namely, to gain profit for rulers and elite and to earn resources for the state building that was one of the quintessential characteristics of the early modern era in Europe and Eurasia. For Russia, this meant capturing or opening lucrative river and overland trade routes, cities, and ports, conquering populations in resource-rich areas such as Siberia, and pushing south into fertile steppe pasture land that could be converted to farming and south and west towards Silk Road and Baltic ports. Russia's campaigns of conquest were clothed in various rhetorics—recapturing lands alleged to have been ancient patrimony, fighting infidel Islam (in the sixteenth century) or pursuing glory (in the eighteenth)—but the chronology and directions of Russia's expansion reveal economic and political goals behind each direction of conquest.
While tropes of Russia as a despotism might have faded, many scholars would counter the approach taken here with a related argument that Russia was a "unitary" state, ruled from the center with no significant political autonomies limiting its actions. Particularly scholars of the empire's nationalities, now free to explore their own national history in the wake of Soviet demise, put the emphasis on the Russian center's coercive power. They are most mindful of the constraints on their national and regional autonomies imposed by the Russian empire, rather than of its toleration of regional differences. Some scholars in post-Soviet Russia, similarly, focus on the power of the ruler, giving less credence to recent scholarship on kinship-based, affinitive relationships in court politics. These interpretations balance the available evidence differently than in this book, which argues that for early modern conditions, strong centers cannot control without significant buy-in from elites and they cannot control with force all the time. They simply lack the communications and manpower to do it. This book, therefore, argues that Russia's power and stability as an empire derived from the synergy of strong central and selectively laissez-faire local power. This was indeed a state of undivided sovereignty that claimed control over key issues of rule—criminal law, taxation, military mobilization, and defense. In fact the Russian empire, as we shall argue, was doggedly insistent on that degree of control, imposing a single law, single bureaucracy, single administration over its vast realm at a time when some of its European and Eurasian counterparts were de facto allowing local nobilities and power bases to form. But, balancing that infrastructure of ideology and bureaucracy, the empire tolerated and depended upon local communities to accomplish many tasks of daily life. If one wants to talk in contemporary terms about Russia as a "great power," it was one historically precisely because of its strong center supported by controlled diversity.
Such, then, is our theoretical approach—to analyze the Russian empire as it constructed an empire "of difference." Such an approach requires a great deal of attention to governance by Moscow, but also invites discussion of the diversity of the realm and its peoples. It also requires flexibility: as we explore how Moscow ruled and how subjects experienced that power, we try to look for mutual interchange, assuming different state policies for different regions and appraising the state's constant adjustments of policies towards subjects in response to new economies, new geopolitical exigencies, new ideologies. Eurasian empire is also inextricable from the global context of trade routes and geopolitical interactions, and we will keep that larger context in mind.
As we recount how Moscow's sovereigns amassed regional power, we combine descriptive and thematic treatment in overall chronological progression. Although historiography is rich in Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages of the post-Soviet space, the bibliography here includes by and large English-language material as most accessible to our readership. A few important works in Russian that are discussed in the text are recognized; translations of major Russian historians into English are included where appropriate.
Part I describes the lands and peoples of empire as Russia assembled its vast expanse from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. In Part II, we start from the center, examining structures of governance in the formative sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; here we look thematically at such key institutions and practices as ideology, bureaucracy, economy and trade, religion, society. Part III on Russia's great century of empire, the eighteenth, replicates a classic divide in Russian history. Peter I (ruled 1682-1725) is often taken to have revolutionized Russia. This is not our argument—he maintained continuity with his predecessors in fundamental elements of state building, such as imperial expansion, institutions of governance and resource mobilization, toleration of difference. But the century stands out for its dynamism—demographic growth was both indigenous and also boosted by territorial expansion; the economy boomed; the Enlightenment provided new discourses and models of governing and cultural life. We explore how the official discourse of empire was renewed, how governing strategies adjusted to new conquests and new ideas, how social categories and roles proliferated. We end with the imaginings of rulers and writers about what empire and identity meant in Russia by 1801.