Russia's policy of controlling the Polish Commonwealth worked well through the century; the Commonwealth's political forces were so divided in the 1760s, for example, that Russia and Austria were able to use a war with the Ottoman empire that spilled into Commonwealth territory to engineer what became the first partition of Poland (1772). When in 1788 the three imperial powers were distracted by war and revolution elsewhere, liberal reformist forces in the Commonwealth seized the best opportunity all century to put their state in order. Calling a Diet that delegates prolonged beyond the usual two to four years (1788-92) by manipulating parliamentary rules, they passed the sweeping Constitution of 3 May 1791. It would have established a modern fiscal regime, centralized state, standing army, and efficient republican representative institutions. Calling this "Jacobin," Russia and Prussia moved in to suppress reform (the second partition 1793). When Tadeusz Kosciuszko led the Poles in revolt, further invasion and the third partition quickly followed (1795). Poland was wiped off the map as a sovereign state, Russia winning all of modern day Belarus' and ethnic Lithuania and most of modern day Ukraine.
In Russia's traditional direction of expansion towards the Black Sea steppe, the Ottoman empire became the most important focus of Russian foreign policy. A vulnerable target, already in the late seventeenth century the Ottoman empire had lost territory to the Habsburgs in Hungary and Transylvania; by the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 it also lost a recently acquired piece of the Commonwealth (Podole). For the Ottoman empire the eighteenth century saw weakening central power, state indebtedness, and emerging provincial power centers. Three major Russian campaigns (1735-9, 1768-74, 1787-92) resulted in the annihilation of the Turkish fleet at Chesme in 1770 and control over the Black Sea littoral from the
Dniester to the Kuban (Treaties of Kuguk Kaynarca 1774 and Jassy 1792). Valuable new Black Sea ports and passage through the Bosporus assured by treaty gave Russia the foundations for a booming export trade economy.
Russia accomplished all this territorial expansion by doggedly mobilizing and controlling resources and taking advantage of regional opportunities. Perhaps William Butler Yeats's renowned line, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," puts into sharp relief the stakes that Russia navigated. In these centuries the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and to some extent the Ottoman empire as well, "fell apart": central control weakened, resources fell into local hands, reforms stalled, regional competitors outpaced them in modern state building. But Russia's rulers ensured that their center did "hold" by balancing tradition and change in imperial ideology, administration, governance, and culture.
PART I
ASSEMBLING THE EMPIRE
1
Land, People, and Global Context
By the eighteenth century the Russian empire extended across forest and steppe from eastern Europe to the Pacific and from the White Sea to the Black. Since the mid-eighteenth century European and Russian cartographers had ended Europe at the Urals, but modern scholars have coined the term Eurasia to connote both the political space straddling Europe and Asia and also the geographical connectedness of this part of the world. In this chapter we will explore the deep material foundations of Eurasia—its topography and climate—and the social and economic connections that have shaped Eurasian space over time.
GEOGRAPHY AND CLIMATE
The Russian empire's northern latitude and distance from warming oceans make it a cold and inhospitable place (Map 1). Before late seventeenth- and eighteenth- century expansion into the steppe, most of the empire lay at or above the 50th latitude, above a steppe-forest line that stretches from around Kyiv eastward to the southern Urals and western Siberia. Expansion into the Black Sea steppe took it not farther south than the 45th latitude, whereas Americans will recall that all of the United States minus Alaska is south of the 49th parallel. Moscow is north of Edmonton, Alberta, the most northerly of Canadian cities; St. Petersburg is at the same latitude as southern Alaska.
Compounding the northern latitude is the effect of surrounding topography. Russia's forest and steppe lands continue the plain that starts in the Atlantic and stretches, with a modest interruption of the weathered Urals (heights around 3,000 to 6,000 feet along 1,550 miles), to the impressive mountains of the Pacific rim. The plain is rimmed by mountains to the south, stretching from the Carpathians and Caucasus to the Pamirs, Tian Shans, and Altais ofCentral Asia (here numerous peaks reach 15,000-18,000 feet), continuing to the Sayan and Stanovoi ranges north of Mongolia and China through the Anadyrs on the far northeastern corner of the continent and volcanic Kamchatka. This arc of mountains creates a "bowl" that obstructs the flow of tropical air and captures frigid Arctic air. Oceanic warmth is also of little help: the Black Sea provides some warming for its environs, but otherwise these lands are too far from the Atlantic to benefit from the Gulf Stream that warms western Europe.
Such a geographical position gave these forest and steppe lands an extreme version of the continental climate (Figure 1.1). Here, relatively short but warm
| | Arctic waste | | Tundra I 4 I Taiga
Mixed forest | | Steppe | | Semi-desert
Map 1. 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.
springs and summers contrast to long winter freezes. The mean temperatures in January in European Russia and southern Siberia average zero to freezing Fahrenheit; the rest of Siberia averages 0 to -32 degrees Fahrenheit. In comparison, western Europe and North America average 32-50 Fahrenheit in the winter months. Growing seasons were accordingly short: around St. Petersburg, four months (mid-May to mid-September); near Moscow about five and a half (mid-April to end September); up to six months in the fertile steppe south of Kyiv. By contrast, much of western Europe enjoys eight to nine growing months with the temperate effects of Gulf Stream and Mediterranean.
Short growing seasons allowed time for only one crop in the summer. Only a narrow range ofhardy grains (oats, rye, barley) and root vegetables could be grown; yields depended upon the quality ofthe soil, and they tended to be not much better than subsistence level until the empire expanded into the black earth steppe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. The length of winters also meant that livestock would be few and hardly robust, as peasants could spare little grain and hay for fodder and the animals were cooped up all winter. In central Russian lands this cycle meant limited supplies of manure for fields and meat and dairy for the peasant diet, balanced by protein from forest exploitation. Expansion into the black earth lands, fertile ground for animal husbandry as well as grain production, improved this situation in the eighteenth century.
Soil and vegetation created the most significant natural divides in historic lands of the Russian empire. Europe and Eurasia are composed of east-west bands of soil and vegetation produced by latitude and relationship to atmospheric bodies of warm and cold air. These in turn dictated settlement patterns and economy. At the far north in European Russia and Siberia, south of the frozen Arctic, is a band of 1.5 million square miles of tundra, or cold desert. A land of permafrost, with a two- month summer thaw, here grow only mosses, lichens, shrubs, grasses, dwarfed plants—no trees. Mainly reindeer live here and the area is generally inhospitable to humans other than Eskimos and Laplanders on the seashore.