The Expansion of Europe

Though Russo-Ottoman comparisons are often very revealing, Russian imperial history is also, however, part of the story of what used to be called “the expansion of Europe.” To be sure, there are fundamental differences between agrarian land empires and transoceanic maritime ones.

Like the British, French, and Spanish, Russia's position on Europe's periphery aided her expansion.

Even if one confines oneself just to the period between 1725 and 1917, the Russian Empire changed greatly over time and differed greatly from region to re­gion. Inevitably some regions and some periods have more in common with European overseas colonialism than others. Russia's last major imperial acquisi­tion, the khanates of Central Asia, was governed indirectly in explicit copy of British India's princely states. The spread of the cotton-growing economy in the region also had obvious parallels with British Egypt. As regards the impact of Russia's empire on literature and the Romantic imagination, the Caucasus comes unequivocally first. The mass movement of Russian colonists into the southern Steppe, which was transformed into one of the great centers of global wheat production, mirrors European farmer colonists' conquest of the North American prairies, with Odessa playing the role of Chicago.

It was in the western borderlands and in its relations with western Europe that im­perial Russia most differed from the European maritime empires. Especially by the nineteenth century, these empires exercised not just political domination, but also cultural hegemony over their colonies. This was far from always true as regards Russia's relationship with its non-Russian subjects in Europe. At the turn of the twen­tieth century the Russians were the ninth most urbanized ethnic group in the empire, and their level of literacy was only just above the average for the empire's peoples. In particular, in terms of literacy, wealth, and urbanization, they stood well below the Protestant peoples of the empire's Baltic region. Meanwhile, throughout the eight­eenth and even nineteenth centuries, Russia imported European ideas, technologies, and professional cadres in order to modernize its state and society.

The history of European cultural hegemony overlaps to a great extent with the global spread of what might be described as the scientific worldview. Traditionally this is usually seen as emerging initially among northwest European elites in the seventeenth century and then spreading downward in their own societies and out­ward to elites in the European periphery. Subsequently European empire extended this scientific way of thinking to the non-European world. The postcolonial critique of empire encapsulates inter alia denunciation of European arrogance toward in­digenous cultures and condemnation of European imperialism for defining some groups of humans—non-whites and women above all—as congenitally incapable of reason.

The Russian case is somewhat special. To some extent the Russian elites are part of this story of the spread of European rationality and the scientific worldview. As already noted, the dominant ideology of Russia's empire outside Europe in the eight­eenth and nineteenth centuries was a variant of the European civilizing mission. But Russian elites were peripheral in a specific way. Seventeenth-century Russia was not just marginal or backward by the standards of England or France in a manner comparable perhaps to Sweden or Portugal. No secular high culture really existed in Russia in 1600, and the religious culture and worldview of Russian elites were drawn much more from Byzantium than from Latin Europe.

This really only became a major issue in retrospect as a result of intellectual and po­litical currents in nineteenth-century Russia. Russian conservative nationalists—and in particular the so-called Slavophiles—denounced Peter I and Russia's Westernized elites for abandoning their own culture and thereby destroying the organic har­mony of Russian society. Borrowing heavily from European Romanticism and from Johann Gottfried Herder, the father of modern scholarship about ethnicity, they denounced Enlightenment rationality and saw authentic national identity as residing in the peasantry. Even their conception of the peasant commune as the key embod­iment of Russian popular collectivism was initially owed to the German scholar August von Haxthausen. The fact that much of the critique of Westernization was actually borrowed from Western sources was of little significance, however. What gave weight to the nationalist critique was the growing sense of crisis as Russia's so­cial and political order was undermined by socioeconomic change and threatened by social-revolutionary and nationalist movements. The tsarist regime itself was Janus­faced, stressing its commitment to the Petrine and European civilizing mission, but also emphasizing its allegiance to the values of Russia's organic society and Russian historical traditions. For scholars of Russian history and culture this is mostly just the familiar story of the tangled competition between Westernizing and nationalist currents in Russian society, thought, and politics. Translated into postcolonial terms, however, this places Russia confusingly on both sides of the colonizing divide.^[2276]

In one key respect, namely location, Russia was sharply different from not only most of the previous agrarian empires, but also the European maritime empires of its day.

Remoteness did have advantages. European armies with their cumbersome logistical tails found it hard to penetrate to the core regions of Russia's empire. Distance, climate, and communications helped to confound Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler. Though the mobile cavalry armies of the Steppe nomads had fewer such difficulties, the northern forest zone offered some protection even against them. When the odds in the age-old conflict between nomad and agriculturalist turned decisively in the latter's favor from the seventeenth century, Russians were well- placed to move southward into the Steppe. Even before that, the sparsely populated forest zone of Siberia had offered few obstacles to their expansion eastward. Moving into the geopolitical vacuum left by the collapse of Mongol power, they were able at little cost first to conquer the rich Siberian fur economy and subsequently to exploit the region's enormous mineral resources. The Urals became the key zone of Russian heavy industry in the eighteenth century. Comparisons with the Ottoman Empire are relevant here. When the Mongol Ilkhanate to the Ottomans' east disintegrated, it was replaced not by a vacuum into which the Ottoman Empire could move, but instead by the powerful and hostile Safavid Empire. In the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman challenge to Europe peaked, the existence of a “second front” to the Ottomans' east was of crucial geopolitical importance. By contrast, the Russians conquered all of Siberia's resources on the cheap and did not encounter a truly dan­gerous rival in the east until they confronted Japanese power at the turn of the twen­tieth century.

In most respects, however, Russia's remoteness was a major obstacle to empire­building. Trade routes created cities, wealth, and literacy. They also often yielded larger revenues at less cost in effort and brutality than was needed to wring taxes from an agrarian economy. At least the agrarian communities on which most great land empires rested were in densely populated regions and therefore relatively easy to control and exploit. Russia's Muscovite core, in contrast, was a relatively infertile and sparsely populated region even in the seventeenth century, in which a slash- and-burn agriculture still often prevailed. Controlling and taxing this population was a challenge. Even as the population thickened and villages became permanent, an enormous open frontier with Cossack settlements happy to welcome runaway peasants threatened to undermine the rulers' efforts to control and exploit rural so­ciety. In this context, serfdom made brutal sense.^[2278]

Western scholars tended traditionally to discuss Russian history in terms of what was lacking in comparison to Europe.^[2279] The deficit usually included feudalism with its representative institutions, a Latin church independent of the crown, and legal traditions embodying absolute property rights and mutually enforceable contracts between rulers and ruled. These historians' aim was to explain Russia's failure to match European liberal and constitutional development. Much of the Russian intel­ligentsia approached their country's history from a similar angle. The comparisons are legitimate and important, but one should remember that they are one-sided and in a sense anachronistic. Seen in its own terms, the creation of a great empire in so hostile a geographical environment was a considerable feat. No doubt ordinary Russians were at least as much the victims as the beneficiaries of imperial power. But if the Russian people suffered greatly to create a powerful empire, the Poles and the Ottoman Muslims also suffered for their failure to sustain a polity able to defend them from external threats. In the case of the Ottoman Muslims, for example, this price ultimately included the ethnic cleansing or death of the majority of the Islamic population of the empire's northern borderlands and of the Balkan Peninsula.