A History of Russia and Its Empire: From Mikhail Romanov to Vladimir Putin

367 Pages·2018·8.956 MB·English

by  Kees Boterbloem

A History of Russia
and Its Empire
From Mikhail Romanov
to Vladimir Putin
Second Edition
Kees Boterbloem
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Executive Editor: Susan McEachern
Editorial Assistant: Katelyn Turner
Senior Marketing Manager: Kim Lyons
Credits and acknowledgments for material borrowed from other sources, and reproduced
with permission, appear on the appropriate page within the text.
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
First Edition 2013.
Maps by Kees Boterbloem and Michael Swierczynski, 2017.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-5381-0439-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-5381-0440-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-5381-0441-5 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on the Transcription xiii
1 Phoenix: The Rise of Russia in the Seventeenth Century, 1613–1689 1
The Romanov Dynasty: Mikhail 1
The Romanov Dynasty: Aleksei 3
Interlude 7
The Ruling System 8
Russia’s Economy, Society, and Culture 9
Women and Men in Early Modern Russia 14
The Geographical Challenge 15
Within and Without Russia 16
Cossacks 20
Religion and Foreigners 21
2 Great Power, 1689–1796 27
Peter’s Significance 27
Russia and the Law; Peter and the Networks 29
Peter the Great: Russia’s Europeanization 31
Peter: Man and Myth 35
Romanov Expansion Eastward: Siberia’s Conquest 38
Cultural and Technological Transfer: Russia’s Key to Survival 41
Female Rule 42
The Academy of Sciences and Russian Culture 44
Anna’s Autocracy 46
iii
iv Contents
Elizabeth 47
Catherine the Great’s Significance 49
Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst: Russia and the Enlightenment 51
The Limits of Catherine’s Power: Foreigner, Woman, Murderess,
or an Autocratic Facade? 53
Poland Partitioned: New Russia 55
3 The Height and Decline of Imperial Russia, 1789–1855 61
The Limitations of the Autocracy 61
Paul and Suvorov 65
Speranskii 67
The War of 1812 70
The Congress of Vienna 72
Perennial Backwardness? 74
Stagnation: The Decembrists and the Third Department 77
The Birth of the Intelligentsia 79
Greece and Poland 82
Russian Colonialism 83
The Great Game 89
The Great Game in Central Asia 91
The Age of Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov 94
4 Domestic Convulsions, 1855–1905 99
The Watershed 99
The Crimean War 101
The Abolition of Serfdom 103
Other Reforms: The Courts and Local Government 106
The Culmination of the Reforms: The Army 108
The Polish Question Revisited 109
Counterreform? 110
Revolutionaries 112
Cultural Brilliance 115
Fatal Contradictions: Industrialization and Urbanization 116
Land Hunger 121
Marxism and Peasant Socialism 122
Liberalism and Conservatism 125
Non-Russian Nationalism 127
5 Fatal Foreign Entanglements and a Failed Revolution, 1877–1914 133
The Russo-Turkish War and Pan-Slavism 133
Russia as an Imperialist Power in East Asia 135
The Russo-Japanese War 137
Political Opposition 140
The 1905 Revolution 144
The End of the Revolution 147
Stolypin and the Tsar 148
Contents v
Peasants into Farmers 150
Industrialization and Economic Growth: Strikes 152
The Bosnian Crisis of 1908 and the Balkan Wars: The Alliance System 153
Women 158
Religion 159
Ballets Russes, Silver Age: Decadence, the Empire’s Last Hurrah,
or Cassandra? 162
6 Forging Soviet Civilization, 1914–1924 167
The First World War 167
Provisional Government and Soviets 170
The Bolsheviks 172
Going Boldly Where No One Had Gone Before 173
How to Build a Communist Society 175
Destroying an Empire 177
Empire and Comintern 180
Cheka and Gulag: The Beginnings 182
A Sham Democracy 185
Victory in War, Retreat in Peace 187
The Soviet Federation 189
Soviet Women 191
7 The Inevitable Triumph of Stalinism? 1924–1941 197
Lenin and Stalin 197
The 1920s Intermezzo and the Great Turn 201
Bolshevik Farming 202
Collectivization and Dekulakization 205
Famine 207
Industrialization 208
The Great Turn in Soviet Asia 209
Culture and Religion 212
The Gulag Archipelago 214
The Great Terror 217
A Potemkin Country 221
Was Stalinism Really Necessary? 223
8 The Great Patriotic War and the Cold War, 1941–1953 229
The Second World War 230
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 230
Before Barbarossa 233
Barbarossa and Beyond 235
Soviet Resolve 237
The Victor’s Spoils: Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam 239
Postwar Reconstruction 241
Foreign Affairs 244
vi Contents
9 Embattled Leader of the “Second World,” 1953–1982 249
At the Apex 249
The Struggle for Stalin’s Mantle 251
Champion of the Third World 253
Mao, Khrushchev, and Beyond 255
The “Secret” Speech and Its Consequences 257
Khrushchev’s Domestic Program and Fall 260
Collective Leadership and Leonid Brezhnev 263
10 The Fall of the Soviet Union and Beyond, 1982–2018 269
Religion and Nationalism 269
Brezhnev’s Successors 272
Glasnost’ and Perestroika 274
Gorbachev Reforms His Country 277
Gorbachev Embattled 279
Russia and Its Former Colonies 282
Change and Continuity in Russia and elsewhere 285
Vladimir Putin 288
Past and Present 291
Chronology 299
Index 321
About the Author 351
Preface
A textbook can never do proper justice to the past of a country as vast and complex
as Russia in its various incarnations since 1613. Then again, no work of history has
ever been able to present a truly comprehensive depiction of the past (and some
may say that great works of literature such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time have been more successful at doing this than any history book). Given
length constraints, I can merely touch on certain key events and trends, necessarily
omitting vast swathes of Russian history, let alone Ukrainian, Kazakh, or Georgian
history. But I have tried to include something of the history of the predominantly
non-Russian parts of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union; the manner by
which these parts were incorporated into Russia; and the relationship between the
Russian center and the non-Russian periphery thereafter. For before 1991, we can
argue that this was the last of the great “multinational” empires, a country in which
almost two hundred distinct ethnocultural groups lived, rather than a nation-state.
And I have placed a fair amount of emphasis on the fact that this empire was con-
tinually faced with challenges from polities on its borders and far away from them.
Russia may be seen as a “civilization” sui generis, as Marshall Poe recently suggested,
or as a distinct “intelligible field of study” for the historian, as Arnold Toynbee much
longer ago proposed (Toynbee added the other Eastern European Orthodox coun-
tries to this “field”), but its history cannot be understood in isolation. The relevance
of this history becomes more evident if it is embedded in a broader discussion of
world history. Again, a discerning reader will undoubtedly wish for more, for my
outline of the international cross-cultural contacts that left an imprint on Russian
and Soviet history merely skims the surface.
Inevitably, I’ve given more attention to nineteenth- and especially twentieth-
century developments. This is partly the consequence of the greater amount of writ-
ing from and about these centuries. Furthermore, more recent developments will be
vii
viii Preface
of greater interest to most readers. It is particularly from approximately 1812 onward
too that Russian history acquires a significance that goes beyond the history of east-
ern (or northern) Europe and northern Asia. Obviously, this importance dramati-
cally increased from 1917 onward. Because of its global significance, Soviet history
takes up a large part of this book. Meanwhile, the more than twenty-five years that
have passed since the implosion of 1991 have begun to allow historians to place the
Soviet experiment somewhat more clearly within the general historical development
of Russian history, as I have tried to do in the following pages.
Political developments provide the narrative framework of this book, which may
be appropriate for an empire in which politics have been such a priority, especially
in recent times. But I am sure that this emphasis will not please all readers. Perhaps
less obvious in reading the following pages will be my conviction that one of the
few constants in Russian history is the absence of the rule of law. In tsarist times,
the autocrat stood above the law and ruled in a wholly arbitrary manner. Tsar and
subjects alike equally ignored the law. In Soviet times too, despite an elaborate
codex, the regime systematically ignored its own laws and, in response, so did its
subjects. And since 1991, authoritarian rule has once again gained ground, not
just in Russia, but also in most of the other states that have succeeded the Soviet
Union. That is why I rarely talk about (Imperial) Russian or Soviet “citizens”: the
state has rarely treated the people living within the country’s borders as citizens, as
people with inalienable rights.
With very helpful advice from my editor Susan McEachern, and from anonymous
peer reviewers, this second edition has been enhanced and updated. In particular,
I have discussed the Putin era to a greater extent as it has become better defined
(or has defined itself more boldly) in the years since the 2013–2014 Euromaidan
rebellion in Kyiv. Apart from additional attention to more recent history, I have also
added more detail on the Caucasus and Central Asia, especially in the hundred years
since 1917. I have updated suggested literature and websites, and I have prepared an
instructor’s manual as a resource for teaching courses on Russian and Soviet history.
Finally, with the help of Michael Swierczynski, a most able graduate student in the
University of South Florida History Department, the maps have been redrawn to
improve their utility.
Irrespective of the book’s political emphasis and my view about the perpetual
absence of a Kantian Rechtsstaat in Russia, and despite the omissions and the some-
what greater weight given to more recent history, it is nonetheless my aim to give
the reader a solid understanding of the last four hundred years of history of the
people who populate the vast territory from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok and from
Arkhangel’sk to Baku today. The text is intended as an introduction to Russian
history, not the final word. I nonetheless hope that the reader will be sufficiently
intrigued after reading this concise history to explore the study of all or parts of Rus-
sian history in greater depth.
The text has been organized in ten fairly sizable chapters so that it can be used in
almost any one-term, college-level survey of Russian and Soviet history, regardless
Preface ix
of the length of the term. Instructors might have their students read some fiction,
as well as watch films or listen to music, for such cultural products bring the past
often much more quickly to life than any textbook can. Bountiful material in this
regard (including many excellent maps) is available and easily accessible on the
Internet these days, and I have suggested some websites to explore. Likewise, many
fine collections of primary sources (translated from the original Russian) are avail-
able in English for both the Imperial and Soviet periods. Some primary sources (in
English) are suggested at the end of each chapter, but almost all Russian-language
sources available in print or online have been excluded, as most of the book’s readers
are presumed to have little knowledge of Russian. Readers are encouraged to further
explore Russian history through my listing of some key scholarly works available
in English (especially recent ones) as well as some Russian-language films (some of
which are downloadable from the Internet for a fee, whereas others are, alas, difficult
to find and a few remain without English subtitles). And in order to help readers find
their way through the text, I have included at the end a chronology of important de-
velopments and events. I have not had the temerity to suggest any music—in which
Russian culture is especially rich (from Ukrainian choirs and Pussy Riot, Nautilus
Pompilius, and Vladimir Vysotskii to Glinka and Schnittke)—ballet, or opera.