Russia as Empire: Past And Present

247 Pages·2020·9.24 MB·english

by  Kees Boterbloem

Russia as Empire

K e e s B o t e r b l o e m
R U S S I A

E M P I R E
AS
past and present
REAKTION BOOKS
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
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www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2020
Copyright © Kees Boterbloem 2020
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 291 4
Contents
Preface 7
1 Empire, Imperial Identity and Colonial Rule:
The Russian Case 17
2 Empire by Design or Accident of History? 38
3 The Russian Empire in Western Eyes 44
4 Prehistory and Geography: Rus’ 59
5 The Mongols, Siberia and Asia 65
6 Moscow’s Rise: The Impact of the Byzantine,
Polish-Lithuanian and Mongolian Empires on
Muscovy 77
7 Troubles 92
8 From Mikhail to Peter: Composite Empire and
Middle Ground 101
9 The Waning of the Middle Ground: The Russian,
French and British Empires, 1721–1853 121
10 Indirect and Direct Rule: The Russian and
British Empires in Asia, 1853–1907 140
11 Multinational Empires: Russia and Austria-
Hungary, 1853–1917 156
12 The Soviet Union as Empire, 1917–91 165
13 Since 1991: Russkii or Rossiiskii? 195
Afterword: Is the Age of Political Empires
Over? 206
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Preface
T
his book intends to sketch how the loose confederacy
of Kyivan Rus’ (c. 988–1240) metamorphosed into
today’s Russian Federation (founded in 1991). In
both past and present, Rus’-Russia has been a polity of signif-
icant geographic size, in which an Eastern-Slavonic-speaking
government ruled, or rules, a great number of varied ethno-
cultural communities (peoples, ethnoi, narody). It is, however,
a simplistic distortion of the historical process to suggest, as is
sometimes done, that a Russian empire has uninterruptedly
existed in northern Europe and northern Asia for more than a
millennium. That for long periods ‘Russia’ has been an empire
is undeniable, but it certainly was not so before 1500, and it is
unclear when exactly it did become an empire after 1500. It fell
apart several times during the last half millennium as well,
returning in a very different form after each collapse. The
followi ng, then, investigates what sort of Eastern Slavonic states
existed on the Eastern European Plain (and eventually in north-
ern Asia) from the tenth century onward, who its sword-bearers
(in a literal and figurative sense) were, and on which ideolog-
ical pillars these polities may have rested.1 And it will suggest
at which point we could consider these states empires, as well
as whether or not we can call today’s Russian Federation one.
It will ponder the enduring belief in an eternal empire in
7
russia as empire
Russian collective memory, even if no such everlasting state
existed in Russian or Eastern Slavic history.
Russia can be compared both to early modern and modern
European overseas empires and to the few longer-lasting
empires located within the borders of Europe that existed
during the last millennium, such as the Holy Roman and
Byzantine empires, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg monarchy.
In some respects and at certain times, it can be compared as
well to Asian empires, such as those of early modern India, Iran
or China. And in some aspects Imperial Russia resembled its
arch enemy, the Ottoman Empire. All of these empires will be
occasionally compared or contrasted to the Russian empire,
when this is illuminating rather than obfuscating.
The book privileges discussing change over continuity,
countering the habit, sometimes open but often surreptitious,
of thinking of Russia as some sort of unchangeable empire.
Since St Volodymyr’s baptism in 988, the political organiza-
tion of the European and Asian realm that eventually became
Russia underwent sweeping transformations. Indeed, as will
be explained, the government that ruled Rus’ from 988 to
approximately 1240 cannot be truly called Russian, despite its
confusing name of Rus’. Neither can this Rus’ be called an
empire. Still, some of the cultural groundwork, particularly in
terms of language and religion, was laid in this period to which
the subsequent Muscovite, Imperial Russian, Soviet and
post-Soviet Russias harkened back.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can discern the first sprouts
of a distinctly Russian (as opposed to Eastern Slavic) cultural
identity emerge between the mid-thirteenth century and the
late fifteenth century; to this era some further origins of a
8
Preface
genuinely Russian empire can be traced as well. The develop-
ment of a Russian language from a common Eastern Slavonic
tongue occurs then, while a Russian-Orthodox religion devel-
oped that was in several ways different from mainstream Eastern
Orthodox Christianity. This happened in a place that was not
yet ‘Muscovy’ or ‘Russia’, but in what was instead a western
borderland of the Mongolian empire. Politically, the principality
of Moscow began to surface as the most significant polity under
Mongolian rule of this easternmost region of Europe. It wrested
itself loose from the Mongol-Tatar embrace towards 1500.
Since about that time a large territory named Muscovy or
Russia (and, for three-quarters of a century, the Soviet Union)
has been ruled by an independent central government, either
from Moscow or from St Petersburg. From approximately 1500
onwards, its leading figures began ever more confidently to
consider and style their country an empire, and by about 1700
foreign states and individuals began to accept this claim. This
imperial government was composed of people who commu-
nicated in Russian, although the sixteenth-century version of
this language had a rather different form from that which long-
serving Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) learned
in the early twentieth century, or from the manner in which
President Vladimir Putin (b. 1952) speaks today. From about
1547 onwards it became customary for rulers to call themselves
tsar, or caesar, before, from 1721 onwards, calling themselves
imperator. They then donned the humble moniker of ‘general
secretary’ after the October coup of 1917. Nowadays Russian
leaders are titled president, but whether they still preside over
an empire is moot.
Whereas its leaders carried the same titles, certain institu-
tions carried the same name, and its elite spoke variations of
9