Nancy Kollmann - The Russian Empire 1450-1801

Sciences have also provided generous research funds to make broad reading possible, and I finish up the work on this book at another wonderful research institute, the Stanford Humanities Center. Again, I am truly grateful for all the collegial and scholarly resources I have been given.

It is often predictable to end a preface with thanks to one's family, and I am true to form. But this is a very, very big thanks to my husband Jack Kollmann— throughout the many years of my work, on this and preceding books and courses and research, he has been at my side. His knowledge of Russian art and religion is boundless, as is his generosity in teaching me and helping me track things down or work things out. His unstinting support, love, and constancy are humbling; I am truly blessed.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

List of Maps xiii

Introduction: The Russian Empire 1450—1801 1

Prologue: The Chronological Arc 9

PART I. ASSEMBLING THE EMPIRE

Land, People, and Global Context 21

De Facto Empire: The Rise of Moscow 41

Assembling Empire: The First Centuries 55

Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 84

Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 103

PART II. THE MUSCOVITE EMPIRE THROUGH THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Broadcasting Legitimacy 129

The State Wields its Power 160

Trade, Tax, and Production 187

Co-optation: Creating an Elite 207

Rural Taxpayers: Peasants and Beyond 222

Towns and Townsmen 235

Varieties of Orthodoxy 244

PART III. THE CENTURY OF EMPIRE: RUSSIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center 267

Army and Administration 296

Fiscal Policy and Trade 316

Surveillance and Control in Imperial Expansion 335

Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 355

Towns, Townsmen, and Urban Reform 375Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire 396

Maintaining Orthodoxy 410

463

Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life 427 Conclusion: Constructing and Envisioning Empire 450

Index

List of Illustrations

1.1 1853 statue of Grand Prince and St. Vladimir, Kyiv 24

Novgorod's Sofiia Cathedral 43

Novgorod's Church of the Transfiguration 47 3.1 Statue of Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelytsky, Kyiv 76 4.1 Tal'tsy Architectural-Ethnographic Museum at Lake Baikal 85

Bell tower of the town hall, Reval (Tallinn) 117

Estonian peasant farms 119

The Illuminated Chronicle 134

Leaders of Novgorod prostrate themselves before Ivan III

(Illuminated Chronicle) 138

Tsar and patriarch re-enacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem as in Meyerberg 140

Moscow Kremlin ensemble 142

Moscow's St. Nicholas Church 144

Solikamsk's Trinity Church 145

Trinity "Over-the-Gate" Church, Kyiv 147

Election and coronation of the Romanov dynasty 152

Muddy road conditions, Novgorod 161

Five types of flogging as judicial punishment as in Olearius 171

Sofiia Cathedral, Vologda 190

Lake Baikal wooden chapel 196 9.1 Tsar Michael Romanov consulting with his boyars 209

Augustin von Meyerberg's Album of his embassy to Russia 226

Chapel of St. Nicholas, Novgorod 228 11.1 Adam Olearius' map of Moscow 237

Mosaic and fresco interior of Kyiv's Sofiia Cathedral 246

Trinity-St. Sergii Monastery 251

Frontispiece to Lazar Baranovych's Blagodat'i istina (1689) 268

Peter I's Summer Garden statuary, St. Petersburg 272

Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his son Peter I 273

Academy of Sciences and Kunstkammer, St. Petersburg 274

Catherine II by Erichsen 278

"The Bronze Horseman" 283

Estate of the Sheremetev family, Kuskovo 285

Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, Kazan 286

Church of the Elevation of the Cross, Irkutsk 287

"Ekaterinthal" palace, Reval (Tallinn) 289

Church of St. Andrew, Kyiv 291 15.1 Arcaded "merchants' quarters" in Kostroma 322 16.1 Trial of Shemiaka 350 18.1 Church of Elijah, Iaroslavl' 392 19.1 Church of the Transfiguration, Buriatiia 402

P. A. Demidov by Levitskii 441

Prince A. B. Kurakin by Borovikovskii 442 C.1 Johann Gottlieb Georgi's sketches of ethnic types (1799) 453 C.2 "Church on Spilled Blood," St. Petersburg 455 C.3 Cathedral of Alexander Nevskii, Reval (Tallinn) 456

List of Maps

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. 22

European Russia c. 1750. Modeled on maps from Allen F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders,

rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), maps 13, 15, and 19. 49

Russian conquest of Siberia in the seventeenth century. 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 34. 61

Urals fortified lines and western Siberia postal roads, mid-eighteenth century. Modeled on a map from James H. Bater and R. A. French, Studies in Russian Historical Geography (London: Academic Press, 1983),

figure 7.4. 87

Provinces of European Russia, Black Sea conquests, partitions

of Poland, c. 1795. Modeled on a map from Paul R. Magocsi and

Geoffrey J. Matthews, Ukraine: A Historical Atlas (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1985), map 16. 104

Introduction

The Russian Empire 1450-1801

How to describe an early modern empire over more than three centuries? So many regions, so many economies, so many ethnicities and so much change over time. By 1801 the Russian empire stretched from Poland to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Caspian and Black Seas, encompassing dozens of subject peoples with vastly different cultures and histories. The task for Russia's rulers centered in Moscow—"grand princes" until 1547, "tsars" until 1721, "emperors" thereafter— was to expand in search of productive resources (human and material) and to maintain local stability sufficient to mobilize those resources once conquered. They faced challenges to their rule of all sorts, ranging from the fundamental problem of distance ("the enemy of empire," in Fernand Braudel's pithy phrase), to violent uprisings, to constant flight of the taxpaying population, to resistance by elites in previously sovereign states. But they accomplished their task of imperial expansion, mobilization and governance nonetheless, rising from a forested outpost on Europe's and Eurasia's fringe in 1450 to a major geopolitical player in both arenas by 1801.

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