Nancy Kollmann - The Russian Empire 1450-1801

constant; it was used liberally to win control (brutal conquest, suppression of opposition) and to maintain it (hostage taking, corporal and capital punishment, constant threat). But early modern empires lacked the manpower to control by coercion alone, so they deployed other strategies to assert legitimacy and govern.

Central to creating imperial legitimacy was the bravado of declaring that one held it. Empires "broadcast" their power, asserting control far more categorically than their on-the-ground power could achieve. Imperial centers set forth a supranational ideology, usually associated with the dominant religion of the rulers and their closest elite, trying to inspire what Tilly calls "commitment." As Karen Barkey elaborated regarding the Ottoman empire and Geoffrey Hosking noted in the

Russian case, such a supranational ideology does not exclusively identify itself with the hierarchs and institutions of the dominant religion, or does so at its peril. It honors those leaders and constructs its rituals and symbolic vocabulary from the dominant faith, but it keeps ideological control in its own hands. It often leavens its identification of the rulers as religious with other qualities as well, perhaps depicting the dynasty as heroic and charismatic, extolling the rulers' ability to protect the realm from enemies and its subjects from injustice. Providing good justice and mercy—in courts and in alms giving—were central attributes of imperial rulers in the Eurasian tradition, and we will explore all these elements of legitimizing ideology and practice in Russia.

Beyond ideology, a crucial element of maintaining imperial power is the delicate balancing of cohesion and control, what Tilly calls "capital." The state creates institutions to organize the market, collect taxes, control population, staff the army and bureaucracy, and otherwise collect resources that it then disburses among the dominant classes to reward and enlist. It creates cohesion among the elite by offering tax, land, and other privileges. It constructs institutions such as judiciary and bureaucracy that serve the populace as well as control them. Subject populations can choose to "accommodate," in Alfred Rieber's phrase, by joining the imperial military or civil service or even culturally assimilating. But the imperial center also avoids too much cohesion, in the form of too much integration of communities on the local level. As true in the Russian empire as it was for the Ottoman case that Barkey explored, imperial rulers operationalize this middle ground of co-optation by maintaining direct, vertical chains of connection to individual communities; they keep those communities and their elites relatively isolated from each other. In what Barkey calls a "hub and spoke" pattern and Jane Burbank calls an "imperial regime of rights," imperial rulers make separate "deals" (the phrase is Brian Boeck's) for packages of duties and rights with constituent groups.

In this way, a "politics of difference" approach directly benefits the center. In the Russian case, separate deals defined different tax rates and military obligations, maintenance of religious practices, local government and elites for groups as various as Russian cavalrymen and their serfs, Don and Ukrainian Cossacks, Siberian reindeer herders, steppe nomads, and Baltic German Junkers. Everyone related to the tsar vertically in personal appeal through the tsar's officialdom; in theory subjects had no reason to connect horizontally across class or geographical affinities for self-help, governance, or, most significantly, for opposition to the regime. This kept the realm loosely unified around the center and stable. To be particularly effective in this, however, a regime had to be flexible, constantly reassessing and renegotiating its relationships with subject peoples in changing times.

Early modern Russia developed its governing patterns from multiple sources, combining a strong acquaintance with Mongol politics and governing institutions with the powerful package of political, legal, cultural, ideological, ritual, and symbolic concepts and practices that Byzantium and other Orthodox centers offered in the centuries after Kyiv Rus' princes accepted Christianity in 988. Its rulers governed over great diversity—ethnic, religious, linguistic, and local— curbed by central authority deftly applied.

A final issue in introducing this work is the question of why Russia created empire. It is unfashionable these days for historians to pose the question, because answers have been so politically charged and continue to be so. Russia did expand very far and very fast, galloping across the continent of Asia to claim authority over all Siberia in the single seventeenth century, pushing across the Far East and Pacific to Alaska in the eighteenth century while also winning the Black Sea littoral from the Ottoman empire and gobbling up (with two European partners) the sovereign state of Poland-Lithuania. Historiography born of the Cold War saw this expansionism as messianic, bent on ruling the world. Some scholars linked seeming rampant expansionism to Russia's "Byzantine heritage" (in a misguided reading of Byzantine ideology); others cited Karl Marx's call for universal socialism or followed up on his cautious discussion of an Asiatic path to socialism to develop the concept of "Asiatic Despotism." Some cited the "Third Rome Theory"—that Moscow was a "Third Rome" and a "Fourth shall never be"—as proof that Moscow intended to rule the world, while that text actually had minimal influence on the court (being embraced only in the seventeenth century by religious conservatives).

Such a normative approach ignores the fact that when Moscow was building empire, so were all its neighbors- the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid empires, European colonial empires in the New World, South and Southeast Asia, land grabs in Europe itself. In Europe such expansion was legitimized in religious terms in the sixteenth century, to which was added mercantilism in the seventeenth and a rich mix of realpolitik and emerging national and racial discourses in the eighteenth. Where improvements in seafaring, in military technology, in bureaucratic control, and fiscal mobilization made it possible, states expanded.

Russia pursued empire for the same reasons that its neighbors did, namely, to gain profit for rulers and elite and to earn resources for the state building that was one of the quintessential characteristics of the early modern era in Europe and Eurasia. For Russia, this meant capturing or opening lucrative river and overland trade routes, cities, and ports, conquering populations in resource-rich areas such as Siberia, and pushing south into fertile steppe pasture land that could be converted to farming and south and west towards Silk Road and Baltic ports. Russia's campaigns of conquest were clothed in various rhetorics—recapturing lands alleged to have been ancient patrimony, fighting infidel Islam (in the sixteenth century) or pursuing glory (in the eighteenth)—but the chronology and directions of Russia's expansion reveal economic and political goals behind each direction of conquest.

While tropes of Russia as a despotism might have faded, many scholars would counter the approach taken here with a related argument that Russia was a "unitary" state, ruled from the center with no significant political autonomies limiting its actions. Particularly scholars of the empire's nationalities, now free to explore their own national history in the wake of Soviet demise, put the emphasis on the Russian center's coercive power. They are most mindful of the constraints on their national and regional autonomies imposed by the Russian empire, rather than of its toleration of regional

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