Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

From the outset the Russian government was concerned not only to integrate them, but also to protect other nationalities against them. When Moscow merchants petitioned in 1791 to be shielded from their competition, the government responded with a decree forbidding them to settle in the capital cities: this became the basis for the creation of the Pale of Settlement, which confined them, with few exceptions, to the former territories of Poland, plus the rest of Ukraine and New Russia.

For much of the nineteenth century, however, the Russian authorities did attempt to find some way of integrating Jews into society. The Jewish Statute of 1804 in some respects exemplified European enlightenment thinking about how this might best be accomplished. Jews were, for example, to be admitted without restriction to education at all levels, or, if they wished, to their own schools, where, however, they would be obliged to learn Russian, Polish or German. Their right of self-government in the kahal was confirmed in so far as it was separate from the rabbinate. They were allowed to set up and own factories, and to buy or lease land in New Russia and certain other provinces. On the other hand, even here there were restrictions: Jews were forbidden to engage in the liquor trade, which had been a major source of income for them in Poland. They were barred from military service, and required instead to pay a special tax. Above all, the Pale of Settlement was confirmed.49

In practice, the assimilatory aspects of the Statute remained a dead letter, while the restrictive ones were applied in full. Russian schools at all levels were so sparse that the Jews were scarcely able to take advantage of them. Even those who did could find it difficult to obtain appropriate employment afterwards: when one Simon Vul’f graduated in law at Dorpat University in 1816, he was briefly hired by the Ministry of Justice, but soon dismissed on the grounds that he could not handle cases involving ecclesiastical law.50 As for the prospect of agricultural settlement in New Russia, the government never backed it up with funds. In local government, it proved impossible to separate the secular functions of the kahal from the religious function of the rabbinate: Russians made the distinction without difficulty, but it was quite alien to Jewish tradition. In 1844 the kahal was officially abolished, but in practice continued to exist, since the authorities were unable to replace it with anything effective. Henceforth, however, it had no acknowledgement or protection at law.

Overall, the Jews suffered from the Russian government’s endemic tendency to promise well-tailored reforms which it was unable to deliver: only for the Jews this tendency was to prove especially damaging. Under Nicholas I assimilation was viewed not as an ultimate goal to be achieved, but as an immediate bureaucratic criterion, to be manipulated in ‘carrot and stick’ fashion. Conversion to Orthodoxy became a pre-condition for Jews’ enjoyment of the normal rights of Russian subjects; for the vast majority who remained loyal to their ancestral faith discrimination intensified. In 1827 the exemption from military service was abolished. This did not merely mean that Jews henceforth bore the same obligations as Russians: many Jewish boys were picked out at the age of twelve for compulsory military training, after which they remained in the army for the customary twenty-five years.

Up to the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews suffered from their anomalous position within the empire, from popular prejudice and from the government’s inability to match aspirations with practical measures. There was as yet, however, no concerted ethnic or racial doctrine directed against them: that was to be a product of a more nationally conscious era, when publicists wanted to explain away the continuing rift between Russian people and Russian empire.

THE BALTIC At the opposite extremity from the Poles and the Jews were the German landed nobles of the Baltic provinces which Peter I conquered from the Swedes in the early eighteenth century. They entered the Tsar’s service with conviction and remained perhaps of all ethnic groups the most loyal to him right up to the end of the empire, even in the period when national identity became the cardinal question in European politics.

There were good reasons for this. Of all the empire’s elites, the Baltic German barons were alone in having nobody with whom they might potentially form a nation. On the lands they owned the peasants were Estonian and Latvian-speaking, fairly labile as regards ethnic identity, but certainly not identifying with Germany.51 Furthermore, from the time of their incorporation, the Baltic barons possessed privileges which no other social or ethnic group managed to gain under the autocracy. Peter I confirmed the Ritterschaften of Estland and Livland in all the corporate rights and privileges which they had enjoyed under the Swedish crown, but had been in danger of losing: these included the right to run local government in the countryside, preservation of the Lutheran church, of German law and the German court system, and use of the German language for all official business. They were not absorbed into the Russian nobility, but kept their distinct identity and institutions.52 Succeeding monarchs confirmed these arrangements: indeed, they later provided some of the principles on which Catherine II reformed the imperial nobility in 1785. (It is true that in carrying out this reform, Catherine also abolished the Baltic nobles’ self-governing institutions, but they were restored by Paul a couple of decades later, and not interfered with again till the later nineteenth century.)

Peter took this unusual line with the Baltic barons because he recognized in them the ideal servitors he needed to carry through the kind of reforms he had in mind. They had long experience of corporate self-government on western models. They had easy access to German universities, where public administration in the spirit of cameralism was taught better than anywhere else in the world. Their Lutheran faith, with its emphasis on personal probity and loyalty to the state, was also an asset. In effect, Peter offered them a deal: confirmation of their privileges in return for loyal service to the Russian Empire.

This was a deal which had much to commend it from their viewpoint as well, and not merely in order to preserve their privileges. Young Germans imbued with ideals of good government picked up at Jena or Göttingen found that the petty principalities of their motherland could offer scant scope for their talents. Even relatively large and enlightened Prussia yielded to Russia in the opportunities it afforded for the deployment of their skills. Russia was a huge and backward empire, whose ruler was determined to develop its resources and mobilize its people: there, if anywhere, was the chance of achievement and promotion. The Tsars entrusted them with high positions of command, both in the armed forces and the civil service. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the 2,867 senior officials mentioned by Erik Amburger in his detailed study of the imperial bureaucracy, 498 (17.4%) were of German origin, and 355 of those from the Baltic provinces alone. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when this German influence reached its height, the figures were even higher.53

Like the English aristocracy of the nineteenth century, the Baltic German nobles combined ancient institutions with a modern understanding of statecraft and usually a ruthless exploitation of the rural population working on their estates. Uniquely among the nobilities of the Russian Empire, they practised entail rather than dividing their estates on the death of the owner. They combined a close interest in agriculture on their domains with an urban and cosmopolitan lifestyle: Riga and Reval, both centres of international trade, ensured contact with Germany and with a wider world and gave them regular intercourse with professional and commercial people, who were often German too, or at least spoke the language.

FINLAND Finland was an unusual success story for Russian imperial policy in the nineteenth century, at least until the final decade. That relative success was due partly to the singular circumstances in which Finland was received into the Empire. A province of Sweden at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was conquered by the Russians during the war against Sweden in 1808–9.

The defeat of the Swedish army did not automatically entail the willing acquiescence of the Finnish people: guerrilla armies were formed and became troublesome to the new Russian administration. In an attempt to win over the Finns, Alexander I promised to uphold all the liberties they had enjoyed under the Swedish crown, and he summoned a meeting of the Finnish Diet at Poorvoo in March 1809. Under the arrangements worked out then, Finland kept its own laws and institutions, and had its own ruling council, or Senate, quite separate from the Russian government, and reporting personally to the Tsar in his capacity as Grand Duke of Finland. The Grand Duchy was even permitted to have its own small army. This kind of concession went further than the normal Russian imperial practice of respecting local traditions and conciliating local elites: it left Finland with unmistakable home rule.

Alexander’s policy was almost completely successful in gaining the Finns’ allegiance, and in this way a unique situation arose: the Russian Empire became home to a small European state, with its traditional laws and liberties inherited from the past. It is true that the Tsars did not see fit to convene the Diet for more than half a century, but in other respects they honoured the engagements they had entered into. The Finns reciprocated: in 1830 they remained quiescent, and some of their army units actually took part in the repression of the Polish rebellion. Finns did quite well out of the settlement with Russia: their high-flyers could take service in the Russian army and civil service, while the reverse road was closed to Russians.

More than that, the Finnish national movement, once it began to take hold during the mid-nineteenth century, initially received the support of the Russian government, as a counter-weight to the cultural and linguistic influence of the Swedes, which had hitherto been dominant. As late as the 1880s, one might have pointed to Finland as an example of successful Russian imperial integration.54

CENTRAL ASIA Turkestan and the oases of Central Asia were not brought into the Russian Empire till the second half of the nineteenth century. They were conquered partly for traditional reasons of security: to protect the open southern border of steppe and desert. As Foreign Minister Gorchakov argued in a classic defence of Russian imperialism sent to other European powers in 1864: ‘The situation of Russia in Central Asia is similar to that of all civilised states which come into contact with half-savage nomadic tribes without a firm social organisation. In such cases, the interests of border security and trade relations always require that the more civilised state have a certain authority over its neighbours, whose wild and unruly customs render them very troublesome. It begins first by curbing raids and pillaging. To put an end to these, it is often compelled to reduce the neighbouring tribes to some degree of close subordination.’55

There were also economic motives in play: the need for a secure supply of cotton at a time when the American Civil War threatened supplies from across the Atlantic, and in general the opportunities opened up by Central Asian raw materials and markets. Above all, the Russian need to shore up its European great power status by means of military successes after the humiliation of the Crimean War, and the ambition of local generals ensured that military solutions were sought for problems which might otherwise have been settled by diplomatic means.56

More than any other Russian imperial territories, Turkestan resembled right up to 1917 a colony of the normal European type, in that it was an area of economic exploitation, distant from the metropolis and recognized as being quite distinct from it. Its native peoples were classified as inorodtsy (aliens) and no attempt was made to Russify them or convert them to Christianity. Their elites, unlike those of the Caucasus, were not incorporated into the Russian nobility, though they were allowed to continue exercising most of their pre-existing powers under a Russian military Governor-General. The Islamic law courts were left undisturbed to exercise their prerogatives, at least in local affairs.

Probably with time, this attitude would have changed, and Russia would have begun the long, patient integration of the territory and its peoples into the imperial structure, as it had done over three centuries with the initially no less distinct Muslim peoples of the Volga basin. But their conquest came too late for this process to be seriously launched before the Tsarist empire itself collapsed.

C. Russia as empire – conclusions57

In the light of modern European imperial experience, mostly overseas and commercial, Russia looks decidedly odd. But that oddness largely fades if one examines it in the light of Asiatic or indeed pre-modern European experience, say that of Rome. Like an Asiatic empire, the Russian one created a supra-national elite with a strongly military ethos to integrate and rule the various subordinate peoples in their charge. It operated by gradually incorporating all those peoples more closely in the structure of the empire. Local tribute-gathering was integrated into the imperial fiscal system; tribal leaders were subordinated to the army command or to St Petersburg ministries; imperial law was given precedence over indigenous custom; Russian peasants or Cossacks were encouraged to move in and settle. All this took place without any presumption that ordinary Russians were superior to other peoples of the empire. Rather the reverse: Russians bore all the burdens of serfdom, from which some other peoples were exempted. All peoples, Russians included, were the raw material of empire, to be manipulated or dominated as seemed expedient to its unity and strength.

Let us sum up the main distinctive features of this empire.

1 It was an overland military empire, not only at the stage of conquest and defence of a new territory, but usually in its long-term administrative provisions, especially in areas considered vulnerable to insurrection or to outside incursion, like Poland or the Caucasus. This did not mean that trade was non-existent, but it was certainly not paramount, and it was often closely associated with the military. This gave military leaders the chance of power and profit in the localities where they exercised their command. In this respect, the Russian empire resembled the Roman, though it lacked traditions of citizenship, and the dynasty remained strong enough to prevent any military leader making a bid for supreme authority.

2 The authorities’ economic and fiscal policies gave priority to maintaining the armed forces and the administration. They tended to work in such a manner as to impede the mobilization of the economic potential of the empire, its population and resources.

3 The church played a relatively minor role. This is at first sight surprising, since at certain crucial phases the expansion of Russia took on the form of an anti-Islamic crusade, as in Spain. But in Asiatic empires there is no place for an independent church: ideology is part of the state’s armoury, and the ruler rules with the ‘mandate of heaven’.

4 There was usually no distinction between metropolis and colonies. Annexed territories became full components of the empire as soon as practicable. The stability of the empire was maintained over time by co-opting local elites and integrating them into the Russian nobility and bureaucracy. This co-option had the effect both of making the empire multi-national in principle and of widening the gap between elites and masses of all ethnic groups, including the Russians themselves. On the other hand, relations between the diverse peoples were markedly less racist than in, say, the British Empire. On the mass level, the worst relationships were between nomadic and sedentary peoples, with the sedentary ones steadily gaining ground, and between the Islamic and Christian peoples of the Caucasus.

5 The Russian culture and language were tangible integrating factors for most ethnic groups, but did not succeed, as they did in China, in obliterating and replacing other cultures. Whereas in China high culture was endogenous and worked along with the official ideology in maintaining order and social integration, in Russia high culture was to a large extent borrowed from outside and became subversive of official values. China was the heartland of Asia, while Russia was on the periphery of Europe, with all the advantages and disadvantages which that position entailed.

6 The empire was permanently open to the surrounding world, to both trade and invasion. Isolationism was not an option: Russia could not become ‘the middle kingdom’ in proud detachment, like China. Foreign and military policy were always crucial. Even when stability and security were attained on the Asian frontiers, they were never complete in the direction of Europe, from where the most dangerous and destructive invasions came, since the European states were technically and culturally on the whole more advanced. That is why the major crises came from there too.

7 At all times the survival of the empire and the maintenance of its territorial integrity were the paramount priorities for Russia’s rulers, before which national, religious, economic and other priorities invariably yielded. The Russian imperial sense of identity was powerful: it rested on pride in the size and diversity of the empire, as well as on military victories. As Karamzin put it in his History of the Russian State, ‘If we look at the expanse of this unique state, our minds are stunned: Rome in its greatness never equalled it … One need not be a Russian, only a thinking individual, to read with admiration accounts of the history of a nation which, through its courage and fortitude, won dominion over one-ninth of the world, opened up countries hitherto unknown, brought them into the universal system of geography and history, and enlightened them in the Divine Faith.’58 Thus Russian national identity tended to be subsumed in that of the empire, whose values were in principle multi-national. That worked well enough until the other European powers, Russia’s bitter rivals, started to become nation-states.

PART TWO State-building

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