Russian and Chinese expansion in Inner Eurasia was part of a global transformation in human relations with the biosphere, as states, empires, and corporations engaged in increasingly feverish competition to mobilize new lands and new resources.1
At a global scale, Europe and the Atlantic world became increasingly important drivers of change. Within Inner Eurasia, new global currents of change seeped in primarily through the Russian heartland, which was now the most powerful polity within Inner Eurasia, and the one most committed to competing on a global stage. Since the time of Peter the Great, Russia's elites had begun to acquire European educations, and to adopt European sartorial and architectural styles, European lifeways and attitudes, and even European languages. Russian control of the Baltic shores and Siberia, and increasing trade through Central Asia, energized commercial flows between the Russian Empire and the rest of the world.
An important sign of Russia's increasing integration into the world economy was the convergence of Russian and European price levels in the eighteenth century. Two centuries earlier, the massive price rises experienced in Europe, driven by cheap American silver and the windfall profits made on the world's first global markets, had little impact in Muscovy. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian prices began to rise, too, as Russia became a major importer of manufactured goods and exporter of raw materials.2 Exports rose as Russia acquired new forms of colonial wealth. Expansion into Siberia provided new sources of furs, but also, for the first time, internal sources of precious metals. Silver was first discovered in 1702 near Nerchinsk, where a silver smelter was built in 1704, using the labor of prisoners and exiles. Gold was discovered in the Urals in the 1740s. By the late eighteenth century, Russia was producing large amounts of gold, and enough silver to mint almost all of its coinage.3 It had also become a major iron producer.
But Russian governments, though keen to borrow anything of value from the increasingly dynamic world of Europe, were also selective in their borrowing. They borrowed to enhance the power and wealth of the Russian state, and that meant scrutinizing European innovations carefully for their potential impact on Russia's traditional mobilizational system, whether they were new methods of farming, or new political and economic ideas. Russia would remain a traditional society, and the political and industrial revolutions that began to transform western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century would make little headway in the Russian Empire until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1820, the GDP per person of the lands that became the USSR was about 750 1990 US dollars (similar to that of eastern Europe at $748), while that of western Europe already stood at about $1,292.4
While China consolidated its grip on much of eastern Inner Eurasia, the Russian Empire consolidated its grip on Siberia, extended its influence deep into the central Inner Eurasian steppes, and also expanded westwards into eastern Europe and southwards into the Pontic steppes and the Caucasus. The area controlled by the Russian Empire increased from about 15 million sq. kilometers in 1750 to 16.6 million sq. kilometers in 1796 and 18.2 sq. kilometers in 1858.5 This chapter will focus on regions west of the Volga, and so will Chapter 10. We will return in Chapter 11 to the history of central and eastern Inner Eurasia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
By 1750, Russia was a European superpower. Its main military rival was no longer Poland or Sweden, but the rising power of Prussia. In the “Diplomatic Revolution” of 1756, Empress Elizabeth allied Russia with France and Austria against Britain and Prussia. Russian armies entered central Europe and defeated the armies of Frederick the Great in 1757, 1758, and 1759, occupied much of eastern Prussia in 1758, and took Berlin itself in 1760. These demonstrations of Russian military might were all the more striking given Russia's dynastic instability since the death of Peter the Great in 1725.
In 1762, the diplomatic and military situation was transformed by the death of Empress Elizabeth and the accession of her nephew, Peter III. Peter admired Frederick the Great and immediately made peace with Prussia. This meant that Russia gained little from the costly wars of the previous decade, though it had asserted both its right and its ability to play a major role in European affairs. Peter was soon forced to abdicate by Guards officers, and then murdered in prison, just six months after his accession. He was succeeded by his wife, the former German princess, Catherine.
In the late eighteenth century, under Catherine “the Great,” the Russian Empire conquered much of western Ukraine, advanced deep into eastern Europe as Poland was partitioned between Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, and the Russian Empire, consolidated its grip on the Pontic steppes, and began for the first time to build an empire in the Caucasus.
In 1764, Catherine abolished the Ukrainian Hetmanate, and in 1781 she brought Ukraine within the new Russian system of provinces. The empire absorbed Ukraine as it had so many other regions, by absorbing its elites, most of whom accepted their new suzerain with little protest. Ukraine's Cossack elites found their position as a ruling class and their control of land and peasants was protected within the Russian Empire, new posts opened up within the Imperial administration, and under the 1785 Charter of the Nobility, they could formally become part of the Russian nobility.6
In the 1770s, the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Prussia began to carve up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was already, by this time, effectively a Russian protectorate. On the face of it, Catherine seemed willing to support an independent, even a reformed Poland. But she was also determined to keep the Polish monarchy weak, so she opposed attempts to abolish the liberum veto. In 1764, she supported the election of a reforming monarch, her former lover Stanislaw August Poniatowski. Most of the Polish nobility opposed his attempts at modernizing reforms, and they united against him in the Confederation of Bar (1768–1772). Russian armies defeated Poniatowski's opponents in 1772, and large numbers of Polish nobles ended up in Siberian exile. In August 1772, Russia annexed most of modern Belarus in the first partition of Poland.
Between 1773 and the second partition in 1793, Poniatowski introduced further reforms, including, in 1791, Europe's first written constitution. In 1793, Catherine invaded once more, having been invited to do so by Polish nobles opposed to a constitution that threatened traditional gentry rights. Poniatowski was forced from the throne after a massive anti-Russian uprising led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko in 1794. The third partition followed in 1795, after Russian armies led by Alexander Suvorov crushed the Polish revolt in a brutal campaign, in which thousands of civilians were massacred in Warsaw.
After 1795, Poland ceased to exist as an independent state. Russia gained the rest of Belarus and Latvia, all of Lithuania, and much of western Ukraine.7 The partitions gave Russia control of former Lithuanian and Polish lands as far as the Vistula, and the Russian Empire acquired a new population whose peasantry was largely Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian, while its elites were mostly Polish and Catholic. Russia also acquired for the first time a large Jewish population. By the seventeenth century most of the world's Jews lived in eastern Europe, having been driven eastwards by persecution in western Europe. Muscovy had long excluded Jews, partly through fear of the impact of Judaism on Orthodoxy, a fear that can be traced back to the so-called “Judaizer” controversies of the late fifteenth century. But from 1667 onwards, Russian expansion brought huge numbers of Jews under Russian rule. The Polish partitions alone brought almost half a million Jews into the empire, creating the largest Jewish community anywhere in the world.8
In the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire also completed the long process of conquering the Pontic steppes, by absorbing the Crimean khanate, the last successor state to the Golden Horde.
In 1696, Peter I had conquered Azov, giving Russia a brief toehold in the Black Sea region. Russia lost Azov in 1711 but reannexed it in 1739. By this time, Tatar raids into Muscovy were no longer the threat they had once been, as Crimean raiding parties were blocked by new fortification lines, and hemmed in by Russian control of the Volga river and left-bank Ukraine.9 Like Poland, Crimea began to look like a dependency of the Russian Empire. Increasingly, its fate depended on decisions taken in Moscow rather than Bakhchesaray or Istanbul. No strong khans appeared in the eighteenth century, partly because the end of slave raiding had impoverished Crimea's rulers and its leading clans. In 1736, Russian armies invaded Crimea and sacked Bakhchesaray. However, provisioning and maintaining a Russian army so far south was still an expensive and complicated business, so Russia's armies withdrew without annexing Crimea. But the threat of annexation was by now real enough. Eventually, Khan Selamet Giray II (1740–1743), realizing that the balance of power in the Pontic steppes was changing fast, opened diplomatic relations with the Russian Empire.
War broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in September 1768, when Russian armies fighting the Polish “Confederation of Bar” entered territory claimed by Crimea. Crimean armies resisted, and in October the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Crimean armies played little role in the war that followed, partly because Russia had negotiated an alliance with the Yedisan Nogais, whose territory lay between the Dniester and Dnieper armies, dividing the Crimean Tatar forces from those of the Ottoman Empire. When Russian warships destroyed the Ottoman fleet off the western Anatolian port of Ceshme in 1770, Crimea was also isolated by sea. Some groups within Crimea began to advocate an alliance with Russia, particularly after Russia promised (as the Ottomans had three centuries earlier) to respect Crimean independence. Russia sent an army to Crimea in 1771. In 1772, a new khan negotiated a treaty with Russia formally granting Crimean independence, after which large numbers of Crimean nobles fled to Istanbul, in the hope of organizing an eventual reconquest. In 1776, Catherine installed a Crimean Poniatowski in Khan Shahin Giray. He tried to strengthen his own authority over the nobility and the major clans and to create a modernized army.10
The 1774 treaty of Kucuk Kainarca marks Russia's domination of the Pontic steppes. The Ottoman Empire gave its reluctant blessing to the existence of a formally independent Crimean state, now under Russian protection. It also conceded Russia control over the northern shores of the Black Sea and the Pontic steppe. For the first time in the region's history, a Russian polity ruled the Pontic steppe, a region in which Slavic armies had campaigned since the time of Kievan Rus’. Preoccupied with the Pugachev uprising and its aftermath in 1775, Catherine resisted pressure to annex Crimea until 1783. Then, after a revolt against Shahin Giray's reforms, Crimea and southern Ukraine were both incorporated into the Russian Empire. The conquest of Crimea gave Russia access to the Black Sea, and to the Caucasus and Persia. It also gave Russia a second major outlet to the sea, turning Russia for the first time into a major naval power.
Russia's conquest of the Pontic steppes was as momentous as the Qing conquest of the Oirat. From 1764, most of the steppelands north of Crimea were included within a new province of Novorossiya, which would be ruled after 1783 by Catherine's former lover, Grigorii Potemkin. To settle the towns and villages abandoned after the massive exodus of Tatars to the Ottoman Empire, Potemkin encouraged immigration from Russia and Ukraine. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Slavic migrants made up a majority of Crimea's population, and Russian was the peninsula's language of government and commerce.11
Conquest of the Pontic steppes brought the Russian Empire to the mountainous southern borders of Inner Eurasia in the Caucasus, and sucked Russian armies into the region's complex and violent politics.
The Caucasus has not been central to this account of Inner Eurasia because, ecologically, it was a mountainous borderland, very different from most of Inner Eurasia. But the story of Russian expansion into the Caucasus tells us a lot about Inner Eurasia, because it shows why and how Russian expansion was eventually slowed and checked at the rim of Inner Eurasia's vast flatlands. In the mountains of the Caucasus, Russian armies and administrators faced novel challenges, and expansion would get tougher and slower, until eventually it ground to a halt. But Russia's prolonged, expensive, and bloody attempts to expand into the Caucasus also demonstrate the extent of the expansionist momentum built up by the Russian mobilizational machine over several centuries.12
For many centuries, the Ottoman and Persian empires had competed for control over the Caucasus. The Russian conquest of the Pontic steppes brought Russian armies, too, within reach of the Caucasus. But Russian interest in the region dated from the sixteenth century. In 1557, a Kabardin (Circassian) prince, Temriuk Aidar, sent envoys to Moscow seeking its protection. In October 1558 his sons, Bulgeruko and Sultanuko, entered the service of Ivan IV and were baptized. Their descendants would be known as the “Cherkasskis” (Circassians).13 After the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanova, Ivan married a daughter of Temriuk, Maria Temriukovna, and that marriage would give Moscow dynastic claims on Circassia, which included much of the central and western parts of the northern Caucasus.14 In 1567, Ivan IV established a Russian fort on the northeastern frontier of the Caucasus at Tersk, where the Terek river empties into the Caspian Sea. It was manned only until 1571, though a new fort with the same name would be re-established in 1588 near the estuary of the Terek, and would survive until the middle of the eighteenth century.
In the early eighteenth century, Russia began to intervene more actively in the Caucasus. In 1722, as Persian power declined, Peter launched an unsuccessful invasion from Astrakhan, in alliance with several Caucasian powers. In the reign of Elizabeth I (1741–1762), Russia began building a line of fortifications along the Terek river, known as the Mozdok line. This was settled by Armenians and Cossacks as well as migrants from the mountains. However, the forts provoked Circassian resistance as they infringed on traditional pasturelands in eastern Circassia. In 1771, during the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774, that resistance gave Catherine the excuse she needed to declare Russian suzerainty over Circassia/Kabarda, relying on the dynastic claims established by Ivan IV.
In 1774, after the treaty of Kucuk Kainarca, Russia became a major force in the Caucasus for the first time. Grigorii Potemkin, as governor of Novorossiya and Crimea, extended the Caucasus line of forts west and north to Azov, and planted new settlements around them. A new viceroyalty of the Caucasus was established. In 1783, King Erekle of Georgia formally accepted Russian protection, and in 1784, Russia built the fort of Vladikavkaz, in the center of the northern Caucasus. As Kappeler writes, the name of the new fort city “stood for a political programme.”15 Russia now began building a “Georgian Military Highway” heading south from Vladikavkaz to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, through mountainous regions dominated by Circassians and Ossetians.
The early nineteenth century was dominated by the Napoleonic wars. Though these began badly for the Russian Empire, they would be followed by a further pulse of expansion, as the Russian Empire became a global superpower.
Opposing French expansion in Europe, Russian and Austrian armies were defeated at Austerlitz in 1805 and again at Friedland in 1807. Now without any significant allies, Tsar Alexander I made peace with Napoleon. In July 1807, the two emperors met on a raft on the Neman river and signed the treaty of Tilsit. Alexander claimed later that he had never intended Tilsit as more than a breathing space. And indeed the treaty cost Russia dearly, as Napoleon forced it to join the “Continental System,” the French blockade of Britain, the country to which Russia sold 70 percent of its hemp and iron, 90 percent of its flax, and most of its wheat. Particularly worrying for Russia was Napoleon's decision to create a Grand Duchy of Poland from Prussian and Austrian parts of Poland. Napoleon described the new Duchy as a “pistol” aimed at Russia.16
In December 1810 Alexander abandoned the Continental System and allowed trade with Britain on neutral ships. He also began a series of military reforms under a new Minister of War, Barclay de Tolly, which doubled the size of the army. In June 1812, a French-led army of 450,000 men with over 1,000 cannon crossed the Neman. In August, it inflicted several defeats on Russian forces near Smolensk. Barclay was replaced by a general with a more Russian-sounding name, Kutuzov. But Russian armies retreated even further after the bloody but indecisive battle of Borodino in September. Napoleon tried to force battle by pursuing Russian armies to Moscow. With Alexander's backing, Kutuzov took the difficult decision to surrender Moscow, while keeping his armies intact, so he could protect the armaments factories of Tula and the rich agricultural lands to the south and east of Moscow.17 Using tactics similar to those Russian armies had faced many times from pastoralist enemies (even the Russians talked of a skifskaia strategiia, or “Scythian strategy”), the Russians lured Napoleon's armies deep into Russia, without offering any clear targets. While France's campaign lost direction and momentum, Russia's armies mobilized more troops and more equipment and supplies with which to attack their increasingly demoralized enemy.18
Long experience of steppe warfare paid dividends. After Borodino, partisan armies, sometimes with nomadic auxiliaries, began to harry French forces. In the winter of 1812, French armies were forced to retreat, and in December 1812 only 40,000 French soldiers and allies returned across the Neman river, a tenth of the number that had invaded six months earlier. Part of the problem was that the French were unfamiliar with the challenge of fighting in Russia, so they did not organize enough supplies, which forced their soldiers to loot, which alienated the population and sapped morale and discipline.19 Russian forces now pursued the remains of the French army across Europe and as far as Paris.
Russia dominated negotiations at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In that year, Tsar Alexander I created a new Kingdom of Poland, ruled by himself. It included only a seventh of the former commonwealth. Fifteen years later, after the unsuccessful Polish uprising of 1830, Russia ended even the semblance of constitutional rule. That Russia was a military superpower now seemed obvious. Its reputation was sustained by smaller military campaigns against Turkey in 1829, in Poland (in 1830–1831), and in Hungary (in 1849), as well as a prolonged and costly war of conquest in the Caucasus.
Russian expansion into the Caucasus continued during and after the Napoleonic wars. In 1801, Catherine's son Paul I formally annexed much of Georgia. Efforts to defend Christian Georgia now drew Russia deeper into the Caucasus. In 1812, a treaty with the Ottoman Empire granted Russia control of western Georgia, while an 1813 treaty with Persia conceded Russian control of much of the eastern Caucasus including much of modern Azerbaijan and the oil-rich region near Baku. By 1828, after Russia incorporated the khanates of Erevan and Nakhichevan, the Russian Empire had replaced Persia as the hegemon of most of eastern Transcaucasia.
Russian expansion into the Caucasus, though encouraged by hopes of increasing influence over the Ottoman Empire and increased trade with Asia, was largely unplanned. The crucial decisions were mostly taken in response to local events, including local requests for Russian support, and attacks on Russian troops.20 Momentum and local initiative usually trumped planning.
Claiming suzerainty over the Caucasus was easy. Gaining real control proved extremely hard. It was a very different task from conquering the Pontic steppes, though fortified points would play a crucial role in both projects. One problem for Russian generals and administrators was that many Caucasian communities lacked formal leadership structures, so there were no established elites that could be negotiated with by Russian commanders or co-opted by the Russian government.21
General Ermolov, who served as proconsul of the Caucasus from 1816–1827, launched a series of murderous pacification campaigns that generated new forms of religious resistance and united previously divided groups. In the 1820s, resistance to Russian rule increased, as the Naqshbandiyya spread through the Caucasus, bringing with them the idea of jihad and a new commitment to sharia law. In the late 1820s, many tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under a Naqshbandiyya Sufi leader called Imam Ghazi Muhammad who advocated jihad against the Russians. In 1834, two years after his death, one of his pupils, Shamil (1797–1871), became leader of the resistance movement. He would command it for a quarter of a century until his capture and surrender in 1859.
In the absence of a broad sense of political, tribal, or ethnic unity, Shamil's war of resistance took the form of a religious war. As Khodarkovsky writes, it was “as much about instilling true Islam and turning the population of the North Caucasus into genuine Muslims as it was about resistance to the Russian invasion.”22 Shamil himself was an Avar from Daghestan. He received a rounded Muslim education in the region's madrasas, and acquired his military skills under Ghazi Muhammad. In 1834, Shamil was chosen as the third Imam of an Islamic state whose center lay in Daghestan and Chechnya.23 He called himself amir al-muminin, or “Commander of the Faithful,” using the title of the early caliphs, and worked hard to replace local tribal law or adat with Islamic sharia law. After his capture by the Russians in 1859, he was exiled to Kaluga. At the end of his life he was allowed to perform the hajj for a second time, and died in Medina.
Michael Khodarkovsky, a connoisseur of the politics of the Russian frontiers, gives a vivid insight into the complexities and cross-cutting interests of these brutal wars in his biography of Semen Atarshchikov, a Russian army officer and translator of Chechen and Nogai origin, who served both sides at different times.24 Atarshchikov grew up in Russian and Cossack townships, was educated in Russian schools, and baptized as a Christian. But he had also lived for a time with relatives in Daghestan, and eventually, like many others in this brutal war, he changed sides. (Russian prisoners reported that in the 1840s there were at least 500 Russian deserters living in the camp of Imam Shamil.) In one vivid scene, Khodarkovsky describes an unsuccessful raid led by Atarshchikov in April 1843 on the Russian frontier fort of Bekeshevskaia. The raid was repelled, after Cossack and Nogai troops from nearby settlements arrived to defend Bekeshevskaia. As so often, better coordination, good intelligence, tactical alliances with local tribes, and disciplined fire gave Russian garrison forces a significant military advantage over less disciplined and coordinated highland raiding parties.25
The nature of the Russian campaigns in the Caucasus changed after the appointment of the English-educated Mikhail Vorontsov as viceroy in 1844. Vorontsov insisted that military methods alone were insufficient. The Russian government also had to offer schools, roads, employment, and some protection for Islam. Nevertheless, the army remained the primary instrument of conquest. Having pacified the eastern Caucasus, by 1864 Russian armies also controlled most of the western Caucasus, where they would crush Circassian resistance and force some 300,000 Circassians to migrate to the Ottoman Empire.
By the 1860s, Russia had conquered the Caucasus, but at a huge cost in money and lives. The Russians probably lost 100,000 battle casualties and nine times as many deaths from disease. As Khodarkovsky points out, if we assume that at least as many natives died as Russians during the war of conquest, that would mean that “two million people perished so that an estimated population of four million natives could be annexed to Russia.”26 Despite these massive costs, Russian control of parts of the Caucasus such as Chechnya remains uncertain even today.
How did successive Russian governments mobilize the resources needed to achieve such a dominant role within Inner Eurasia, eastern Europe, the Pontic steppes, and the Caucasus?
First, the mobilizational achievement owed much to demographic and economic growth. Second, though, successive Russian governments used their increasing human, material, and financial resources with great effectiveness. That, in turn, reflected the third crucial factor, the continued unity and cohesion of Russia's ruling elites, the metaphorical shareholders in the Russian mobilizational system. However, in this period we can also begin to see how the very successes of the system would eventually sap elite unity. This is why it is appropriate to think of this period as a mobilizational plateau. The Russian mobilizational machine functioned with great efficiency and power, yet it showed no signs of generating further mobilizational power because it seemed to have enough power in reserve to cope with all its major challenges. Eventually, the system's success would reduce the disciplinary pressure on Russia's elites and undermine the elite unity that held it together.
In contrast to the relatively stagnant economies of the steppelands and Central Asia, the Russian Empire experienced a long period of sustained population growth that drove and fueled territorial expansion. Demographic and territorial expansion provided the rising tide of people and resources that gave the Russian mobilizational project its buoyancy. Within the territory controlled by Muscovy at the end of the seventeenth century, the peasant population grew from c.9 million in 1678 to 20 million a century later, and c.32 million in 1857.27 If we add new populations incorporated through expansion, the empire's total population rose by more than five times in the same period, from c.11 million in 1678 to about 37 million in 1795, and 59 million in 1857.28 No other polity in Inner Eurasia could boast of such sustained growth.
Russia was still a land of peasants, so population growth meant, above all, more peasants. Agriculture was the main occupation even of most towndwellers in the eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth century peasants accounted for a third of those living in towns.29 Why did peasant populations grow so fast? High fertility is typical of most peasant societies, because labor is the one factor of production over which peasant families have some control.30 In frontier societies, or regions with surplus land, such practices make even more sense, because with more hands you can cultivate more land. So peasant women spent most of their fertile years pregnant, or rearing children. High birth rates were vital to provide labor and to support the old, and also to compensate for very high rates of infant mortality.
Almost all peasants married. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those who never married before the age of 60 accounted for just 1 percent of the population, a number that matches the number of the severely disabled.31 Most marriages produced many babies, but many babies died young. The crude birth rate among the Orthodox population in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was about 50/1,000. Mortality rates in the eighteenth century ranged from 40 to 60/1,000 in urban areas, but were lower, at 30–40/1,000, in the villages.32 These average differences between birth rates and death rates were enough to allow sustained growth of the peasant population.
Territorial expansion created new border regions with abundant free land, which increased the value of new hands both to peasant households and to their landlords. Serfowners encouraged population growth because peasants were capital. More peasants meant more serfs and more labor. Even in the core regions of Russia, where poor soils, short growing seasons, and unpredictable climates made intensive farming risky, spare land was still available until the late eighteenth century, so the best way of profiting from extra labor was to bring more land into cultivation, using traditional methods. Few peasants or landlords had the capital or the skills needed to intensify production by introducing more modern farming methods.33 And, particularly in the core regions of Muscovy, most peasant agriculture continued to be organized collectively, by peasant “communes” that partitioned both the land and tax obligations between households according to their size. Particularly in the Muscovite heartlands of Russia, collective ownership of the land slowed the development of more entrepreneurial forms of farming.
In summary, the needs of the peasant household, of serfowners, and of the state coincided in encouraging population growth, expansion, and the plowing up of new land.
Differences in the availability of land, in soils, and in climates in different parts of the empire did encourage limited experimentation as peasants adapted to novel conditions. While peasants in the more densely settled central regions introduced three-field crop rotations or took up wage work or specialized in crafts of various kinds, in regions of recent migration, from Siberia to the Pontic steppes, less intensive farming methods persisted. Peasants often left large areas fallow for several years, or raised large numbers of livestock. In these regions, individual farming was generally more common than communal farming.34 Specialization forced peasant households to engage more with markets and to trade both labor and produce. In the second half of the eighteenth century alone, the number of factories using hired labor rose four times, to about 2,000.35
How could the Russian mobilizational machine best profit from sustained growth in people, resources, and land?36
First of all, the government built up the size and effectiveness of its armies. The army, in turn, provided the military security and the territorial advances that allowed continued expansion. Not surprisingly, the army and navy, which were both drivers and beneficiaries of growth, regularly consumed 50 percent of government revenues.37
On its western frontiers, Russian armies faced rivals such as Prussia or, eventually, France, which enjoyed much larger revenues. Relatively speaking, this meant that the Tsarist state had to tax its populations harder to remain a Great Power.38 As always in Inner Eurasia, mobilizational pressure had to compensate for limited resources. In 1756, to give just one illustration, the Russian army (including irregulars) was larger than that of France, though Russian government revenues were only a fifth as large as those of the French government.39
Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, the government's cash revenues steadily rose. The poll tax, introduced by Peter I from 1719, was the most important single revenue raiser in the eighteenth century. Levied on all males, its yield rose as populations increased. However, as the economy became more monetized, indirect taxes and taxes on market activities also yielded more revenue. Particularly important were taxes raised from products such as liquor and salt that were needed by every peasant household, but hard or impossible to produce within the household economy. Because they were used by most of the population, taxes on such commodities could yield huge revenues that rose, like the yield from the poll tax, as populations increased. By 1724, taxes on distilled liquor (vodka) accounted for about 11 percent of government revenues; in the nineteenth century, they yielded, on average, about 31 percent of revenues.40 Salt had been an important item of internal trade for a long time, and the main source of the Stroganov family fortune. Peter the Great turned salt production and sale into a government monopoly, but the costs of managing the monopoly were huge, and in 1818 the government abandoned its salt monopoly.
In the eighteenth century, Russia began to create a modern banking system. Russia's first bank, the Loan Bank, was created in 1754 to provide loans to merchants and landlords. In 1769 paper money was introduced under the management of a new “Assignat” bank. The first savings banks open to all classes were not created until 1841. Russian governments also gained access to international credit, though such transactions were largely handled by foreign “court bankers.” In 1769, the Russian government took out its first major international loan, which was handled by an Amsterdam bank, Raymond and Theodore De Smeth. Later in the century it took out more loans, mainly to finance the fleet, and military operations in Poland and Turkey.41 The late development of overseas borrowing suggests a low level of monetization, but it also highlights the remarkable fiscal self-sufficiency of Russian governments. Until the late nineteenth century, limited dependence on credit spared the Russian government from the financial embarrassments that had undermined the French monarchy in the late eighteenth century.
The most direct form of mobilization was recruitment. Since 1705, peasant recruits were expected to serve for life. In 1793, the period of service was reduced to 25 years. Between 1720 and 1867, Russian governments conscripted some 7 million men, almost all from the peasantry.42 By 1825, the standing army included 750,000 men, making it by far the largest army in Europe. During Alexander's reign, about 4 percent of the male population served in the army. No other European country, except perhaps Prussia, had such a high military participation rate.43 Serfdom and population growth allowed Russia to field large armies despite high casualties in battle and even higher casualties from disease.44 Russian armies increased in size despite massive casualties during the Northern Wars of Peter I and the Napoleonic campaigns.45
Rough estimates of the fiscal burden on peasant households suggest that from 1700 to 1850, most households surrendered to the state about half of what they produced. This represented an exceptionally high level of mobilizational pressure, as it seems likely that the total burden was less before 1700 and after 1850. However, the fiscal burden was almost certainly lower away from the central provinces. In frontier regions, noble estates were less common and it was easier to avoid the attentions of tax collectors.46
Even these calculations do not convey the full burden the army placed on the peasantry. For example, the government kept trying to make the army pay for some of its own costs. Such experiments began with the granting of land to the strel'tsy in the sixteenth century so they could grow their own food. (Chinese governments had made similar experiments with soldier/farmers since the Han era, particularly in Xinjiang and Mongolia.) In the nineteenth century, the government of Alexander I founded military colonies, settlements of soldiers that were expected to grow their own crops. These experiments may have been modeled in part on the traditions of Cossack communities in frontier regions from Ukraine to eastern Siberia, or on the practice of settling soldiers on land along Muscovy's frontier lines. In the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855), as many as a third of Russia's soldiers were military colonists.47
The government had many other ways of getting the army to pay for itself. Army units were supplied with leather and cloth so they could make their own boots and uniforms. Military artels or work cooperatives were encouraged to earn wages working on estates or engaging in trades.48 Quartering troops on peasant or town households for 8 months of the year was another way of passing the costs of the army on to the “tax-paying” population.
Recruitment for life meant that Russian soldiers were socialized into the army more thoroughly than the soldiers of rival armies, many of whom were mercenaries. Desertion had been a serious problem in Peter's time. But after his reign it became less common, as lifelong recruitment cut soldiers off from civilian society. Recruits lost all ties with their native villages and entered an entirely new society, the artel, a unit of 8 to 10 men who lived and fought together. The artel handled any money or wealth the individual soldier might gain through looting or wages, so that soldiers built up savings, which they would lose if they deserted. The artel also inherited a soldier's wealth when he died. Because of the religious, ethnic, and linguistic uniformity of the Russian heartlands, and the tendency to exclude non-Russian ethnic groups from the army or form them into separate units, the army was also remarkably homogeneous in culture, religion, language, and ethnicity. These powerful forms of socialization allowed Russian commanders to march their forces by night or near swamps, practices that other armies avoided because they invited mass desertion.49 The low desertion rates of Russia's armies astonished European observers. A German officer serving in the 1740s wrote: “as to desertion, it is a thing unknown in the Russian armies.”50 These factors help explain why an army recruited from serfs proved such a reliable defender of serfdom.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the Russian army had largely caught up with European methods of organization and the technologies of the gunpowder revolution. But its main strengths were still mobilizational rather than technological.51 Most military innovations were borrowed from abroad, though they were adapted, often with great skill, to Russian conditions. For example, General Munnich, a German-born Russian general who served under Empress Anna, tackled the problem of supplying troops with water in arid zones by transporting it in vast wooden casks pulled by oxen. When the water was used, the oxen were slaughtered for food and the casks burnt as firewood.52
Though the mobilizational pressure exerted on the population was intense, it was relieved by territorial expansion. For example, grain produced in the Pontic steppes helped feed the Russian army in 1812. Imperial expansion explains why it was not necessary to increase the tax burden even further as the army grew. While the size and cost of the regular army increased by three times from the 1760s to the 1790s, the proportion of government revenue spent on the army and navy fell from 63 percent to 35 percent between 1762 and 1796.53
The Russian victories after 1812 were so spectacular that Russian governments began to display a certain complacency. Under Nicholas I, the army expanded, from c.729,000 soldiers in 1826 to more than 930,000 regulars and 240,000 irregulars by the time of the Crimean (or “Eastern”) War in 1853–1856. In 1834, Nicholas allowed those who had served “flawlessly” for 15 years to retire from the army, though they remained available as reservists. (The reform did create a pool of reserves, but many retired soldiers found they were unwelcome in their former villages and became vagabonds or beggars or criminals.) Nicholas also established Russia's first General Staff College.54 But the army also suffered from weaknesses that were tolerable in wars against weaker opponents, but would prove dangerous when it faced the most advanced European armies during the Crimean War. Despite the size of its armies, the Russian government found it increasingly difficult to get troops where they needed to be. Part of the problem was the size of the country and the limits of its transportation system, and part was the high rate of casualties, caused largely by disease and poor medicine. Between 1825 and 1850, some 30,000 Russian soldiers died on the battlefield, but 900,000 died of disease.55
The late eighteenth century was a golden age for the Russian nobility, the primary shareholders in the Russian mobilizational system. Serfowners benefited from population growth, geographical expansion, and rising prices. The number of serfs increased, as did the amount of land available to the gentry, while rising prices increased the profits from selling grain and other goods produced with serf labor.56 At the same time, the successes of the Russian Empire reduced the need for the sort of extreme disciplinary pressure experienced by the Muscovite and Petrine nobility.
Though Peter's reforms had opened new pathways for the talented, they had widened the cultural gap between the system's main beneficiaries, the noble estate or soslovie together with its many hangers-on, and the “tax-paying” people, the towndwellers and peasants who supplied most of the empire's recruits and resources. By the late eighteenth century many nobles spoke French in preference to Russian, and their houses, clothing, cuisine, and lifestyles were a civilization away from the world of the serfs who supported them. True, many lesser nobles still lived lives not so different from those of their serfs, but even they usually lived in a different mental world, shaped more by literature and philosophy than by the imperatives of agriculture and village religion. They also lived in a different legal realm. Like Mongolia's taiji (see Chapter 11), Russian nobles, however poor, were not subject to taxation.
Some worried that Westernization would expose the nobility to corrosive western European ideas about the independence, the dignity, and the rights of nobles. The literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment introduced ideas that sat uneasily with Muscovy's political culture. Several eighteenth-century monarchs lent legitimacy to that discourse as they tried to compete culturally as well as militarily with Europe. In 1724, Peter the Great had founded Russia's first scholarly society, the Academy of Sciences, and staffed it mainly with European (mostly German) scholars. In 1755, Tsarina Elizabeth created Russia's first university, the University of Moscow. One of its founders, the scientist, poet, and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, after a period working in German universities, would become the first modern Russian intellectual of non-noble origin. He was also the first ethnically Russian member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.57
Tensions between Russia's autocratic political culture and European cultural influences were particularly evident in the reign of Catherine the Great, herself of German origin. In 1767, she convened a Law Code Commission. On the face of it, this seemed to reintroduce some form of consultation between monarch and nobility, and the Nakaz or “Instruction” that she composed for the commission talked much of the rule of law. Yet in practice her notion of law was as autocratic as that of Peter I. She saw the law mainly as a lever with which to mobilize resources, and her Commission, like the Zemskii Sobors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was really a way of organizing and unifying the nobility behind a mobilizational project from which they all benefited.58 Catherine's grandson Alexander I, whose Swiss tutor LaHarpe had briefly been a member of the Parisian Jacobin society, took constitutional ideas seriously for a brief period after coming to power. But that talk evaporated as he engaged with the military threat posed by Napoleon.59
The extreme pressure that Peter I had placed on the nobility was relaxed in the eighteenth century. During his six-month reign, Peter III abolished the formal requirement that all nobles serve the state for life. Under Catherine the Great's “Noble Charter” of 1785, nobles were formally granted property rights and allowed not to serve if they chose. Her provincial reforms created new provincial institutions dominated by the nobility. On the face of it, these changes seemed to be creating a more independent and more European noble class.
Nevertheless, Russia's elite traditions of unity, cohesion, and service survived. Most nobles continued to serve in some capacity despite a reduction in their formal obligations, and service retained great prestige. For poorer nobles government service was also an important source of income. Almost 80 percent of the officers fighting at Borodino claimed not to own estates.60 Poorer nobles could not afford the luxury of dissidence. The writer Karamzin captured their ethos when he wrote in 1811:
Autocracy is the Palladium of Russia. Its integrity is vital for Russia's happiness. This does not mean that the Tsar, the only source of power, should humiliate the nobility, which is as ancient as Russia itself, and has been in fact no less than a brotherhood of the leading servants of the grand princes and tsars.61
Wealthier nobles had very good reasons for supporting an autocratic system from which they did so well. And the nobility's relative homogeneity also limited dissidence. Ethnically, the nobility was mainly Russian, despite the fact that its leaders were increasingly French-speaking and Europeanized. (The first words of Tolstoy's War and Peace are in French.) True, many nobles were descended from non-Russian ancestors, from Tatar or Polish or Ukrainian or Baltic families that were incorporated within the Russian nobility as the empire expanded. But, as we have seen, the Russian mobilizational system, like that of the Mongols, was very good at securing the loyalty of former rivals and enemies, and most nobles of non-Russian origin, like the Cherkasskis, were deeply Russified. To those with a toehold in Inner Eurasia's dominant mobilizational system, disloyalty had little attraction. By and large, the ethos of membership in a ruling elite trumped any sense of ethnic or national differences within the nobility, as it would two centuries later within the Soviet nomenklatura.
Yet over time, and in many subtle ways, Westernization did begin to change the ethos of the Russian elite, creating splits that would widen in the late nineteenth century. The Europeanization of the high aristocracy and of a growing class of well-educated non-nobles, the intelligentsia, and the growing importance of educated experts in the army, the civil service, and the professions encouraged a more critical attitude to Russia's autocratic traditions. Traveling to the West with the armies that defeated Napoleon was a transformative experience for many educated Russians, because it showed them both the power and the limitations of the Russian Empire. A future participant in the 1825 Decembrist revolt, which attempted to overthrow Nicholas I, wrote in his memoirs:
From France we returned to Russia by sea. The first division of the Guard landed at Oranienbaum [a royal palace near St. Petersburg] and listened to the Te Deum performed by the Archpriest Derzhavin. During the prayer, the police were mercilessly beating the people who attempted to draw near to the line-up of troops. This made upon us the first unfavourable impression when we returned to our homeland. … Finally the Emperor appeared, accompanied by the Guard, on a fine sorrel horse, with an unsheathed sword, which he was ready to lower before the Empress. We looked with delight at him. But at that very moment almost under his horse, a peasant crossed the street. The Emperor spurred his horse and rushed with the unsheathed sword toward the running peasant. The police attacked him with their clubs. We did not believe our own eyes and turned away, ashamed for our beloved Tsar.62
The Decembrist revolt, just after the death of Alexander I in 1825, involved about 500 well-educated army officers of progressive views, including 16 colonels and two major generals.63 Most of the Decembrists favored a constitutional government of some kind, though some, such as Paul Pestel, argued for a strong, highly centralized government. In its methods, though, the Decembrist revolt was closer to the eighteenth-century coups that had replaced one autocratic monarch with another than to the French Revolution. Catherine herself had come to power as the result of a Guards revolt, and the tactic of launching surgical palace coups against incompetent rulers was perhaps a useful corrective in an autocratic system. (It explains Madame de Staël's remark that the Russian “constitution” was “a despotism mitigated by strangulation.”)64
During the reign of Nicholas I, the government began for the first time to encourage modern forms of Russian nationalism, which always threatened to conflict with the imperial realities of the empire. The Minister of Education, Sergey Uvarov (1786–1855), supported an ideology of “official nationalism” whose slogan was “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality.” Official conservatism probably reflected the views of most nobles. Nevertheless, during Nicholas's reign, European, and particularly German, influences began to encourage more critical views within some sections of the nobility and the intelligentsia.
It is customary to divide these tendencies into two main dissident ideologies, those of the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, advocates, respectively, of Westernization and a distinctively Russian path to the future. Rivals debated these ideas in the so-called “thick journals” that circulated widely among the educated elite in the 1840s and 1850s. Their discussions were described in Alexander Herzen's sparkling memoirs, My Past and Thoughts. The debates were prompted by a devastating critique of Russian cultural and political backwardness written by Petr Chaadaev. Herzen himself began as a Westernizer. Eventually, though, he would leave for Europe, where he came under the influence of Western revolutionary and socialist thought and founded an illegal journal, The Bell. Influenced by Slavophile ideas, though much more radical in its tone, this argued for a distinctive form of Russian socialism based on the collectivism of the traditional Russian peasant commune. The Slavophiles, though equally influenced by German thought, were drawn to organic thinkers such as Herder. Though critical of autocracy, Slavophiles such as Alexei Khomiakov and Konstantin Aksakov also criticized the individualism and rationalism of the West. In a foretaste of forms of cultural nationalism that would emerge in many other parts of the world, they argued for a distinctive “Slavophile” path to the future that would resist Western approaches to governance, following instead the traditions of Russian Orthodoxy and Russia's communal rural traditions.65
Such thinkers remained as yet just a small, though influential, dissident minority within a still conservative ruling elite. Most educated Russians still accepted the ideal of elite unity and discipline under an autocratic Tsar. And no wonder. Russia's autocratic traditions had yielded rich dividends to its main beneficiaries and shareholders.
In 1800, both the Russian and Qing empires had reason to feel complacent about the future. That mood was captured well in the famous reply of the Qianlong emperor in 1793 to the requests of a British trade delegation led by Lord Macartney. To King George, the Chinese emperor wrote:
You, O King, from afar have yearned after the blessings of our civilization, and in your eagerness to come into touch with our converting influence have sent an Embassy across the sea bearing a memorial. I have already taken note of your respectful spirit of submission, have treated your mission with extreme favor and loaded it with gifts …
While acknowledging Britain's humble petitions, the Qianlong emperor announced that China had no need of British goods. Like all other foreign traders, the British would have to continue trading through the single port of Canton. Russian governments knew Europe much better and were more aware of what it had to offer and how dangerous it could be. Yet the government of Nicholas I shared the confidence of Qianlong in its own power, durability, and invulnerability. Victory in 1812 had generated a certain smugness within Russia's elites, a conviction that Russia had no need to compromise with European ideologies such as liberalism or nationalism. Russian armies had crushed revolts in Poland in 1830, defeated Ottoman armies in 1829, crushed a revolt in Hungary in 1849, and completed a long and difficult conquest of the Caucasus.
But though it was hard to see at the time, the very rules of mobilization began to change in the nineteenth century. By 1860, both the Qing and Russian empires had suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of European armies and navies. These exposed serious weaknesses in the mobilizational machines they had constructed over many centuries. For China, defeat came with the Opium War of 1839–1842, when Britain used the Nemesis, the first iron gunboat ever built, to destroy Chinese war junks and secure control of the junction between the Yangzi river and the Grand Canal, the commercial lifeblood of the empire. In 1842, at the treaty of Nanking, China conceded territory to Britain in Hong Kong, and agreed to pay war reparations. A second Opium War, in 1858–1860, would force China to legalize the opium trade.
Russia's moment of truth came during the Crimean or “Eastern” War, in 1853–1856.66 European anxiety over Russian ambitions in the Balkans, and over-ambitious Russian diplomacy turned a minor conflict over the right to protect Christians in Palestine into a major war. Fantasies of controlling Constantinople, the religious homeland of Orthodox Christianity, had circulated in elite circles and within the Orthodox Church for centuries. They had even been taken up by Catherine the Great as Russia advanced south and into the Caucasus. She named her second son Constantine and taught him Greek. The decline of Ottoman power, reflected in a series of military defeats at Russian hands since the late eighteenth century, encouraged all European powers to jostle for influence in the region. Finally, Nicholas I supported an official nationalism that encouraged hopes of growing Russian influence in the eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire.
In the early 1850s, the government of Nicholas I overplayed its hand by demanding that the Ottoman government give it the right to protect Orthodox Christians on Ottoman territory, including the Holy Land and Jerusalem. The Ottoman Empire rejected these demands, with French, British, and Austrian backing. The rising north Italian power of Sardinia joined them. The Russian army invaded the Ottoman Balkan principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, and the Russian navy destroyed the Turkish Black Sea fleet at Sinope. Fearing a Turkish collapse, France and Britain declared war, and in September 1854, allied forces invaded the Crimea. Russian forces failed to defend their main naval base of Sevastopol, which fell after an 11-month siege.
At the peace conference in Paris in 1856, the new Tsar, Alexander II, was forced to surrender Bessarabia, and the Black Sea was demilitarized. The war itself would be the bloodiest of the nineteenth century for Russia, apart from the campaign of 1812. Russia lost 450,000 soldiers and sailors.67 The military system created by Peter I had failed. Many Russian officials and generals immediately understood the significance of the fact that the victorious coalition included highly industrialized societies, societies that could move armies more efficiently by rail and steamship, that could supply them with more powerful and accurate cannon and firearms, and could communicate using the telegraph. As Fuller puts it, “The complacency engendered by 1812, which blinded much of the Russian elite to the military implications of the Industrial Revolution, would be shattered forever on the Crimean peninsula.”68
The Opium Wars and the Crimean War were the first signs that the achievements of the Russian and Chinese mobilizational systems over many centuries might no longer be adequate. The rules of power and mobilization under the energy regime of the agrarian era were beginning to change with the arrival of a new energy regime based on fossil fuels. The second half of this book will show how rulers in Inner Eurasia reacted to the dizzying mobilizational challenges of a new era that seemed to supply virtually free energy in apparently limitless amounts, to both enemies and friends.