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 popula-
tions 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’sofficialdom; 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 beflexible, 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.
4 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801