Afinal 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 expan-
sionism 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 eight-
eenth. Where improvements in seafaring, in military technology, in bureaucratic
control, andfiscal 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 differences. Some scholars in post-Soviet Russia,
similarly, focus on the power of the ruler, giving less credence to recent scholarship
on kinship-based, affinitive relationships in court politics. These interpretations
Introduction 5