Conclusion
Constructing and Envisioning Empire
By the end of the eighteenth century Russia’s rulers and elite began to exhibit some
introspection about identity—Russian identity, imperial identity. This began at the
top—Peter I recruited hordes of scholars to classify and categorize his peoples and
Catherine II thought and wrote about what the“Russian empire”was. Educated
Russians—historians, playwrights, ethnographers, memoirists—also posed the
question of how to think about the empire and about being Russian within it.
Early modern Russia did not develop the sort of discourses of“national con-
sciousness”that emerged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, for good
reason. In England, France, Italy, and Poland, these arose as monarchies, urban and
noble republics, and national markets came into shape, as literacy and education
embraced more of society, as vernaculars replaced Latin, as national Churches took
shape in the storms of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as expansion across
the continent or across oceans introduced Europeans to the world’s diversity. From
all these points of view European writers began to develop what historians call
national consciousness, not nationalism but an important step towards it. In Russia
none of these circumstances prevailed to such a degree, neither the shock of
Reformation nor the stimulation of expanding literacy and printing, economic
prosperity, social mobility, and national monarchies, nor the confrontation with an
exotic Other that nurtured feelings of cultural and religious superiority.
Russia’s expansion did not take it into lands of the unknown, like Columbus’s
three ships or Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation. East Slavs had lived side by
side with peoples of different religions, ethnicities, and cultures since before the rise
of the grand principality of Moscow; new trade routes, new resources, new people
to subjugate were not separated by oceans but were contiguous; cross-cultural
contact was constant. When Russians took control, they did so by controlling
people: exchanging gifts, co-opting elites, hiring translators and fortress guards,
taking hostages, bringing people to oath taking, collecting furs or other taxes.
Accordingly, Russians did not express the sense of“wonder”and“discovery”of
strange new peoples that Europeans encountering the New World felt. Despite its
expansion in the sixteenth century, Russia did not develop a discourse of Russian-
ness against foreigners or against its own non-Russian subjects. Certainly individual
sources can be found condemning Siberian natives as barbaric, or Muslim subjects
as infidels, but these were generally tropes of monastic history writing. Through the
Muscovite period there was no conscious or coherent ideology of Russian national