superiority or even great difference from other ethnic groups. Muscovite tsars,
as Valerie Kivelson showed, reveled in the diversity of their many lands, proof of
their power.
Peter I’s cultural Europeanization of his elite prompted a complex process across
the eighteenth century of assessing what it meant to be Russian and how Russians
should relate to the West on the one hand and to their subject peoples on the other.
As Yuri Slezkine, Elena Vishlenkova, Ricarda Vulpius, and many others have
explored, Russian writers took pains to identify Russia with the Enlightened
“civilization”of Europe. In“advice literature”from mid-century through Catherine
II’s time—polemics in journals, in plays, histories, panegyrics, and odes—Russians
developed a confidence that their culture was equal to that of Europe, even while
writers of the French Enlightenment were coming to regard Russia and its empire
as“uncivilized,”as Larry Wolff has chronicled.
As for its subject peoples, Russian authors and statesmen applied these concepts
in the eighteenth century. As we have seen, the“well-ordered police state”model
encouraged Peter and his men to assess the state’s resources, and he and his
successors began a century of scientific expeditions to map and collect. Displaying
the dress, baskets, ritual artefacts, and tools of native peoples of the empire, as Peter
did in collections still on display in St Petersburg’s Museum of Anthropology and
Ethnography alongside his Kunstkammer collection of natural history marvels,
demonstrated the breadth of the tsar’s power. Self-consciously comparing their
empires with that of the Spanish in the New World and the Dutch in the Pacific, or
looking with appreciation to the British suppression of the Celtic peoples, Russian
writers declared that the tsar’s non-Christian subjects not only needed the im-
provement of morals and discipline that Russian civilization would bring, but were
capable of assimilating it. Significantly, they did not dismiss the empire’s peoples as
barbarian; they promoted a project of civilizing that raised standards of culture
without condemning ethnicities per se. Even when in the nineteenth century
Russians begin to develop a more nationalistic discourse of Russian superiority,
they never developed the“racist thinking” so virulent in nineteenth-century
Europe. Vulpius and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye argue that Russians
themselves felt vulnerable in the category of civilization: they lacked some of its key
attributes in contemporary Europe, after all, such as civil equality and political
pluralism. So the degree to which they bring their“Asian”peoples to civilization
affirmed their own Enlightenment.
Eighteenth-century attitudes towards the subject peoples were not perceived as
“Russification”but as Enlightenment with a capital E, more integrative than
hierarchical. As Vulpius cogently puts it,“This kind of civilizing mission, aiming
at the full integration of the newly incorporated peoples, meant a deliberate fusion
of the Russian core with the territory of the whole empire.”Such an imperial
approach maintained in some way age-old traditions of tolerance of diversity;
cameralist impulses or even Enlightenment universalism prompted in thefirst
half of the eighteenth century brutal campaigns of forcing non-Christians, particu-
larly animists, to accept Orthodoxy, but by the end of the century Russian
“imperial”thinking was consciously more inclusive.
Conclusion 451