open spaces. Even in foreign centers—Carlsbad, Vienna, and Copenhagen in
Europe, Port Arthur in the Far East, the holy city of Jerusalem—neo-Russian
Orthodox churches proclaimed the national uniqueness of the Russian empire at
the turn of the century.
But such efforts to blend empire with Russian nationalism were decades away
from the eighteenth-century consciousness of empire with which we end our work.
By 1801 rulers and elites shared a cosmopolitan sense of identity—rather than
casting Russianness as a binary in opposition to their non-civilized subjects, they
embraced the entirety of the realm’s peoples, as yet still confident in the Enlighten-
ment’s validation of all human experience. When confronted with a more exclusive
sense of nationalism, such as Ukrainian and Polish struggles for regional autonomy,
Russian rulers had no problem quashing such movements to maintain hardball
control behind this rosy vision. It was, of course, an“imaginary,”a usefulfiction for
asserting the cohesion of a realm of tremendous diversity, a cohesion kept together
by coercion and co-optation as well as ideology. But that vision also provided
Russia’s multi-ethnic elites and educated populaces with a means of understanding,
identifying with, and participating in Russia’s“empire of difference.”
*****Russia’s rise to geopolitical power between 1450 and 1801 might be said to have
defied expectations. In thefifteenth century the grand principality of Muscovy was
a forested backwater far from urbanized central Europe and from the richly
commercialized band, home to ancient and early modern empires, from the
Mediterranean to Eurasia to China. Moscow rose to power at a crucial historical
turning point of state building and empire building. Settled agrarian empires were
assembling the capabilities not only to conquer each other, but in Russia’s part of
the world to control the steppe. Doing so meant that principalities in the forest that
had previously participated in the global economy as hosts of transit trade could
now enrich themselves directly at trade junctures and ports all along transit routes.
For Russia that meant the Volga, ports on the Black and Caspian Seas, and Siberian
junctions of eastern trade. Controlling the steppe also offered fertile lands that
could be farmed, after centuries of nomadic pastoralism, to produce surplus grain
and spirits distilled from it, cattle, and other goods to export to its own burgeoning
population or to Europe. Controlling the steppe required doing a good job in the
tasks of early modern state building—military reform, bureaucratic control, polit-
ical centralization,fiscal mobilization. From that, the capability of expanding
westward towards the Baltic also followed.
The story of Russia’s rise as an empire is one of strong state building. With
limited resources, Russia kept up with its neighbors in military reform, bureau-
cracy, and centralization, eventually surpassing them. Like its powerful peers in
Europe and the Ottomans, Russia also in these centuries was able to expand in
whatever directions opportunity presented, to the east into Siberia, westward into
the Commonwealth. In the seventeenth century its formidable rival the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth had weakened from lack of military reform and strong
central control, and by the eighteenth century the same problems—a lag in military
Conclusion 457