reform and decentralization of political power—also made the Ottoman empire
vulnerable. How was Russia able to amass such state-building energy? Surely it was
a combination of geographical and geopolitical setting and dogged determination
to make much out of few resources.
If one compares the challenges that the grand princes of Moscow faced in the
fifteenth century when they amassed significant regional power with those faced by
the Osmanli dynasty in Istanbul at about the same time, it might be argued that
Russia had an easier playingfield. The Ottomans were taking control over lands
that were productive in agrarian and manufactured goods, highly commercialized,
densely settled in many places, and socially diverse. Of course all this redounded to
the prosperity and power of the state, but also posed challenges—moving into the
Balkans, Anatolia, Egypt, and the Arab lands, the Ottomans encountered social
classes that often had the economic means and territorial integrity to pose oppos-
ition to the center. By the eighteenth century, those centrifugal forces undermined
central authority; the empire was de facto divided up among networks of powerful
notables, whose power was grounded in wealth. They were tax farmers, creditors,
and supporters of their local economies—in vast stretches of Anatolia, Egypt, the
Balkans. The Ottoman empire had to deal with a much more complicated
landscape in its rise to power, and by the eighteenth century struggled to maintain
the center.
Moscow’s rulers might have wished for the wealth of the Ottoman empire’s
commercial centers and their merchant and notable families, but they at least
avoided some of the attendant headaches. Russian grand princes and tsars were
forced to create empire on the cheap, supporting the army withpomest’eand
serfdom, defining the tasks of government minimally, leaning on communities
for basic services, tolerating difference to avoid investing in local government,
neglecting social welfare services even when they paid lip service to the concept
of the common good in the eighteenth century. Relative poverty made for skeletal
government, but it also gave the center great leverage.
The lands Russia conquered in the center, in Siberia, and the steppe from the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries had few indigenous elites with the organization
and resources to resist effectively. Certainly conquest was not without opposition:
Siberian tribes and steppe nomads constantly attacked Russian fortresses. To the
west it took constant warfare from the sixteenth century and ultimately the force
of three empires with superior military technology to subdue Poland-Lithuania.
But persistently Russia accumulated the military and naval technology to expand.
Its leverage was felt perhaps even more importantly in its ability to co-opt the
elites it needed to control the realm. In this area of limited agrarian productivity,
the tsar was the only source of wealth. Claiming the land and its resources as
patrimonial possessions, constantly expanding to increase the reservoir of land,
population, and largesse that they could distribute to followers, the tsars attracted
ambitious political elites. They were able to enforce the expectation that all elites
served, in the military or civil service, since there were few other professions,
occupations, or investment opportunities upon which elites could build self-
sufficient bases of power.
458 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801