“Eurasian empire”was different, each“empire of difference”was different, but this
approach to political control worked well for Russia.
In narrating Russia as empire, we have bypassed other common paradigms, such
as that of Russia as a despotism. We have portrayed it as an autocracy—a state with
undivided sovereignty by a single ruler—and have explored how autocracy worked.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russia was able to maintain control over
far-flung acquisitions to the Pacific and to weather a near-fatal dynastic crisis in the
early seventeenth century. It grew rich on Siberian furs, and inched its way into the
steppe, establishing stable if minimal government across the realm. By the eight-
eenth century Russia was a wealthy and militarily dominant empire, keeping pace
in important ways with its peers. Alexander Martin and Dominic Lieven both
remark that many of Catherine’s reforms—communications, urban development,
military reform, economic diversification—matched her European counterparts in
her day. They also note, as does Aleksei Miller, however, that we should not
exaggerate this success. Russia’s achievements soon stalled in comparison to the
meteoric rise of European industrialization in the nineteenth century; Russia was
saddled with a serf-based economy, inadequate infrastructure, and increasingly
inflexible autocratic rule. In many ways, Russia’s success as an empire—in geopol-
itical achievements, domestic institutional organization, and economic dynamics—
reached its peak at the turn into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, we cannot
fail to note that Russia’s creation and endurance as an empire came at the cost of
coercive conquest, the brutality of serfdom, impoverishment and deprival of
freedom for the mass of the population. That this statement also applies to some
degree to its contemporaries across the world—to America with its slavery, to
European slave-based colonial empires, to the Ottomans with theirdevsirmesystem
of enslaving Christians for court service and supporting a lively slave trade for
domestic economy—does not negate the point.
One phenomenon in the eighteenth-century empire, however, might be brought
to the fore in conclusion. Much of the political, intellectual, and social change
engendered in the eighteenth century worked to provide Russia with skilled experts
and infrastructure within which they might govern effectively. Scientific training in
history, ethnography, cartography, and natural theoretical sciences was being
established. Literacy was expanding and the Russian language honed for modern
expression. Practical skills were being mandated—fiscal record keeping, census
taking, mapping, urban planning, infrastructure such as roads, canals, and sewage
systems—in every gubernia in the 1775 reforms. More middle-level administrative
personnel were getting experience in administration, even if the 1775 reforms
favored retired noble army officers over professional bureaucrats. Literacy was
expanding, and under Paul I the professional training of bureaucrats was enhanced.
These changes paved the way for a remarkablefirst half of the nineteenth century,
an underappreciated“saddle”era in Russian historyflanking old and new. Some
aspects have received attention—the educated intelligentsia’s frustration with its
inability to effect political change; Nicholas I’s harsh autocracy, epitomized by the
Secret Police, enhanced censorship and crackdowns on religious dissidents. But
these decades also saw steady administrative reorganization, professionalization of
the bureaucracy, and codification of the realm. Mikhail Speranskii and successors
460 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801