led a monumental codification of law, resulting not only in a chronological“complete
collection”of laws from 1649 to 1825 (in over 40 volumes published simultaneously
in 1830), but also in codices (svody) on civil and criminal law and compendia of law for
many of the empire’s subject peoples (Baltic Germans, German colonizers, Jews, non-
Christianinorodtsy). Mapping and scientific exploration continued. From the 1830s
and 1840s the state worked out more formal infrastructure and agreements to define
the tsar’s interactions with his“foreign faiths.”Under government patronage myriad
scholarly societies were founded. Natural history museums and ethnographic societies
to study the empire’s peoples, particularly the Russians, were founded in the 1830s.
Historical sources were collected and published in voluminous collections by branches
of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Vilnius, and provincial
capitals; Russian historians (Nikolai Karamzin, M. P. Pogodin, S. M. Solov’ev, and
others) wrote the national past to modern European standards. The literary language
was being formalized and academic dictionaries published. All this work nurtured the
development of skilled experts who might generate change towards more integrated
and pluralistic governance. Laying the groundwork for such social energy is one of the
more salutary continuities that the early modern period contributed to modern Russia.
*****
Different perspectives on the“success”of the Russian empire: Alexander M. Martin,
Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762– 1855 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013); D. C. B. Lieven,Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals
(London: J. Murray, 2000); Geoffrey A. Hosking,Russia: People and Empire, 1552– 1917
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Alfred Rieber,The Struggle for the
Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World
War(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Alessandro Stanziani,After Orien-
tal Despotism: Eurasian Growth in a Global Perspective(London, 2014); Aleksei Miller,
“The History of the Russian Empire: In Search for Scope and Paradigm,”in hisThe
Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research,English
edn. rev. and enl. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 9–43.
On weaknesses of the Ottoman empire, see Karen Barkey,Empire of Difference: The
Ottomans in Comparative Perspective(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Ali Yaycioglu,Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of
Revolutions(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016).
European tropes about Russia in the eighteenth century: Larry Wolff,Inventing Eastern
Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment(Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1994).
On attitudes toward non-Russian subjects before Peter I: Valerie A. Kivelson,Cartographies
of Tsardom: The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia(Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2006) and her“Claiming Siberia: Colonial Possession and Property
Holding in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,”in Nicholas Breyfogle,
Abby Shrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds.,Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland
Colonization in Eurasian History(London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 21–40; David
Schimmelpenninck van der Oye,Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter
the Great to the Emigration(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Michael Khodar-
kovsky,“‘Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects’: Constructing Non-Christian Iden-
tities in Early Modern Russia,”in Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds.,Russia’sConclusion 461