Preface
This book is dedicated to my graduate mentor, Edward L. Keenan (1935–2015).
This book hardly approaches what he could have done with this material—few
could match his originality, insight and depth of knowledge about the early modern
past. He was always able to look afresh at familiar things, going against the grain to
suggest an interpretation thatfit the real grain of the historical times (rather than
received opinion). I cannot aspire to his erudition, but I know this book takes the
tack that he would have. He and another great mentor at Harvard in the 1970s,
Omeljan Pritsak, taught us to be Eurasianists—to take Russian history out of a
narrow, and ultimately ahistorical, national context and set it in its international
setting. While everyone had been comparing Russian history to Europe since the
nineteenth century (usually to Russia’s detriment), Keenan and Pritsak urged us to
look east and south—to Russia’s connections with Asia as well as Europe; they
introduced us to the great rhythms of forest and steppe and the Silk Roads
connecting peoples, cultures, and trade.
Keenan loved thefluidity of the historical past, the way you cannotfit it into
modern day national bounds. He loved to explore the day-to-day reality of how
cultures interacted, asking where were the trade routes, who could talk with whom,
who had incentive to connect, what cultural, linguistic, and religious barriers or
commonalities shaped encounters. He drew our attention to the great legacy of
Chinggisid rule in the Eurasian world in which Russia interacted and to the many
cultural worlds that Orthodoxy provided to Russia over the early modern centuries; he
was particularly fascinated with the cultural and political ferment that blossomed in
seventeenth-century Moscow with the influence of Greeks, Ukrainians, Belarus’ans,
Poles, and northern Europeans. Keenan saw Russian history as a kaleidoscope of
peoples, languages, and cultures interacting on a human scale; he made history come
alive. And he did it by working from the sources on up; he was the most rigorous
scholar of primary sources that I have encountered—always, always asking,“How do
you know what you think you know?”This book is a modest homage to what he
taught us about Russia as an empire—it seeks to get at more than government, more
than Moscow, bringing the diversity of peoples and cultures in.
It’s a gargantuan and difficult task, of course—more than three centuries, more
than ten modern time zones, scores of different cultures. I have tried to explore how
the empire was governed and how people experienced Russian rule, whether in the
East Slavic, Orthodox heartland or the many non-Russian borderlands. It is
difficult to escape a Moscow-centric approach, particularly since I have spent my
career studying“court politics”at the center and since so many sources stem from
the center. And giving the peoples of empire a“voice”for these early centuries is
difficult. But I have tried to do more than scratch the surface of imperial diversity.
This work is based on a career’s worth of writing and teaching, starting with
graduate work at Harvard with Keenan and Pritsak. In addition to a big Eurasianist