condescending to their rude culture, keeping them trapped in an antiquated
agrarian economy.
Etkind and others, in highlighting the irony of the added burden of the Russian
peasantry compared to the non-Russians, point to the fundamental amorality of
imperial policy. The center did not rule in a way that was intended to protect the
Russians and exploit non-Russians; Russians were readily exploited. In the early
modern centuries, nationalism did not yet shape policy. Russia’s rulers and elite
ruled in a way that kept their power stable and funded their privileges. They taxed
and recruited the people they could most control, the people with a common
language, religion, and historical experience, who lived readily at hand in the center.
These were indeed primarily Orthodox Christians, and training in the Russianfield
army included mandatory church services. For thefield armies Russia avoided
recruiting border populations where distance was an obstacle (recruiting Siberian
natives from eastern Siberia to campaigns on the Polish border was probably not
worth the effort). It did recruit border natives into local garrison service across
Siberia and formed irregular units of native elites, such as Bashkirs, to serve in the
tsar’s army. Other empires did this differently—the Ottoman empire imposed
heavier taxes on non-Muslims than on Muslims, for example—but in all cases,
early modern empires made the decisions that sustained the existing power struc-
ture, not a (still to be born) nation.
As Russia concluded the seventeenth century, the outline of its imperial imprint
had been laid down. Expansion moved towards the Pacific, the Black Sea, western
Europe. The eighteenth century was Russia’s great century of empire, when these
aspirations were fully fulfilled.
*****
General introductions to imperial expansion are D. J. B. Shaw,“Southern Frontiers in
Muscovy, 1550–1700,”in James H. Bater and R. A. French, eds.,Studies in Russian
Historical Geography, 2 vols. (London: Academic Press, 1983), 1: 117–42; Andreas
Kappeler,The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow,
England: Longman, 2001); Michael Khodarkovsky,Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making
of a Colonial Empire, 1500– 1800 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2002). Richard White’s concept of“middle ground”was introduced inThe Middle
Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650– 1815 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
On slavery: Christoph Witzenrath, ed.,Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World
History, 1200– 1860 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Alan W. Fisher,“Muscovy and the Black
Sea Trade,”Canadian-American Slavic Studies 6, no. 4 (1972): 575–94; Liubov
Kurtynova-D’Herlugnan,The Tsar’s Abolitionists: The Slave Trade in the Caucasus and
its Suppression(Leiden: Brill, 2010); Halil Inalcik with Daniel Quataert,An Economic and
Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
On the conquest of Kazan and Muslim–Russian interaction in the Middle Volga: Matthew
P. Romaniello,The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552– 1671
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) and his“Grant, Settle, Negotiate:
Military Servitors in the Middle Volga Area,”in Nicholas Breyfogle, Abby Shrader,
and Willard Sunderland, eds.,Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland ColonizationAssembling Empire 81