and particularly for slave labor—were met by age-old maritime and overland trade
routes, most notably the Silk Road that traversed the steppe as an east–west
highway (with north–south offshoots) transferring people, goods, and ideas. Steppe
prairieland constituted the middle of these three swaths of territory, north of the
“civilized”urban world and linking it to the third swath, northern forests full of
valuable resources such as slaves and furs. Riverine routes north–south linked
forest, steppe, and urban emporia as long ago as Homer’s time, when amber
from the Baltic Sea made its way to the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
The lands that Russia came to control enter the picture among the Eurasian
empires with the construction of trade networks from the Baltic to the Black and
Caspian Seas in the ninth century, resulting in the emergence of a grand princi-
pality that called itself“Rus’,”centered at Kyiv. It rose politically into the eleventh
century on the great Dnieper River trade route to Byzantium and, in a fashion
typical for medieval states, dissolved into multiple principalities in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries as trade routes shifted. Those principalities heir to Kyiv
gravitated to trade opportunities in the west, the Baltic coast, and the upper
Volga, which is where the princes of Moscow rose as a regional power in the
fifteenth century. To some extent the Russian empire’s rise marks a new stage in
Eurasian empire building. Historically, empires hadflourished in the Mediterra-
nean, Middle East, Eurasia, and Far East, but they were difficult to maintain over
time. Rome, the Mongols, and various Chinese dynasties historically were great
successes in expanse and longevity, while more typical of Eurasia, particularly in the
steppe, were constantly changing coalitions asserting control in segments of steppe
or in smaller regions. From thefifteenth century onward, large continental empires
became able to establish more enduring power and to control the steppe, because of
improvements in communications, bureaucracy, and military. From thefifteenth
to eighteenth century settled agrarian empires gradually took over the steppe—the
Ottoman, Habsburg, Safavid, Mughal, Russian, and Qing empires—and Russia’s
role in that historical turning point is our story here.
Assertive central control established empire; what kept it together wereflexible
policies of governance, policies that ran along a continuum from coercion to
co-optation to ideology, with a large middle embracing many forms of mobilization
by rulers and accommodation by subjects. Charles Tilly calls this triad“coercion,
capital and commitment.”The various pieces of this continuum, which will provide a
structuring principle for our work, had to be kept in balance. Coercion was essential
and constant; it was used liberally to win control (brutal conquest, suppression of
opposition) and to maintain it (hostage taking, corporal and capital punishment,
constant threat). But early modern empires lacked the manpower to control by
coercion alone, so they deployed other strategies to assert legitimacy and govern.
Central to creating imperial legitimacy was the bravado of declaring that one
held it. Empires“broadcast”their power, asserting control far more categorically
than their on-the-ground power could achieve. Imperial centers set forth a supra-
national ideology, usually associated with the dominant religion of the rulers and
their closest elite, trying to inspire what Tilly calls“commitment.”As Karen Barkey
elaborated regarding the Ottoman empire and Geoffrey Hosking noted in the
Introduction 3