16
Surveillance and Control
in Imperial Expansion
In earlier chapters we surveyed the degree to which the Muscovite state exerted
strong, central control when it needed to, even while maintaining an overall
tolerance of difference and laissez-faire imperial governing strategy. Here we will
not pause long on the theme of armed violence; it is abundantly clear that the
Russian state, almost constantly at war in the eighteenth century, used coercive
force to conquer and pacify, as a few examples demonstrate. Peter I’s punishment
of Don Cossacks in the Bulavin revolt of 1708 killed an estimated 90 percent of
the population in the northern Don Cossack lands; as fortress lines inched into
the steppe, Russian troops inflicted as much violence against Bashkirs, Kalmyks,
and Kazakhs as nomad raids had done on them. Russia’s invasion of Crimea in
the 1770s–80s was devastatingly destructive; Suvorov’s army massacred an esti-
mated 20,000 in the suburbs of Warsaw in 1794. Serfdom relied on banal,
quotidian violence and threat of violence. Nothing changed in the use of coercion
in this century.
Nor had the empire’s fundamental goals of empire building and expansion
changed; the state still forcibly moved populations to staff and support factories
and mines or settle new lands; it used punishment and exile to assert power and
maintain order. But this was also a century of a more engaged and self-conscious state.
Russia applied new energy to gathering data to inform policy and to shaping, marking,
and connecting society more energetically through road and waterway construction,
map making, knowledge collection, food provisioning, and public health.
FORCIBLE POPULATION MOVEMENTS
Throughout the eighteenth century the state forcibly moved people to serve its needs.
Peter I, for example, transferred 2,750 military men and over 6,500 accompanying
family members to create a colony and harbor at Azov in 1698. By 1701 more than
half hadfled or died, long before Russia was forced to yield Azov to the Ottomans in
the Treaty of Adrianople in 1713. Furthermore, Peter forcibly transferred over 5,000
state peasants to metallurgical works in the Urals and, by a decree of 1721, allowed
non-nobles to purchase serf villages for this purpose.
These practices continued as the empire moved fortified lines into the steppe.
From the 1730s the state moved 12,300 Russians from Voronezh and Kursk gubernii