Most of the people on whom Russia depended for local control (Russian gentry,
bands of Cossacks, co-opted Siberian elites) did not share a European expectation
of constitutional, institutional participation in power. They were willing partici-
pants in a culture of autocracy where the tsar’s“slaves”were actually the most
highly rewarded social stratum. When elites who might have chafed under the
absence of more western style legal rights and institutions to which they were used
came under Russian control (Baltic German nobles, Ukrainian Cossacks, Polish
nobility, Magdeburg Law cities), the center by and large allowed them to maintain
their autonomies (laws, self-government, language, religion); Catherine II’s attempt
at social and political homogenization in the western borderlands was overturned
by her successor.
To support its elites, Russia’s rulers used force to control peasant labor (serfdom)
and assiduously kept to a program of devoting minimal resources to the bare
infrastructure that mattered. They assembled a powerful enough army to conquer
territory that in turn produced income; they paid for the army initially with service-
tenure land and peasant labor. They assembled a sufficient bureaucracy to control
the population and collect taxes, but begrudged resources for it. Through most of
the eighteenth century, while the military went on salary basis, the bureaucracy
lived off fees, not salary, and was understaffed. Only in the late eighteenth century
did reforms help the empire approach the capability to support army and admin-
istration with salary through enhancedfiscal control.
Meanwhile, local government per se was skeletal; the empire’s“politics of
difference”approach put responsibility for conflict resolution, social welfare, public
works, law and order, and many other challenges of daily life in the hands of private
groups—state peasant and serf communes, landlords, native communities, Chris-
tian, Muslim, Buddhist, and other legal and welfare institutions, special deals given
to communities as diverse as Don Cossacks, Armenian and Indian traders, and
German Mennonites in Novorossia. Communities ruled themselves to one degree
or another: Muslim elites and courts in the Middle Volga, Tatar communities in
Crimea, tribal organizations in Siberia, Cossack regimental governing structures in
the Hetmanate, Junker noble institutions in the Baltics, landlords’estates and state
peasant communes in East Slavic territories.
Moscow demanded unpaid service from lesser social groups by leaning on age-
old customs of collective responsibility and by granting enough mercy and largess
in judicial proceedings and public interaction to sustain the myth of a just tsar.
Moscow constantly had to deal with the agency of the people it conquered and
controlled. Building the empire was a gradual, eclectic process; it took decades to
move frontiers forward or to consolidate local power. It required putting down
recurrent native rebellions, co-opting elites, and getting locals to accommodate to
imperial power. It meant constructing relationships with locals, enlisting locals as
translators, bureaucrats, and Cossacks. Crucially, it depended upon minimalism of
“a politics of difference.”It required providing an overarching ideological model of
the tsar as benevolent, patrimonial leader for all his people. Most energetically after
Peter I’s reforms, empire building offered, at least for most elites, a model of
imperial identity shaped by European culture, education, dress, and habits. Each
Conclusion 459