the Moscow patriarch (others in the Right Bank had gone to the Union). But the
Kyiv metropolitan initially was guaranteed autonomies from Moscow in its eccle-
siastical court system, its schools, and printing presses and control of its extensive
landholdings.
The“Deluge”that the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania, particularly in the
Rus’palatinates and Grand Duchy, suffered in the second half of the century is
aptly named: Sweden invaded from the north, Russia and Zaporozhian Cossacks
from east and south, and Brandenburg-Prussia meddled in Polish affairs on the
west. By the end of the century, Russia, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Sweden had
emerged as the potent players in central and eastern Europe and the Common-
wealth had been crippled as a sovereign power and had lost territory. In addition to
gaining the Left Bank Hetmanate as a vassal, Russia had won a valuable north–
south strip of territory on its western border, lands that were politically, econom-
ically, socially, culturally, and religiously very different from the Moscow center.
The city of Smolensk is a case in point. Moscow had won Smolensk from the
Grand Duchy in 1514 and kept it until 1611; when regained in 1654, Smolensk
had become a very different place, an outpost of political pluralism unknown in
Russia. Its burghers enjoyed self-government under Magdeburg law; its Ruthenian
noblemen enjoyed Polish political institutions and legal privileges; the Uniate
Church was dominant. In the seventeenth century, Muscovy adhered to its
laissez-faire colonial policy: it guaranteed the social rights and privileges of the
nobility and Magdeburg-law privileged towns and burghers; it governed indirectly
through a chancery devoted to this area. But Russia also deployed coercion, forcibly
moving over 300 Smolensk nobles and local Cossacks to the Trans-Kama frontier
and abolishing the Uniate Church in these areas. Peasants had already been
enserfed under Polish control, and that status endured.
*****In itsfirst 150 years of empire, Russia expanded fantastically. Russian scholar Ia.
E. Vodarskii estimates that from thefirst quarter of the sixteenth century to 1700,
the area of European Russia (west of the Urals) had risen from 2.8 to 4 million
square kilometers, and Siberia constituted another 12 million square kilometers. In
the process the empire assembled a host of dependent peoples in various degrees of
subjugation. Cossacks on the borderlands were free-wheeling and hard to control;
Kazan and the Middle Volga were becoming Russianized with in-migration.
Different subject peoples enjoyed“separate deals” according to a laissez-faire
colonial policy. Taxes were collected in furs or cash, rebellions put down brutally,
corporal and capital punishment for felonies and political crime meted out. But
otherwise, communities maintained their own institutions, languages and religions,
elites and institutions. This was an“empire of difference.”
It was also a state on the move, expanding into lands of new cultures and peoples.
Classically, in early modern comparative perspective, theflip side of imperial expan-
sion is colonization. States send administrations to control subject peoples and they
send populations to bring the standards and cultures of the dominant center. We end
by reflecting on these issues in the Russian context. Historians have waxed eloquent
Assembling Empire 79