on Russia’s historical expansion but much of their attention has been focused on the
restless movement of the Russian peasant himself. Early modern East Slavs were a
population in constant mobility, even after serfdom was imposed by the mid-
seventeenth century. The great Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii (1841–1911),
following his teacher S. M. Solov’ev (1820–79), famously said that Russia“colonized
itself,”referring to agrarian practice in the northern forests whereby peasants would
exhaust the soil and move a few miles to clear forest and start the process over again.
Or they trapped their way across the taiga, forging ahead as they exhausted supplies of
squirrels, beavers, and sables. Or peasants moved when land became tight in the
overpopulated and enserfed center and more fertile black earth lands became available
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, peasants constantlyfled enserf-
ment and built lives on the borders. Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii disparaged such
restless activity, attributing to it a perceived lack of national spirit and attachment
to land and country.
Modern scholars have asked whether this peripatetic movement constituted
colonization in the sense of closed communities of subject peoples directly con-
trolled by the state in a way distinct from the state’s overall administrative system.
Many argue against this concept, noting that, as Willard Sunderland points out,
Russians considered the continental, contiguous expanse of Russian power a single
space within which they“moved”; they did not have a word for“colonize”and did
not express sharp distinctions between themselves and natives. Rather, new settlers
took up a wide array of relationships to the state. Some carried with them their
previous status, such as taxpaying, recruit-providing serfs, while others morphed
into new roles (peasants took up garrison duty on borderlands). Communities of
new settlers or natives brought under Russian control usually enjoyed administra-
tive andfiscal autonomies that set them apart from others. There was no single,
consistent state policy of colonizing the borderland; particularly in the eighteenth
century, the steppes from the Black to Caspian Seas were teeming with variety.
Since Russian peasant migration was so constant, and Russian and native popula-
tions alike so sparsely settled in the new territories, some, harking back to Solov’ev
and Kliuchevskii, argue that Russians have historically had a hard time defining
themselves as a nation. Or, one can say they embraced the multi-ethnic imperial
empire as Russian space.
A related discussion has recently stirred around this theme. Some scholars use the
concept of“internal colonization”to condemn the Russia state’s predatory attitude
towards its own peoples. Alexander Etkind writes of the historical irony that the
state laid the heaviest burdens—serfdom, poll tax, recruitment into the army—by
and large on Russian and eventually other East Slavic peasants (Belarus’an, Ukrain-
ian), asking less in taxation (iasak) and military service from borderland, non-Slavic
peoples. They evoke sociologist Michael Hechter’s study of Britain’s“internal
colonization”of Celtic peripheries (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) in the sixteenth
through eighteenth centuries, by which he meant the ways in which a central
authority makes peripheral peoples in its own contiguous territories into distinct,
subordinate, and separate populations, controlled coercively from the center.
Etkind argues that the Russian government treated its peasantry in these ways,
80 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801