A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

14 Russia as an Empire

The Russian Empire’s foreign wars over the centuries laid the foundation for its expansion to include the whole of northern Eurasia. Of course by British standards, the results were not impressive. Most of the Russian Empire lay in Siberia, the largest part of which was seemingly impenetrable forest and tundra. Russia’s newest acquisitions in Central Asia were small in population and were poor – no equivalent to India or even Burma. The resultant state included extensive areas on its borders with non-Russian populations, effectively two empires, a traditional land empire in Europe and an attempted imitation of the British example in Central Asia. In both west and south internal and foreign politics were inextricably intertwined.

Nicholas I had understood that Russia’s empire had very limited possibilities for expansion. After 1828 its main effort went into subduing the Caucasian mountain peoples already within Russia rather than the conquest of new territory. In Central Asia the army also concentrated on strengthening the existing frontier and control of the Kazakhs of the steppe while making no serious attempt at expansion. Even in the Balkans, Nicholas had pursued a status quo policy, preferring to maintain Russian influence in a unitary Ottoman state rather than run the risks of partition schemes. Even this modest policy had been too much for Britain and France, but it reflected the tsar’s strategic prudence as well as his tactical blunders. The new situation after Crimea brought different possibilities.

The treaty of Paris not only ended the Crimean War but put an end to hopes of Russian influence on the Ottomans, leaving Russia with only the local nationalist movements in Serbia and Bulgaria as potential allies. Bands of insurgents with plans for democratic republics, the Balkan nationalists were unlikely allies for the Russian empire, and the international and military position of Russia, weakened by defeat and saddled with debts and an enormous deficit, rendered Russia’s European policy essentially passive. The need for stability on the European border also arose from the feeling that the Russian Empire’s boundary in the west was very difficult to defend, running an enormous length through territories poorly served by communications. The answer would be railroads, but they took a long time to build. Threatening noises from Britain and France during the Polish revolt in 1863–64 caused nightmares in St. Petersburg, but they came to nothing, in large part because of the firm Russian alliance with Prussia, now under its new chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian alliance meant that the western boundary was largely secure, especially as Bismarck defeated Russia’s rivals, Austria and then Napoleon III, establishing in the process a powerful new state in the unified imperial Germany, for the time being Russia’s friend.

Preoccupation in Europe with Germany and Italy and the pacific policies of Russia’s foreign minister, Prince Gorchakov, secured peace in the 1860s. Russia could gradually reform itself and also begin to rebuild its army on more modern lines, but crisis in the Balkans soon created a new dilemma. The Serbian and Bulgarian revolutionaries had repeatedly attempted insurgencies inside Ottoman territories, calling on the Slavic and Orthodox peoples to rise against their Turkish masters. The response was increasingly savage reprisals, until in 1875 the Serbs of Bosnia revolted again and were able to hold their own for several months before the Ottomans crushed the revolt, in the process perpetrating the largest genocide in modern European history up to World War I. The next year the Bulgarians rose as well, and Turkish irregular units exterminated entire villages, causing even English public opinion to waver in its support of the Turks. Here was a chance for Russia to reassert itself and secure influence in the Balkans, and in 1877 Russia proposed to the Turks an autonomous status for the rebel areas. The Ottomans refused, and Russia declared war. The war that ensued was bloody but relatively short. The Turks had first-class fortresses, were well supplied with European weapons, and fought with their usual courage and determination. The Russian army, though larger, was still in the process of reformation and hampered by old-fashioned and unimaginative generals. After a series of bloody assaults on the Turkish forts, the Russians finally pushed their way over the mountains and arrived near Istanbul in 1878. They then made a treaty with the Turks that established Bulgaria as the main Slavic state in the Balkans, one that would presumably become a Russian client. This alarmed Britain and Austria, and the result was the treaty of Berlin, which created a much smaller Bulgaria with a German monarch. Austria was allowed to take Bosnia as a protectorate. This was Bismarck’s work, and it was a qualified defeat for Russia after all the sacrifices and heroism of the war.

The Russian Empire had become a conglomerate of two very different sorts of empire, each posing its own problems for St. Petersburg. At the same time as the failure in the Balkans, a new empire arose in Central Asia, where Russian generals overwhelmed the local khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva. The first was entirely annexed to the empire, while the latter, much reduced in territory, became Russian protectorates. By the 1880s all of Central Asia was directly or indirectly under Russian rule. In explicit imitation of British India, Russia set out to build a modern colonial empire.

On the western border, the issues were mainly those of nationality, not colonialism. The Poles posed the chief national issue throughout the nineteenth century and, after mid-century, it was the Jews. For quite different reasons, neither Poles nor Jews fit well into the imperial structure. The Poles were seen in the government as a hostile element, and for many government officials the Jews were not able to assimilate and exploited the local peasantry. The Polish revolts and the pogroms directed against Jews added an element of violence absent in relations with the other European minorities of the empire. Finland, in contrast, was quiet and largely loyal to the tsar until the 1890s. Both Poland and Finland were important to a large extent for military reasons, as they both formed part of the crucial western frontier. The economies of both western borderlands contributed to the overall prosperity of the empire, but Russians had few investments there in either land or industry. In population together the Poles and Finns were less than ten percent of the total population of the empire. The largest non-Russian group in the European part of the empire was actually the Ukrainians (about seventeen percent), whose ambiguous ethnicity and national consciousness kept them on the margins of Russian politics until 1905.

The integration of the western borderlands of the Russian Empire had depended since the eighteenth century on the inclusion of local elites in the imperial power structure. The ruling circles of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg were very far from uniformly Russian. Prominent Germans included Nicholas’ minister of finances Georg Kankrin, his foreign minister Karl von Nesselrode and the head of the Third Section, Alexander von Benckendorf. Among the Ukrainians in the imperial elite were minister of internal affairs Viktor Kochubei and the victorious field marshal Ivan Paskevich, the viceroy of Warsaw after 1830. Finlanders were important in the army and navy, and two of them (Arvid Adlolf Etholén and Johan Hampus Furuhjelm) were governors of Alaska in its Russian period. The diplomatic core had several princes Lieven, Baron Nicolai, and a host of others, as did the court and the army. Only the Polish nobility, loyal to its traditions of Polish statehood, held back from Russian service, aside from a few prominent exceptions.

The reliance on noble supporters of the Romanov dynasty, so successful earlier on, had one shortcoming. In the course of the century the development of commercial and then industrial capitalism, however slow by European standards, changed the society of the empire. In the western borderlands the result was the declining economic fortunes of the nobility, the principal support of the empire. Businessmen, on the other hand, in Finland, Poland, and other western areas benefited considerably from the imperial market and were willing to cooperate (within limits), but the aristocratic conservatism of the court and most of the ruling elite made an arrangement with newer social groups difficult or impossible. The Russian empire could not fully abandon its alliance with the local nobilities, nor could they survive without the tsars, and they all went down to destruction together in 1917.

POLES IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

The outcome of the Congress of Vienna meant that the historically Polish lands incorporated into the Russian Empire fell into two areas with quite different character and status, central Poland (Congress Poland) and Poland’s former eastern territories. In both parts the Polish nobility did not cooperate in large numbers with the Russian Empire, and instead provided the social basis for nationalist revolt.

The central Polish lands around Warsaw formed the Kingdom of Poland, an autonomous unit within Russia, with the tsar as king of Poland. Its population was overwhelmingly Polish, and until the 1830 revolt, the Kingdom of Poland had its own government, legislature, and army under the general aegis of the tsar and his viceroy in Warsaw. After the revolt was crushed, the Russian viceroy field marshal Paskevich ruled the area directly, with the assistance of appointed officials. Polish émigrés in France and Britain formed a series of revolutionary societies aimed at overthrowing Russian rule, but none of them had any success until after the Crimean War. The eastern territories of the old Poland, today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and the western Ukraine, were quite different in their fate. There the Poles were primarily the nobility, owning serfs of different nationalities whose relationships to the Polish cause ranged from somewhat friendly in Lithuania to quite hostile in the Ukraine. As the townspeople were largely Jewish and thus not part of the Polish nation in the eyes of the revolutionaries, the potential base of the Polish cause in these areas was thin indeed. To make matters worse, these areas were never autonomous within the empire, though the Russian authorities continued to apply Polish law in civil and criminal matters until the 1830s.

To make things even more complicated, the Kingdom of Poland, where serfdom had been abolished by Napoleon, developed more rapidly than the Russian interior. Textile industries came into being in Warsaw, Lodz, and other cities, mostly the work of Jewish, German, and other immigrant entrepreneurs but attracting Polish and Jewish workers and gradually building more modern cities in place of the old centers with their noble palaces and impoverished artisans. Warsaw became the center of unrest in the area. The Russian authorities’ reactions to the new revolt of 1863–64 was to further reduce the limited autonomy of Poland, the policy that came to be known as “Russification.” Even the official name was changed from Kingdom of Poland to “Vistula Provinces” and the school system was henceforth required to teach in Russian. The Russian government enacted reforms of landholding more favorable to the peasantry, seen as a potential counterweight to the nobles. The Polish response to the defeat was a generation that avoided politics and turned toward smaller deeds, the building of civil society through education, even if in Russian, and taking advantage of the booming economy. The irony was that much of the prosperity of Poland’s economy was the result of the huge market provided by the Russian Empire, where Polish goods, uncompetitive in Western Europe, found ready customers. The revival of Polish politics in the 1890s brought new groups into the underground, the National Democrats, a middle-class nationalist group and the various socialist parties, all of whom would play a major role in 1905.

THE BALTIC PROVINCES

In some ways the Baltic provinces, Estonia, Livonia, and Kurland (modern-day Estonia and Latvia) were more profoundly affected by the evolution of state and society in the Russian Empire than other non-Russian European areas.¹ Alexander I had abolished serfdom in the Baltic provinces in 1816–1819. The landless emancipation left the Estonian and Latvian peasants still the sharecroppers or tenants of the German nobility, and frequently still obligated to perform labor services, but the emancipation did begin the process of modernization. The role of the Baltic provinces as ports of entry to the Russian Empire made Riga a major commercial and eventually industrial center by the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time the restoration of Baltic noble privileges under Paul I meant that the provincial assemblies of nobles – all of them Germans – and the restoration of traditional forms of city government meant that effective control of the area remained in the hands of the nobility and the German city patriciate. The noble assemblies were freely elected, and worked directly with the tsar, often bypassing the Russian governors, the only representatives of the central government in the area. These were free institutions of a type that did not exist in the rest of the empire (except Finland), but their existence perpetuated the rule of an ethnically distinct nobility over the rural population.

The persistence of the autonomous noble institutions and the freedom of the peasants meant that the effects of the reforms of the 1860s were different in the Baltic provinces from the rest of the empire. For the peasants the great issue was not their legal status but access to land ownership, granted only in the 1860s. The press flourished and was much less restricted than in the rest of the empire as a result of the local legal system. Latvian and Estonian journals and newspapers appeared beside the older German press, providing a forum for political debate as well as cultural and national polemics. There had always been minorities of Latvian and Estonian artisans and small traders in the towns, and the economic development of the area led to a rapid flow of population from the countryside into the city, so that by the end of the nineteenth century the Germans were a minority in the cities. At the same time the spread of education, as elsewhere in the empire, gave rise to an educated class among the Baltic peoples, and voluntary cultural societies carried national ideas to the Latvians and Estonians. For these emergent nationalities the Germans, not the Russian tsar or the Russian people, were still the enemy. Indeed Russian Slavophiles thought that the imperial government should encourage the Latvians and Estonians against the Germans, but the conservative pro-nobility policies of St. Petersburg, as well as the excellent court connections of the Baltic nobles, prevented the full emergence of such a tactic by the Russian authorities.

All of these changes led to conflict between St. Petersburg and the Baltic nobility, but the local noble assemblies continued to exist and function, and in the countryside the German nobility was still completely dominant. Most of them continued to serve in the Russian army and administration and particularly the aristocratic elite remained loyal to the Empire. The existence of the new united Germany after 1870 provided an attraction for some, but on the whole the reliance on the nobility in the area was a largely successful policy in the Baltic provinces. The situation began to change only after 1900, when social changes and national movements brought the Latvian and Estonian majorities onto the front stage of society and politics. And they were not nobles.

FINLAND

Like the Baltic provinces, Finland retained autonomous institutions until the end of the empire, but these institutions and Finnish society were otherwise quite different from the Baltic provinces. Finland, in the words of Alexander I, had been “raised to the rank of nations” by the Russian annexation of 1809. No longer was it merely the eastern extension of Sweden with an exotic language spoken by peasants, but it was a country of its own under the Russian tsar. Alexander had also granted Finland the continuation of the laws and Lutheran religion from the Swedish time, a separate government in Helsinki, and a legislature modeled on the old Swedish diet. Unlike the situation in the Baltic provinces, Finnish peasants had never been serfs but were free tenants and freeholders, and the Finnish diet continued the Swedish practice of including peasant representatives.

Thus the Russian tsars at first could rely in Finland on the loyalty of the Swedish-speaking nobility for they found that the nobility lacked both the antagonism to Russian rule of the Polish nobles and the caste egotism of the Baltic Germans. Indeed for much of the century the Russian tsars looked favorably on Finnish economic development, state building, and emerging national consciousness. The generally peaceful relationship was not wholly untroubled, for Nicholas I never called the Finnish diet to meet. The local government in Helsinki remained in power, carrying out numerous educational and economic projects with the support of the Russian governors-general and the Finnish State Secretariat in St. Petersburg (usually headed by a Finn). The establishment of a university in Helsinki not only raised the cultural level of the country but also provided a center for an emerging national culture in both Swedish and Finnish that affirmed national dignity while maintaining loyalty to the empire. Perhaps the most important result was Elias Lönnrot’s compilation of Finnish folkore, the Kalevala, most of it collected among the Finnish-speaking peasantry of northern Russia rather than in Finland itself. Finnish rapidly became a literary language alongside Swedish, though the latter remained the primary language of administration until the end of the Russian Empire. As the 1809 agreement added the Finnish territories taken by Peter the Great to the rest of Finland, the border ran almost to St. Petersburg itself. Thus only a few hours from his capital, the Russian tsar became a constitutional monarch. Finnish law remained separate from that of the rest of the empire, with the result that Russian revolutionaries could hide in Finland without legal obstacles to their activities.

The Crimean War brought some destruction to Finland, as the British navy shelled and burned a number of coastal towns, though no bombardment could knock out the great fort of Sveaborg in the Helsinki harbor. Finland repeatedly demonstrated its loyalty, and was rewarded in the reform era that followed. As in the rest of the empire, the end of the Crimean War meant a radical relaxation of censorship and a new economic policy oriented toward capitalist development. Economic development and reform brought newspapers and public opinion to Finland as well, and political groupings began to form. The decisive change came in 1863 when Tsar Alexander called the Finnish diet into session, an elected legislature that represented “estates” (nobility, townspeople, clergy, and peasants), not the country as a whole since the franchise was sharply restricted. The peasants were overwhelmingly Finnish speakers, and the tsar recognized their needs the same year, mandating that petitions and other documents to the administration could be presented in Finnish as well as Swedish (Russian was not contemplated). The Finnish peasant deputies, all firm supporters of the Finnish language, were the tsar’s main allies in Finland, against the mostly Swedish-speaking liberals among the urban and noble deputies.

Inclusion in the Russian Empire created a new economic situation for Finland, as St. Petersburg was an enormous market for labor and goods. In the early nineteenth century more Finns lived in St. Petersburg than in any Finnish city, and the Finnish countryside provided an increasingly large proportion of the capital’s food supply. The more rapid development of the Russian interior after the emancipation and the construction of railroads only speeded the integration of Finland into the empire’s economy, as textile mills and metalworking plants provided products for the seemingly unlimited Russian market. Thus businessmen as well as nobles had an interest in preserving a stable autonomy within the empire. This success story only came to an end with the attempt at “Russification” by governor-general N. I. Bobrikov in 1896–1902. Bobrikov decided that Finland needed to be further integrated into the empire, a goal shared by Tsar Nicholas II. Bobrikov’s actual measures were rather limited (use of Russian by high officials, a threat to draft Finns to the Russian army) and most of them remained on paper, but they were enough to create a crisis without actually advancing Russian rule in the country. The result was the emergence of radical nationalist groups and dissension among the nobility and business classes. Finland retained almost all its autonomous rights up to 1917, but Nicholas II and Bobrikov had succeeded in alienating large sections of the population, including the elites.

JEWS

The Jews constituted a substantial population – accounting for approximately five million in the Russian empire, about four percent of the whole. At first the social and legal structure of the Jewish community was inherited from Poland and only in the 1860s did the Russian state began to mark out a distinctive Jewish policy in keeping with the principles of the reform era.

Russia had no Jews among its population from the end of Kievan times until the First Partition of Poland in 1772. In the eighteenth century some Jewish merchants and artisans settled in the Ukraine and in Riga, but this was technically illegal and the groups were small. When Russia acquired its first substantial Jewish community, the reaction of the Russian government was to preserve the status quo. The kahal organization of the Jewish community remained as it had been in Polish times, with the chief rabbis of each town collecting the taxes for the state and administering justice. Further, the Jews were restricted to the former Polish provinces (the “Pale of Settlement”), so that they could not move into the Russian interior, though the Pale did come to include the Black Sea coast provinces with the new city of Odessa. Nicholas I’s attitude toward the Jews was essentially hostile, but his only measures of consequence were to draft them into the army (at a higher rate than Christians!) and to formally abolish the kahals in 1844. Virtually all Jews remained inside the Pale until the 1850s.

The reforming governments of the 1860s took a different direction, one of selective integration. (Assimilation or “Russification” was not contemplated.) The idea was that the Jews needed to become more useful to the state and to Russian society, and therefore were to be encouraged through education to form elites that could both render that service and provide modern leadership for the Jewish community. To that end the Russian government listened to the petitions of the Jewish commercial and banking elite, and in 1859 permitted individuals of that elite to take up residence outside the Pale. In 1865 similar permission was granted to the wealthiest artisans. The result was the formation of an important Jewish commercial and intellectual elite in St. Petersburg, whose leaders were the Ginzburg banking dynasty. The Ginzburgs’ ties to the government and court ensured them a voice on Jewish affairs until the 1880s.

The other side of the reform policy was the opening of Russian universities to Jews beginning in the 1850s. Crucial to the fate of Jewish students was the November 1861 decree permitting all Jewish university graduates the same rights to private occupations and residence granted to Christians upon completion of the university degree. Though state service, however, remained closed to them, these measures speeded the transformation of Jewish society, especially since they more or less coincided with the first wave of the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment that rejected the traditional Jewish religious world for the adoption of European education and norms. By 1886 some fourteen percent of all university students in the empire were Jews, and some ten percent of gymnasium students.

The assassination of Alexander II proved to be a disaster for the Jews of the Russian Empire. In wake of his death a wave of pogroms swept the southwestern provinces (mainly the Ukraine) and continued on and off for two years. The mob blamed the Jews for the tsar’s death, looted their houses, and assaulted and raped thousands of people, though only two died in the violence. Alexander III’s government blamed Jewish exploitation of the peasantry for the riots and began to rescind some of the existing legislation. The most important measure was the introduction in 1887 of quotas in the universities, to be only three percent for Jews in St. Petersburg and Moscow, five to ten percent elsewhere. Outside the two capitals, however, the quotas were not strictly enforced. Petitions for exceptions presented to the Minister of Education and other means led to the actual growth in percentage of Jewish students to twenty-seven percent (Kharkov University) and twenty-four percent (Odessa). Thousands of Jews also went abroad for education, especially to universities in Germany and Austria. There they confronted a paradox. Though legally equal in all respects to native students, Russian Jews confronted a student culture that was, by the end of the century, nationalistic and militantly anti-semitic. In Russian universities, where the students mostly supported the liberal opposition to the state or even the revolutionaries, the student culture was largely favorable to the Jews.

Thus the government had gone back on the spirit of selective integration, but most of the legal structure remained and the modernization of Jewish society continued, if slowly. The lack of more general progress inspired various responses, one being massive emigration to Western Europe and the United States, but this option also was not universally available or desired. Another response was the appearance of a Jewish press that was liberal in its politics and oriented toward the reform of the empire. Baron Ginzburg and the St. Petersburg Jewish elite lobbied unceasingly, but with less and less success after 1881. More radical options, especially among students and young people generally were the various revolutionary movements. Many Jews joined the Russian populists, including the terrorist groups, and later the Marxists who preached international solidarity. Others formed specifically Jewish socialist groups, the Jewish Workers’ League (the Bund), and finally the growing Zionist movement encouraged Jews to opt out entirely and move to Palestine. As the Russian government after the 1880s tried more and more to present itself as “Russian,” anti-Semitism became more or less an official policy. Pogroms like the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which nearly fifty Jews died, further poisoned the atmosphere. In response, Russian liberal and radical groups underlined their opposition to legal and social discrimination against the Jews, and Jewish parties grew more radical as well.

In spite of the restrictions, the evolution of Russian society meant that more and more Jews entered the business classes, the professions, the intelligentsia, and more of them found ways, legal or otherwise, to evade their confinement to the Pale. By 1897 six percent of Jews lived officially outside the Pale – many unofficially. Jewish communities emerged in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and even in towns on the Volga far from the legally permitted areas. Jews were entering Russian society, and the emergence of mass politics in 1905 would bring them to center stage in many ways, some of them highly explosive.

UKRAINIANS

Though the largest non-Russian group in the empire, the Ukrainians played little role in imperial affairs until 1905, except as a potential opposition to the Polish national movement and its claims. Their minor role was the result of the ambiguities of Ukrainian national consciousness, only slowly and incompletely changing among some parts of the local intelligentsia from a Russian regional identity into a national Ukrainian one.

Before the Crimean War the Ukrainian territories were Ukrainian only in the nationality of the peasantry, with the exception of the Left Bank, the former Hetmanate, and the Kharkov province. In these latter regions the local nobility was descended from Khmelnyts’kyi’s officers and maintained local traditions of history and a modest regionalist literature in Russian and occasionally Ukrainian. In the 1830s and 1840s, Ukrainian cultural activities of that local nobility were looked upon with favor from St. Petersburg as a counterweight to Polish political movements and a regional example of Russian uniqueness. The dominant figure in Ukrainian culture, however, came from a wholly different milieu. He was Taras Shevchenko, a serf whose talents at drawing led him to an education at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and liberation from serfdom. A lottery organized by Russian noblemen, with the prize being a portrait of the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii, raised enough money to buy him out of serfdom. His first volumes of poetry attracted more attention than his art, and back in Kiev he soon joined the historian Nikolai Kostomarov and other local intelligentsia who were dreaming of Slavic federalism. These dreams came to the attention of the authorities on the eve of 1848, and earned the poet a decade of exile on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

After Crimea the changes in Russian society and government policy had a sharp effect on the tiny Ukrainian intelligentsia. They began to publish a journal in St. Petersburg and involved themselves in the many activities of Russian radicals and liberals, including trying to educate the peasantry. Shevchenko returned from exile and resumed his central place in Ukrainian culture. The cultural efforts of the nascent Ukrainian intelligentsia came to a sharp stop in 1864 and 1867, when most publishing in Ukrainian became forbidden out of fear that Polish nationalists would penetrate the Ukrainian movement. In the Ukrainian cities small groups of intellectuals with a Ukrainian cultural orientation emerged, but they had little impact as yet. The cities remained firmly Russian speaking up to 1917 and after. Most university students in Kiev or Kharkov, Ukrainian or otherwise, ignored the Ukrainian movement and joined Russian radical groups or entered careers in the Russian administration or other institutions. The zemstvos, the elected local councils, were introduced into the Left Bank provinces, but their occasional forays into politics were oriented to the empire as a whole, not to specifically Ukrainian problems. Disagreements among the various layers of Russian bureaucracy over the language issue meant that some Ukrainian language books did appear, and local history and traditions were cultivated in the Russian language. Ironically the chief venue for Ukrainian history was the Archeographical Society in Kiev, which subsisted on funds from the Russian imperial military governors-general of the southwestern provinces. The main area of concern to the Russian empire was the Ukrainian movement across the border in Austrian Galicia, where electoral politics made possible a variety of Ukrainian parties, most of them not friendly to the Russian tsars. In the Russian Empire, however, the Ukrainian movement would not spread beyond the small Ukrainian intelligentsia to a larger population until the eve of the 1905 Revolution.

THE ASIATIC EMPIRE

If the European side of the empire was largely the result of territorial and strategic ambitions, the Asiatic Empire combined those same goals with a largely chimerical desire to imitate the economic success of the European colonial empires. Within that general framework, the Asiatic possessions of Russia fell into two areas, the Caucasus acquired by 1828 and Central Asia, where Russian conquest began in earnest only in the 1860s. To make matters more complex, the Crimean and Volga Tatars and the Bashkirs, conquered earlier and largely surrounded by Russian settlers, played a role both in Russian imperial rule and in the formation of native nationalism in Central Asia and elsewhere. Altogether the various Asian parts of the empire constituted about twenty-five percent of its population.

In the Caucasus Russia began to move beyond the sixteenth century boundary only at the end of the eighteenth century, annexing (rather theoretically) the North Caucasus and then Transcaucasia. Formal control was largely complete by 1828. South of the mountains the Russians established an administration based on Russian officials and the cooperation of the local Georgian and Armenian nobility. These Christian elites were integrated into the imperial nobility rather like the Baltic Germans or the Finns, and many of them played major roles in the Russian state and especially in the army up until 1917. The Azeris and other Muslims were a different story, though the Russian government was to a large extent able to coopt the Muslim clergy and other local elites after the end of the Caucasian wars.

The conquest of the Caucasus had been carried out to secure the eastern flank against the Ottomans. Commercial motives played some role in the planning, for trade with and through Iran was assumed to be a viable path to enormous profits. That idea proved to be an illusion, since Russia lacked the commercial infrastructure to make use of what was available, but that result did not become clear until the 1830s. In any case, the strategic value of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia as a southern frontier against Turkey was immense, and the Russians were not going to leave just because trade with Iran did not prove to be a bonanza. The mountain peoples of the north slopes of the Caucasus were not impressed by Russian strategic interests and liked even less the gradual penetration of Russian settlers in the adjacent lowlands. The result was war.

The Caucasian Wars of the nineteenth century fell into two fronts and two phases. One front was in the western end of the mountain range and its foothills, and the principal opponents were the Circassians, while the other front was far to the east, in Dagestan and parts of Chechnia. The wars began with the Russian attempt to build a solid line of forts to control the area in 1817, which met furious resistance both in east and west. Dagestan emerged as the main center of resistance in 1830, with Islam as its banner. The leaders were part of the Naqshbandi sufi order, which acted as the leadership group for the rebellion. The mountaineers proclaimed Shamil their imam in 1834 and for the next twenty-five years he led the struggle in Dagestan and Chechnia from his stronghold in the southern Dagestani mountains where he was born. This was a war of small units, night raids, guerilla tactics, and occasional massacres, which irritated the Russians but did not defeat them. The Russian army’s attempts to send expeditions into the mountains to defeat the insurgents were equally fruitless until the 1840s. Then they realized that the solution to their problem was not more troops or battles but the construction of roads in the mountains and particularly the cutting of pathways and cleared areas in the dense Caucasian forests. It was the axe more than the gun that gave the Russians an advantage in the Caucasian wars – new “American” axes wielded by thousands of Russian soldiers. Finally, with the end of the Crimean War, Prince Alexander Bariatinskii, the viceroy of the Caucasus, decided to put an end to it and introduced large Russian forces. Shamil had to surrender in 1859, the effective end of resistance. On the northwest slopes of the Caucasus the war with the Circassians continued intermittently until the 1860s, when the Russian government began to encourage them to migrate to Ottoman domains, leaving large areas on the western slopes of the Caucasus for Russian settlers. From then until 1917 the north Caucasus was largely quiet. Even the Sufis turned to purely religious concerns and rejected holy war, and in 1914 Russia fielded an entire cavalry division consisting of Dagestanis, Chechens, and other Caucasian mountaineers with Russian and Georgian officers and commanded by a Grand Duke. There were ten Muslim generals and 186 Muslim colonels in the Russian army in 1914, mostly Caucasians, though Muslims did not join the imperial elite in St. Petersburg. Most of the North Caucasus remained under military rule, with Russian (and often Georgian or Armenian) officers appointed to supervise the local communities where the village elders remained in power.

On the southern side of the mountains society evolved in response to Russian rule and the social changes that it brought. The great reforms brought an end to serfdom in Georgia, creating a crisis for much of the Georgian nobility. At the same time the slow spread of education led to the formation of a Georgian intelligentsia, liberal in politics and determined to preserve and continue the national culture. A few of the younger generation were already attracted to Russian populism, and in the 1890s the first Georgian Marxist groups appeared in Tiblisi and Baku. Similarly the Armenians formed a local business class and intelligentsia, both with centers in Tiblisi and Baku rather than Erevan, still a sleepy provincial town. For Russian Armenians the great issues were the condition of the Armenians across the border in the Ottoman territories and increasing Russian pressure on the Armenian Church. The increasing nationalist radicalism of the Armenian intelligentsia led to the formation of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun) party in Tbilisi in 1890, a nationalist party with a mildly socialist program. Though its main opponent was the Ottomans, the Dashnaks quickly attracted the enmity of the Russian authorities.

In spite of slow economic growth, development in Trancaucasia remained on the level of peasant agriculture, artisan production and trade with one major exception: Baku. The great irony of Russian Transcaucasia was that it did eventually provide a great economic benefit to the empire in the form of the Baku oil fields. Local producers, mostly Armenians, already exploited the oil in a small way for lighting and other purposes, but by mid century more modern drilling technology appeared, some in local or Russian hands, but the Russian branch of the Swedish Nobel family became the main producer, selling kerosene as fuel for lamps all over Russia. The American Rockefellers joined them, but Nobel remained dominant until the revolution. The result was to produce a modern, European type city on the shores of the Caspian, populated mainly by Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Azeris. Until 1905, the Azeris themselves showed little interest in secular politics or new ideas, but beneath the surface they too were influenced by the changes emanating from Baku.

CENTRAL ASIA

Russia had started to move south into Kazakhstan in the eighteenth century, but until the Crimean War its main activity was the building of border stations and trying to maintain influence among the various tribal rulers of Kazakhstan. Attempts to make a more permanent penetration were failures. Only in 1853 did the Russians manage to seize the small fort of Ak Mechet on the Syr Darya near the Aral Sea, on the south side of the Kazakh steppe. Nothing further happened until 1860. The driving force behind the expansion of Russia into Central Asia was the army and Ministry of War, operating partly out of the need to control the frontier in Kazakhstan and partly out of fear of British expansion into and beyond Afghanistan. The immediate context was the decision to maintain a fortress line south of the Kazakh steppe, on the northern borders of Central Asia proper. This meant seizure of the forts built by the khans of Kokand to control the southern Kazakhs, and put Russia into conflict with both Kokand and Bukhara. In 1860–1864 the Russians took control of the Kokand forts on the southern fringe of the Kazakh steppe, and then moved south to the Central Asia cities. Acting on his own initiative but with the general approval of the Ministry of War, General Mikhail Cherniaev took Tashkent in 1865, giving Russia a stronghold in the rich and well-watered Ferghana valley, Kokand’s base. The largely Uzbek Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand were old-fashioned and weak even by the standards of the Near East in the nineteenth century and soon fell to Russian arms. The khanates’ attempts to fend off the Russians only led to more defeats for them and in 1876 the whole of Kokand fell under Russian rule. Bukhara and Khiva were reduced to Russian protectorates on the model of the native states of British India, and in 1881 general Mikhail Skobelev eliminated the last resistance among the Turkmens. The Russian Empire now stretched to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan. The conquest was achieved at a low cost to Russia, only a few hundred soldiers died over the years of fighting. The soldiers of the Khanates were not used to European warfare and though numerous and brave, could not stand up to disciplined troops. Thus the largest problems for the Russians were logistic: learning to transport men and equipment over arid steppes and actual deserts, coping with intense heat in the summer and cold in unsheltered steppe in the winter. Fortunately, for all the British concern about Russian expansion, Central Asia was just too far away for the authorities in Delhi and London to try to counter the Russian moves. Iran and Afghanistan separated the Russian possessions from the British and the Ottomans as well. That is not to say that Britain was not concerned by Russian policy, obsessed as it was by the specter of losing India. The result was the continuation of the long “cold war” between the two empires – a situation that caused immense problems for Prince Gorchakov at the Russian foreign ministry, for his focus was stability in Europe. Thus the army often acted without informing him of its moves until it was too late for him to object.

The Russian colonial administrators, with general Konstantin von Kaufman at their head, were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Caucasus, which they saw as a narrowly military approach to empire. Instead they were going to imitate the master imperialists, their English rivals, and build a modern empire. Central Asia was to be slowly modernized by building European infrastructure, giving modern education to the natives, and encouraging or directly setting up investments that would benefit the empire. The great idea was the development of cotton growing, already a major crop, to supply the Russian textile industry. This project enjoyed modest success, but only by the early twentieth century. All these plans brought a small measure of modern society to Central Asia, one of the poorest and most backward parts of the Muslim world. Those modern elements, however, had other effects, for they called into being a small local intelligentsia with some modern ideas.

Figure 15. Nomadic Kirghiz (Kazakhs) around 1900.

The development of the local intelligentsia was a response not just to Russian rule and its consequences but also to developments among other Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire and beyond. One current was pan-Turkism, the idea that all Turkic speaking people were really one nation, propounded by the Crimean Tatar aristocrat Ismail Bey Gasprinskii. Gasprinskii advocated a modernized state and modernized Islam, but his views on the unity of the Turkic peoples raised the suspicion in St. Petersburg that he was essentially furthering Ottoman foreign policy aims against Russia. Another trend, influential also in Central Asia was jadidism, from the Arabic work jadid (“new”). Jadidism began in the late nineteenth century among the Muslims of British India, who believed that a modernized Islam would be closer to the original inspiration of Mohammed, stripped of the accretions of centuries in between. Like Gasprinskii, the jadidists wanted a modern education system that went beyond rote memorization of the Koran in Arabic and the study of classic Islamic texts. They also wanted many of the features of modern society, which they did not see as contradictory to the Islamic spirit, if not to the Islamic practice of their time. These ideas soon spread among the Volga Tatars, living as they did among Russians who had already achieved a more modern society than that of the Tatars. The Volga Tatar merchants had been for centuries the intermediaries in trade between Bukhara, Khiva, and Russia, and now many came to settle in Central Asia under the aegis of the Russian Empire. They found an audience among the local intelligentsia, which began to try to put their ideas into practice. In the Central Asian cities the only result was the creation of a few small cultural circles, but it was the beginning of modern nation building.

For the Russian Empire, Central Asia, once conquered, was not a serious problem until nearly the end of the empire. Aside from a small Islamic revolt in 1898 in Andijan, the interior of Central Asia was quiet. In the Kazakh steppe matters were more complicated. Russian cities appeared on the northern fringes of the steppe and in them a small Kazakh intelligentsia emerged, dependent on Russian institutions and loyal to the empire. At the same time the economic integration of the Kazakhs into the emerging Russian industrial economy brought demand for cattle and other products that disrupted the traditional nomadic society. Even worse, large numbers of Russian peasants settled among them with the encouragement of the state. Before 1905, however, open conflict was largely absent.

THE MANCHURIAN GAMBLE

Russia’s last attempt at empire on the Western model was its expansion into Manchuria. Witte’s Transsiberian Railroad went right through Chinese territory to Vladivostok, and Russia carved out a sphere of influence like those of the other Western powers in China. The railroad was under Russian control, and the Ministry of Finance had its own police force to guard it. The Russian fort at Port Arthur provided a base for the Russian navy and also anchored the Russian military presence in Manchuria. The center of Russian administration and business, however, was Harbin, a modern city built from scratch by the Russians, with a Russian administration and a progressive urban order unknown in the rest of the empire. Most restrictions on Jews, for example, did not apply in Harbin. Witte was building a modern Russia on Chinese soil. All these plans came to an end, however, with the Russo-Japanese war. The final peace gave the Russian naval base at Port Arthur to Japan, and Japan proceeded on the path of development and control that led to its further expansion in China. Russia retained control of the railroad, but never achieved dominance in northern China. Manchuria was too far away from the Russian heartland, and too close to Japan.

The Russian Empire, conglomerate as it was, functioned successfully only as long as it could remain a coalition of nobilities united by loyalty to the Romanov dynasty and rewarded appropriately for faithful service. Clearly this model of the empire mainly applied to the European areas and the Christian Caucasus, but there it did work until the strains of modernization undermined the domination of the nobility. The Russian state also tried to increase administrative uniformity and centralization, the policy known as Russificiation, but its efforts were half-hearted. There were too many obstacles, lack of financial resources, the influence of local elites, and the general backwardness of the country. The state could not abolish the variety of legal status and local administration in favor of a single unified state that might strive to assimilate all minorities to Russian language and culture, and indeed almost no one in the government had any such aim. Outside government policy, there were, of course, other more modern forces of integration – the power of the huge Russian market, the modernization of Russian culture, modern transportation and media, as in other countries, but they were all weaker than in Western Europe. The result was an unstable equilibrium in an empire too modern to remain an empire of nobilities around the tsar but too backward to fully unleash the social forces that integrated minorities in Western Europe. The Russians could not hope to imitate the ruthless and highly successful Germanization schemes in the German parts of Poland, for those depended on the combination of state resources, enthusiastic public support from a populace mobilized around nationalism, and the economic pull of German society. Russia had little of this, and its policies, especially in Poland, antagonized the people without being effective. Such integration of non-Russian minorities that did occur, and it was not small, came about simply by the ordinary motion of social change, not from state policy.

As time progressed, traditional loyalties eroded. Nationalist movements among the minorities emerged during the 1890s, but did not yet set the tone among non-Russian peoples. Few, save the Poles and the more radical of the Finns, actually anticipated or sought independence: their aim was greater autonomy within Russia. Many of the minorities were more concerned about one another than about Russians or the imperial state. The Baltic peoples saw their main antagonists in the Germans, the Finns fought over the Swedish-Finnish language issue, the nationalist movements of the Poles and Ukrainians feared each other and the Jews. Politicized Jews increasingly turned to Jewish socialist movements (the Bund) or to Zionism. At the same time, the great cities, especially St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the Donbass mining and manufacturing towns, were powerful integrating forces, attracting thousands of migrants from among the Baltic peoples, Finns, Poles, and Jews. The main concern of the state remained the politics of the Russian core, the maturing liberal opposition and the revolutionary socialists. The autocracy saw them, not local nationalists, as their main threat, and it was right.

¹ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term “Baltic Provinces” did not include Lithuania, which was part of the former Polish political and cultural sphere. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came to be called the “Baltic states” and seen as a group only after independence in 1918.