Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience

Venus in Furs

Beginning from the seventeenth century, European thinkers formu­lated "the four stages theory" which stated that the original mode of human economy was hunting and fishing, which gave way to pastur­age, which was replaced by agriculture, and, finally, by commerce. This narrative was based mainly on what was happening in the recently colonized America, where the four stages had followed one after the other (Meek 1976). But the Russian fur trade demonstrated a coexistence of distant stages, such as hunting and commerce. Those European thinkers who were closer to Russia, such as Pufendorf, did not agree with the four-stage theory but believed that various modes had in fact coexisted from biblical times. In his version of European history that was translated into Russian in 1718, Pufendorf talked about the Russian Empire as "vastly extensive" though "barren and uninhabited." However, the Emperor's revenue was "very consider­able" and "the Trade in Sables which is entirely in his own Hands is a vast Addition thereto" (1764: 2/347-8). Pufendorf knew that although the whole world could, at the beginning, have been like America, at its next stages it had become like Russia, mixed and twisted.

Though the fruits of the Russian north, fur pelts, had been familiar to the Europeans, only in the eighteenth century did the literate world learn about these lands. Then, a mixed group of German academics, Orthodox missionaries, and political exiles found themselves in Siberia and were able to write back to Europe. Exiled to Siberia in 1790, Nikolai Radishchev was the first to explain the takeover of Siberia as colonization and its motive as fur. In his Concise History of the Acquisition of Siberia, he wrote that the tsars gave rights to the Siberian pioneers "over the lands that did not belong to Russia" and that they were exempted from taxes in exchange for supplying furs to Moscow (1941: 2/148). Writing in the 1830s, another Siberian historian, Piotr Slovtsov (1886), described in detail how, in their search for beaver and sable, the first Siberian pioneers ignored every­thing else, including the metals that were discovered later on the same lands. When the merchant family of Stroganovs, the oligarchs of west Siberia who financed Russian tsars, obtained their coat of arms in the eighteenth century, they chose sables as their emblem.

Figure 7: Coat of Arms of the Stroganovse, 1753. Two sables hold the shield picturing another creature. Stroganov's motto said, "Ferras, opes patriae, sibi nomen" ("Will give wealth to the fatherland and name to myself"). Source: Wikimedia Commons

A traveler, who visited Moscow in 1716, reported the local inter­pretation of the Greek myth of the Argonauts: the Golden Fleece was understood as the Siberian sable and the Argonauts as fur traders (Pogosian 2001: 282). The peak of this fur-clad myth-making was the famous novel by the Austrian writer Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (1870), which featured a Slavic beauty who gave and received pleasure from playing with Russian sables and the knout. But Peter the Great rejected the ancient symbol of Russian power, Monomakh's Cap with its sable trimming, for the imperial crown made of gold and diamonds.

In his Capital, Marx compared primitive accumulation with origi­nal sin, which European empires committed in their colonies. "In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time imme­morial" (Marx 1990: 354): the origins of the imperial capitals in the bloody commodities such as silver, fur, or ivory elude memory. On a more scholarly note, it was Afanasii Shchapov who in the mid- nineteenth century understood the crucial role of the fur trade in terms of history, geography, ethnology, and ecology (he did not know the latter word). A Siberian, Shchapov realized the historical meaning of the depletion of the fur trade. He knew about the tragedies that developed at the frontlines of this hunting colonization, where the Cossacks were exterminating the hunting tribes in order to force them to exterminate the fur animals. One such example, which Shchapov used extensively, was the colonization of the Aleut Islands, where Russians forced the locals to hunt sea otter until almost all of them, otters and humans, had perished (1906: 2/291). Victims were illiter­ate, the perpetrators complicit, and historians mute about these early catastrophes. In this situation Shchapov developed his anachronistic method, imagining the past by analogy with the present.

Immensely influential among Russian radicals (see Chapter 11), Shchapov's ideas can be traced far into the twentieth century. During his Siberian exile in 1900-2, the young Lev Trotsky worked for the Siberian merchant Yakov Chernykh, who bartered fur with the local tribe of the Tungusy in exchange for vodka and cloth. Illiterate, Chernykh had a revenue of millions and many thousands of people in his employ, and he operated on land that spanned from the Lena to the Volga. This Chernykh was the "indisputable dictator" of the whole district, wrote Trotsky (1922), who knew the meaning of the word "dictator."

Trotsky made this view public while debating Russian history with the leading Marxist historian, Mikhail Pokrovsky, in 1922. They both agreed that Russia featured an "uneven development," a phrase that Trotsky made famous. But Pokrovsky attacked Trotsky for pro­ducing too static a picture of this unevenness. What created these extreme differences? He cited the final chapters of Marx's Capital, which narrated how, after the Middle Ages, "the colonial system" played the "preponderant role" in Europe and how the "strange God" of colonialism "perched himself on the altar, cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe" (Marx 1990: 374). A student of Kliuchevsky, Pokrovsky easily applied these colonial idioms to the rewriting of Russian history (1920, 2001). Trotsky's work for a Siberian fur oligarch gave Pokrovsky just another example: Chernykh was a new version of the Stroganovs, wrote the historian. As a result, Pokrovsky revealed a belief that he ironically called one of his "her­esies" - namely, that Russia had developed "according to the colonial type." Trotsky misunderstood this primary cause for Russia's "com­bined and uneven development." Pokrovsky asked Trotsky:

Is the concept of the colonial system applicable only to the countries with hot climates and colored populations, or could one imagine it also in the Siberian forest or in the Northern Russian marshes? Does it require ostriches and rhinoceroses, or are foxes, sables, and martins enough for the colonial system? (Pokrovsky 1922)

On the other side of the ocean, an American scholar, Frank A. Golder, gave a boost to the scholarly studies of Russian colonial trade. Born in Odessa, Golder started his career with teaching English in Alaska in 1899. Alaska was still a land where the natives preferred Russian to English; Golder even had to give his Fourth of July speech in Russian. After this experience, he studied Russian history at Harvard and in 1921 took part in the American Relief Administration (ARA), trying to help the victims of famine on the Volga. He wrote a magisterial book on the Russian expansion in the Pacific (1914). Fed by his personal experience, his interest was in demythologizing the fur trade and traders, who were still perceived as like the Argonauts:

The Siberians of the 17th and 18th centuries were part of the movement in which they were caught . . . yet we are expected to fall on our knees and bow to heroes. As a matter of fact they were, at best, very ordinary men and some of them were vicious and depraved. . . . In every seaport town and in every frontier community one will find [similar] men. (Quoted from Lantzeff and Pierce 1973: 224)

Two Californian historians, Harold Fisher (who was Golder's associ­ate in the ARA) and George V. Lantzeff, continued Golder's work (Dubie 1989; Emmons and Patenaude 1992). Writing in the 1950s, Lantzeff (in his introduction to Lantzeff and Pierce 1973) stated that "no search for any single commodity has ever resulted in the acquisi­tion of as huge an area as the one acquired by Russia in this quest." One could add that no other quest for any single commodity has been so well forgotten in the history of human suffering. We know a thing or two about Cortez or Kurtz; but looking at the splendid portraits of British kings, nobody thinks about those little peoples in the Arctic who exchanged these furs for "protection."

Space Through Time

Catherine the Great justified monarchical rule in Russia by its unusu­ally large territory. But how was this territory acquired in the first place? She asserted that the Russian Empire appropriated a big part of the world, "from the Irtysh River to the Kuril Islands," because of the Russians' "proclivity for adventure" (Ekaterina II 1869: 256). Catherine misrepresented a crude economic reality: this land was taken in the quest for fur. However, the Russian Empire retained its hold on the colonized land even after the fur was depleted. With the one big exception of Alaska, the areas of the fur trade were all held under Russian sovereignty even after this trade was discontinued and the lands had no mercantile value. In the nineteenth century, these lands were used mainly as penal colonies. Even Soviet military- industrial sites did not change this large picture. A huge expanse of northern Eurasia, of a size much larger than Europe, remains under­developed and underpopulated (Hill and Gaddy 2003).

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these lands of the fur trade have played a new and precious role, which feels uncannily similar to the old one. The same geographical areas that fed the fur trade of medieval Novgorod and Moscow have provided the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia with their means for existence. The oil and gas fields of western Siberia have been found in those very spaces that the greedy sons of Novgorod colonized for the fur trade with the Iugra, Hanty, Mansi, and others. Like then, with the exhaustion of older sites, the drillers are moving eastwards, to the coasts and islands of the Pacific. The main consumers of Russian gas and oil are also located in many of those same places, from Hamburg to London, which consumed Russian fur. The large pipelines of Gazprom run along the terrestrial route, from Moscow through Poland to Leipzig and further to the west, which was used for the export of fur. The future North Stream, the underwater pipeline that will provide north­ern and Western Europe with gas from western Siberia, runs almost precisely along the routes of the ancient Hanseatic trade.

Geographically, this resemblance is accidental. Aesthetically, fur and oil could not be more different. Ecologically, there is no correla­tion either: people drill for oil and gas in forests as well as in deserts, but fur animals are to be found only in forests. But politically, there is much in common between an economy that relies on the export of fur and an economy that relies on the export of gas. Both economies are victims of the resource curse, the one-sided development of a highly profitable extraction industry that leaves the rest of the economy uncompetitive and undeveloped. In the longue duree of Russian history, taxing the trade in these commodities has become the source of income for the state; organizing their extraction, its preoccupation; securing the lines of transportation that stretch across Eurasia, its responsibility. The extraction takes highly specialized skills that have little to do with the occupations of other parts of the population. Very few people take part in business, with the result that the state does not care about the population and the population does not care about the state. A caste-like society emerges in these condi­tions. The security apparatus becomes identical to the state.

This is the political economy of what Arendt called "the mass man's superfluousness," a situation that she believed to be founda­tional for totalitarian rule (1966: 311). More recently, institutional economics has described two modes of relations between resources, the state, and the subjects (North et al. 2009). In the "natural state," a dominant group limits access to valuable resources, creates rents out of these resources, and rules over the population by applying suppression and bribery. A different social order is "the open access state," which controls internal violence by providing equal opportu­nities to its citizens. In such a society, there is no legal or metaphysical difference between the elite and the populus. Historically, the lack of natural resources leads to the development of human capital and the creation of the open-access system, while the abundance of such resources keeps a state in its resource-bound condition. However, there are many exceptions from this rule of thumb. Norway and Canada remain balanced economies despite the abundance of oil. Holland overcame its mid-twentieth-century "Dutch disease." In Russia, Trotsky's "unevenness of development" meant that while some regions in some periods were entirely dependent on raw com­modities such as fur, other regions developed crafts, processing indus­tries, and labor shortages. Politically, resource-dependence can be dealt with. Historically, it can come and go.

There have been two resource-bound periods of Russian history: the era of fur and the era of gas. Historically discontinuous, these two periods feature uncanny similarities - structural and geographic, essential and accidental. Processing these commodities is unusually messy. The state's dependence on them makes the population super­fluous. Extracting, storing, and delivering these resources makes secu­rity more important than liberty. Reliance on these resources destroys the environment, natural and cultural. And as fur was centuries ago, so oil too is counted in barrels.

We know how the first period ended. The depletion of the key resource, fur, drove the state into a major crisis. It forced a radical change in Muscovite mores, which included the election of a new dynasty by vote, the import of the European Enlightenment, and the institution of the formal empire. The state redirected its colonization activities from the fur-rich eastern forests to the grain-rich southern steppes, and later to the silk-rich Transcaucasia and cotton-rich Central Asia. However, nothing in this later history would be com­parable in profitability, duration, and scale of expansion to the fur trade. Consumers also changed, though it is amusing to notice how long it took the west to kick its fur habit.

Part III

Empire of the Tsars

Occult Instability

In 1849, an organizer of settlements in New Zealand blamed British colonial administrators for being "deeply convinced of the inferiority or nothingness of the other classes." To strengthen the argument, he said that these people had already been "more privileged than any class in any European country at present, excepting Russia perhaps" (Wakefield 1849: 59). In New Zealand and other British colonies, the distance between the privileged and the underprivileged was struc­tured by race, defined primarily as the color of the skin. Visible race marked the total sum of differences between human groups and had a particular kind of metrics. It squeezed the variety of humanity into a few categories, white, black, and everything in between (Gates 1985). But in a society of internal colonization that had annexed, absorbed, and exterminated its others, almost everyone was of one and the same color. To play the function of race, this society created estates, a legal category that was also similar in function to caste. Like race, estate defined people's roles and regulated their rela­tions. Like caste, it was inherited and for many practical purposes, unchangeable. Like race and caste, estate clashed with capitalism and the early attempts at democratic politics. Race was supposedly bio­logical and estate was supposedly legal, but both constructs belonged to culture. The cultural construction of race naturalized power; the cultural construction of estate legalized it. The larger the distances these constructions created, the less stable they were. Low estates, races, or castes were particularly unsteady. It was, as the Caribbean psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote about the colonial situation, "the zone of occult instability where the people dwell" (1967: 183).

empire of the tsars Terra Nullius

British colonists applied English law to any territory that they found lawless; they called this foundational principle of imperialism terra nullius. A land was construed as empty even though it was inhabited. This claim terminated all existing customs, property rights, and lines of inheritance in the land. In practice, this principle was followed a long time before it was codified by the British (Gosden 2004). For the eighteenth-century physiocrats, terra nullius justified imperial domination by claiming the duty to cultivate the land: those who did not do it in the way that was considered proper were not recognized by law (Nelson 2009; Boucher 2010). The principle of terra nullius was metaphorically connected to the biblical idea of creation ex nihilo and to Locke's idea of tabula rasa, creating a comfortable unity of imperial politics, theology, and epistemology (Arneil 1996; Bauman 2009).

Terra nullius probably was an intuitive strategy of Peter I, but this idea is more evident in the writings of those imperial intellectuals who glorified his rule throughout the nineteenth century. Peter pre­sented himself as the creator not only of the Russian Empire, but of the land, of the people, and even of himself. He did change many laws and institutions, but he wished to exaggerate their novelty even more; he played a foreign conqueror, suggests Richard Wortman (1995: 1/44). One hundred years after Peter's death, the imperial Minister of Finances, Egor Kankrin, said that Peter had changed the Russians so much that they had better stop calling themselves Russians and start calling themselves Petrovians, and their land Petrovia (Riasanovsky 1985: 109). The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky devel­oped the analogy between Russian history and the book of Genesis even further: "With his powerful 'Let there be . . . !' Peter dispelled the chaos, separated the light from the darkness, and called the country to its great, global destiny" (Belinsky 1954: 5/117). Belinsky called upon the Russian historians to terminate their debates about Rurik and to focus on Peter, who was "incomparably more impor­tant" for the creation of the state (Belinsky 1954: 5/94). Piotr Chaadaev wrote that "in his hand Peter the Great found only a blank sheet of paper"; he "swept away all our old institutions; he dug out an abyss between our past and our present" (Ermichev and Zlatopol'skaia 1989: 205, 225). Completed in 1782, the Bronze Horseman, the monument to Peter in the center of St. Petersburg, showed Peter and his horse jumping to the present over an abyss.

Both Chaadaev and Pushkin were eager to call Peter's period a "revolution" (Riasanovsky 1985: 104; Etkind 2001b: 32). If it was a "revolution," as some historians also believe (Kagarlitsky 2003: 222; Cracraft 2004), it followed the Dutch and English revolutions but preceded those in America, France, and Haiti. Working on his unfinished novel, Peter the Great's Negro, Pushkin presented the story of his ancestor, the black African Abram Gannibal, as an exem­plary case of reshaping humankind:

With grief, Peter saw that his subjects resisted the Enlightenment and in the interest of proving the changes that could be wrought on a per­fectly foreign breed of man, asked his envoy to send him a talented little Arab. . . . The Emperor was very satisfied with the boy and edu­cated him diligently, always with this goal in mind. (Pushkin 1995: 67)

Having refashioned his valet from a harem boy into an artillery officer, Peter failed with larger tasks, said Pushkin: his subjects "per­sisted with their beards," and "Asian ignorance reigned over the tsar's court" (1995: 64). This was reversed orientalism in action: while a black African was fully accepted as an individualized, powerful figure, Russian subjects were orientalized in a non-differentiated, anony­mous way. Pushkin's ancestor, the black builder of a fort in Siberia and a port in Estonia, was an admirably imperial figure (Barnes 2005). However, for the idea of terra nullius he was rather a counter­example. Gannibal did not downplay his black origins but, instead, publicly celebrated them, and Pushkin followed his example. As a Russian noble, Gannibal chose a coat of arms with an elephant in the center. He built a manor house near Pskov in a Southern style that was unknown to the Russian province. Still, "Fortuna vitam meam mutavit optime" was his motto ("Chance changed my life entirely") (Leetz 1980: 117; Teletova 1989).

"Immobility and petrification belong to Asia like the soul belongs to the body," wrote Belinsky, an extreme orientalist, as Said defined the term. Drawing a picture of the pre-Petrine Russia as the land of ignorance and torture, Belinsky saw it "Asian, barbarian, Tartar" (Belinsky 1954: 5/103). He applied terra nullius to a period of history rather than a piece of land. In Chaadaev's philosophy of history, "the starting point defines destiny," and this starting point for Russians was either Rurik, or Peter, or both (for more details, see Etkind 2001b: 21-34). In 1836, Chaadaev's essay in the journal Telescope caused a scandal. Nicholas I exiled the editor of Telescope, the phi­losopher Nikolai Nadezhdin, and put Chaadaev under house arrest.

Figure 8: The coat of arms of Abram Gannibal (c. 1742). Source: Grigiorii Fridman, Gipotezy i legendy o proiskhozhdenii Abrama Gannibala, Zametki po evreiskoj istorii, 2/63, 2006

A military doctor, Ivan Iastrebtsov, was sent to visit him daily to check his state of mind. He became one of Chaadaev's disciples. Under the pressure, all three men articulated a new idea. Russia's freedom from historical legacies was not a liability but an advantage. Precisely because of their innocence, Russia and the Russians were ideal objects for imperial transformation. Iastrebtsov wrote with a reference to his patient and friend Chaadaev: "Russia is free of preju­dice. . . . It is as if the past does not exist for Russia. . . . Its people are white paper, write on them" (1833: 197). From his exile, Nadezhdin formulated emphatically and almost comically:

We are children, and our childhood makes our happiness. . . . With our simple, virgin nature, unspoiled by any prejudice, one can do what is needed without labor and without violence. It is possible to shape us into perfection as if we are a pure, soft wax. Oh, what an unimaginable advantage before the Europeans we have with our saintly, blissful child­hood! (1998: 96)

After Chaadaev's scandal, this idea of Russian civic infantilism became common. The critic Belinsky wrote that the Russian people were "fresh, young, and virgin" (1954: 5/119). The historian Soloviev wrote more specifically that the Russian man in the eighteenth century was "perfectly clean and ready to perceive the new ways - in a word, he was a child" (1856: 500). Changing its metaphors from white paper to pure wax and from barbarity to infancy to virginity, the idea of terra nullius affirmed the transformative energy of the imperial power.

Point of Rule

In one of the first Russian victories of the Northern War (1700-21), Peter I took the delta of the Neva. With a fort there, he restored control over the strategic river route from the Baltic Sea to the great Russian lakes and Novgorod. In 1712, Peter transferred a part of his administration, military and civil, to St. Petersburg (many offices remained in Moscow for another 50 years). By the right of conquest, the land was his. But the right of conquest functioned in the colonies; in eighteenth-century Europe, international treaties transferred land from one state to another. According to these treaties, Swedish rule over this territory was confirmed in 1617 and remained valid until 1721. "In Russia, the center is at the periphery," wrote Kliuchevsky (2001). Even more, the imperial capital was established on foreign land. Peter "needed a land entirely new, without tradition, where the Russians would find themselves in an entirely new space and could not help but change their mores and habits," explained Belinsky (1954: 5/145).

The new land was called Ingria. Under Russian rule, it kept its name and identity for a number of years. Peter even created the Duchy of Ingria there, but the land was treated as terra nullius, with no legacy or identity apart from the idea that it should be Russian. Sparsely populated by dispersed Finnish people, Ingria was not very appealing. The low land, the barely passable harbor, and regular flooding precluded urban development. But Peter loved his place on the Neva. It was deceptively similar to Amsterdam, where the young tsar spent his apprenticeship. The memory of the Hansa was still alive on these banks. In order to shape Russia as if it was an empty land, Peter needed an external point of leverage from whence to push the project.

The historian Nikolai Karamzin in 1811 mocked Peter's project as "turning Russia into Holland" (1991: 36). Having spent four months with the East India Company in Amsterdam, Peter was aware of Dutch colonial practices, mercantilist theories, and Calvinist energy. A mercenary from Geneva, Franz Lefort, a major influence on Peter who accompanied him on the European tour, had introduced him to his adventurous Calvinism even before their trip to Holland in 1697. Late seventeenth-century Holland was the commercial leader of Europe and the cradle of the radical Enlightenment. No less impor­tantly, Holland was the center of the world's largest empire, whose sources of wealth spread as far away from Amsterdam as Russia's did from St. Petersburg.

There were (and are) no two countries more different in Europe than Russia and Holland. However, Russia was not alone in choosing to follow this model. Prussia was also reshaping itself after Holland, with huge success. Historical sociologists generalize that, for changes of this scale, the alliance between an enthusiastic sovereign and a popular religious awakening was always crucial (Gorski 2003). Frederick William of Prussia counted on Pietism, but Peter ostracized the Russian religious activism in which he saw just another expres­sion of barbarity. His reform of Russian Orthodoxy submitted the church to the state and left no place for popular enthusiasm.

Historians have variously described Petrine policies as "reforms," "modernization," or "revolution." Arguably, they were a decisive move in Russia's internal colonization, with a Calvinist touch. This colonization was mainly about the population rather than about the territory. While the resource-bound Muscovite economy largely left the people to themselves, the emerging Empire was dependent upon its population. Peter's subjects "are his only mines of gold and silver," wrote a foreign observer (Hughes 1998: 135). Starting with Peter, taxation, draft, disciplinary innovations, and grassroot resistance marked the history of the Empire. To transform a tribute-based domain into a bureaucratic, tax-collecting, law-abiding state was a task that Peter started and nobody completed (Raeff 1983). His eco­nomic ideas are mostly understood as an authoritarian version of Dutch and British mercantilism. For these competing empires, mer­cantilism was a strategy of maximizing the income of the mother countries by monopolizing their dealings with their daughter colo­nies. From his apprenticeship in old and new imperial centers,

Konigsberg, Amsterdam, and London, Peter learned the rules of this game. But he also knew what some historians still find it hard to comprehend: that in Russia, the mother and the daughter were the same and the Emperor was their master. Practiced though never theo­rized by Peter, this incestuous idea revised the calculus of mercantil­ism. Having its colonies inside itself, Peter's Empire did not bother about tariffs, piracy, and trade surplus, the concerns of the mercantil­ist Europe. Most importantly, the Empire did not bother about the incomes in the mother country. Having imposed a poll tax and other duties on the Russian population, Peter's financiers could ignore the imperial shareholders, because, apart from the crown, there were none. They extracted smart colonial profits without being concerned with the greedy rentiers of the metropolitan lands. It was a good deal for the Empire.

As built by Peter and his heirs, the new Russian capital embodied the universalist imaginary of ancient Rome. The results were mag­nificent and disruptive. They erased not only the vague memory of the native semi-Christian, semi-shamanistic tribes of Ingria, but also the traditional culture of Russia. There was no resemblance between the imperial St. Petersburg and the medieval Moscow or Novgorod. Struggling to over-compensate for its self-perceived back­wardness, the Empire amassed huge collections of European art, purchased Europe's best architects and sculptors, and trained Russian artists in European academies (Cracraft 1997). Russian museums document a full break between the imperial culture and the pre- Petrine past. Leaving the rooms of "icons" and entering the wing of "Russian art," one feels the same rupture as when moving from a section of native art into the imperial section in any colonial museum in America, Australia, or India. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the imperial arts became increasingly similar all over the world, with the result that there is more resemblance between the imperial art of India and the imperial art of Russia than there is between either of them and their own folk arts.

Founded by a great warrior, St. Petersburg was first and foremost a military capital. Peter and Paul Fortress was its focal point and many of its spectacular squares, parks, and edifices were the living and training quarters of the Imperial Guard. The Guard was the supreme master of the city and the Empire. It started and ended wars, ran balls and duels, enthroned and dethroned emperors and empresses, and glorified or killed romantic poets. Officers of the Guard were partially European and largely bilingual; soldiers were overwhelm­ingly Russian. Until 1762, the gentry was obliged to serve. Peter III abolished this regime, but a career in the Guard and, later in life, in a provincial administration remained the typical path for a gentle­man. Disseminating the ways and manners of the imperial capital throughout the provinces, these careers helped to colonize the Empire.

A diplomat from Hanover wrote in 1714 that the new capital was still "a heap of villages linked together, like some plantation in the West Indies" (Hughes 1998: 215). Forcing the court and government to move to St. Petersburg meant that this time not only the peasants but also the gentry were subject to a mass resettlement. Reportedly, families lost about two-thirds of their capital in the move (Rogger 1960: 12). The new capital emulated Amsterdam not only in its islands and channels, but also by being very far from the vital sources of the imperial economy. Grain, timber, and even stone for the new city were delivered from the heartlands. The gentry had to abandon the old way of living off their estates; accustomed to getting their supplies for free, they had to buy them for prices that were five times higher than in the central provinces.

Unlike older European metropolises, St. Petersburg was never enclosed within walls. Divided into two parts, the official center and residential suburbs, it sprawled in all directions from the center. Like the Empire itself, the periphery had no limits and the central part of the city developed more slowly than the suburbs. The enormous central squares and construction sites of the future palaces stretched along the spacious river, creating a gigantic void in the center which was analogous to the larger geography of this Empire. Throughout the High Imperial Period, the center of St. Petersburg was still a work in progress, which was completed only after this period ended, with the ensemble of the Palace Square finished in 1843 and St Isaac's Cathedral in 1858.

The abundant columns, the painted brick, and the regularity of streets and squares followed Palladian examples. Everywhere on the four continents of the colonized world, one could find similar porti­cos, heroic sculptures, coats of arms, Greek columns, lions, eagles, balconies, fountains, meadows. Against the flat, cold terrain, the painted, multicolored facades look irreconcilably alien: a beautiful embodiment of the occult instability of a colonial situation. As in Washington DC, all was big and sublime in St. Petersburg. One feels a resemblance between these two capitals that were both built on no-man's land, a territory that was cut out from the existing polities so that it could rule over them from an outstanding point, specifically designed as the site of power. A central part of Washington, the empty mall that divides and connects the city, is similar to the line of St.

Petersburg squares and parks along the Neva. Rooted in the same European tradition, both capitals promoted their self-images as aspir­ing masters of the world. They also had similar insecurities, one being too far to the north, another too far to the south, both distant from the economic and demographic centers of their lands, and both ridiculously available to their common enemy, the British Navy.

St. Petersburg's consumption outweighed any trade advantage that it could provide as a seaport. Peter's idea was to launch an export of grain from the city to Germanic lands; but since the construction of St. Petersburg led to the increase of grain prices in Moscow, the authorities regularly stopped the export of grain altogether. Exporting goods from the existing Russian ports in Riga and Archangel was more efficient than from St. Petersburg, and the government restricted operations in these older ports (Jones 2001).

As St. Petersburg was developing its current shape, with large apartment buildings facing its straight, flat streets, another feature of the city became apparent. Colder than Berlin or almost anywhere in the urban world, Petersburg winters required serious amounts of firewood. Food was a problem in Ingria, but at least firewood was readily available in the country. In the well-ordered plan of the city there was no place to store it but in the internal courtyards - large, passable spaces of relative wilderness. Classical facades and low gates hid the chaos of life from the eye of power. Courtyards contained the real economy of storage, stables, workshops, outhouses, sewage systems, and huge piles of firewood. Three centuries after Peter, many of these spaces are still awaiting cultivation. On several levels, the development of the capital reproduced the script of internal colonization.

A Big Shave

Catherine II famously observed to Diderot that he should be happy to write on paper - monarchs write on skins. Writing on the bodies, faces, and minds of its subjects, the Russian Empire needed a substi­tute for race, which proved to be even more problematic than race itself. Physical, visible, and, preferably, unwashable signs of distinc­tion had to be found or made between the newly created estates. If estate could be written on skin, this racialized status would work for police officials, road patrols, and plantation managers. "Culture can also function like nature," writes Etienne Balibar; culture can selec­tively mark individuals and groups and lock them into immutable, intangible categories of discrimination and privilege that work as races (Balibar 1999: 22).

Peter the Great produced a great experiment on the subject. Immediately after his return from a grand European trip, he demanded that the gentry's beards be shaved. As the Austrian envoy wrote on that day of August 26, 1698, "the razor plied promiscuously among the beards of those present" (quoted in Hughes 2004: 22). Peter began with his immediate entourage, then sent police barbers into the streets, and then introduced national legislation that included a beard tax. The history of beards is a rich subject (Reynolds 1949; Peterkin 2001) but nothing similar in scope to Peter's shaving reform has ever been recorded. Dress code was also changed, with the addi­tional advantage that it embraced both genders. During the following decades, several decrees on shaving became more discriminate. The purpose was not to shave all Russian males, but to differentiate between them (Hughes 2004: 31). The gentry had to be clean-shaven; the clergy and peasantry remained bearded; townspeople existed in a gray zone with the rules constantly changing.

The big shave of 1698 preceded the other founding acts of internal colonization, such as "The Manifesto on the Summoning of Foreigners into Russia" (1702), the foundation of the new capital on the occu­pied land (1703), and the birth of the Russian Empire (1721). In a very Petrine way, abrupt and foundational, shaving established a class structure where there was not one. Before Peter, Russia did not have estates (Freeze 1986) though it had myriad self-conscious groups - ethnic, religious, professional, genealogical, and others. Though some of the previously accepted laws had codified social differences, estates - large non-ethnic social groups that were recognized and differen­tially treated by the government - were created by Peter's decrees on beards.

While estate was a substitute for race, the beard was a substitute for skin color. In A Sportsman's Sketches, Ivan Turgenev presents a serf called Khor who was prosperous enough to buy freedom from his master, but who chose not to do so. The narrator insists, "It's always better to be free." To this Khor objects that even after buying his freedom he would keep his beard, even though he knows that he would be considered inferior because of it. The narrator's solution is easy again: "Then shave your beard." But Khor chooses to stay with his serfdom, his beard, and his money (Turgenev 1963: 4/12).

In Europe during this period, beards also connoted Romanticism and something like a return to nature. The early Russian nationalists, the so-called Slavophiles, had grown beards, but in 1849 the govern­ment ordered them to shave these off, as being "unsuitable for the nobility" (Tsimbaev 1986: 13). Garibaldi's rebels were all bearded; in 1853, the Austrian Emperor ordered his civil servants to shave off their beards. With the advent of populism in Russia in the 1870s, facial hair sprouted again: the higher estate emulated the lower one. As Russia approached its twentieth-century turmoil, the beards of artists and bureaucrats, favorites of the imperial court and leaders of popular sects, became longer and longer. Following western fashion and characteristically exceeding it, the length of the Russian beard, black and white, found expression in the symmetrical figures of Rasputin, the folk prophet who became a favorite of the Imperial court, and Tolstoy, the aristocratic writer who became a folk prophet.

In the estate society, inequality was legal. Estates were defined by their rights and duties, which were different for each of them. There was a separate system of law for each estate and only those who belonged to one and the same estate were equal before law. These different systems of law were codified with diligence, much more so than was customary in nations with racial inequality. It was precisely because estates were invisible that their codification needed more effort. The matrix of four estates was simple: gentry, clergy, towns­people, and peasantry. The gentry could own people and land and had to serve the state, usually in the military. The clergy could not own people or land and had to serve God. With the right to marry, Russian priests had many children. Their sons did not serve in the army, but they could receive education and make careers in the ranks of bureaucracy. Neither of these estates paid taxes. The third estate, the townsfolk or merchants, could own property but not people, and had to pay taxes. The peasantry could not own land or property, had to serve their masters, and also paid taxes. Along with their houses, horses, tools, allotments, and families, peasants were owned either by their masters or by the state. But individually or collectively, peas­ants had some "use rights" with respect to their belongings, rights that before 1861 could exist in practice but not in law. Differing legal codes punished peasants with corporal punishments and the gentry with a penitentiary system. The gentry and townsfolk had some ability to travel, but the peasantry were usually bonded to the land, the master, and the commune. In the army, peasants served as sol­diers, gentlemen as officers, and clergymen were exempt from service. Only sons of the gentry and clergy could enter universities. The law and custom conditioned estate differences in food, clothing, health­care, education, living conditions, marital behavior, and everything else that mattered.

Since many people did not fit into any of the estates, new categories had to be invented, chaotic and porous (Freeze 1986; Wirtschafter 1997; Confino 2008). People of different estates defined themselves by their relations to one another. Like races and castes, estates were produced by merging native traditions and imperial categories. Like races and castes, estates also survived reforms and revolution. In 1917, estate law was abolished, but Soviet practice soon re-estab­lished it in the form of "social origin," which reversely discriminated against those who originated from the gentry and clergy (Fitzpatrick 1993). Even in post-Soviet Russia, sociologists suspect there has been a re-emergence of the old system of estates under new names (Kordonsky 2008).

Race and Estate

"Estate" is a poor translation of the Russian word soslovie; a literal translation would be "a coordinate." Indeed, the estates provided the system of coordinates in which the Russian Empire structured Russian society. Dividing society into several layers, the Empire codified divi­sions and strengthened boundaries between social classes in a way that helped to avoid political conflicts, but that hampered economic and cultural development. The sociologist Michael Mann asserts that organic states, which aimed at national homogeneity, were often more dangerous than stratified states; when organic states colonized distant lands or identified an internal enemy, they were prone to commit genocide (Mann 2005). Large religious, ethnic, and service groups - Cossacks, Jews, Poles, Tartars - received their own lists of rights and duties which worked as if they were estates. Small ethnici­ties were categorized and treated in a summary way: "mountaineers," "nomads," and "little peoples of the North." From the start, the polity was pluralistic and fragmented, which enabled it to absorb more elements and create new coordinates. In the colonial frontiers, with their cycles of rebellion and oppression, and in the internal provinces, with their routine of corporal punishments, the level of violence was high. But when the revolution abolished the estate system, violence only increased.

Like the system of castes in India, the system of estates was created by the modernizing efforts of the imperial state, which appropriated local traditions and changed them for its own purposes (Dirks 2001). The idea that the condition of the bearded Russian peasants was similar to that of a colonized race was formulated immediately when the critics of the Enlightenment discovered colonialism. Abbe Raynal wrote in the History of Two Indies about Russia:

Civil slavery is the condition of every subject in the empire, who is not noble: they are all at the disposal of their barbarous masters, as cattle are in other countries. Amongst these slaves, none are so ill used as those who till the ground. . . . Political slavery is the lot of the whole nation, since the foreigners have established arbitrary power [there]. (1777: 246)

Modern Russian literature started when Raynal's volume was smug­gled into St. Petersburg. The customs officer who did it was Nikolai Radishchev, the author of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790). When interrogated, Radishchev said that he modeled his Journey after Raynal and Herder. He wrote:

Just imagine, - my friend told me long ago, - that the coffee in your mug and the sugar that you put there, deprived a human being, who is like you, of his peace.. . . My hand started trembling and I spilled my coffee. . . . And how about you, dwellers of St. Petersburg? (Radishchev 1992: 75)

For this and similar passages, Radishchev was exiled to Siberia. In the mid-nineteenth century, the radical-minded Alexander Herzen blamed the world for forgetting about the Russian serfs while banning the slave trade. Writing in English, he explained this discrepancy by unfolding serfdom's "extravagant and unparalleled history, that . . . almost def[ies] belief" (1957: 7, 10). A literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote about serfs as "white negroes"; Herzen wrote about them as "negres geles" (frozen negroes) (1956: 302). Belinsky described "the horrifying state of the country where people trade people, having no sly justification even of the sort that American slave-owners have when they say that the negro is not a human being" (1954: 10/213). Mocking the idea that American slavery was better than Russian serfdom because it was justified by belief, Belinsky saw their difference. Nobody in Russia, definitely not the state, claimed that serfs were neither human nor Christian. They attended churches and their pastoral care was a recognized duty of the clergy. For the gentry, Christians who owned Christians, this arrangement caused problems. It was also a problem for the clergy, who did not have serfs of their own, but gave Christian sermons to congregations that mixed the masters with their serfs.

The orientalization of serfs was part of the cognitive machinery of serfdom: treating humans like property, one needed to construct a difference between them and oneself. This oceanic gap between gentry and peasantry is well known, but the distance between gentry and clergy is no less illuminating (Manchester 2008). In the 1830s, a highly successful philosophy professor from Moscow Imperial University, Nikolai Nadezhdin, offered his hand in marriage to the daughter of a noble whom he taught privately. The love was mutual and the reason for her family's rejection was his origins in the clergy. The marriage never happened. In the 1880s, the young historian Pavel Miliukov, of impoverished gentry, happily married the daughter of a highly positioned Moscow clergyman. They had to keep their wedding secret; Miliukov's mother rejected her daughter-in-law; Miliukov (1990: 1/152) wrote about their experience of being newly wed as "a social dead-end." For a lady or a gentlemen, it was much easier to marry a foreigner than to marry a person from a lower estate. The introspective, free-minded Miliukov felt the impact of the estate boundary even in his academic affairs. He could not learn from his professor, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, who was from the clergy, because Kliuchevsky "understood the meaning of Russian history from the inside," and he did not. With a bit of irony, Miliukov explained that "the clergy retained a better connection with the old tradition" while the gentry had lost it (Miliukov 1990: 1/115). Indeed, having come from a dominated estate, Kliuchevsky made the development of estates and their struggles against each other a central theme of Russian history. Like Kliuchevsky, many Russian historians were sons of the clergy and owned nothing; the major Russian critics were also from the clergy rather than from the gentry. In contrast, the major nineteenth-century Russian writers and poets were gentlemen and owned estates, often more than one, and serfs. It was as if, in Russia, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction was also based on the estate origin.

Emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 happened almost simul­taneously but in a more peaceful way than the abolition of slavery in the United States. There were many more serfs in Russia than there were slaves in America; in Russia, emancipation re-engineered the life and work of many millions (Kolchin 1987). Since serfs were property, the state-sponsored program of withdrawing this property from its legal owners was perceived as illiberal, even revolutionary. The gentry were left with little in way of a role in post-emancipation Russia. Around 1857, the government discussed and rejected a project to provide them with the functions of the rural police - to turn the former owners into the sheriffs of their former serfs (Saltykov- Shchedrin 1936: 5/73); later, the reformers built a mechanism of local governance that was led by the elected gentry. With emancipation, the state compensated the owners and the former serfs had to pay their redemption fees back to the state. Almost everyone - peasants, nobles, state officials, and public intellectuals - was unhappy about the details of emancipation, but they did serve to prevent or defer major outbursts of violence. In 1913, an underground activist, Vladimir Lenin, wrote a short essay, "Russians and Negroes," which argued that though the emancipation of Russian serfs and American slaves had taken place almost simultaneously, the procedures and results were different. Slaves received their freedom as the result of a violent war, serfs as the result of a peaceful reform. Precisely because of this difference, observed Lenin, "there are more traces of slavery kept among the Russians than among the negroes" (Lenin 1967: 22/346). Thus, in 1913, Lenin believed that the reforms of 1861 in Russia had deferred an American-style civil war, not prevented it. Great violence was necessary after which the races, or estates, would truly mix together. Lenin did what he could to realize this prophesy: he succeeded with the first part but failed with the second.

A Trip to the Countryside

Since the establishment of the Empire, Russian and foreign explorers had traveled into its lands with the thrill of discovery. Mostly orga­nized by Germans on Russian service, the eighteenth-century expedi­tions went to Siberia, to the Caucasus, to the southern steppes, and also into the heartlands (Moon 2010). The enlightened voyagers of this period appreciated their travels to the central, and also exotic, parts of the Empire. Having led a huge expedition to Kamchatka in the 1730s, Gerhard Friedrich Muller died while exploring the coun­tryside around Moscow (Black 1986; Muller 1996). Responding to Abbe Raynal's History of Two Indies, Radishchev wrote his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In the nineteenth century, a trip through European Russia was included in the nobleman's Grand Tour along with visits to Paris and Rome (Kozlov 2003). Nineteenth- century literature depicts many of these travels to a strange land that was populated by compatriots, including the officials who suspected every visitor of being an inspector-general. Responding to Byron's Childe Harold Plilgrimage, in which the protagonist travels to the exotic Mediterranean, Pushkin wrote "Onegin's Journey," in which the eponymous character travels through Russian provinces, from Novgorod to Astrakhan and then to Odessa (see Hokanson 2010: 126). Pushkin's drafts demonstrate how in this journey Onegin traded his pan-European dandyism for an improvised nationalism, a devel­opment that became emblematic for the mid-nineteenth century. Grand Duke Konstantin, arguably the most liberal member of the dynasty, urged the government to focus on Russia's central parts, which "all share one faith and nationhood." He advised disposing of those edges that were impossible to protect and cultivate, and "keeping only those which it is possible to keep" (Istoriia 1997: 3/386; Dameshek and Remnev 2007). Under Konstantin's pressure, the Navy Ministry and the Russian Geographical Society organized sys­tematic travels into the depths of Russia. Together, political liberalism and cultural nationalism turned their focus towards the heartlands.

On June 21, 1826, the Russian diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboedov entertained himself with a day trip from St. Petersburg to Pargolovo, a village near the capital, now a suburb. Having had posts in the colonial administration of the Caucasus and the military mission to Persia, Griboedov had recently been brought back to St. Petersburg. He spent six months under arrest for being involved in the recent rebellion of the troops in the capital, but the inquest resulted in an acquittal and Griboedov was preparing to head back to Tiflis (now Tbilisi). But then his comedy, Woe from Wit, was for­bidden from being presented on the stage. In the midst of this turmoil, the local festivities in Pargolovo proved memorable:

Beneath us, on the banks of a quiet stream, along the wooded alleys, we spotted groups of girls; we chased them, wandering for an hour or two; suddenly we heard the ringing sounds of singing and dancing, female and male voices. . . . Songs of motherland! Where have you come from the sacred banks of the Dnieper and the Volga? - We returned: that hill was already full of fair-haired peasant girls, with ribbons and necklace, and also a boy choir; I liked two boys, with courageous features and free movements, more than others.

After chasing the local girls for an hour or two, the group of gentle­men joined the local festivities. At this idyllic moment, Griboedov's findings in Pargolovo turn from the banal to the astonishing:

Leaning on a tree, I turned my eyes from the loud-voiced singers to the damaged class of the half-Europeans to whom I also belong. It was all wild for them, all that we saw and heard: these sounds were incompre­hensible to them, these outfits seemed strange. What black magic has made us alien among ourselves! The Finns and the Tunguses are more easily admitted to our community, grow higher than us, become models for us, but our own people, the folk of our own blood, are separated from us, and for ever! If by any chance a foreigner got here, one who would not have known the Russian history of the century, he would conclude from the sharp difference of mores that our masters and our peasants originate from two different tribes, which have not had enough time to mix their mores and customs. (Griboedov 1999b: 276)

With his fresh colonial experience, Griboedov grasped the meaning of the event better than others. Common Russians in Pargolovo seemed "strange," "incomprehensible," even "wild" to the dwellers of St. Petersburg. Griboedov described a trip to the nearest suburb as if he was a romantic traveler visiting a distant land, enjoying the girls and songs of noble savages but misunderstanding their meaning, toying with an idea of mixing with them, and admitting to his sorrow that it was impossible. In the Caucasus, Griboedov would have been in these situations often, though his future marriage to a Georgian princess demonstrated that there, in a truly exotic land, the cultural gap was less noticeable. But Pargolovo was different from Tbilisi: there was no exoticism in the village, only a gap. The civilized Finns were close to Pargolovo and the wild Tunguses were far away in Siberia, but they had a better chance of being absorbed into the impe­rial elite than Russian peasants, said Griboedov. The contrast between geographical proximity and cultural distance could not have been stronger. Space did not matter; this was an empire in which social distances were greater than geographic ones, which themselves were huge. This empire's heart of darkness throbbed in places like Pargolovo.

There were no natives there. Originally a Swedish land with a Finnish population, the suburb was inhabited by settlers whom the Empire brought there to service and feed the capital. Griboedov guessed that these particular peasants came from "the sacred banks of the Dnieper and Volga." His friend, who accompanied him to Pargolovo, specified that these peasants had been resettled from the "internal provinces" about 50 years earlier (Bulgarin 1830: 155). Both reported a touristic, ethnographic interest in these peasants, their looks and their songs. Meaningfully, Griboedov filled his parable with erotic hints, which were typical for many narratives of the contact zone (Pratt 1992).

In Griboedov's formula, the Russian gentry failed to become good Europeans because they were foreign to their own people. A trained historian, Griboedov knew that it was exactly the perceived foreign- ness that defined the mechanism of imperial power in Russia. Apart from illicit moments, the elite did not mix its blood and customs with the commoners because self-segregation was the condition of self- preservation (Wortman 1995: 5). There is a powerful feeling of dis­content in Griboedov's narrative. Rather than naturalizing differences, Griboedov felt unsettled by them. The inability of his friends, the Russian gentlemen, to understand a peasant festivity, or to take part in it, made these gentlemen a "damaged class of half-Europeans." Griboedov seemed to believe that a truly European elite would have been better connected to the folk in their heartland. But he probably remembered how, a few decades earlier, his French peers observed the same gap among their people. The nobles, wrote abbot Sieyes (2003), was "an isolated people," "a stranger to the nation" in the land where "third estate was everything."

Traveling between Tbilisi and St. Petersburg, Griboedov (1999a) devised a grand-scale project that would, if accomplished, have reshaped the Empire. In 1828, he applied to the government with a plan for the Transcaucasian Russian Company, which would be modeled after the British East Indian Company. His plan would resettle many thousands of peasants from central Russia to the Caucasus, creating massive colonies there: dozens of new Pargolovos. As the best model for the Russian colonization of the Caucuses, Griboedov presented the British colonization of North America. It was an unfortunate example; American colonies had emancipated themselves a few decades earlier and the Russian government closely followed these events, which renewed its anxieties about the fate of Siberia and the Caucasus. For this reason or another, Griboedov's project was rejected. He was appointed ambassador to Persia, where he was murdered by a Muslim mob in Tehran in 1829, less than a year after his marriage to the Georgian princess.

Black Magic

Older than Griboedov, Arthur Young wrote from the other end of Europe: "What a melancholy reflection is it to think that more than nine-tenths of the species should be the slaves of the despotic tyrants!" (Young 1772: 20). The promenade to Pargolovo connoted the same melancholic reflection, but there was more to it. In colonial situa­tions, racial difference defined statutory difference; Griboedov knew how it worked in the Caucasus. Now in the countryside near St.

Petersburg, he discovered the same correlation between race and power, but the causality was reversed. Status inequality changed the perceived racial characteristics of people so much that they seemed to belong to two different tribes. Griboedov's experience was close to a colonial construction of race as the instrumental divide that cuts across humanity to benefit its minority. If Griboedov was right in his perception, a Russian village, an army platoon, and even a noble manor were all places of intercultural miscommunication, "contact zones" (Pratt 1992) that hosted myriad routine dramas typical for a colonial order. In a similar trope, Kastor Lebedev, a respected lawyer and member of the Russian Senate, wrote in 1854 about his routine trip to a village near Orel:

Peasants are not far from domestic animals. This old man, unwashed, unkempt, barefoot; this half-naked woman; these dirty, disheveled boys lying in the mud and straw, all them are not human figures! It seems as if they all are beyond the boundary of the State, all are illegitimate children of Russia, all are defeated by a conqueror who does not belong to their tribe; as if all our memos, boards, and committees, all these cases in the courts are not about them, not for them. (Lebedev 1888: 354)

The law was not for the peasants and they were not for the law; they lived, worked, and traded outside the law. Unless a serf fled his master or was killed by his master, the state did not interfere in the life of the manor. The serf's life was bare: though they could be pun­ished, they could not be sacrificed (Agamben 1998). Griboedov described the oceanic difference between the masters and the serfs by saying that they seemed to belong to two different, unmixed races. He clearly referred to the invasion of the Varangians, and the idea that the gentry were their descendants.

On January 28, 1974, Michel Foucault gave a lecture in the College de France:

One must say . . . that two races exist whenever one writes the history of two groups which do not . . . have the same language or, in many cases, the same religion. . . . Two races exist when there are two groups which, although they coexist, have not become mixed. (2003: 76)

Like Griboedov, Foucault detached the concept of race from colonial discourse and applied it to the relationships between groups inside Europe. Exploring the war-like nature of politics in a time of peace, Foucault suggested that the struggle between races was at the origin and the center not only of colonial, but also of metropolitan politics. Two groups form "a single polity only as a result of wars, invasions, victories, and defeats" (2003: 76). In other words, races merge only as a consequence of great violence. Examining how the English and French revolutions reactivated the ancient memory of wars between the races of Romans, Celts, Saxons, and Normans, Foucault general­ized about the internal colonialism that the pre-revolutionary Europe imposed on itself (2003: 103). When English or Scottish kings claimed their divine right to govern, they had to present themselves as heirs of William the Conqueror. It was not that the theory of divine right was connected to the theory of Norman succession; these two theo­ries were the same. Those who questioned their power, like the radical sectarians of the English revolution, protested against the kings' "Norman yoke" and referred to the people's "Saxon right." Foucault detected similar constructions in medieval France. He could also have mentioned the Russian myth of Rurik or the revolutionary idea that the Romanovs were a "German dynasty."

While Marxian social historians interpreted these racial ideas as a disguised form of class war, Foucault neutralized the very difference between class and race. He presented two mythological languages, one of race and another of class, as mutually convertible. Sometimes the former, sometimes the latter was closer to the actual experience of historical agents. But theorists and ideologists always had their preferences. In a broad stroke, Foucault presented Hobbes's and Marx's political philosophies as attempts to pacify the race war. Like Marx, but in a different way, Hobbes proposed a scheme of things - the state of nature, covenant, sovereignty - that made races irrel­evant. "In a word, what Hobbes wants to eliminate is the Conquest" (Foucault 2003: 110).

There is much that is exciting and much that is exaggerated in Foucault's narrative of the European race wars (Stoler 1995). Unlike his many other ideas, this peculiar emphasis on European races has not been integrated in the main body of the contemporary humani­ties; the leading American theorists of race, enthusiastic followers of Foucault in some other respects, have declined to assess the contrast or similarities between their "race" and Foucault's. Rather than pointing at weaknesses in Foucault's arguments, I wish to transfer the focus closer to my subject. There was an important moment in Russian historiography that closely followed the script that Foucault portrayed in his course, the struggle between race and class in the interpretation of history. In the mid-nineteenth century, two histori­ans from Kazan, Stepan Eshevsky and his student Afanasii Shchapov, produced an important body of racial history. Soon, their work was overshadowed by two historians from Moscow, Sergei Soloviev and his student Vasilii Kliuchevsky, who devised the Russian version of social history as the history of estates.

An old Tartar capital, Kazan was taken by Russian troops in 1552, which was a huge step in Russia's empire-building. Throughout almost all of the nineteenth century, the university there was the easternmost one in the Empire. It was the site of unusual achieve­ments in scholarship, such as Nikolai Lobachevsky's "imaginary geometry," which was built on the assumption that parallel lines converge. Eshevsky's history was also counterintuitive but was more closely linked to the local, Russian and Tartar, realities. An expert in ancient and early medieval Europe, Eshevsky taught courses such as "The Center of the Roman World and its Provinces" and "Races in Russian History," which presented unusually rich and balanced nar­ratives of colonization, resistance, and transcultural exchange. The guiding idea of his courses was the unconquered spirit of the colo­nized peoples, which enriched the imperial culture and survived it. He observed a similar dialectics in his contemporary Russia and even in America. In 1864, he began his course on race at Moscow University with an extended reference to the American Civil War: "However great the significance of race is for the political life of the United States, it is even more important for scholarly history" (Eshevsky 1870: 22). He believed that it was an achievement of science to be able to look at humanity not just as "an indifferent mass, everywhere and always the same," but as divided into races, which had physical and spiritual manifestations. For him, races were recognizable and stable, but he also emphasized their internal complexity and ability to merge, mix, and change. Pursuing a synthesis between history, linguistics, and ethnography, Eshevsky responded critically to the field of physical anthropology, the nineteenth-century science of races. He distinguished between two concepts, creolization and hybridization. The difference is that animal hybrids cannot repro­duce, but mixing human races gives prolific results. He surveyed and rejected the racist idea that the fate of creoles was degeneration; on the contrary, he described the mulatto and other mixes as more viable and productive than pure races. While his famous French contempo­rary, Arthur de Gobineau, claimed that "the fall of civilization is due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood" (cited in Arendt 1966: 172), Eshevsky celebrated the racial mixing that he saw as the source of progress, in Russia as well as in America. Races are analogous to breeds rather than species, humanity is one whole, and historical change is not a process of racial displace­ment and substitution but a process of racial mixing and absorption. This course on race, taught at Moscow Imperial University in 1864, was remarkably anti-racist even in comparison to the later ideas of the so-called "liberal anthropology" (Mogilner 2008).

Revising concepts of colonial anthropology helped Eshevsky to offer a new view on Russian history. A large part of European Russia was originally populated by the Finnish race, taught Eshevsky. At the start of the recorded history, the Finns lived not only where Novgorod stands, but also where Moscow is located; in the earlier period they lived as far to the south as Kiev. However, they were all substituted by the Slavs.

What does it mean? History does not know about the deportation of the Finns, or even less so, their systematic extermination by the Russians. . . . The process occurred inconspicuously. There is no memory of the bloody race war in the Russian chronicles or in folk legends. However, only Russians live now in the purely Finnish land that was populated by the purely Finnish tribes; and these are the Russians who believe that they are the purest, the most typical Russians. (Eshevsky 1870: 97)

The Slavs did not have firearms like Cortez or superior organization like the Romans. They could not exterminate the Finns, but they mixed with them and absorbed them. Referring to his own observa­tions in Kazan, where he watched "all the grades of absorption of the Tartars and the Finns by the Russians," Eshevsky claimed that only this peaceful process of intermixing could explain the growth of the Russian people. It had left no historical memory because of its gradual, non-violent character. Remarkably, Eshevsky imagined a process that both Lenin and Foucault denied for purely theoretical or rather, ideological reasons: a non-violent, gradual racial mixing.

Negative Hegemony

One idea proved seminal for Russian letters: that while the fruits are national, the roots are foreign. The source of strength and pride should be sought outside among others, even among very distant others ranging from the Vikings to the Amazons. A classical example is the ode that Gavriil Derzhavin, a poet who also served as the gov­ernor of Tambov, the Minister of Justice, etc., wrote to Catherine II in 1782. According to the convention of its genre, the ode depicts

Catherine as the embodiment of virtues and the author as a humble subject climbing the ladder of perfection. "The Kyrgyzes-Kaisaks" (now called Kazakhs), the nomadic tribes of the later Orenburg prov­ince, had just been brought under Russian sovereignty, and the ode celebrates this event. However, its rich oriental symbolism is so unusual that this ode became a puzzle for many generations of schol­ars. It is not that the German-born Empress is presented as the source of the westernizing influence and Derzhavin, who was of Tartar blood, as her oriental subject. On the contrary, the Empress is called "the God-like Tsarina of the horde of the Kyrgyzes-Kaisaks," her Russian courtiers are called "murzas" (the Tartar nobility), and the whole Empire is transposed into the Orient, a fairytale space some­where between "Baghdad, Smyrna, and Cashmere." While the humbler narrator tames his passions in the process of a personal Enlightenment that had, no doubt, European origins, he identifies his sovereign with her base oriental subjects. This is not a satire or parody; this is an ode, for which success in the court testified to the seriousness of the orientalization process. Reversing the order of domination, this exoticizing vision of sovereignty signaled the early and deep revision of the European legacy of orientalism as it was appropriated by Russian literature.

The Russian romantic novel often depicted love between partners who are racially or socially unequal, presenting the death of one of them as a sacrificial mechanism that reveals the deep dynamics of the underlying historical situation (see Chapter 11). In stories of external colonization, it was love between an imperial officer and a native beauty, as in Pushkin's The Prisoner of the Caucasus and Lermontov's "Bela." In both stories, love is fatal to the native woman and both of the male characters, Russian officers, are clearly blamed for causing the deaths of their loving, noble savages. This recurrent plot effec­tively redeems, I would even say deconstructs, the imperialist slogans that one can find in the very same texts. The apparent contradiction between the structure of the romance and the explicit ideology of prologues and epilogues creates a dynamic that has long interested readers.

Students of Russian literature love Mikhail Lermontov's novel, The Hero of Our Time (1840). With its multiple narrators and egocentric protagonist, this novel gives a complex and critical picture of the Russian imperial experience. Like Lermontov, its central character, Pechorin, fights in the Caucasian War. He dies during a diplomatic mission to Persia, like Griboedov. The novel features memorable adventures with Russian and native beauties, an inevitable duel, and a portrait of a rank-and-file imperial officer, Maksim Maksimovich, a counter-balance to the brilliant, unstable Pechorin. Having served in the Caucasus for about 25 years, Maksim Maksimovich launches the novel by cracking a typically colonial puzzle. The Ossettians drive two Russian carriages through the mountains. One carriage is light and six bulls cannot move it; another is heavy but four bulls pull it easily. The light carriage belongs to a novice in the Caucasus, the heavy one to Maksim Maksimovich. The Ossettians and even their bulls employ the "weapons of the weak," deception and sabotage, to deceive the Russians and to get more money for the service. "Horrible beasts are these Asians," says Maksim Maksimovich (Lermontov 1958: 4/10). Apart from this generalization, he manifests a detailed knowledge of the locals. He smokes a pipe of the Kabarda people, wears a hat of the Cherkess people, and strongly prefers the Chechens to the Ossettians. A storyteller, he is the first source of our knowledge about the enigmatic Pechorin, whom he leads through the incompre­hensible Asia.

In a short essay of 1841, "The Caucasian," which is the best com­panion to The Hero of Our Time, Lermontov presented an anthro­pological analysis of people like Maksim Maksimovich, the backbone of the empire, the officers of an imperial army that was stationed in a rebellious colony. In this essay, the Caucasian is a typical Russian officer who, said Lermontov, knew and loved his enemy, the untamed tribes of the Caucasus. "A half-Russian, half-Asian creature," with every year of service the officer had become more and more oriental­ized. He had first learned about the Caucasus from Pushkin, but since then he collected much information about the customs and leaders of various tribes. He knew their genealogies. He preferred their weapons, horses, and women to the Russian ones. He admired the mountaineers' manners of riding, fighting, and living. He started learning their languages, more than once. Discussing the Caucasian tribes in comparative detail had become his and his peers' favorite preoccupation. "The true Caucasian deserves much surprise and respect," wrote Lermontov. A primary agent of imperialist rule, the Russian officer in the Caucasus turned into a lay anthropologist who felt the temptation to "go native" and had not much reason to resist (Lermontov 1958: 4/159; see also Layton 1994; Barrett 1999).

Lermontov was highly critical of these feelings. He distanced himself in equal measure from the destructive snobbery of Pechorin and the naive orientalism of Maksim Maksimovich. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the growing body of Russian literature and thought experienced the temptation to go native. Abandoning the

Figure 9: Karl Briullov, A Portrait of an Officer with his Servant (1830s). Note the oriental ambiance and the physical resemblance between the two.

Source: http://gallerix.ru/album/Brullov/pic/glrx-863742065

privileges of the higher estate and merging with the common Russian folk was often depicted as the mission of the educated class. Maksim Maksimovich exemplified a similar affection for non-Russians. Historically, this longing for non-Russian peoples preceded the mid- nineteenth-century prose about the Russian folk and the actual Going-to-the-People movement (Hokanson 1994).

In about 1820, a Baltic German in the Russian Navy, Captain Ferdinand Vrangel, visited Yakutsk on his way to Russian America. He found there a major fair that traded fur for grain, tobacco, and vodka. All the Russians in town were busy with the fur trade. All the craftsmen, hunters, and horse-drivers were Yakuts. Most of them had been christened; they even painted the icons in the town's five churches. However, they also retained their shamanistic customs, wrote Vrangel.

Many were of mixed ethnic origin. Wealthy Russian families used Yakut nurses to help raise their children and they spoke Yakut. In any case, the Russians and the Yakut all looked the same because of the fur clothing that helped them survive the climate. Their diet was also similar; grain was too expensive and flour was made of dry fish. The overall picture presented an unusually rich cultural hybridiza­tion, in which the assimilation worked in both directions and the urbane society spoke Yakut instead of French:

At the higher level of the local society the Yakut language played the dominant role, similar to French in our capitals. I was extremely sur­prised by this situation at a glorious dinner party in the house of the richest fur trader. . . . The society consisted of the chief of the district, the respected priests, the officials and some merchants, but the conver­sation was so interspersed with Yakut phrases that I could barely take part in it. (Vrangel 1841: 171)

After 1821, "Creole" became an official term in Siberia. Pure or mixed ethnically, many Russians there were bilingual and bicultural. Built on long-term processes of ethnic- and gender-specific displace­ment, the results were culturally productive on the Russian, imperial side. Himself a Creole, Afanasii Shchapov documented these pro­cesses in a series of essays that he wrote in political exile in the 1860s (1906: 2/365-481). He argued that Russia evolved as the result of the millennium-long Slavic colonization of lands that belonged to Finnish, Tartar, Yakut, and many peoples (Shchapov counted 111 altogether). This colonization was the substance of Russian history; "all our truth and our guilt" are connected to this process. Referring to the examples of the outright extermination of the Pacific tribes, which were known because they had happened recently, he implied that the earlier Slavic invasions in Europe were no less bloody, but that their memories had been forgotten. Shchapov was more realistic than his teacher, Eshevsky, in his understanding of the violence and oblivion that was characteristic of this colonization process. Giving many examples, Shchapov emphasized an entirely unknown aspect of Russian colonization. In two huge areas that he knew well, in the Tartar lands near Kazan and in Western Siberia, Russians effectively assimilated the natives by christening some of them, passing their crafts to the natives, and involving them in markets. But the opposite process also took place: the Russians acquired the skills, customs, dress, language, and even the physical appearance of the local communities.

Though this reversed assimilation was not rare in the history of the empires, the Yakuts could be an exception. A people with a tra­ditional culture of hospitality and relative immunity to European diseases, they benefited from the fur trade more than others. Further east and north from Yakutsk, several warlike tribes rejected contact with the Russians and became targets of ethnic extermination. However, Willard Sunderland (1996) gives multiple examples of the "nativization" of Russians in various areas of Siberia. Whether it was civil peace in Yakutsk or an imperialist war in the Caucasus, Russian influences on the natives met with the natives' influences on the Russians. As Lermontov demonstrates with a persuasiveness unavail­able to the historian, even while waging a bloody war, the people of the dominating power admired and imitated the mores of the oppressed.

Domination without hegemony, a concept that the Indian scholar Guha (1997) used to summarize British rule, created an unbalanced situation that featured distrust, resistance, and the frequent discharge of violence. The situations of reverse assimilation in Yakutia and the Caucasus were different. In both these colonial situations, one peace­ful, the other violent, domination and hegemony developed in oppos­ing directions. With cultural hegemony not just absent but evolving as a negative entity, the officers of the Empire were going native with an unexpected agility. As Edyta Bojanowska (2007: 107) notes, in his sketch of "universal history," Gogol depicted the Roman Empire in a way that was similar to what he, a colonial himself, perceived to be the situation in the Russian Empire: "The Romans adopted every­thing from the conquered peoples; first they adopted their vices, then their enlightenment. Everything mixed again. Everyone became a Roman and there was no genuine Roman, not a single one!" (Gogol 1984: 6/39). The way to describe these situations is to posit a nega­tive hegemony and reversed orientalism as corollaries of internal colonization. A negative hegemony could coexist with a relatively non-violent domination, as in Yakutia, but its combination with the massive violence in the Caucasus was doomed. From Gogol to Conrad and from Pushkin to professional Russian orientalists (Berezin 1858; Morrison 2008: 288), intellectuals on both sides of the colonial divide perceived this situation as abnormal, unviable, and reversed in com­parison to western imperialism. It also gave ground for hope that as an imperial nation, Russians possess a uniquely cosmopolitan, uni­versal comprehension. Though readers of Russian literature associate this idea with the Pushkin speech by Dostoevsky (1880) and its poetic elaboration by Aleksandr Blok (1918), these ideas were developed throughout the High Imperial Period. Writing, in the 1840s, a cul­tural history of migrations in world history, the polymath, Aleksei Khomiakov, was first to describe this reversed situation as the advan­tage of the Russian way of colonization:

There is no American in the United States . . . who speaks the language of the red-skinned. .. . In his colonies, a fat, phlegmatic Hollander looks at the natives as a tribe that God created for service and slavery, as cattle and not as human. . . . The Russian looks at the dwellers of the enormous Northern land as his brothers. The Siberians often use the language of their neighbors, the Yakuts and the Buriats. A dashing Cossack marries a Chechen, a peasant marries a Tartar or Mordovian, and Russia finds its joy and glory in the great-grandson of the Negro whom the American proselytes of equality would have refused to con­sider a citizen. (Khomiakov 1871: 1/107)

Fireworks

Domination can be effective with or without shared language, beliefs, and schooling; but hegemony presupposes a common culture. Throughout two centuries, the Empire experimented with various combinations of these factors. Gunpowder was a major factor that made it possible for the Empire to acquire and control its enormous space. The early drivers of Russian industrialization, canons and rifles figured in every confrontation between the Empire and its subjects from the Time of Troubles. It was only because of two unique features of firearms, their killing power and the ease of controlling their pro­liferation, that the state could monopolize violence on its territory. The sail created Britain's Empire, the canon created Russia's.

But of course the gun was important for all modern empires. In Russia, gunpowder, the universal substance of domination, also pro­vided a means of hegemony over the hearts and minds of the imperial subjects. In rare moments of unity, salutes and fireworks provided an official language that integrated the sophisticated and the illiterate, those who understood the changing assortment of languages of the Empire and those who did not. In its ability to emulate the acts of God, fireworks affirmed and allowed the Empire to speak with its subjects in a language of light, movement, and explosion that was uniquely free of culture.

Starting with Peter I and through a large part of the High Imperial Period, fireworks demonstrated the might and beauty of the Empire. The actual fireworks were over-saturated with allegorical meanings;

they impressed everyone, but only the culturally literate deciphered their subtle messages. Emblems and verses literally shone, whirled, and exploded in the heavens, emulating the acts of God via the rituals of the Empire. Peter saw the connection between fireworks and fire­arms: those subjects who were used to the fun of fireworks would withstand the fire of cannons, he asserted. To celebrate the victory over the Swedes in 1710, a flaming Russian eagle launched a rocket into a burning Swedish lion. The scale was truly modern: in 1732 on the Neva, 30,000 torches could be ignited in two minutes (Sarieva 2000: 89). Creating fireworks in St. Petersburg was one of the main functions of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, a way in which it proved its utility to the state. These regular events were among the few festivities in imperial Russia which involved both the masses and the elite, the first means of mass communications. Fireworks repre­sented battles, landscapes, maps, and other images of colonial con­quest - Turkish forts, Swedish ships, and once in 1748, even a Siberian pine tree (Werrett 2010). The coronation of Catherine the Great included a firework with "an allegorical figure of Russia" accompanied by a 101-gun salute (Wortman 1995: 1/118). In 1789, there appeared a do-it-yourself instruction for those gentlemen who wished to impress their families and serfs with fireworks on their estates (Sarieva 2000). In 1857, Nikolai Ignatiev was traveling through Central Asia with a group of Cossacks. Attacked by hun­dreds of Turkomans, he dispersed them with fireworks. Allegedly, they were so impressed by "the Devil's fire" that they "craved forgive­ness" (Stead 1888: 272). Andrei Bolotov, a Russian officer who studied philosophy in Konigsberg, subtly interpreted the function of fireworks as "blinding the common people with [their] very splen­dor" (1986: 448).

Man-made images of paradise, fireworks illustrated the most dif­ficult tenet of imperial philosophy, the power to transform nature and sublimate culture by the sheer will of the sovereign. For those few who understood the Russian technology of manufacturing gunpow­der from manure, ashes, and filth, the process of sublimation seemed even more impressive. There was a universalist energy in these per­formances that could, if but for a moment, integrate the free and the bound, the rich and the poor, in one awesome climax. No other experience was as inter-estate, cross-ethnic and therefore multicul­tural as were fireworks. Firearms were means of domination; fire­works were means of hegemony.

But as the enterprising subjects of the empire eroded the state monopolies on both firearms and fireworks, the High Imperial Period was coming to its end. "Gunpowder in Russia is no more precious than sand," quipped a Danish envoy to the court of Peter I (Juel 1899: 257), and there was a predictive power in his observation. The same black powder that was employed for defeating enemies and celebrating victories was also used for assassinating emperors and overthrowing the Empire.

Disciplinary Gears

Serfdom has become an increasingly unpopular subject in post-Soviet historiography; the contrast between the non-existent Serfdom Studies in Russia and the booming Slavery and African American Studies in the USA could not be stronger. In what remains the best study of serfdom, the American historian Stephen Hoch researched the archive of a large estate near Tambov, a black-soil region of European Russia and a proverbial territory of the Russian interior. In the early nine­teenth century, the peasants' productivity and diet on this estate were equal to or better than what was common in Germany or France. The difference lay in their motivation, property rights, and principles of management. Since neither the land nor a major share of the product belonged to the peasants, they worked under the threat of corporal punishment, which was used routinely. In Hoch's data, in about 1826, 79 percent of males were flogged at least once, and 24 percent twice a year. For more serious misdemeanors, peasants were also shaved on one side of the head (Hoch 1989: 162).

Founded in 1636, Tambov was a fortress that protected the Muscovite state from the nomadic tribes that had populated this land before the Russians invaded it. Tambov was thus a contemporary of Williamsburg (1632), an early center of plantations in Virginia, and of Cape Town in South Africa (1652). Near Tambov, however, the security situation made stable agriculture impossible for 100 years after its foundation, and a plantation-type economy unfeasible for another 100 after this. Centrally located, the estate that Hoch studied was still far from the markets; it took a week to deliver grain to the river hub, and to transport it to Moscow took months. Forced reset­tlements of serfs populated this land, and immigration continued into the nineteenth century. Even then, the demographic growth on this estate did not compensate for the draft of recruits and the flights of the serfs (Hoch 1989: 5). Though the estate was relatively rich, it could not sustain the imperial demands. It is counterintuitive to con­sider Tambov as a colony, but anywhere else in the world a land that was populated by forced settlers at a time of high imperialism and, in addition, cultivated under the permanent threat of the lash would be so designated. It so happens that scholars of the Russian peasantry have rarely addressed its particularity from a colonial perspective, though some remarkable exceptions exist (Rogger 1993; Frank 1999).

Serfs and Colons

Serfdom became law in Russia after the turmoil of the Time of Troubles (1598-1613). A little earlier than the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618 - 48), this Russian crisis also included a confessional conflict, a civil war with foreign intervention, celebrated cases of fake identities, and the general breakdown of the state (Dunning 2001). As part of the European crisis of the seventeenth century, the situation in Russia was provoked by the collapse of the resource-bound economy (see Chapter 5). With no fur or silver for mercenaries, land remained the only currency available to Moscow. But making any profit on land was problematic. The three-field agricultural system, which was the condition for productivity in central Russia, demanded long cycles (Confino 1963). But bonding people to the land involved a high level of violence. With the arrival of firearms, the servitors obtained a decisive advantage over the peasants; armed with muskets or rifles, a small number of soldiers could control a crowd of peasants carrying axes and knifes (Hellie 1971; Pettengill 1979). Eventually, the new regime was codified as a serfdom and became a major feature of the Russian state. The import of firearms made a larger contribu­tion to the establishment of serfdom than any economic consider­ation. But violence was difficult to translate into power; complex institutions were needed for this task.

While in Western Europe, serfs became farmers and free toilers, in Poland and Russia, free men became serfs. Some historians explain this "second serfdom" as a result of the growing export demand, with Eastern Europe becoming the supplier of cereals and livestock to the west (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007: 162). But in contrast to Baltic lands, in Russia there were few opportunities for a landowner to export his crops. Until the Black Sea ports became available in the mid-eighteenth century, Russia's largest agricultural export was the hemp and flax that the Brits were buying in Archangel. However, serfdom developed not in Archangel but in those land-locked prov­inces of Russia that had the worst export opportunities. Racially white, religiously Orthodox, ethnically Russian, centrally located peasants suffered from serfdom more than anybody else. Kliuchevsky showed that the closer a province was to Moscow, the higher was the percentage of serfs there. He interpreted this distribution in secu­rity terms: "the fortress of serfdom" (Kliuchevsky 1913). There were few privately owned serfs in northern Russia and Siberia; no serfdom among Kalmycks, Kazakhs, Jews, or peoples of the north; few serfs among Tartars; only some serfs among the Russian Old-Believers and sectarians; and millions of serfs among the Orthodox Slavs (Kappeler 2001: 30). However one defines the core of this Empire, the closer one got to it, the more serfs there were. Despite the intellectual chal­lenge that this situation presented, there was no racial or religious theory that explained or justified such selectivity. Neither the church, nor the state, nor the intelligentsia formulated anything equivalent to the American planters' belief that African Americans were fit for slavery and Native Americans were not (Nash 2000). But the practice of enserfment was consistent with the idea that Orthodox Russians were fit for enserfment and other peoples were not. Much later, the emancipation of serfs also fitted in with this idea. The great reforms of the mid-nineteenth century were first tested on the periphery of the Empire, in those Baltic and Polish lands where Russian and non- Russian peasants were serfs, and then applied to its core. In the long history of serfdom, the peasants of the internal provinces were enslaved earlier and emancipated later than the peasants of the impe­rial periphery, and in much higher proportions.

In his comparative study, Orlando Patterson characterizes Russian serfdom as "highly extrusive," with the serf imagined as "an internal exile," who had been deprived of the protection of law and all claims of community. The Orthodox Church encouraged the enserfment of the Orthodox by the Orthodox but did not provide a justification for their inequality: "Russia was the only Christian state whose church did not help to define the slave as a converted infidel." Instead of defining serfs as the foreign enemy within their land, the Russian serf-owner "chose exactly the opposite way in defining himself as the foreigner of noble ancestry" (Patterson 1982: 43-4). Whether Rurikide or Petrovian, the typical serf-owner kept hundreds or thou­sands of his serfs in a state of social death. From 1649 to 1861, masters could legally sell, buy, and mortgage serfs, though in most cases they could not do this to individual serfs, only to whole families.

Masters could force their peasants to work, but they could not legally kill them. Serfs could not sign contracts, could not testify in courts, and could not denounce their masters.

"Ruling the countryside like local satraps or colonial administra­tors" (Frank 1999: 8), landed nobles had to feed themselves with the help of their serfs. If they failed to do so, the state subsidized them, as it would do with the administrators. The nobles benefited in two ways, socially and economically. While the social benefits - conspicu­ous consumption, lifestyle preservation, and various privileges of power - were primary, the economic benefits were unreliable and increasingly unsustainable. The non-economic nature of serfdom made it different from slavery in America (Kolchin 1987). There, plantation owners would not keep their slaves from generation to generation if they did not bring a profit. But the standard property of a Russian noble, with many square miles of land and hundreds of peasants, was a not-for-profit institution. Keeping serfs despite losses was the rule rather than the exception. Starting with the early nine­teenth century, the empire offered nobles ways of mortgaging their lands, together with the peasants, in state banks. Unpaid mortgages converted into foreign debts and inflation. Serfs subsidized the Empire but the Empire subsidized serfdom. Introduced by Egor (George) Kankrin, the Imperial Minister of Finances (1823 - 44), this policy was much ridiculed by Marxist historians. In the twenty-first century, when an average European farm receives about a third of its income from the state, Kankrin's policy seems forward-looking. Serfdom did not have an economic rationale; the social interests of the nobility and the disciplinary interests of the Empire dictated its preservation. In 1856, about two-thirds of male serfs (6.6 million "souls") were mortgaged, but foreclosures on the landed gentry could be counted in the dozens (Pintner 1967: 37- 42). The government gave loans to the rural gentry on the security of their serfs and refused to credit manufacturers and merchants. During most of its reign, the Empire restricted industrial development in favor of unproductive agricul­ture. In its core areas, serfdom was a mechanism of social policy and preservation of lifestyle (Moon 1999).

The mechanism of land grants to the state servitors was not differ­ent from what went on, during approximately the same period, in many parts of the colonized world, from the American South to New Zealand. To make money on these lands, servitors needed labor. This labor could be found locally or had to come from afar. In either case, the new masters of the land had to employ various regimes of coer­cion. The choice was narrow, from slavery to serfdom, with hired labor as a distant possibility. Already, Soloviev and Kliuchevsky understood the low density of the population as the cause of serfdom, and contemporary economists agree (Domar 1970; Millward 1982). In the newly colonized lands, labor was brought from afar, as in the British colonies. In central Russia, it was already there, but the peas­ants had to be guarded so that they would not leave their native land. In its original form, serfdom was an institution of the internal colo­nization of the Russian heartland.

But external colonization also required peasant labor. Masters could resettle their serfs to new lands or buy serfs and transport them to a new settlement. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these forced resettlements of serfs were massive operations; they were also expensive (Sunderland 1993). Since nobody would move, guard, and feed hundreds of families without expecting a profit, these colo­nial resettlements changed the nature of serfdom. The leading Marxist historian of the 1920s, Mikhail Pokrovsky, acknowledged the devel­opment of "plantation serfdom" in Russia only in the early nine­teenth century (2001: 10; also Kagarlitsky 2003). It is meaningful that the most important Russian novel about serfdom, Gogol's Dead Souls, is a story of the resettlement project.

In his major work of 1885, The Origins of Serfdom in Russia, Kliuchevsky argued that early serfdom was not introduced by the state, but grew as a result of multiple deals in which peasants could not pay back rents and other debts to landowners (1956: 7/245). Instead, they accepted lifelong contracts that deprived them of per­sonal freedom. Later, these contracts were codified by the state. As a model for this speculation, Kliuchevsky used the study of the Roman "colonate" by the French classicist, Fustel de Coulanges, whose books were later translated by Kliuchevsky's friends. Coulanges argued that the colonate, an institution of bondage in the late Roman Empire and Byzantium that acted as a gray zone between slavery and free farming, grew from the debts of peasants. When free peasants became "colons," their lords owned them and their descendants; their freedom was restrained (Coulanges 1908). Like the Russian serfs, the Roman colons were used both in the new Roman colonies and in the Italian heartland. Etymologically and historically, these Roman colons rested at the very origins of the idea of colony and colonialism (Morris 1900: 1/6).

The enserfment of Russians by Russians was a mechanism of inter­nal colonization, a regime of population management, and an institu­tion of production. Order rather than profit was its utility function; coercion rather than investment was its method; the reproduction of the population and the colonization of land rather than the produc­tion of goods was its purpose.

German Colonies

In 1763, after taking the Russian throne by force, Catherine the Great issued the Manifesto that invited foreign colonists to settle in Russia and promised substantial benefits to the immigrants, such as free agricultural land, exemption from military service, relocation subsi­dies, free loans, and tax immunity for 30 years (Bartlett 1979: 3). They were guaranteed freedom of faith. Those newcomers who would like to establish factories (the Manifesto called them "capitalists") would be able to purchase serfs. Attached was a long list of available lands, from western Russia to Siberia. The official name for the future immigrants was "colonists." Catherine created a special chancellery to take care of the colonists and commissioned her favorite, a hero of the Seven Years War, Grigorii Orlov, to head this agency. As Orlov explained in his report to the Imperial Senate in 1764, with the accommodation of the large numbers of colonists, "Russia will seem no longer to be as strange and wild as it has seemed until now, and the firm prejudice against it will inconspicuously disappear" (Svod 1818: 5/128). The idea of the civilizing mission was redirected from the margins of the Empire to this empire's exotic interior. Ideologically, internal colonies were also connected to Catherine's vague desire to abolish serfdom, with foreign or native colonists replacing serfs in some sectors of the economy. But this experiment was realized only in a few estates belonging to the royal family (Bartlett 1979: 92).

In the post-Westphalian world, moving Germans around the world was a business. Prussia moved large groups of colonists into the reclaimed territories on the Rhine and settled large numbers of Calvinists from France, a success that Catherine II tried to repeat in Russia. England used German conscripts to suppress the rebellion in America, a plan that Catherine rejected when the Brits offered her a profitable deal. Lured by the riches of Russia, foreign advisers came to help its enlightened Amazonian Empress. A French adventurist and later famous writer, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, arrived in Russia in 1762 with a plan to establish a "European colony" to the east of the Caspian Sea. This colony would pacify the natives "with the power of example or arms." It would cultivate the desert and open trade with India. Bernardin asked Catherine II for a loan of 150,000 rubles but did not receive this huge sum of money. He became famous for his novel, Paul and Virginie, set in the French Mauritius, but before he died in 1814, he was working on a major novel that was set in Siberia. The story was set in 1762, when Bernardin was in Russia, and Catherine's coup d'etat is repeatedly referred to as a "revolution" (Cook 1994, 2006). Another adventurous Frenchman, Abbe Raynal, in his History of Two Indies explained:

The best method [for Russia] would be to choose out one of the most fertile provinces of the empire and . . . to invite free men from civilized countries. . . . From thence the seeds of liberty would spread all over the empire. .. . We are not to bid them [Russians] to be free; but we are to lay before their eyes the sweets of liberty. (Raynal 1777: 248)

Later, Raynal visited St. Petersburg and met Catherine, but his History was not welcome there. In 1765, Catherine invited a trustworthy German, the pastor Johann Reinhold Forster, to promote the first steps of colonization on the Volga. He came along with his adolescent son, George, mapped the new colonies and took part in the efforts to create a legal code for them (Bartlett 1979: 100). There were rumors in St. Petersburg that Forster wished to create his own colony (Dettelbach 1996: lx). He was never paid for his service, but the publication of his maps with the Royal Society was his first scholarly achievement (Forster 1768). As for his son, George Forster, then aged 11, his first work was a translation of Lomonosov. Both Forsters became famous later, when they took part in James Cook's second expedition.

For the media-savvy Catherine, it seemed perfectly correct to call the organized immigration of Europeans into Russia "colonization," the newly cultivated areas, "colonies," and the new subjects, "colo­nists." The colonization of what? The Russian Empire. Colonization by whom? European settlers. Under whose authority and in whose interest? The Russian Empire. While many newcomers took money and perished in the open steppe, one particular category of settlers redeemed the project. The successful colonists were the heirs of the radical Reformation and supporters of very special ways of life, some of the strangest people who ever lived in Europe. Persecuted in many countries, these non-violent people found in Russia what they wanted, i.e. virgin land and exemption from military service. Catherine and her favorite, Orlov, found their model in Frederick's colonizing activi­ties on the Rhine (Blackbourn 2007), the success of which Orlov could observe, or at least hear about, while he was fighting with Frederick a few years earlier.

Figure 10: The first publication of Johann Reinhold Forster, who would later circumnavigate the world with Captain Cook. Source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 58 (1768), pp. 214-16

Competing with Frederick for a steady supply of colonists, Catherine made them a better offer; exemption from conscription was particularly important for the radical sectarians. Their organized communities survived the new life much better than the individual adventurists. The largest and the most successful group of colonies was established by the Moravian Brothers. They created booming towns on the Volga and daughter colonies in the south. Active mis­sionaries, they converted thousands of Estonian peasants and played conspicuous roles in the imperial capital. In Russia they became known as Herrnhuters, from the Saxonian village, Herrnhut, where Count von Zinzendorf settled the Moravian refuges in the 1720s. Alexander I particularly favored them, visited Herrnhut, and gave the Brothers highly unusual privileges in the Baltics, which were soon withdrawn. Having had their best moment in the early nineteenth century, the Brothers remained influential for a long period. Aleksandr

Golovnin (2004: 53), the Empire's Minister of Enlightenment (1861- 6), wrote in his memoirs: "In my mind there is much from my childhood, from the Quakers, from the Herrnhuters." Lev Tolstoy mentioned the Herrnhuters surprisingly often; he was influenced by their non-violence and by how hard they worked.

Immigrants came by ship to Kronstadt near St. Petersburg - the Ellis Island of Imperial Russia - and swore an oath to the Empress. They were then assigned to vast, practically unknown lands thou­sands of miles away. Accompanied by army officers, they traveled up the Neva, across the lake of Ladoga and further to Novgorod, repeat­ing the ancient route of Rurik, whose story they might have known. Much later, Gottlieb Beratz (1871-1921), a parish priest on the Volga who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in Saratov, began his history of the German Colonies by mentioning Rurik, "the Norseman of German blood," as proof that Russia always welcomed foreigners (Beratz 1991: 2). From Novgorod, the colonists traveled overland to the Volga and floated downstream. The trip from St. Petersburg to the lower Volga took many months; many had to spend a winter on the way. Catherine's plan was such a success that, in 1766, some German rulers and princes collectively prohibited emigration from Germany. Nevertheless, it continued. After the Russian occupation of the Crimea in 1774, another religious group, the Mennonites, resettled from Prussia to contemporary Ukraine. Around 1818, still another wave of immigrants came from Germany. This time they were Pietists, who wanted to meet the coming end of the world, which they believed would happen where Noah had embarked on his ark, in the Caucasus. Some German colonists cultivated the lands around St. Petersburg, a difficult job in which the English Quakers, specialists in drying marshes, also participated.

Two colonial administrations, in Odessa and Saratov, were created. The new daughter colonies were organized in various places, from the Caucasus to the Altai. The Empire encouraged the communal character of these settlements. Leaving them was hard; a defector would have no property or rights whatsoever. With the consent of the state, members of the community were bonded to it, spiritually and economically. It was an example of success in indirect rule, which created stable and prosperous, albeit illiberal, proto-socialist com­munities. The Moravian Brothers did not own individual property. Land, cattle, and income belonged to the communities. They lived in dormitories that were segregated along gender lines and had their children raised in separate houses. They used no arms, obeyed their elders in everything including marital choice (which in some communities was entrusted to a lottery), ate meals collectively, enter­tained themselves by reading the scriptures, and worked the land with amazing efficiency. On the Volga, their towns, gardens, and fields looked like islands of prosperity and high culture. They influenced the Orthodox Russians, Muslim Tartars, and Buddhist Kalmyks who lived around them; some of the Russian sects on the Volga copied the radical beliefs of the Herrnhutters. But discontent among the colonists was also high. Reportedly, about 100 Germans joined the rebels of Pugachev when they massacred the Volga colonies in 1774 (Beratz 1991).

One hundred years later, the population of German colonists in the Russian Empire reached half a million. Exemplary tax-payers, they did not mix with their neighbors but they influenced them. Some of their children grew up bilingual; their contribution to Russian culture was immense and non-appreciated. The Moravian Brothers built Sarepta, which became a part of the city that would turn out to be best known as Stalingrad. Eduard Huber (1814 - 47), born in a little colony on the Volga, produced the first translation of Goethe's Faust into Russian. Working in Sarepta, Isaak Jacob Schmidt translated the New Testament into Kalmyk and Mongolian (Benes 2004). The colo­nies gave employment to some first-class Russian intellectuals, includ­ing Alexander Pushkin, who served in the administration of the southern colonies during his exile in the early 1820s.

The leader of the mid-nineteenth-century radicals, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, grew up in Saratov, the center of the Volga colonies. In his youth, Chernyshevsky befriended Pavel Bakhmetev, a son of the local seignior, and Alexander Klaus, a son of the German organist (Eidelman 1965). Bakhmetev later went to New Zealand to establish a utopian community there. Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862, wrote his radical novel, What is to be Done? in prison, and was exiled to Yakutia. Klaus became head of the Saratov colonial administration. In 1869, he published his own book, which was provocatively called Our Colonies. In a move that was no less radical than Chernyshevsky's, Klaus presented his people, the German colonists in Russia, as the model for Russian peasants after Emancipation. Objecting to the liberal idea of individual rights, he contrasted it to the land arrange­ment of the Mennonites and other "sectarians." When they came to Russia, land was granted to them collectively, not individually. They could leave their colony but could not take with them their share of the collective property. As a result, a few of them left, definitely a lower proportion than that of the peasants who fled their fields after Emancipation. Klaus argued that this collective arrangement should be replicated in the legislation on the Russian peasant commune (Klaus 1869). His book continued the unusual tradition in which nineteenth-century social utopianism converged with the legacy of the sixteenth-century's radical Reformation. His recipe for Russian development was similar to the revolutionary gospel of Chernyshevsky, a trained historian who prophesized a leap from the peasant commune straight to socialism. The unique social arrangement of these internal colonies impressed many Russians, who found there a template for the good life before Marxism and independently of it. It was probably no accident that both Lenin and Trotsky had grown up in the colo­nized areas, the former among German colonists on the Volga and the latter among Jewish colonists in Ukraine.

The decline of the colonies started in the 1870s, when the imperial administration broke its promise by subjecting them to conscription and introducing Russian in their schools. In response, thousands of sectarians sold their land and left for North America. Ethnographic studies of these immigrants in America reveal that, even decades later, their local co-religionists perceived them as "Russians" (Kloberdanz 1975). About a million German descendants of the "colonists" stayed in Russia and Ukraine. They suffered terribly during the revolution and civil war of 1917-19, famines on the Volga in 1921- 2 and 1932 - 3, and the massive deportations in 1937 - 8 that were ordered by Stalin's government. At the start of World War II, Alfred Rosenberg claimed all the land in southern Russia that was cultivated by Germans for the German Empire; this land, he said, was larger than all the plowed land of England (Yampolsky 1994: 165). A Baltic German who studied engineering in Moscow and loved to quote Dostoevsky, Rosenberg had educated Hitler in his early Nazi organization, "Reconstruction: Economic and Political Association for the East." He later became Hitler's Minister for the Eastern Territories during World War II (Kellogg 2005). The memory of German colonies pro­vides some historical context to bizarre statements made by Hitler, such as "the Volga must be our Mississippi" (Blackbourn 2009: 152). It so happened that the battle of Stalingrad took place around the prosperous colony of Sarepta, which was created in Russia by the industrious, non-violent Germans.

Panopticon

In his famous rediscovery of the Panopticon, Michel Foucault (2003) did not mention that its first invention took place in Russia. The

British naval engineer Samuel Bentham traveled there in 1780. He was invited by Prince Potemkin to perform a wide variety of duties, from ship-building to brewing beer. In 1785, Potemkin invited Jeremy Bentham as well. The Bentham brothers worked in Krichev, one of Potemkin's estates in the newly conquered Belarusian lands. Foreigners on the Potemkin estates were exempt from all taxes for five years. The land where Ukrainians, Jews, and Tartars had lived for centuries was being quickly settled by the colonists, most of them Germans and Greeks. Jeremy Bentham served as a secretary, while Samuel received the rank of Russian colonel. British industry was introduced into the Potemkin villages by military force. Samuel, however, was resourceful and flexible. He built an amphibious boat, which could be driven by oars in the water and run on wheels on land. He also built a "vermicular vessel," which could follow the course of Russian rivers. However, the Bentham brothers' major invention in Krichev was the Panopticon. It was a structure that combined the functions of factory and dormitory. The windows of the round-shaped multi- storied building looked inwards toward its courtyard. In the center there was a tower, which was devised in such a way that the workers would believe that they were under surveillance, whether the tower was empty or not, thereby creating the "apparent omnipresence" of power (Bentham 1995). British bricklayers started to build two such structures, in Krichev and further south, in Kherson. In Krichev, Jeremy Bentham wrote his treatise, Panopticon, which made him famous. The actual constructions, however, were not completed, because of the outbreak of another Russo-Turkish war and the unex­pected sale of Potemkin's estate (Pypin 1869; Christie 1993; Etkind 2001a; Stanziani 2008).

Samuel Bentham was involved in the construction of an even more famous architectural phenomenon, the Potemkin village. Facades erected along the path of the Empress, who was heading south along the Dnieper river in 1787, the decorated villages deceived the eye with their splendor. In their games with truth, power, and vision, both inventions, the Bentham Panopticon and the Potemkin villages, won­derfully complemented each other. In fact, two key strategies of power - visual control and visible fiction - combined in the project of the Panopticon. It was while living on Grigory Potemkin's estate that Jeremy Bentham started to work on his famous theory of fictions. As if summarizing his various interests, the word "panoptikum," defined as a collection of sights and curiosities, entered Russian and German languages. Samuel Bentham traveled twice to Siberia and in 1788, presented Potemkin with a new project, a voyage to America: he wanted to sail from Siberia, land on the Pacific coast, and reach New York with a detachment of Russian soldiers under his command. Potemkin showed little enthusiasm, so Bentham went instead for a vacation to England (Christie 1993: 253). He did not return, but, in accordance with his advice, a Panopticon was actually built near St. Petersburg, on the banks of the Okhta river in 1807. This time, it was designed as a shipbuilding wharf and school. The six-rayed building was 12 meters high, with a lift in the middle, so that all five floors of the building could be seen from the central tower (Priamursky 1997). On exactly the same spot where this panoptical structure stood, the Russian gas and oil corporation Gazprom was planning to build its headquarters, an enormous, cucumber-like tower that symbolized its power overseeing the land. This controversial project was suspended in 2010.

Conceived in Russia as a factory, the Panopticon was used in England as a prison. Jeremy Bentham left Russia in late 1787. Much later he wrote to Alexander I that two years in Krichev brought him "the richest observations" of his life. While Bentham saw the Napoleonic Code as "mere chaos," he proposed that the tsar adopt a new all-embracing legislation, which would all follow, as if from a central tower, from the principle of the general good (Pypin 1869). Time passed, and the project of the Panopticon caught the eye of Foucault. The Brits invented the Panopticon for a Russian colony and redesigned it for the Russian capital; nearly 200 years later, in Paris, it was redescribed as the prototype for all disciplinary practices.

Military Self-Colonization

After the victorious war with Napoleon, the Empire launched another large-scale colonial experiment. The returning veterans of the army that took Paris settled in newly constructed settlements, where they did the plowing and drilling. These large, scientifically organized plantations were first established near Novgorod, in the very heart of Russia; later, they were created in Ukraine and elsewhere. About a third of the imperial army was settled this way, and there were plans to locate all the infantry in northern Russia and the cavalry in the southern provinces (Pipes 1950). To create the necessary space, the local peasantry were resettled or mixed with the soldiers. The manor houses in these areas were bought for a symbolic price and the owners were forced to move out. In the bureaucratic documents of the time, routinely written in French, the new administrative units were called colonies; in Russian documents, they were called settle­ments. As happened in nineteenth-century France and its overseas colonies (Stoler 2009: 37), the Russified terms "colonist" and "colony" acquired multiple, interconnected referents. In various dis­courses, it could apply to an orphanage in Central Russia, a military settlement in Ukraine, a penal camp in Siberia, an outpost in the Caucasus, or a huge domain in Central Asia.

All military colonies were included in one imperial structure that was led by the artillerist Aleksei Arakcheev (1769-1834). Life in these colonies mixed various cultural elements. Bachelors married women who were chosen by their superiors, though one witness wrote that couples were chosen by lottery, exactly as with the Hernhutters (Petrov 1871: 159). Boys were educated in the "Lancasterian schools," which emphasized a system of mutual education, with the more advanced children helping to teach the less advanced. Invented by a British Quaker, Joseph Lancaster (1778 - 1838), these schools were popular in the English and Spanish colonies. Every colony had a standard plan, with a central square, huge public edifices, and an observation tower. On Arakcheev's estate, he had a particularly tall observation point which one of his better-informed guests compared to the Panopticon (Svin'in 2000: 143). Military colonies were out­posts in a land that was foreign to them, and the purpose of their planners was to make these spaces entirely different from Russia. The Minister of Internal Affairs, Viktor Kochubei, wrote to Arakcheev that leaving a colony was like being "thrown from a land of educa­tion to a country of barbarism," as if by "some revolution of the globe" (Kartsev 1890: 87). Even now, the enormous ruins of colonial, classicist edifices stick out of the woods and marshes, with a local population insufficient to reuse its abundant brick.

"Foreign colonies" and "military colonies" in Russia were inti­mately connected. In the 1810s, which was the booming period for both experiments, two brothers, Pavel and Andrei Fadeev, directed the two state chancelleries that ran these colonies. Some German colonists were settled in military colonies as role models. But military colonies evoked much resistance. In a series of cholera riots in the 1830s, soldiers and peasants killed hundreds of officers and doctors; the rebels received corporal punishments, usually by gauntlets that often led to death on the spot. The concept of Arakcheevism became a popular signification for acts of arbitrary, cruel rule; one can find instances of this word even in Lenin's writings, more than 100 years after Arakcheev's death. The promise of financial self-sufficiency was never fulfilled. In 1857, a few years before the emancipation of the

Figure 11: A cavalry training ring with a church, part of the military colony in Selishche, near Novgorod, built in 1818-25. Source: Wikimedia Commons

serfs, Alexander II disbanded the military colonies. The lands and works were transferred to the same Ministry of State Properties that was also administering the "foreign colonies."

Communes and Gauntlets

In the culminating scene of Aleksandr Pushkin's masterpiece, Evgenii Onegin, there is a peasant song, which is performed by young women while collecting berries for their mistress. They were forced, no doubt by the threat of lashes, to sing in a choir so that their mouths would be busy and they would not eat the berries: an "invention of rural wit," said Pushkin (1950: 3/66). In Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the seignior, Levin, finds a resolution to his existential problems in the ecstatic experience of collective, rhythmical scything with a group of peasants who accept him as a peer. It is not an accident that, in both examples, collective manual work was supplemented by an aesthetic activity - coerced singing while picking berries, or choreographed movements while scything. Though functional for specific forms of peasant labor, collective work was unusual. Still, the Empire treated peasants not individually, as they were most often treated in Europe, but in collectives.

When drafted into the army, which in the nineteenth century was all about collective movement, peasants were difficult trainees. Following the Prussian model, the Russian army practiced a highly specialized technique of scapegoating that consolidated the soldiers' collective. The soldier was dragged through the ranks of his col­leagues, who beat him, one after another, with wooden rods of a standard length. A soldier who neglected this duty risked becoming the next victim of his community. Punishments were public not because the public watched the performance of an individual perpe­trator, but in the deeper sense that these punishments were performed by a community of peers, with each member contributing exactly the same share of the punishment as the others. The death penalty was officially abolished in 1753, but running the gauntlet in the Russian Army often resulted in death. In 1863 the gauntlet was replaced with lashes, which were used as a supplement to the developing peniten­tiary system. As Foucault (2003) showed, public execution on the scaffold symbolized the power of the king. The gauntlet symbolized the power of the collective or, rather, the unity between the power and the collective.

In civil life, the peasant commune realized a similar function. It was publicly discovered by the Prussian official, August von Haxthausen, who visited Russia in 1843. He traveled into the heart­lands with money and a translator provided by the Ministry of State Properties (Morozov 1891; Starr 1968). He went to the Volga to explore the German colonies there and interviewed some of the most radical Russian sectarians. His experience with the regular, Orthodox peasants was limited (Dennison and Carus 2003). But among them, he made the discovery that made him famous, the peasant commune which practiced regular repartitions of land among the peasants. The commune was "a well-organized free republic," wrote Haxthausen. In his Romantic vision, while the Russian elite lived westernized, petty lives that were based on private property and public corruption, the Russian peasant followed an entirely different tradition, hidden and hitherto unknown. Giving a racial interpretation to the concept, Haxthausen believed that the commune had its origin among the ancient Slavs. He found the same institution among the Serbs and believed that the indigenous Slavic population of Prussia also lived in the communes, before Germans arrived and destroyed them.

Widely practiced all over Russia, the commune remained unknown to westerners as well as to westernized Russians. One estate, the peasantry, lived in communes; other estates knew nothing about them, and the life of the gentry was particularly anti-communitarian. Haxthausen wrote that the peasants in the secrecy of their communal ways had already realized the "dreams of some of the modern politi­cal sects, particularly the St Simonians and Communists" (Haxthausen 1856: 132). Approaching the revolutionary year 1848, the word "commune" was in fashion; Haxthausen contrasted what he saw as the false French theories of communism to the true, noble Russian practice of the commune. As a conservative Romantic, a graduate of Gottingen, and a friend of the brothers Grimm, Haxthausen found in Russia precisely what he was looking for. No revolution, he said, would ever occur in Russia, because it had already been accomplished in a conspiracy shared by millions. Impressed by Haxthausen, Friedrich Engels started learning Russian, but Marx remained skepti­cal (Eaton 1980: 108; Shanin 1983). Engels referred to Haxthausen's discovery of the Russian commune in his famous The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1840) and even in the Communist Manifesto.

The first Russian review of Haxthausen's book emphasized paral­lels between his discoveries in Russia and colonial adventures in Africa and America with a healthy bit of irony:

Our educated people will find a lot to learn from Haxthausen's book. Many of its pages will seem like a perfect trip to the interiors of Africa or even to Eldorado. . . . Yes, dear gentlemen, Eldorado is in Russia. But in order to see it, you have to take away the blindfold that your governors tied around your eyes in your childhood and that, in your maturity, the exceptional reading of western books supports. ([Anonimous] 1847: 10)

Enthusiastically supported by various groups of Russian intellectuals, Haxthausen's discovery of the commune produced an unusual con­sensus among the public. In 1851, the French historian Jules Michelet compared Haxthausen with Columbus and the newly discovered commune with the New World. Bitterly, Alexander Herzen concurred that Russians had to wait for the German to discover their own treasure, the commune (1956: 301). But as with Columbus, argu­ments about priority soon emerged. Aleksei Khomiakov claimed that he had discovered the commune on his own estate earlier than Haxthausen. They actually met in May 1843, and this conversation was probably the most important source of Haxthausen's informa­tion about the commune (Bogucharsky 1912; Druzhinin 1968). Apart from the petty question of priority, Khomiakov and the Slavophiles concurred that the Russian commune was an ancient, noble institu­tion that embodied the soul of the Russian people.

In the 1840s, the Slavophiles grew beards, read Herder and Hegel, and explored the Orthodox Church. They condemned the foreign influences that they associated with the Petrine Empire, but found it difficult to articulate their own positive ideas. Rich serf- and land­owners, they felt that the Empire did not provide them with existen­tial comfort. In their quest for an organic community that would rely on Russianness and Orthodoxy, the Slavophiles struggled with the multi-ethnicity of the Empire. Their theocratic nationalism was adversely affected by the fact of the Russian religious schism, a sev­enteenth-century religious conflict that made a significant number of the bearded, pious Russians non-Orthodox (see Chapter 10). It was the Schism that made it impossible to imagine a Russian nation based on Orthodoxy. Repeatedly returning to this theme, Khomiakov devel­oped an original strategy, which was different from that of his more fundamentalist friends. It was not so much theocratic but, rather, communitarian and racialized. He was one of the first to identify the colonial nature of Russia's clash with modernity (see Chapter 1). Like his French contemporaries such as Francois Guizot (Foucault 2003: 226), Khomiakov racialized the political problems of his time. The Russian aristocracy, the descendants of Viking warriors, presented themselves as racially different from other estates, the clergy and the peasantry, the descendants of the peaceful Slavs. While the monarchy strove to neutralize this racial discourse, Khomiakov re-enacted it. Perceiving the written law, governmental rationality, and, most of all, property rights as the legacy of the European colonization that started with Rurik, he elaborated the idea of the commune. According to this contrarian idea, the commune was the ancient custom of the Slavs that preceded the Norman conquest of Russia and survived it. This idea came as salvation and became the central tenet of Slavophilism.

Thus, from romantic nationalism the Slavophiles shifted to com- munitarianism, which valued custom over law, the oral over the written, and the community over the individual. Furthermore, they declared Russia's priority in these anti-modern values. Later, the commune had become equally important to those radicals who believed in socialism but who preached a particularly Russian path to it. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who would soon go into Siberian exile developed a theory that, because of communal land-holding, Russia would escape capitalism. Since the future socialism would be built on the same principle of collective property as the commune, Russia would be able to reach socialism directly from its current condition, bypassing the hateful capitalism (Chernyshevsky 1856; Bogucharsky 1912; Walicki 1969; Dimou 2009). Nationalist move­ments in the colonies often affirmed their differences from the west in a similar way, constructing the "west" as materialist and individu­alistic and their own cultures as spiritual and communitarian (Chatterjee 1993).

Blending socialism with nationalism and combining ethnography, history, economics, and politics, the commune was a truly big idea, the grand narrative of Russian intellectual history. Boris Chicherin, a legal scholar who would become the major proponent of Russian liberalism and an elected mayor of Moscow, attacked Haxthausen in a much-discussed essay, which today would be called revisionist. Chicherin denied that the commune was an "ancient" institution and claimed that it was created in the imperial period. "The commune is a modern institution," wrote Chicherin (1856); it had nothing to do with the ancient Slavs and was created by the state for fiscal purposes. Essentially, Chicherin understood the commune as an incomplete analogue of the German-style municipality and credited Catherine the Great with importing it to Russia. But while the intellectuals were debating the origins of the commune, its actual power in the coun­tryside was only increasing. The commune repartitioned land among its members, collected annual and special taxes, mediated between the peasants and the manor or the state, and chose recruits among the available young men, so that it could get rid of the troublemakers (Mironov 1985; Moon 1999). In the 1840s, the government strength­ened the commune's disciplinary power even more, giving it the right to subject its members to corporal punishment or to send them to Siberia. The legislation of 1861 codified the emancipation of serfs from their lords but strengthened their dependence on the commune, which became the primary institution to structure Russian peasantry. Closer to the twentieth century, the commune became the main target of the struggle between the government, which wanted to emancipate the peasants from the commune and bring the land to the market, and the populists, some of them terrorists, who saw in these attempts the betrayal of both Russian and socialist ideas (Bogucharsky 1912; Gleason 1980; Wcislo 1990).

The peasant agricultural commune shared important features with the military institution of the gauntlet. In both cases, the gauntlet and the commune, the Empire delegated the execution of disciplinary practice to the grassroots level. The function of both institutions was to discipline the collective, suppress the private interests of its members, and, finally, reveal, expose, and destroy dissent. But of course, the commune was perceived as having deep national roots, while the gauntlet was regarded as an imported Prussian tradition - even the Russian name for it, shpitsruteny, sounds German. Russia's illiberal empire (Engelstein 2009) was based on an alliance between monarchical power at the top and practical communitarianism from below: both prevented the growth of the individual and capitalist development. As Chicherin showed, the commune was founded on the remains of customary law from the mid-eighteenth century, which was about the time that the gauntlet replaced the knout. "Such a communism is very easy to arrange, it is only necessary that there are lords and slaves," wrote Russian liberals (Kavelin and Chicherin 1974: 33).

Nowadays, scholars largely agree that the peasant commune was contemporaneous with the Empire, though the formative role of the state is a different issue (Atkinson 1990; Moon 1999). In the late nineteenth century, agricultural experts noted that in Siberia and other areas of recent colonization, the resettled Russian peasants created land communes spontaneously and without encouragement from officials, sometimes even despite new regulations that insisted on private ownership. Summarizing this evidence, an influential econ­omist and historian of the peasants' resettlements, Aleksandr Kaufman, disagreed with the Russian liberal historiography. He maintained that the commune in the central and southern provinces also developed in a "self-generating way" that was similar to its development in Siberia (Kaufman 1908: 440; Shannon 1990). But he recognized that in the areas with an ancient agricultural population, e.g. in northern Russia, peasants developed individual farming prac­tices with well-established property rights.

Kaufman was close to the conclusion that I formulate in my own language, which is not very different from his. In Russia, the commune was an institution of colonial ownership of land, which the settlers did not own or feel was theirs; it was also an institution for managing the population of settlers who were not attached to their land. In this institution, the peasants' interest in survival met with the state's inter­est in taxation and discipline. There was also a long-term tendency toward privatizing communal land, which eventually destroyed com­munes by converting its property to individual ownership. But only in the areas of the most ancient colonization, in the north, did this cycle reach its later phase.

Russia's most peculiar institution, the commune was different from the Soviet collective farm that replaced it. In neither institution did members own the land that they cultivated. However, members of the commune worked land individually or with their families, while members of the kolkhoz worked land together, in a collective which was modeled on an assembly line. First attributed to the industrial workers, the Marxist idea of the proletarian collective was then applied to peasants, prisoners, children, and the intelligentsia (Kharkhordin 1999). If there was a communitarian sentiment in the Russian village, through the Soviet period the kolkhoz destroyed it. Historically, the Russian commune showed huge variability over periods, areas, and types of property, but its mythology was more uniform. It was all about building a contrast between the higher and lower classes in Russia, a contrast as great as could possibly be imag­ined. While the higher classes of the Empire developed sophisticated laws of private property and means of self-expression, among the lower classes, so the story goes, life and land did not belong to the individual but to the collective.

The Reversed Gradient

The maritime empires made a clear, sharp distinction between their citizens and the subjects in their colonies. While citizens in the met­ropolitan areas enjoyed a progressively growing number of political rights, the subjects in the colonies were deprived of them. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, metropolitan territories were developing into nation-states while preventing their colonies from doing the same. The difference between the political rights of the citizens of the metropolitan states and those of their colonized sub­jects translated into perceived and, often, real differences in their economic freedoms, educational access, and, finally, their life stan­dards and prosperity. One could call this complex sum of inequalities, which was constitutive for western empires, the imperial gradient. Its consequences were simple: the centers of empires enjoyed a better life than their colonies.

In a way that was unusual for "traditional empires" but probably typical for terrestrial ones, the Russian Empire demonstrated a reversed imperial gradient.[6] Only Russians and some other eastern Slavs were subject to serfdom. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the majority of the nobles in the Empire were non-Russian, though this situation changed later (Kappeler 2001). In about 1861, education and income were higher among Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Siberian settlers, and, arguably, even among Tartars and Jews, than among the Russians of the central provinces. The Emancipation began with reforms at the periphery of the Empire and from there moved to the heartland. After Emancipation, Russians were still subjected to heavier economic exploitation than non-Russians. In the 1880s, an administrator in the Caucasus reported to the Ministry of Finances that while the local population in the Caucasus was "much richer" than the "hungry dwellers" of the central Russian provinces, the taxes on the former were four times lower than those on the latter (Pravilova 2006: 265- 8). At the end of the nineteenth century, the average resident of the 31 provinces with a predominantly Russian population paid twice as much tax as a resident of the 39 provinces with a predominantly non-Russian population (Mironov 1999). Financially and demographically, colonization of the Caucasus and Central Asia throughout the nineteenth century produced losses for the central provinces: their population was decreasing, while taxation was increasing. In Siberia, the natives paid 2 - 10 times less to the state than the Russian peasants of the same region; in addition, they were exempted from the draft (Znamenski 2007: 117). The life expectancy of Russians was lower than that of the Baltic peoples, the Jews, Ukrainians, Tartars, and the Bashkirs. The internal oppression of the imperial nation was a "remarkable feature of the socioethnic structure" of Russia (Kappeler 2001: 125; Hosking 1997). On the eve of the revolution, "the impoverishment of the center" became a popular topic in political debates. Even the Jews, who were oppressed by the special regime of the Pale, recognized that their condition was better than that of the Russian peasants in the central provinces (Nathans 2002: 71).

Indirect Rule

In Russia, colonization often meant collectivization. Subordinating large ethnic communities, the Empire divided them into smaller, col­lective units of indirect rule that mediated between the sovereign and individual families. On vital issues such as taxation, draft, and even crime, the sovereign dealt not with the individual or his family, but with the community. Created as socio-spatial units, these communi­ties were imagined like cells in a healthy organism, separate but con­nected. Such a cell could be led by a noble who owned the land and the peasants, or by an administrator who was appointed by the state, or by an elder who was elected by the community. Most of their duties before the sovereign were the same. Much smaller than the Ottoman millets, Russian territorial communities were endowed with some rights of self-government and self-taxation. In exchange for tribute, taxes, and recruits, they received non-interference into their religious and cultural life. As scholars of colonialism know well, indirect rule prevented the development of national sentiments and outbursts of violence (Hechter 2001); but it had its limits. The advance of modernity brings the individual subject, and his family, into immediate contact with the state. Intermediary levels, apart from the temporary and voluntary ones, tend to lose their power (Gellner 1998; Slezkine 2004). Individual freedom and mobility provide the economy and culture with the vibrancy that is characteristic of modern societies. Competing with European powers, the Russian Empire could not escape the same process. However, leveling the boundaries between the estates and destroying the particularity of the communes had its dark side (Mann 2005). The advance of modern nationalism, the universal draft, and a uniform educational system increased the chances of ethnic discrimination, forced migration and emigration, pogroms, and other forms of ethnic cleansing.

Having developed within various national traditions, liberal theory presented voluntary associations as the primary institution of civil society. On the contrary, "involuntary association is the most imme­diate cause of inequality" (Walzer 2004: 2). For the Russian Empire, the idea of free entry and exit was entirely foreign. The subjects did not create their groups and did not choose among them. The enforced, territorial character of their communities meant their members were bonded twice: to the land where they lived and to the group to which they belonged. These groups contained the whole life cycle of their members. Born within these groups, most of them worked and married within them, had children who stayed within these groups, and died as their members. Therefore these groups were strong, their meanings thick, and their boundaries barely passable. While the ruling elite structured itself as a solar network of individuals and institutions with the Emperor at the center, the subjects of the Empire were organized as a cellular structure, like the body or, perhaps, a beehive.

The sovereign gave the land not to individual settlers, but to the entire collective as a whole. This land could not be sold or mortgaged. Individuals and their families did not own the land they used; in the case of the Russian peasantry, the land was repartitioned with every new generation - or even more often. People were settlers on this land, not masters of it. Various obstacles hampered departure from these communities. Until its very end, the Empire did not encourage the development of a market in land, particularly of agricultural land. It did not wish to deal with individual agents, only with nobles, administrators, or elders, who managed hundreds of peasants each. Communes did not communicate amongst themselves; all transac­tions were vertical, between each commune and the hierarchy leading to the sovereign. For a long period, starting from the mid-eighteenth through the turn of the twentieth century, this beehive system orga­nized the enormous space of the Empire. Throughout the imperial period, this system emerged among peoples with very different tradi­tions. A system of indirect rule, it had to be neutral in terms of culture and ethnicity.

As a codified law, the cellular system of settlers' colonization was first written for the German colonies on the Volga. Moving from one province to another, a group of top imperial administrators intro­duced this system elsewhere, though the practical results were differ­ent. Trying to create a uniform imperial pattern that could be applied to all ethnic cases, they compared their policies across the Empire and exchanged good practices among themselves: "We permit a mufti for the Islamic peoples, and so why not a leader among the Jews?" asked Gavriil Derzhavin; in his project of reforming the Jewry, he used the model of the German colonies on the Volga (Klier 1986: 107). Among the Tartars, the Empire applied the same template and created the magistrates in the Muslim environment (Lowe 2000). In western Siberia, Mikhail Speransky divided the Kazakhs into dis­tricts, with the elders collecting taxes from the communities on the basis of customary law, "adat" (Martin 2001). One of the most sea­soned Russian bureaucrats, Speransky, came to Siberia from St. Petersburg after he helped to codify the innovations into serfdom and drafted the Charter of Military Colonies. The imperial Minister of Finances who oversaw many of these developments, Egor Kankrin, started his career as the inspector of the German colonies near St. Petersburg.

The Pale of Settlement was the Jewish colony of the Empire (Rogger 1993). Though overall restrictions on the migration of Jews were unusual, in many other ways their treatment was not unique; in fact, the policy toward the Jews did not much depart from governmental actions toward other religious minorities. In the 1830s, the Jews of the Pale were treated by law in the same way as the minor Polish nobles, whom the Empire downgraded to a taxable estate. Having colonized the Jewish part of Poland, the Empire found in operation there the ancient Jewish unit of self-governance and tax collection, the Kahal. In 1844, the Empire issued a decree that forbade the Kahal, forcing the Jewish settlements to conform to the structure of the Russian commune, which was then in the process of codification. In fact, the Empire failed to change the structure of Jewish self- government, but it did undermine its traditional authority (Dubnow 1920: 227; Stanislawski 1983: 48, 124). This story has usually been told as the unsuccessful application of the institutional norms of the Russian commune to the Jewish Kahal. However, the reverse was also true: known to Russian administrators since the eighteenth century and much debated in the 1840s, the collectivist structure of the Kahal was transposed onto the peasant commune. In fact, indirect rule helped to reduce violence and other expenses of the Empire. The abolition of the Kahal reflected the imperial pattern toward the uniform, cellular regulation of all populations, Russian and non- Russian alike. Like serfdom, the Pale was an instrument of imperial domination, with communes and Kahals as parallel structures of indirect rule. Imperial administrators explained their resistance to the emancipation of serfs and the desegregation of the Jews in similar terms, referring to their immaturity or backwardness. As Hans Rogger demonstrated, governmental anti-Semitism corresponded to a similar complex of sentiments and prejudices about the Russians. While the imperial "elites shared a genuine and deep-seated fear of the destruc­tive, anarchic power of the Russian mob," imperial administrators agreed on "a pessimistic assessment of their own ability to control popular violence" (Rogger 1993: 1219). Much earlier, Vasilii Kliuchevsky characterized this state of affairs, which he felt was typical for the nineteenth-century Russian gentry, as "complete moral confusion: nothing can be done and nothing needs to be done" (1990: 100). This self-fulfilling pessimism helped the managers of the

Empire to avoid their responsibility: when a peasant rebellion, a Jewish pogrom, or an abuse of their own power occurred, the author­ities did little because they felt they could do nothing.

Though the advance of imperial rule was everywhere different, its unwinding was more uniform. Like a boomerang, the Empire's increasingly violent methods of domination spread centripetally from the periphery inwards. Massive migrations, forced or voluntary, accompanied the process. In the spirit of "imperial revisionism" (Mann 2005: 31), the new, organic ideology translated into attempts to make the draft, taxation, and official language universal across the Empire. While the active introduction of indirect rule began with the German colonies, the unwinding of this mechanism began with the Jewish Pale. Forbidding the Kahal while preserving the Pale meant introducing direct rule over an enormous ghetto. East European Jews under the Russian yoke responded with two protest movements that defined the twentieth century, Zionism and Communism (Slezkine 2004).

The bet on the Russian land commune was equally fateful. Started as a cultural myth, the commune materialized into a disciplinary mechanism that organized life and work in an enormous space, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Closer to the end of the nineteenth century, the economic liberals in the imperial government wished to dismantle the commune, to bring land to the market, and to eman­cipate labor. To replace the commune, they created new, larger and relatively democratic institutions of indirect rule in the countryside, zemstva. Further legislation allowed many thousands of peasants to start their own farms. Despite the economic success of these reforms, they met resistance from an unusual source, the armed intelligentsia. Inspired by the intelligentsia's populist beliefs, its terrorist under­ground tried to force the leap from the commune to communism. This confrontation between the fans and foes of the commune was a major factor leading up to the Russian revolution. Finally, the col­lectivization of 1928 resuscitated the communal myth in a new and pernicious form.

With the end of the High Imperial Period, Russia approached its age of reforms, but in the final account, things went wrong. Despite the emancipation of serfs and many other changes, the Empire failed to escape its collapse and the waves of violence that followed it. This lesson has been discussed myriad times, but it is still pertinent for the twenty-first century globalization, which confronts some of those very problems that Russia's rulers faced in the nineteenth century. Direct rule over a segregated society - a collection of estates, ghettos, and state-patrolled borders - is not viable. The last Romanovs suc­cessfully dismantled the old imperial order that kept different com­munities under an indirect rule, which prevented violence but was economically inefficient. But in this Empire, the undoing of indirect rule was followed by massive outbursts of violence. Polish rebellions and Caucasian wars marked the first half of the nineteenth century. The massacres of the sectarian villages in the 1870s, the Jewish pogroms of the 1880s, and the populist terror marked its second half. Culminating in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, these events responded to the innovations in imperial unification, such as equal taxes for different estates, the universal draft, the destruction of the commune, and mandatory primary education. Steps on the ladder of modernity, these innovations had their dark side, which was "the ladder of violence" (Mann 2005). In good conscience, the imperial reformers built the shining ladder of progress, but they misjudged the danger of its dark side, the ladder of violence. Or it was one and the same ladder.

The dismantling of the old order of collective, territorial subjects should have gone hand-in-hand with the cultural neutralization of the state and universal access to education and careers (North et al. 2009). If the Russian imperial experience can teach us anything, the image of the interconnected but antithetical, light and dark vectors of modernity is the lesson. To avoid a Russian-style collapse, the transition from indirect to direct rule should provide an equal chance for prosperity to every individual citizen. The metaphor of progress is not a single, vertical ladder but a free-standing, folding one. The two parts of the ladder of modernity, global unification and universal access must be of equal height or they will collapse.

Internal Affairs

In a recent essay, Willard Sunderland (2010: 120) asks why imperial Russia never created a Ministry of Colonial Affairs. The person who asked this question the first time, August von Haxthausen, stated that Russia had to establish a colonial ministry, "like England, although in a somewhat different sense" (1856: 2/76). But even this proposal was too little too late. An answer to the question of why Russia did not have a colonial ministry is that it did have one, or two.

Intellectuals in Power

The motto on the coat of arms of Count Lev Perovsky, Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire (1841-52), said, "Being, not Seeming." An illegitimate son of Count Aleksei Razumovsky, Minister of the Enlightenment (1810-16), Perovsky earned his title by service in proximity to Nicolas I. His motto was devised by Vladimir Dal, a military surgeon who authored the magisterial dictionary of the Russian language and was also the head of Perovsky's special chancel­lery (Melnikov-Pechersky 1873: 310). As it happened, to achieve "being," the minister surrounded himself with writers and scholars, experts in deceitful disciplines of "seeming." In Russian intellectual history, people of the 1840s have usually been represented as high­brow idealists, connoisseurs, and devotees of German romantic phi­losophy (Berlin 1978). Those in the Ministry of Internal Affairs belonged to a different species. Political foxes rather than romantic hedgehogs, these intellectuals knew a lot about power and eagerly demonstrated their value, as intellectuals, to those in power. Within their lifetime, knowledge gave power over nature. Science created vaccinations, navigation tools, and other successes that everyone could appreciate but only specialists could apprehend. In a similar way, sophisticated, specialized knowledge about the population - as these intellectuals would say, about the People - would provide power that would be beneficial to the People and the Empire. Being was different from hearsay, though only trained professionals could dif­ferentiate between them. The apparent phenomena that were acces­sible to the public were irrelevant to the art of governing. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Ministry of Internal Affairs hired first-rate philoso­phers, orientalists, and, in particular, many writers.¹ This was a brilliant group of intellectuals. The contemporaneous staffs of the imperial universities in Moscow or Petersburg were negligible in comparison to this group.

The Empire was entering the new age of rational, bureaucratized modernity, when the nobility needed experts and became experts themselves (Weber 1979: 973). Producing millions of documents every month (Lincoln 1982), the Ministry of Internal Affairs con­trolled enormous areas of general administration, including the nation-wide police force, healthcare, and censorship. It managed most of the communications between the sovereign and the prov­inces; it appointed provincial governors, sent inspections, drew maps, oversaw roads, and ruled over the religious and ethic minorities. Though it did not have power over the serfs, it defined rules for the seigniors. The habits of aristocratic rule felt obsolete, but replacing them was difficult. Cameralism, a Germanic science of government, introduced the statistics of population, budget accounting, and eco­nomic rationality; but its practice was very different from its theories (Wakefield 2009). Though edited by the philosopher Nikolai Nadezhdin, the journal of the ministry was increasingly filled with statistical tables along with detailed maps, technical blueprints, and psychiatric case studies. The famous Schlozer had taught statistics to Perovsky's father, and the ministry tried to introduce some of these scientific devices; but they were not the only methods in vogue there. Under Perovsky and even much later, the majority of high officials in the ministry were generalists (Orlovsky 1981: 111). Even by nineteenth-century criteria, many were still dilettantes: a medical

The philosophers were Nikolai Nadezhdin, Konstantin Kavelin, and Petr Redkin. The Orientalists were Ivan Liprandi, Vasilii Grigoriev, Pavel Savel'ev, and Iakov Khanykov. The writers were Pavel Mel'nikov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Aksakov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Vladimir Sollogub, Nikolai Saltykov- Shchedrin, Evgenii Korsh, Nikolai Leskov, and others.

doctor wrote a dictionary, a philosopher practiced ethnography, an intelligence officer invented religious studies, and an orientalist cen­sored the press. There were aspects of the imperial experience and control which found better expression in high literature or collections of folklore than in the emerging statistics. The very scale of the Empire, the enormity of its problems and the miniscule numbers of the ministerial stuff, required a writer, preferably a romantic senti­mentalist with his broad vision, quick pen, and heroic propensity for simplification. As one of the employees of the ministry, the satirist Nikolai Saltykov-Shchedrin, wrote in the 1860s, "I am a publicist, a metaphysician, a realist, a moralist, a financier, an economist, and administrator. If needed, I can become even a friend of the people" (Saltykov-Shchedrin 1936: 10/71).

The minister's father was a Ukrainian Cossack, a nephew of the secret husband of Empress Elizabeth. Trained at home, he became Minister of the Enlightenment. Married to the richest heiress in Russia, he fathered 10 children with a daughter of his horse groom, one of them the future Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev Perovsky. The most popular novel of the period, Ivan Vyzhigin (1829) by Faddei (Tadeusz) Bulgarin, featured a bastard, the illegitimate offspring of an aristocratic, Ukrainian-based family, who made his way through various trials, including beggary, prostitution, and a clandestine reli­gious sect, to finally reach high imperial posts. A Polish intellectual, Bulgarin shifted his allegiances from being an officer of Napoleon's army to an agent of what today would be called Russia's secret service; he penned hundreds of pages of reports and denunciations for this agency (Reitblatt 1998). In the Empire, the rivalry between various law-enforcement agencies was routine; Bulgarin provided it with a literary dimension.

Though illegitimate, the Perovsky brothers occupied the very top of the imperial pyramid. After his spell as Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev became Minister of Crown Lands and Director of the Imperial Cabinet until his death in 1856. The eldest bother, Nikolai, a member of the mission to China in 1805, was later Governor of the Crimea. Vasilii was General-Governor of Orenburg in the Southern Ural, from where he led a series of colonial endeavors that began with remark­able failures but resulted in the Russian annexation of Central Asia. Close to literature and very close to the dynasty, in 1839 he read to the imperial family the most sacrilegious text of Russian poetry, Lermontov's Demon, which would be forbidden for publication for several decades (Gershtein 1964: 69-73). In the 1870s, Lev Tolstoy planned to write a whole novel about this Perovsky.

Sofiia Perovskaia

terrorist hanged in 1881

Sergei Uvarov

Lev Perovsky Governor of St Petersburg

Aleksei K. Tolstoy writer

Minister of Enlightenment

Anna Perovskaia

Boris

Aleksei Perovsky Perovsky tutor of writer Alexander III

Razumovsky, Minister of Enlightenment

Maria Sobolevskaia

Figure 12: The Perovsky descendants of Aleksei Razumovsky

(1748-1822).

Source: A. Etkind

his wife Varvara <- Sheremeteva

Vasilii Nikolai Lev Perovsky Perovsky ^Perovsky Minister of General Governor of Internal Governor the Crimea Ekaterina Affairs of Orenburg Razumovskaia

The younger Aleksei became known as the writer Antonii Pogorelsky. A socialite and the author of several novellas, he is remembered mainly for a fairytale, "Black Hen," in which the little protagonist sees a group of ministers even in his night dream. The youngest brother, Boris, was tutor to the future Emperor, Alexander III. Sergei Uvarov, Minister of the Enlightenment and the author of many initiatives of the period, was a brother-in-law of the Perovskys. Through the decades of the rule of Nicolas I, the clan of Perovsky brothers competed with the clan of Pashkov sisters, who were married to the Minister of Justice and the two most powerful leaders of the State Council (Korf 2003: 73).

The Perovsky brothers collaborated on many levels. A friend of Pushkin and other literati, Aleksei connected his brothers to the literary elite; he recruited Vladimir Dal for his service in the colonial administration in Orenburg under Vasilii Perovsky. Later, Dal moved from Orenburg to Petersburg to serve in Lev Perovsky's Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some other officials moved in the opposite direction,from Petersburg to Orenburg. Introducing innovations, the Empire tested their models externally and applied them inside the country; one family managed both parts of the colonization boomerang. Trained in justice and rationality, this new group of imperial experts inevitably gave birth to the latest group of dissidents. A son of the eldest Perovsky brother became the Governor of St. Petersburg. His daughter, Sofia, organized the assassination of Alexander II and was hanged in 1881.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs was in charge of legal, administra­tive, and agrarian reforms. Starting from the 1830s and throughout the larger part of Perovsky's tenure, the chief of staff of the ministry was Karl von Paul, a Moravian Brother whose unusual disciplinary ideas created conflicts with the provincial governors whom he oversaw (Shumakher 1899: 109). From early 1840, Perovsky implemented collective works in the estates belonging to the royal family. This new regime, which Perovsky called "social plowing," forced peasants not only to pay their taxes collectively, but to do their actual work in a collective way. Typical for the German colonies on the Volga, this method was not known in Russian peasant communities. Perovsky introduced "social plowing" with the help of the hired managers who

Figure 13: Vasilii Perovsky on the capital of a column, 1824. Portrait

by Karl Briullov.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

received, in a very capitalist way, a percentage of the output. A little later, the Ministry of State Properties, led by Count Pavel Kiselev, emulated and rivaled Perovsky's model among the state peasants. Kiselev's previous job had been the administration of lands that con­stituted contemporary Moldavia and Rumania; he also brought his external experience to the internal governance. His ministry spon­sored Haxthausen's trip to Russia and, therefore, the discovery of the Russian commune. The idea of the commune flourished among phi­losophers and lawyers within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, though the agricultural specialists of the ministry knew that communal land usage was an impediment to productivity (Lincoln 1982: 123). The Emancipation of 1861 made the commune the central mechanism of social and financial control in the countryside. Though the actual reforms were penned after Perovsky's term expired, the leading authors made their careers under his auspices. Lev Perovsky was also a very rich landowner who was able to hire a British manager to oversee his estates. In anticipation of the reforms, he was buying up cheap peasants in the impoverished central provinces and resettling them to his land in the south. Unlike the protagonist of Dead Souls, Perovsky speculated with living peasants (see Chapter 10).

As minister, Perovsky once ordered a map "of all the corners of the State, with marking by different colors all the various tribes, aliens, and natives" (Liprandi 1870b: 111). Empires have always been obsessed with maps, which often were models for, and not models of, their actual possessions (Brubaker 1992; Suny 2001; Stoler 2009). Perovsky had no interest in standardizing political rights or economic goods across the Empire, but rather welcomed the variety of the imperial colonies, provided that they could be controlled, mapped, and taxed. The imperial space was filled with these imagined communities, colorful and exotic. Groups, not individuals, were the units of imperial rule. The ministry took responsibility for drawing the correct boundaries between these multicolored groups, for com­prehending their organic essences, and for harmonizing their relations for the sake of the common good. In these ceaseless efforts, the min­istry was concerned even more about confessional communities than about ethnic ones.

Especially Dangerous Sects

In 1843, Ivan Liprandi organized the ministerial "Committee for Schismatics, Castrates, and other Especially Dangerous Sects." With origins in the Spanish gentry, Liprandi founded Russian counter­intelligence during the Napoleonic Wars, pursued lifelong studies on oriental languages and politics, and sought police measures against the Slavophiles whom he believed to be a sect. He was a friend of Pushkin and the protagonist of some of his stories (Grossman 1929; Eidelman 1993); his investigation of a political conspiracy resulted in Dostoevsky being sent to a labor camp in Siberia. A true imperial thinker, Liprandi wrote:

Fortunately or unfortunately for Europe, the idea of natural boundaries and national unifications has been disseminated among the nations. . . . In itself, the idea is sublime and enduring, as it satisfies the natural inclinations of human nature, but in practice it . . . will drown Europe in crimson flows of blood. At first, Turkey and Austria will become sacrifices of this great but fantastic idea; then it will overturn all of Europe, and finally spread beyond its borders to other parts of the world. (Liprandi 1870a: 234)

Since "different lands of one and the same tribe" are often more hostile to one another than to "an alien race," Liprandi predicted the collapse of German and Italian unification efforts. Russian imperial power had to rest not on tribal pan-Slavic feelings, but on the power of information and coercion. Since "tribes" did not matter, Liprandi saw his task as exploring and exploiting other, less evident units of imperial management. Following this logic, he singled out religious communities as his special subject. Working mainly with police files and missionary reports, he made himself into an early and incompa­rable expert in the Russian Schism, which he categorized into "sects," some of which manifested a "dangerous" or "very dangerous" char­acter. He evaluated the total number of these sectarian communities at six million people, which was approximately ten times more than what had been estimated earlier. Interestingly, his intuition of the mutual hatred between similar peoples (better known to us as the Freudian "narcissism of small differences") did not apply to the sec­tarians. On the contrary, he believed that many of these variegated communities were integrated into one "confederative religious repub­lic." This republic within the monarchy had large capitals, its own means of communication, and even a secret language, which the ministerial linguist, Vladimir Dal, was commissioned to put to paper. It was precisely the sectarians' secrecy that justified the efforts of the illustrious intellectuals of the ministry (Liprandi 1870b: 107). A dis­covery of a colony inside the mother country, this confederation was mapped not geographically but theologically. But it needed policing, and urgently. Among the sects, Liprandi revealed such horrifying vices as "incest, sodomy, the unpunished cohabitation of women with women," and the belief that "movable property belongs to everyone" (immovable property, land, did not belong to peasants anyway). "Is it not a true communism?" asked Liprandi (1870b: 82-5). Equally grave was Liprandi's suspicion that these religious schismatics from the people communicated with the political dissidents from the elite, an inter-estate conspiracy that had been the nightmare of Russian authorities since the famous trial of the publisher Nikolai Novikov in 1792.

Liprandi published this memorandum, "A Brief Survey of Russian Schisms, Heresies, and Sects," in 1870 and dated it 1855, but intel­lectual circles in St. Petersburg had already read it in 1851 (Annenkov 1989: 510). The memo invented new realities on a giant scale. Huge numbers of people, some of them rich, some noble, and many entirely obscure, were described as a single political community, a republic within the monarchy, which was arranged on an unheard-of, revolu­tionary base and was fundamentally hostile to the empire. It was possible though, Liprandi believed, to take action, and if not destroy this underground community completely, then at least reduce its danger. Liprandi proposed to chose individual agents among both the sectarian and intellectual communities and, "having established per­sonal relations with them, smartly induce mutual hostility between the communities." He also proposed to start "a focused, secret sur­veillance of the Schismatics, whose very existence is an important Evil" (Liprandi 1870b: 131).

Liprandi composed this memo while embedding one of his spies in the reading group lead by Mikhail Petrashevsky, a translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whom Liprandi and his colleagues sent to Siberia in 1849 after a mock execution. Fyodor Dostoevsky was also a member of this group. Using his agent, Liprandi was trying to uncover the connection between these western-minded elitists from St. Petersburg and the folkish Schismatics. Simultaneously, he was trying to launch a new and larger affair, a trial of the Moscow Slavophiles, whom in his "Brief Survey" he listed as a sect, "the secular Schismatics." In fact, the Slavophiles did communicate with the Old-Believers; for example, they organized theological debates with them in the Kremlin.

Rumors that the sect of Skoptsy (Castrates) had bribed Liprandi destroyed his reputation, and in 1855 Pavel Melnikov, a provincial official who later became a writer most known for his novels about the Schism, replaced him in his position. Other religious experts in the ministry were Afanasii Shchapov, a former professor of history and a future Siberian exile (see Chapter 9), and the young journalist Nikolai Leskov, another future celebrity (Chapter 11). Leskov recorded the fierce debate between two parties, "the hesitant Melnikovians" and "the resolute Shchapovians," that was taking place in the 1860s. According to the former, every Schismatic was a debaucher, while, according to the latter, every Schismatic was "a little Fourier of a sort" (Stebnitsky 1863: 39). Divergent narratives by the two leading experts on the Schism, the conservative Melnikov and the radical Shchapov, competed for control over governmental policies. In the bureaucratic world of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, these visions complemented one another. Shchapov's idea of the polit­ical nature of the Schism only justified police measures against sectarians.

The New Alliance

In Gogol's Inspector-General, the central character is an impostor who pretends to be doing what officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs regularly did: an inspection of a distant province with all its ignorance, chaos, and corruption. Curiously, among the things that this character brags about is his friendship with Pushkin, which makes the provincial officials and their daughters tremble.

In 1843, Ivan Turgenev started his service in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His boss there was Vladimir Dal, and he worked on another project of agrarian reform. An extended memo, "Some Remarks about the Russian Economy and the Russian Peasant," was one of Turgenev's first written works (1963: 1/459-75). A rich landowner, he resigned in 1845 to publish his great masterpiece, A Sportsman's Sketches, in several parts, starting in 1847. Turgenev's Sketches had a larger impact on Russia's internal affairs than did dozens of ministe­rial memos. The mainstream Russian encyclopedia declared with a characteristic mixture of dependency and hubris: "[T]he role of A Sportsman's Sketches in the emancipation of serfs was equivalent to the role of Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the difference that Turgenev's book is, aesthetically, incomparably higher" (Vengerov 1902: 99). In 1852, Turgenev was arrested for his obituary of Gogol and, after a month in the police station, was exiled to his own com­fortable estate. Later, he wrote his novels about Russian life while living in Western Europe.

After his appointment to the ministry in 1848, the young lawyer, Ivan Aksakov, went to Bessarabia (Moldova) to study its remote though powerful community of Old-Believers. There in the steppes, he started writing a poem, The Wanderer, with a free, wandering peasant as the protagonist. Upon his return to St. Petersburg the fol­lowing year, he was arrested in the context of the forthcoming inves­tigation of the Slavophile circle, which his chief in the ministry, Liprandi, proclaimed to be a dangerous sect. Nicolas I personally ordered Aksakov's release (Sukhomlinov 1888). Aksakov was sent to the province of Yaroslavl as an inspector-general, a job that to a recent prisoner probably felt too close to Gogol's play. Known as a center of the Schism, Yaroslavl fascinated Aksakov. Combining both his tasks, of inspector of bureaucracy and researcher of the Schismatics, he wrote to his father that Russia would soon split into two halves: the Orthodox that takes bribes and the Schismatic that gives bribes (Aksakov 1994: 177). In one village on the Volga, Aksakov and his colleagues from the police discovered a sensationally new community, the Beguny (Runners). These people saw it as a sin to spend two nights in one place. They rejected money, property, and family. Understandably, Aksakov gave up his poem, The Wanderer, and wrote an extensive report on the "sectarian community" of wanderers. His report became the only source of information about the sect; nobody else could locate them, though many tried (see Chapter 9). Having heard about the poem, Perovsky requested its text and must have been puzzled by the coincidence. Though he found nothing dangerous there, he asked Aksakov to make a choice between creative writing and state service. Aksakov resigned and returned to his estate. He became a leading figure among moderate Russian nationalists, an editor and publisher.

Among these aristocrats, heirs of beautiful manors with hundreds of peasants attached, the boundary between the office and the prison was strangely unstable. Another writer with the blood of a Rurikide, Nikolai Saltykov-Shchedrin, was exiled for his writings in 1848 to the remote though still European province of Viatka. He served there in the governor's office and continued writing, until he was given a position in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1855. Traveling for inspections, he collected impressions for an astonishingly broad and equally aggressive satire on many aspects of Russian officialdom. He later became Vice-Governor of Riazan province and the favorite writer of Lenin.

Though most of the classical Russian authors did not serve in offices, many of their male protagonists did. One of the explanations is that the officials and their families constituted a major part of the reading public. Seeking readers' responses, the seigniorial authors imagined scenes in harems, battlefields, madhouses, and other inter­esting places. But very often, they depicted scenes in the offices. Having turned from Romanticism to Realism, mid-nineteenth-cen­tury literature provided narrative models and the stylistic training that were required for paperwork in the imperial offices. The Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Aleksei Levshin, who came to the min­istry after a long service in the colonial provinces of Orenburg and Odessa, wrote that during the preparation of the Emancipation of 1861, "literature provided a great service to Russia by espousing its variegated views and explications on the question [of serfdom], which had earlier remained a full mystery, a terra incognita" (Levshin 1994: 84). The influence went both ways, from the office to fiction and from fiction to the office. History, philology, and the erstwhile Tsarina of the humanities, ethnography, were construed as applied sciences that had their legitimate places in the tool-kit of the rulers. Applying this rhetoric to the practice of governing, the Ministry of Internal Affairs could pursue its agenda despite the virtual absence of social statistics and economic data. Nikolai Nadezhdin, then a professor of philoso­phy at Moscow University who would later become a top official of the ministry and the founding father of Russian ethnography, said early in 1831 that a new "Holy Alliance" was about to emerge, between the humanities and the practical life of the people. He derived this formula from the ruins of the Holy Alliance between the European powers, created by Russia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Nadezhdin's dream of the new Holy Alliance would lead Europe on the basis of uniquely Russian discoveries, made within the applied sciences in their studies of the Russian people (Nadezhdin 2000: 2/736-48). Working in the Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1843, Nadezhdin took part in the production of an outstanding body of scholarship, in which he partially realized his dream of the new Holy Alliance. The Russian Geographical Society, with its vanguard section of ethnography, was created by Nadezhdin, Dal, and other associates of the ministry and was financed from its funds (Lincoln 1982; Knight 1998). Supported by Grand Duke Konstantin, the Minister of the Navy who was also the leader of the 1861 Emancipation reforms, the Russian Geographical Society focused on the investiga­tion of the Russian heartland rather than the global world. The richest collection of Russian fairytales, the ground-breaking study of Russian sects, the best-known dictionary of the Russian language, and the pioneering studies of non-Russian subjects of the Empire were all realized in the ministerial circles. The participants of this movement knew of its colonialist nature as well as of the crucial connection between power and knowledge. As Vladimir Dal wrote in 1842:

Let's take an example which is close to our purposes. Say you have the task of developing the principles and foundations for processing the language of some Pacific islanders; it is supposed to transform, to re-educate these savages, to give them literacy, upbringing and to adjust their baby-like babble. . . . What would you begin with? Of course, you would start from the very beginning, from the study of their language, as coarse, wild, poor, and unprocessed as it is. Then on this foundation . . . you would build further on. This is what we have to do. (Dal 2002a: 424)

Writing the Dictionary

A close friend of Pushkin, Vladimir Dal nursed this poet in his mortal agony after a duel in 1837. Dal was trained as a Navy officer and military doctor; he was also an engineer, ethnographer, linguist, and popular author. His father was a Danish Lutheran, his mother a French Huguenot. He was born in Lugan, on the territory of con­temporary Ukraine, a colony which was shaped in the mid-eighteenth century by refugees from the Balkans. A few decades later, a Scottish engineer found ore and coal there and Dal's father, the German- trained theologian, settled in Lugan to serve in the mining factory. Vladimir learned Russian from his St. Petersburg-born French mother, who spoke five languages. His written Russian was beautiful, but there is little doubt that his foreign origin contributed to his interest in this language. The author of the most famous dictionary of Russian, Dal completed most of this enormous work far from the Russian heartlands; his informants were soldiers, craftsmen, and other folk involved in imperial projects.

Dal started to work on his Russian dictionary during his Navy service in 1819 on the Baltic Sea. Interviewing soldiers, he enriched his collection of Russian words when he served as a military doctor in imperial campaigns in Turkey, Poland, and Central Asia. The major work on the dictionary was done during his service as a civil official in Orenburg, the steppe frontier of the Empire, where he also took part in the military expedition to Khiva (contemporary Uzbekistan) in 1839-40. Though this ill-conceived expedition was a tragic failure, it paved the way for the Russian colonization of Central Asia. Dal completed his dictionary while he served in St. Petersburg as head of the personal chancellery of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev Perovsky. His unusually long and rich career as an imperial officer creatively combined the tasks of external and internal coloni­zation. His multiple moves between geographical locations and bureaucratic offices reflected the shifts between what were then "the external" and "the internal" in the Empire.

Wherever Dal's uniformed body fulfilled his imperial duties, his unquiet mind remained in the heartlands of Russian language and folklore. Walking before a dinner near his friends' estate near St. Petersburg, Dal met a cleric who introduced himself as a monk of the Solovetsky monastery. In a brief conversation, Dal recognized his Volga accent and was able to identify the province and even the dis­trict of his actual dwelling. A moment later the alleged monk, who was a runaway serf, was groveling at the feet of the linguist (Melnikov- Pechersky 1873: 289). Besides his magisterial dictionary, Dal pub­lished multiple volumes of Russian fairytales which he allegedly heard from the common people and wrote down during his travels. "I think in Russian," he wrote. "A human mind belongs to those people whose language this mind uses" (Dal 2002b: 258). But he was pursued by nationalist hostility throughout his entire career. In 1832, he was arrested for his fairytales, in which authorities found political hints that they found unacceptable. Dal's literary friends helped him get out of jail. In 1844, Lev Perovsky commissioned Dal to compose a study of the Skoptsy, the Russian sect that castrated its followers for pious reasons. When Nicholas I learned that the author was a Lutheran, he ordered Perovsky to find an Orthodox author for such a delicate subject (Nadezhdin reworked and signed this essay). Also in 1844, Perovsky ordered a new investigation of the old question: did the Jews of the Empire commit ritual murders? The ministry issued an anti-Semitic pamphlet in two versions, though neither of them was circulated; one pamphlet was signed by Dal.

In the late period of Dal's life, his essays took a distinctively counter-Enlightenment turn. From objecting to the spoiling of the Russian language with foreign words, he switched to an outright denial of the value of literacy for the folk. A radical historian who belonged to the next generation noted that Dal and his circle per­ceived a "dissonance between the life of the educated class and the life of the common folk. They hoped that this dissonance could be ameliorated by their new cult of the people, but they had no idea how. . . . The writers and ethnographers of this school actually

«Л. С. Пушкин [i В. II. Двл ь н ;iii.ic снятых Косьыи н Дамргаия».

№она XIX в.

Figure 14: Pushkin and Dal presented on an icon as St Kozma and St Damyan.

Source: Pravoslavie i ateizm v SSSR. Muzei istorii religii i ateizma. Leningrad: Lenizdat 1981

played the hostile role of spies and detectives in the life of the people" (Pypin 1890: 1/418-19). Dal's dictionary, the huge success of his life, also invited many doubts and criticisms. Some ethnographers accused Dal of inventing entries; others glorified this dictionary as a monument to the richness of Russian language. This debate con­tinued well into the twentieth century, when Vladimir Nabokov admired the dictionary and used it routinely, while Boris Pasternak ridiculed its artificial language. A Swedenborgian and a committed believer in spiritism who organized experiments with rotating tables and ghost apparitions, Dal converted to Orthodoxy before his death.

In 1848, Perovsky asked Dal to destroy his notes because keeping them at this anxiety-ridden time could be dangerous even for these high officials; Dal obeyed and burned hundreds of pages of precious material. The few pages that survive present him in a strangely mel­ancholic light. He was pursued by suspicions and accusations; his only consolations were his domestic life, his irreproachable service, and his humility:

The generosity of the Minister of Internal Affairs secures my domestic needs. . . . Should I be listening with quiet humbleness to accusations that are insulting to the loyal citizen and subject? Should I give up the best part of my noble name, of my honor? . . . Our feelings and con­templations are hidden; a human being cannot reveal them before his judges. . . . But one finds humility in suffering. Humans are given patience and unshakeable faith in the future. (Dal 2002b: 262)

These unhappy musings sound as if they came from the memories of his Huguenot mother; it is surprising to read them in the notes of a highly successful imperial bureaucrat. If Dal had not destroyed his papers under the pressure of his chief, we might have had many more documents of this genre. Executing disciplinary power over the Empire, this quintessential intellectual wrote and thought under ceaseless suspicion from the outside and under doubt from within. Was he exploring Russians or inventing them? Was he legitimate in doing either of these things? Were he, his power, and his work real or merely spoken of? Adoring the language of the common folk and devoting his lifetime to writing down their words, he denied literacy to these same people. Embodying truly imperial, cosmopolitan skills and talents, he abused them for the sake of a gruesome nationalist message.

In mid-nineteenth-century Russia, sentimentality turned into the grotesque. This affinity was also a part of the imperial experience. It is exciting to reimagine Gogol's story, "The Nose," as happening in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with Kovalev asking Dal for the position of vice-governor, Dal interviewing Kovalev about his pro­vincial dialect, and both anxiously guarding their disobedient parts.

System of Tenderness

An official of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a colonial administra­tor, a professor of oriental languages, and the chief censor of the Empire, Vasilii Grigoriev (1816-81) applied his orientalist knowledge to various tasks of imperial power. Promoting projects of external and internal colonization, he mixed them as he and his bosses saw fit. By training, Grigoriev was a typical nineteenth-century orientalist who graduated from a specialized department at St. Petersburg University, spoke several Asian languages, and wrote on issues ranging from archeology to linguistics to cultural criticism. In 1837 the young Grigoriev applied to the University Council with the syllabus for a new course, "History of the East":

The spreading and strengthening of Orientalist interests in Russia would give us more autonomy and work as a counter-balance to the Western elements which oppress our national development, and would support this development. . . . The best way to resist the influence of the West is to rely on the studies of the East. (Veselovsky 1887: 33)

Orientalism was Grigoriev's profession, nationalism his preoccupa­tion. Russians needed to study the east because it facilitated a par­ticular way of understanding themselves. As at other moments of his career, Grigoriev's positions seemed more hawkish than those of his superiors, and his program was rejected. From 1844, he served as a civil servant in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He helped Nadezhdin to edit the journal of the ministry and penned multiple studies on subjects as diverse as the condition of peasants in the central prov­inces, book-printing in Riga, and the newly discovered Judaic sects. In the Hasidic Jews, he saw "extreme ignorance, horrible illiteracy"; in the "sect of Talmudists," as he called the majority of the Jews, he saw "a major danger for Russia" and "the misery of human kind" (Grigoriev 1846). In 1847, Grigoriev and his friend, Pavel Savel'ev, who was also an orientalist, bought a St. Petersburg journal, The Finnish Messenger, which they renamed The Northern Review. Among others, this journal published Mikhail Petrashevsky who would soon go to Siberia; curiously, while Liprandi was implanting an agent into his group, Grigoriev was publishing essays and transla­tions that were written by the same group. In this journal, Grigoriev started the propaganda of Haxthausen's views on Russia ([Anonimous] 1847; Seddon 1985: 267). In 1848, Grigoriev traveled into the central provinces with the commission to learn how the nobles and the peas­ants were responding to the rumors of revolution in Europe. In 1849, he inspected bookstores in Riga, confiscated 2,000 books, and fell sick as a result of the book dust.

Invited by Vasilii Perovsky, in 1851 Grigoriev left the capital for Orenburg, the actual east that had become a part of Russia. Until 1863, he served in the provincial governance of Orenburg and also as chief of the administration of the Kyrgyz frontier. Living the tumul­tuous life of a colonial administrator, he organized punitive expedi­tions and took part in military offensives. He mapped borders of the occupied territories and arrested rebels. He wrote laws, established courts, and ran investigations. He performed all these multiple tasks without any legal training or even military experience. However, he never stopped studying the "orientals" and never failed to miss any opportunity to refer to his background in academic orientalism. "As an orientalist, I, for my sins, understand Asia and the Asians, while those who control my actions know nothing about either," he wrote from Orenburg in 1858. "The Kyrgyz steppe is trembling before me. I arrest the sultans and catch the bandits but, extremely unfortu­nately, I have no power to hang them." Justifying his cruelty, Grigoriev did not hesitate to use his academic erudition. While the Kyrgyz unrest was developing, he wrote in a personal letter: "I invented a fine method . . . a deeply Machiavellian trick, and I did it because I read books and was not an official from the cradle. Long live books!" His method was another series of punitive measures. With much excitement, he positioned himself somewhere between Genghis Khan and Liprandi: "Now, Genghis Khan is nothing for me. I have pur­chased a beautiful Kyrgyz hat, have grown a beard, and in a glorious robe . . . run 16 investigations at once, a la Liprandi" (Veselovsky 1887: 134, 139, 118).

Grigoriev believed in his superiority over his bureaucratic col­leagues because of his professional, orientalist knowledge: "What would happen to these gentlemen if something seriously dangerous were actually to occur on our borders?" In response, these colleagues, most of them military officers, saw him as an extremist and put restraints on his activities. When another rebellion began in the steppe, Grigoriev blamed the pliability of his superiors. "This system of tenderness brought the administration of the Kyrgyses to the same end that brought Russia its pliability in relations with Europe." Exoticizing the natives, Grigoriev presented them to the Emperor and the metropolitan public on the basis of racist preconceptions; he proposed sending to the coronation of Alexander II "several fine- looking figures in tall hats with golden embroidery and brocade caftans with galloons" (Veselovsky 1887: 140, 146). In the end, the orientalist became involved in a conflict with the governor-general, Vasilii Perovsky, and applied for retirement. His academic back­ground made this linguist even more hawkish in colonial policies than were his military-trained colleagues. From Orenburg, he also managed to take part in literary debates in the capital. One of his essays, a long and disrespectful obituary of his former classmate, a historian of Europe, Timofei Granovsky, caused a scandal. On top of his gossip about Granovsky, Grigoriev tried to show that Russian scholars should turn their backs on western history and literature; only ori­ental studies could be useful for Russia and only in this field was Russian scholarship higher than European. "The dirtiest among dirty men," wrote the leading Russian liberal, Boris Chicherin, about Grigoriev (Pirozhkova 1997: 146).

To be sure, Grigoriev's orientalism was non-traditional (Knight 2000; Schimmelpenninck 2010). With his knowledge, Grigoriev worked for the imperial domination over the eastern colonies and over the imperial nation itself. Immediately after his return from the Kyrgyz Border Administration, Grigoriev became a professor of ori­ental languages at St. Petersburg Imperial University. He also took part in several ministerial committees: for Asian trade, for taxation of the Kyrgyzes, for surveillance over university students, and for convict prisons. In 1872, he became a member of the "Jewish Committee" which considered proposals to abolish the Jewish Pale. Grigoriev's opinion was based on his "scholarly" knowledge of the issue. "All evil results from the fact that Jews do not want to work productively." To allow Jews to settle beyond the Pale would be dangerous to all the peoples of Russia, he wrote in another anti- Semitic memo. "Whoever once falls into the hands of the Jews will never be free of them" (Veselovsky 1887: 251).