In my view, then, autocracy and backwardness were symptoms and not causes: both were generated by the way in which the building and maintaining of empire obstructed the formation of a nation. I deploy the evidence for this assertion in what follows.
If I am right, the implications for contemporary Russia are profound. If she can find a new identity for herself, as a nation-state among other nation-states, autocracy and backwardness will fade out. It may perhaps be objected that the nation-state is not the be-all and end-all of history, and that we are moving into a post-national era.15 In particular, in the case of Russia, it may be argued that the relatively low level of virulent nationalism has spared the collapsing Soviet empire the spasms of violence which accompanied, for example, the departure of the French pieds noirs from Algeria. (There has been considerable violence, but most of it has been directed by non-Russians against other non-Russians.)
There is something to be said for these arguments, but I believe the nation-state is likely to be with us for a long time yet as the foundation of the international order, and that in Russia the sense of solidarity associated with nationhood would do much to diminish the criminality and the bitter political conflicts which still disfigure its internal order. I do not pretend, of course, that the process of strengthening national identity in Russia can be wholly reassuring either for her neighbours or for the international community at large. But I believe it is preferable to any attempt at rebuilding empire, which I take to be the only serious alternative.
A word about the structure of this book. I decided at an early stage that a purely chronological exposition would obscure permanent or long-lasting features of Russian society – what one might call its ‘deep structures’ – to such an extent as to undermine the presentation of my overall thesis. I have therefore made Parts 1 and 3 structural, and Parts 2 and 4 chronological. Part 1 examines why a Russian Empire arose at all and what were its abiding features, Part 3 its effects on the major social strata and institutions of Russian society. Parts 2 and 4 adopt a more familiar kind of historical narrative. I hope that the accompanying Chronology (pp. 487–492), Index and occasional cross-references will make it easier to understand the way the sections relate to each other.
For the present, I have ended my study in 1917. After that year the problem of the relationship between Russians and their empire certainly remained crucial, but its terms changed radically, as is symbolized by the bare fact that the empire was no longer named after them. If life and energy persist, perhaps I shall one day try to trace that story too. For the moment, I have confined myself to a few preliminary thoughts on the way my story has affected the Soviet and post-Soviet experience.
GEOFFREY HOSKING,
School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London.
April 1996
The Russian Empire: How and Why?
A. The Theory of Empire
‘With the aid of our Almighty Lord Jesus Christ and the prayers of the Mother of God … our pious Tsar and Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich, crowned by God, Autocrat of all Rus’, fought against the infidels, defeated them finally and captured the Tsar of Kazan’ Edigei-Mahmet. And the pious Tsar and Grand Prince ordered his regiment to sing an anthem under his banner, to give thanks to God for the victory; and at the same time ordered a life-giving cross to be placed and a church to be built, with the uncreated image of our Lord Jesus Christ, where the Tsar’s colours had stood during the battle.’1
Thus the official chronicle recorded the moment in October 1552 when Muscovy set out on its career of empire by conquering and annexing for the first time a non-Russian sovereign state, the Khanate of Kazan’. Muscovite Rus’ was already a multi-national state, since it included within its borders some Tatars, as well as Finno-Ugrian tribes, but the conquest of Kazan’ signified a new approach to relations with its’ neighbours. Rus’ had embarked on a course of conquest and expansion which was to last for more than three centuries and create the largest and most diverse territorial empire the world has ever seen.2
The chronicle emphasizes the religious motives for the Kazan’ campaign. But there were many others. One of them was quite simply the longing for security, a terrible problem for an agricultural realm whose eastern and southern frontiers lay open and exposed to the steppes which stretched thousands of miles without major barrier all the way into Central Asia. The Golden Horde, which had dominated those steppes since the thirteenth century, had broken up into a patchwork of successor khanates which fought among themselves for the territories north of the Black and Caspian Seas: the Nogai Horde, the Khanates of Crimea, Astrakhan’, Kazan’ and [West] Siberia.
The openness and extent of this terrain generated a shifting pattern of temporary alliances and enmities, a constant and restless jostling for power, for the domination over or elimination of one’s neighbour. Security was sought but never attained, since, however far hegemony might be extended, there was always a farther border beyond, and with it a further neighbour and a further potential enemy. On this hazardous terrain Muscovy learned its diplomatic and military skills. Like a cumbersome and nervous amoeba, it expanded to fill the space it was able to dominate, and was impelled into a perpetual dynamic of conquest, reversing the thrust of the Mongols of three centuries earlier.
It is not enough, however, to say that Moscow was one of the contestants in the struggle for the steppes, for in many ways it was the odd man out amongst them. It was an agricultural realm, and its population was sedentary, whereas the other protagonists were all nomadic principalities, at least in their origins and in many of their abiding characteristics. The rulers of Muscovy regarded their dominions as a patrimony, to be ruled over in undivided sovereignty, whereas its adversaries lived by nomadic rules: homage to an ultimate ruling dynasty (the Chingisids) underpinned a pattern of shifting clan allegiances, which changed according to circumstance and need. Tatar nobles might swear homage to the Grand Prince of Muscovy, but they regarded their obligation as a treaty relationship which could be revoked without dishonour to either side. The Muscovite ruler, by contrast, deemed that they had permanently entered his service and acknowledged his sovereignty, so that a subsequent break was nothing less than an act of treason. The chronicle records that Ivan IV, having occupied Kazan’, ‘had all the armed people put to death as traitors’.3
In some ways, then, what Moscow had undertaken in invading the Khanate of Kazan’ was an act of retribution for oathbreaking, of vengeance for violated sovereignty. But also underlying it was a combined sense of religious and national mission which had assumed greater prominence as Muscovy became the strongest among the principalities of Rus’ after the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, in which the Grand Prince of Moscow, Dmitrii Donskoi, defeated the Mongols. In the earliest chronicles, Rus’ was identified with the ‘Russian land’, with the Orthodox Church, and with the patrimony of the princes of the Riurik dynasty. During the fourteenth century these concepts had begun to coalesce around Moscow. In 1328 what had been the Metropolitanate of Kiev, the principal Orthodox jurisdiction in Rus’, moved its seat there.
Under Ivan III in the late fifteenth century the first steps had been taken towards harnessing to Moscow’s growing dominance a new and more grandiose concept of statehood than that associated with a dynastic patrimony. Not long before Moscow finally repudiated the sovereignty of Mongols in 1480, Ivan married Sofia Paleologue, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor. He established a sumptuous court, attended with magnificent ceremonial, on the Byzantine pattern. Ivan put about the story that Constantine