Davies, Brian. (1983). “The Role of the Town Governors in the Defense and Military Colonization of Muscovy’s Southern Frontier: The Case of Kozlov, 1635-1638.” 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Davies, Norman. (1982). God’s Playground: A History of Poland. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Hellie, Richard. (2002). “Migration in Early Modern Russia, 1480s-1780s.” In Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1550-1800. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.
Colonialism is a type of imperial domination of the non-Russian peoples who inhabited the southern and eastern borderlands of the Russian Empire and who subsequently fell under the control of the Soviet Union. It refers specifically to policies to spread Western civilization (a “civilizing mission”) among peoples in those territories, and to integrate them into the imperial state and economy. It extends as well to the colonization by Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlers of lands inhabited by pastoral nomadic tribes.
COLONIZATION
The Russian Empire’s southern and eastern borderlands became its colonial territories. Russian expansion onto the plains of Eurasia had by the middle of the eighteenth century brought within the boundaries of the empire all the lands south to the Caucasus Mountains and to the deserts of Turkestan, and east to the Pacific Ocean. Much of the area consisted of vast plains (the “steppe”) once dominated by confederations of nomadic tribes, who became the subjects of imperial rule and the empire’s first colonized peoples. The grasslands where they grazed their flocks along the lower Volga River and in southern Russia (the Ukraine) attracted peasants from European Russia seeking new farmland.
The imperial government encouraged this southward movement of the Russian population (most of whom were serfs owned by noble landlords). Occasionally nomadic tribes fought to reCOLONIALISM
A greedy octopus represents Russia’s expanding influence in 1877. © CORBIS tain their lands. Prolonged resistance came first from the Bashkirs, Turkic peoples whose tribes occupied lands east of the Volga and along the Ural Mountains. During the eighteenth century many clans joined in raids on the intruders and battled against Russian troops. They joined in the massive Pugachev uprising of 1772 to 1774 alongside Cossacks and rebellious Russians. But in the end Russian armed forces invariably defeated the rebels.
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russia’s borders of the empire shifted further southeastward into Eurasian lands, bringing an increasingly diverse population into the empire. Peoples in these borderlands spoke many different languages, mostly of Turkic origin; practiced a wide variety of religions, with the Islamic faith the most widespread; and followed their own time-honored customs and social practices. Russia was becoming a multiethnic, multireligious empire.
THE IMPERIAL CIVILIZING MISSION
In the reign of Empress Catherine II (r. 1762-1796), the empire’s leadership began to experiment with new approaches to govern these peoples. These policies drew upon Enlightenment concepts of government that redefined the object of colonial conquests. They became the basis of Russian colonialism. Previously, the Russian state had extended to the princes and nobles of newly conquered eastern territories the chance to collaborate in imperial rule. It had required their conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and had periodically encouraged Orthodox missionaries to conduct campaigns of mass conversion, if necessary by force. Before Catherine II’s time, the state had made no concerted effort to alter the social, economic, and cultural practices of the peoples on its southern and eastern borderlands. This authoritarian method of borderland rule demanded only obedience from the native populations.
In the late eighteenth century, some educated Russians began to argue that their empire, which they believed a civilized Western land, had the duty to spread civilization, as they understood it, to its backward peoples. They had two principal objectives. By spreading Russian culture, legal practices, and opportunities for economic enrichment, the empire could hope to recruit a progressive group from these peoples who would become willing collaborators in Russian domination. Equally important was their belief that Russia’s own historical development made the spread of its newly acquired Western culture among “savage” peoples a moral obligation.
Catherine II herself traveled among the empire’s eastern peoples at the beginning of her reign. Impressed by what she described as the “differences of peoples, customs, and even ideas” in Asian land, she looked for new ways to win the loyalty of the population. Encouragement of trade, education, and religious toleration appeared to her desirable and useful tools to strengthen the bonds between these colonial peoples and their imperial rulers. These goals suggested practical guidelines by which she and her advisers could build their empire on modern political foundations. These also confirmed in their eyes the legitimacy of their imperial domination of backward peoples.
Catherine II shared the Enlightenment conviction that reason, not religious faith, lay at the core of enlightened government. She did not abandon the policy of maintaining Orthodox Christianity as the state religion of the empire, but ended forced conversion of Muslim peoples to Christianity. In 1773, she formally accorded religious toleration to Islam. Her successors on the imperial throne maintained this fundamental right, which proved a valuable means of maintaining peaceful relations with the empire’s growing Muslim population. They encouraged the conversion to Christianity of peoples holding to animist beliefs, for they believed that their duty was to favor the spread of Christianity. They also promoted the commercial exploitation of colonial resources and the increased sale of Russian manufactured goods in their colonial territories. The Western colonialists’ slogan of “Commerce and Christianity” described one important aspect to Russia’s civilizing mission. Self-interest as well as the belief in spreading the benefits of Western civilization provided the ideological basis for Russian colonialism. This new policy never fully supplanted the old practices of authoritarian rule and discrimination against non-Russians, which had strong defenders among army officers on the borderlands. But it, too, enjoyed powerful backing in the highest government circles. In the nineteenth century, their vision of an imperial civilizing mission brought Russia into the ranks of great Western empires.
COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY IN COLONIAL ALASKA
Alaska was the first area where Russian colonialism guided imperial rule. In the late eighteenth century Russian trappers had appeared there, having crossed the Pacific Ocean along the Aleutian Islands from Siberia in their hunt for fur-bearing sea mammals. The sea otter, whose fur was so highly prized that it was called “soft gold,” was their chosen prey. They forced native peoples skilled at the dangerous craft of hunting at sea (mainly Aleutian tribesmen) to trap the animals, whose range extended from the Aleutians along the Alaskan coast and down to California. In 1800, the Russian government created a special colonial administration, the Russian-American Company, to take charge of “the Russian colonies in America.” Its main tasks were to expand the commercially profitable fur-gathering activities, and to spread Orthodox Christianity and Russian culture among the subject peoples of this vast territory.
“Commerce and Christianity” defined the Russian Empire’s objectives there. It operated in a manner somewhat similar to that of the British Hudson’s Bay Company, also established in colonial North America. And like other overseas colonies of European empires, the Russians exploited Alaska’s valuable resources (killing off almost all the sea otters), in the process confronting periodic revolts from their subject peoples. Faced with these difficulties, the Russian government finally abandoned its distant colony, too expensive and too distant to retain. In 1867, it sold the entire territory to the United States.
COLONIAL TURKESTAN AND IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP
In seeking to create a unified, modern state, the Russian Empire moved toward establishing a common citizenship for the peoples in its multiethnic, multireligious borderlands in the late nineteenth century. It began this effort in 1860s and 1870s, at the time when it freed its peasant serf population from conditions of virtual slavery to its nobility. Reformers in the government conceived of an empire founded on a sort of imperial citizenCOLONIALISM ship, extended to former serfs and to native peoples.
That was the period of the empire’s last major colonial expansion, when its military forces conquered a large
