The Transformation of the World (80 page)

The Tsarist Empire and North America Compared

The Eurasian-frontier problematic cannot be reduced here to the putting together of the multiethnic Tsarist Empire as seen through Russian eyes. Rather, we shall consider the specificities of Eurasian frontiers in comparison with North America.

First
, until the founding of the United States—indeed, until the British-American War of 1812—the most powerful Indian nations remained to some extent foreign-policy partners of the white settlers, in a relationship roughly similar to that which existed between the Tsarist state and the Tatars, Kyrgyz, and Kazakhs. In both parts of the world, the great shift in the balance of power occurred only in the years around 1800. In North America, the Indians were never integrated into society on the settler side of the frontier, but this very exclusiveness of the frontier made possible the formation of a “middle ground,” a mixed or transitional zone of contact. In contrast, as Andreas Kappeler put it in his standard account, the Tsarist Empire had “ancient traditions of multiethnic symbiosis which went back to the Middle Ages.”
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The non-Russian peoples included within it were not completely unarmed, and their elites were to some extent recognized by the Russians as aristocracies in their own right. Moreover, ill-defined zones on the margins of the empire (in what is now Ukraine and elsewhere) had been home since the late fifteenth century to semiautonomous, militarized Cossack societies—a form without an equivalent in North America, though similar in many respects to the
bandeirantes
in Brazil. The Cossacks were typical people of the frontier, who scarcely differed in lifestyle or military tactics from nearby steppe nomads such as the Nogai Tatars or the Kalmyks. Long feared by the tsar, they were not at all willing tools of central government in the early modern period.

Such special societies were transitory by nature, because at some point they became an obstacle to the development of solid imperial or national structures.
Much as the British state, around 1720, took energetic action against Caribbean pirates who had previously served it in wars against the French and Spanish, the Cossacks' position grew ever weaker as they lost their usefulness as a buffer against steppe nomads and as the Tsarist state took direct charge of its security requirements. It would be wrong to imagine the Cossacks as “European” fighters against rampaging Asiatic hordes. In many ways their social organization and cultural models made them closer to their nomadic neighbors than to the core Russian population. This was especially so in the Caucasus, where Terek Cossacks and Caucasian mountain peoples lived in close contact, each mirroring the other's martial culture. For the Cossacks, Russian merchants and caravans were easier prey than their armed neighbors. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Tsarist state put pressure on the Terek Cossacks to fight against the Caucasian peoples, many were divided in their loyalties or even defected to the other side and converted to Islam. Only in 1824 were they officially accepted into the realm of the Russian state, thereby obligating them to perform services and to pay taxes.
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Second
, the US Army's role in the hostilities with the Indians should not be underestimated. Apart from the interlude of the Civil War, the frontier saw the largest deployment of troops in the period between the war with Mexico (1846–48) and the Spanish-American War (1898). The high point of army activity in the American West happened to coincide with the Tsarist offensives in the Caucasus and against the emirates of Central Asia (above all Khiva and Bukhara). The most notable difference was that the US army gave flanking protection to private settlers, engaging in what were ultimately major police operations rather than campaigns of conquest, whereas the Tsarist army became an instrument of conquest neither preceded nor followed by agricultural settlements. Continuing an earlier pattern, the Russian state exhibited a greater talent for military action than for the systematic organization of new settlement. Economic motives were not altogether absent from this army-led expansion of the empire: the conquest of Central Asia entered its decisive phase in 1864, when the American Civil War was interfering with cotton supplies to the Russian textile industry and Moscow was looking for alternative sources.
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Moreover, strategic objectives in the confrontations with the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the British Empire were at least as important as aggressive decisions on the part of army commanders on the spot. Such military imperialism did not lead to the development of a frontier. It was a state matter, which invariably rocked the foundations of the non-Russian societies under attack, without resulting in the construction of new kinds of society.

Third
, unlike the Indians of North and South America, the embattled Central Asian peoples had the opportunity (often only minimal) to enlist the support of external allies, or at least to be welcomed as exiles in a third country. At best the North American Indians could escape to Canada; few were offered a safe haven there. The peoples of the Caucasus, inserted as they were into a web of Islamic
solidarity, could at least count on acceptance in the Ottoman Empire. Caught in a pincer between Russian tsardom and Sino-Manchurian imperialism, the peoples of Muslim Central Asia had little room for maneuver toward the end of the eighteenth century—although some were able to jockey for a while longer between the two great empires. Several paid tribute until 1864 both to Russia and to China. From 1820, when China's hold on Xinjiang began to slacken, uprisings of the Muslim population broke out there and just across the border in Kokand. Repeated attempts were made until 1878 to create independent Muslim states in the space between the empires.
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With the exception of a number of Siberian peoples, the victims of Tsarist expansion were able to retain a leeway that was denied to the Indians of North America.

Fourth
, it is possible to speak of a frontier-like invasion of settlers in two large regions: Western Siberia and the Kazakh steppes. Since its beginning in the seventeenth century, the Russian conquest of the vast Siberian expanse east of the Ural Mountains was driven by the demand for animal skins and furs, so that the region joined the broader nexus linking the forests of the northern hemisphere with European and Chinese markets.
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But the resources tapped by hunters and trappers were too widespread for a real “fur frontier” to come into being. Much as in North America, the indigenous peoples were at first able to take great advantage of the new market opportunities. But their situation worsened as the agricultural colonization of western Siberia, first made possible after 1763 by the construction of a road from the Urals to Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, gathered speed in the late eighteenth century; it was then not much farther to the Chinese border. A ribbon thousands of kilometers long had to be cut through the forest, and a surface laid that was capable of bearing wagons and sledges. This was a major technical accomplishment, carried out several decades
before
the work on the Oregon Trail in the United States and more than a century before the construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad. The so-called
trakt'
went so far south that the need for dangerous river crossings could be kept to a minimum. It stimulated the growth of existing localities en route, especially Omsk, which in 1824 became the seat of the governor of Siberia. But it also facilitated the exploitation of nature and profoundly affected the living conditions of indigenous Siberian peoples.

A second watershed was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. It is true that this still did not give them full mobility—the legal restriction tying them to their village community was not lifted until 1906—but hundreds of thousands managed to get around this. In the 1880s an average of 35,000 people a year were emigrating to Siberia from European Russia; in the 1890s the figure was close to 96,000, and the flood after 1906 peaked two years later with an annual total of 759,000.
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Multiple tensions appeared between the newcomers and earlier migrants to Siberia, the
starozhily
, who had largely adapted to the subsistence way of life of the Siberian peoples and sometimes even unlearned their Russian.
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The consequences of the new colonization were disastrous for the indigenous peoples. Their social capacity for resistance was as low as that of the
North American Indians vis-à-vis the Euro-Americans, or that of the Mongols in relation to the Han Chinese. The growing difficulty of hunting and fishing, debt burdens, and alcohol undermined traditional ways of life and cultural orientations. As far as the Sea of Okhotsk—and in the East there was additional pressure from Chinese settlers—native Siberians either tried unsuccessfully to adapt to the new conditions or retreated still deeper into the forests. Like the
indios
of South America, they were not even afforded the protective shelter of reservations.
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The most important region for agricultural settlement was the Kazakh steppe: that is, the area between the Lower Volga and the foot of the Altai Mountains near Semipalatinsk (today's Semey).
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In order to defend itself from nomadic Kazakh horsemen (organized in great “hordes”) and from steppe peoples such as the Bashkirs, the Russian state began in the 1730s to build a chain of forts, of which the chief at first was Orenburg. From these, representatives of the tsar conducted a policy mixing negotiation with division and intimidation, but despite their many successes this steppe frontier was not brought under control until the nineteenth century. As late as 1829, when Alexander von Humboldt visited the region at the Tsar's invitation, he was given a large Cossack escort for the route between Orenburg and Orsk, which was considered especially dangerous. Nomadic horsemen often raided Russian territory and carried off humans and livestock; some people were sold as slaves to Khiva, where they were apparently much prized for irrigation works. Russian soldiers watched events in the steppe from their wooden towers. The Kazakh absorption into the Russian Empire happened not through rapid conquest but through a slow process involving both ad hoc military expeditions and a gradual replacement of feudal allegiances with imperial subjection. The aim was not only to secure the region but also to convert the nomadic horsemen into farmers and to “civilize” them within overarching imperial structures.
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An even deeper impact was made by the settlement of Russian and Ukrainian peasants, who set about cultivating marginal areas of steppe more energetically than the Cossacks had done with their seminomadic mixed economy. As earlier in Siberia, the emancipation of the peasantry created the initial impetus, but once again the state lent a powerful helping hand. The Steppe Statute of 1891 drastically curtailed the ownership of land by Kazakhs. The nomadic herdsmen, few of whom could be induced to settle down, were driven farther south and cut off from the wetter pastureland essential to grazing cycles. The comparative chronology is striking here. Not until the 1890s, when there was no more “ownerless” land left in the Midwest or High Veld frontier areas, was the South Russian steppe frontier being
opened
. Here too, this happened at the expense of the indigenous peoples, although they did not disappear into enclosed enclaves but continued their nomadic existence on marginal land. The Kazakh settlement frontier was the most striking instance of its kind anywhere in the Tsarist Empire; a nomadic lifestyle was displaced by the farmer's plough. The conflict was
less between populations at different “stages of development” than between different types of society or ethnic groups. The region where the frontier process unfolded was transformed “from a frontier zone of nomads and Cossacks to an imperial realm of farmers and bureaucrats,” and from a Turkic-Mongol world into a multiethnic sphere under Slav domination.
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It matters little whether one calls the outcome an “internal colony” or a “borderland.” However, since it did not come under a special administration but was incorporated into the Russian state, there is much to be said against the term “colony.”

A similar sequence may be found in other frontier regions of the Tsarist Empire: first came the Cossacks, then garrison towns and frontier fortresses, and finally settlements of farmers. The state tried to steer this process, and indeed every aspect of the opening of frontiers, much more forcefully than in the United States or South Africa. The main contribution of the American state was to make cheap land available to settlers in an orderly manner. The pioneers were completely free individuals: no one could send them anywhere. In Tsarist Russia, by contrast, until the liberalization of agrarian policy under Prime Minister Stolypin, the state intervened to guide the process of settlement. This posed no problem in the case of “state peasants,” but even with other categories, whether dependent or “freed,” the state presumed to act in a guardian-like capacity. Although many settlers eventually shaped their own lives, the settlement frontier was not, as in the United States, theoretically formed by their free decisions.
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A further difference with the United States was the small weight of urban settlements. The North American frontier was everywhere associated with the formation of small towns, some of which profited from a favorable transportation location to develop rapidly into major cities. At the western end of the continent, the frontier ended in a densely settled urban zone that did not actually owe its formation to the frontier. No Russian California would ever emerge; Vladivostok did not blossom as a second Los Angeles. But neither did frontier urbanization in the strict sense become a large-scale phenomenon.

Fifth
, all forms of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expansion of Russia were highly ideologized. Public rhetoric in the United States toward the Indians also went through phases in which the task of “civilizing” them was seen either as futile or as important for mankind. But the fantasies in the eastern Tsarist Empire were far more extravagant; nowhere in the whole history of European expansion was a “civilizing mission” taken so seriously.
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Since many Russians at the time believed that civilization should mainly follow colonization, interpretations of history appeared—for example, in the influential Moscow historian Sergei M. Solovyev—which in many ways anticipated the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. In the early nineteenth century, the view began to spread that Russia should act in Asia on behalf of progressive Europe. The space between the Arctic and the Caucasus seemed to be one where the enlightened Russian upper stratum could prove itself as a promoter of European civilization; conquest and colonization proceeded, as it were, with a look over the shoulder
toward Western Europe. At the same time, it was intended to distance Russia from all the ill-famed aspects of colonialism and imperialism; indeed, Russian and Soviet historians have always shied away from admitting the imperial character of Russian policies. This shamefaced urge to camouflage reality, similar in a way to the American aversion to admitting the colonial side of US expansion, echoes in the much-loved talk of “assimilation” (
osvoenie
) of non-Russian regions and their inhabitants. But—and this is another important difference—whereas Turner's frontier involved a turning away from Europe and the birth of the distinctively American pioneer, Solovyev and his followers continued to regard Western Europe as the measure of all things. The Europeanization of Russia was supposed to advance farther, in the form of a Russification of other nationalities within the Empire.
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