2016 02/17 Charles Steinwedel

CHARLES STEINWEDEL

Threads of Russian Empire: Identity and Authority Where Europe Met Asia, 1552 to 1917

Charles Steinwedel is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. This talk highlights themes in his book “Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 15521917,” which will be published by Indiana University Press in April 2016.

Graduate student inquirer TBA

Summary

After Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) and his forces conquered the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, the Russian government first in Moscow, then in St. Petersburg, sought to identify parts of the primarily Turkic, Muslim population that could stabilize imperial rule in Russia’s east. Although this challenge remained constant, strategies of imperial rule changed substantially over time. The tsar and his officials first assigned status in a manner similar to their predecessors on the steppe, then sorted the population according to legal status, religion, into a military estate, and eventually, according to nationality. They did so in order to identify and reward those considered loyal or to identify targets of sometimes harsh violence or dispossession. I argue that by the mid nineteenth century, strategy succeeded in producing a local elite that identified with imperial authority and stabilized imperial rule. Only in the last two decades of the empire, in the conditions of mass politics after 1905, did tsarist officials start to consider members of nonRussian, nonOrthodox groups unable to participate fully in imperial political life. In the East, imperial officials started to push Turkic and Islamic members of the elite from imperial institutions.

The full importance of shifts in imperial governance over becomes clear over the longue durée. I examine the Russian Empire over the entire 365 year period from the empire’s arrival in a region known as Bashkiria to its demise in 1917. Bashkiria is about the size of Colorado and is located 750 miles east of Moscow. It lies in and just west of the Ural Mountains, which Peter the Great’s geographers identified as the geographic feature separating European from Asian parts of the empire. In Bashkiria, Russian Orthodox met Muslim, settled agriculture met seminomadic pastoralism, Slavic met Turkic, and Europe met Asia. Bashkiria’s core became the basis for the first autonomous republic in the Soviet Russia in 1919.