Chapter 1 of A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600–1918 argues that, in the first millennium CE, “Northern Eurasia” was but a multitude of spaces, a hypothetical entity that can be defined only negatively, as a blind spot in the perspective of actually existing “collective observers” of the time: the literate cultures of ancient China, Persia, and Byzantium. Extremely low population density allowed various groups on the vast territory—between the Carpathian Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, from the steppes in the south to the tundra in the north—to mold their social organization primarily based on the specific ecological niches they inhabited. Infrequent intergroup contacts and the general lack of written culture prevented the synthesis of multiple local knowledge into a more general worldview and its transmission in space and time.

An important exception that only confirmed this generalization is the case of the so-called Orkhon inscriptions on the stela in Old Turkic script, dated back to the early eighth century CE. On the one hand, they register the rather late acquisition of literacy in the region and the mechanism of this process—in close proximity to and in direct interaction with one of the great literate cultures of the South, the Tang Empire in China. On the other hand, they document the peculiar social organization and nascent political order of the region’s most cohesive group—the steppe nomads. We learn about their perception of their neighbors, including the exceptional place of China on this mental map, the biography of an ideal nomad leader, and the role of horses, whose names are registered in the inscriptions more diligently than the names of princes. Excerpts from the Orhon inscriptions—one of the first authentic voices from the would-be region—open this sourcebook.

The second text included in this section documents the opposite perspective—from the great Islamic/Persian literate culture onto the conglomerate of semi-isolated, and thus perceived as exotic, societies of the north. A Persian geographer and traveler of the early tenth century CE, Abu-Ali Ahmed ibn Rustah, personally visited many remote places, traveling as far north as Novgorod. However, his Book of Precious Records reflected the collective knowledge accumulated by his culture, as personal impressions are seamlessly interwoven with borrowings from earlier texts by Arabic and Persian authors. Ibn Rustah registers a diversity of the region’s “tribes” that are described in terms of the constellation of and adjustment to specific environmental conditions, their shared religious beliefs, nascent political organization, and socioeconomic arrangements. Though very distinctive, these population groups are fairly interconnected, both in their more or less systematic contacts and in the eye of an outside observer, who describes their position relative to each other, placing them side-by-side on the same mental map.

This chapter contains three documents that illustrate the mechanisms of nascent political self-organization in the region in the ninth–tenth centuries.

The first text is an extract from a book by another great Arab-language scholar and native of Central Asia, Muhammad al-Farghānī. In the mid-ninth century, he attested to the inclusion of the region’s nomads and the sedentary societies north of them on the mental map of Islamic culture. Identified with the most remote sixth and seventh “climes”—regions defined by the length of the longest day—these societies were now imagined as parts of a common geographical and potentially political space.

A century later, Liudprand, the bishop of Cremona in Lombardy, was dispatched by the soon-to-be king of Italy, Berengar II, on a mission to Constantinople in 949 CE. In the book written at this time, he cited eyewitness accounts of Prince Igor’s 941 attack on Constantinople, recorded just one year after the event. The book’s fragment included in this volume presents the most authentic record of the episode, which is usually described based on the work of authors writing a century or two later. Liudprand identifies “Rusii” as “Nordmanni” and characterizes them as neighbors of nomadic confederations in the steppes.

The third document in the chapter is an excerpt from the letter of the missionary bishop Bruno of Querfurt to Holy Roman Emperor Henry II (ca. 1008 CE), written from the border of the Rous’ Lands. This is a unique firsthand testimony on intergroup cultural contacts: amicably received by the Kyivan prince, Bruno traveled to his archenemies, the nomadic Pechenegs. Despite their initial hostility toward him, he was not harmed, and he succeeded in baptizing some of them, thus offering us a glimpse of the region’s Christianization as a foundation for gradual political consolidation.

The two documents included in this chapter are intended to more vividly demonstrate some aspects of the otherwise abstract notion of political consolidation. Specifically, they show how self-organization was predicated on economic interests, security concerns, and cultural preferences.

In about 1172, the German author Helmold of Bosau wrote Chronica Slavorum—a history of the Saxon colonization of Slavic populations in the lower Elbe River region, which also mentioned other Slavic groups. Excerpts from this document explicate the Rous’ Lands’ entanglement with the Baltic societies of Scandinavia and German lands, the importance of the Baltic trade for all parties involved, and the political domination of the Polish king over the Kyiv prince.

The second document included in this chapter is a fragment of the treatise Chronicon (ca. 1286) by the head of the Syriac Orthodox Church, Gregory Bar Hebraeus (Abu’l-Faraj). As a physician, in 1244 Bar Hebraeus entered the Mongol service during the Mongol occupation of Eastern Anatolia, so he was able to share in his book firsthand knowledge of the Mongols. Especially valuable are his records of the laws (yasa) of Chingiz Khan and news of the recent Mongol campaign in Eastern Europe, mentioning the Rous’ Lands and Bulgars on the Volga River (rendered in this English translation as “Bulgarians”). 

Two documents in this chapter reflect a new stage of political dynamics in the would-be region, as smaller horizontally arranged polities produced by self-organization became integrated into larger, hierarchical, composite structures.

First, there are excerpts from The Travels by the famous Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta, who in the 1330s visited the Desht-i Qipchaq Steppe dominated by the Golden Horde. Ibn Battuta documented a culturally and religiously heterogeneous society ruled by the dynasty that had recently adopted Islam. He accompanied the khan’s third wife, who happened to be a Byzantine princess, to her father in Constantinople, where she planned to give birth to her child; this episode further underscores the permeability of seemingly rigid religious and linguistic barriers. Political hierarchy appeared to coincide only minimally with cultural affinity and religious unanimity.

By contrast, the second document shows how the cultural and religious similarity of the former Rous’ Lands populations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Principality of Moscow became a source of political rivalry rather than cohesion. Specifically, this letter of Grand Prince Algirdas of Lithuania to Patriarch Philotheus of Constantinople (1371) lists complaints about Muscovy. Regardless of the charges’ plausibility, they portray a tightly entangled if fragmented political sphere that operated by the logic of a zero-sum game, unable to reach more complex forms in the absence of a supreme authority recognized as legitimate by everyone. 

This chapter elucidates the emergence of larger, better-integrated polities in Eastern Europe with the discovery of abstract, nondynastic principles of sovereignty, primarily on the example of the Grand Principality of Moscow. The documents translated for the chapter contextualize this historical process.

One of these is the memoir of a Flemish nobleman, Guillebert de Lannoy, about his travels to the Baltics, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Rusian principalities of Novgorod and Pskov in 1413 and 1421. He planned to join the Teutonic Knights in their crusade against the pagan Prussians but instead found the neatly interconnected political world on the verge of a major realignment: the demise of the Teutonic Order and the gradual rise of Muscovy.

The next historical source is the Latin poem The Song of the Zubr-Bison (1523) by Mikola Husoŭski (Mikołaj Hussowczyk), who was likely born on territory of modern-day Belarus. The poem gives voice to a patriot of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania who is increasingly drawn into the orbit of the Polish Kingdom not only by his Roman Catholic faith but also by security threats from foreign enemies: Crimean Tatars and Muscovites.

Finally, a block of eight documents presents the correspondence of the grand princes of Moscow with Turkic khans and aristocrats in the steppe and Crimea (1493–1556). These documents reveal intimate relations based on mutual interest, dependence, and cooperation. Despite their formal vassal subordination to the Golden Horde having ended long before, Moscow’s grand princes were still expected to maintain amicable relations with steppe polities by regularly sending their rulers lavish gifts. The letters of Nur Sultan, wife of the Crimean Khan, highlight the exceptional role of women in post-Golden Horde Muslim polities. Meanwhile, other documents reveal the interest of Muscovy’s Christian rulers in attracting Muslim aristocrats to their service. 

The first half of the seventeenth century was a period of profound social transformation in Europe and Asia. Alternative scenarios of new, transpersonal principles and mechanisms of social cohesion—that is, beyond the traditional clan and tribal ties or the “feudal” hierarchy of vassals and suzerains—were tried in different countries. This broader context is essential for understanding the unexpected success of Muscovy in the competition with more advanced regional powers.

Three clusters of documents make up this chapter. The first relates to the Sandomierz Rebellion (1606–7) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—the szlachta’s armed opposition to the king justified by his tyrannical violation of their rights and privileges. The Articles of Rebellion that listed the opposition’s demands and the Act of Dethronement presented to King Sigismund III reveal the political culture of the Commonwealth that in many ways was the most advanced in Europe. At the same time, these documents explain the ensuing political demise of a country unable to use either the efficiency of the central government or the mobilizing potential of parliamentarism.

The second cluster relates to the Cossack Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–54 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The uprising—a direct result of the Commonwealth’s having essentially become reduced to the monocultural and monoreligious Kingdom of Poland—reflected the demand of the Orthodox petty servitors to be recognized as equals with the Polish Catholic nobility. This political and legal action was fully justified by the initial “constitution” of the Commonwealth but took the form of truly genocidal cleansings of Polish nobility and Jewish communities, as attested in Khmelnytsky’s declarations and a Jewish chronicle translated for this chapter.

Finally, the third cluster includes excerpts from the remarkable travelogues of the Ottoman writer Evliya Çelebi, who vividly depicted his impressions of his visits in the 1650s–60s to the Ukrainian lands, the Crimean Khanate, and the mountaineer societies of the North Caucasus, which are strikingly underrepresented in historical narratives of the period. Evliya Çelebi was a keen observer, whose detailed travelogues also convey a certain outsider’s bias. While an Ottoman traveler cannot be an Orientalist by definition, it is interesting to discuss this bias in relation to what is expected from a “European” Orientalizing gaze. 

Chapter 6’s inquiry into historical dynamics in Eastern European societies, particularly the main regional powers—the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Crimean Khanate—helps explain much about the political processes in Muscovy at the time. This chapter singles out three aspects of the Russian Tsardom’s history in the seventeenth century.

The first was the radical reset of the previous political tradition during the Time of Troubles. A unique direct eyewitness testimony about these events, partially translated for this volume, is presented in the so-called Diary of Marina Mniszech, written by an anonymous Polish nobleman. Especially valuable are his firsthand observations of False Dmitry after he ascended the throne, and the personal and political dynamics between the new tsar and senior Polish dignitaries. These observations are suggestive of the Polish side’s actual attitude toward Tsar Dmitry Ivanovich, as well as the tsar’s own political views.

The second characteristic of this period was the incredibly rapid expansion of nominal Moscow’s authority over the enormous spaces of Siberia. The report of the Lena River region administrators (ca. 1641) cites the oral testimony of a remote fort’s servitors, who traveled along the Indigirka and Ianga Rivers, for the purpose of collecting tribute from the sparse Indigenous population and discovering new lands. The force that was dispatched many hundreds of miles into the taiga to collect tribute was remarkably insignificant. While it does not question the coercive nature of Muscovite colonization, this document suggests a more complex political and economic dynamic on the ground.

Finally, the third aspect singled out in this chapter was the hitherto unprecedented female rule of Princess-Regent Sophia Alekseevna (1682–89). On the one hand, the chapter presents her encrypted letters—intimate and tender—to Prince Vasily Golitsyn, who headed the military campaign against the Crimean Khanate in 1689. On the other hand, the chapter includes Sophia’s decree “Twelve Articles concerning the Schismatics” (1685), which formulated a policy of uncompromising and cruel terror against the Old Believers. Never before or after Sophia’s reign was the government’s treatment of the Old Believers so harsh. 

Until the eighteenth century, Northern Eurasia was dominated by several regional powers—the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita), the Crimean Khanate, and Muscovy—with a fairly stable division of spheres of influence among them. These polities could be characterized as “gunpowder empires”—formidable military powers with premodern social organization. Their failure to embrace modern political institutions led to their abrupt decline throughout the eighteenth century. Only Muscovy avoided this fate by radically transforming itself into a quite different polity subsequently known as the Russian Empire. This country alone underwent a “cameralist revolution” that was purposefully, if hectically, staged by Tsar Peter I. He promoted the culture and institutions of the nascent form of modern statehood that was conceptualized by the north European theory of cameralism.

The chapter presents documents highlighting several aspects of this complex historical process. First, it addresses war as a staple of Peter I’s policies that served as the main instrument for achieving his aims, including the borrowing of more advanced forms of social organization. War was a way of differentiating society into “us” and “them,” and not necessarily on the battlefield. One document in this subsection is a letter penned in 1704 by Russia’s chancellor Fyodor Golovin to the de facto ruler of the Ukrainian lands, Zaporozhian hetman Ivan Mazepa. Golovin conveyed a complaint to Mazepa from Russia’s ally in the Great Northern War with Sweden, a high official of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, regarding acts of marauding by Cossack troops on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as they marched through the country for a siege of Swedish fortresses. Golovin entirely excused the Cossacks and practically apologized to Mazepa for the need to formally reprimand him. One could imagine that the concept of modern military discipline was alien to the Russian authorities, but the next document suggests otherwise. After hetman Mazepa changed allegiance and joined the Swedish king in October 1708, Russian troops under the command of General Alexander Menshikov swiftly moved into the territory of the Hetmanate. Before entering the Ukrainian lands, Menshikov issued an order to the troops; the order is published in this chapter. It is an exhaustively detailed list of measures intended to prevent any abuse of local civilians by the Russian troops. As it turns out, modern discipline was well-known to the Russian army, and abundant mechanisms for its enforcement existed. However, there were political considerations that made its enforcement either desirable or redundant depending on different circumstances. The enforcement—or neglect—of military discipline served as an instrument to cement subjecthood.

The second concern of cameralist rulers was the procurement of cold cash. There were no known silver ore deposits in Russia at the time, so the main sources of silver money were the coins minted in the Bohemian town of Joachimsthal (Jáchymov)—Joachimstalers, which were refaced as silver rubles. Original talers/thalers were not allowed into circulation in Muscovy but the ban did not extend to the Ukrainian lands, where they were procured for the tsar’s mint by officials and private agents. The first document in this group is a missive from Peter I to hetman Mazepa demanding that private traders from Muscovy be barred from harvesting coins in Ukrainian territory (1704). The second document is a proposal to Peter I concerning cost-saving measures for manufacturing copper coins to be achieved by reducing their weight (1711). Government monopoly and debasement of coinage were core economic measures in the arsenal of cameralist statesmen.

The truly distinctive elements of cameralism were nascent biopolitics and the rational management of human resources in general. On this topic, the chapter offers several documents. One is hetman Mazepa’s missive to Menshikov, who was overseeing St. Petersburg’s construction, discussing the massive desertion of Cossacks from the construction site and problems with disciplining them (1705). The next is Peter I’s decree titled “On the Examination of Fools in the Senate” (1722), which required the official examination of noblemen suspected of mental incapacity. Those found mentally impaired were forbidden to marry and manage property. Two other documents outline the procedures for the examination of nobles before admitting them to government service (1740) and allowing them to marry (1744).

A native of Hamburg, Heinrich von Fick, was the primary architect of the 1719 reform that introduced an administrative system in Russia based on specialized collegia. Fick, a central figure of Peter I’s cameralist revolution, was prosecuted after the emperor’s death and exiled to eastern Siberia. Exonerated by the new empress Elizabeth, he penned a memo on the miserable state of Siberian Native peoples and potential measures to improve their condition (1744). Extracts from the document are translated for this volume.

Finally, the chapter features several documents related to the case of Ivan Kain, the mid-eighteenth-century Russian criminal turned headhunter. The documents trace the evolution of his status from a pickpocket denouncing fellow criminals to the authorities, to a sleuth working for the Moscow police, who was widely perceived as a government agent. This remarkable story opens a window on the everyday life of low-rank Muscovites in the 1740s while also exposing the transitional character of the Russian imperial state, where a private individual performed the functions of a government agent.

Together, these documents explicate the practical side of sociological abstractions such as “the modern state,” “economic policies,” “population control,” and “public administration,” demonstrating how a modern society was emerging in Northern Eurasia. 

Until the mid-eighteenth century, the Russian government’s main concern was to sustain the Petrine cameralist state; it considered “empire” little more than a grand title. Since the 1740s, more concerted attempts had been made to realign the sociopolitical structures of the country to alleviate some of the most disruptive inner disputes, including the conflict between the archaic social organization of diverse territories and the modern cameralist administrative system. From the moment of Catherine II’s ascension to the throne in 1762, she made it her ultimate priority to design a rational sociopolitical order—essentially, by inventing a modern empire.

Catherine was an ardent follower of the Enlightenment’s social theorists, so her first attempt at empire-building was aimed at concluding a countrywide social contract. In 1766, she announced the convocation of the Legislative Commission—a de facto constituent assembly. Deputies were brought from all over the country, representing all social and ethnoreligious groups, to elaborate a new legal framework for the empire that would satisfy everyone. However, when 564 elected deputies arrived in Moscow the next year, they brought with them about 1,500 instructions from their electors, which showed the mutual incompatibility of different group interests and thus the futility of the entire enterprise. This chapter presents two instructions coming from the same city—Astrakhan—one composed by the Armenian town commoners and merchants, and the other by the local Tatars. The groups pressed for mutually contradictory aims and agreed only on one main point: the demand for exemption from any universal, empire-wide legislation, thereby securing the particularist arrangements of earlier times. A close reading of these documents demonstrates the predicament of any empire-wide coherent reforms.

The Legislative Commission yielded no practical results, and in 1773–4, the Russian Empire was shaken by the large-scale Pugachev Rebellion. It was a profoundly imperial phenomenon, as Pugachev’s army included Rusian serfs and workers, Tatar and Finno-Ugric peasants, Kazakh nomads, Cossacks, as well as Bashkirs, who made up to two-thirds of the entire force. Their leader was a young Bashkir aristocrat and poet, Salawat Yulaev (Yulay uly). The chapter includes the translation of a song attributed to Yulaev—the earliest account of the rebellion from the rebel’s camp. Another document in this subsection is a decree of Pugachev, who pretended to be the deceased Emperor Peter III. Addressing the Bashkirs of Orenburg Province, the decree was originally written in Turki—another testimony to Pugachev’s success in connecting with the diverse population of the empire more efficiently than Catherine II in her Legislative Commission.

It comes as no surprise that immediately after crushing the Pugachev Rebellion, in 1775 Catherine II ordered the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich—the self-governing Cossack autonomy in the Ukrainian lands. The Cossack Nikita Korzh (1731–1835) was an eyewitness to this event and to the last decades of the Sich’s history in general. In the late 1820s, his oral recollections were recorded by two senior clergymen, and excerpts from this text are included in this chapter. Korzh vividly depicts the Sich as a thriving community characterized by complex social organization and social practices imaginable only in a lawless frontier.

An important aspect of Catherinian empire-building was the rational elaboration of Russian imperialism as a coherent foreign policy program. It culminated with the development in the early 1780s of a strategic plan for reshaping the existing geopolitical order. Known as the “Greek Project,” this plan, developed by Catherine II and her inner circle and shared with the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, considered the legacy of the Ottoman Empire after its anticipated collapse. The chapter includes fragments of Catherine II’s letters to Joseph II outlining her ambitious plans. Though entirely utopian, it is instructive to compare her project to the actual transformation of the European part of the Ottoman Empire over the next 150 years. 

By the early nineteenth century—in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—the Catherinian model of empire had been adjusted to rely on three pillars: (1) the moving target of Europeanism as its main criterion of success; (2) constant reformism as the only way to sustain the unstable equilibrium of inner diversity; and (3) nation as the most advanced form of groupness. The latter element presented the biggest challenge: not only were there several competing concepts of the nation at the time, but the government’s empire-wide imposition of the national principle stimulated the growth of local nationalisms, which were considered a major threat to the imperial regime. Because the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia extensively outlines this dynamic, the primary sources included in this chapter of the reader explicate the paradoxical interconnectedness of the imperial and the national.

The first document is related to the most autonomous and politically advanced part of the Russian Empire—the Grand Duchy of Finland. It is a letter written in 1838 by a senior administrator of the Grand Duchy, Lars Gabriel von Haartman, to the nominal imperial governor-general of Finland, Prince Alexander Menshikov. The Finlandian patriot and Swedish aristocrat Haartman sought to sever the traditionally tight economic ties between Finland and Sweden and lobbied for the introduction of Russian currency in the Grand Duchy of Finland instead of the Swedish paper currency. As was typical of his cohort of Swedish aristocrats—the Grand Duchy’s political elite—Haartman believed that Finland’s closer integration with the Russian Empire served Finlandian national interests, just as the influence of Sweden was destructive.

Then comes a cluster of twenty-two documents originating on the opposite end of the Russian Empire, which was popularly perceived as “barbaric” and unruly—the Northern Caucasus. Covering the period of the 1820s–50s, almost all these documents were produced by different segments of culturally diverse and politically polarized local societies: the leaders of the Imamate of Dagestan and their opponents among the local aristocracies, free communes of mountaineers and Muslim clergy. Together, the documents portray a multifaceted picture of the overlapping and mutually escalating social, cultural, and political crises in the region, of which Russian imperial expansion was only one important element. While not downplaying the role of Russian imperialism, these documents restore the historical agency of the local populations and the significance of their conflicting interests. Eliminating local parochialism embodied by regional aristocratic clans and imposing cultural unification of the multilingual communities on the basis of Islam, the Imamate promoted a version of nation-building. Losing their privileges and facing the threat of physical extermination, noble families sought protection from the Russian Empire, dragging the Russian forces even deeper into the region’s contested political sphere. Thus, the defense of cultural and historical distinctiveness of a group that is often associated with nationality required an alliance with the Russian Empire, while the elimination of any group specificity—social or cultural—was a prerequisite for joining the “nation of Islam” in the Caucasus. This consolidation could even be leveraged by the imperial authorities to establish more efficient control over the region's diverse communities. This was achieved by substituting the Imamate’s authoritarian rule with the imperial administration, demonstrating an accommodation of universalizing Islamic norms. 

The Great Reforms of the 1860s institutionalized nation-building as the government policy central to the overall modernization push, without reconsidering the old imperial “constitution.” This explains the fundamental ambivalence of the period. On the one hand, the old imperial structures, whose primary function was to coordinate the utterly heterogeneous society without eliminating local diversity, were rationalized and adjusted to accommodate in the future a possible “imperial nation” of political equality and cultural autonomy. On the other hand, the mainstream urge to nationalize found a more direct outlet in promoting ethnoculturally Russian (Rusian) nationalism and identifying Russia as a nation-state of ethnic Rusians. This scenario promoted an even more aggressive and outright genocidal attitude to other national movements that sprang up in the general climate of moderate liberalization and active nationalization.

This dualism of the national and imperial is vivid in the correspondence of the region’s top officials regarding the need to attract Chinese labor to the recently annexed Russian Far East for large-scale infrastructure projects (1861). Two missives included in this chapter reveal a confusing combination of imperialism and anti-colonialism: Russian administrators did not doubt the legality of the region’s annexation but were appalled by the example set by American companies that exploited and abused Chinese workers. Instead, Russian officials advocated reliance on Russian domestic free labor.

A different example of this duality is presented in the essay “On Islam in the Steppe” (1863) penned by Chokan Valikhanov, who was the son of a high-ranking Kazakh administrator and captain of the Russian army, and became prominent as a diplomat and scholar. Championing the goal of developing the Kazakhs from a clan-based society into a modern Kazakh nation, Valikhanov criticized the Russian imperial authorities for the lack of Russification policies and their support of Islam as presumably more organic to this nomadic Turkic people. To him, Islamization was a threat to Kazakh national identity, while Russification in the form of baptism into Russian Orthodoxy was a pass to modernity.

There was nothing ambivalent about Rusian (ethnic) nationalism hijacking the supreme authority in the Russian Empire and advancing the modern policy of ethnic cleansing against population groups deemed subversive. The chapter features extracts from nineteen documents concerning the displacement (Sürgün) of Caucasian Muslims in the 1850s–60s as the final solution to the pacification of the region. Russian military authorities had planned and executed a coordinated policy of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism, driving 80 percent of the original population from their homes—to the plains and to exile in the Ottoman Empire—and replacing them with Slavic peasants.

While the 1861 documents from the Far East reveal the imperial authorities’ reluctance to emulate Western colonialism, just several years later the impromptu imperial expansion in Central Asia was already framed by explicitly colonialist and Orientalist rhetoric, as can be seen in two documents included in the chapter. One is the proclamation issued by general Mikhail Cherniaev to the residents of Tashkent—the largest city in the region he had captured with negligible military force (1865). Stylized as if written by some fictional Harun al-Rashid, the document was sealed with Cherniaev’s personal stamp depicting his name in Arabic script. The second document was composed three years later for the same purpose: General Konstantin von Kaufman addressed the population of Samarkand, another ancient city conquered by Russian troops (1868). This time, there was no imitation of a grand Oriental ruler: Kaufman’s was a laconic and stern message from a European colonizer to the aboriginal population of a different and inferior culture.

The next document was produced by Mykhailo Drahomanov, a Ukrainian activist and lecturer at Kyiv University. Under the pressure of the Russian authorities, in 1876, Drahomanov was forced to emigrate to Switzerland. He used the 1878 International Literary Congress in Paris as a platform to protest the anti-Ukrainian policies of the Russian imperial government, outlining them in a pamphlet distributed at the congress—fragments of that text are translated for this chapter. Drahomanov also argued for the Ukrainian nation as one with an ancient history and distinct culture, and thus deserving political autonomy if not full sovereignty.

In parallel with the increasing nationalization of the empire, an opposite trend toward developing old imperial practices did not disappear entirely until the 1890s. In the 1860s, the Kazan-based Russian linguist and Orthodox missionary Nikolai Ilminsky elaborated a syncretic program for developing literacy among the Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples of the Middle Volga region in their native languages as a means of Christianizing them. His project resonated with Chokan Valikhanov’s vision and was generally endorsed by local educated elites interested in modern nation-building of their ethnoreligious communities, even at the cost of Christianization. The chapter features a letter written by Ilminsky in 1880 to the future renowned Turkologist Nikolai Katanov (1862–1922), a Khakass from Eastern Siberia. In this letter, Ilminsky explained his method, making it clear why his missionary project had played such a significant role in the late imperial and early Soviet nation-building of non-Rusian peoples. 

The documents included in this chapter cover the formative period in the history of the modern revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire during the first two decades after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, which made the abstract notion of “the people” a social reality.

The first text underlines the ambivalence of “the people” as a concept central to the revolutionary populism that emerged at the turn of the 1860s. Born to a Polish petty noble family in Ukraine, Volodymyr Antonovich was active in a clandestine Polish nationalist organization in Kyiv in the late 1850s. However, he soon evolved from politically embracing Polish nationalism to prioritizing the emancipation of peasants, who were overwhelmingly Ukrainian speaking in the region, which eventually made him a Ukrainian patriot. A fragment of Antonovich’s memoir included in the chapter outlines this intellectual evolution. It also highlights the autonomous roles of political ideology, ethnicity, and class as components of revolutionism. Their varying proportions produce different types of revolutionary movements.

Another representative of the Polish nobility, Konstanty Kalinowski, who came to identify with Belarusians, had undergone a similar transformation. He participated in a clandestine Polish organization during his student years in the late 1850s, but in 1862 he began producing and disseminating the revolutionary newspaper Peasant’s Truth in the Belarusian language set in Latin script. After the January Uprising of 1863 in the former Polish-Lithuanian territories, Kalinowski rose to the Polish revolutionary government’s rank of commissar for Lithuania. The chapter features three documents penned by Kalinowski at various stages of his revolutionary activity that elucidate the logic of his political evolution.

The third set of documents from the mid-1860s presents another dimension of revolutionary populism: political rather than ethnicity-based anti-colonialism. In the early 1860s, a small community of ethnically Russian (Rusian) Siberian expats formed in St. Petersburg, united by an interest in contemplating the future of Siberia through the lens of the newest social theories. Subsequently, the members of this intellectual network became known as Siberian regionalists. In 1865, they were arrested, along with several dozen acquaintances, on charges of plotting Siberia’s secession from the Russian Empire. The chapter presents extracts from the regionalists’ publications and police interrogations.

The rise of the revolutionary propaganda movement in the 1870s is reflected in the memoirs of Dmitry Klements, who, as a university student, took part in the so-called Going to the People movement of 1874–5. Excerpts from his recollections are included in this chapter. It is instructive to compare this cohort’s struggle to establish contact with “the people” in the countryside with Antonovich’s earlier experience.

By the end of the decade, the most radical group of populists, frustrated by the inefficiency of peaceful propaganda, resorted to systematic political terror. They formed the terrorist revolutionary organization People’s Will, and on March 1, 1881, succeeded in assassinating Emperor Alexander II. The organization invested no less effort in propagating the cult of self-sacrificial terrorism among Russian educated society, thus forming a distinctive subculture of “Underground Russia” by publishing the newspaper the People’s Will and leaflets. The chapter includes extracts from the first issue of the People’s Will published after the assassination of Alexander II. The issue celebrated the spread of anti-Jewish violence in the Ukrainian provinces as a sign of the popular revolution triggered by the assassination. Once again, purely political populist revolutionism demonstrated its intrinsic interconnectedness with ethnic populism. 

The prevailing scenario of the nationalizing empire was already fraught with unresolvable contradictions between competing elite nationalist projects. At the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of a mass society, characterized by a horizontal social hierarchy and an egalitarian social imagination, made the explosion of the sociopolitical situation inevitable. Nationalisms channeled and escalated political mobilization, while the old imperial structure once designed to buffer the intergroup contradictions had been largely dismantled by the nationalist regimes of Alexander III and Nicholas II.

Some imperial administrators realized that that the country was speeding toward catastrophe, and they attempted to introduce measures of nascent social engineering aimed at minimizing the most acute conflicts. One of these officials was an ambitious secret police officer, Sergei Zubatov, who, in 1898–1902, successfully promoted his project of “police socialism.” Under his patronage, the first legal trade unions were established in the empire’s main industrial centers, along with a legal Jewish party. Three documents included in this chapter depict Zubatov’s initiatives. While eventually discarded by the government in 1903, these initiatives were likely instrumental in preparing the ground for the revolutionary labor movement in 1905.

As Zubatov tried to keep the urban labor movement under control, in the remote and dramatically undergoverned rural Guria region in the southwestern Caucasus, typical local peasant unrest escalated to the level of a coordinated revolutionary movement. In 1902–6 they were talking of a “Gurian Republic” with its own democratic administration and justice system, run by revolutionaries. The Guria region was distinctive for its high level of popular literacy and small-scale landholding, even by the nobility, so the failed harvest of 1901 combined with the propaganda of Georgian social democrats among the unusually literate Gurians produced a remarkable effect. A cluster of seven documents depicts various stages in the history of the Gurian Republic between October 1902 and October 1905. They reveal how the basic socioeconomic frustration of peasants interfered with generalizations advanced by various revolutionary groups, ultimately producing a sustained popular revolutionary action, something the populists of the 1870s could only dream about.

In the imperial urban centers, the rising tide of mass revolutionary movement was spearheaded by anarchist groups that began spreading like wildfire after the second half of 1903. Anarchists developed a scenario of revolution as an urban uprising that they propagated in their leaflets, one of which is translated for this chapter. Despite being mocked by “systemic” revolutionary parties for their lack of theoretical foundation, anarchists produced the most comprehensive and influential algorithm of a revolution and its immediate aftermath.

The Revolution of 1905 culminated in October of that year: the general strike led to attempted uprisings in many imperial cities. At the very last moment, the imperial regime avoided collapse by promising a comprehensive political reform via the Manifesto of October 17, which triggered empire-wide counterrevolutionary riots that often assumed the form of Jewish pogroms. The chapter presents excerpts from interviews with witnesses of the Odessa pogrom in October 1905 recorded by a Jewish revolutionary party emissary. These are followed by an article written by a prominent Kazakh intellectual and liberal politician, Alikhan Bukeikhanov, in the wake of the October monarchist riot in the Siberian city of Omsk. Except for the anti-Jewish component, the events in Omsk followed the same timeline and scenario as the riots in Odessa and other imperial cities, underscoring the centrality of political component in monarchist riots.

Escalating throughout 1904 and 1905, the systemic political crisis of the Russian Empire coincided with the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) provoked by Russia’s adventurist imperialism in the Far East. The chapter accounts for this major political conflict by highlighting the situation of the prisoners of war, particularly the Japanese ones held in captivity near the city of Novgorod. Their condition is described in detail in a report produced by the US vice-consul in Moscow, who visited the Japanese POWs in February 1905, as well as in a petition penned by captive Japanese officers. The handling of POWs during that war revealed deep cultural differences between the warring parties as well as their consistent attempts to stick to universal norms in the treatment of enemies. These practices sharply contrasted with propaganda’s exploitation of cultural otherness, including the “Yellow Peril” hype, suggesting that racist prejudices were neither natural nor uncontrollable. 

The Revolution of 1905 toppled the old autocratic regime in Russia but also shattered the normative worldview of the radical intelligentsia, who were terrified by the actual experience of everyday revolutionary violence. Russia’s educated society had to seek new scenarios of modernization, eventually finding them in international progressivism with its ideology of “apolitical reformism.” Excerpts from the diary of a young woman, Ekaterina Sakharova (1905–11), chronicle this sea change.

The government relied on the same pool of ideas, although it tried to implement them in a quite conservative way. This included the agrarian reform carried out by Prime Minister Petr Stolypin. In a letter to Leo Tolstoy—the famed writer with a reputation of moral authority—Stolypin explained the philosophical views behind his social engineering efforts (1907). Paradoxically, it seems that by shifting the focus from political and economic disagreements to the moral plane, Tolstoy’s criticism seems to make it harder to substantiate opposition to Stolypin’s policies.

The next group of five documents attests to the common roots of Stolypin’s agrarian reform and the intelligentsia-backed public reform movement through societal self-organization as elaborated in Sakharova’s diary. A cross between the two, the Russian Grain society, was founded in 1908 and headed by Alexander Stolypin, a conservative journalist and brother of the prime minister. Aimed at providing peasants with firsthand experience in advanced farming techniques, Russian Grain arranged long-term “internships” on advanced farms abroad, mainly in Slavic regions. These peasants were asked to write reports sharing their experience. Five letters penned by three interns, one female and two males, are translated for this chapter. These are unique personal testimonies by actual peasants, who were prompted to reflect on agriculture as an economic enterprise rather than an inherited way of life. Placed in a foreign sociocultural environment, they also demonstrated their adaptability and communication skills.

Compared to different projects of unofficial self-organization, the sphere of institutional politics looked surprisingly regressive despite the introduction of the parliament (the State Duma), hailed as the chief gain of the 1905 Revolution. The government and the parliament were locked in a systemic confrontation over who was the true representative of national interests and hence the superior branch of power. Extracts from the first session of the Second State Duma discussing substantial issues (March 6, 1907), included in the chapter, vividly demonstrate this impasse. 

This chapter opens with minutes of the Fourth State Duma meeting after the outbreak of World War I (July 26 / August 8, 1914). Seven years had passed since the meeting presented in the previous chapter, and the radical evolution of the sociopolitical imagination became obvious. Both in 1907 and in 1914, Duma deputies were speaking on behalf of “the people,” but whereas in 1907 they referred to the revolutionary concept of the people as all the “toiling population,” in 1914 they invariably spoke of the people as ethnoreligious groups with whom they identified. Pledging support for the war effort, all the speakers conditioned it by demanding the recognition of nationalities’ interests by the government after the victory.

Next, the chapter presents Bashkir and Crimean Tatar soldiers’ songs recorded during the war. There is also a unique song sung by Crimean Tatars holding Ottoman passports, who were rounded up and deported from Crimea as enemy nationals. Bellicose enthusiasm, fatalist acceptance of one’s lot, and laments are as specific to these groups of Russian Muslims as they are typical of the wartime experiences of other subjects of the empire.

A cluster of nine documents presents different perspectives on the 1916 Uprising in Central Asia—more specifically, in the steppe region in the vicinity of the Issyk-Kul Lake. Faced with a dramatic shortage of labor for infrastructure and logistics projects behind the front line, the Russian government attempted to mobilize workforces all over the empire and abroad (in China), especially among the population groups that were legally exempt from the military draft. After a decade of intensive peasant colonization of the steppe boosted by the Stolypin government and accompanied by massive seizures of land traditionally used by Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoralists, the mobilization order ignited the accumulated anti-colonial ressentiment into a full-scale uprising. Among the materials included in the chapter are the depositions of eyewitnesses, recollections of uprising participants, extracts from the diary of a Russian woman presenting the perspective of the colonists, and documents depicting the genocidal character of the uprising’s suppression by the authorities and the colonists.

Besides giving a major impetus to all forms of nationalism, the war also encouraged rethinking the future of the empire as a supranational polity aimed at neutralizing sectarianism and accommodating diversity—in the form of a federation or a confederation. One of the most consistent theorists of this transformation was a Ukrainian intellectual, Maxim Slavinsky, who developed a concept of multitiered imperial citizenship combining simultaneous membership in ethnocultural nations and the pan-imperial Russian political nation. The chapter features excerpts from Slavinsky’s essay “The War and the Nationalities Question” (1915). The views expressed in the essay reflected a new type of social imagination that developed within the all-Russian educated society (obshchestvennost’) after 1905. These perspectives might have seemed like wishful thinking during the last years of Nicholas II’s reign, but they look quite different when viewed through the prism of the 1917 Revolution and the early Soviet project.

Discussions about the desirable future of the transformed Russian Empire were in their initial stages when the February Revolution of 1917 toppled the regime of Nicholas II. The new Provisional Government was preoccupied with sustaining the war effort amid the escalating political crisis. Still, the question of the postimperial arrangement loomed large in Russia, and the new government had to address it at once in the new oath of allegiance published in early March 1917. Essentially, this was an attempt to accommodate the ethnoreligious diversity of the Russian Empire by reviving the old practices of particularistic treatment of each group. In a modern mass society mobilized for total war, this archaic imperial practice could have led only to social disintegration. A practical scenario of social cohesion along the lines proposed by Slavinsky—at the regional, national, or postimperial level—did not yet exist.