Russian Imperialism Under the Old Regime

‘Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia’, by Vasily Surikov (d. 1916)

There has been a periodic historiographic tendency to stress the continuity between the Russian Tsardom and the Soviet Union. Sometimes this argument is clearly driven by motivated reasoning, as with anti-Communist Leftists who wanted to discredit the U.S.S.R. by portraying it as “reactionary”. More often, the argument results from the ordinary work of historians, sifting the balance of continuity and change, and, in this era where the Great Man is out of fashion, concluding that radical changes from the top-down do not mean much; there are a lot of impersonal “forces” and “processes” in play that are not much affected by “high politics”. There are recurrent pieces of dubious evidence that show up in making this case,¹ but, of course, there also really were things that got held over after the Revolution: nothing comes from nothing.

The issue is that focusing on such instances of continuity is superficial and almost invariably misleading.² When practices of the Imperial Government utilised by the Bolsheviks are looked at in full context, it transpires to be within a matrix of other new policies and towards such a different end that the fact of an overlap fades into irrelevance. To put it in biological evolutionary terms, it would be like looking at a Velociraptor and a duck, the one descending from the other, and zeroing in on the fact they both have feathers. So it is with Tsarist and Soviet imperialism.

CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

The Muscovite State that emerged as the Islamised Mongol Empire splintered at the end of the fifteenth century was immediately confronted with enemies on three fronts—the Mongol Khanates in Siberia in the east, Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the west, and the terrifying slave-seeking remnant of the Golden Horde in the south, which was backed by the Ottomans. For three-hundred years, Muscovy fought for survival in a war that was at once defensive and expansionist, domestic and foreign. The Mongol inheritance and this experience gave Russia its distinctive features: limitless, arbitrary despotism—the Tsar required absolute control over every resource, including Russia’s people—and a strategic culture that recognised no distinction between internal and external enemies, seeking security in a predicament without natural frontiers through “defensive expansionism”.³

By the end of the eighteenth century, Siberia had been incorporated after a blood-drenched saga comparable with the Spanish arrival in the New World; Poland-Lithuania had been dismembered, with its core territories, including what is now Ukraine, annexed to Russia; and a final end had been put to the menace of the Golden Horde in Crimea. No sooner had this been completed and Russia was confronted by the French Revolution. The Russian troops leading the opération de sauvetage for Europe against Napoleon’s institutionalised Revolution proved to be a vector for the revolutionary contagion, which exploded in the 1825 Decembrist Revolt. But the challenge was thrown back and the stern rule of Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) provided the first true respite from insecurity for Russia, taking the country to a position of dominance on the Eurasian landmass unequalled before or since, and allowing her greatest cultural flourishing.⁴