Russia and the Concept of Empire

Ab Imperio, 3-4/2000 329 Seymour BECKER RUSSIA AND THE CONCEPT OF EMPIRE When Peter the Great formally redefined Russia as a European state, giving it a new name, Rossiiskaia imperiia, and himself a new title, imperator , he claimed for his country imperial status in the eyes of Europe. Russia had in fact been an empire long before Peter – at least, from Ivan the Terrible's conquest of the Muslim khanates along the Volga. In fact, Geoffrey Hosking has recently placed the theme of empire at the very center of Russian history. His thesis is that in Russia, state-building obstructed nation-building; the needs of empire required the development of an autocratic regime and the subjection of the entire population to its service, thereby precluding the growth of a healthy civil society.1 According to Hosking, Russia's “autocracy and backwardness were symptoms and not causes: both were generated by the way in which the building and maintaining of empire obstructed the formation of a nation.”2 Hosking assigns Russia to a category of polities distinct from the European national states that crystallized around royal courts in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, integrating their subjects into nations by means of mass armies, statewide market economies, and standardized literary languages. Hosking also distinguishes Russia from the European overseas empires established during the same centuries. Russia belongs rather, according to him, to the category of “Asiatic” empires. In 1 Geoffrey Hosking. Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917. Cambridge, MA, 1997. Pp. xxiv, xxvi. 2 Ibid., P. xxvii. S. Becker, Russia and the Concept of Empire 330 Asiatic empires a “supra-national elite with a strongly military ethos,” into which local elites are coopted and culturally integrated, (1) rules over subject ethnic groups; (2) gradually incorporates them into the taxation , administrative, and legal structure of the empire; and (3) subordinates trade, economic, fiscal, and religious considerations to military and administrative ones, and primarily to the political survival and territorial integrity of the state. In Asiatic empires the ruling aristocracy demonstrates no sense of ethnic superiority toward the various subject peoples, who, being left to their own devices on condition of obedience to imperial authority, are allowed to retain their own distinct cultures.3 Hosking's characterization of the Russian Empire as an Asiatic rather than a European type of state is open to serious objection. By his definition , not only Russia but its Austrian neighbor qualifies as an Asiatic empire. True, Metternich is alleged to have observed that “Asia begins on the Landstrasse,” the main road leading east out of Vienna, thereby consigning to Asia the Habsburgs' Hungarian kingdom. It is not, however , a matter of defining where Europe ends and Asia begins, and to which Russia belongs. Asia, after all, is nothing but a European intellectual construct.4 More to the point is the very concept of empire and its several varieties, Asiatic or other. A useful starting point is Michael Doyle's definition of empires: “relationships of political control imposed by some political societies over the effective political sovereignty of other political societies.”5 Doyle, like many other scholars, e.g., David S. Landes,6 insists on political control , rather than economic dependence alone, as the defining characteristic of empire. 3 Ibid., Pp. 8-9, 39-41. Hosking's differentiation between the Russian/Asian and European models was earlier asserted by, among others, Robert G. Wesson in his The Russian Dilemma: A Political and Geopolitical View. New Brunswick, 1974. P. 3: “Russia...was a different type of state from those of Western Europe, a semi-Asiatic empire as opposed to the nation-states.” 4 On Asia, as well as Africa, as European intellectual constructs, see Bernard Lewis. Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery. New York, 1995. Pp. 63-71 and M. W. Lewis and K. E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley, 1997. 5 Michael W. Doyle. Empires. Ithaca, 1986. P. 19. See also ibid., Pp. 19, 30, 32, 36, 40, 45. 6 David S. Landes. Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism // Journal of Economic History. 1961, Vol. 21. December. Pp. 496-512. Ab Imperio, 3-4...