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Russian Expansion to the East Through the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

C. M. Foust
C. M. Foust
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

Most historical generalizations must be approached with a wary eye; Kliuchevskii's dictum that “the history of Russia is the history of a country in the process of colonization” is no exception. Taken unjudiciously this dictum grievously compresses time, focuses attention on only a single historical dynamic, lends to the historical process a pre-ordained character which is indeed usually absent. The historian's critical apparatus is dulled, and the delicate nuance and important variant are neglected. Moscow, it has been argued, was a chosen town to lead the southward and eastward expansion of the Great Russian people because of her physical location on the edge of the Valdai hills giving her control of the crucial waterways of European Russia. (Why not, for the same reasons, Vladimir or Rostov, Suzdal or even Uglich?) Muscovite expansion forms the central thread of Russian history, determining the economic and political structure of the state. It was the expansion which fixed and defined the necessity of the “service state,” which in turn subjugated all classes and groups to the all powerful tsardom. (Why not the reverse—the “service state” defining the expansion—and why did not an independent merchant class come to control the expansion, and the towns and politics of Muscovy?) To pursue the argument to a logical conclusion, die modern audioritarian state in Russia (bodi Soviet and Tsarist) is essentially a continuation of old Muscovy. As the latter expanded and colonized, so must the former. (The role of the Party and the Marxist dialectic, by this line of argument, has no fundamental historical significance.)

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 1961 , pp. 469 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1961

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References

1 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii O., Kurs russkoi istorii, Lektsiia II, in his Sochineniia (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1956–1959), I, 31Google Scholar.

2 Lappo-Danilevskii, Aleksandr S., Russkiia promyshlennyia i torgovyia kompanii v pervoi polovine XVIII stoletiia. Istoricheskii ocherk… (St. Petersburg: Tip. V. S. Balashev i komp., 1899), pp. 314–16Google Scholar.

3 Kotoshikhin, Grigorii K.O rossii v tsarstvovanie Aleksiia Mikhailovicha (3d ed.; st. Petersburgh: Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1884), pp. 157–59. cf.Google ScholarBaranovskii, Mikhail I. Tugan, Russkaia fabrika v proshlom i nastoiashchem. Istoriko ekpnomicheskoe izsledovanie… (St. Petersburg: Izd. L. F. Panteleeva, 1898)Google Scholar.

4 By far the best works on Siberia prior to the eighteenth century in the English language, and for that matter among the best in any language, are those of Lantzeff, George V., Siberia in the Seventeenth Century, A Study of the Colonial Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), andGoogle ScholarFisher, Raymond H., The Russian Fur Trade, 1350–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943)Google Scholar. This article owes a great debt to these superbly researched distillations of a mass of often contradictory and always incomplete material. Reference should also be made to the older “standard” histories of Siberia: G. F. Müller, P. A. Slovtsov, V. K. Andreevich, J. E. Fischer, and to the more modern works of B. G. Kurts, S. V. Bakhrushin, and K. V. Bazilevich.

5 Lantzeff, , Siberia, p. 13Google Scholar.

6 Raeff, Marc, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956), passimGoogle Scholar.

7 The best description of these troops is in Lantzeff, , Siberia, pp. 62–72Google Scholar.

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11 Chulkov, , Istoricheskoe opisanie, III, bk. 2, 242–55Google Scholar. Polnoe sobranie zakonov, No. 7906, X, 908; No. 8237, XI, 256; and No. 8436, XI, 480.

12 See Catherine's celebrated Instruktsiia of 1767 in The Documents of Catherine the Great (Reddaway, W. F., ed.) (Cambridge: The University Press, 1931), p. 265Google Scholar.