Gathering and Geopolitics in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia
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The Eye of the Tsar: Intelligence- Gathering and Geopolitics in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Afinogenov, Gregory. 2016. The Eye of the Tsar: Intelligence- Gathering and Geopolitics in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493450 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Eye of the Tsar: Intelligence-Gathering and Geopolitics in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia A dissertation presented by Gregory Dmitrievich Afinogenov to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts November, 2015 © 2016 - Gregory Dmitrievich Afinogenov All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor David Armitage Gregory Dmitrievich Afinogenov The Eye of the Tsar: Intelligence-Gathering and Geopolitics in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia Abstract This dissertation argues for the importance of knowledge production for understanding the relationship between the Russian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and European actors, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It focuses specifically on intelligence-gathering, including espionage, as a genre of intellectual work situated in state institutions, oriented toward pragmatic goals, and produced by and for an audience of largely anonymous bureaucrats. It relies on archival sources from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Rome, as well as published materials. The dissertation begins by investigating how seventeenth-century Siberians compiled information about China, and how maps and documents were transmitted first to Moscow and then to Western Europe to be republished for wider audiences. It then examines the post-Petrine shift to more specialized forms of intelligence-gathering, focusing on industrial espionage in the Moscow-Beijing trade caravan. As the dissertation shows, the changing priorities of the Russian intelligence gathering apparatus shaped and often crippled the ability of Russian Qing experts to address wider audiences. On the mid-eighteenth-century Russo-Qing border, the dissertation follows the building of a robust Russian intelligence network in Qing Mongolia amid unprecedented inter-imperial tension, and its ultimate failure to achieve desired geopolitical ends. These intelligence failures are then shown to provide a compelling iii new explanation for the collapse of European imperial attempts at diplomacy in East Asia in the last third of the eighteenth century. Finally, the dissertation concludes by showing how, by means of strategic forgetting, intelligence was reconstructed into academic sinology during the reign of Alexander I. iv Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I: The Russo-Qing Encounter and European Intelligence, 1675-1725 .................. 33 1. Making Hybrid Frontier Texts in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy ........................ 39 2. The Pursuit of Russian Intelligence, 1625-1705 .......................................................... 56 3. Publishing and Russo-Qing Relations, 1695-1720 ...................................................... 70 4. From Sinology to Intelligence ........................................................................................ 76 Chapter II: The Noblest Commerce: Moscow-Beijing Caravans as Intelligence Nexus... 82 1. The Varieties of Caravan Intelligence .......................................................................... 84 2. Caravans and Strategic Intelligence .............................................................................. 91 3. Industrial Espionage ......................................................................................................... 99 4. Caravan Intelligence and the Academy-Jesuit Correspondence .......................... 107 Chapter III: Publish and Perish: Scholarship and Service at the Ecclesiastical Mission 133 1. Rossokhin: Down and Out in Beijing and St. Petersburg ...................................... 137 2. Leont’ev: Getting Ahead ................................................................................................ 157 3. Aleksei Agafonov and Anton Vladykin: Two Steps Back...................................... 171 Chapter IV: Frontier Intelligence and the Russo-Qing Cold War, 1755-1769 ................... 179 1. Secrecy and Russo-Qing Relations in the Mid-18th Century ................................. 183 2. Conquest and its Aftermath in Jungharia .................................................................. 193 3. Espionage and Defection in Transbaikalia ................................................................ 206 Chapter V: Ships in the Night: Imperial Encounters in the North Pacific ........................ 231 1. Local Power and the End of Intelligence, 1770-1813 ............................................... 235 2. The New Ohio: Kamchatka and Pacific Geopolitics, 1771-1791 ........................... 245 3. Russia and the Macartney Embassy, 1791-1795 ....................................................... 257 4. Iurii Golovkin and the End of Russo-Qing Diplomacy, 1805-1855 ...................... 275 Chapter VI: From Intelligence to Sinology ............................................................................... 285 1. Two Disasters ................................................................................................................... 288 2. Rebuilding the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission ......................................................... 302 3. Mission Reform and the Remaking of Sinology ....................................................... 314 4. Russian Sinology in the Nineteenth Century ........................................................... 323 v Conclusion: Knowledge and Power, Ignorance and Weakness ........................................... 329 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 336 vi Acknowledgments It is an ironic inevitability that in acknowledging the debts I have come to owe in the process of writing this dissertation, which focuses so intensively on the forgetting of intellectual forerunners and antecedents, I should forget so many myself; the following list is thus unfortunately and necessarily incomplete. Without the constant support, guidance, and intellectual serendipity that David Armitage has supplied over the years, this dissertation would not have been written. Neither could it have survived without Kelly O’Neill, who has always reminded me that legacies do not go away when you decide to ignore them, or Mark Elliott, who convinced me that I had something to say to a community of scholars I did not think I was competent to address. John Randolph, meanwhile, has already begun to shape the future fate of this work. Ann Blair, Terry Martin, Steven Shapin, David Brophy, Devon Dear, He Bian, and John LeDonne have each in their own way left their impression on the text; outside of Harvard, Willard Sunderland, Nicolas Standaert, Robert Maryks, and Matthew Mosca have done the same. An undertaking of this length would not have been worth it without friends. I count myself lucky to have accompanied Tom Hooker, Kathryn Schwartz, Mircea Raianu, Nick Crawford, Stephen Walsh, Sofia Grachova, Carla Heelan, Shaun Nichols, Polina Ivanova, Kristen Keerma, Mårten Saarela, Devin Fitzgerald, Eric Schluessel, Josh Ehrlich, and Carolin Roeder through various stages of this journey here, and Julia Leikin, Felix Waldmann, James Morris, Houssam Alissa, Eleanor Bindman, and John Lorinskas elsewhere. My research was made possible by grants from the American Councils for International Education and the Social Science Research Council, as well as short-term grants from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Davis Center for vii Russian and Eurasian Studies. The hospitality and bountiful espresso provided by Mark Mir of the University of San Francisco’s Ricci Institute was a powerful influence at the beginning of my research term. My thanks go to the archivists and staff of the Russian State Library, Russian National Library, Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Russian State Historical Archive, the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and other collections in both Russian capitals. In Paris, I benefited from the kind assistance of the staff of the Bibliothéque de l’Institut de France, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Observatoire, and the Archives des Affaires Etrangères; I must especially thank Fr. Robert Bonfils SJ of the Archives jésuites de la Province de France. In London, the staff of the Asian and African Reading Room at the British Library provided much-needed assistance, as did those of the National Archives in Kew. In Rome, the advice of Fr. Robert Danieluk SJ proved invaluable. The openness and generosity of these individuals and institutions, so unlike their eighteenth-century counterparts, made my