Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence of Rus’-Land, Sixth to Nineteenth Centuries

Home , Aristotele Fioravanti, At Home (short story), Berendei, Caucasus Mountains

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence of Rus’-land, Sixth to Nineteenth Centuries

Dirk Hoerder Emeritus Arizona State University, formerly Universität Bremen

Abstract

Migrations in the intercontinental macro-region have been studied as proto-Slavic early settlement; as transit zone for Varangian-Arab trade and Byzantine-Kiev interactions; as space of Mongolian intrusion and as a territorially integrated Muscovite state with rural populations immobilised as serfs. This article integrates migrations from and to the neighbouring Scandinavian, East Roman, and Steppe macro-regions up to the fifteenth century and, more briefly, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In these poly-ethnic worlds, resident and in-migrant cultural groups adapted in frames of intercultural contact, migration, hierarchies, processes of power imposition and of exchange. An important facet is the ‘small numbers-large impact’ character of many migrations before the advance of Mongol/Tatar armies. From the fifteenth century, elites of the new Muscovite state such as traders and colonisers moved east into Siberia’s societies and attracted technical and administrative personnel from German-language societies. The traditional historiographical narrative, centred on an east-west perspective, is expanded to include the north-south axes of migration and cultural contact.

Keywords

Russian migrations – Varangian migrations – Byzantine migrations – Mongol migrations – cultural contact Eastern Europe – Kievan migrations – enslavement of Slavic speakers – labour migration in Russia

* I am grateful for comments by Leslie Page Moch, Claudia Rapp, and Lewis Siegelbaum as well as by participants of the symposium ‘Migrationen im mittelalterlichen Jahrtausend. Kulturwissenschaftliche Ansätze’, Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau, May 2012, and anonymous reviewers.

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Introduction

Migrations in the intercontinental macro-region which, under the name of ‘Russia’ or the ‘Russian lands’, at times extended from East Central Europe to the Kamčatka Peninsula and from the Arctic Sea to the Black Sea and Tien Shan Mountains have been studied as proto-Slavic early settlement, as transit zone for Varangian-Arab trade and Byzantine-Kiev interactions; as space of Mongolian intrusion and as a territorially integrated Muscovite state with rural populations immobilised as serfs. This article presents a synopsis, albeit superficial at many conjunctures, of neighbouring Scandinavian, East Roman, and Steppe macro-regions up to the sixteenth century and, briefly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The developments suggest that mobility and migration were hardly sepa- rated from each other and provide reflections on open issues in migration research:

– Are migrations over thousands of verst (1 verst = c. 1.07 km or 0.66 miles) to a different culture internal merely because they occur within an empire? The migrating men and women did not cross any borders between realms of rule (‘states’) – which, in any case, were imposed upon them – but they crossed boundaries between cultural ways of life and regional economies, traversed contact zones, and perhaps experienced the region’s vastness. – Are trading missions of merchants to Kiev, Novgorod, or Moscow ‘temporary’ if they involve annual months-long seasonal stays, residence over several years, or even settling over two or more generations? Is a trajectory extending over years, for example from Central European German-language regions into Siberia and back, ‘merely’ travel? It may involve cultural contact, recognition of Otherness, and acculturation. – How are concepts of resident and itinerant connected when trade involves a locally stationary merchant family or partnership and permanently mobile mercantile travellers who are ‘at home’ in many ports and places of exchange? Some merchants had no geographical home base and yet remained in their trading space – a kind of ‘travelliving’ to use a twenty-first-century neologism; ‘nomadism’, the older term was never applied to traders or, for that matter, clerics and other permanently mobile individuals. – How are migrations and cultural exchange related? Is it quantity – sizable numbers, of migrants – that allows the assumption of lasting impact? War- rior migrants in limited numbers subjugated vast populations of different lifeways and, while exploiting them, adopted their language. Similarly, small numbers of highly placed or highly skilled migrants, whether priests,

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architects, or specialised craftsmen, deeply impacted the receiving society’s building styles and religious practices while at the same time changing their own styles and liturgies. In more theoretical terms: how do quantitative, qualitative, and power hierarchy-based or sub-alternising approaches relate to each other? The questions inform the survey and are meant to be pursued in research on other macro-regions.

Recent research has focused on migrations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has connected Russian migrations to Siberian, southern Muslim, and western European ones. A quantitative-qualitative assessment of Eurasian migrations from 1500 to the present included both European and Asiatic Rus- sian data and noted the high ratio of migrants to non-migrants in the macro- region.1 This article focuses on migrations from the sixth and seventh to the sixteenth centuries with a concluding summary of sixteenth- to nineteenth- century migrations. It outlines early north-south trading connections and, subsequently, from and to Scandinavia in the north, from Byzantium in the south, and from the eastern steppe regions. In terms of rule, the period covers the realm of the Kievan rulers, during the early tenth to twelfth centuries, the Novgorodian rulers, eleventh to fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Mus- covite rule from the fourteenth century – as well as those of Pskov, Tver, and others. In these poly-ethnic worlds, resident and in-migrant cultural groups adapted because of the experience of intercultural contact, migration, new hierarchies, processes of power imposition, and of exchange. Subsequent to traders’ voyaging on the Birka-Itil route from the sixth century, three phases of migration to the vast regions east and west of the Dnepr River may be identified: the migration of armed ‘Varangian’ bands into settled lands of Slavic-speakers, the migration of tiny numbers of ‘Byzantines’ into the same region, and a massive ‘onslaught’ of steppe people – or was it an onslaught of Varangians and a migration of steppe peoples? From the fifteenth century, the elites of the new Muscovite state began to send emissaries east to Siberia’s societies and west to the German-language societies. The traditional historiographical narrative from an east-west perspective hides the

1 John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin (eds), Russia in motion: essays on the politics, society and culture of human mobility, 1850-present (Urbana 2011); Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad is my native land. Repertoires and regimes of migration in Russia’s twentieth century (Ithaca 2014); Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘Measuring and quantifying cross- cultural migrations: an introduction’, in: Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (eds), Globalising migration history: the Eurasian experience (16th–21st centuries) (Leiden 2014) 3–54, esp. 31–35.

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182 Hoerder north-south axes of mobility and contact that lasted for almost a millennium.2 Major migration systems emerged in the early modern as well as the post- serfdom periods. The high presence of mobility is paralleled by their absence in historians’ narratives until recently.3

Frames of Thought – or Being Framed by Established Discourses?

Those who want to understand the dynamic Eurasian spaces of settlement and turn to respected encyclopaedias will learn that, apparently, nothing worth mention happened: as regards the history of Eastern Europe before 1025 only the Byzantine and the First Bulgarian empires and ‘barbarian invasions’ are mentioned. For the chroniclers, the human beings who lived in these realms or migrated across smaller or larger regions did not count – still, they fed imperial courts and invaders.4 This survey of a thinly settled culturally interactive intercontinental space will, as far as possible, concentrate on voluntarily or involuntarily mobile people. In contrast to gate-keeping narratives, popular language and idiom, in the German version at least, did value mobility: a broadly knowledgeable person is bewandert (of migratory experience, accumulating funds of knowledge), a term presumably dating back to the trans-European migrations of artisan journeymen; someone impressed by an experience at home or elsewhere is bewegt (has been on the route, is moving). The vast region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was the arena of migrations and settlements of Baltic-, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic-speaking peoples. Transients, who came from the east, some from as far as the northern Chi- nese border, were described in the terms of cliché-laden master narratives as

2 The East-West perspective of Euro-centric historiography is, what might be called, an old hat: Herodotus described the conflict between the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids (est. sixth century bce) and the Greek states in this perspective. Later historians elevated him to ‘father of historiography’ and his interpretation to paradigm. Perspectives to the south, Egypt for example, or the Scandinavian north were not on the agenda. 3 Dirk Hoerder, ‘From migrants to ethnics: acculturation in a societal framework’, in: Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (eds), European migrants: global and local perspectives (Bos- ton 1996) 211–262; Dirk Hoerder, “Nützliche Subjekte’ – Fremde – Mittler zwischen Kulturen: Migration und Transkulturalität in Europa, 1600–1914’, Sozial.Geschichte – Zeitschrift für his- torische Analyse des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 18:3 (2003) 7–34; Christiane Harzig and Dirk Ho- erder with Donna Gabaccia, What is migration history? (Cambridge 2009). 4 Georges Duby (ed.), Atlas historique. L’histoire du monde en 334 cartes (Paris 1994) 26; Peter N. Stearns (gen. ed.), Encyclopedia of world history (6th ed., Cambridge 2001) 183–191, in which the following chapter bears the title ‘Western Europe and the age of cathedrals, 1000–1300’.

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‘Asiatic horsemen’ – though women and children also migrated. Other multi- ethnic groups were singularised into ‘Huns’ in Western European or ‘Tatars’ in Russian usage. They did pose massive threats to whole settled peoples, to specific communities, and to individual families in the many meso- and micro- regions of the Slavic-language realm. In the south, the region connected to the Anatolian-Syrian-Egyptian region as part of an integrated Mediterranean many-cultured and multi-religious world. From the East Roman Empire came trade goods, religion, building styles and elite migrants. Things and words migrated with their transmitters. As regards settlement, mobility in the macro-region originally involved slow, land-bound advances through the Plains of cultural groups from Mazuria in the north to the Lower Danube in the south. Nineteenth-century ethno- centric historians localised the origin of the groups in the uncivilised wetlands of the Pripyat-River and those between the rivers Bug in the west and Dnepr in the east. While the evolution of their common proto-Slavic language has been traced, the name ‘Sclavenes’ is an outside-imposed label, affixed by (East) Roman authors to the many peoples beyond the Black Sea. Westward, the migrations involved settlement in the Danubian plains and East Alpine foot- hills from mid-sixth century.5 In a further phase, migrants from among the Scandinavian-, Finno-Ugrian- and Baltic-language groups began to travel the northern water routes – sea, rivers, lakes – and the wide southward-flowing rivers. Further to the south, Huns moved from east to west (fifth century), followed by Magyars (eighth century) and Pecheneg (890s). These many-cultured groups – a term more flexible than the essentialist identities-suggesting term ‘peoples’ – often were agents of destruction to the settled cultures but, usually, established settled cultures of their own.6 As regards trade, merchants from Birka at Lake Malaren (near today’s Stockholm) and the Baltic island of Gotland travelled via the Volga River and Caspian Sea or Dnepr River and Black Sea to connect with Persian and Arab and, from the mid-seventh century, Arab-Muslim merchants. The new Islamic rulers engaged in fast military expansion and founded the Abbasid

5 The migrations were described in the Kievan monks’ ‘Primary Chronicle’ of about 1113 based on earlier Slavonic chronicles, native legends, Norse sagas, and the Greek-language annals of Ioannes Malalas (c. 491–578) and Georgios ‘Hamartolos’ (mid-ninth century), as well as on treaties between the Kievan Rus and East Rome. 6 Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The emergence of the Rus 750–1200 (London 1996), also mention northbound migrations from the Caucasian Mountain range (71–80) and trading places along the Donetsk River where Chinese goods from the Tang-period have been excavated (83). Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich. Entstehung-Geschichte-Zerfall (Munich 1992, rev. ed. 2001) 9–24.

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Caliphate, which would provide the frame for trade exchanges, in 749. The wealthy elites in the first and second capitals, Damascus and Baghdad, coveted luxury items, furs and amber in particular, from the north. The supplying Got- land- and Birka-merchants sailed east on the Baltic Sea and transhipped their goods from larger vessels unto river boats at Staraia Ladoga at Lake Ladoga, as well as at Gorodishche and Novogrod at Lake Ilmen. Further south, from the eighth century, Khazar middlemen or families were involved and, from the tenth century, Bulgarian ones. The northern trading centres were the exchange nodes for Arabian, Persian, and Byzantine (Roman or Greek) southern ‘exotic’ products, coveted by Scandinavian elites; Choresm, a region of oases south of the Aral Sea, and Itil the southernmost port of the Caspian Sean for northern ‘exotic’ ones. The latter were close to the caravan-trade cities of Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand at the western end of the (later so-called) Silk Roads (plural) and at the northern end of Arab and Iranian merchants’ routes from Indian Ocean and Arab Sea port communities.7 A traveling merchant, Ibn Fad- lan, left an account of the mid-Volga city of Bolgar, inhabited by ‘Volga Bul- garians’ mixed with Finish-, Armenian-, and Slavic-speakers, predominantly Muslim as well as poly-religious. A Varangian-Rus’ force attacked the city in 922. The Volga route remained a trade route; the Dnepr waterway became a major migration route: from armed and hierarchic métissage the ‘Varangian- Rus’ culture and the Kievan realm of rule (‘state’ would be an anachronistic term) emerged.8 In the region as a whole, residents and newcomers engaged in numerous large-scale overlapping or sequential migrations from the seventh to the sixteenth century: (1) people of (east) Slavic language variants as well as of other languages moved; (2) Scandinavian men and women from specific small locations-of-origin in- and transmigrated; (3) from and to the East Ro- man (‘Byzantine’) Empire cultural contact and migration ‘took place’ or, better, involved manifold interactions; (4) westward contacts in the Baltic cultural space connected Novgorodian and Lübeck and Brügge Hanseatic merchants, southward ones to Arab and Iranian merchants. Distinct aggressive spatial mobility involved (5) the advance of mobile cultural groups from Eastern Siberia as well as Middle and Central Asia into the Rus’s core lands and beyond, and (6) mobility as well as settlement projects of cultural groups along the east- west corridor between eastern Slavic- and Greek/Roman-language societies. (7) In the northern East Baltic region, a multi-ethnic knightly Order intruded

7 Peter B. Golden, Central Asia in world history (Oxford 2011) 50–62. 8 Barry Cunliffe, Europe between the oceans. Themes and variations: 9000 bc – ad 1000 (New Haven 2011) 12, 263, provides maps of the trans-European migratory space.

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 185 aggressively from the thirteenth century to its defeat at Tannenberg (Grun- wald), 1410, by a Polish and Lithuanian army. This Order had been founded in Palestine by the many-cultured intruding Christian knights. Expelled when Muslim rulers took over, the well-organised band of armed men, restlessly and over generations, migrated or fought their way in search of income, land, and peasant populations to rule via Mediterranean islands to Transylvania and ‘crusades’ against settled non-Christian agricultural peoples in the Baltic Memel River region: the, by then, self-labelled ‘German Knights’ labelled the targets of their aggression ‘Saracens of the north’ or ‘heathens’.9 (8) Finally, from the sixteenth century, in power struggles over rule on the Baltic Sea and adjoining lands, soldiers of Polish-Lithuanian, Danish, Swedish, and Russian belonging were sent to fight in and conquer the Rus-lands. Wounded and demobilised men, as well as those left behind after lost campaigns, stayed involuntarily, settled and became in-migrants to the region.

Migrations from the North: ‘Varangians’ and Cultures of East Slavic Languages

When men and women of early Slavic language had settled in central parts of the region that would later be called Rus’ rather than ‘Slavic’ lands, others, mainly men, from the northwest began to penetrate into the region. Scandina- via’s and Jutland’s naturally limited agriculturally usable land, given population increases, forced people to depart. Long and protected coasts as well as resulting seafaring expertise made this possible.10 In a vast arc they migrated from economic micro-regions and meso-regional realms of rule westbound over-seas to Iceland, Greenland, Vinland, and – according to recent evidence – further south; eastbound via the Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Finland and via the Narva, Neva, and Daugava (or Western Dvina) rivers to the lakes Peipus, Ladoga, and

9 Eric Christiansen, The northern crusades: the Baltic and Catholic frontier, 1100–1525 (Lon- don 1980); Michael Burleigh, Prussian society and the German order: an aristocratic corpo- ration in crisis, 1410–1466 (Cambridge 1984); Helen Nicholson, Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights: images of the military orders, 1128–1291 (Leicester 1993); Werner Paravici- ni, ‘L’Ordre Teutonique et les courants migratoires en Europe centrale. xiiie–xive siècles’, in: Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Le migrazioni in Europa secc. xiii–xviii (Florence 1994) 311–324. 10 The Portuguese Crown’s early fifteenth-century decision to send ships to explore possibil- ities of expansion or trade along the African Coast was motivated by similar conditions: limited agriculturally usable land, seafaring expertise, a reservoir of manpower, a search for economic opportunities for both ruler and individuals.

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Ilmen; and west- and southward across the North Sea to the islands settled by Britons and immigrant Angles and Saxons as well as the peninsula later called ‘Normandy’. From there they would continue to Sicily and to the cities in Syria and Palestine, holy to Jews, Christians, and from the seventh century to Muslims.11 Contemporaries and later historians named these circum- and transcontinental waterborne migrants according to perceived roles: (1) state- building Normans (and Nor-women), (2) Vikings as raiders or long-distance traders, and (3) Varangians as aggressive power-imposing settlers and traders. Like the ‘Sclavenes’, the northern men and women were labelled according to the perceptions and discourses of chroniclers from the societies in which they arrived or which they aggressed. Naming involves categorising and affixing la- bels, it furthers contrastive depictions and often hinders integrated analysis.12 By place of origin or, more analytically, space of socialisation, the generic seventh-century ‘Varangians’, probably traders with shared liability, included ‘Swedes’ from Uppland (Uppsala län) and Östergötland, ‘Gotlanders’ from the isle of Gotland, and others who mixed with Baltic and Finno-Ugric residents- migrants. Archaeological research indicates that Swedes were armed, military- style, predominantly male migrants while Gotlanders were trade-oriented family-style migrants.13 Via the Baltic Sea they kept contacts westward to the trading spaces of the North Sea merchants.14 The in-migrants were also called ‘Rus” (Slavic), ‘Rūs’ (Arabic), and ‘Rhōs’ (Greek), a name presumably originat- ing in an older name of one of the regions of departure, RoÞer or RoÞin at the Swedish Baltic coast. In a linguistically-connotatively-conceptually confusing turn, the name came to be used for the new mixed Nordic-Slavic population

11 Lucien Musset, ‘L’aristocratie normande au xie siècle’, in: Philippe Contamine (ed.), La noblesse au moyen âge xie–xve siècles: essais à la mémoire de Robert Boutruche (Paris 1976) 71–96; David Walker, The Normans in Britain (Oxford 1994). The court of the Sicilian rulers, esp. of Norman Roger ii (1103–54) and Hohenstaufen Frederick ii (1212–50), were centres of intercultural and inter-religious exchange. The ‘German’ Frederick was the son of a Norman mother and a German-language father and was educated in Sicily. 12 Gwyn Jones, A history of the Vikings (Oxford 1968) 241–268; Franklin and Shepard, Emer- gence of the Rus; Dominik Waßenhoven, Skandinavier unterwegs in Europa (1000–1250). Untersuchungen zu Mobilität und Kulturtransfer auf prosopographischer Grundlage (Berlin 2006). 13 Archeological data indicate the presence of migrants from the Baltic island of Åland at the middle Dnepr in the tenth century. 14 The westbound trade routes gained in importance when Arab Muslim merchants began to compete with South European Christian merchants in the eighth-century Mediterra- nean. John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the rise of Russia. A study of Byzantino-Russian relations in the fourteenth century (Cambridge 2010) 9.

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 187 and, finally, as ‘Russians’ for their East Slavic-speaking métis-descendants in, what was called from the fifteenth century, Rus-land or Russia.15 From their initial settlements, the Varangians expanded to the vast rural lands where fixed abode, contrary to later constructions, was not the rule. For Slavic speakers, in the eighth and ninth centuries:

‘home’ was itself a movable and uncertain affair for the inhabitants of the river valleys and the depths of the forests alike – part hunter-gathers, part fishermen and part agriculturists [i.e. families, d.h.]. They had few ties other than, in some areas, burial-grounds and ancestor worship to bind them to a particular spot, and dearth and hunger offered periodic stimuli to move on, while the increase in mouths, which prolonged freedom from dearth could engender, would ultimately have the same effect. Therefore the population of the major river valleys was never wholly im- mobile and the small but fairly numerous promontory settlements […] seem to have been meeting-points and places of co-residence of diverse ethnic groups over a protracted period.16

Establishing Rule in Kiev: Highly Mobile Elite Families and Their Warriors

Having established rule over local people with Novgorod and Pskov as centres,17 some of the Varangians migrated southward down the Dnepr and in the eighth century imposed themselves in the Kiev region on East Slavic-speaking families who had lived there since the sixth century. The mostly male migrants’ mixing with the residents, often terminologically downgraded to ‘locals’ without a

15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nation- alism (1983, third ed., London 1986). 16 Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of the Rus, 6–27, quote 6. 17 A later founding legend personalised the name and hierarchised the ‘peoples’. Three Nordic brothers – along with their families and dependents – were called by resident strife-torn Slavic groups to reestablish order. The oldest, Rurik, provided the name for both Rurik-legend and Rurikid-dynasty. In most such stories, young brothers migrate – from an age cohort that wants to separate from parents and, literally, depart from hearth and home. In Nordic sagas sisters and wives were also mentioned. The (ascribed) name of such in-migrants often became the name of the new upper strata and, by extension, of the subjugated peoples of the region. Benedict S. Benedikz (translated, revised, rewritten), The Varangians of Byzantium, by Sigfús Blöndal (Cambridge 1978) 1–7; Patrick J. Geary, The myth of nations. The medieval origins of Europe (Princeton 2001).

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188 Hoerder larger horizon, involved violence. The mobile-settling heavily armed newcomers from the north enslaved Slavic men to work, including building boats for further mobility, and made Slavic women sex objects, concubines, or wives. The enslaved might be commodified and sold and, as such, would be handled as carefully as other wares. The Nordic migrants established themselves as an overlay while being subversive to the residents’ ways of life. Was the compara- tively limited number of Scandinavian migrants absorbed as suggested by their adoption of the Slavic language or did they deeply change the region’s and sub- alternised residents’ economy as suggested by patterns of trade? Hierarchical métissage involved a process of ethnogenesis with a new Rus’ and Slavic ‘Rus- sian’ population emerging. Like all peoples, they were never characterised by an essentialist folk (or national) identity but evolved continuously. In the ninth century, a Kievan society emerged and, at the beginning of the tenth century, the Novgorod ruler moved his capital to Kiev (911)18 and began a further aggressive expansion: attacks against cities with Muslim populations in the southeast, against Orthodox Christian populations in the south, and south- westward moves against peoples in the Balkans. Parallel, a westward migration of Slavic speakers to the Danubian plains and northern Greece began. Each and every military campaign mobilised men, including mercenaries from afar, generated masses of refugees, and required resettlement of lands vacated of their populations. Such dramatic occurrences enter historic narratives. While war-faring over large distances became the core of power-subservient rather than masterly ‘master narratives’, movement through geographic space with the goal of finding a sustainable way of life were deliberately forgotten. The Kievan elites were highly mobile. The – perhaps legendary – first ruling couple Igor and Olga, seems to have been born in Novgorod and Pskov respec- tively. After Igor’s death at the hands of soldiers of a neighbouring (Drevlian) ruler in 945, Olga established the new state’s tax and military structures and regulated the hosting of travelling merchants and officials. She undertook a voyage to Orthodox Christian Constantinople in about 955 and, in a political move, agreed to be baptised or sought baptism.19 Diplomatically astute, she also sent a delegation westward to German-speaking Latin Christian rulers in search of faith or alliances. Igor’s and Olga’s son Sviatoslav i. (r. 960s–972), however, sent all Christian emissaries-missionaries off and expanded his rule to the Sea of Azov and the Don River. Poly-ethnic, Turk-speaking, multi-religious Khazaria – with an elite seemingly converted to the Jewish religion in the

18 Franklin and Shepard (The Emergence of the Rus, xix) caution against capital city-centred or ‘kievocentric’ interpretation of the many moabilities. 19 How, where, and when the baptism happened is controversial, as is its religious content.

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 189 eighth century – ruled the steppe region north of the Black and Caspian seas in the ninth and tenth centuries and thus the trade routes controlling the western segment of the trans-Asian Silk Roads. They encouraged trade by men of different cultures and religions as ‘foreign’ merchants. Sviatoslav, in order to appropriate for himself this source of wealth – trade to and from the Chinese Empire’s artisanal family producers – destroyed the Khazar elite. He trans- ported prisoners off. In Kiev, the number of Jewish residents, who had trade connections as far as Provence, increased. In westbound troop movements, Svi- atoslav’s soldiers destroyed the first rule of in-migrated poly-ethnic Bulgars in the Balkan-Danubian region. In 972 he was killed, like his father, by soldiers of a neighbouring (Petcheneg) ruler probably encouraged by a delegation from Con- stantinople where Sviatoslav’s fast growing power had raised apprehensions. His three sons immediately began to fight over the inheritance. One son, Vladimir, born by a bondswoman and prophetess Malusha, first sought refuge with relatives in Sweden-Norway in 976, then returned with an army of Norse warriors and won.20 He settled Turk-language Torki and Berendei as border guards at the southern limits of his realm. He sent delegations to or heard wise men of Muslim, Jewish, Latin Christian, and Greek Christian faith and, given his delegation’s report on the splendours of the Hagia Sophia and Orthodox liturgy, decided for the latter. This did not stop the aggression. He moved with an army to the Crimean Peninsula, less than 300 nautical miles off Constan- tinople, and occupied the East Roman city of Chersones (modern: Cherson). Threatening to advance, he negotiated to have Emperor Basil’s ii sister Anna Porphyrogenita21 as his wife. Basil demanded Christianisation of the Kievan realm as part of the bargain. Much of the valuables captured in Chersones, Korsun in Slavic, came to Novgorod, the first bishop of which, Ioakim Korsuni- anin, seems to have had family ties to the Crimean city. After Vladimir’s death, in 1015, the sons again competed for rule and mobilised troops or sent assassins over large distances: Jaroslav hired Varangians and Novgorodians; while Mstislav employed Slavic-speakers according to some chroniclers or, according to others Saxons, Hungarians, and Slovenes as well as men from the Steppes and the Caucasus mountains as mercenaries. All marched across settled lands over vast distances, were left behind or demobilised somewhere, had distant families or formed new ones. The ‘Rurikid’

20 Another example of macro-regional mobility was the later Norwegian King Harald iii (1047–66) who fled to Kiev, lived in Constantinople 1034–1043, and then returned to Nor- way. Benedikz, Varangians of Byzantium, 32–102, for other travellers, 193–222. 21 Porphyry, a red stone, was imported from Egypt and used for the walls of a room in the imperial palace. This indicates artisanal connections and mobility of transport workers.

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190 Hoerder family under Jaroslav (r. 1019–1054), was part of the trans-European nobility and he married off his children – involving migration with armed retainers and servants – into families ruling Norwegian-, French-, Hungarian-, Polish-, and German-language territories or sections of them. An emphasis on fixed terri- toriality of rule obscures such military, commercial, and cultural interaction.22 And emphasis on the small number of in-migrant rulers and their armed men obscures the mobility and interactive life of the large numbers of ruler- and warrior-feeding agricultural families.

Contacts in the South: East Slavic-speaking Varangian Rus’ and the Many-Cultured East Romans

Their expansion in general and especially the southward advance made the Varangian-Rus’ people-in-ethnogenesis strange and curiosity-arousing objects for the neighbouring-yet-still-distant southern realm of rule, the chroniclers in East Rome’s capital Constantinople.23 In 860, a mere two centuries after the Varangians’ arrival in the Lake Ladoga region, a fighting force of some 5,000 of their descendants as well as recent migrants appeared before the city’s gates – located some 2,000 km from Novgorod as the crow flies – in quest of booty. The Byzantine Emperor, moving with thousands of soldiers eastward in the context of border wars with the Persian Empire, successfully asked for negotiations and, prudently, also reversed the direction of his marching men. The intended clash became the beginning of intensive interaction – an unplanned ‘bumping into each other’ in which the participant units might bump off in many directions like billiard balls. Unexpected by both multi-ethnic Rhom and Varangian-Rus’24 the potential clash would solidify the role of the Dnepr as an axis of contact. Chroniclers would name the physical-geographic axis societally-functionally as ‘route from the Rus’ to the Rhom’. Migration and trade became markers for conceptualising space: merchants travels, ‘Christian missions to the Slavs’, migration of personnel of the East Roman Church, voy- ages of Kievan rulers with their retinues to Constantinople, marriage migration of Byzantine imperial princesses to Kiev; migration of underemployed job-seeking Varangians-Rus’ soldiers to the East Roman Empire’s labour

22 Christian Raffensperger, Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the medieval world, 988–1146 (Cambridge ma 2012). 23 A Rus’ delegation had come to Constantinople in 838. 24 East Roman texts occasionally mentioned both components, thus suggesting ethnogenesis as an ongoing process.

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 191 market segment ‘military work’.25 Even though aggressions occurred until the mid-eleventh century,26 trade continued: mobile merchants paused, let soldiers ‘do their thing’, and resumed trade. The soldiery destroyed populations but not elite demand and capability to pay. The ‘drifting’ of names, as in the case of Scandinavian-Varangian-Rus’ be- coming Slavic-speaking Russians, had a counterpart in the construction of names. Their wealthy southern neighbour, the East Roman Empire with its many-cultured ‘Rhomaian’, ‘Rhom’, or ‘Rum’ inhabitants, was renamed a century after the Empire’s demise in 1453. The Augsburg humanist Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580) decided to eliminate the memory of an eastern Rome with the intention to elevate the western Carolingian reinvention of a ‘Rome’ and the Latin-language Church to the sole successors to ‘the Roman Empire’ before the fifth century. Using as reference the Greek settlement of Byzantion, near which Constantinople had been built since the 330s, he relabelled the polity and people ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantines’. Western historians have used the misnomer ever since even though Greek-speakers in Europe’s southeast retained both memory and name, calling themselves Rōmaíoi or Romií until the nineteenth century. Ethnic naming involves bordering and fixing in place, an act that disguises the continuous change, the composing and re-composing, i.e. the transitoriness of ethno-cultural groups. Fixed names referring to shift- ing entities have disastrous consequences for scholarly analysis. The high levels of literacy among East Rome’s elites – poly-ethnically composed of speakers of Greek, of the Latin of the fourth- and fifth-century in-migr ants from Italy, of Macedonian, Bulgarian, Vlach, Alan, Magyar, and Georgian – as well as the imperial chancellery’s extensive documentation indicate knowledge about the northern neighbouring Others, first seen as aggressors and summarily called Varangians, Rhōs, or Tauroskytians. With increased interactions – continued and growing trade after the negotiations of 860, Orthodox Christian missionising from 862, and trade privileges for Varangian merchants from 907 – the East Roman literati’s depictions changed from ‘alien’ and ‘dangerous’ to information about the Kievan populations, their

25 Jerzy Wyrozumski, ‘La géographie des migrations en Europe centrale et orientale du Moy- en Age au début des temps modernes’, in: Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Le migrazioni in Europa secc. xiii–xviii (Florence 1994) 191–198; Michael Bibikov, Vladimir M. Kabuzan and Vladislav D. Nazarov, ‘Ethno-demographic changes in the region of northern Pontos- southern Russia-Ukraine’, in: Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Le migrazioni in Europa secc. xiii–xviii (Florence 1994) 271–297. 26 A last aggression of a Kievan army of, according to chroniclers, 20,000 men with about 400 boats, ended in defeat in 1043.

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192 Hoerder customs, and Christian pr actices. In contrast to widely held images, the actual informants, mobile traders and migration or travelling clerics were few while their impact was immense. They created a commercial space extending from Novgorod to Constantinople and expanded East Roman Greek-language Christianity to the Kievan and, subsequently Muscovite realm.

Few Migrants, Massive Impact: Commerce with and Organised Religion from the ‘Byzantines’

Given Constantinople’s role as central exchange node between the western, eastern, and Arab-Indian Ocean segments of the, then, global tri-continental commerce and its wealth; and given Varangian-Rus’ merchants’ interest in trade and profit and Varangian-Rus’ princes’ interests in appropriating luxury goods for themselves, intensive exchanges emerged. The Emperors countered aggressions with negotiations; diplomacy, far more cost effective than warfare, was their preferred instrument of policy.27 For warrior princes, intent on proving their masculinity through aggressiveness, negotiations may have been face-saving when ‘unmanly’ defeat loomed. From the aggression-negotiation of 911, a treaty regulating trade relations emerged: the Emperors permitted (or had to permit) the coming of merchants, men rather than families, for a time-limited stay. The treaty of 944, after a further Kievan aggression and defeat, contained clauses more favourable to the Constantinopolitans. The price for slaves – young men and women captured in raids and force-migrated – was reduced by half. Cumans, who had ruled the steppes north of the Black Sea since the end of the eleventh century, supplied most of them. Did they make up for their loss of profit by increasing the vol- ume of the trade? The Kievan merchants’ right of temporary residence was limited to places outside of Constantinople’s walls and they could enter the city only unarmed and in groups of no more than fifty men at a time. They were to be supplied with free provisions for up to one month and receive support for their return voyage, presumably in the autumn. Such protocols of trade were common in the Europe of this time since territorially fixed dynasties had to rely on the ca- pabilities of trans-territorially mobile merchants for economic exchange. The last of the three treaties was signed by fewer merchants with Scandinavian names – does this indicate the Varangians’ acculturation in Kiev or changed

27 Emperor Konstantin vii Porphyrogenetos, De administratio imperio (948–952).

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 193 power relations? Subsequent to their Christianisation, Rus’ princes accepted trade relations that were more favourable for the Christian Rhom merchants. The East Roman merchants traded only as far as the Crimean cities28 and left the Dnepr-Kiev-Novgorod route to Rus’ colleagues. They exported Chris- tian cult objects like icons, silver utensils for the liturgy, luxury products for the court and upper strata, glass, amphora with wine and oil, and, for mosaics, tesserae, i.e. ceramics, and terracotta pieces. Northbound clerical personnel carried Greek texts with them. Thus, far fewer men than objects and words migrated. All were to have perhaps more (constructive) influence in the macro-region than the large numbers of (destructive) mobile warriors. From the Kievan economy – the macro-region’s most powerful principality from mid-ninth to mid-twelfth century – merchants exported beeswax (in high demand for liturgical purposes), honey, timber, furs, and, as transit traders, slaves from the Steppes and amber from the Baltic. The material-cultural impact found visible expression in the ‘new Kiev’ that Prince Jaroslav ordered to be built from 1037. Living in Novgorod were ‘overseas merchants’ and Byzan- tine and Serbian painters and travellers, and Armenian and Byzantine-Roman motifs in art and products were common:

The city was linked by trade with Scandinavian countries on the Baltic, with Kiev and Constantinople in the south, Smolensk in Western Russia, the littoral of the White Sea and the Transuralian regions in the north- east, and, via the Volga, with the Arabian states in the south-east.29

Merchants of different religious faith are missing in Christian chronicles. Archaeological evidence indicates that men of Jewish religion traded along both the Volga and Dnepr routes. In the early centuries, they may have come from the Syrian region, later from the Jewish community in Constantinople. The Khazar elite decided to become Jewish but not to engage in trade itself. Pat- terns of trade changed from the end of the tenth century with the Kievan take- over of Khazaria, semi- and partial Christianisation of peoples in the transit

28 Chroniclers listed the multiplicity of ethno-cultural groups in the cities of the peninsula and surroundings. 29 Vladimir Gormin and Liudmila Yarosh, Novgorod. Art treasures and architectural monu- ments 11th–18th centuries, transl. from the Russian by Lenina Sorokina and Carolyn Justice (Leningrad 1984) 5–23, quote 6–7; Ferdinand Seibt, Ulrich Bosdorf and Heinrich Theodor Grütter, Transit Brügge – Novgorod. Eine Straße durch die europäische Geschichte (Essen 1997); Norbert Angermann and Klaus Friedland (eds), Novgorod. Markt und Kontor der Hanse (Cologne 2002).

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194 Hoerder region, and increasing usage of Slavic as language of exchange. In Scandina- via, usage of Muslim-Arabic burial objects ended; their provenance had varied over the centuries in relation to changing power relations in Arabia, Persia, and Mesopotamia.30 Parallel to the southbound merchants, Christian clerics from Constantino- ple’s Patriarchate migrated on ‘missions’ – a later term – to the Varangians. In 862, only two years after the first clashing-negotiating contact, the brothers and monks Cyril and Methodios travelled-migrated northward. Like men, women, and children displaced by warfare, they would move about, but in contrast to refugees would not be classified as vagrants. Rather, like traveling rulers, they were respected, received accommodation and sustenance. Itinerancy of the powerful and the influential from one centre of mission to another, between monasteries, or from castle to castle and palace to palace, has never been com- pared to the alms-seeking mobility of the weak: goal-directed and resource- appropriating powerful vs. begging poor. When Methodios travelled further west, however, and reached Bohemia’s inhabitants – which the Latin Church as institution and the Bavarian and Salzburg bishops as local impersonation claimed as their tithe-payers – respect ended.31 The competitors had him ar- rested and asserted their ‘right’ to the Bohemian and Pannonian income, the dues of those Christianised or subjected to the faith. Had Methodios been suc- cessful, the flow of funds and commerce would have been directed eastward. To reach the (future) faithful, Cyril and Methodios, in the planning phase of their itinerant mission had decided for language flexibility rather than fixed liturgical tradition. They ended the dogma of the oneness of liturgy and Greek language and, using the oral South Slavic version as a basis, created the ‘Glagolitic’ alphabet which, in Cyrillic version, would assume macro-regional and lasting impact as Old Church Slavonic which came to be used in most East Slavic languages.32 Thus two men and their entourage migrated with words and texts, and deposited both with local preachers: a migratory innovation in- tending to expand and popularise a belief system, to spread formal Church

30 Information is based on Scandinavian, Slavic, Byzantine, and Arab sources. Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of the Rus, 39–80, 183–204. 31 The Latin versions had been translated in the third and fourth centuries from the Greek and had been canonised – or degraded as apocryphal – by clerics at Church Councils from the fourth century. 32 The creation of a written version of a local language had repeatedly been part of Chris- tian expansion, for example in Armenia and among the Goths (by Wulfila) in the fourth century.

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 195 institutions, to elevate the role of the institutions’ priests, and to enlarge the sphere of influence of Emperor Basileios i (867–86) and his successors. The language policy and mobility of the two men as well as the Kievan ruler’s decision to receive them created a migration-inducing demand: the expanding Church needed personnel, churches to be built, icons to be painted. Up until the mid-eleventh century the Metropolitan of the new bishopric of Kiev was always a Rhom – sometimes called ‘Greek’ because of the language – sent by Constantinople’s Patriarch. When the first Metropolitan of Rus’ culture, Ilarion (before 1155), assumed the position, he began to label Rus’/Kievan Christian- ity as distinct from the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate.33 To build churches and monasteries architects from Constantinople migrated to Kiev and as far as Novgorod, painters specialised in icons and frescoes followed and a specialised labour market emerged. However, only a few craftsmen and co-workers followed. The skilled migrants trained local craftsmen who translated the Byz- antine architectural-artistic language and, in some cases, even had to learn basic new production methods. Since Ruslandish churches had customarily been built from wood, building craftsmen had to learn how to make bricks and how to develop masonry. Such training avoided job-competition between residents and migrants and, since the construction firms or funding institutions for stone-churches remained local, so did profits and jobs. Did familial and intimate contacts emerge between in-migrating ‘Greek’ men and the local residents, especially women? The sources do not provide any information. Since the Orthodox Church never opposed marriage of priests, migrating clerics may have come with families or formed families with resident women. The latter would be mediators in terms of language and customs. As the Kievan people had emerged from a north-south hierarchical fusion- métissage, their spirituality, Church institutions, and material liturgy developed from south-north fusion-métissage. Methodologically and theoretically research requires a joint Church and migration history and the study of theological- artistic everyday cultural contacts on overlapping levels. Since resident Rus’ artisans-artists were part of the process, a mixing of distant imported languages with local languages of form, colour, and symbols emerged. Quantita- tive studies of translations and icons produced and of the presence of ‘Greek’ names indicate the respective shares of in-migrants and residents in religious production. Greek priests and craftsmen did attempt to protect ‘their’ segments of the labour market: for some two hundred years, the explanatory texts in icons of saints, mosaics, or frescoes remained Greek in lettering and language rather than Slavic-Old Church Slavonic. Thus ‘white collar workers’ from

33 Ilarion became an important figure in Ukrainian historiography.

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196 Hoerder the Byzantine society and culture (priests, teachers, translators) remained in demand for long even though the Rus’ ‘blue collar workers’ had learned the imported language of symbol and form and had mastered the techniques required. This trans-lation – the building of cultural bridges – between two (or more) cultural contexts attempted, on the one hand, to remain as close to the original as possible and, on the other, to get as close to the new audience as necessary for easy understanding. In this frame, the constructed or postulated difference between metropolitan and ‘primitive’ art, Byzantine and Russian (correctly: East Roman and Rus’) in this case, requires re-conceptualisation in order to question discur- sively imposed hierarchies of imperial-peripheral, central-marginal, capital city-provincial. Only if ‘First Peoples’ and ‘arts premiers’ of less complex structures of societal organisation are treated as equal may imported and ‘local’, i.e. resident-established, culture be dealt with at par.34 Such parity is central to an understanding of the reception of changing symbolism: those addressed – the ‘consumers of religious art’ or ‘the faithful interpreting new symbolism’ – were not to be deterred by overly foreign, even alien, elements of form and expression. Métissage, a Russianising of Byzantine architectural vocabulary, is visible in the impressive early twelfth-century Novgorodian St. Anthony and St. George monasteries and the frescoes in Novgorod’s churches and the Pskov Mirožskij Monastery. Byzantine visual techniques and iconographic patterns – the dark tone of the imagery – were adapted to the lighter colours in Rus’ painting and to Slavic folklore. Generic ‘Byzantine’ influences through migrating artists or hand-drawn pattern books, by the twelfth century, diversified into regional Russian ‘schools’ of expression. The products of so-called ‘minor’ arts of deco- rative sculpture and carving (jewellery, metal objects, ritual utensils, liturgical vessels) also combined Rhom and Rus’ styles. Techniques were passed on to subsequent generations of craftsmen.

Soldiers from Scandinavia in a Trans-European Military Labour Market

Eastern Roman emperors, who diffused the aggressive north-south contact through negotiations and, if necessary, tribute payments, also saw the intrud- ers as an opportunity: when in need, they might hire soldiers and sailors from

34 Marine Degli and Marie Mauzé, Arts premiers. Le temps de la reconnaissance (Paris 2000).

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 197 the north.35 These and some of their commanders perceived hiring themselves out as an opportunity. Migratory military connections equalled the trading and religious ones in number, if not in importance. They would assume continental dimension. From the Kievan and other rulers’ perspective, sending dis- ruptive young men eager to pick a fight into foreign armies was a strategy to rid their realm of internally unruly elements. As early as 911 some 700 sailors of the East Roman fleet sailing against Muslim Arabs were Varangian Rus’. A decisive intensification of military migrations began when Emperor Basileios ii (976–1025) faced an internal revolt of landowners. He requested help from Prince Vladimir, whose Scandinavia-recruited army had recaptured the Kievan throne for him. The no-longer needed but armed 6,000 men, he probably sent off happily. In 989, they had quelled the revolt and, thus, were again in need of jobs.36 Basileios kept them busy by making them his palace guard, the ‘Varangian Družina’. The men, in contact with northern micro-societies of socialisation and with migrants and their descendants in the diaspora – Normandy, the British Isles, and Sicily – spread word about the opportunities. Thus, migrations for military labour increased and assumed a transcontinental dimension: (1) via Russia’s south-flowing rivers, (2) seaborne via diasporic settlements along the North Sea coasts, (3) onward via Gibraltar and (Norman) Sicily. (4) Others came land- and seaborne via ports in Provence (France) or via an Italy- or Rome-route and the Mediterranean.37 Mention of Constantino- ple in Icelandic sagas demonstrates that the northwest-trans-European-and- Mediterranean connections entered popular memory.

Mobile Men and Women from the Eastern Steppes

‘Word of mouth’ about the western realms of rule also spread eastward among Steppe cultural groups. In later narratives, these segments of herder societies

35 George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine state (New Brunswick 1969) 370; and Benedikz, Varangians of Byzantium, 20, listed Pecheneg, Cumans, Turks, Italians, French, Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, groups from the Caucasian Mountains (Abkhaz and Alans) as well as Arabs in imperial armies. 36 Whether the men had come with a ‘train’ of women and children as well as service personnel, is not clear from the sources. 37 Alexander A. Vasiliev, ‘The opening stages of the Anglo-Saxon immigration to Byzantium in the eleventh century’, Annales de l’Institut Kondakov (Prague) 9 (1937) 247–258; R.M. Dawkins, ‘The later history of the Varangian Guard: some notes’, Journal of Roman Studies 37 (1947) 39–46; Nicholas C.J. Pappas, English refugees in the Byzantine armed forces: the Varangian Guard and Anglo-Saxon ethnic consciousness (Huntsville tx 2004).

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198 Hoerder were said to move in order to pillage the wealthy and sophisticated societies from Kiev and Constantinople to Latin Europe. The initial attraction, however, were – from their perspective – the westerly grasslands north of the Black Sea: forage for their animals was more abundant and better. Similarly, by southward migration, cultural groups from the central Urals and Upper Kama regions im- proved their pasturage and agricultural productivity in the latter half of the ninth and in the tenth century: down the Kama River valley to the Middle Volga region.38 When, since the mid-eleventh century, cultural groups from further east established themselves in the Steppe corridor north of the Black Sea, the Kiev-Constantinople axis lost importance since transmigration became more difficult, dangerous, and costly. Migration, however, did not come to a stand- still: Kievan monks came to Byzantine monasteries, Mount Athos in particular, and Kievan pilgrims passed through Constantinople on their way to the Holy Land and back. For the Russian principalities the open eastern region had long been a contact as well as conflict zone with Turk-speaking mounted Pecheneg, Kipchak/ Polovcer/Cuman cultural groups and mobile-migrating Volga-Bulgars moved westward and established a realm of rule. Since 1220, the ‘Mongols’, a many- cultured group then under Genghis as khan, pressed onto the eastern Rus’- ruled and, further west, Russian-settled lands. Its leaders, of Mongol culture, had destroyed the political rule of the ‘Tatar’ cultural group but had incorporated the population. The Rus’ used ‘Tatar’ for the composite Mongols. In view of the aggressive intrusion, earlier arriving groups, like Pecheneg and Polovcer/ Cumans, were forced to negotiate alliances with the Rus’ but, defeated in 1223, had to flee into the East Roman realm. From 1235 the aggressors moved into the spaces of Rus’ settlement. The newcomers have often been described as nomadic horsemen39 under particularly brutal rulers and fifteenth-century Church chroniclers introduced the trope ‘Yoke of the Tatars’ into Russian historical memory.40 The Mongol armies, said to involve 120,000 or more men were followed by equal numbers

38 Franklin and Shepard, Emergence of the Rus, 61–70. 39 The designation’s connotation of simple folk with little internal organisation does not reflect the complex goal-directed migrations and establishment of structures of rule. The most often named ‘Golden Horde’ had its name not from ‘ravaging hordes’ but from ‘orda’, settled ‘camp’. 40 Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde. The Mongol impact on medieval Russian history (Bloomington 1985); Leo de Hartog, Russia and the Mongol yoke. The history of the Russian principalities and the Golden Horde, 1221–1502 (London 1996); Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols. Cross-cultural influences on the Steppe frontier (Cambridge 1998).

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 199 of equally fast moving women and children. Possibly moving fast and shooting arrows, as in Muscovite and Latin imagery, was far less complicated and de- manding then moving fast all day and setting up accommodation and house- hold each evening. With the destruction of Kiev in 1240, Kievan rule ended. For rural Rus’, however, life hardly changed – they had to work the soil and pay tax- es. From 1237, Russian principalities had to pay tribute, elites stayed in power, Rus’ princes had to travel to the Mongol capital for a letter of grace to assume their position. They became tax collectors of the respective khan – the taxpay- ing families had to support two elites. Over the next decades and lasting into the late fourteenth century, the khans established macro-regional rule with extensive tribute income. Their intercontinental pax mongolica from Moscow via the first capital Karakorum to the second, Khanbaliq (Beijing), permitted resumption of the caravan trade with the Chinese Empire. These highly mobile and well-armed groups, like the Pecheneg and Cumans before them, came to realise the advantages of sedentary ways of life. They established flourish- ing capital cities attracting transcontinental migrants or, at least, sojourned in urban contexts for extended periods. Resident living permitted accumulation and storage of possessions and the new urban residences became centres of wealth and intellectual life. Traditionalists considered sedentarism a loss of freedom. In contrast, in the north the aggressions by the Swedish Crown and of Li- vonian German- and Estonian-language warriors, had to be fought off at the Neva and Lake Peipus in 1240 and 1242 by Novgorod’s and Vladimir’s Prince Alexander ‘Nevsky’. With Tatar rulers, who were more accommodating and religiously tolerant, he negotiated modes of coexistence.41 This remained so when, in the fourteenth century, the khans and, at least formally, their subjects turned to the Islamic faith.42 When internal struggles of succession among Mongol ruling men and families permitted the Rus’ Prince of Muscovy, Dmitry, to challenge their rule, his army defeated a Mongol army in 1380 at the Don River, thus the name ‘Dmitry Donskoi’. Later clerical chroniclers, gatekeepers of historical memory, styled this victory as one of Russian Christians against Heathen Barbarians in a deliberate falsification since both armies were multi- ethnic as well as multi-faith. Mongol suzerainty came to an end in 1480 and, when Prince Vasilij iii (r. 1505–1533) ruled, Muskovy had become a state with 3.5 to 5 million (mainly annexed) subjects. One of the bases of the new rule was

41 Diplomats from the Latin Church, seemingly, were fostering Mongol-Novgorod war to weaken their Orthodox competitors. 42 The Metropolitan in Moscow negotiated freedom from taxation in return for including the Khan in the Orthodox Church’s prayers.

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200 Hoerder the Mongols’ highly developed transimperial postal system which permitted both fast communication of orders and transmission of information. Another facilitating element were Mongol commanders who, observing the decline of their superiors as well as the rise of Muscovite princes, decided to join the win- ning side. They were integrated into the Moscow’s elite, their armies – families included – became part of the population. Braided lifeways emerged, the Princes adopted practices of rule and courtly hierarchies from their Mongol suzerains-neighbours-enemies.43

Migrations from the Founding of Muscovy to the Nineteenth Century

When Muscovy emerged the once hegemonic East Roman Empire no longer existed. Its ‘Huns’ – the western ethnicised imagery – had been ‘the Latins’, the Frankish-Venetian warriors who under the guise of holy war or ‘crusade’ had attacked and sacked Orthodox Constantinople in 1204. Italian city-state merchants, especially from Venice and Genova, came to dominate commerce in the Black Sea, the Crimean ports had become their colonies since the thirteenth century. Generically labelled ‘Italians’, they mediated trade from Kaffa and Tana via their quarter in Constantinople between Central Asia, Iran, and China and the ‘Italian’ Mediterranean. Their role ended when multiple Turk- language cultural groups (later labelled ‘the Turks’) advanced into Anatolia and occupied Constantinople in 1453. Already in the preceding decades the Constantinople-Kiev connection had changed in character. From the beginning, the eastern Roman Emperors had called the game. After Kiev’s destruction, however, the Metropolitans had dis- tanced themselves by moving further north to Vladimir (1299) and Moscow (1325). In the fifteenth century, in view of the Advancing Ottomans, East Ro- man Emperors had attempted to reduce the distance to the Latin Church and John viii Palaiologos, at the Council of Ferrara-Florence 1438/39, for papal

43 Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols; Gertrud Pickhan, ‘Von der Kiever Rus zum Mos- kauer Reich. Osteuropa’, in: Thomas Ertl and Michael Limberger (eds), Die Welt 1250–1500 (Vienna 2009) 113–137; Ralph Kauz, ‘Zerstörung, Eroberung, politische Umstrukturierung: Zentralasien’, in: Thomas Ertl and Michael Limberger (eds), Die Welt 1250–1500 (Vienna 2009) 297–324; Golden, Central Asia in world history, 77–79, 83–84, 93; Gertrud Pickhan, ‘Von der Kiever Rus zum Moskauer Reich. Transkulturelle Verflechtungen in Osteuropa 1240–1533’, in: Thomas Ertl and Michael Limberger (eds), Die Welt 1000–2000 (Vienna 2009) 113–137.

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 201 military support against ‘the Turks’ had conceded the pre-eminence of the Pope in Rome over the Patriarch in Constantinople. But neither did the Latin Pope support the Orthodox co-Christians nor did the Orthodox faithful accept the submission. The Muscovite Metropolitans declared their independence or autokephaly in 1448 and, after 1453, suggested a ‘translatio imperii’ from Con- stantinople to the Muscovite Grand Prince Ivan iii (r. 1462–1505) who, acced- ing to the suggestion, claimed to be head of the Orthodox Church.44 The visible symbol of this translatio, from about 1500, was the ‘Monomakh’ or ‘Golden’ Cap. This crown had been crafted by Middle Asian artisan-artists in the thirteenth or fourteenth century; Moscow clerics in 1498 crafted the legend that it had been gifted by the Byzantine Emperor Vladimir Monomach (r. 1093–1125) – thus, empirically, the crown and legend signified a double translatio. Constantinople, as first ‘new Rome’, in the fourth century the destination of nobles from old Rome in Italy, became an emigration region after the Lat- ins’ ravages and Ottoman rule. Families and individuals, who could afford to, left. Orthodox faithful and priests (with families, since priests could marry) migrated to the Muscovite state. This new connection would last far beyond 1453. Russian nobles would send funds to restore churches in Constantinople including the Hagia Sophia, in bad repair since the rule of the Latin-Frankish crusader-vagrants. Among the emigrants, dignitaries had good reason to support the ruler’s and the Metropolitan’s claims: it increased their insertion into the receiving society and opened options to again hold office. In Muscovy, Ivan iii changed the parameters of mobility by, first, terminat- ing the ‘right to depart’, to out-migrate, of the service nobility whose members often wanted to escape their obligations; and, second, in 1497, of the peasant families who could leave their lords only during the two weeks after the harvest (St. George’s Day Law).45 A fixed location facilitated control as well as requisi- tion and imposition of additional work or fiscal obligations. Having thus secured power in the interior, Ivan iii expanded his external reach by marrying Sofia (Zoë) Palaiologos in 1472, niece of the last Emperor. To demonstrate his claim of being the successor of the East Roman emperors he called himself ‘Tsar’ (1478).46

44 Whether Moscow, as has often been said, was called the ‘Third Rome’ remains a matter of debate. The positioning developed from advice to rulers by the monk Filofej in Pskov, 1512. 45 Gustave Alef, ‘Das Erlöschen des Abzugsrechts der Moskauer Bojaren’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 10 (1965) 7–74; Andreas Kappeler, Rußlands erste National- itäten. Das Zarenreich und die Völker der Mittleren Wolga vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Co- logne 1982). 46 In Byzantium, the Hellenised term ‘Kaisar’ was used for younger designated successors while the ruling emperor was called ‘Basileus’ or ‘Augustus’.

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202 Hoerder

Zoë’s marriage migration, following a trans-European pattern, served to his- toricise claims for rule and territories.47 To embellish his capital, Ivan iii called architects, artists, and craftsmen from Mediterranean cultures – no longer from Constantinople but from Ital- ian cities, several recruited by the Venetian ambassador. Among them were Pietro Antoni Solari, Antonio Gislardi, Marco Ruffo – Russianised as Mark Fr- jasin (‘Mark Foreigner’) – and Aristotele Fioravanti. They introduced Italian Renaissance styles, in part Byzantium-inspired by clerics, intellectuals, architects, craftsmen and others who, after 1453, had migrated to the Latin realm. The Russian tsars began a process of inviting and incorporating foreign experts in order to limit the power of the local Boyar families who claimed position but had neither education nor training. Later newcomers, often from German- language regions, filled military and administrative positions or, as merchants, created the links between the economy of the new Muscovite state westward to established markets and eastward to the fur-producing Siberian spaces. Moscow became the seat of in-migrant merchants, often – and with some jus- tification – generically labelled ‘Germans’.48 With the expansion of the Muscovite State, its people became generic Rus’- Russians as subjects of the emperors but continued to evolve regionally as, in earlier periods, Novgorodian and Kievan urban and rural cultures had differed. The many micro-societies coalesced, in top-down views, into (Great) Russians, Byelo- or White Russians, and Ukrainians as meso-regional groups. All were inhabitants of the ‘Land of the Rus”, Russkaya zemlya, Rus-landish people of fused northern and eastern European as well as Steppe and Central Asian backgrounds.

47 In the north, Ivan iii expanded by military force – conquests of Novgorod (1471/1478), Tver as the strongest Rus’ competitor state (1485), and Lithuania (1492/1501) – and in- voluntary or forced migrations: westward expulsion of Novgorod’s Hanseatic (German- language) merchants and deportation of the traditional upper classes to Central Russia. 48 Since the fourteenth century commercial contacts existed between Kiev and Nuremberg. Arne Öhberg, ‘Russia and the world market in the seventeenth century’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 3 (1955) 123–162; Clifford M. Foust, Muscovite and Mandarin. Rus- sia’s trade with China and its setting, 1727–1805 (Chapel Hill 1969); Gilbert Rozman, Ur- ban networks in Russia, 1750–1800, and premodern periodization (Princeton 1976); Roger P. Bartlett, Human capital. The settlement of foreigners in Russia 1762–1804 (Cambridge 1979); Paul Bushkovitch, The merchants of Moscow, 1580–1680 (Cambridge 1980) 30; Erik Amburg- er, Fremde und Einheimische im Wirtschafts- und Kulturleben des neuzeitlichen Rußland. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Klaus Zernack (Stuttgart 1982).

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Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence 203

When in the fifteenth century Muscovy expanded into Siberia49 at the other end of the continent, Portugal expanded across the seas. While the later West- ern ‘master’ narrative would focus on the connectivity of the Atlantic World, a global northern fur trading belt had already emerged: from Siberia via Scan- dinavia to the Hudson Bay and, across North America, to then Russian Alaska with financial centres in Moscow, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. A decline of prices paid for pelts in Moscow or London could force fur-supplying families in this global raw material-producing periphery to migrate or to find other means of gaining a livelihood. By 1700 the ethnic Russian population in Siberia amounted to 200,000. It increased to half a million in 1800 with the native First Peoples accounting for only one half of the total.50 The master narrative of this ‘Russian’, in fact multi-ethnic, realm of rule, like those of all alleged nations invented in the nineteenth century, seems a sequence of political-military events: conquest of Khanate of Kazan (1552), annexation of the eastern border region or military border, ‘ukraina’ in Russian (1654), Peter the Great (1682/89–1725), the Great Nordic War (1700–1721), Cath- arine ii (1762–1796), partitioning and annexing Poland (1772–1795), Napoleon’s invasion (1812). By including the people involved, annexed, or overran all such ‘events’ appear in a different perspective. Expansion into the regions of Kazan, Ukraine, Siberia, and Poland involved (1) the mobilisation of large numbers of men as soldiers,51 (2) flight, exile, or annihilation of annexed peoples’ elites, (3) relocation of populations, (4) migration/delegation of administrative and military personnel: either as opportunity for Russian-speakers to create positions

49 For Siberian First Peoples (‘Ureinwohner’), see Donald W. Treadgold, The great Siberian migration. Government and peasant in resettlement from emancipation to the First World War (Princeton 1957); Georges Dupeux (ed.), Les Migrations internationales de la fin du xviiie siècle à nos jours (Paris 1980) 199–202; Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (eds), Russia’s Orient. Imperial borderlands and peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington 1997). 50 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in contact: world migrations in the second millennium (Durham 2002) Chap. 13. Ukrainian and Soviet scholars have debated whether Russian or Ukrainian settlers moved to Siberia: W. Kubijowytsch [V. Kubiiovych], Siedlungsgeschichte, Bevölker- ungsverteilung und Bevölkerungsbewegung der Ukraine, transl. from the Ukrainian (orig. L’vov 1938, Berlin 1943) 18–33; Inge Blank, ‘A vast migratory experience: Eastern Europe in the pre- and post-emancipation era (1780–1914)’, in Dirk Hoerder et al.(eds), Roots of the transplanted, 2 vols. (New York 1994) 201–251. 51 Fritz Redlich contrasted a medieval ‘sedentary type’ of mercenaries who returned home regularly to an ‘uprooted’ type since the sixteenth century. The German military enter- priser and his work force in European economic and social history, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden 1964), 1965. In general Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, transl. Michael Jones (French orig. 1980, London 1984).

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204 Hoerder for themselves or as punishment for administrators, critical of the government and re-moved to the Empire’s far reaches. In the reverse, segments of the elites of annexed cultural groups migrated to new urban administrative centres, became part of both strategies of rule and of acquiring positions under the new rulers. While the north-south river routes continued to be of economic and, given Ottoman advance and settlement of migrants of Muslim faith in the fertile lands north of the Black Sea, of military importance, the transcontinental east-west-east exchanges intensified. Tsar Peter ‘the Great’ undertook a multi- year voyage to Western Europe as a kind of apprenticeship to understand new technological processes in order to introduce innovations in his own imperial ‘firm’ or ‘business’. He re-established migratory connections that had existed in Novgorodian-Hanseatic times. From this west came Catherine ii, also called ‘the Great’, as a migrant in the trans-European nobility’s marriage networks. Her policy emphasised the south again, her war and victory over the Ottoman Empire resulted in the mass flight of farming families of Muslim faith from the North Ottoman-South Russian Plains. To resettle the vacated lands, noble families with their serf families came over large distances and in large numbers through internal migration. Peasant families from the southwestern German- language states as well as Mennonites, persecuted for religious reasons, came in rural-to-rural migrations in smaller numbers. One vignette of this mobility and resettlement, ‘Potemkian villages’, is preserved in popular imagery. Ac- cording to legend, Count Potemkin, in charge of the internal re-settlement, had village façades constructed along the Dnepr’s banks when Catherine ii came to inspect the, as yet incomplete, enterprise. Meant to deceive the Em- press, the label came to connote something ‘fake’. The façades may, however, be read as reflection of an ongoing process: families, who would settle in the region, build homes, and pursue their life projects, were on their way but had not yet arrived. Their envisioned façades of hope would be filled with actual life and economic activity.52

52 Hans Auerbach, Die Besiedlung der Südukraine in den Jahren 1774–1787 (Wiesbaden 1965); Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ‘The Odessa grain trade: a case study in urban growth and devel- opment in Tsarist Russia’, Journal of European Economic History 9:1 (1980) 113–151. More recently: Carol B. Stevens, Soldiers on the steppe: army reform and social change in early modern Russia (DeKalb 1996); David Moon, ‘Peasant migration and the settlement of Russia’s frontiers 1550–1897’, Historical Journal 40:4 (1997) 859–893; David Moon, The Rus- sian peasantry: the world the peasants made (New York 1999); Brian L. Davies, Warfare, state, and society on the Black Sea steppe, 1500–1700 (New York 2007); Brian J. Boeck, ‘Con- tainment vs. colonization: Muscovite approaches to settling the steppe’, in Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (eds), Peopling the Russian periphery:

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Illustration 1 Portrait of the Empress Catherine ii of Russia (1729–1796) in travelling costume, by Petr Drozhdin, 1797. Private collection

While South Russian resettlement occurred under control of the state, many Russian peasant families took the realisation of their hopes into their own hands. The southern Siberian expanses, far from the state’s personifications in terms of tax collectors and other officials, seemed attractive. From the eighteenth century those intent on migrating away from lords and administrators sent ‘locators’ to scout for arable lands – a decision comparable to that of Slavic rulers who, in around 1000, had sent recruiter-locators to German- language peasant families willing to settle their realm.53 When, in the context of the Russian government’s eastward imperial-global strategies, the Kamčatka Peninsula was to become a self-sufficient military border region, a German agronomist, Johann Karl Ehrenfried Kegel (1784–1863), was sent to collect information. Kegel was a quintessential trans-European migrant. Born in the Harz Mountains he had visited Belgium and France, had leased agricultural land in Central German regions, and, induced by his wife’s family ties,54 the family migrated in 1826 to Russia: St. Petersburg, Saratov, and Odessa. His

borderland colonization in Eurasian history (New York 2007) 41–60; Brian J. Boeck, Imperi- al boundaries: Cossack communities and empire-building in the age of Peter the Great (New York 2009); Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive empire: Kazan and the creation of Russia, 1552–1671 (Madison 2012). 53 Lewis Siegelbaum, ‘Those elusive scouts: pioneering peasants and the Russian state, 1870s–1950s’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14:1 (2013) 31–58. 54 The source does not mention his wife’s (family) name and activity. This ‘veiling’ of women’s roles might be discussed as forcing a burqa on womankind and feminist theoreticians have called it ‘symbolic annihilation’.

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206 Hoerder exploratory voyage to Kamčatka in the 1840s lasted six years.55 Colonisation from the first Slavic-language speakers’ migrations via Muscovite expansion eastward from the sixteenth century and southward in the eighteenth century was a basic fact of Russian history. Expansion required resettlements and, beginning with the 1490s law, the state-landowner complex immobilised peasant families: power over people with forethoughts of making them moveable to wherever the state or the owners could realise better profits from their labour. On the restrictions on peasant families’ mobility followed permanent enserfment in 1649. The notion of being ‘tied to the soil’ evokes peasant rootedness and immobility in their lands or nobles’ exploitation of immobilised labour. But serf-ownership varied according to lifestyle and economic interests: when hunting was the fashion, serf families had to be sent packing so that forests could expand. When income from crops – and sumptuous country-seats with bound servants – was the style, more powerful lords raided their neighbours’ estates to kidnap additional serfs. In addition, the government’s policies to settle specific regions at specific times as well as peasant families’ self-determined need for land made Tsarist Russia a highly mobile society. For some, the lifeways of free Cossacks, self-liberated serfs, were attractive – the government which could not subdue them, incorporated them as border troops. To use a modern concept, they decided for emigration without papers, sans-papier resettling peasant families: a family project, creation of pioneer societies, a critique of power relationships. From the tsarist point of view and interest, people, no matter what their sta- tion, ‘were potentially portable, available to be ordered into movement’ as state interest required. Russia’s history, more than that of any other European state was one of ‘colonization,’ of peasant migration; ‘serfdom’ involved many regimes and mobilities.56

55 Werner F. Gülden (ed.), Forschungsreise nach Kamtschatka. Reisen und Erlebnisse des Jo- hann Ehrenfried Kegel von 1841 bis 1847 (Cologne 1992); Michael Polanyi, ‘The Republic of Science’, Minerva 1 (1962) 54–73: Fifteen of the first sixteen members of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences were non-Russian: Germans (13), Swiss (1), and French (1). 56 Willard Sunderland, ‘Catherine’s dilemma: resettlement and power in Russia 1500s–1914’, in: Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (eds), Globalising migration history: the Eurasian experience (16th–21st centuries) (Leiden 2014) 55–70; Gijs Kessler, ‘Measuring migration in Russia: a perspective of empire, 1500–1900’, in: Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (eds), Globalising migration history: the Eurasian experience (16th–21st centuries) (Leiden 2014) 71–88; Willard Sunderland, Taming the wild field. Colonization and empire on the Russian steppe (Ithaca 2004). The standard history of the Russian peasantry is Jerome Blum, Lord and peasant in Russia from the ninth to the nineteenth century (Princeton 1971).

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Over the enserfed, or through their plots and villages, armies moved: the Great Nordic War (1700–1721), during the partitioning and annexing of Poland, of its people (1772–1795), during Napoleon’s trans-European wars including the invasion of 1812. Peasant families fled, were decimated, had to find places and means of survival. Soldiers, for example after the Swedish Crown’s lost battle at Poltava, were abandoned and had come to terms with local residents. Some integrated as partners of local women who could offer expertise in soil conditions and be cultural mediators and language teachers. Such couples’ children formed a place-specific Russian-Swedish population. Napoleon’s wars – a destructive interlude between the French revolutionary and the trans-European counter-revolutionary wars – mobilised hundreds of thousands of men and forced millions into flight. This included Moscow’s whole population. Across all regions and micro-social spaces involved, conscripted and then defeated or wounded soldiers remained behind. To celebrate the Russian victory, personalised as the Emperors’ achievements, well-uniformed and dashing men of the Cossack regiments rode into Paris. Unintendedly they initiated a Russophile movement in France and, on the intimate level, perhaps a genera- tion of Russian-French children.57 Tsarist Russia’s annexation of eastern Poland involved the incorporation of a large population of people of distant-past migratory background, essentialised as ‘the Jews’ but, in fact, individuals and families of Jewish faith, Ashkenazi culture, and Yiddish-German language in Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian variants. They contributed in particular to small-town and urban economic growth. In view of cultural-economic restrictions, imposed on both people of Jewish and of Ukrainian culture, and from the 1880s exacerbated by a policy of Russification,58 as well as due to population growth among Jewish families in particular, more than two million men, women and children of Jewish and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian culture would depart. A migration divide, stretching from Lake Peipus along the Dnepr River to the Black Sea, emerged: Russian and East Ukrainian peasant families moved eastbound in the Russian- Siberian migration system, Jewish and West Ukrainians westbound in European- North Atlantic migration system. Emphasis on the two intercontinental systems is informed by the ‘crossing of international borders’-approach. In the nineteenth century a third, ‘internal’

57 Hoerder, Cultures in contact, 278–279, 303. 58 This ‘policy of nationalisation,’ in comparative perspective, was part of the (aggressive) nation-building of the period: Americanisation, Germanisation, Germanisation in Habsburg-Austrian variant, Magyarisation. Similar projects of in- but, far more, of ex- clusion were also part of policies of other states.

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208 Hoerder system between the countrysides and metropoles as well as cores of mining and industrialisation developed. In it many more millions moved per decade or even per year than either west or east in the whole century before 1914. ‘Serfdom’, as has been emphasised, was no monolithic regime. Given the self- interest of noble serf-owners, two major variants emerged under the one law. In the fertile belt of black soils, where serf families’ labour could be used intensively over the whole year, owners kept their serfs tied down (barschina- system). In the less fertile northern region, where the serfs’ labour power could be used profitably only for part of each year, owners monetarised dues and thus un- dercut the immobilising aspect. Enserfed families or some of the members had to migrate for part of the year to waged employment to earn the means for pay- ing their owners. This obrok-system was a ‘mobile tied to the soil’ or migration- inducing serfdom. In the process the serf-migrants increased their funds of knowledge and options. When, in 1861, the government ended serfdom, they had far more migratory experience than barschina-serfs. Immediately and over the next decades internal rural-urban migration increased massively. It remained temporary since migrants remained part of their community-of- birth, which was collectively liable for tax payment and the supplying of re- cruits to the army.59 In contrast to these mass migrations, a few small, even miniscule movements had important effects on society: following the practice of deportation of crim- inals to – a cold section of – Siberia, young men from well-placed families who attempted to reform the regime from 1825 on were deported to Siberia or fled to exile in Western Europe. The young men’s sisters, also intent on reform, but restricted to ‘traditional’ roles and – in a programme to prevent their social and intellectual mobility – prohibited from attending universities, circumvented the imposed boundaries by transborder mobility if families could afford it. They, sometimes with guardians, migrated to Swiss universities, especially Zu- rich, studied and obtained their degrees. Upon return, rather than revolt, they practiced reform through social work and medical services. Their punishment was not deportation but immobilisation, prohibition to study abroad.60

59 Barbara A. Anderson, Internal migration during modernization in late nineteenth-century Russia (Princeton 1980); Ben Eklof and Stephen P. Frank (eds), The world of the Russian peasant. Post-emancipation culture and society (Boston 1990); Barbara Engel, ‘The wom- an’s side: male outmigration and the family economy in Kostroma Province’, Slavic Review 45:2 (1986) 257–271; Rose Glickman, ‘Peasant women and their work’, in: Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynn Viola (eds), Russian peasant women (New York 1992) 54–72. 60 Daniela Neumann, Studentinnen aus dem Russischen Reich in der Schweiz (1867–1914) (Zurich 1987); Sabine Veits-Falk, Rosa Kerschbaumer-Putjada 1851–1923 (Salzburg 2008).

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Migration and mobility was omnipresent. With the help of Dutch drain- age experts and conscript labour the capital of St. Petersburg was built upon swamplands, with the labour of migrant families the Donbass region became a mining and industrial region, migrants developed the region of the Amur River and the city of Harbin – where they met migrants from the China-Manchuria migration system. Societies and their changing (state) structures depended on migration – political-institutional narratives describe facades without future. If societal regimes refuse changes in response to challenges, individuals and families will or have to do so, often by migrating to less constraining circum- stances. The mentally stationary self-centred elites would have to flee after the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

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