Information and Empire Mechanisms of Communication in Russia 1600-1850 EDITED BY SIMON FRANKLIN AND KATHERINE BOWERS To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/636 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Information and Empire Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600–1850 Edited by Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2017 Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers. Copyright of each chapter is maintained by the author. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). 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ISBN Paperback: 978–1-78374–373–5 ISBN Hardback: 978–1-78374–374–2 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978–1-78374–375–9 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978–1-78374–376–6 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978–1-78374–377–3 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0122 Cover image: Top: Clement Cruttwell, Map of the Russian Empire, in Atlas to Cruttwell’s Gazetteer, 1799, image by Geographicus Fine Antique Maps (https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:1799_Clement_Cruttwell_Map_of_Russian_Empire_-_Geographicus_-_Russia- cruttwell-1799.jpg). Bottom: image from the first Italian edition of Sigismund von Herberstein’s description of Muscovy (Venice, 1550), private collection. Cover design by Katherine Bowers and Corin Throsby. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Acknowledgments 1 Notes on Contributors 3 Introduction 7 Simon Franklin I. MAP-MAKING 1. Early Mapping: The Tsardom in Manuscript 23 Valerie Kivelson 2. New Technology and the Mapping of Empire: 59 The Adoption of the Astrolabe Aleksei Golubinskii II. INTERNATIONAL NEWS AND POST 3. Muscovy and the European Information Revolution: 77 Creating the Mechanisms for Obtaining Foreign News Daniel C. Waugh and Ingrid Maier 4. How Was Western Europe Informed about Muscovy? 113 The Razin Rebellion in Focus Ingrid Maier III. NEWS AND POST IN RUSSIA 5. Communication and Obligation: The Postal System of the 155 Russian Empire, 1700–1850 John Randolph 6. Information and Efficiency: Russian Newspapers, 185 ca.1700–1850 Alison K. Smith 7. What Was News and How Was It Communicated 213 in Pre-Modern Russia? Daniel C. Waugh IV. INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND COMMUNICATION 8. Bureaucracy and Knowledge Creation: The Apothecary 255 Chancery Clare Griffin 9. What Could the Empress Know About Her Money? 287 Russian Poll Tax Revenues in the Eighteenth Century Elena Korchmina 10. Communication and Official Enlightenment: The Journal 311 of the Ministry of Public Education, 1834–1855 Ekaterina Basargina V. INFORMATION AND PUBLIC DISPLAY 11. Information in Plain Sight: The Formation of the 341 Public Graphosphere Simon Franklin 12. Experiencing Information: An Early Nineteenth-Century 369 Stroll Along Nevskii Prospekt Katherine Bowers Selected Further Reading 409 List of Figures 417 Index 423 Acknowledgments This volume had its genesis in the project “Information Technologies in Russia, 1450–1850”, led by Simon Franklin. We are grateful to Cambridge University and the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support of the project. The volume grew out of the discussions at the symposium “Information Technologies and Transfer, 1450–1850”, co-organised by Katherine Bowers and Simon Franklin, and held at Darwin College, Cambridge in September 2014. The symposium was made possible by a Research Network Workshop Grant from the Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies, and funding from the Dame Elizabeth Hill Fund and the Department of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University. We thank all of the symposium participants for facilitating such a vibrant discussion. We wish to particularly thank Professor Don Ostrowski of Harvard University for his sage comments as we began to plan the volume, as well as the comments of the three anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript and provided valuable feedback. Last, but not least, we are grateful to our editor, Alessandra Tosi, who has supported this volume from its earliest stages, and her team at Open Book Publishers. Notes on Contributors Ekaterina Basargina is a Senior Researcher in the St Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her research mainly focusses on the history of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her publications include: The Imperial Academy of Sciences at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries (in Russian, 2008), The Russian Academician G. H. Langsdorff and his Travels to Brazil, 1803–29 (in Russian, 2016, ed.), The Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Imperial Academy of Sciences During the First 50 Years of its Activities, 1841–91 (in Russian, 2017, with O. Kirikova). She won the Macarius Prize in 2004. Katherine Bowers is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research interest is nineteenth- century Russian literature and cultural history, and she is currently working on a book about the influence of gothic fiction on Russian realism. Other publications include Russian Writers at the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism (2015, ed., with A. Kokobobo) and A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts (forthcoming 2018, eds., with C. Doak and K. Holland). From 2012–14 she was Research Associate on the project, “Information Technologies in Russia, 1450–1850”, led by Simon Franklin, and a Research Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Simon Franklin is Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He has written widely on the history and culture of early Rus, Muscovy and Russia. Books include The Emergence of Rus 700–1200 (1996, with Jonathan Shepard), Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300 (2002), and National Identity in Russian Culture: an Introduction (2004, ed., with Emma Widdis). His recent research has focussed on the social 4 Information and Empire and cultural history of technologies of the word in Russia in the late medieval and early modern periods (ca.1450–1850). Aleksei Golubinskii is a Lead Researcher in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (since 2007) and a Junior Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 2016). A specialist in eighteenth–century history, his research interests include the General Land Survey, GIS, peasant literacy, and cartography. He recently collaborated on the project Cities of the Russian Empire from the Economic Notes of the General Land Survey (in Russian, 2016, eds., with D. A. Chernenko and D. A. Khitrov). Currently he is a participant in the project “16th- and 17th-century Drawings of the Russian State”. He also created and maintains the website of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents. Clare Griffin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan). She is the author of ‘In Search of an Audience: Popular Pharmacies and the Limits of Literate Medicine in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 89 (2015), and ‘Russia and the Medical Drug Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, Social History of Medicine, forthcoming. Her current research considers the role of the Russian Empire in early modern commodity and knowledge exchanges relating to medicaments. Valerie Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth Century Russia (2006), Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013), and most recently, with Ronald G. Suny, Russia’s Empires (2016). With Joan Neuberger, she edited Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008), and her current work brings together her interest in empire and the visual. Elena Korchmina is a Research Associate at New York University in Abu Dhabi. She has published several articles in Rossiiskaia istoriia, most recently under the title ‘“… v chest′ vziatok ne davat′… ”: kak “pochest′”stanovitsia “vziatkoi” v postpetrovskoi Rossii’ [‘… don’t give bribes in honour…’: how gifts became bribes in Post-Petrine Russia’] Notes on Contributors 5 (no. 2, 2015). Her most recent publication is the chapter ‘The Practice of Personal Finance and the Problem of Debt Among the Noble Elite in Eighteenth Century Russia’, in The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825. Public Role and Subjective Self, A. Schönle, A. Zorin, A. Evstratov, eds. (2016).