σ IMPERIALσ RUSSIA σ Sponsored by the Joint Committee on the Soviet Union and Its Successor States of the Social Science Research Council and the Americanσ Council of Learned Societies. indiana-michigan series in russian and east european studies Alexander Rabinowitch and William G. Rosenberg, general editors advisory board Deming Brown Jane Burbank Robert W. Campbell Henry R. Cooper, Jr. Herbert Eagle Ben Eklof Zvi Gitelman Hiroaki Kuromiya David L. Ransel William Zimmerman σ IMPERIAL RUSSIA NEW HISTORIESσ FOR THE EMPIRE EDITED BY Jane Burbank AND David L. Ransel INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA www.indiana.edu/~iupress Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 1998 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Imperial Russia : new histories for the Empire / edited by Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel. p. cm. — (Indiana-Michigan series in Russian and East European studies) Includes index. ISBN 0-253-33462-4 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-21241-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Russia—History—18th century. 2. Russia—History—19th century. I. Burbank, Jane. II. Ransel, David L. III. Series. DK127.I475 1998 947′.06—dc21 98-1 7132 1 2 3 4 5 03 02 01 00 99 98 σContents Acknowledgments xi Introduction Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel xiii Part i Autocracy: Politics, Ideology, Symbol 1 1 Kinship Politics/Autocratic Politics: A Reconsideration of Early-Eighteenth-Century Political Culture Valerie A. Kivelson 5 2 The Idea of Autocracy among Eighteenth-Century Russian Historians Cynthia Hyla Whittaker 32 3 The Russian Imperial Family as Symbol Richard Wortman 60 Part ii Imperial Imagination 87 4 Collecting the Fatherland: Early-Nineteenth-Century Proposals for a Russian National Museum Kevin Tyner Thomas 91 5 Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845–1855 Nathaniel Knight 108 Part iii Practices of Empire 143 6 Lines of Uncertainty: The Frontiers of the Northern Caucasus Thomas M. Barrett 148 7 An Empire of Peasants: Empire-Building, Interethnic Interaction, and Ethnic Stereotyping in the Rural World of the Russian Empire, 1800–1850s Willard Sunderland 174 8 The Serf Economy, the Peasant Family, and the Social Order Steven L. Hoch 199 9 Institutionalizing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850 Gregory L. Freeze 210 Part iv Individuals and Publics 251 10 An Eighteenth-Century Russian Merchant Family in Prosperity and Decline David L. Ransel 256 11 Freemasonry and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Russia Douglas Smith 281 12 Constructing the Meaning of Suicide: The Russian Press in the Age of the Great Reforms Irina Paperno 305 In Place of a Conclusion Jane Burbank 333 Contributors 347 Index 349 Acknowledgments σ he editors thank several institutions and many scholars for the support, Tresearch, and stimulating discussions that made this project possible. We begin with our sponsors. The Joint Committee on the Soviet Union and Its Suc- cessor States of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies provided the material, logistical, and personal support for three workshops for the project as well as seed money for the volume itself. We are particularly grateful to Susan Bronson, historian of imperial Russia and for- mer Program Of¤cer at the SSRC, who has seen this project through from be- ginning to completion; to Robert Huber, former Program Director of the Joint Committee, who gave superb advice on both intellectual and ¤nancial matters; and to Jill Finger, Program Assistant, who directed everyone to the right place at the right time. The organizers of the SSRC-ACLS project were Jane Burbank, Nancy Shields Kollmann, Richard Stites, and Reginald Zelnik, members of the Joint Committee. A planning meeting was held at the University of Iowa in November 1991, supported in part by the Center for International and Comparative Studies there. We thank the Center and in particular Steven Hoch, our host on the steppe in a snowstorm, for the warm reception and gracious adjustments to weather wor- thy of Russia. The papers in the volume were produced for two workshops, entitled “Visions, Institutions, and Experiences of Imperial Russia.” The ¤rst workshop was held at the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C., in September 1993. We thank the Institute and above all its director, Blair Ruble, for hosting us and especially for our splendid meeting place in the Smithsonian castle. The second workshop was cosponsored by Portland State University at its lovely urban campus. Our historian host, Louise Becker, made this an ideal lo- cation. The discussions at all three meetings focused on the issues of interpreta- tion, analysis, and categorization that inform this volume. We are grateful to all the participants in the meetings, including the authors of the chapters presented here, for their many contributions to the project. A big thank you, then, to Thomas Barrett, Sarah Berry, Jeffrey Brooks, Daniel Brower, Michael Con¤no, ix x Acknowledgments James Cracraft, Laura Engelstein, Lee Farrow, Gregory Freeze, Manfred Hilde- meier, Steven L. Hoch, Isabel Hull, Austin Jersild, Colin Jones, Andrew Kahn, Andreas Kappeler, Allison Katsev, Michael Khodarkovsky, Valerie Kivelson, Nathaniel Knight, Nancy Shields Kollmann, Gary Marker, Louise McReynolds, Harriet Murav, Daniel Orlovsky, Irina Paperno, Priscilla Roosevelt, David Schimmelpeninck, Yuri Slezkine, Douglas Smith, Michael Stanislawski, Rich- ard Stites, Willard Sunderland, Frank Sysyn, Kevin Thomas, Donald Thumin, William Wagner, Cynthia Whittaker, Richard Wortman, and Reginald E. Zelnik. The editors are especially grateful to Michael Con¤no for his supportive engagement with this project, which was inspired in the ¤rst place by his splen- did and provocative studies of imperial Russia. Jane Burbank David L. Ransel Introduction σ he goal of this volume is to raise questions and to encourage scholars to re- Tenvision imperial Russian history liberated from schools, parties, and single story lines. The essays incorporate new research and new topics, results of a revitalized attention to Russia’s past that has engaged historians and others in recent years. The volume has a speci¤c genealogy: it is based upon a series of three workshops at which scholars from different universities, disciplines, and generations discussed new research and encouraged each other to imagine how imperial history might be reconceptualized. This introduction will sketch the intellectual and social context of this project and highlight the themes, ques- tions, and methods represented in the book’s separate subsections and chapters. With an eye toward future projects, Jane Burbank’s “In Place of a Conclusion” takes a critical look at the blank spots, open questions, and un¤lled plans that are likely to shape histories of imperial Russia still to come. Reconceptualization of imperial Russian history was inspired by two recent changes: the collapse of Soviet power and with it the conventional framework for narratives of Russian history, and a new turn in historical writing about other places and times. The sudden appearance in 1917 of Soviet Russia with its claim to be the ¤rst socialist society had oriented much of the historical study of Russia in the twentieth century toward the problems and possibilities of Soviet-style organization, and, of particular relevance to this volume, toward the origins of the Russian revolution. This emphasis upon the Bolshevik revo- lution relegated Russian history before 1917 if not to the dustbin, then to the morgue. Many studies of the imperial era were scholarly autopsies, performed in con¤dent awareness of the body’s chronic ailments; the overriding ques- tion concerned the disease or combination of illnesses that had caused the or- ganism’s long-overdue demise. This perspective was a matter of form, if not faith, for most Soviet historians, but it ¤gured, too, in many other interpreta- tions. Nicholas Riasanovsky placed the blame for the revolution of 1917 on the rigidity of the system created by Nicholas I in the ¤rst half of the nineteenth century; Richard Pipes, following Petr Struve, pushed the beginnings of the em- pire’s illnesses back into the early eighteenth century.1 The dissolution of the Soviet Union was accompanied by a reversal of evaluations of imperial Russia. In Russia, challenges to of¤cial history became xi xii Introduction weapons in the political offensives of perestroika and the subsequent struggles for control over the new polities emerging after 1991. Much of the history pub- lished in the popular press in the last years of the Soviet Union and the early years of the new Russian Federation described the whole Soviet period as a per- version of “normal” development. From this partisan perspective, imperial Rus- sian history was re¤gured to represent the natural order. The corpse was ex- humed and the autopsy performed again, this time to reveal the body’s robust growth and strength before an untimely, tragic, perhaps criminal death. For historians eager to move out from the long shadow cast over the tsar- ist period by the Soviet project and, at the same time, willing to investigate revisionist narratives before proclaiming them, the 1990s offered a chance to re- excavate the historic site of imperial Russia with new imagination and atten- tiveness.