Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

It was one thing to operate such a system within a culture familiar to all those intermediate administrators, quite another where the laws, customs, religion, and language were alien to them. Moreover, most Russian officials were military men, whose training ill fitted them to empathize with locals. Very few of them had even an elementary knowledge of local languages; they had to rely on indigenous interpreters, who were embedded in local networks and, undetected, could offer biased translations of the kind their colleagues wanted to hear. Russian officials guessed what was going on, but could do little about it. Such mismatches bedevilled many aspects of life: tax-collection, irrigation control, the administration of justice, and the settlement of disputes over religious endowments.

There were special difficulties when imperial concepts of law, custom, or hygiene differed markedly from those of locals. Among the Kazakh nomads, for example, the custom of barimta was widespread: it was considered honourable and proper, when other means of settling clan conflicts had failed, for one clan to take cattle, or even abduct a woman, to be returned when a settlement was finally reached. To Russian officials, this was theft or kidnapping, a criminal offence. Yet it was difficult to outlaw it without having anything effective to put in its place as a means of mediation.

The difficulties were intensified by the fact that Russian officials themselves disagreed on the ultimate purposes of their rule. General Kaufman, the first Governor-General in Tashkent, had long experience of the Caucasus, loathed Muslim ‘fanaticism’, and gave absolute priority to establishing good order as that was understood by senior army officers. In the long term, he expected Turkestan to evolve into an orderly, law-abiding region, but thought he could expedite the process by marginalizing Islam as far as possible. Many civilian officials, on the other hand, were committed ‘Westerners’, who believed Russia had a civilizing mission and aspired – like many of their counterparts in British India – to enhance the welfare of their colonial subjects and gradually turn them into full citizens of the Russian Empire. Such an outlook entailed tolerating Islam, allowing the ulema to continue their role, while gradually ‘enlightening’ them in the ways of the modern world, as interpreted by Russia.

The relative peace of Central Asia lasted only as long as the state’s demands on its inhabitants were not too importunate. But in the middle of the First World War, when Muslims were for the first time conscripted to serve in the army, long-pent-up resentment exploded. There were riots in most major towns, and the army had to be called in to quell them. The loss of life and subsequent emigration into China meant that Turkestan lost nearly one-fifth of its inhabitants in 1916–17.

Poland and the western regions

When Russia annexed a large part of Poland in the late 18th-century partitions, it took on two peoples who were to prove especially irreconcilable to Russian rule: Poles and Jews. Poles formed the local elites, but the majority of the population were Ukrainians and Belorussians, long ago separated from Rus by the Mongol invasion. Imperial Russia felt a special right to incorporate them as part of the ‘gathering of the lands of Rus’. But the Poles had alternative ambitions for them, as the subject population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. That population was already partly Polonized: many belonged either to the Catholic Church, like the Poles, or to the Uniate Church, which practised Orthodox rituals but recognized the supremacy of the Pope. During the 1830s, they were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy, a campaign which left a legacy of bitterness among them.

Ukrainian culture itself became a tangible independent force inside the Russian Empire. Ukrainians claimed their distinctive political inheritance from the self-governing communities of the Cossack Hetmanate. In the early 19th century, Taras Shevchenko, freed from serfdom by an admiring patron, published Kobzar, a verse tale about a Ukrainian folk poet. It provided an example of how the various Ukrainian dialects might crystallize into a literary language. Later, Shevchenko was exiled for belonging to a society which aimed to convert Russia into a free federation of Slavic peoples. The government was seriously worried that Ukrainians, given their own literary language, might form a nation separate from Russia. Accordingly, in the 1870s publications and public performances in Ukrainian were banned.