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The Ministry of Asiatic Russia: The Colonial Office That Never Was But Might Have Been

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Willard Sunderland
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Abstract

The late tsarist state was a colonial empire, Willard Sunderland argues, yet it never established a colonial ministry like the other colonial empires of the era. Sunderland asks why this was the case and proposes that, while there are many explanations for Russia's apparent uniqueness in institutional terms, historians should also consider how the country's institutional development in fact approximated western and broader international models. The late imperial government indeed never ruled through a colonial ministry, but an office of this sort—a Ministry of Asiatic Russia—might have been created if World War I and the revolution had not intervened. Sunderland sees the embryo of this possibility in the Resettlement Administration, which emerged as a leading center of Russian technocratic colonialism by the turn of the 1900s.

Type
Forum: Colonialism and Technocracy at the end of the Tsarist Era
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , Spring 2010 , pp. 120 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

The arguments in this article were first presented in a lecture at Princeton University in December 2006 and later at the workshop “Imperium Inter Pares: Reflections on Imperial Identity and Interimperial Transfers in the Russian Empire,” organized by the German Historical Institute in Moscow in September 2008. I thank the gracious audiences at these two meetings for their helpful feedback and, in some cases, good-spirited disagreement. Additional special thanks to Peter Holquist, John LeDonne, my colleagues in the History Department at the University of Cincinnati, and David MacLaren McDonald and the second anonymous reader for Slavic Review for their constructive criticism. Finally, I thank the Taft Research Center of the University of Cincinnati for its generous funding of my research.

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14. I take this phrase from Osterhammel, Colonialism, 119.

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48. The quoted phrase comes from Prince Kurakin's proposal in 1797 to create a united Russian American company. See Wheeler, Mary E., “The Russian American Company and the Imperial Government: Early Phase,” in Starr, S. Frederick, ed., Russia's American Colony (Durham, 1987), 56, 61Google Scholar; and Petrov, A. Iu., “Obrazovanie Rossisko-Amerikanskoi Kompanii (1795-1799),” in Bolkhovitinov, N. N. ed., Istoriia russkoi Ameriki 1732-1867, vol. 1, Osnovanie russkoi Ameriki 1732-1799 (Moscow, 1997), 356 Google Scholar.

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58. Alekseev et al., eds., Aziatskaia Rossiia, 9; Mark Bassin, “Geographies of Imperial Identity,” in Lieven, ed., Cambridge History of Russia, 2:47.

59. Willard Sunderland, “Imperial Space: Territorial Thought and Practice in the Eighteenth Century,” in Burbank, Jane, Hagen, Mark von, Remnev, Anatolyi, eds., Russian Empire: People, Space, Power, 1700-1930 (Bloomington, 2007), 39 Google Scholar.

60. See, for example, the map of the “newly acquired territory” between the lower Dniestr and Dnepr published by the Institute of Mines: Rossiiskii atlas iz soroka chelyrekh kart sostoiashchii i na sorok na dva namestnichestva imperiiu razdeliaiushchii (St. Petersburg, 1792), 87 Google Scholar.

61. For these uses, see, for example, Khlebnikov, Kiril Timofeevich, “Zapiski o koloniiakh v Amerike,” in Fedorova, S. G., ed., Russkaia Amerika v “zapiskakh” Kirila Khlebnikova (Moscow, 1985)Google Scholar; and Kostlivtsov, S. A., Otchet po obozreniiu rossiisko-amerikanskikh kolonii (St. Petersburg, 1861)Google Scholar.

62. Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” in Brower and Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient, 27-57; Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 60-61. For Catherine's reference, see “Pis'ma Ekateriny Vtoroi k Baronu Grimmu,” Russkii arkhiv 16, no. 9 (1878): 93 Google Scholar.

63. The term inorodtsy was not new—it appears in descriptions of non-Russian peoples from at least as far back as the sixteenth century. But it began its trajectory as a widely recognized legal category with Mikhail Speranskii's Siberian Statute of 1822. See Geraci, Robert P., Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2001), 31 Google Scholar; Sokolovskii, S. V, Obrazy drugikh v rossiiskoi nauke, politike i prove (Moscow, 2001), 52 Google Scholar; Belova, O. V, “Inorodets,” in N. I. Tol'stoi, ed., Slavianskie drevnosti: Etnolingvisticheskii slovar’ (Moscow, 1999), 2: 414-18Google Scholar.

64. Alexei Miller, “The Empire and the Nation in the Imagination of Russian Nationalism,“ in Miller and Rieber, eds., Imperial Rule, 21; Charles Steinwedel, “How Bashkiria Became a Part of European Russia,” in Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev, eds., Russian Empire, 94-124; and Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field. On the changing morphology of the center, see Leonid Gorizontov, “The ‘Great Circle’ of Interior Russia: Representations of the Imperial Center in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev, eds., Russian Empire, 67-93.

65. Pravilova, Ekaterina, Finansy imperii: Dengi i vlast’ v politike Rossii na natsional'nykh okrainakh, 1801-1917 (Moscow, 2006), 107 Google Scholar; Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993), 24 Google Scholar; Arsen'ev, K. I., Statisticheskie ocherki Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1848), 25–26 Google Scholar; Berezin, I., “Metropoliia i koloniia,” Otechestvennye zapiski 117', no. 3 (1858): 81–99; 117, no. 5 (1858): 349-70; 118, no. 5 (1858): 74-115Google Scholar; Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire, 29; Jeff Sahadeo, “Progress or Peril: Migrants and Locals in Russian Tashkent, 1906-1914,” in Breyfogle, Nicholas B., Schrader, Abby, and Sunderland, Willard, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (London, 2007), 155-56Google Scholar; 1.1. Rodigina, , “Drugaia Rossiia“: Obraz Sibiri v russkoi zhurnal'noi presse vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX veka (Novosibirsk, 2006), 146 Google Scholar; Alekseev, et al., eds., Aziatskaia Rossiia, 431-32, 435-36; F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, eds., Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg, 1890), 1:231Google Scholar.

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67. Slocum, John W., “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 173-90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 31-32. For a title that reveals some of the range of peoples covered by the term by the early twentieth century, see Alektorov, A. I., Inorodtsy v Rossii: Sovremennye voprosy; finliandtsy, poliaki, latyshi, evrei, nemtsy, armiane, tatary (St. Petersburg, 1906)Google Scholar.

68. For a small hint of the wide-ranging public discussion on these issues, see Fortunatov, F., Natsional'nye oblasti Rossii (opyt statisticheskogo issledovaniia po dannym vseobshchei perepisi) (St. Petersburg, 1906)Google Scholar; Kokoshkin, F. F., Oblastnaia reforma i edinstvo Rossii (Moscow, 1906)Google Scholar; Novotorzhskii, G., Natsional'nyi vopros, avtonomiia i federatsiia (Moscow, 1906)Google Scholar; Ratner, M. V., O natsional'noi i territorial'noi avtonomii (Kiev-St. Petersburg, 1906)Google Scholar; Grushevskii, M., Edinstvo ili raspadenie Rossii? (St. Petersburg, 1907)Google Scholar; Korf, S. A., Federalizm (St. Petersburg, 1908)Google Scholar; and Evreinov, G. A., Natsional'nye voprosy na inorodcheskikh okrainakh Rossii: Schema politicheskoi programmy (St. Petersburg, 1908)Google Scholar.

69. Haxthausen, Baron von, The Russian Empire: Its Peoples, Institutions, and Resources (1847-1852; reprint, New York, 1968), 2:76, 1Google Scholar.

70. Remnev, “Stepnoe general-gubernatorstvo,” 175.

71. The most comprehensive study of the Ministry of State Domains in its formative period is Druzhinin, N. M., Gosudarstvennye krest'iane i reforma P. D. Kiseleva, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1946-58)Google Scholar. See also Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel'nosti Ministerstva Gosudarstvennykh hnushchestv, 1837-1887 (St. Petersburg, 1888)Google Scholar.

72. The quoted phrase is drawn from the Resettlement Administration's masterwork, Aziatskaia Rossiia (St. Petersburg, 1914), l:vGoogle Scholar.

73. On the history of the Resettlement Administration, see Treadgold, Donald W., The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton, 1957), 120–21, 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vysshie i tsenlral'nye gosudarstvennye uchrezhdeniia Rossii, 1801-1917 (St. Petersburg, 2002), 3:72, 91–92 Google Scholar. On GUZZ as the center for “new administrative techniques” and a “democracy of experts,” see Yaney, George, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana, 1982), 133-38Google Scholar. On “scientifically informed government” in Russia in this period, see Hirsh, Empire of Nations, 31, 47.

74. On these details, see the remembrances of one of the administration's new officials: Tatishchev, A. A., Zemli i liudi: Vgushche pereselencheskogo dvizheniia, 1906-1921 (Moscow, 2001), 34 Google Scholar.

75. For all of the above, see Andronikov, I. A., “Kolonizatsiia Sibiri v sviazi s zemleustroistvom mestnogo naseleniia,” Voprosy kolonizatsii (hereafter VK), 1907, no. 2: 119 Google Scholar; Kuznetsov, V, “Ekonomicheskoe rezul'taty pereseleniia v Sibir’ i Stepnoi Krai,” VK, 1907, no. 2: 83 Google Scholar; Vvedenskii, I., “Pereselenie i agrarnyi vopros,” VK 1909, no. 5: 78 Google Scholar; Shkunov, M., “Zemleustroistvo inorodtsev v Gornom Altae i ispol'zovanie svobodnogo fonda dlia kolonizatsii,” VK, 1909, no. 5: 171 Google Scholar; Skorniakov, E. E., Oroshenie i kolonizatsiia pustyn’ shtata Aidago v Severnoi Amerike na osnovanii zakona Keri (Carey Act): Otchet po zagranichnoi komandirovke, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1911)Google Scholar; Epanchin, N. N., Oroshenie i kolonizatsiia chernozemnykh prerii dal'nego zapada Kanady obshchestvom kanadskoi zheleznoi dorogi: Otchet po komandirovke v Kanadu v 1912 g., 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1913)Google Scholar; and Kaufman, A. A., Po novym mestam (St. Petersburg, 1905)Google Scholar.

76. Spisok izdanii Pereselencheskogo Upravleniia, s risunkami (St. Petersburg, 1914)Google Scholar. On mapping in particular, see Bagrov, L. S., Karty Aziatskoi Rossii (Petrograd, 1914), 28 Google Scholar.

77. The original instructions for the administration emphasized the new agency's responsibilities for organizing and supporting the movement of settlers and their establishment in their new homes. As a result, right until the end of the regime, most of the administration's work on the ground flowed from this basic mandate. See “Vysochaishe utverzhdennoe, 2 dekabria 1896 g., mnenie Gosudarstvennogo Soveta ob uchrezhdenii v sostave Ministerstva Vnutrennykh Del Pereselencheskogo Upravleniia; otdely I i II,“ Sbornik uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii opereselenii (St. Petersburg, 1901), 2–4 Google Scholar.

78. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Dal'nego Vostoka (RGIADV), f. 702, op. 3, d. 347, pt. 1, 1. 216.

79. Gins, G., “Voprosy kolonizatsii Aziatskoi Rossii i ‘vystavka po pereselencheskomu delu,'” VK, 1912, no. 11:3–4 Google Scholar.

80. Ibid, 4. Gins returned to this idea in another publication: see Gins, , Pereselenie i kolonizatsiia (St. Petersburg, 1913), 29 Google Scholar.

81. Aziatskaia Rossiia, 1:viii.

82. For example, see ibid., 1:39, 42, 88-92; Glinka, K. D., ed., Predvoritel'nyi otchet ob organizatsii i ispolnenii rabot po issledovaniiu pochv Aziatskoi Rossii v 1908 godu (St. Petersburg, 1908), 4–8 Google Scholar; and RGIA, f. 391, op. 6, d. 300, 11. 58ob. (reference to Asiatic Russia as Siberia, the Steppe Territory, and Turkestan), 88 (reference to Asiatic Russia as all of the above and Trans-Caucasia as well). Remnev notes that “Siberia” gradually disappeared from administrative discourse over the course of the nineteenth century, while the use of “Asiatic Russia” increased. See his “Koloniia ili okraina?” 115.

83. This definition of colonization (kolonizatsiia) appears in an administration document from 1916. See RGIA, f. 391, op. 6, d. 300, 1. 26ob.

84. Krivoshein, K. A., Aleksandr Vasil'evich Krivoshein: Sud'ba rossiiskogo reformatora (Moscow, 1993), 126, 131Google Scholar; and Gins, Pereselenie i kolonizatsiia, 20. Krivoshein was also closely involved in eastern questions through his influential position on the Committee for the Settlement of the Far East, which was formed under the Council of Ministers in 1909. See Remnev, A. V., Rossiia Dal'nego Vostoka: Imperskaia geografiia vlasti XIX-nachala XX vekov (Omsk, 2004), 479-87Google Scholar. Krivoshein's influence over Far Eastern colonization was especially pronounced prior to 1911. After Stolypin's death, the committee met far less frequently and was closed in 1915.

85. “Rech’ glavnoupravliaiushchego zemleustroistvom i zemledeliem A. V. Krivosheina v Gosudarstvennoi Dume 10 noiabria 1908 goda,” in Guterts, A. V., ed. and comp., Stolypinskaia reforma i zemleustroitel’ A. A. Kofod: Dokumenty, perepiska, memuary (Moscow, 2003), 89 Google Scholar. Prior to his appointment as head of GUZZ, Krivoshein served eight years in the Resettlement Administration.

86. Poezdka v Sibir’ i Povolzh'e: Zapiska P. A. Stolypina i A. V. Krivosheina (St. Petersburg, 1911), 55, 11Google Scholar. On the tour with Stolypin, see Charles Steinwedel, “Resettling People, Unsettling the Empire: Migration and the Challenge of Governance, 1861-1917,” in Breyfogle, Schrader, and Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery, 134-41; and Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, 153-83. On Krivoshein's inspections of the Caucasus and Turkestan, see Voshchinin, V., “Kolonizatsionnoe delo pri A.V. Krivosheine,” VK, 1915, no. 18: 3–24 Google Scholar; and [Krivoshein, A. V.], Zapiska glavnoupravliaiushchego zemleustroistvom i zemledeliem o poezdke v Turkestanskii krai v 1912 g. (Poltava, 1912)Google Scholar.

87. In 1906, GUZZ's, colonization budget was 5 million rubles. By 1914, it had risen to over 30 million. “Khronika,” VK, 1914, no. 14: 183; Aziatskaia Rossiia, 1:493 (graph)Google Scholar.

88. See, for example, the discussions in RGIA, f. 391, op. 6, d. 300, 11. 28, 54ob.-55, 59ob.-60. As it turns out, despite their best efforts, administration officials were unable to stop a steep drop off in colonization investment during the war years. The year after the war began the administration's colonization budget declined by 10 percent to 27 million rubles. By 1916, it had fallen another 20 percent to 21.5 million. Ibid., 1. 28.

89. Ibid., 1.65.

90. Materialy po zemel'nomu voprosu v Aziatskoi Rossii, vol. 8, Zhurnaly komissii po voprosam pereseeniia i kolonizatsii (Petrograd, 1918), 18Google Scholar.

91. On this proposal, see RGIA, f. 391, op. 5, d. 735, 11. 1-8.

92. On colonization in Persia, see Sakharov, A., Russkaia kolonizatsiia Astrabadskoi provintsii v Persii (Petrograd, 1915)Google Scholar; Voshchinin, V., “Sovremennye zadachi Rossii na severe Persii,” VK, 1915, no. 17: 26–51 Google Scholar; Bezsonov, B. V., Russkie pereselentsy v Severnoi Persii (Petrograd, 1915)Google Scholar; and RGIA, f. 391, op. 5, dd. 306 and 307. See also Peter Holquist's discussion on Persian colonization in his article for this forum. On the administration's desks and bureaus, see Vysshie i tsentral'nye gosudarstvennye uchrezhdeniia Rossii, 1801-1917, 3:91-92. For archival materials on resettlement work in Uriankhai during the war years, see RGIA, f. 391, op. 5, dd. 1390, 2173, and 2174.

93. See, for example, the administration's agenda for 1915 in RGIA, f. 391, op. 5, d. 1557, 1. 12ob.

94. RGIA, f. 391, op. 6, d. 300, 1. 5. The administration's involvement in Mongolian affairs was not new. As early as 1910, administration officials had had a seat on a secret interministerial commission created to study the issue of expanding Russian influence in the country. One of these officials was Gennadii Chirkin, soon to serve as the last head of the administration. On the commission and its members, see RGIA, f. 23, op. 8, d. 163, 1. 1. For Chirkin's description of the administration's Mongolian-oriented activities during the war, see his “Znachenie dlia Rossii Mongol'skogo rynka: K voprosu o sooruzhenii Mongol'skoi zheleznoi dorogi; Kiakhta-Urga,” VK, 1915, no. 17: 77-84.

95. As quoted in Sud'ba, veka: Krivosheiny (St. Petersburg, 2002), 130 Google Scholar.

96. This is the “dilemma of modern empire” identified by Lieven in “Russia as Empire and Periphery,” 19, 22.

97. See, for example, the grumblings of the military governor of the Amur Region in 1907: RGIADV, f. 1, op. 4, d. 2146, 1. 279.

98. Pahlen, Constantine [Palen], Mission to Turkestan: Being the Memoirs of Count K. K. Pahlen, 1908-1909, ed. Pierce, Richard A., trans. N.J. Couriss (Oxford, 1964), 191 Google Scholar.

99. By 1907-08, the Resettlement Administration had achieved the dubious distinction of being reviled by critics from all across the political spectrum and was, according to one account, “the most persistently abused state agency in the Third Duma.” See Voshchinin, V. P., Pereselencheskii vopros v gosudarstvennoi Dume tret'ego sozyva (St. Petersburg, 1912), 29–33, 57-58Google Scholar.

100. See the conclusions in Remnev, “Rossiiskaia vlast'.“

101. Krivoshein cites the precedent of the Far Eastern committee directly in his proposal. See RGIA, f. 391, op. 5, d. 735, 11. 5-6. And Krivoshein would have known about the committee because he was a member.

102. See RGIA, f. 1282, op. 2 (1903), d. 24. The report on administrative structures in the German, French, and British empires appears on 11. 266-303. My thanks to Anatolii Remnev for pointing me to this material.

103. Voshchinin, “Kolonizatsionnoe delo pri A. V. Krivosheine,” 24. In postrevolutionary retirement, former assistant minister of the interior Vladimir Gurko regretted that the empire had never created a “special ministry … colonies” as this would have been the appropriate way, in his view, to administer Turkestan and Russia's other “essentially colonial possessions” in the east. Gurko clearly did not imagine Krivoshein as the minister, however. See his Cherty i siluety proshlogo: Pravitel'stvo i oshchestvennost’ v tsarstvovanie Nikolaia II v izobrazhenii sovremennika (Moscow, 2000), 155-56Google Scholar. I thank David McDonald for this reference.

104. “Ot redaktsii,” VK, 1907, no. 1: i.

105. On the influence and implications of the phrase “united and indivisible” on imperial politics, see Remnev, “Okraina ili koloniia?” 121-22; and Peter Holquist, “Dilemmas of a Progressive Administrator: Nolde, Baron Boris,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 266-67, 271-72Google Scholar. The idea of “Greater Russia,“ embraced by Stolypin, Nolde, Petr Struve, and various politicians and commentators across the ideological spectrum, echoes the influential vision of a “Greater Britain” first voiced by the British historian John Seeley in 1883. For a brief discussion of Seeley and his influence, see Ward, Stuart, “Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History?” in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking luith and through the Nation (Durham, 2003), 44–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.