This article considers the significance of geopolitical space to the configuration of the Russian Empire. The spatial possibilities for empire depend in part on what other empires have set in place or ignored. Moscow emerged as a bud of imperial power because at the start no great power was interested in its backwater location. Ambitious princes in this region had a chance to expand and learn how to govern before other powers took notice. Moscow’s leaders also had the good geographical fortune of eventually rubbing up against multiple imperial powers during their history. Their dynasty, the Rus’, had integrated Viking and Eurasian-style political practices on the way to power in Kiev. Kiev bequeathed Muscovites a distinctly imperial state religion – Byzantine-style Christianity with its linguistic tolerance, writing systems, and resplendent art. When the Mongols extended their western empire into the lands of the Rus’, the Muscovites acquired useful administrative techniques and were compelled into expansion to retain their hold as first-rank subordinates of the Chinggisid khans. The subsequent Romanov dynasty and the later communist and post-communist leaders continued the practices of expansion in Eurasian space and inclusion of unlike peoples under imperial protection and discipline. Russia’s rulers kept acquiring military, economic, and cultural skills from a series of imperial competitors – the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Prussians, British and the rest of what became known as the West – over the next centuries and into the present. At the start, distance from great powers gave Moscow time to run over smaller ones, but eventually expansion outward in multiple directions was critical to how Russians put their empires together and ruled them.

Chapter six sets a counterpoint to this argument, exploring cases in which the Muslim population proved uncooperative with, or openly resisted, state institutions, including the judiciary, police, and local administration. Most of these cases were related to land issues and the fear of forced conversion in the Volga region. In Crimea, where forced conversion was less of a threat and where land had been surveyed and demarcated earlier, most remaining disputes could be fought out in court by the 1870s.

Focusing on the “crisis year” 1879, in which uprisings by Volga Tatars were violently crushed by the Kazan authorities, the final chapter investigates one of the situations in which the existing legal order broke down and gave way to arbitrary rule. The example shows that while the formalized rule of law was influential by the late 1870s, it continued to be challenged by the autocratic order.

Introducing the two regions at the heart of this study, chapter two maps out the geographical, political, economic, and cultural setting of the book. While it focuses on the years around the Great Reforms, it puts this period into broader perspective, tracing continuity and change throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, the chapter combines elements of temporal and spatial comparison, highlighting the distinctiveness of the two regions and their similarities. First, it discusses their dynamic, and diverging, role in the imperial imagination. While both regions were considered to be different from both the empire’s peripheries and traditional heartlands, they were appropriated as part of the imperial core, in discourse and in practice. Second, the chapter reviews the demographic composition of the two territories, their changing institutional landscapes and forms of governance. Finally, it charts the socio-economic conditions under which people lived, while paying close attention to the effects of migration. In all of these questions, the situation of Muslim Tatars is foregrounded.