The theme of East vs. West, Asia vs. Europe, is a very old one in European history, with roots in Greco-Roman civilization, Europe’s parent. The Greeks invented the words Asia and Europe for the lands on the opposing shores of the line of bodies of water from the Aegean Sea in the south to the Don River in the north. A cultural connotation was added to the words by the fifth century B.C.E., when the Greek city-states clashed with the Persian Empire. The notion of a sharp cultural difference was strengthened when Rome’s imperial expansion brought her face to face with the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Near East, and then the Neo-Persian (Sassanian) Empire. During these centuries, and for many more to come, the terms Asia and Orient applied only to the westernmost portions of the continent – those best known to the Greeks, Romans, and their heirs – as distinct from the much less known India and the more-mythical-than-real Far East.
During its formative period in the Early Middle Ages, Latin Christendom, later known as European or Western civilization, was in the process of differentiating itself from its eastern neighbor and sibling, Orthodox Christendom. By the time this process reached completion in the mutual distrust of the twelfth century, much of Orthodox Christendom had been conquered by Islam, and the rest would soon follow. By the late fourteenth century, Latin Christendom’s only adjoining civilization was, and would long remain, Islam. A partial exception was the Russian lands, a peripheral part of Orthodox Christendom, which from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century was under the control of Asian steppe nomads, themselves converted to Islam during this period.
There is no evidence that Russians in the Kievan and udel’nyi periods perceived their encounters with their nomadic neighbors as part of an age-long struggle between East and West, Asia and Europe. In the sixteenth century Moscow presented itself as the successor to Constantinople, the Christian capital, and its conquest of Kazan as a Christian victory over Islam. Schismatic Europe was left out of this picture, and the struggle of religions was not yet seen as one between civilizations.
Only from Peter’s time on did Russia place her earlier confrontation with the steppe nomads, along with her contemporary encounters with neighbors across the breadth of the Asian continent, in the context of a struggle between East and West. This was the inevitable result of Russia’s having joined the European state system and begun the process of Westernization, in the cultural as well as other spheres. Educated Russians fully subscribed to European notions of East and West. This deeply rooted dichotomous view of the world had survived the discovery of the trans-Atlantic “New World,” whose political, demographic, and cultural integration into Europe had begun in the sixteenth century. Russians, however, were fully aware that their country’s inclusion in the West was recent and in many ways not fully accepted by the latter. The intelligentsia’s efforts at coping with this problem are the subject of my 1991 article, which follows this introduction.
Russia’s role between East and West was an important theme for the most widely read nineteenth-century historians – the authors of multi-volume histories of Russia and of school textbooks. These historians are only touched on in the following article; they are treated more fully in an earlier article of mine.^[1] However much they differed among themselves on other subjects, they were of one mind on Russia’s relationship to Asia.
In the first half of the century, N. M. Karamzin and his successors (I. K. Kaidanov, N. A. Polevoi, M. P. Pogodin, N. G. Ustrialov, and A. O. Ishimova) depicted Russia’s Christian neighbors in Europe as motivated in their dealings with Russia by fear, suspicion, envy, and greed. (One may say that they treated Russia not too differently from the way in which they dealt with each other.) Russia’s infidel neighbors to the south and east, by contrast, were labeled as perfidious, savage, ferocious, blood-thirsty, rapacious barbarians, brigands, and predators. This characterization of Russia’s Asian neighbors was repeated endlessly and without change by the historians of the second half of the century. The moral was stated explicitly: there was no alternative to forcible subjugation of such neighbors.
Karamzin implied the unchanging nature of the nomads’ threat to Russia by identifying the modern Kazakhs as “kinsmen” of the eleventh-century Polovtsi, whose customs he described with disgust.^[2] Ustrialov justified Catherine the Great’s annexation of the Pontic Steppe by Russia’s civilizing mission among the “semi-savage nomads” and “predatory peoples” of the region.^[3]
In the mid-nineteenth century S. M. Solov’ev established the terms in which Russia’s relationship to Asia would be presented down to 1917 by Russia’s most widely read historians (apart from Solov’ev himself – N. I. Kostomarov, D. I. Ilovaiskii, S. E. Rozhdestvenskii, I. I. Belliarminov, V. A. Abaza, V. O. Kliuchevskii, P. N. Miliukov, and S. F. Platonov). Using geography as a major determinant of Russian history, Solov’ev argued for Russia’s European nature and for her vital role in the age-long struggle of European civilization against Asian barbarism.
Russia’s location on the East European Plain, an area united by an extensive network of navigable rivers whose sources were close to each other and by the absence of internal mountain ranges, destined her to expand to that region’s natural frontiers – the seas into which its rivers emptied (the Arctic, Baltic, Black, and Caspian) and the mountains that bordered it (the Carpathians, Caucasus, and Urals). The plain itself, however, according to Solov’ev, was divided into a northwestern forested sector traversed by rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean and Baltic Sea and a southeastern steppe zone traversed by rivers flowing into the Black and Caspian seas. The former sector, with its sedentary population, was an integral part of Europe; the latter, with its nomads, was a transitional zone between Europe and Asia.^[4] For Solov’ev, the southeastern steppe zone, despite its geographic and demographic affinity with Asia, could be only a “transitional” zone, because nature intended the entire plain for Russia, i.e., Europe.
In the Kievan period, Solov’ev continued, Russia had held her own against the steppe nomads. In the Mongol period, the latter had subdued her, isolated her from her European brethren, and introduced Asiatic influences long thereafter reflected in the crudeness of Russian customs.^[5] From the late fifteenth century Russia had gone over to the offensive, which carried her beyond the Urals, the natural frontier of the East European Plain, as far as the Pacific. To liquidate Asia’s last foothold in Europe, the Crimean khanate, however, Russia had first, in Peter’s reign, to go to school in the West. There she began to repair the damage to her cultural development caused by the Tatar Yoke and acquired the knowledge necessary for a definitive victory over Asia.^[6]
Solov’ev equated Catherine’s victories over the Turks with those of the ancient Greeks over the Persians and of Rome over the Huns. With Russia’s annexation of the Black Sea coast, more than thirteen centuries of Asiatic rule in Europe had ended.^[7] Solov’ev, strangely, seems to have overlooked the continuing presence of the Turks in the Balkans – not only in Catherine’s day, but even in his. But the struggle was not yet over, for the Caucasus remained as “the last refuge of Asiatic savagery.”^[8] Not quite the last, for Solov’ev himself had identified Central Asia as the heartland of which the Kazan khanate was a “bulwark (oplot) against Europe.”^[9] Ilovaiskii celebrated Russia’s liberation of Central Asia in the 1860s-70s from “Muslim fanaticism, the slave trade, every type of rapaciousness, and the constant internecine wars of the local rulers.”^[10]
Russia’s irreconcilable foes to the south and east, in need of subjugation and the blessings of European civilization, were variously identified by her historians as nomads, Turks, Muslims, or simply Asiatics. Further clarification was unnecessary, for Russia’s nomadic neighbors had from the beginning been Turks and, from the early fourteenth century, also Muslims, and nomadism was associated with Asia. That many of these Muslim Turks (e.g., those in Kazan and some of those in the Caucasus and Turkestan) had long ago exchanged a nomadic for a sedentary existence was hardly worth noting. Islam, fully as much as nomadism, represented Asiatic darkness in contrast to European enlightenment – the minds of Russians as of Europeans.
The most effective means for disseminating European enlightenment among the barbarians and infidels of Asia was colonization by Russians. Among the historians, Solov’ev, Kostomarov, and especially Kliuchevskii were ardent advocates of Russia’s mission to establish towns and villages to bring European civilization to her Asiatic subjects.^[11] In executing this mission, Russia would affirm her European identity.
The Orient, as Edward Said has argued, has indeed contributed to Europe’s image of itself; it has done no less for Russia.