Кругосветное плавание, империя, современность, раса: влияние кругосветных путешествий на российское имперское сознание

Илья Винковецкий

1-2/2001

Публикуется на английском.

SUMMARY:

Статья И. Винковецкого посвящена исследованию того влияния, которое оказали на восприятие образованными русскими собственной империи начавшиеся в 1803-1806 г.г. кругосветные плавания. Новый морской (“океанский”) путь от Петербурга к тихоокеанским пределам России значительно сблизил два полюса империи и стимулировал имперские амбиции. Русские, принимавшие участие в кругосветных плаваниях, посещали европейские колонии по всему миру и возвращались в Петербург полные наблюдений, которые затем старались применить на практике. Наиболее очевидно влияние этих путешествий сказалось в Русской Америке, где реформировали и модернизировали систему управления и учредили новое сословие креолов. Но более глубокий и устойчивый след кругосветные плавания оставили в сознании русских, повлияв на их восприятие расы, империи и колонизации.

1.“Russians” as used here refers to all subjects of the multiethnic Russian Empire (rossiiane rather than russkie); as will be elaborated further down in this article, many of the people participating in the round-the-world voyages did not identify themselves as ethnic Russians.↩

2.Some of the reasons for this oversight are examined in my dissertation: Ilya Vinkovetsky. Native Americans and the Russian Empire / PhD dissertation. UC Berkeley, 2001. Soviet scholars emphasized almost exclusively the strictly scientific contributions of the voyages. Western scholarship either followed suit or neglected Russia’s round-the-world voyages altogether.↩

3.About sixty-five Russian voyages took place between the Baltic and the Northern Pacific Rim up to 1867: James R. Gibson. Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America. New York, 1976. Pp. 78-81.↩

4.The vistas opened up for Russian imperialism by the opening of a trans-oceanic route between the two ends of the Russian Empire have remained largely unexamined in scholarship. In contrast, much has been written on the practical impact of changing sea routes on the operation of the British Empire. See: Daniel R. Headrick. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1981. Especially pp. 129-213 (Part Three: “The Communications Revolution”).
It should also be said that the network of contacts that the Russian navy established in various ports as its ships sailed around the world added up to a kind of marine “road of empire,” analogous to the more extensive “roads of empire” that served the British navy. I am grateful to Dov Yaroshevski for leading me toward this insight. Osterhammel refers to a similar phenomenon when he speaks about the construction of “naval networks” (Jürgen Osterhammel. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview / Trans. by Shelley L. Frisch. Princeton, 1997. Pp. 9-10.↩

5.Lieutenant Zagoskin’s Travels in Russian America, 1842-1844: The First Ethnographic and Geographic Investigations in the Yukon and Kuskokwim Valleys of Alaska / Ed. by Henry N. Michael; trans. by Penelope Rainey. Toronto, 1967. P. 71.↩

6.For recent treatments of the Russian penetration of Tlingit territory, see: Sergei Kan. Memory Eternal and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries. Seattle, 1999 and Andrei Grinev. Bitvy za Sitkhu i padenie Iakutata // N. N. Bolkhovitinov (ed.). Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki. Moscow, 1999. Vol. 2. Pp. 53-83. On Russians in California, see: A. A. Istomin. Osnovanie kreposti Ross v Kalifornii v 1812 g. i otnosheniia s Ispaniei // Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki. Vol. 2, Pp. 190-274. On the Hawaiian Islands see: N. N. Bolkhovitinov. Russkie na Gavaiakh (1804-1825) // Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki. Vol. 2. Pp. 275-302, and Richard A. Pierce. Russia’s Hawaiian Adventure, 1815-1817. Berkeley, 1965.↩

7.A joint-stock company founded in 1799, the Russian-American Company went on to run Russian America (and its fur trade) until the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867.↩

8.The list of names of junior and senior naval officers who participated in the early circumnavigation voyages includes many men who went on to hold leading positions in the coming decades.↩

9.The remarkable artists enlisted for the round-the-world voyages included Louis Choris and Mikhail Tikhanov, among others. See: Louis Choris. Voyage pittoresque autour du monde, avec des portraits de sauvages d’Amerique, d’Asie, d’Afrique, et des iles du Grand ocean; des paysages, des vues maritimes, et plusieurs objets d'histoire naturelle; accompagne de descriptions par m. le baron Cuvier, et m. A. de Chamisso, et d'observations sur les cranes humains, par m. le docteur Gall. Paris, 1822; Diliara Safaralieva. M. T. Tikhanov (1789-1862), Artist-Traveler // Barbara Sweetland Smith and Redmond J. Barnett (eds.). Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier. Tacoma, Wash., 1990. Pp. 33-39.↩

10.The pageantry surrounding these voyages is a subject onto itself. It is a pity that Richard Wortman does not discuss Emperor Alexander I’s visits aboard the vessels in his Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol. 1. Princeton, 1995.↩

11.On imperial imagination, see: Mark Bassin. Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865. New York, 1999.↩

12.Nathaniel Knight. Constructing the Science of Nationality: Ethnography in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia / PhD dissertation. Columbia University, 1994; incidentally, Knight reports that the charter of the Royal Geographical Society in London was used by Litke as a model for the charter of the Russian Geographical Society.↩

13.See also Nathaniel Knight. Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845-1855 // Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire. Ed. by Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1998. Pp. 108-41.↩

14.Yuri Slezkine. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, 1994. P. 75.↩

15.It should be noted that the one thing that Siberian background did not prepare them well for was open-ocean travel. Nonetheless, the Russians who ventured to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska from the Siberian coast had to build vessels right on the coast; the iron nails were carried from as far away as Irkutsk. There was a maverick quality to their island-hoping mode of ocean travel; in that regard, at least, Russian penetration of the Aleutian Islands and North America was anything but a mere extension of the old Siberian frontier.↩

16.I. Veniaminov. Zapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskago otdela. 3 vols. St. Petersburg, 1840. Vol. 1, pp. 109-13.↩

17.Willard Sunderland. Russians into Iakuts? ‘Going Native’ and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s –1914 // Slavic Review. 1996. Vol. 55. No. 4. Pp. 806-25.↩

18.See F. P. Litke, Dnevnik, vedennyi vo vremia krugosvetnogo plavaniia na shliiupe ‘Kamchatka’ // L. A. Shur (ed.). K beregam Novogo Sveta: Iz neopublikovannykh zapisok russkikh puteshestvennikov nachala XIX veka. Moscow, 1989. P. 89.↩

19.For a contemporary British perspective on Russian naval service see A Voyage to St. Petersburg in 1814, with remarks on the Imperial Russian Navy, by a surgeon in the British Navy. London, 1822.↩

20.For a discussion of the importance of the travel book as a genre in early nineteenth-century Europe, see Victoria Joan Moessner. Translator’s Introduction // Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff. Remarks and Observations on a Voyage around the World from 1803 to 1807 / Ed. by Richard A. Pierce. 2 vols. Kingston, Ontario, 1993. Vol. 1. Pp. xi-xxx.↩

21.Glynn Barratt. Russia and the South Pacific. 3 vols. Vancouver, 1988. Vol. 1. Pp. 20-24.↩

22.Their desire for fame and glory is beyond dispute; for example, see F. P. Litke. Dnevnik, vedennyi vo vremia krugosvetnogo plavaniia na shliiupe ‘Kamchatka’. P. 89; see also G. I. Davydov. Two Voyages to Russian America / Ed. by Richard A. Pierce, trans. by Colin Bearne. Kingston, Ontario, 1977. Pp. 22-23.↩

23.Glynn Barratt. Russia in Pacific Waters, 1715-1825: A Survey of the Origins of Russia's Naval Presence in the North and South Pacific. Vancouver, 1981. P. 119.↩

24.Langsdorff. Remarks and Observations on a Voyage around the World. Vol. 1. Pp. 4, 17.↩

25.See Iu. M. Lotman. Russo i russkaia kul’tura XVIII veka // M. P. Alekseev (ed.). Epokha Prosveshcheniia: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury. Leningrad, 1967. Pp. 208-81.↩

26.A particularly illustrative example of an “exotic” Native who fascinated the circumnavigators is provided by the Pacific Islander named Kadu, who befriended the captain of a Russian ship and spent some time sailing on his ship around the Pacific: Otto von Kotzebue. A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering’s Straits, for the Purpose of Exploring a North-East Passage, Undertaken in the Years 1815-1818, at the Expense of His Highness the Chancellor of the Empire, Count Romanzoff, in the Ship Rurick, Under the Command of the Lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Navy, Otto von Kotzebue. 3 vols. London, 1821. Vol. 2. Pp. 121-31, 142, 143, 151-55, 161-63, 166, 173, 176, 211, 213. See also Adelbert von Chamisso. A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov Expedition in the Years 1815-1818 in the Brig Rurik, Captain Otto von Kotzebue / Trans. and ed. by Henry Kratz. Honolulu, 1986.↩

27.On the naval officers’ views of the Siberian promyshlenniki (fur hunters), see Iu. Davydov. Golovnin. Moscow, 1968. P. 89; and G. I. Davydov. Two Voyages... Pp. 88-91.↩

28.On the naval officers’ sense of duty to civilize see V. A. Bil’basov’s introduction to Arkhiv grafov Mordvinovykh. St. Petersburg, 1902. Vol. 5. P. ix.↩

29.Bassin. Imperial Visions… P. 53.↩

30.Richard A. Pierce. Russian and Soviet Eskimo and Indian Policies // Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, 1988. Vol. 4. P. 122.↩

31.On the attitude of Russians in Siberia to race, see John J. Stephan. The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford, California, 1994. P. 25.↩

32.Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii (in Moscow). Fond 341. Opis’ 888. Delo 277. Ll. 1-3.↩

33.In terms of social standing, rights and obligations, the estate (soslovie) in the Russian Empire that most closely resembled the Creole estate in Russian America was the meshchanstvo. Broadly defined, the meshchanstvo estate consisted of relatively poor town dwellers who did not qualify for membership in other estates.↩

34.Sergei A. Kostlivtsov. Otchet po obozreniiu Rossiisko-Amerikanskikh kolonii, proizvedennomu po rasporiazheniiu Gospodina Ministra Finansov. St. Petersburg, 1861. Pp. 22-23.↩

35.Russian-American Company rules prohibited the removal of Creole children from Russian America to Eurasia by the fathers.↩

36.The German-born naturalist Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff (Grigorii Ivanovich Langsdorf), a participant in the first voyage who became Russia’s consul in Brazil, routinely welcomed the Russian circumnavigators at his Brazilian estate, where they socialized with European scientists, local notables, and foreign dignitaries. When Ferdinand Petrovich Vrangel’ (an officer in the Russian navy and former governor of Russian America who was also known by his Baltic German title and name Baron Ferdinand von Wrangell) went on an official negotiating mission to Mexico, he consulted German and English literary sources, and drew especially on the advice of German diplomats and other members of the “German colony” in Mexico (L. A. Shur (ed.). K beregam Novogo Sveta. P. 183).↩

37.Fedor P. Litke. A Voyage around the World 1826-1829 / Trans. by Renee Marshall. Kingston, Ontario, 1987. Pp. 74-75.↩

38.The Canadian ethnohistorian Jennifer S. H. Brown notes a similar pattern of differentiation and stereotyping by the officials of Hudson’s Bay Company of its metis (half-white/half-Native American) workforce: Jennifer S. H. Brown. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Vancouver, 1980. Pp. 206-07.↩

39.See Pavel N. Golovin. Civil and Savage Encounters: The Worldly Travel Letters of an Imperial Russian Navy Officer, 1860-1861 / Trans. by Basil Dmytryshyn and E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan. Portland, 1983. Pp. 115-17.↩

40.Aside from Bering and Chirikov’s expeditions (1725-1730; 1733-1741), the government sponsored two other large-scale voyages to the region: the first (1764-1769) was led by Petr Krenitsyn and Mikhail Levashev; the second (1785-1792) by Joseph Billings and Gavriil Sarychev.↩

41.Veniaminov. Zapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskago otdela. Vol. 1. P. vii.↩

42.Svetlana Grigor’evna Fedorova’s Russkoe naselenie Aliaski i Kalifornii. Moscow, 1971. This is the most comprehensive study of the Russian population of Alaska. See also Svetlana G. Fedorova. Ethnic Processes in Russian America. Anchorage, 1975.↩

43.On the inability of the merchant estate of the Russian Empire to defend its interests, see Alfred J. Rieber. Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia. Chapel Hill, 1982. Pp. xxii, 23-24.↩

44.Among those purchasing shares in the spring of 1802 were Emperor Alexander I, Dowager Empress Mariia Fedorovna, and statesmen N. P. Rumiantsev, N. S. Mordvinov, and I. A. Vedemeier (Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov. The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775-1815 / Trans. Elena Levin. Cambridge, Mass., 1975. P.169).↩

45.On the ambitions of the navy to gain influence in running Russia’s American colony, see Vasilii M. Golovnin. Materialy dlia istorii russkikh zaselenii po beregam Vostochnago okeana // Prilozhenie k Morskomu Sborniku. St. Petersburg, 1861. No. 1; M. S. Al’perovich. Rossiia i Novyi Svet (posledniaia chast' XVIII veka). Moscow, 1993; and Glynn Barratt. Russia in Pacific Waters, 1715-1825. P. 186.↩

46.Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov (1746-1819) was the first and longest-serving glavnyi pravitel’ of the Russian-American Company (1799-1818). He was born in the town of Kargopol’ in north European Russia, but had extensive experience in Siberia from 1780 on, prior to setting off for America from the Siberian port of Okhotsk in 1790. Between 1790 and 1799, he served as the chief manager of the Shelikhov-Golikov Company, which had been the main commercial predecessor of the Russian-American Company.↩

47.The chief manager of the Russian-American Company was the highest-ranking official and de facto governor of Russian America. He was subservient to the Company’s headquarters located in St. Petersburg. From its founding, the Russian-American Company was placed under the protection (pokrovitel’stvo) of the Emperor.↩

48.See Gibson. Imperial Russia in Frontier America. Pp. 153-73, 199-211.↩

49.A. V. Grinev. Indeitsy tlinkity v period Russkoi Ameriki. Novosibirsk, 1991. Pp. 143-144.↩

50.A. J. Krusenstern. Voyage round the world, in the years 1803, 1804, 1805, & 1806, by order of His Imperial Majesty Alexander the First, on board the ships Nadezhda and Neva, under the command of Captain A. J. von Krusenstern. 2 vols. London, 1813. Vol. 1, pp. xx-xxix; V.M. Nasetskii. Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern. Moscow, 1988. Pp. 17, 24.↩

51.The Russians of course also traded with the Chinese at the border post market in Kiakhta. But the restrictions imposed on that trade by Chinese officials irked the Russians and made them pine for an opening of Chinese ports to Russian ships. Access to Chinese ports was denied to Russian ships until after the Opium Wars; Russian-American Company ships could then become involved in the port trade on a limited basis.↩

52.Nasetskii. Kruzenshtern…Pp. 22-23.↩

53.Fedorova. Russkoe naselenie Aliaski i Kalifornii... P. 123.↩

54.On the East India Company’s “double role” see: Jurgen Osterhammel. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. P. 32.↩

55.V. M. Golovnin. Around the World on the Kamchatka, 1817-1819 / Trans., with an Introduction and Notes, by Ella Lury Wiswell; foreword by John J. Stephan. Honolulu, 1979. Pp. 130-31.↩

56.For use of the term “imperial laboratory” see S. Frederick Starr. Tsarist Government: The Imperial Dimension // Jeremy R. Azrael (ed.). Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices. Praeger, 1978. P. 30.↩

57.On the general inapplicability of Western theoretical models to the Russian Empire proper, see Andreas Kappeler. Rossiia-mnogonatsional’naia imperiia: Vozniknovenie, istoriia, raspad. Moscow, 1997. P. 12. For a recent valiant attempt to theorize on Russian America, see A. V. Grinev. Tuzemtsy Aliaski, russkie promyshlenniki i Rossiisko-Amerikanskaia kompaniia: Sistema ekonomicheskikh otnoshenii // Etnograficheskoe obozrenie. 2000. No. 3. Pp. 74-88.↩

Ab Imperio

Ab Imperio

Кругосветное плавание, империя, современность, раса: влияние кругосветных путешествий на российское имперское сознание

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