SUMMARY:

During the 18th and 19th centuries when the Russian empire was engaged in virtually continuous conflicts over the acquisition of new territory, the question of the political and economic costs and benefits of imperial expansion was always extremely important. In this article E. Pravilova scrutinizes the emergence of discourse of the “economic burden of the empire” in governmental considerations, public and later parliamentary debates, which allows to trace the evolution of governmental perspectives on the nature of the imperial polity and nation-centered thinking about the economic relationship between the Russian (Rossian) empire and the Russian and non Russian nations. The author analyzes often contradictory assessments of the balance sheet of economic relationship between the imperial center and Transcaucasia, the Kingdom of Poland (and later Polish gubernias), Turkestan and the Grand Duchy of Finland. While economic motivations for conquest and maintenance of the empire inevitably took a backseat to geopolitical considerations, the imperial government nonetheless recognized the enormous economic potential of its newly acquired territories and generally aimed to integrate them within the empire’s economic system and its broader processes of economic development. In devising its economic policies in the borderlands, the government’s actions were shaped by two basic concerns: the first was the urge to increase the return gained from these regions in order to make sure that they did not become a financial burden on the center; and the second was the need to respect the particularities of the national economies, revenue structures, and levels of economic development in the borderlands in order to guarantee political stability. Financial relations between center and periphery within the empire ultimately evolved on the basis of these two occasionally contradictory political and economic principles.