On January 22nd 1912 , the Exhibit on Resettlement in Asiatic Russia opened at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in St. Petersburg. Sponsored by the Resettlement Administration to showcase the achievements of the Great Siberian Migration, the exhibit offered a predictable array of displays and activities, including charts with settlement totals for “Russia beyond the Urals,” maps of the soil types of the Amur Territory, photographs of settler life, a reconstructed peasant hut from “the Region beyond the Angara River” (Zaangar’e), a Kazakh yurt, and public readings on the “resettlement question” for “interested citizens.” Impressions were positive, but the exhibit, much like its subject, was a complicated matter and not every one was exactly sure what to make of it. Was resettlement a phenomenon of agriculture or imperialism? Was it a story of colonial expansion or internal development? Did the exhibit provide an exposé of the one or the other, or perhaps both at once? Reflecting the imprecision that surrounded the issue, the resettlement official Georgii Gins managed to suggest, all within the space of a single review, that “Asiatic Russia” did not constitute a “genuine colony,” that the Resettlement Administration was not a true colonial ministry, and that the exhibit itself reminded him of the Colonial Museum in Berlin.^[1]
Gins, in other words, was somewhat inconsistent, but can one blame him? On the one hand, the land of the tsars was a sprawling multiethnic and multiconfessional domain with characteristics reminiscent of Europe’s overseas empires. The state’s ethnically Russian population was concentrated in the center (the metropole?), most non-Russians were in the periphery (colonies?), most of the peripheral territories were incorporated into the state through conquest, all the conquerors in charge – that is, the state’s rulers and power brokers – were either Russian or thoroughly Russianized, and all delighted in the grandeur and the chic of ruling over un-Russian peoples, from Peter the Great who kept Kalmyks and Yakuts at his court as “pets” to free-spirited Russian Byrons who dressed up like Circassians or “nomadized” with the Bashkirs. The Russians’ vision of their civilizing mission, which the official and ethnographer Pavel Nebol’sin described in 1852 as unfolding “with gentleness, Christian love, and a strict sense of justice,” was likewise quite similar to that of the British, the French, or the Germans.^[2] Yet at the same time it was also true that precise dividing lines between “metropole” and “colony” in Russia’s empire were very hard to find; that Russian peasants were enserfed while non-Russian ones were not; that Islam and “foreign faiths” were broadly tolerated and even occasionally promoted (much to the chagrin of the Orthodox hierarchy); that Armenian, French, Baltic German, and Buriat noblemen could occupy the highest posts of government; and that educated Russians often considered Russian plebeians to be just as “backward” as non-Russian “aliens.” (In fact, to some observers in relation to some “aliens,” Russian plebeians seemed much more backward.) In other words, the tsarist empire was undeniably an empire in the European mold, but the imperialism that built and sustained it was highly ambiguous and all its own.
This ambiguity had many sources, but one that has been less appreciated than most is the nature of Russian colonization. Russian settlement in the peripheral territories of the empire changed over time and unfolded in different ways in different regions, but its practices and meanings were always complicated and thus tended to both reflect and reproduce the ambiguity of the empire itself. Indeed, the ambiguous relationship between colonization and imperialism in the Russian context was such that many Russians, high and low, in the time between Peter and 1917 did not see the relationship at all, and even when they did, which was increasingly the case towards the end of the tsarist era, their conclusions were far from straightforward. At the heart of the issue was a cluster of entangled realities: colonization in the Russian empire unfolded over land rather than across oceans, most of it was agricultural rather than urban, most of the colonists were peasants, not all of them were Russians, and to observers and would-be champions of the process within educated society (obshchestvo) the sometimes less than stellar performance of Russian colonists raised vexing questions about the nation, which in turn raised questions about the empire itself as a national product. Making sense of Russian colonization amounts, in effect, to making sense of the problems, or combinations of contradictions, that flowed from these realities. This short essay will consider three of these problems, each of which underscores colonization’s ambiguities as an imperial process.

The Problem of Terminology

Russian colonization for most of the imperial period was not called Russian colonization. Instead, it was described as “settlement” (zaselenie) or “resettlement” (pereselenie). Of the two, the term “resettlement” was more specific and also more common: by the early 19th century it had become the generic term used by the government to describe both the migration process and official settlement policy. What did resettlement imply? Quite simply, it was the relocation of peasant migrants (literally: “resettlers” [pereselentsy]) from one part of the state to another for the purposes of farming. Defined in these terms, resettlement appeared internal and agricultural, a question of domestic economics and demographics. Indeed, in and of itself the term implied absolutely nothing about the projection of imperial power. Even the de facto recognition that most “resettlers” were Russian peasants from the interior who were relocating to the non-Russian periphery and might therefore be considered actors in a colonial enterprise was just that – de facto rather than de jure. The 1843 Supplementary Regulations on the Resettlement of Land-Poor State Villagers to Land-Abundant Places, for example, became the basis for the government’s resettlement of over one million peasants from central areas to the steppe provinces and Siberia in the mid-19th century, but there was nothing in the decree that specified that the “land-abundant places” in question had to be in the borderlands.^[3] Indeed, migrants covered by the legislation were welcome to resettle within their own provinces if the lands were available and those who did were not considered any differently than those who moved to the periphery.
Compared to “resettlement,” the Russian term kolonizatsiia, like its English equivalent, was broader in its implications and suggested both physical occupation of the land as well as a more comprehensive process in which outsiders and their institutions take over, develop, and incorporate a territory not originally their own. For a long time, however, the term was rare in Russian imperial discourses. It did not appear in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy compiled in the late 18th century nor even in the famous dictionary of Vladimir Dal’ first published in the 1860s – and this despite the fact that Dal’ did include entries for the related terms kolonist and koloniia, which since the late 1700s had become standard references for foreign farmers and their settlements within the empire.^[4] Still, it was in the course of the 1860s that kolonizatsiia seems to have become more prevalent in official and public writing, though its growing use did not displace “resettlement” as much as supplement it. Thus Russian “resettlers” now began to appear also as “colonists” in official correspondence; a special “Chronicle of Colonization” in the Journal of the Ministry of State Domains considered the topic a matter of both foreign labor immigration and internal peasant migration; and Apollon Skal’kovskii, prolific chronicler of southern settlement, described New Russia as “the greatest colony of the Russian people” (glavneishaia koloniia russkogo naroda), clearly implying that a “colony” in the Russian context had come to be seen as much more than an enclave of foreign farmers.^[5] By 1869, the explorer Nikolai Przhevalskii wrote of the need for something he called “correct colonization” (pravil’naia kolonizatsiia) on the sparsely settled banks of the Southern Ussuri, and bureaucrats in St. Petersburg had begun to stress the same thing in provinces like Ufa and Orenburg.^[6]
Over following years, and especially once levels of peasant migration to “the East,” began to soar in the fin de sciècle, the use of the word kolonizatsiia and derivative terms like kolonist and koloniia became commonplace, and the linkage between kolonizatsiia and pereselenie did as well. Thus by 1900 one could find regular references to “resettlement and colonization,” to “resettlement as colonization,” and even to something called “resettlement colonization” (pereselencheskaia kolonizatsiia), convincing proof, it seems, that educated Russians had become willing (even eager) to acknowledge the empire-building implications of Russian settlement in an Age of Empire.^[7] Yet even so, the relationship between resettlement and colonization in the Russian case remained persistently complicated. Were the two nouns synonymous or sequential? Was the one purely agricultural, the other broadly developmental? The former domestic, the latter colonial? As it turned out, there was no single answer to these questions and late imperial officials and observers frequently flipped back and forth when using the terms, making and then dissolving distinctions between them, a habit which then resulted in conflicting analogies for interpreting the process. Aleksandr Kaufman, for example, suggested that Russians colonized by resettling and therefore their experience could only really be compared to the transcontinental migrations of the Americans while Petr Semenov-Tian-Shanskii argued that Russian resettlement was in fact part of the “great colonizing movement of the European race” and therefore fully comparable to Spanish, French, and British migration overseas.^[8] For their part, members of the Special Commission to Draft an Agenda for the Development of the Caucasian Black Sea Coast tried to distinguish between pereselenie, which to them implied “improving the welfare of the settler,” and zaselenie, which was about “the development of the territory,” yet they ultimately had to admit that the two terms were unavoidably interrelated and were best considered “two aspects of a single idea.”^[9] The result was a terminological mix that was as multidimensional and overlapping in its implications as the colonization process itself.

The Peasant Problem

The overwhelming share of the estimated fifteen million settlers who resettled to the imperial borderlands between the early 18th century and 1917 were rural people, and of these rural people, most were peasants.^[10] (The most prominent exception were the Cossacks, though many of the latter began as peasant colonists and only became Cossacks once in situ.) That peasants would predominate in the settler stream made sense since Russia was a peasant state, but this fact had complicated consequences as far as shaping the meanings of the colonization process. The first and most obvious was that it turned colonization – both for the government and the educated public – into a question of agriculture as much as a question of empire. Indeed, if anything, the edge tended to go more to the former than the latter. In Catherine’s time, for example, patriotic landlords in the Free Economic Society as well as the empress and her lieutenants lauded colonization as a way to bring Russian-style “civility” (grazhdanstvennost’) to the steppes, but they even more attention to its dividends for the rural economy, both in the interior where an exodus of peasant settlers was expected to ease the burdens created by “the lack of land” (malozemel’e) – the product of population growth and persistently primitive farming – and in the borderlands where the settlers’ arrival would “transform wastes into flourishing fields” and “abodes of serpents into the homes of men.”^[11] The Catherinian regime’s ardent promotion of foreign colonization within the empire was likewise driven by the pursuit of population rather than the promotion of imperialism.^[12] (Or to put it more exactly, both motivations were important, but it was the former that always got top billing.) And the same pattern endured in the 19th century. By the late 1830s, the organization of colonization, described officially as “resettlement,” became concentrated in the Ministry of State Domains whose raison d’être was rural reform. By 1896, the operation finally managed to acquire its own agency – the Resettlement Administration – but after starting off under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior, the new body was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Management in 1905.^[13]
The imperialist connotations of colonization were also affected by the fact that most peasant colonists simply were not interested in the goals of empire-building and did not construe their colonization as an imperialist endeavor. Peasants did not resettle to the borderlands to teach nomads to be farmers, spread Orthodoxy, hold back the “Yellow Peril,” inspire the nation with their indomitable adaptability, or expand the empire’s agricultural exports. Instead, they relocated either because they had to (that is, they were forced by their lords or pressured by dismal economic and social circumstances) or because they were drawn by expectations of a better deal – that is, by hopes of finding a larger and more fertile stretch of land in a new place with more berries, cheaper consumer goods, more fish in the local river, and hopefully fewer “lords” and “bosses” all around. State peasants from the early 19th century petitioned the government to resettle due to “lack of land and good woods” in their home villages or, in the case of religious sectarians, “to avoid harassment from neighboring peasants of the Orthodox faith.”^[14] For their part, settler correspondents from the larger migrations of the late 1800s wrote of hoping to find “open land” (vol’naia zemlia) or, more simply, a place where “life [was] possible” (gde zhit’ mozhno).^[15] The scout (khodok) M. Sumkin who was literate (and politically inclined) enough to compose a long narrative of his experience explained his motivations for resettling in the following way:

On a clear spring day, the 8th of May 1907, I left my native village. I set out for Siberia to search for open land where I could set myself up with the good peasant’s life, a life without all the hardship, without all the failed harvests, without the cruel exploitation of village kulaks.^[16]

Peasant colonists in the borderlands cared about the tsar, believed in mother Russia, seemed to feel that they were entitled to whatever land they could obtain, and had their own clear prejudices about the “un-Christian peoples” (nekhristi) around them, but they were not supremely self-conscious empire-builders.^[17] By the last decades of the regime, the empire’s educated observers knew this, commented on it, and generally folded the fact into their own complicated impressions of the colonization process.
The last important complexity to note in relation to the overwhelmingly peasant character of Russian colonization is that far from all the peasants in question were Russian. Indeed, Russianness – even Orthodoxy – was rarely a required attribute for colonization as far as either the colonists themselves or their presumed superiors were concerned . The serfs swept up in resettlement were overwhelmingly Russian because there were few non-Russian serfs, but the far greater share of the empire’s colonists, especially in the 19th century prior to the Emancipation, were state peasants who represented a variety of “tribes” and “confessions”: Russians, Little Russians, Jews, Tatars, Chuvash, Mordvins, Maris, Estonians, to name but a few. As noted earlier, the Russian state, in particular between the 1760s and the early 1800s, also encouraged and permitted well over one hundred thousand foreign settlers, many of them farmers from Europe, to resettle to the empire just as they periodically invited various Muslims from “beyond the lines” in the Northern Caucasus to cross to the “empire’s side” and sponsored the borderland colonization of Dukhobors, Molokans, and other “sectarians.”^[18] The need for agriculture and population effectively trumped would-be preferences of ethnicity or religion. Even in the last decades of the Old Regime when St. Petersburg’s bureaucrats were increasingly concerned with bolstering the “Russian element” everywhere from the Western Provinces to the Steppe Territory, colonization did not entirely shed its multiethnic quality, and indeed multiethnicity itself still retained its champions, among conservatives as well as liberals and moderates. The Ukrainian historian Dmitrii Bagalei (Dmytro Bahalii), for example, criticized what he saw as the Russian government’s excessive generosity to German colonists as well as its enserfment of the Ukrainian peasantry, but he lauded the multiethnic colonization of New Russia: “One nationality (narodnost’) developed one aspect of [the region’s] culture, others others.”^[19] The conservative observer V. Dedlov, for his part, was moved to a kind of rapture as he observed the varied parade of migrants passing through a resettlement station in Western Siberia in 1894:

And so they come and come and come to the East..., these peasants of Samara, of Tula, of Ekaterinoslav, of Chernigov, of Kiev, of Podol’...Among them one finds the rich and the poor; the strong and the weak; the bright and the stupid...There are Russians (Rus’) and Tatars, Mordvins and Chuvash, Little Russians and Germans...And why do they come? They come in search of happiness.^[20]

The Nation

The imperial/unimperial ambiguities created by and reflected in colonizing terminology and the overwhelmingly peasant character of colonization were secondary, however, to the locus of the greatest ambiguity of all: the notion of the nation. After all, how was one to make sense of the nation in colonization? What did colonizing reveal about the Russian character, about Russian history, about Russian destiny? Through to the mid-19th century, answers to these questions tended to be positive and relatively straightforward. 18th-century scholars, preoccupied with defining the “habits and customs” (nravy i obyknoveniia) of the empire’s peoples, noted that the Russians were different from the rest of the empire’s inhabitants in that they lived “all across the state” whereas everyone else resided in their own more specific territory (obitanie). The space of the Russian nation was thus commensurate with the space of the empire and, by extension, the migration of the Russians within this space appeared entirely natural.^[21] Some Petrine and post-Petrine scholars even advanced the claim that the Russians’ very name – Rossiane – derived from the verb rasseiat’, meaning “to spread out” or “to disperse,” underscoring colonization’s deep importance as a national habit. (Not every one agreed with the etymology, of course, but even skeptics like the professorial poet Vasilii Tred’iakovskii still admitted that there was a certain logic to the proposition since “the dispersal [rasseianie] of the Russians [was] indeed a famous and certifiable fact” [izvestnaia i dostovernaia istina]).^[22] The close identification between Russianness and colonization then continued in the 19th century and by the era of the Great Reforms, proto-populist writers had established the Russian colonist as a naturally gifted assimilator of the “aliens” and earnest pioneer; official ideologues (as well as a few proto-populists) had turned Russian expansion into manifest destiny; and a range of otherwise discordant historians now agreed (to quote one of them) that “the settlement of European and Asian Russia by the Russian tribe...represents one of the most important determining factors of our domestic history.”^[23]
Yet it was also precisely in the Great Reforms period that contemporaries began to take more notice of national limitations and ambiguities within the colonization process. As the public sphere become noisier and more diverse, the empire expanded in Central Asia, the Amur, and the Caucasus, and colonization grew in scale and importance, questions proliferated. The Russians had indeed colonized the New Russian steppes and the Siberian forest, but could they colonize the humid slopes of the Eastern Caucasus or the blazing sands of the Trans-Caspian? Russian colonists had helped to spread the plow and the “true faith” in “the East,” but could they be called successful assimilators when most of “the East” was still “alien” and some eastern “aliens” had actually “alienized” the Russians? Finally, couldn’t one argue, as did a number of Liberal commentators, that Russia’s long colonizing history was not driven by national destiny but rather by the backwardness of the muzhik who always found it easier to pick up and go somewhere else than to stay put and improve his farming?^[24] All in all, by the turn of the century, colonization had emerged as a bonafide “question,” a subject of discussion that was marked with the ambivalence of all the other “questions” that preoccupied Russian minds in the late imperial era.
Not surprisingly, the new cascade of national concern about colonization only perpetuated its ambiguities as an imperial project. On the one hand, in the heyday of the Great Siberian Migration, varied writers and statesmen appeared more ready than ever to recognize that Russian colonization in “the East” was fundamentally of the same order as European settlement overseas; that “Asiatic Russia” was fundamentally a colony; and that the Resettlement Administration was fundamentally a colonial ministry, or at least needed to be turned into one. (This was Gins’ position, for example.)^[25] And yet, at the same time, Russian colonization remained for many so elemental, so long-standing, and so intimately tied to issues of agriculture and peasant life that its imperialist dimensions were easy to forget, or at least omit from the picture. One example of this tendency appeared in Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s Course of Russian History (1904) where the great historian made his famous declaration (drawn almost verbatim from his mentor Sergei Solov’ev) that “the history of Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself.”^[26] To Kliuchevskii, in other words, colonization was not external but internal, not imposed on others but performed on the self. Russians had not migrated to take over the territories of other peoples but had simply spread out to occupy their own, all of which clearly suggested that their proliferation across Eurasia amounted to a national story rather than an imperial one. The most influential historian of his generation thus managed to present colonization as “the basic fact of Russian history” (another one of his famous phrases) while at the same time eliding its history as a basic fact of Russian imperialism.
Nowhere were the enduring complexities of Russia’s imperial/non-imperial colonization more neatly revealed than in the stacks of the Resettlement Administration library in St. Petersburg. In these collections at the turn of the twentieth century one found a predictable array of official publications such as the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, statistical surveys of interior and borderland provinces, soil maps, ethnographic maps, and zemstvo agronomical manuals, but also a variety of academic studies relating to “internal” and “external” European colonization, works like the proceedings of the Deutsche colonial-gesellschaft für Südwest Afrika, A. Nugenberg’s Innere Kolonisation in Nordwesten Deutschland, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, and Louis Pauliat’s La politique coloniale sous l’ancien régime.^[27] A visitor to the intellectual headquarters of Russian colonization at the dawn of the 1900s would thus have been able to read up just as readily on Russian peasant farming in Tambov and Tomsk as on European colonial domination in Namibia and New France. He would have been led to assume that Russian colonizing in Stavropol’ or Turkestan was fundamentally comparable to German colonizing in Schleswig-Holstein or British colonizing in India. And if this was the case, then what exactly was Russian colonization?

Conclusion

The implications of the complexities discussed here were significant. Because agricultural settlement in Russia was never unambiguously imperial, it was never singled out as an imperial policy and only very late in the imperial period was any attempt made to give it coherence as a area of government activity. Even the Resettlement Administration, which was ultimately created for this purpose, did not focus exclusively on settlement in obviously “colonial” areas of the empire. Indeed, its purview included the Russian North and already highly Russianized south of European Russia as well as the more strikingly “alien” territories of the Caucasus, Turkestan, and Southern Ussuri. Likewise, because colonization was rarely construed as a purely Russian endeavor, it was rarely approached as a purely national mission. National perceptions of colonization became markedly more popular in the twilight of the old regime as Russian nationalism came to dominate state policy and public opinion, but even with rising concerns about promoting the settlement of the “Russian element,” restrictions against non-Russian settlers were incomplete and inconsistent. Some official migrant questionnaires in the 1890s listed nationality (natsional’nost’) as a category, others did not.^[28] Settlement on the eastern shore of the Black Sea and in the Steppe Territory was supposed to be restricted to “people of Russian origin,” but that did not stop Germans and even some Jews – the empire’s most discriminated ethnoreligious community – from moving to these areas.^[29] Multiethnic realities, it seems, always interfered with visions of nationalistic uniformity.
But perhaps most importantly, the confusion that resulted from colonization being at once a matter of internal development and a matter of external expansion helped to turn the Russians into a people who ended up with an enormous empire but a somewhat less developed sense of imperialist identity. Russian peasant colonists did not articulate visions of colonization that were based on a sense of national/religious/civilizational superiority, mission, or entitlement, and even more privileged Russians who did embrace such visions (wholly or partially) rarely saw colonization as a factor of purposeful colonial expansion. Conquest and the incorporation of territory was one thing; the migration of Russian settlers was another. The former was empire-building; the latter, more often than not, was considered a question of population redistribution and agriculture. Territorial contiguity, the lack of “natural frontiers” clearly distinguishing “Russia” from its “colonies,” and the relative abundance of “open” land coupled with the relative sparseness of non-Russian populations in the “East” made transcontinental migration easy to undertake and just as easy to interpret as a natural, unimperialist process. As Kliuchevskii and later many of his Soviet successors noted, using a most natural analogy, the Russians’ long history of colonization consisted of their “resettling by hopping like birds from territory to territory, abandoning their old homes and settling in new ones” (pereseliaias’, perenosilos’ ptichnymi pereletami iz kraia v krai, pokidaia nasizhennye mesta i sadias’ na novye).^[30] What could possibly be imperialist about that?