Russian History Pre-1600: A Turn to a Postcolonial Perspective?

Abstract

Russian History Pre-1600A Turn to a Postcolonial Perspective? Gleb Kazakov (bio) Marat Shaikhutdinov, Between East and West: The Formation of the Moscow State. 274 pp. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1644697139. $109.00. Vladimir Shirogorov, War on the Eve of Nations: Conflicts and Militaries in Eastern Europe, 1450–1500. 509 pp. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1793622402. $142.00. Cornelia Soldat, Russland als Ziel kolonialer Eroberung: Heinrich von Stadens Pläne für ein Moskauer Reich im 16. Jahrhundert (Russia as a Goal of Colonial Conquest: Heinrich von Staden's Plans for a Muscovite State in the 16th Century). 285 pp. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022. ISBN-13 978-3837661644. €45.00. It is not a simple task to define what should be considered the "premodern" era in Russian history. A long-standing tradition in Russian historical literature sees an important threshold in the Petrine reforms at the beginning of the 18th century, thus everything before Peter the Great is labeled as "Old Russia" (Drevniaia Rus´). A different approach has gained popularity in recent years among North American scholars: here the Russian 18th century is viewed as a natural continuation of the state and empire building begun by Ivan III (1462–1505) of Muscovy, and the start of Russian modernity is postponed to roughly 1800.1 The early modern period of Russian [End Page 873] history thus stretches over three and a half centuries. Different stages of this long epoch have received different levels of attention in the historiography. Interest toward the study of the 18th-century Russian empire has indisputably been greatest. The rather uncomplicated access—for foreign scholars—to archival sources (most of which are stored in one central archive—the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, RGADA]), which was the norm from the 1990s to the outbreak of war in 2022, has accelerated research on 17th-century Russian history, opening it up to new approaches, topics, and methods. The history of Russia (or, to be more precise, of the Grand Principality of Moscow) before the 1530s has, however, received less attention and is still largely viewed within the old Karamzinian paradigm of the "gathering of the Rus´ lands" by the grand princes of Moscow. This paradigm remains, by and large, very Moscow centered and, as one may even call it, proto-imperial in its main narrative, for it recognizes only the agency of one particular actor, leaving other entities of the region—be it the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Tver´, or Novgorod—in the role of mere obstacles along the path of the emerging centralized state. Since the appearance of Andreas Kappeler's Russland als Vielvölkerreich in 1992 (published in English as The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History), the view of tsarist Russia as an empire and a multiethnic colonial state has been largely accepted by Western academics.2 However, the discourse about Russia's colonialism usually starts with the conquest of Kazan in 1552, leaving the prior centuries a gray area.3 The changes are, however, most likely already underway. It is no secret that the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is having a significant impact on the field of East European studies. Not only political scientists dealing with the evolution and nature of Putin's regime but also historians are being confronted with the question: should the role of the colonial discourse in Russian history be stressed even further or even reevaluated? Certainly, the most lively debates about the role and nature of Russian colonialism arise from the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, but even the premodern period cannot be omitted from [End Page 874] current trends.4 Russian propaganda narratives before and during the war have demonstrated that the medieval and early modern periods can be exploited to create historical myths.5 A deconstruction of the old paradigm of the history of Moscow's emergence and rise as well as a tendency to give voice to subaltern actors in the history of Eastern Europe in the 14th to 16th centuries are to be expected in the immediate future. In this essay, I do not claim to cover the whole...