Russia’s recurring pursuit of expansion into warmer territory and attempting to rule over non-Russian ethnic groups in the Black Sea, Caucasus, and Central Asia became problematic in the 1880s as the nation sought a modern colonial empire similar to other European powers.
Bushkovitch describes complex and tense international relations on Russia’s borders, both western and southern: “In the course of the century the development of commercial and then industrial capitalism, however slow by European standards, changed the society of the empire. In the western borderlands the result was the declining economic fortunes of the nobility, the principal support of the empire… western areas benefited considerably from the imperial market and were willing to cooperate (within limits), but the aristocratic conservatism of the court and most of the ruling elite made an arrangement with newer social groups difficult or impossible. The Russian empire could not fully abandon its alliance with the local nobilities, nor could they survive without the tsars, and they all went down to destruction together in 1917” (Bushkovitch, 52). The strain of imperialist practices and increasingly capitalist international economy along Russia’s borders played a role in diminishing the traditional, autocratic foundation of the economy, already imperiled by the emancipation of the serfs.
Russia’s imperial structure relied on cooperation from well-off classes in the lands they took control over, but this system was vulnerable to fall apart in the face of certain aspects of Russian ‘modernization,’ notably education, which undermined the cooperation between foreign noble classes that formed the basis of the empire (Bushkovitch, 270).
This imperial situation, in which Russia expands to control southern territories of foreigners, engages in remote battles on unfamiliar terrain, and provides education to people who later use it against the empire oppressing them all sounds rather familiar. Russia’s engagement in the Caucasus and Central Asia are reminiscent of the way Catherine II’s empire grew to create a periphery that later became the home of the Pugachev Revolt, which Madriaga classified as being driven by Cossacks and Old Believers living in occupied land as much or more than runaway peasants, all marginalized groups living at the edges of the empire beyond its direct control.
How do these kinds of power struggles along imperial borders drive social movements, such as peasant rebellions, anti-imperialist wars, and revolts? How might these expansions and shifts in power along the margins of the Russian Empire have contributed to the broader destabilization and unrest leading up to the revolution of 1917?
