Forging a Unitary State: Russia's Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850 by John LeDonne

Reviewed by: Forging a Unitary State: Russia's Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850 by John LeDonne Colum Leckey (bio) John LeDonne, Forging a Unitary State: Russia's Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. ISBN 9781487506117 (hardcover) / 9781487542115 (paperback). For 40 years, John LeDonne has generated a massive body of work on the politics, administration, and foreign policy of the Russian Empire. In Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (1985) and Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (1991), he first proposed his signature thesis that aristocratic clans, bound through networks of kinship and patronage, developed into a ruling elite that permeated the military, bureaucracy, and court. Next, in The Russian Empire and the World: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (1997) and The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (2003), he ventured into the thicket of geopolitics, contending that Russia's raison d'être was hegemony over Eurasia, a strategic goal its rulers doggedly pursued for three centuries. Now, in Forging a Unitary State: Russia's Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850, LeDonne offers a wide-ranging synthesis of his previous work. Rejecting conventional wisdom that Russia was an empire comparable to the maritime states of Western Europe, he dismisses the immense variety of local privileges and institutions as "residual" sideshows in the face of tsarist power (7). Instead, he argues that the Russians constructed a political system that was neither imperial nor national, but "unitary," a state whose purpose was to integrate "Eurasia" under the "centralized management" of the tsars and their supranational ruling class (9–10). The project is expansive and complex. To highlight the unified approach to Russian state building over two centuries, LeDonne has devised an elastic model for analyzing governing strategies in regions as diverse as Lithuania and Iakutsk. Most important is the notion of the Russian state as an "expanding core," one whose mechanisms of control gradually folded peripheral zones into the Muscovite administrative system. Facilitating this integration was "superstratification," the practice of absorbing non-Russian elites into the cosmopolitan command structure while reducing commoners, irrespective of nationality, to the status of taxpayers, serfs, and tributaries. As the unitary state reached maturity in the 19th century, Russian officials developed rival approaches to governance, which LeDonne calls "territorial" and "functional" administration. In the former case, officials strived to preserve local agencies and institutions in the name of order and efficiency. In a few instances (Finland, for example), they even sided with local elites against St. Petersburg authorities. Their efforts clashed with the agendas of the ministries, whose leaders [End Page 127] sought to build centralized functional administration with specializations (e.g., military, education, trade, finance, etc.) that cut across Russia's regions and formed the backbone of the state. As LeDonne shows, the government never fully resolved the contradiction between territorial expansion and unitary administration, a policy failure that nationalists of all stripes exploited in the final decades of the empire. LeDonne divides his book into three sections, each dedicated to a strategic "theater": the Baltic northwest, a region stretching from Finland through Lithuania and Warsaw, which Russia acquired from Sweden and Poland between 1700 and 1815; the Pontic steppes along Muscovy's southern border, which included modern-day Ukraine and Crimea as well as the Don, Zaporozhian, Kuban, and Terek Cossack hosts; and the immense expanse of the Urals, Siberia, and northern Kazakh steppe. Each part is further subdivided into three segments tracing the construction, consolidation, and stalling of Russia's unitary project. Interestingly, it was the northwestern region, arguably the most complex, that best adapted to the superstratification of Russia's expanding core. Religious differences aside, German barons and Polish magnates from Lithuania were ardent defenders of serfdom and noble privilege, and Russian officials successfully incorporated them into the power structure. Although regional particularisms such as the Magdeburg legal code, local salt taxes, and the Baltic German obsession with codifying their privileges slowed down the government's efforts, the fact remains that bureaucratic inertia was to blame for these deficiencies as well. Only when Russia collided with a "civilizational...

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