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

Reviewed by: Forging a Unitary State: Russia's Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850 by John P. LeDonne Alexander Morrison LeDonne, John P. Forging a Unitary State: Russia's Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2020. xvii + 663 pp. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $166.00; $88.00 (paperback & e-book). Few historians have done more to help us understand the administrative structures and elite strategies of the Russian Empire than John LeDonne. In a series of weighty books — Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, NJ, 1984), Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700–1825 (Oxford, 1991), The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (Oxford, 1996), and The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (Oxford, 2004) — he has built up a composite and detailed account of how the Russian state expanded over time and how its administration, taxation and bureaucracy functioned, all underpinned by a careful attention to hard geographical constraints. This mammoth volume is a culmination of this life's [End Page 561] work, and seeks to provide a comprehensive account of the integration of what LeDonne calls the western, southern and eastern theatres of expansion into the Russian 'core', from the mid seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century. While these terms are used as shorthand, LeDonne provides detailed explanations of what they mean in terms of both physical (watersheds, rivers, soil types) and political geography. The western theatre corresponds to Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic Provinces and Finland, the southern to Ukraine, the Black Sea Steppes and Crimea, and the Eastern to the Urals, Siberia and the Steppe frontier. All of these presented different challenges when it came to their integration with the Muscovite core of the Volga-Caspian basin — a complex process which unfolded in administrative, legal, economic and ecclesiastical terms — and, he argues, led to the creation of the 'unitary state' of the title. LeDonne contrasts this term to the more familiar 'empire', which for him does not properly explain what those who controlled the Russian state were trying to achieve as it expanded — not simply the ad-hoc management of difference through existing elites, customs and practices across these vast territories, but an often ruthless elimination of local particularities and privileges in favour of a single unitary administrative and legal regime. Here he is setting himself against much recent Anglophone writing on the Russian empire, such as that of Jane Burbank, which has emphasized its legal pluralism and the local adaptations of its governance to the heterogeneity of its population. It is true that much of this scholarship focuses on the later imperial period, after the Great Reforms (which in many ways set metropolitan Russia apart from its borderlands once again) and further Russian expansion into the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East. LeDonne very deliberately excludes these latter regions, which proved unassimilable in cultural and administrative terms, and indeed he acknowledges that even within his chosen geography and chronology there were some groups — notably the Poles and Crimean Tatars — who proved resistant to co-optation and integration into the Russian core. Even on its own terms then, there are some clear limits to LeDonne's argument, which — partly because of his main source base, the Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii — frequently tells us more about the Russian state's goals than about what actually happened on the ground. What LeDonne refers to as 'superstratification' — i.e. the assimilation of existing elites in newly-conquered areas to the all-Russian nobility — was of course the touchstone of Russian statecraft from the fall of Kazan´ in 1552 to the mid nineteenth century. It had some notable successes among the sluzhilye Tatars of the Volga, the Bashkirs, the Baltic Germans and later the Georgians. However in all these cases this rested on the acknowledgement and preservation of existing privileges and particularities, such as the practice of Islam among the Tatars and Bashkirs (and in the latter case strong noble land [End Page 562] rights) and of Lutheranism and the particular privileges of the...

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