'Between All Parts of the Universe': Russian Cosmographies and Imperial Strategies in Early Modern Siberia and Ukraine

In the early seventeenth century, learned Muscovites, as they set themselves to the task of working out a Russian and Orthodox vision of their place in the world, began to read, translate and modify the atlases produced by their slightly earlier European counterparts: Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu and others. The Russian solution to this geographical puzzle grew out of and reflected a sense of the tsardom's unique location and imperial ambitions. The position that Muscovite cosmographers and geographers generally assigned to their realm was a connective one: the tsardom lay proudly between points on the globe; it linked vastly different lands and peoples; and it contained within its purview a heterogeneous assortment of peoples, faiths, tongues and cultures. In this article, I examine the different manifestations of that thinking and of Muscovite ideological conceptions of empire in two widely separated parts of the tsardom—Siberia, at some length, and then, more briefly, Ukraine/Belarus—and explore how their ideological frameworks affected the subject populations of those two areas.

Keywords: Early modern Russia; cosmographies; cartography; Siberia; Ukraine; Semyon Remezov

Some empires imagine themselves as the centre of the universe. In the early modern era, as Russian writers first attempted to define their position in the world in geographical terms, they found more effective framing for their tsardom in the concept of 'betweenness'. Evidence of this conceptual predilection emerges in textual and cartographical sources, here primarily cosmographies but also in the visual representation of the Russian empire in maps. In maps, cosmographies and diplomatic pronouncements, Russia's literate elite formulated a concept of world geography that drew on Western models in combination with the teachings of Orthodox theology and gave voice to a compelling sense of Russia's unique geographical position and its concomitant imperial mission.

While Western cartographers accentuated the divisions of the globe into continental units, generally placing Russia on the Asian side of the continental divide, Russians recast the European/Asian discussion to emphasize their own position as spanning the region, linking the extremes and occupying the expanses between the defining edges. The position that Russian cosmographers and geographers generally assigned to their tsar's realm was a connective one: the tsardom lay proudly between points of the globe; it linked vastly different lands and peoples, and it contained within its purview a heterogeneous assortment of peoples, faiths, tongues and cultures. The tsar's realm was not simply 'Russia' but the entrepôt between all parts of the universe.

Russian cosmographers came to articulate a sense of their connective position in the world, beginning in the late sixteenth and particularly in the seventeenth century, as they gained familiarity with the cosmographies published by their European neighbours. Their geographical thinking was simultaneously coloured by the explosive growth of the tsardom into a vast imperial power during the same period. Although many starting points are possible, it makes sense to begin a narrative of Russian imperial expansion with the reign of Ivan IV (1533–1584), known to later historians as the Terrible. Ivan advanced the creation of an imperial realm resolutely, both in deed and in title. He oversaw the conquest of the first fully sovereign non‐Russian, non‐Slavic, non‐Orthodox polities and their incorporation into what became a recognizably imperial structure. With the conquest of the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552 and 1556, he turned Russia from a grand principality into an empire (tsardom) and adopted the title of Tsar, a word derived from Caesar (Fig. 1).[1]

MAP: Figure 1 Map of Russia and Siberiac.1670. In the southwest, the official boundary of Russia followed the Dnieper River, although the west bank city of Kiev was included in Russia. To the east of the Iaik River, which received its modern name (Ural River) only after the Cossack Rebellion of 1773–1774, the tsarist empire grew dramatically after Ivan the Terrible's conquest of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s. By 1639 Russian explorers and adventurers had reached the Pacific Coast.

Toward the end of his reign, Ivan brought yet another khanate under his mighty hand: Sibir' (meaning western Siberia), conquered without the tsar's permission by a group of renegade Cossacks in 1582. After this first incursion into the territories across the Ural Mountains, Russian trappers and adventurers, backed by Cossacks and other soldiers, pushed deep into Siberia, reaching the Pacific by 1639. Russian expansion was rapid, but colonial settlement was a slow process. Russians did come in small numbers to settle the land, where they drove off the indigenous hunters, trappers and herders, and tried to make a go of farming in the harsh terrain. Of greater interest to the crown, however, was the preservation of hunting and trapping cultures, which could fill the tsar's treasury through mandatory payment of tribute in furs, called iasak.

At the other end of the geographical spectrum, the Ukrainian and Belorussian lands, known at the time as Little and White Russia, also attracted the attention of the tsar. As the Orthodox Slavs of these Polish‐ and Lithuanian‐controlled regions grew increasingly restive under their Lithuanian overlords, Russia's southern and western borderlands became disorderly and dangerous, pushing the Russians into some hard soul searching in defining their obligations to co‐religionists across political divides.

Through a rather dramatic sequence of events, Russia acquired all Ukraine east of the Dnieper River in 1656, and in the following century added more of the religiously mixed lands in western Ukraine and White Russia. Fuelled by the influx of highly educated Ruthenian clerics (that is, Uniate or, in this case, Orthodox non‐Russian Slavs from Polish‐Lithuanian controlled territories), Russian literary and scholarly culture grew apace in the second half of the seventeenth century, as scholars and publicists from those lands came to define, in writing, newly forming official views about the relationship between Orthodoxy and Russianness, and between the Russian metropole and its outlying holdings.[2]

Thanks in part to the efforts of these Ruthenian clergy who came with their learning, books and translations of Latin texts, Russian authors began to commit to paper their thoughts about their country's position in an expanding world geography. The first modern European world atlases had been produced in Europe by Abraham Ortelius and Gerhard Mercator from 1570. After a relatively short time lag, these and other cosmographies reached Moscow, where they were translated into Russian.

Cosmographical texts had circulated in the Russian lands long before these new European atlases made their way east, but earlier Russian translators and copyists had shown a marked preference for fully Christianized, biblically based descriptions of the heavens and the earth to those that drew on pagan science. Of all the cosmographical texts circulating in previous centuries, the most popular had been the sixth‐century Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, but even that was cleansed of its refutation of the Aristotelian model and preserved only the discussion of a box‐shaped universe derived from the biblical description of the Old Testament tabernacle given in the book of Exodus.[3] By the early seventeenth century, however, Russian readers were hungry for a newer approach to the universe. From the 1630s on, atlases became among the most popular and widely copied translated texts in Russia, although the Russian versions included only text and omitted the maps.[4]

In the decade before Peter the Great took the throne (variously, 1682 or 1689, reigned until 1725), Russian translators and editors produced new atlases, created from various sources, with each edition including idiosyncratic adaptations, modifications and insertions.[5] By the last decade of Peter's reign, a new commitment to scientific geography replaced earlier cosmographical approaches, and the texts and maps of the seventeenth century were set aside.[6] In the late seventeenth and even the early eighteenth century, however, a vibrant early modern hybrid of imported cosmographical texts and indigenous alterations flourished in Russian monasteries, ministries and imperial outposts. As intimated above, among the recurrent modifications of the Western texts from this period, one of the most intriguing is Russian geographers' insistent stressing of Russia's position across boundaries and between landmarks or neighbouring states.

Russian geographers accepted the ancient wisdom that held that the River Don 'divides Europe from Asia, that is to say, it forms the boundary'.[7] That continental boundary, according to the standard scheme of Western geographies, also marked one of the divides between the parts of the world allotted to the sons of Noah after the great flood. Building on that definition, the Russian texts pushed farther, consistently emphasizing Russia's unique position, cosmographically speaking, in confounding the divisions between the sons' portions: some of its territories lay in Asia, the part of the world assigned to Noah's oldest son, Shem, and some in Europe, the inheritance of Noah's second son, Japhet.[8]

Siberia, the Asian part of Russia, was defined by its cross‐cutting and in‐between location. The anonymous late seventeenth‐century Russian compilation, Book Called Cosmography, explained:

In the division, as described by the ancient philosophers, Shem's portion, as the first son, was located in the east and was called by the name of Asia.... ; the other end reached to the Persian Gulf and to the Black Sea. The third part was between the Chinese tsardom and the land of the animal‐like people, that is Siberia, and to the Caspian Sea.[9]

The Russian author of another of the late seventeenth‐century cosmographies, Brief Selection from the Book Called Cosmography, enthused:

The land [of Russia] is great and wide and its expanse covers the space between all parts of the universe... (emphasis mine).

The passage continues to define precisely where that in‐between space lies and what parts of the world it connects:

[The land of Russia reaches] even to Asia and the Sea called the Caspian, that is, the Khvalimskoe, and to the Persian lands, to the south as far as the borders of Cherson and the Crimea, and to the Turkish borders, to the sea called the Black Sea, to the west even as far as the limits of Germany and Liefland and to the sea called the Varangian Sea, to the north as far as the Great Ocean and to Lapland and Norway, and to the east as far as the Frozen Sea and to the land of Siberia and to the limits of the Chinese and Bogdanskoe tsardoms.[10]

This interest in Russia's position between disparate parts of the world had significant ramifications for Russians' own sense of their imperial holdings and their role in the world. Spanning the immense reaches between all parts of the universe, the Russian imperium of necessity extended over people of many kinds and incorporated them in a variety of ways. The Brief Selection continues:

[Russia] has under it the entire Siberian land with all of the hordes that it contains, as well as the tsardom of Kazan and Astrakhan, which they took from the infidel. And myriad various tribes of Tatars, Nogais, Kalmyks, Cherkas, Cheremis, Mordvins and many other pagan peoples belong to [Russia]. They hold them in subordination and collect tribute from them.[11]

An imperial geography imagined as and defined by an in‐between location accommodated ranges and spectra of difference, of kind, of religion and of political affiliation.

It was in their descriptions of the peoples of Siberia and their relation to the Russian sovereign, that the Russian cosmographers diverged from their Western sources most profoundly and introduced their most significant innovations. European geographers knew little about the mysterious reaches of the region they called 'Tartaria' and consequently filled it in with little demons and dragons on their maps. Mercator confined his remarks on Siberia to reporting, with some degree of doubt, legends of the land of Magog, populated with mythical people like the 'Essodones, men who rejoiced most at their Parents deaths', or the 'Neuri, of whome (beleeue it who list) it is reported, that they could turne themselues into Warewolues, and anon againe resume their true being'.[12]

Since Cossack adventurers did not defeat the Siberian khan in the name of the tsar until twelve years after the publication of the atlas, Mercator can hardly be held accountable for his failure to report on Russia's control of the region. Ortelius adopted a more sceptical position in his atlas and omitted the more wildly imaginative legends about the monstrous people of the east, but he found little concrete information with which to fill in the gaps. Even in revised editions of thirty and forty years later, the Ortelius atlas still relied heavily on the reports of medieval envoys to the Great Khan and the more recent but already outdated account of Sigmund von Herberstein, whose visits to Russia predated the conquest of Siberia by more than half a century.[13]

The lack of coverage of Russian Siberia in the Western atlases left an opening for Russian cosmographers to fill in the blanks with their own more up‐to‐date information and insights. The Cosmography of 1670 and the Cosmography in 76 Chapters, for instance, both repeat the Western cosmographers' stock description of Siberia as the land of 'animal‐like and wild people', but correct the geopolitical record by noting that 'they are in subjugation to the dominion of the Muscovite tsar'.[14] The Brief Selection includes Siberia in the list of Russian holdings, which extend 'to the Frozen Sea and to the land of Siberia and to the edge of the Chinese... realm'.[15]

These cosmographers, working in monastic and administrative centres in Moscow, Kholmogory, Solovki and elsewhere in European Russia in the last three decades of the seventeenth century, derived their knowledge of the Siberian frontier from reports and maps produced by explorers, Cossacks and administrators who served the tsar in the far reaches of the north and east. One of these agents of empire was the petty servitor Semyon Ulianovich Remezov (1642–c.1725), who distinguished himself as a great chronicler and cartographer of Siberia and provides a rich body of source material on the questions at hand.

In distant Tobolsk, the capital of Russian Siberia, Semyon Remezov served the advance of the Russian state as soldier, administrator, land surveyor, icon painter, historian and cartographer‐cosmographer. Evidently self‐taught and exposed primarily to local traditions in Siberian cartographic practices, he was commissioned in 1696 by the Siberian Chancellery to make an atlas of all Siberia. He spent a few months researching in the libraries of imported maps, atlases and geographical treatises in Moscow before returning to his native Tobolsk to complete the project. By the end of his life he had produced three major manuscript atlases or, as he called them, sketchbooks, filled with maps, drawings and commentary, as well as a great assortment of other treatises, histories and religious and secular artwork. His writings indicate his awareness of and enthusiasm for Peter the Great's early westernizing reforms and advances in science and education, but he nonetheless chose most often to stick to the tried‐and‐true techniques of Russian map making, rather than adopting the methods and forms he observed in the imported models.[16]

Working in a register somewhere between the scholarly cosmographers back in Moscow and the rank‐and‐file soldiers and officials who populated his immediate milieu, far from central supervision, Remezov painted and described a spacious imperial geography of the spaces in‐between. He emphasized this explicitly in the conclusion to the 'Working Sketchbook', a manuscript atlas, in his words, 'of the entire interior of Siberia, with the reigning city of Tobolsk and the cities, settlements, forts and parishes under its jurisdiction, especially between the countries of Asia, Europe and America' (emphasis mine).[17] The illustration he chose to accompany a similar text in his 'Chorographic Sketchbook' is a two‐hemisphere map copied from a Dutch original, which depicts the Russian land mass off centre and between the other continents (Fig. 2).[18] His own cartographic efforts render this quality of 'betweenness' more graphically, with a huge, diffuse 'middle' occupying the majority of the page, and the framing landmarks—Russia, China, the Frozen Ocean—squeezed to the margins.

MAP: Figure 2 The double‐hemisphere map in Semyon U. Remezov, 'Chorographic Sketchbook' [Khorograficheskaia kniga Remezova], 1697–1711. The map was clearly copied from a Dutch original. It illustrates Remezov's conception of Russia's position between the world's 'countries': Asia, Europe and America. 16×18 cm. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, Houghton Library, Bagrow Collection, MS Russ. 72 (6). (Reproduced with permission from Houghton Library.)

In most of his maps, Remezov followed the conventions of earlier Russian map making rather than the ones he had demonstrably learned and even copied from Western atlases. For example, he felt it worthwhile to make numerous copies of the earliest known Russian map of all Siberia, the so‐called Godunov Map, named after the Siberian governor who commissioned it in 1666 or 1667. In his cartographic compilations, he included faithful copies of both the original and updated versions replete with new geographical information, but he manifested a decided and consistent preference for working within the template provided by the earlier prototype. As illustrated in the example reproduced here, from his 'Working Sketchbook', he maintained the orientation common to Russian maps of Siberia, placing south at the top (Fig. 3). China, cordoned off by the Great Wall, appears in the top left corner, while the yellow curve of the Urals delimits the land of Siberia to the west along the right‐hand edge. The Arctic Ocean frames the map at the bottom, and the Ocean Sea (the Pacific) is at the left. Rather than latitude and longitude, or any kind of grid, river networks create the basic structure of the map, as they would have for pragmatic users, explorers, Cossacks and administrators interested in plotting a route from one place to another.

Graph: Figure 3 This map, one of several copies that Remezov made of the 1666 or 1667'Godunov Map' of Siberia, illustrates the traditional seventeenth‐century mode of mapping Siberia. South is at the top. China and the Great Wall (marked in red on the original) are located in the top left corner. The Ural Mountains mark the limit of Siberia in the west. The Arctic Ocean runs along the bottom of the map, and the Pacific Ocean frames it on the left. River networks create the basic structure of the map, tracing a branching pattern that links the variety of peoples and places connected by the Russian imperial expanse. 31×20 cm. From Semyon U. Remezov, 'Working Sketchbook' [Sluzhebnaia chertezhnaia kniga Remezova], St Petersburg, Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka [Russian National Library], Ermitazhnoe sobranie [Hermitage Collection], no. 237, ll. 30 ob.–31. (Reproduced with permission from the Russian National Library.)

Remezov's updated, more elaborate and densely annotated 'Map of All Siberia' [Chertezh vseia Sibiri] (c.1699), an enormous work surviving as a stand‐alone sheet in Harvard University's collection, employs the same general layout, demonstrating that he followed Muscovite conventions by choice and not only when reproducing older works (Plate 3). Remezov's map preserves the framework of the Godunov map but fills the space with far more information than its antecedent. It shows Moscow, a small, glowing red star, pushed to the right‐hand margin, and China, again designated by the Great Wall in bright red, edged to the top left.[19] The dotted hook jutting in from the top of the map near China is the 'Sandy Sea', the Gobi Desert. The map is dominated once again by an expansive, undifferentiated middle, interrupted by only one landmark of significance to Remezov, his hometown, Tobolsk, shown again in a red aureola, just right and below the centre of the map. The tsardom fills the space of the page between defining endpoints.

The title page of Remezov's 'Chorographic Sketchbook' repeats this theme of betweenness with a dedication to 'Great Sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince Peter Alekseevich, Autocrat of all Great and Small and White Russia, and of many tsardoms and states and lands, of the east, of the west, and of the middle' (my emphasis). A pair of angels labelled 'land' and 'sea' hold the Siberian crest 'like a mirror showing in its space all of Siberia' (Fig. 4). The theme of land and sea underscores the geographic extent of the tsar's dominion, stretching from one end of the earth to the other, and suggests the wealth of peoples and environments subsumed within its expanse.[20]

Graph: Figure 4 The title page of Remezov's 'Chorographic Sketchbook' makes the theme of betweenness explicit with a dedication (below the imperial arms) to 'Great Sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince Peter Alekseevich, Autocrat of all Great and Small and White Russia, and of many tsardoms and states and lands, of the east, of the west, and of the middle' (my emphasis). Below these words a pair of angels, labelled 'land' and 'sea' to left and right respectively, hold the Siberian crest 'like a mirror showing in its space all of Siberia'. The four representatives of the countless different peoples of Siberia, each distinctively costumed and identified, remind the viewer that in the expanse between the angels' land and sea abide a wealth of peoples and environments, all supplying tribute to the tsar. 16×18 cm. Semyon U. Remezov, 'Chorographic Sketchbook' [Khorograficheskaia kniga Remezova], 1697–1711, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, Houghton Library, Bagrow Collection, MS Russ. 72 (6), p. 8. (Reproduced with permission from Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

In the allegorical frontispiece to the 'Working Sketchbook', Remezov placed the Russian imperial double‐headed eagle in the middle, between a winged Polish angel and a hookah‐sipping Turk—'The Turk practices Islam', the label informs us (Fig. 5).[21] Thus situated, Russia inherently occupied a zone of transition, between Catholic Poles and Muslim Turks, between Orthodox Ruthenians and shamanistic Siberians, Mongols and the great kingdom of China. Russia lay between and contained all of the varieties and possibilities, permutations and combinations of the lands and cultures that it connected.

Graph: Figure 5 In the allegorical frontispiece to Remezov's 'Working Sketchbook', the Russian imperial double‐headed eagle is placed prominently at the centre of the compass rose that occupies most of the lower part of the composition. Above, a smiling sun beams approvingly and the small heads of the 'merry winds' bring health and prosperity to the Siberian land. The hand of God, or of the Great Draughtsman, encloses Russian imperial expanse in the span of a pair of dividers, or draughting compass. Signs of the zodiac and cryptic allegorical phrases float above the landscape. Note the framing of the tsar's arms by a winged Polish angel on the left, that is, in the west, and a hookah‐sipping Turk on the right, that is, in the east. The composition is atypical in having a north–south orientation, but by thus placing the tsardom in an intermediary position, Remezov highlighted its connective role between Catholic Poles and Muslim Turks. 31×20 cm. Semyon U. Remezov, 'Working Sketchbook' [Sluzhebnaia chertezhnaia kniga Remezova], St Petersburg, Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka [Russian National Library], Ermitazhnoe sobranie [Hermitage Collection], no. 237. (Reproduced with permission from the Russian National Library.)

'Betweenness' in the Russian usage differed significantly from 'centrality', a concept more commonly encountered in early modern geographical claim making. Most famously, in one of its several cartographic traditions, China defined itself as the 'Middle Kingdom' and placed itself squarely at the middle of its world maps, centring itself in cosmological space. The centre enjoyed inherently elevated status in Chinese cartography, whether in maps of the cosmos, the world, the empire, a single city or even a house.[22] The centre, in this way of imagining the world, carried cosmological significance far different from the middle as 'in‐between' space that characterized Russian geographies.

European maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth century represent their own centrality in still other ways. Europe, frequently figured allegorically as a woman, reigns supreme at the top of the frontispiece to Abraham Ortelius's great Theatrum orbus terrarum. Monarch of the seas and of the continents, Europe asserts her regnant centrality.[23]

Russian geopolitical thinkers and actors were certainly able to imagine themselves at a regnant centre when such a vision proved expedient. At times, Russian writers delighted in placing themselves at the centre of the world. In a prominent strain of its ideological work, Russia developed its own variant of central‐place geopolitical theory. As the 'New Constantinople' or 'New Jerusalem', and later and to a far lesser degree the 'Third Rome', Moscow used an argument about translatio imperii in asserting its pivotal position in a cosmic geography and chronology.[24] In specifically imperial contexts, however, particularly when representing Russia's enterprises across Eurasia, Russian geographers defined the tsardom's greatness not by extolling its centrality but instead by cataloguing its far‐flung peripheries, the lands it lay between and the diverse worlds that it connected.

Remezov demonstrated some of the complexities of an argument for Russian centrality when he situated his beloved Tobolsk relative to Jerusalem: 'from the centre of world, from the city of Jerusalem, Tobolsk is located toward the cold countries, toward the north, in the steppe'. Evoking the centre of the Christian world and placing Tobolsk in relation to it, he deliberately acknowledged his city's displacement.[25] Even for an enthusiast like Remezov, centrality was a difficult concept to apply in the distant reaches of the steppe, and other formulations accomplished the same ideological work more effectively. In all of these maps and cosmographic descriptions, betweenness carries more power and grandeur than centrality, revealing a peculiarly Russian topography of power.

What does this de‐centred configuration of imperial geography say about Russian ideas of empire and their imperial subjects? In emphasizing the disparity of lands and peoples that the tsarist empire connected, Russia necessarily had to acknowledge the spectrum of diversity contained within its borders. In order to keep track of all the variety in its territories, the men involved with the imperial project devoted time and attention to cataloguing the real people who paid tribute to the tsar, as opposed to Mercator's mythical tribes.

The sense of empire as a territorial patchwork of ethnic differentiation is conveyed in Remezov's so‐called 'Ethnographic map', the centrepiece of his grandest and most official atlas, the Chertezhnaia kniga or Sketchbook (Plate 4).[26] The map gives form to a Russian assumption that all people—Russians, Siberians, landlords, peasants—had a natural, historical and God‐given connection with their homelands or a particular territory. The names of peoples were commonly traced back to natural landmarks, and the natural landmarks' names back to the mythical founders of a group, according to legends commonly repeated in the cosmographies. The picture of ethnographic diversity in Remezov's map reflects both an actual and a deliberately fostered reality, ensconced in both ideological and diplomatic texts.

Rather than erasing all indicators of indigenous presence or eliding the signs of difference under a uniform veneer of tsarist dominion, the Russian maps and cosmographies took the opposite tack: they over‐emphasized the clarity of the relationship between indigenous populations (who, after all, were primarily nomadic) and particular, clearly bounded pieces of land. Building on the same conceptual pictures set forth in maps and cosmographies, Russian overlords in Siberia established lasting precedents for forms of imperial rule that rested on a sense of their own importance as masters of the many lands and peoples of the in‐between. Such a mental geography encouraged tsarist officials to celebrate rather than to eliminate the diversity that characterized the spaces between the empire's defining limits: the Ocean Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Great Wall of China at one end of the earth, and the heretical Swedes, Poles and Lithuanians of the West at the other.

Powerful as the model of diversity and connectivity was in Siberia, it played out somewhat differently at the western edges of the empire. In keeping with the logic of the invidiousness of small differences, diversity among the Orthodox Christian Slavs of the Ukrainian and Belarusian borderlands proved far more difficult to accept. As Serhii Plokhy argues in a recent book, the East Slavic lands perennially faced a major problem of categorization: how to classify East Slavs, who spoke related but noticeably different languages of Ukrainian or Belarusian and who identified themselves as Orthodox, attended a Slavonic mass and yet were bound in allegiance to Catholic monarchs?[27] Could an Orthodox Ruthenian subject of the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth be a 'Russian'? Was he truly Orthodox?

During the period of Cossack insurrection and the influx of Ukrainian and Belarusian clergy into Moscow in the seventeenth century, the shifting border, as negotiated by successive treaties, served as a site of much political and ideological anxiety. Some influential theologians came to advocate 'what might be termed pan‐Russianness, the unity of the peoples of Rus', as opposed to any parochial or regional claims from among them for spiritual, political, or historical autonomy'.[28] For others, however, the border of the polity came to define the limits of those truly considered part of the fold. Among policymakers and diplomats, less concerned than their clerical counterparts with the imperative to rescue Orthodox 'brethren' across the political divide, the easiest solution to the dilemma of determining loyalties and affiliations was to draw the line at the border.

In the politics of suspicion and surveillance on the ground, Orthodox residents of the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth were written out of the Russian Orthodox family.[29] Those who transgressed the divide, even those committed Orthodox people seeking asylum from their own homelands' pressures to leave the faith and join the Uniates, were greeted with suspicion, questioned and often arrested merely for being 'Belarusian', to use the surprisingly articulate language of national distinction that emerges from the texts.[30] Under such a regimen, foreigners, even Orthodox Christian Slavs, were regarded with suspicion, occasioning discussion as to whether or not they should be rebaptised in order to qualify as truly Orthodox inside Russia. Geopolitical pragmatism turned religious affinities inward, restricting them within national boundaries, as Russia sought to develop a sense of itself as both a nation and an imperial entity.

The threatening proximity of ambiguously defined and ambivalently understood Ruthenian neighbours required the construction and policing of an ideological wall, a firm and fixable border that could be monitored and controlled. A remarkable map from the second half of the seventeenth century illustrates the fiction of geopolitical clarity that came to characterize Moscow's understanding of its western border in the late seventeenth century. The 'Sketch‐map of Ukrainian and Cherkassian Cities from Moscow to the Crimea' [Chertezh Ukrainskim i cherkaskim gorodam ot Moskvy do Kryma], held today in the Swedish National Archive in Stockholm, is a lovely, hand‐painted work, which survives as an individual sheet, outside of any atlas (Plate 5 and Fig. 6).

Graph: Figure 6 'Sketch‐map of Ukrainian and Cherkassian Cities from Moscow to Crimea' [Chertezh Ukrainskim i cherkaskim gorodam ot Moskvy do Kryma], c.1667–1673, in Stockholm, Riksarkivet (National Archives), 'Tshertosch ukrainskim i tsherkaskim gorodam ot Moskwij dokrijma'. Author unknown. East is at the top. 93×78 cm. Detail showing Kiev with its golden walls. The rest of the area beyond the Dnieper River, the official border between Russia and Poland‐Lithuania, has been left blank, as if to emphasize the definitive limit of the Russian land and the sharp differentiation of Russian territory from the hostile and dangerously Catholic reaches beyond the political divide. See Plate 4 for the full map. (Reproduced with permission from the Riksarkivet. Photographer Kurt Eriksson.).

The piece has been convincingly dated on the grounds of its placement of the border to the period soon after the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667), which fixed the Dnieper River as the dividing line between Russian and Polish territories in the Ukraine, but granted Kiev to Russia. In the usage of the time, the map's title distinguishes 'Ukrainian' (what we would call Russian) from 'Cherkassian' (what we would call Cossack or Ukrainian) cities. Oriented to the east, the map represents the gleaming towers of Moscow in the north, near the left‐hand margin, and Crimea, oddly shown as an island, at the right. In this strategic image, the Ukrainian (Russian) lands extend only as far west as the Dnieper, where the drawing stops abruptly, showing only the grand city of Kiev, painted oversized in yellow‐gold, on the far (right) bank of the river. The world beyond the Russian border is rendered invisible.[31]

The Ukrainian map may well be one of a pair, of which the second map, with a similar colour scheme and sense of design, shows the eastern half of the empire.[32] The two maps survive in copies that appear to have been made by different hands, but presumably based on the matching set of a common original pair. The identification of the two as coming from different versions of a pair of maps displaying the entire stretch of the empire is speculative, based on stylistic similarity, a shared spatial conceptualization and demonstrably close dates of production, but the argument seems quite convincing. The surviving version of the eastern part of the pair, held today in the Russian State Military‐Historical Archive in Moscow, depicts Siberia stretching between the Grand Principality of Moscow in the west, the Chinese metropolises beyond the Great Wall in the south, and the cold waters of the Pacific framing the coastline in the east (Plate 6 and Fig. 7).[33]

Graph: Figure 7 Detail of the Chinese border from the'Sketch‐map of Siberia to the Tsardom of China and Nikasskoe' [Chertezh Sibirskii do Kitaiskago Tsarstva i do Nikasskogo] (c.1673; see Plate 6 for the full map). South is at the top. 80×95 cm. The walled cities, labelled Tsardom of Nikanskoe and Tsardom of China, are represented by signs that are little different in style from those used for the Siberian towns, but their exaggerated size and apparently open gates may have been intended to suggest the attractiveness of the populated Chinese centres to Russian traders and other visitors. Similarly, the rendering of the borders as broad paths would appear to invite cross‐border connection rather than impenetrable division. The large body of water north of China is Lake Baikal. The area just to the southeast of Baikal, showing small fortified outposts and a dense network of tributaries branching from the Amur River, would have merited particular interest on the part of the mapmaker since the border negotiations with China, more or less settled with the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, still lay in the future. (Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Military‐Historical Archive, Moscow.)

The two maps, although presumably initially produced by a single cartographer, embody radically different conceptions of borders in their respective imagery. The Ukrainian map ends decisively at Kiev and the Dnieper, showing nothing beyond that boundary. The boundaries of the Siberian map, however, are painted as thresholds to other lands, as openings to the worlds beyond. By elaborating the attractive red and gold cities that beckoned across the divide and even indicating the presence of the lapping ocean shore, the Siberian map represents borders as lines to be crossed, gateways to be entered and seas to be sailed.

As a great power linking the ends of the earth and encompassing multitudinous lands and peoples, Russians, we have seen, celebrated the comity that united them all beneath the tsar's sceptre. And yet the decisive delineation of the western border confronts us with precisely the opposite formulation, disrupting our picture. In order to harden boundaries and clarify ambiguities, Russians and Ruthenians worked to mask any distinctions among themselves within the Russian borders, while at the same time actively denying commonalities across the border. According to the visual tale told by the cartographic record, the tsardom rejoiced in its connective role in linking lands and regions across borders in the distant east, but it expended far more energy on erecting barriers and patrolling borders in the Christian and more contested west.

Commentators on the peculiarities of Russia's development have noted that from the time of its inception as an identifiable polity Russia had an imperial identity. As Geoffrey Hosking wrote, 'Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire'.[34] The observation seems apt. From the mid‐sixteenth century on, the consolidation of the tsarist state and the development of a sense of Russian identity progressed hand in hand with the expansion of empire. The absence of a fully formed national identity outside an imperial identity allowed for a broadly inclusive, although strictly hierarchical, definition of who belonged in the amorphous in‐between spaces. That inclusivity was sorely tested, however, when demanded by Ruthenians from across the western border, tainted as they were by their Polish and Catholic environments and possible conflicting loyalties. Russia's closest kin, the Ruthenians on the west, proximate in geographic, ethnic, linguistic and religious terms, came to define the outer limits of what Russia lay between. Within a geopolitical conception of the Russian Empire as the yawning stretches and connective zones of the in‐between, policies of toleration were easy and sensible in the middle or at the sparsely populated shores of the Arctic and Pacific oceans. It was the contested edges in the south and west that challenged the paradigm.

Au début du 17e siècle, alors que les lettrés moscovites s'attelaient à la tâche de produire une vision russe et orthodoxe de leur place dans le monde, ils commencèrent à lire, traduire et modifier les atlas produits peu avant par leurs homologues européens, les Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu et autres. La solution russe à ce problème géographique provenait et était le reflet d'un sentiment de localisation exceptionnelle de l'empire ainsi que des ambitions impériales. Les cosmographes et géographes russes assignèrent généralement à leur royaume une position intermédiaire l'empire se tenait fièrement entre les points du monde, il unissait des terres et des peuples extrêmement différents et il contenait dans ses limites un mélange hétérogène de peuples, de croyances, de langues et de cultures. Dans cet article, j'examine les différentes manifestations de cette idée et des conceptions idéologiques de l'empire de la part des Moscovites dans deux parties très différentes de celui‐ci—Sibérie, assez longuement, puis Ukraine et Bélarus, plus rapidement—et j'examine comment ces cadres idéologiques affectaient les populations de ces deux territoires.

Als im frühen 17. Jahrhundert gebildete Moskowiter sich daran machten, eine russische und orthodoxe Sichtweise auf ihre räumliche Lage auf der Erde zu erarbeiten, begannen sie die Atlanten der etwas früher tätigen europäischen Kartographen—Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu und anderer—zu studieren, zu übersetzen und zu verarbeiten. Die russische Lösung dieses geographischen Puzzlespiels lässt ihre Wurzeln in einer speziellen Vorstellung von des Zarenreichs einzigartiger Position und kaiserlicher Ambition erkennen. Die Stellung, die moskowitische Kosmographen und Geographen üblicher Weise ihrem Reich zumaßen, war eine verbindende: Das Zarenreich liege stolz zwischen anderen Regionen auf dem Globus. Es verbinde äußerst unterschiedliche Länder und Völker und umfasse in seiner Sphäre eine heterogene Menge von Völkern, Glaubensrichtungen, Sprachen und Kulturen. In diesem Beitrag untersucht die Autorin die verschiedenen Belege für diese Denkweise und für die Idee des Kaisertums nach der moskowitischen Ideologie in zwei voneinander weit entfernten Regionen des Reiches: ausführlicher in Sibirien und knapper in der Ukraine und in Weißrussland und sie legt dar, wie dieses ideologische Konzept Einfluss auf die unterworfenen Völker in jenen Gebieten gewann.

A principios del siglo XVII, algunos eruditos moscovitas, empeñados en la tarea de elaborar una visión rusa y ortodoxa de su lugar en el mundo, comenzaron a leer, traducir y modificar los atlas realizados por sus homólogos europeos algo anteriores: Ortelio, Mercator, Blaeu, entre otros. La solución rusa ante dicho puzzle geográfico consistió en aumentar y reflejar la privilegiada localización del Imperio Ruso y sus ambiciones territoriales. La posición comúnmente asignada al territorio por los cosmógrafos y geógrafos moscovitas consistía en una conexión: el Imperio de los Zares se establecía orgullosamente entre puntos del globo; conectaba ampliamente distintas tierras y gentes; y contenía dentro de su ámbito una heterogénea variedad de pueblos, creencias, lenguas y culturas. En este artículo, examino las diferentes manifestaciones de ese pensamiento y la concepción del imperio por parte de los moscovitas en dos partes claramente separadas—Siberia, con cierta extensión, y posteriormente, de manera más breve, Ucrania/Bielorrusia. Asimismo, exploro de qué forma el marco ideológico repercutió en las poblaciones de estas dos áreas.