The empire widens

Johann Baptist von Lampi painted Grigory Potemkin in the 1790s: sash, star, the face of a favourite who had become the chief architect of an imperial policy. The likeness is not a gazetteer of ports. It is a reminder that southern expansion in this reign had a manager, and that the manager was also a lover of the 1770s whose power outlasted the affair. Catherine’s years were notable for imperial growth. First in importance were the securing of the northern shore of the Black Sea by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, the later annexation of Crimea, and expansion into the steppes beyond the Urals and along the Caspian. This page is the shore, the towns and the social pattern that followed. The peninsula has the next article. Do not annex it early for the sake of a single Black Sea sentence.

The treaty was signed on 10 July 1774, 21 July New Style, at Küçük Kaynarca in Bulgaria, ending the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74. It ended undisputed Ottoman control of the Black Sea and provided a diplomatic basis for future Russian intervention in Ottoman internal affairs. Russia’s frontier reached the southern Bug. Azov passed to Russia, as did the fortresses of Kerch and Yenikale on the eastern Crimean peninsula, part of Kuban, and the Dnieper–Bug estuary including the Kinburn fortress. The Crimean khanate was to be an independent state, subject to the Ottoman sultan-caliph only in religious matters. That independence is the hinge into the next page. The commercial clauses of this page still matter: consulates anywhere in the Ottoman Empire, navigation through the Straits. A sea that had been closed was, on paper, a route for grain and for flags.

Those gains permitted the adequate protection of Russian agricultural settlements in the south and southeast and the establishment of trade routes through the Black Sea and up the Danube. On the other hand, they involved Russia more and more in the political and military struggle over the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. A treaty can open a shore and still close a simpler foreign policy. Potemkin’s later towns would sit on that shore. Crimea’s later annexation would sit on the independence clause. This article keeps the towns, the hosts, the nomads and the serfs who were moved. It does not yet take Bakhchysarai. The map of 1774 is already a Black Sea map. It is not yet a peninsula painted the same colour as Kherson.

Ivan Aivazovsky painted Odessa’s harbour in 1852. It is a later marine of a port named among Potemkin’s foundations. Use it for the success the sources record in towns, not as a dockyard diary from the 1770s. A later seascape can still teach the eye what a new export city was for.

Odessa is one name in a list. Kherson, Nikolayev, Taganrog and Mariupol belong with it as towns that grew faster than the agricultural colonies around them. Britannica’s verdict is split on purpose: mediocre success for farms, great success for ports. The picture is of a harbour because the policy’s visible victory was water, warehouses and a reoriented grain trade from Ukraine. The invisible cost sits in the next paragraphs: serfs moved from the centre, Cossack hosts reduced, nomads told they were a stage. Look at the 1852 ships, then remember they paint a city Potemkin’s generation had only begun. A later painter can be honest about water and still be late for 1778.

Potemkin, Catherine’s favourite in the 1770s, promoted large-scale foreign colonisation and peasant resettlement in the south. Agricultural settlements had only mediocre success. Towns and ports did better. Odessa, Kherson, Nikolayev, Taganrog and Mariupol, also called Pavlovsk, grew rapidly. Within a generation or two they became lively cultural centres and major commercial cities for southern Russia, reorienting trade toward agricultural exports from Ukraine. The Kherson arsenal was begun in 1778. A second Russo-Turkish war, in 1787–91, would test the Black Sea fleet built in these years. The fleet belongs with Crimea’s harbour as much as with this list of names. The point on this page is the map of settlement: grain looking for a port, and a port looking like a civilisation.

Local society was transformed on the Russian pattern. Landlords became imperial service nobles with full control over their peasants. Vast new lands were parcelled out to prominent officials and made available for purchase by wealthy Russian nobles, who also received the right to resettle their own serfs from the central regions. Serfdom, with elements of the plantation system, was extended to still more people and over whole new provinces. Expansion benefited the state and a small, already wealthy part of the nobility. It increased the misery and exploitation of the Ukrainian and Russian peasantries. The Charter of 1785 will freeze landlord power in legal language two articles from here. The south had already practised the fact. A Nakaz that disliked perpetual bondage did not stop a surveyor handing out souls.

The traditional military democracies of the Cossack hosts on the Dnieper, Don, Ural, Kuban and Volga lost their autonomy and special privileges. Wealthier officers became Russian service nobles, receiving the right to own and settle serfs on their own lands. Rank-and-file Cossacks sank to the level of state peasants with special military obligations. That sentence is a social revolution written as an administrative reform. Hosts that had been border bargains became, in law, a rank structure. Pugachev’s war, two articles on, would draw on Yaik Cossack anger that had already shown itself in 1772. Do not tell that war here. Tell the reduction of the hosts as part of how the empire digested a shore: officers into nobles, the rest into a taxed military peasantry.

The new ports looked like success. The new estates looked like the old bondage, moved south.

Integration of the new territories required the absorption of a large number of non-Russian, non-Christian nomadic peoples. Until the late nineteenth century the prevailing approach came from Enlightenment writings: a natural progress from hunting and fishing through nomadism to settled agriculture, trade and urbanisation. The government sought to bring nomadic peoples up to what it considered the Russian peasantry’s higher way of life, with the added advantage of uniformity in administration and law. It was willing to let religious, cultural or linguistic differences stand, without feeling committed to protect them actively. The effort to change nomads’ ways still affected culture, religion, social equilibrium and a sense of national identity. Some peoples accepted changes more or less under duress, which eased the extension of Russian agricultural settlements onto open steppe.

The same policy, Britannica records, also gave rise to a growing sense of identity based on cultural, linguistic and religious traditions. Those nationalistic sentiments clashed with officials accustomed to thinking in universal categories. The policy thus defeated some of its own aims: it handicapped economic development in border regions, for example in Siberia, and worked against social and cultural integration into the dominant Russian culture, although Russification did take place on a significant scale among some native elites, as in the Caucasus and Crimea. A theory of stages that was meant to make the map uniform could also make the map louder. This article does not need a later nationalist chronology. It needs the eighteenth-century wager: settle the steppe, and call the settling progress.

Potemkin spared neither men, money nor himself in a gigantic scheme for colonising the Ukrainian steppe, but he never calculated the cost, and most of the plan, Britannica records, involved exaggeration. Agricultural mediocrity and urban speed can live in the same policy. So can a later legend of cardboard villages, which belongs with the Crimean voyage of 1787, not with this town list. What this page can carry without stealing the next is already heavy: a treaty that opened a sea, a favourite who founded ports, Cossack hosts rewritten as service and state peasantry, serfdom planted on new soil, and an Enlightenment theory of stages pressed onto nomads. The gains permitted better protection of Russian agricultural settlements and trade routes through the Black Sea and up the Danube. They also involved Russia more and more in the struggle over the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the Balkans.

Fyodor Alekseyev painted Kherson’s town square in the 1790s: church, low ranges, an open centre. It is a prospect from the first generation of the new towns, not a plan of the arsenal begun in 1778. A square can look finished while colonisation still fails to count its cost.

Lampi’s Potemkin, Aivazovsky’s later Odessa, Alekseyev’s Kherson: three pictures of a policy that was personal, commercial and unfinished. The Instruction of the last article had spoken of free individuals and disliked the perpetuation of serfdom. The south put serfs on new provinces anyway. Do not resolve that as hypocrisy in a single moral. Resolve it as the sources do: the state and a thin wealthy nobility gained; Ukrainian and Russian peasants paid; nomads were told they were a stage. A shore is not only grain. It is a diplomatic trap that looks like a harbour. The next article is the peninsula taken in 1783. This one should end on the pattern that annexation would inherit.

Towns that worked, farms that lagged, landlords who arrived with the right to move people, hosts that no longer governed themselves as they had: that is the widened empire as a social fact. Crimea is next because a treaty that made a khanate “independent” was not the last word on the Black Sea. Readers who want Poland or Pugachev will wait their turn. The golden age, seen from the steppe, is a list of ports and a thicker bondage. Seen from St Petersburg, it is a favourite in Lampi’s coat. Both views are in the sources. Neither view needs a cardboard village yet. That legend travels with the empress’s later tour, on the next page, where a harbour has a name.