Historically it was Russia’s geographical position, near Siberia—a huge and almost
empty space—that made expansion easy. This was a great advantage for Russia compared
with the countries of mainland Europe that competed for territorial expansion in an
area where land was scarce. Russia’s opportunities for territorial expansion were
enhanced after Ivan III (The Great), who reigned from 1462 to 1505, had succeeded
in driving the Mongols back. Under his grandson Ivan IV (The Terrible), who reigned
from 1547 to 1584, Russia—as if driven by a horror vacui—started to conquer the vast expanses of Siberia. Within a century the Russians had
reached the Pacific. They did not stop there, but crossed the Bering Strait and went
on to conquer Alaska. In the early nineteenth century Russian colonists went as far
as California, where, in 1812, they founded Fort Ross north of Bodega Bay on the Pacific
coast, just above San Francisco.[18] According to the American geopolitician Nicholas J. Spykman, “It was fair to assume
that if the grip of Spain in California ever weakened, Russia would be eager to take
her place.”[19] However, Russian territorial expansion into the South, the West, and the North
was less easy. Here it was less pull factors of an easy expansion than the push factors of a deliberate imperialist policy that prevailed.
An important push factor for Russia’s imperial expansion was Russia’s economic system. It was based on agriculture in feudal properties, and the labor force consisted
largely of serfs. This agriculture was not capital-intensive, as was mostly the case
in Western Europe, but coercion-intensive.[20] This meant that it was neither innovative nor efficient and rendered only marginal
profits to the landlords who disposed of two methods only to raise their profits:
increasing the exploitation of the serfs or adding new land. Because the exploitation
of the serfs could not be increased beyond certain physical limits, this led to a
continuous search for new land and territorial expansion. This tendency was reinforced
by the fact that “the Russian state took shape in a capital-poor environment.”[21] The state simply did not have enough money to pay or reward faithful servants of
the state and successful military commanders. “[T]he logic of warmaking and statemaking
in a region of little capital led rulers to buy officeholders with expropriated land,”[22] and with newly acquired land. The two above-mentioned factors led to Russia developing
a tradition of territorial expansion from an early stage. Territorial expansion became,
as it were, the normal “way of life” of the Russian state. It was like an organism
that grows and grows and continues to grow until it has reached its full size, preordained
by its biological nature. But unlike an organism, Russia did not have a genetically preordained “normal size.” It could go on and on, growing beyond
any limit. And in a certain sense that was what happened. According to Colin Gray,
territorial expansion was “the Russian way,” just as it has been “the Soviet way.”
It is estimated, for example, that between the middle of the 16th century and the
end of the 17th, Russia conquered territory the size of the modern Netherlands every year for 150 years running. Furthermore, unlike the case of most other imperial powers conquest by Russia
became a permanent and nonnegotiable political fact (save under conditions of extreme
duress, as with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918).[23]
Traditions can be upheld and followed with more or less constancy and enthusiasm.
A country can become an imperial power by making this an explicit choice or in a more
or less accidental way. The British Empire, according to the nineteenth century British
historian Sir John Seeley, was acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” There existed
no previous, elaborated British plan to build an empire. Edward Dicey, a British journalist and writer, wrote in 1877:
We have never been a conquering nation. Since the days when the Plantagenets essayed
the conquest of France we have never deliberately undertaken the conquest of any foreign
country; we have never made war with the set purpose of annexing any given territory.
We have had no monarchs whose aim and ambition it has been to add fresh possessions
to the crown, in order simply and solely to extend the area of their dominions.[24]
