221 Ab Imperio, 1/2006 Sergei GLEBOV “REGULIERTER POLIZEISTAAT” AND “IASAK”: HEINRICH VON FICK’S SIBERIAN MEMORANDUM Empires are not nation-states, as much as historians know. Moreover, in the history of the Russian Empire, the historiography knows of no “emergence of the Russian imperial consciousness” as it does with the national one.1 As the research presented in Ab Imperio has demonstrated, there has hardly been at any point in Russian history a clear and unambiguous “language of imperial self-description,” voiced by a single subject of imperial authority, or, alternatively, by some oppressed imperial subject.2 The imagery of “empire” as the prison of nations, a multinational realm ruled by an enlightened multiethnic and cosmopolitan nobility, or a quasi-totalitarian dictatorship with a uniform-dressed emperor at the helm can hardly be considered reflections of self-description, for they first emerged with the rise of nationalism as a concept of political practice, and second as an analytical tool inspired by nostalgia (the third appears to be a projection of twentieth-century historical realities on the distant and not so distant past). Rather, the complex and shifting social, ethnic, and cultural configurations of identities and group solidarities within the empire generated diverse and 1 Hans Rogger. National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge, 1960; Liah Greenfeld. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, 1992. 2 See the annual program of Ab Imperio for 2006 in this issue. 222 S. Glebov, “Regulierter Polizeistaat” and “Iasak”... often contradictory languages of self-description, spoken by individual or collective authors in dialogue with each other and in situations of unequal and asymmetrical power relations. These languages often drew on the very situation of multiple voices, appropriated what others had said, and reflected the circulation of concepts and words from one level of discourse to another. In individual cases, biographic contexts facilitated or complicated the coming together of different languages, as individuals made sense of imperial diversity and traditional practices in terms that they acquired in the course of their lives. Such is the document presented to our readers in this issue of the journal. Heinrich Fick’s Most Subject Propositions and Report Regarding Iakuts, Tungus, and Other Remote in Northern Siberia to the Russian Empire Submitted Iasak Peoples brings together the rationalist and universalist language of the early Enlightenment, a new self-representation of the Russian empire as a civilized and regular European state, and the ad hoc practices and workings of the “extractive empire” in North-Eastern Siberia. Written by a cosmopolitan bureaucrat and professional exiled to Siberia, this document oscillates between the didactic language of Puffendorff and that of the reports and complaints that seventeenth-century Cossacks and voevody sent to Moscow; it brings together the concepts of Polizey and Iasak – the former a legacy of German judicial and political thought and the latter a sediment of Mongol imperial rule in Central Asia and Siberia – in one seemingly natural, easy flowing speech of boundless rationalism; it foreshadows both the attempts to regulate the lives of the inorodtsy in the imperial borderlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the often sympathetic and compassionate depictions of Siberian peoples by exiled opponents of the imperial state (thus giving a voice, albeit mediated , to the imperial colonial subjects, and establishing the ground for the Romantic celebration ethnic groups). * * * Although there is a continuing debate among historians regarding the depth of Peter the Great’s reforms and the nature of the rupture in the fabric of Russian society produced by his illustrious reign, few would in fact doubt that in the first half of the eighteenth century the languages with which different groups and institutions within the polity described themselves experienced a profound transformation.3 The very medium through which 3 Reinhard Wittram. Peter I, Czar und Kaiser. 2 vols. Göttingen, 1964; N. I. Pavlenko. Petr Velikii. Moscow, 1990; E. V. Anisimov. The Reforms of Peter the Great. Progress 223 Ab Imperio, 1/2006 such descriptions were enunciated – the written language – was undergoing a tectonic change.4 One only needs to compare Peter Tolstoy’s travelogue of 1697-98 or Vasilii Tatishchev’s or Ivan Kirillov’s writings to the smooth, elegant, and...
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Feb 7, 2024
Roberta Raffaetà 
Open Access
