Russia’s Standing as a Great Power, 1494–1815

Abstract

No doubt about it, Russia is a challenge. When observed from the West, there is an economic and political incompatibility about the place that spells fascination. Sometimes, this fascination turns into outright fear. We know about the immediate historical causes for this— the pangs of transition from communism to something else, communism itself being the nineteenth-century experience of keeping the ancien régime that other European powers discarded one by one. These experiences certainly account for the incompatibility. They do, nonetheless, raise a further question that has to do with our understanding of the roots of that incompatibility. It makes a difference whether the Russian empire was accepted into the European order on a par with other entities, only to slip away after the Napoleonic Wars, or whether Russia was really always different. In this chapter, I will try to answer this question by surveying Russia’s standing in Europe before the Napoleonic Wars. The story to be told is, first, one of how Russia made its presence felt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but not in a degree strong enough to be a presence as the modern European system of states congealed into place. Secondly, it is the story of how Peter the Great established Russia as a power in the North, and how, during the eighteenth century, Russia was gradually accepted as a great power. In the extant literature, there is no consensus about when Russia actually became a great power.

Thanks arc due to the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where, as a guest in December 2002, I commenced work on this piece. Thanks also to Kristian Gcrncr, Hiski Haukkala, Pål Kolstø, Ole Jacob Sending, Shogo Suzuki, William Wohlforth, and particu- larly Ted Hopf for comments on earlier drafts.