In the seventeenth century, when Russian administrators in Siberia attempted to subject conquered populations to iasak, exploitive tribute in fur and walrus tusk, they found themselves perplexed. With guns and bayonets, they could force vanquished Siberians to swear obedience, but instead of signing their names to the tribute rolls, the new iasak-payers drew pictures of reindeer, bows and arrows, shamans’ drums, or unidentifiable squiggles. What were administrators to do with a mess of indecipherable drawings?Footnote ¹ Siberian pictograms flouted all norms of Muscovite bureaucratic record-keeping. This article explores both the emergence of a more or less homogeneous mode of administrative writing and the challenges that arose when Muscovite administration confronted practices of non-Russian subjects of the expanding empire.

The earliest examples of Siberian signature marks to survive in Russian archives date to the 1620s, but, as we shall see, already in the late sixteenth century Siberian signing practices troubled the “Muscovite bureaucratic graphosphere,” the space of the administrative word made visible.Footnote ² Such a sphere should not be taken for granted. Prior to 1200, Rusʹ princes relied little if at all on written texts as expressions of administrative power.Footnote ³ Later rulers and their officials gradually incorporated documents into their administrative toolkit, but the form took centuries to evolve into the ideal type. In the fifteenth century, a flowing cursive called skoropisʹ replaced the semiuncial of medieval texts. Long, thin sheets of paper of a standardized size edged out parchment.Footnote ⁴ Documents were then glued together into continuous strips and rolled up into scrolls. Visually, the Muscovite bureaucratic graphosphere took on a definite, recognizable form, with the scroll as its centerpiece.

In the early eighteenth century, Peter I put an end to the use of scrolls as vehicles of official communication. Scrolls offended his sense of well-ordered governance, so he did away with them. Books were declared the administrative form of his new, efficient era. Peter had a point, of course. Scrolls present a host of practical challenges. Long rolls of paper were unwieldy, difficult to use, difficult to store in an accessible manner. Tracking down a document involved hunting through heaps of scrolls piled on shelves or dumped into boxes and then rolling and unrolling the two sides until the relevant page was exposed.Footnote ⁵ Surely, this was not a great system.

And yet, scrolls served their function admirably for centuries. Defining what that function was helps explain their enduring success. They acted in surprising ways, far beyond the pragmatic administrative record-keeping we might imagine. For instance, one might wonder why Muscovite scribes painstakingly copied each previous installment of an epistolatory exchange prior to writing out the new information or instruction they were tasked to communicate. This would seem wasteful of scribal time and of expensive paper and ink. Nancy Shields Kollmann explains this repetitive practice as a means of “conquering time and distance”: “In the face of frequent change of governors and scribes, great distance, and slow transport, such documents preserved the whole record of a case or correspondence; it became a mobile archive… . Intentional redundancy was an elegant solution to a problem that plagued all empires.”Footnote ⁶ Ungainly material form and tedious, repetitive content fused in an alchemical process that produced adequate administrative accountability, if not sleek Petrine efficiency.

Books and scrolls figure prominently in the illustrations of the Litsevoi letopisnyi svod (LLS), or Illustrated Chronicle Compilation, a vast compendium of the history of the world from Creation through 1567. Comprising more than 20,000 page-faces, the LLS is distinguished by its extraordinarily ambitious program of illustrations, more than 17,000 by the latest count.Footnote ⁷ The illuminators frequently chose to depict textual objects in their illustrations. Their efforts provide a visual snapshot of Muscovite written culture. They visually distinguish various aspects of written culture, marking a textual taxonomy within the graphosphere. Books are associated with churchmen or church ceremonies, or, more rarely, with education.Footnote ⁸ Scrolls represent diplomatic or administrative communication, writing produced within the bureaucratic realm. Reports from the battlefield or from the ruler’s agents at home or abroad, missives to and from foreign rulers, petitions from subjects or would-be subjects: all are shown in the form of scrolls. Sometimes they appear on the desks or across the knees of scribes as they record the words dictated to them by higher-ups, sometimes they are shown in the hands of the emissaries who carry or deliver them. As they move across the landscape, they are held aloft, made visible as they convey the weighty words of the powerful. Unfurled scrolls often show up as blank ribbons, announcing their function with no pretense of content. Elsewhere they are striped in pale orange and white or else marked with tiny, meaningless letters, with black dots, or with faux writing. (Figure 1).

Table 1.

No. of images of scrolls and No. with corresponding textual references in volumes of the LLS

Table 1 Long description

Counts compare scroll images in selected LLS volumes with how often the same documents are mentioned in the accompanying text. Book 22, covering 1553 to 1557, has 109 images and 84 mentions, about three quarters. Books 9 and 17 each have 20 images; Book 9 (1373 to 1380) has 18 mentions, about nine tenths, while Book 17 (1483 to 1502) has 14 mentions, about seven tenths. Book 1 (1114 to 1151) has 2 images and no corresponding mentions. Overall, the largest image count occurs in Book 22, while the highest mention rate occurs in Book 9. Percentages reflect the share of images with a matching textual reference and may depend on how “corresponding mention” is defined.

Figure 1.

Scrolls in the LLS, 22:312.

What was the place of scrolls as indicators of what we might call a bureaucratic graphosphere? If we catalogue representations of scrolls in the LLS, interesting patterns emerge. Because of the enormous size of the compendium, I have been selective in my examination. To allow for a sense of change over time, I looked at books 1 (covering the years 1114–51), 9 (1373–80), 17 (1483–1502), and 22 (1553–57) of the Rusʹ and Russian history sequence in the Akteon facsimile edition. These four volumes alone include over 2,000 images.

The number of illustrations that depict scrolls increases dramatically over time, with a particularly sharp rise in the sixteenth century. (Table I).

The numbers fit what we know of actual administrative practice. The earliest surviving segment, which opens with the reign of Vladimir Monomakh, includes almost no images of paperwork. One marvelously self-referential illustration shows the hegumen Selivestr composing the very chronicle in which the illustration appears. Several place books in the hands of clergymen; these are evidently books of sermons or holy writ.Footnote ⁹ Of the two depictions of what could be classified as administrative texts, one represents princes swearing an oath, and the other illustrates princely communication during the internecine strife of the twelfth century.Footnote ¹⁰ In both these cases, including pieces of paper, or what would at the time have been parchment, was the illuminators’ embellishment. The chronicle text, originally written at or near the time of the events, makes no mention of a document. The striking absence of documents in the text, and accordingly in the images that illustrated the text, confirms Franklin’s finding that prior to the thirteenth century, the princes of Rusʹ conducted the rudimentary administration of their lands in primarily oral form. Written texts were the vanishingly rare, and mostly symbolic, exception.Footnote ¹¹

By the fourteenth century (book 9), administrative documentation was beginning to make a showing. Cued by verbal references in the chronicle, the artists drew scrolls in twenty of their illustrations. The text mentions a variety of official paperwork, mostly exchanged with neighboring sovereigns: a iarlyk (edict) from the Mongol khan, a gramota (charter) establishing peace between Moscow and Tverʹ, a khartiia (another charter) sent to the patriarch in Constantinople, dogovory and kliatvy (agreements/peace treaties and oaths), a poslanie (letter), and perhaps most interesting of all, a plea to the Tatar ‘tsar’ Mamai, directly quoted in the text of the chronicle. In addition to its taxonomy of purpose-specific documents, the text prompted the illustrators to include scrolls in their artwork by introducing a small set of “writing” verbs: opisati, napisati, pisati. The illustrators responded to the directions of the text, including documents as required. Compared to the first volume, that requirement had grown tenfold.

In book 17, chronicling events of the late fifteenth century, the number of depictions of scrolls or administrative documents holds steady, but the vocabulary expands. This volume adds the terms raspolozheniia (grants of jurisdiction), vesti (news, reports), chelobitʹia (petitions), and a still small but increasingly articulated assortment of specialized gramoty (documents): opasnye (safe passage), dogovornye (treaties), and razmetnye (declarations of war).Footnote ¹² In these two volumes, 9 and 17, depictions of documents remain rare (appearing in roughly 4% of their illustrations), but the creeping infiltration of documents into the text and images signals a growth in administrative paperwork.

It was in the sixteenth century that administrative paperwork skyrocketed.Footnote ¹³ This proliferation is evident in book 22, the penultimate volume of the LLS, which records the middle years of Ivan IV’s reign. Writing verbs pepper the text, demanding that the illustrators take heed. The nomenclature of administrative documents expands still more, to include prigovory (orders), otpiski (reports), okhrannye gramoty (safe passage letters), spiski (lists, muster rolls), smotry (military reviews), pisʹma (letters), and mirnye gramoty (peace treaties). Illustrators dwelled on these documents, often depicting the various stages of production, transportation, reception, and response in a single miniature. In these diachronic illustrations we can see the dynamics of Kollmann’s “mobile archive.”

State bureaucracies are loci of power, so their forms matter. This observation holds true at the contested edges of the expanding tsardom as in its metropolitan center. One might argue that the Muscovite empire was made as much through paperwork as by guns. The sherti (oaths of loyalty; sing. shertʹ) that bound non-Slavic peoples of the steppe to the grand princes and tsars are a case in point. It was through these sherti that Moscow registered the subjugation of the peoples of the Volga and Siberia and recorded their tribute obligations. Michael Khodarkovsky argues convincingly that the ritual of shertʹ carried sharply different meanings for the steppe peoples than for Muscovites. Where the people of the steppe saw reciprocal oaths and gifts as indicators of respect between equals, the Russians interpreted those same exchanges as signs of total submission to the tsar.Footnote ¹⁴ But the artists of the LLS were unaware of or indifferent to those discordant interpretations. In the volumes of the LLS that cover the sixteenth century, that is, books 17 through 23 of the Akteon edition, twenty-two entries mention sherti.Footnote ¹⁵ The depictions of these encounters expose the significant challenges they posed to the Muscovite bureaucratic graphosphere.

In the imagination of the chroniclers and artists of the LLS, sherti might or might not take written form. Sometimes a shertʹ is mentioned in a general way, and the illustration correspondingly portrays an oral exchange.Footnote ¹⁶ Other passages refer to written documents or employ verbs of writing. In 1530, the princes of Kazan signed a shertnaia zapisʹ to the tsar “and on the zapisʹ they were to place their seals, and those who were able to write were to sign, but those who were illiterate were to put their seals [on it].”Footnote ¹⁷ The illustrator helpfully included each of the variants: the scrolls carry lines of pseudo-writing and also are marked with small, round, gold seals. (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Kazanian shertʹ with gold seal, LLS, 19:50.

Figure 3.

1497 shertʹ sworn by the princes and ulany and all the people of Kazan, involving ritual with green cloth and a cup. LLS, 17:327.

When an envoy of the Siberian prince (kniazʹ) Ediger came before Ivan IV in 1557, bringing 1,000 sables and the equivalent of 160 sables in squirrel skins as tribute from the “whole Siberian land,” “he also brought a sworn document with the prince’s seal.” The illustration depicts the tsar in discussion with a Siberian representative who holds the shertʹ, shown as a scroll.Footnote ¹⁸ The artists, in other words, responded to verbal cues with familiar imagery drawn from the Muscovite visual and material repertoire of the bureaucratic graphosphere. But the people of the steppe operated in a different mode. The illustrators drew on conjecture and on what they knew, but the signatures and “seals” that the people of the Volga and of Siberia placed on the pages the Russians provided were undoubtedly not written in alphabetical script and were not imprinted into gold-colored wax; they were almost certainly tamgi or znamena, that is the pictograms that Russian administrators would collect in the seventeenth century, as described at the beginning of this article. Tamgi were the currency of identification and authority throughout the Mongol and post-Mongol sphere, and the illustrators themselves had an inkling of this practice. In several illustrations of the Mongol Khan Batu’s assault on Rusʹ, for instance, the artists embellished the khan’s tent with an imperial tamga.Footnote ¹⁹

But in the context of Muscovite administrative paperwork, pictographic signatures were entirely alien. The practice exceeded the illustrators’ knowledge or imagination, and so they defaulted to what they knew: scrolls signed in writing or stamped in golden wax. The shertʹ defied the illustrators’ imaginative capacities in other ways as well, ways that expose some of the challenges of extending and imposing the norms of a bureaucratic graphosphere in an aggressively imperial context. Muscovites required their new subjects to swear fealty “according to their faith (po svoei vere).” Usually this involved a ritual with a sharp blade and other ceremonial objects. For instance, when Ayuki, the chief Kalmyk tayishi (noble), signed a written oath to the tsar in February 1673 near Astrakhan, “Ayuki, in accordance with Kalmyk custom, bowed down, kissed a burkhan (one of the Buddha’s images), followed by a bichig (a prayer book) and prayer beads, and put a saber to his head and throat.”Footnote ²⁰ But the illustrators in their Kremlin workshops knew nothing of such particulars. Working a century before this exchange with the Kalmyk Ayuki, as they attempted to illustrate the ritual swearing of oaths with people of the steppe in historical scenes from the distant or immediate past, they were working in the dark. They had no idea what “according to their faith” might entail, so they made something up. In several striking illustrations, they invented their own imagined rituals, one involving a cup and pile of green fabric heaped up on a table, somehow signifying “their faith.”Footnote ²¹ (Figure 3).

A.V. Artsikhovskii, the first scholar to examine LLS miniatures seriously as a historical source, understood them as illustrative of the realia of everyday life. These fabricated fantasies about the shert’ convey instead the utterly unrealistic but highly imaginative expectations of Kremlin artists in the late sixteenth century, or, more precisely, an unrealistic fantasy that they cobbled together from the materials of a world they knew.Footnote ²²

Traces of Muscovy’s bureaucratic graphosphere become increasingly visible over the centuries covered in the pages of the LLS. This increase reflects an actual increase in the circulation of bureaucratic documents. It also reflects a sedimentation of the assumption that power works through text and paper, configured in specific forms. The LLS illustrations are both a reflection and a symptom of the growth of administrative paperwork. The illustrations show the standardization of forms in writing. They demonstrate the ways in which paperwork came to certify and authenticate the exercise of power. The curious case of the shertʹ reveals the inescapable hierarchies structured into an imperial bureaucratic graphosphere, where power was unequally allotted. At the same time, it exposes how the rules and forms of a particular graphospheric culture, however expansive and inclusive, constrained the imaginations even of those at the heart of power, forcing them to undertake extraordinary contortions to come to terms with unfamiliar graphic conventions.