In her new book, Janet Hartley analyzes the Volga/Itil River's dramatically changing roles in the lives of those who lived along its banks and competed for the riches it offered. Four key changes, in the remarkably complex account presented in this study, took place from the seventh to the late twentieth centuries.
Initially, Hartley portrays the Volga as a rich trade route controlled by no single entity, rather adding a particular north-south dimension to vast overland trade routes (ca 600–1570). Competition for access to, and participation in, this wealth from states along the Volga (Khazaria, Bolgar) and merchants from many lands (Rus΄ principalities, Armenians, South Asians, and others) soon attracted great Empires (the Mongols of the Golden Horde with their capital on the Volga delta and then Muscovite power emerging to the west).
Moscow, having already subjugated Russian principalities on the uppermost reaches of the river, eventually set out to conquer the Khanates of Kazan (along the middle Volga, 1552) and Astrakhan (on the lower Volga, 1556). As an Orthodox and Slavic empire, Moscow's efforts to control land and trade along the middle and lower reaches of the Volga met both active and passive resistance from diverse ethnicities and confessions. Also, parts of the mid-lower Volga basin became centers for those who rejected Moscow's expansion and who responded violently to its policies, including Old Believers and Cossacks (Stenka Razin, Emilian Pugachev). Into the early nineteenth century, then, Russians saw the river as a boundary between an agriculturally prosperous west and a dangerous, largely pastoralist, east; a view with both ecological and political components.
Many setbacks and difficulties resolved in the nineteenth century into a complex “settler colonialism.” Through persistence, reform, and assimilation, by the late 1800s, the river had ironically become a symbol of Russianness: Matushka Volga. But the transition from borderland to heartland was neither easy nor universally accepted. Among other things, ethnic and religious diversity gradually became self-aware nationalism, especially among the Volga Tatars.
By the twentieth century, the Volga region had become a more integral part of the empire and then of the USSR than ever before; no longer a boundary, but one part of empire among others: emancipation, revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization. But it still played a distinctive role. For example, the creation of Soviet Associated Republics developed in some respects from the resistance of the Volga Tatars in 1918 and their short-lived state. Vladimir Lenin's famous dictum, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” drew heavily for its fulfillment on reservoirs, dams, hydroelectric power centers, and canals along the Volga that linked much of the western part of the country with waterways and electricity, while changing the pace and geography of the river's flow. Unexpectedly, during WWII, battles at Rzhev and then Stalingrad abruptly re-emphasized the Volga's Russianness (as well as its strategic importance) while re-establishing itself as a boundary, one beyond which the invaders would not pass.
Perhaps, Hartley intimates, the Russian Federation is witnessing a fifth role for the Volga. Ethnic, nationalist, and religious movements have undercut the vision of a unitary state, while serious ecological and pollution issues stemming from the rise and fall of industrial cities along its length as well as earlier changes to the Volga's flow are newly emerging and challenging concerns.
The Volga traces the changing importance and significance of a region and its people over more than 1300 years in a readable and erudite analysis. Like any sweeping overview, one could point to debatable or omitted matters, such as its brief treatment of the post-WWII period. Of further interest is the geographic distinction mentioned at the book's beginning: the upper, middle, and lower Volga. The book portrays a great deal of the Volga's distinctiveness as deriving from the middle and lower reaches of the river, its location, and the people along its banks. The more “Russian” upper reaches of the river receive less attention, and their role in trade and environmental change seems possibly quite similar to that of other major “Russian” rivers (like the Don), a fact that is not remarked upon. Nonetheless, The Volga is an important study whose focus is the construction of Russian territorially-contiguous colonialism and its broad impacts, well worth the attention of both colleagues and the less specialist reader.
