This book is the fourth volume and culmination of a trilogy on which John LeDonne has been working most of his scholarly life: Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Ruling Class, 1700-1825 (1991); The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (1997); and The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (2004). Together with numerous scholarly articles, these studies have conveyed in rich detail the evolution of Russia's military, administrative, and political structures from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, and they explain its geopolitical dilemmas in endeavoring to control the vast Eurasian heartland and deal with rival powers.

One of the key concepts that has informed LeDonne's exposition is “ruling class.” He has argued that the cement holding the empire together was not so much the autocrat as the ruling class with the serf-owning dvorianstvo service nobility at its heart. As a result, the empire was partly the object of individual and family interests as well as those of the state as a whole. This account led some scholars to question whether the concept of “ruling class” was applicable to Russia, since its members had no autonomous corporations but were entirely answerable to the autocrat. However, LeDonne's argument has always seemed justified to me. Autocrats cannot rule on their own: they need agents who transmit their requirements both at the center and in the regions, and those agents have their own personal, familial, and clan interests that they will pursue in carrying out, and sometimes thwarting, the autocrat's will. Nor is the Marxist coloring of “ruling class” wholly inappropriate: local elites undoubtedly brought much of the economy under their own control.

This is important, since LeDonne's geopolitical exposition, drawing on the geopolitical concepts of Halford Mackinder, has shown how Russia gradually conquered or otherwise dominated the “heartland” of Eurasia, for which purpose a ruling elite was crucial. He has further drawn on Geoffrey Parker's concept of the “core area” within a territory, together with Owen Lattimore's of the natural frontier, beyond which further expansion was counter-productive. When Russia tried to expand beyond its natural frontier into the territory of a rival power it ran into serious trouble, LeDonne argues. Even the occupation and domination of the Eurasian heartland itself required Russia to advance along corridors that led to territory controlled by other powers—Sweden, Poland, the Ottoman Turks, and China—and therefore compelled Russia to become and remain above all a Militärstaat, a state whose first priority is its armed forces and its security establishment.

The present book proceeds from the same general concepts as its predecessors and identifies the same three theatres of expansion: western (the Baltic region), southern (towards the Black Sea) and eastern (the steppes and Siberia). It now merges the internal problems with the external ones, creating a single overall exposition. LeDonne also expands the historical coverage to outline the centuries before Russian takeover, showing what inbuilt problems it inherited in asserting its own responsibility for solving them.

LeDonne divides his account of the incorporation of each of the three theatres into three stages, with slightly different chronologies: (a) Laying the Foundations, (b) Full Integration, and (c) Unitary State or Empire? In each theatre he outlines the situation before Russia took over and shows how existing structures and conflicts influenced the way Russia handled its new territory. He then examines in detail how Russia gradually established its overriding control in administering its manifold inheritance; how it manipulated tariff policy and reconstructed communications to reconfigure trade to the advantage of the heartland; how it first accepted existing laws but then modified them in such a way as to bring them closer to central norms; how it calibrated educational and ecclesiastical policy to accommodate diverse religions and ethnic traditions.

The overall strategy of rule he summarizes as “superstratification,” through which a Russian voevoda (governor or governor-general) was superimposed on the existing hierarchical relationships between a local elite and one or more subordinate strata of the population. German, Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian, Tatar, and other nobles took their place as a component part of the ruling class. This gradual process is shown in every region as extremely varied, with divagations motivated by local peculiarities or the pressure of events.

The third heading of his expository stages bears a question mark: why “unitary state” and not “empire”? The author's reply is most fully articulated, rather bizarrely, in the middle of the book, on pages 359–70. LeDonne asserts that, whereas western empires (British, French, Spanish, Dutch) were aggressive and aimed to compel alien peoples to work for their conquerors, the Russian empire was at least in part reactive, a “response to the stimulus of pressures”: it aimed to defend itself against raids by nomadic forces across open territory, which it could only do in the long term by incorporating the region from which the raids came. Russia aimed not so much at exploitative conquest (though, one might add, it certainly achieved that) as at keeping the peace and incorporating others’ territories by the process of superstratification. Though it had to be done with glacial slowness, LeDonne implies all the time that Russia's rulers had a consistent long-term aim, a “unitary state”—though the skeptical reader might well regard many of their actions as improvised responses to particular contingencies.

If forward conquest was mainly reactive and conducted across open land frontiers, perhaps the rulers of Muscovy/Russia had no choice: if they did not become the overarching authority in the heartland of Eurasia, then they would have been a small and helpless component of someone else's huge dominion. And having once chosen to expand and dominate, had they any serious alternatives to how they actually carried out that process?

In any case, is the distinction between unitary state and empire really clear and absolute? Not always: Britain's relationship with Ireland in the nineteenth century was constitutionally articulated at one and the same time as colony, subordinate territory, and part of the metropolis; it is no accident that within the British empire Ireland's situation most closely resembled that of a Russian dependency. Where the absorption had not (or not yet) succeeded, as in Poland, Finland, and Transcaucasia, Russia, according to LeDonne, was an empire, a metropolis ruling over a dependency, rather than a unitary state. In Poland and Finland Russia was faced by an existing ruling class whose culture was so different that they could not be transformed into Russians. In the case of Transcaucasia the problem was different: Russians would not settle in its mountainous terrain, as it was totally unsuited to traditional Russian agriculture or cattle breeding. Another test of imperial status was whether or not Russia had transgressed the “natural” frontier of its “heartland,” defined by sea, by mountain ranges (which placed Transcaucasia outside it), and by desert in large areas of Central Asia. Yet another test was whether the metropolitan ethnos had superior status or not throughout the territory. Russians were not always superior: in many regions they bore the same or even more severe burdens as the indigenous peoples. They might be at the pinnacle of super-stratification, but they were also often at its base.

LeDonne's Olympian survey implies that Russia was pursuing a consistent policy planned over centuries. He indicates that his principal source was the Polnoe sobranie zakonov, the chronological list of legal enactments, a huge set of volumes that set forth intentions of state officials rather than their achievements. The reality on the ground looked very different: sometimes individual governors, diplomats, and military commanders were reacting to immediate circumstances and to personal or clan interests rather than the long-term interests of the state.

Several overall accounts of the Russian empire have been published since LeDonne started out on his long quest for understanding. On the surface, the most contrasting is that of Jane Burbank. She starts from the presumption of the unified nature of the autocracy, and shows how in fact it adopted different laws and customs in different regions in order better to integrate its various peoples and religions. In a comparative study of Russia and China, she asserts that “accommodation to difference, not its eradication, was a hallmark of the two regimes.” The Romanovs’ “politics of difference allowed them to reward—selectively—elites of incorporated regions, to accommodate under supervision a variety of religions and customary practices, and to parcel out rights and duties pragmatically.”Footnote ¹ Her vision of the empire thus focuses on variety and contingency rather than uniformity and long-term planning. Both approaches from their counterposed viewpoints are legitimate and illuminating.

One publication might have helped LeDonne grapple with his complexities. Alfred Rieber's The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands shows how the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Iranian, and Qing Empires competed for the decisive borderlands of the Eurasian heartland.Footnote ² The book's focal concept is “shatterzones”: borderland areas of both interaction and conflict where competing ethnic, religious, economic, and political interests clash and complicate the rivalry of empires, leading always to serious problems and sometimes to war and/or ethnic cleansing. Rieber shows that Russia had direct contact with more shatterzones than any other empire, and that in order to secure control over them it had to introduce special borderland laws and edicts, whose effect was then reflected back to the metropolis, generating harsh authoritarian legislation that affected the entire population: diversity leading back to uniformity.

The closing year of LeDonne's book, 1850, is significant. He never faces up to William Fuller's argument that Russia's relative success in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries directly prepared its later failure: Russia's expansion enlarged the list of its potential foreign enemies and increased the number and variety of its potential internal enemies—those whose resentment simmered at the alien, oppressive and/or corrupt nature of autocratic control and the loss of their culture and traditions.Footnote ³ The price of that control would not become fully apparent until after 1850.

One can argue about terminology and interpretation, but Forging a Unitary State remains a tour de force, and a worthy culmination of LeDonne's life's work. It has its own carefully thought out and substantiated theories; it is a major contribution to the growing literature on empire, and it is an invaluable handbook to the enactments of the Russian state from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Future scholars will refer gratefully to it.