Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Russia

This is a fascinating, highly readable, and well-illustrated tome that looks at Muscovite maps created in the seventeenth century as a still poorly exploited source that can inform our understanding of the politics and culture of the time. The book comprises two distinct parts. Chapters 1–4 focus on spatiality in the heartland, scrutinizing local maps drawn to substantiate and defend positions during litigation procedures. Chapters 5–7 focus on maps as a vehicle for better understanding the ideologies underlying the construction of the Russian empire in Siberia. Kivelson argues the relation between these two, noting that the period itself was characterized by two major developments – the enserfment of the peasantry, including its increased fixity to specific places, and the rapid expansion of empire from a European heartland across Asia. She successfully contends that the two foci complement each other in underscoring, at very different scales, how Russians’ position in the Russian Empire was very much informed by their location. Along the way, Kivelson challenges some prevalent assumptions – that Russia was a highly autocratic and absolutist regime, that peasants had little power, that Russian Orthodoxy was a dour religion. She does not seek so much to unseat these assumptions as to demand an acknowledgement of the complexities and seeming contradictions such assumptions often mask. Through an adroit reading of maps, she also contributes to the debate on how Russian empire building differed from that of other colonial powers.