Women of the Conquered Territories. Territorial expansion continued throughout the first 150 years of the imperial period, with the result that by 1861 the Russian Empire was the largest nation

Territorial expansion continued throughout the first 150 years of the imperial period, with the result that by 1861 the Russian Empire was the largest nation on Earth, covering a land mass three times the size of the continental United States. Peter added to Russia today’s Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Catherine annexed southern Ukraine, the Crimea, Belarus, and central Poland. Alexander I laid claim to Finland. Throughout the eighteenth century the colonization of Siberia continued. In the nineteenth, Russian armies, officials, and traders pushed southward into the Caucasus and southeastward into Central Asia, the region north of Afghanistan and Iran.

The consequences of this expansion for non‑Russian women followed the patterns established in the seventeenth century. In Siberia, native women coped, some by moving with their people into lands the Russians had not penetrated, others by marrying Russian husbands. The third path, the one taken most often, was to attempt to meet Russian demands while preserving native culture. For example, the women of Tungus, a people who lived near Lake Baikal, continued, as they had done for centuries, to herd and milk the reindeer every day, make deerskin coats and boots, clean, and cook, while the men hunted and processed the kill. They produced more of their warm, weatherproof coats after the Russian advent than previously, and traded them to the Russians for tea, flour, sugar, salt, tobacco, and alcohol. The groups that succeeded best at this accommodationist strategy were the peoples of southern Siberia, who had a long history of dealing with outsiders. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russian incursions were as yet too limited to affect the great majority of women.

Russian rule strengthened serfdom in the western borderlands and consequently increased the hardships of women’s lives there. The change was particularly severe in Ukraine, where the peasants had known a period of freedom in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, the increased power granted the Ukrainian nobility by the Russian crown came at the expense of the peasantry, whose labor dues were increased. Catherine the Great also gave enormous swaths of Ukraine to private landowners who imposed onerous requirements on the peasants. The burdens of Russian rule fell less heavily on peasants living in Polish territory, for the mournful reason that serfdom was already quite severe there. In the nineteenth century, the government actually eased the exactions of Polish serfdom, in an effort to court peasant support against the rebellious Polish nobility. The nobles of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, influenced by liberal ideas flowing in from Central Europe, were more enlightened, less exploitative serf‑owners, despite the establishment of Russian rule.

Annexation by Russia did not substantially alter the patterns of women’s lives in Polish, Baltic, Belarusian, and Ukrainian territories, mainly because Russian gender values and practices were very similar to those of the conquered peoples. This correspondence was closest among the elites, who communicated with one another and imbibed the same influences from Central and Western Europe. Where there were differences, in inheritance laws for example, the Russian government did not challenge local gender arrangements, because officials believed that doing so would stir up unrest. A notable example of this unwillingness to interfere occurred after the Polish Rebellion of 1830–31, when Nicholas I abolished the autonomy of the government in Warsaw, but refrained from diminishing the authority of Catholic ecclesiastical courts over marriage and divorce.