The Baltic Baron

1737, Gargždai

Thus far this theme has shown two figures in the false mirror. The first was the impostor: Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, who in Mecca passed himself off as a Muslim in order to describe the community from within, and who later placed the knowledge he thus acquired at the service of a colonial administration that declared the ulama ﵀ of Aceh its enemy. The second was the scholar: Ignác Goldziher, who dissected the hadith and early Islam with a philological sharpness that his own love for Islam could never quite conceal, and who thereby left behind a method that redefined the tradition from the outside. Both looked into the mirror and saw not Islam as it experienced itself, but Islam as Europe needed it to be.

The third figure looked neither through the eyes of a scholar nor through those of an impostor. He looked through the eyes of an administrator. Where Snouck studied Islam and Goldziher dissected it, Baron Osip Andreyevich Igelström did something that neither of the two ever grasped: he organized it. A full century before Snouck wrote his first advisory to Batavia, he built the first apparatus ever established by a European state that did not describe Islam but governed it, that examined and appointed mullahs, that granted prayer a license. The blueprint of what Snouck would later call Islam-politics already lay ready, and it lay in the snow of the Russian steppe.

To understand how that blueprint came about, we must first understand the world from which the man who drew it came. And to understand what is wrong with the light he brought, we must first know the darkness that preceded it. This first article is therefore not about the Spiritual Assembly of Ufa, nor about the printed Qur’an of Saint Petersburg. It is about a boy born in 1737 on the edge of the Baltic Sea, and about the empire he would enter: an empire that for two centuries had tried to break Islam, and that was on the point of discovering that one could better bend it.

Gargždai and the Baltic Nobility

He was born in 1737, in Gargždai, a place that today lies in Lithuania and that then belonged to the Baltic world where Swedish, German and Russian influences had crossed one another for centuries. His family was of Baltic-Swedish nobility, a lineage that bore the name Igelström and that belonged to the thin upper stratum of German-speaking nobles who governed the coastal regions of Livonia, Estonia and Courland long before those regions came definitively under the tsar. His father, Gustaf Henrik Igelström, was land marshal in the governorate of Livonia, an office that represented the noble estate before the crown, and his mother, Margarethe Elisabeth von Albedyll, came from the same milieu of Baltic nobles who generation after generation gave their sons into state service.

It is important to understand this milieu well, for it explains much of the man Igelström would become. The Baltic German nobility was an estate without a state of its own. It served the empire in which it found itself, whether that was Sweden or Poland or, as increasingly became the case in Igelström’s time, Russia, and it did so with a loyalty that sprang not from kinship with the ruler but from service to the institution of rule itself. These nobles were not Russians. They spoke German, they prayed in Lutheran churches, they married among themselves, and yet they served the Orthodox tsar with a devotion that sometimes astonished native Russians. Their loyalty was owed not to the people and not to the faith of their ruler, but to the order he embodied.

Whoever is formed in this way learns to see power as an instrument that stands apart from the person who bears it and from the faith that enfolds it. A Lutheran nobleman who serves an Orthodox empress over an empire full of Muslims learns early that a state is not one faith but many faiths under one authority, and that the art of governing lies not in imposing the one true faith but in ordering the many. That insight, which for a native Russian of the eighteenth century was anything but self-evident, the Baltic nobleman carried, as it were, with his mother’s milk. It is no coincidence that it was precisely a man of this estate, and not an Orthodox zealot, who would design the institution that gave Islam a place within the empire instead of driving it out.

There is a second trait of this estate that Igelström would carry with him all his life, and that is indispensable for understanding the later administrator. The Baltic nobleman was a pragmatist. He served no ideal and no cause; he served order, and order he judged by what worked. For the native Russian nobleman, Orthodoxy was a part of his identity, something one lived for and if need be died for; for the Lutheran Balt in Orthodox service, the faith of his ruler was a given that one respected without sharing. This detachment, this capacity to regard faith from above as an administrative fact rather than as an absolute truth, is precisely the disposition out of which modern religious policy was born. Whoever himself believes passionately cannot coolly govern the faith of another; he will want to combat it or convert it. Whoever regards faith from above as one of the many forces that keep a society in motion can begin to order it, channel it, put it to use. And that is exactly what Igelström’s life’s work would become.

He was educated in Riga and in Germany, in the languages and the manners of the European nobility of his time. Riga was then one of the important cities of the eastern Baltic, a merchant city with a German-speaking burgher class and a university culture that prepared the sons of the nobility for service. What the young Igelström learned there was not the theology and not the philosophy that would form a scholar, but the skills of administration and command: languages, law, the handling of authority, the art of giving and receiving orders. He would never become a man of books as Snouck and Goldziher were. He would become a man of institutions, and that difference is essential to this theme.

In the Service of the Tsarina

In 1753, sixteen years old, he entered Russian military service. It was the customary course for a son of the Baltic nobility, and it was at the same time a choice for the empire that in the eighteenth century grew the fastest and that offered men of his estate the most opportunities. Russia under the successive empresses, from Anna through Elizabeth to the woman whom history would call Catherine the Great, was an empire in motion, hungry for capable officers and administrators, and willing to seek them outside its own native nobility, among Germans, Balts and other foreigners who brought knowledge and ability with them.

The Russian state that Igelström entered was in two respects at once familiar and strange. Familiar, because it was a European monarchy with a court, an army and a bureaucracy that he recognized from his upbringing. Strange, because it was an empire that stretched across an immensity of peoples and faiths of which Western Europe scarcely had any knowledge. Russia was not only Orthodox. It was also, and increasingly, Islamic. The conquest of the Volga khanates in the sixteenth century had brought millions of Muslims under the tsar, Tatars and Bashkirs and later, with the advance toward the south and the east, the nomadic peoples of the steppe. The empire that Igelström was about to serve was one of the greatest Islamic powers in the world, without any of its rulers ever having wished to call it so.

The scale of this Muslim population is hard to overstate. From the Volga with its Tatars and Bashkirs the Muslim land stretched across the Urals to the steppes of Central Asia, where Kazakh, Bashkir and later Turkestani peoples lived whom the empire would bind to itself in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Millions of people, across a territory so vast that a journey from one border to the other took months, shared the faith of Islam under the authority of an Orthodox empress. No Western European power in that century faced a comparable question within its own borders; the colonial empires with their millions of Muslim subjects would arise only a century later. Russia was, whether it wished to be or not, out in front in the experience of governing a large Muslim population, and the solutions it devised would therefore become an example even before the others knew the problem.

This is one of the forgotten truths of European history, and it matters for this theme. When we think of Europe and Islam, we think of the crusades, of Andalusia, of the Ottoman sieges of Vienna, of the colonial empires of France, England and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. We seldom think of the fact that the Russian empire for centuries united the largest number of Muslims under a Christian ruler, and that the question of how one was to deal with those Muslims was posed in Saint Petersburg long before it was posed in The Hague or Paris. Russia had its own East, within its own borders, and the way in which it governed that East would become a model from which later colonial powers, consciously or unconsciously, would learn.

It is illuminating to see how differently the great empires of that time dealt with their subjects of an alien faith, for that difference explains why Russia faced a question that demanded its own solution. The Ottoman Empire, the great Islamic power in the south, had for centuries governed its Christian and Jewish subjects by recognizing their own religious communities as administrative units, each with a spiritual head who was answerable to the sultan for his flock. The Christian paid his tax, accepted his subordinate place, and in return was left in his faith, his law and his worship, governed by his own patriarch under the supreme authority of the sultan. It was not equality, far from it, but it was an ordered place, a recognized space within the empire.

Russia had nothing of the kind for its Muslims. It had no framework in which Islam occupied a recognized, ordered place under the tsar; it had only the church, which saw the Muslim not as a community to be governed but as a soul to be converted. Where the Ottoman sultan gave his Christians a place, the Russian tsar gave his Muslims a choice between baptism and the burden. This is the deep shortcoming of the old Russian approach, and it is precisely this shortcoming that Catherine, and after her Igelström, would want to remedy. They would create for Islam under the tsar something the empire had never possessed: an ordered, recognized, governed place. And in that lies both the progress and the trap, for the place they would create was not the place the Muslim would have chosen for himself, but the place the empire deemed fitting for him.

In the decades after 1753 Igelström slowly rose through the ranks. He was a capable officer without the flamboyance of the great courtiers, a man who carried out his assignments and did so well, the type of servant an empire needs in greater number than it needs geniuses. His chance to prove himself came with the war that broke out in 1768 between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the war that would decide the fate of the Crimea and of millions of Muslims and that for Igelström became the school where he learned the craft that he would later refine in Ufa.

The Turkish War as a School

The Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774 was one of the decisive conflicts of the eighteenth century. It brought the two great land powers of Eastern Europe face to face, Christian Russia under Catherine and the Islamic Ottoman Empire under the sultan who called himself caliph of the believers, and it ended with a Russian victory that shifted the balance of power on the Black Sea for good. For Igelström it was the war in which he earned his spurs.

His most cited feat of arms from these years was the taking of the fortress of Akkerman in 1770. Akkerman, at the mouth of the Dniester, was one of the Ottoman strongholds on the northern Black Sea, and its capture was one of the many steps by which the Russian army prised loose the Ottoman grip on the northern coast. It was not a glorious battle that would be sung in songs, but the kind of methodical, patient military operation in which Igelström excelled: the siege, the fitting-in, the establishment of authority over conquered territory. He was not a conqueror who rages through history; he was a man who takes what must be taken and then orders it.

What Igelström saw at close hand in these years was the scale of the question the empire faced. Every conquered fortress, every annexed district brought under the tsar populations that had their own faith, their own law and their own clergy, and that did not simply fit into the existing order of the empire. On the northern Black Sea, in the regions the Russian army conquered from the Ottomans and their allies, lived Muslims whose bond with Constantinople was centuries old. One could kill them or drive them out, but then one lost the population that worked the land and yielded the tax. One could convert them, but that had been tried for two hundred years and it had failed. Or one could govern them as they were, as Muslims, and find a way to fit their faith into the order of the empire instead of fighting against it. It was this third way that slowly took shape in the thinking of the Russian administrators, and Igelström was one of the men who would take it.

It is precisely that second skill, the ordering of the conquered, that distinguishes Igelström from the ordinary general, and it is the skill with which this theme is concerned. An army can take a fortress; that is a matter of cannon and men. But what does one do with the population that lives behind the walls, with its mosques and its clergy, with its law and its customs? There governing begins, and there Igelström began to learn what would later become his life’s work. In the war years he saw at close hand how a Christian empire annexed Muslim populations, and he also saw, for he was an observant man, that the old method of breaking and converting did not work. It made enemies where the empire needed subjects. It cost blood and money and yielded unrest. There had to be another way.

The war ended in 1774 with the Peace of Küçük Kaynarca, a treaty of great significance for the history of Islam under Russian rule. It declared the Crimean khanate, which for three centuries had been a vassal and ally of the Ottoman sultan, an independent state, severed from Constantinople. On paper this was a gift of freedom to the Muslims of the Crimea. In reality it was the first step toward their annexation, for a khanate that no longer stood under the protection of the caliph was a khanate ripe for the Russian grip. The sultan retained in the treaty a shadow of religious authority over the Crimean Tatars as caliph of the believers, but the political reality had shifted, and everyone who read the map understood where it was shifting.

For Igelström the peace of 1774 was the end of his first great school and the beginning of his actual career. He had served the war; now peace awaited him, and peace brought a problem larger than any battle: the problem of the millions of Muslims the empire was acquiring and that it would somehow have to govern. It was a problem with which Russia had already wrestled for two centuries, and to understand what choice Catherine would make, and what role Igelström would play in it, we must go back to the beginning of those two centuries, to the fall of a city on the Volga in the year 1552.

Kazan and Two Centuries of Coercion

In 1552 Tsar Ivan IV, whom history would call the Terrible, took the city of Kazan. Kazan was the capital of an Islamic khanate, an heir of the Golden Horde, a city of mosques and madrasas and of a Tatar culture that was already centuries old when the Russian armies appeared before its walls. The fall of Kazan was not only a military event. It was the beginning of something new in history: the subjection of a large Islamic population to a Christian ruler who treated it not as ally or vassal, as the Ottomans treated their Christian subjects, but as a people that had to be converted.

What followed the conquest was two hundred years of varying but ever-recurring coercion. The mosques of Kazan were destroyed after the taking or turned into churches. The Muslims were driven out of the city itself into the suburbs and the villages. In the centuries that followed came waves of conversion pressure, in which state and church worked together to bring the Tatars and the other Muslim peoples of the Volga to Orthodox Christianity, now with promises of tax exemption and land, then again with open coercion. Whoever let himself be baptized received advantages; whoever remained a Muslim bore the burdens. It was a policy of gradual attrition, meant to let the Islam of the Volga slowly evaporate under the pressure of advantage and persecution.

This coercion was not merely the excess of a single zealous bishop; it was institutionalized. In 1740, in the reign of Empress Anna, the empire established its own bureau for conversion, housed in a monastery near Kazan, with the task of promoting baptism among the Muslims and the heathens of the Volga. It worked with the two means that conversion policy has always employed: advantage and coercion. Whoever let himself be baptized received money, goods, tax exemption and sometimes exemption from recruitment; whoever remained a Muslim bore the burdens that the converts no longer bore, so that the burden of the community weighed more heavily the smaller it became. And where advantage did not suffice, coercion came: complaints have been preserved from villages that tell how the clergy beat them and baptized them against their will. By the middle of the century hundreds of thousands of Muslims and heathens had in this way been brought to Orthodox Christianity, at least on paper, for a great part of them returned to Islam at the first opportunity, in secret or openly, as soon as the pressure lessened.

The height of this coercion fell in the seventeen-forties, in the reign of Empress Elizabeth, and it took on a face in the person of Luka Konashevich, the Orthodox bishop of Kazan. Under his leadership a campaign was waged that was harsh even by the standards of the time. Mosques were demolished by the hundred. According to the common count, within a few years more than four hundred of the roughly five hundred mosques in the Kazan region were destroyed, a figure that, even when one handles it with the necessary caution, speaks of a destruction on a scale that struck the Muslim community of the Volga in its roots. At the same time the pressure to be baptized was increased, baptized and unbaptized families were driven apart, and the Islamic scholarly tradition, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to pupil that forms the backbone of every Muslim community, was systematically impeded.

The coercion did not go unanswered, and the answer was bloody. The Bashkirs of the southern Urals, a Muslim people who upon their attachment to Russia had believed their rights to their own land secured, rose several times in the eighteenth century against the encroachment on those rights and on their faith, and the greatest of those revolts, that of the years 1735 to 1740, was put down with a punitive campaign in which rebellious villages were massacred, inhabitants were enslaved and forcibly baptized. This is what the old method looked like in practice: not only the demolished mosque and the baptismal font, but also the punitive expedition and the massacred village. It is this history, with its bureaus and its bishops and its punitive campaigns, that forms the backdrop against which Catherine’s later mildness would shine, and it is this history that explains why that mildness was so welcome and at the same time cost so little.

It is important to be honest here about what this meant, for without that one does not understand the rest of this story. The Muslims of the Volga, the Tatars who had inhabited Kazan and the Bashkirs of the southern Urals, lived under a regime that treated their faith as a problem to be solved. Their mosques were not safe. Their scholars ﵀ could not pass on their knowledge in freedom. Their children could be pulled away to the baptismal font with promises or threats. This was not an incident and not an aberration; this was, with interruptions, the policy of two hundred years. And yet Islam remained. The community withdrew into the villages, preserved its faith from breast to breast and from father to son, held its scholars in honour even when they were no longer allowed a madrasa, and survived. That is the fact that stands on the other side of the scale, and that we must not forget when presently we speak of Catherine’s “enlightenment.”

For it is precisely these centuries of coercion that are the backdrop against which the policy that was to come will shine. Whoever has seen the mosque destructions of Konashevich will experience the edict of tolerance that Catherine issued in 1773 as a liberation, as the end of a long night. And that, in a certain sense, it was. The mosques were rebuilt; the baptism campaigns ceased; Islam was allowed to exist again. But the question this theme poses is not whether the light that Catherine brought was brighter than the darkness that preceded it, for that it unmistakably was. The question is what lay hidden in the nature of that light. And to be able to pose that question, we first had to know the darkness.

On the Eve of a Different Policy

When the war with the Ottomans ended in 1774, the Russian empire stood on the eve of a choice that it had already put off for two centuries. The old method, that of Ivan and Elizabeth and Konashevich, the method of breaking and converting, had failed. It had not exterminated Islam; it had hardened it and turned it into an enemy. And now, with the peace of Küçük Kaynarca, the empire was on the point not of reducing but of enlarging its Muslim population, for the Crimea and its Tatars lay within reach, and behind the Crimea beckoned the endless steppes with their nomadic Muslim peoples. The empire would have to govern Muslims on a scale it had never before known, and it could not do that with the cannon of Konashevich.

Catherine the Great understood this. She was a woman of the Enlightenment, a reader of the French philosophers, a ruler who carefully cultivated her reputation as an enlightened sovereign, and she saw that the old religious coercion was not only cruel but above all impractical. An empire does not govern its subjects well by breaking their faith; it governs them well by ordering their faith in a way that serves the administration. That insight, sounding so sober and so reasonable, is the seed from which springs everything that is told in the following articles. It is the insight that would make the false mirror smile.

For here lies the heart of this period, and it is well to name it now already, at the beginning, so that the reader can carry it through the following articles. Tolerance can be a virtue, born of reverence for the conscience of the other. But tolerance can also be an instrument, born of the calculation that a licensed religion is governable and a free religion is not. The first tolerance sees the Muslim as a human being with a faith that deserves to be respected. The second tolerance sees the Muslim as a subject with a faith that must be organized. From the outside they resemble each other; both build mosques instead of demolishing them. But their roots are different, and those different roots in the course of time bear different fruit.

One must not reproach Catherine with hypocrisy in this, for that would make the matter too easy and caricature the theme. She did not lie when she said she disapproved of the persecution; she truly disapproved of it, both because it was cruel and because it was stupid, and in the spirit of the Enlightenment that she admired, cruelty and stupidity were closely related. Her tolerance was sincere in the sense that she really had the mosques built and really halted the persecution. The point of this theme is not that she lied, but that her sincerity and her calculation coincided in the same policy, so that one cannot pull them apart. She meant it well and she meant it useful, and it is precisely that coincidence that makes the false mirror so hard to see through. An open persecutor one recognizes at once; a smiling benefactor who meanwhile tightens the reins one recognizes only much later, when the reins are already fastened.

Igelström, the Baltic baron, the man without a state of his own who served the state of another with the loyalty of his estate, was preeminently suited to forge the instrument of the second tolerance. He had no theological passion that would drive him to break Islam; he also had no religious reverence that would restrain him from ordering it. He had the sober gaze of the administrator for whom a religion is a given that one must fit into the order of the empire. In the war he had learned to take and to order. In the years that came, he would apply what he had learned on the battlefields to the most difficult matter of all: the faith of millions of people.

His first great assignment awaited in the south, on the peninsula that for three centuries had been the heart of a Muslim people, where the last khan of an old lineage sat on his throne and did not know that the man who would take him prisoner was already on his way. To the Crimea, and to Şahin Giray, the next article goes.

Sources

• Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, Harvard University Press (2006)
• Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II”, Slavic Review 27/4 (1968)
• Charles Steinwedel, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917, Indiana University Press (2016)
• Danielle Ross, Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia, Indiana University Press (2020)
• Museum-digital, biografisch lemma “Iosif Igelström (1737–1823)”
• Adeeb Khalid, “Tolerating Islam”, London Review of Books 29/10 (2007)