Ethnicity, Intelligence, and the Russo-Qing Cold War, 1674–1818

As early as the 1670s, Russian observers began to notice that the Qing Empire was not only a multiethnic state like their own but also one riven by ethnic tension, with a Han (nikanskii) majority chafing under the domination of a minority that Russians called Tartar or even Chinese (kitaiskii). Over the ensuing decades, Russian strategic plans would return to this conflict again and again as a key weak point with the potential to counterbalance the overwhelming numerical superiority of Qing forces. But as Russia’s intelligence apparatus along the southeastern border became more sophisticated in the 1750s, a more complex approach to the ethnic makeup of the Qing empire also began to emerge. The key to successfully challenging the Qing in Eurasia, as some Russians now saw it, was to approach its peripheral subject peoples piecemeal, inducing them to transfer their allegiance to Russia. Though this policy was neither consistently applied nor successful, it did stimulate the production of a body of specialized knowledge about the peoples of Eastern and Central Eurasia, including piecemeal intelligence reports as well as, indirectly, compositions like A. V. Andreev’s pioneering 1785 ethnography of the Kazakh Middle Horde. Drawing on archival Russian intelligence documents that have hitherto been left out of English-language work, my paper will offer a look at the Russian Empire’s evolving ethnographic approach to Central Eurasia and the Qing empire, especially its mediation through Mongol, Jesuit, and other local informants. As I will argue, the privileged, highly time- and place-dependent documents produced in the intelligence context provide a much clearer sense of Russia’s intellectual engagement with the region in the early modern period than the academic works that are typically studied.