Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Russian History and Culture)

Empire Speaks Out Russian of History and Culture Library Economic History VOLUME 1 General Editors Peer Vries, Unive...

Author: Ilya Gerasimov | Jan Kusber | Alexander Semyonov

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Empire Speaks Out

Russian of History and Culture Library Economic History VOLUME 1 General Editors

Peer Vries, University of Vienna Regina Grafe, Northwestern University, Evanston

VOLUME 1

Empire Speaks Out Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire

Edited by

Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber and Alexander Semyonov

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover illustration: It is a historic document from the 19th century: a folk picture— lubok. It speaks to the heart of the volume, showing the multiplicity of speaking agents, whose position is structured by the Empire’s attempt to find for itself a language of expression, the famous Minin and Pozharsky monument. In the center is not the monument per se, but its discussion by the surrounding people. And since it is lubok, it does divert attention from the conventional story of monarchy, officials, and generals who are usually taken as speaking and acting on behalf of empire. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Empire speaks out : languages of rationalization and self-description in the Russian Empire / edited by Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov. p. cm. — (Russian history and culture, ISSN 1877-7791 ; v. 1) “Published . . . within the collective research project Languages of Self-Description and Representation in the Russian Empire”—T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17571-6 (hbk.) 1. Russia—Ethnic relations. 2. Russia—Social conditions. 3. Russia—Politics and government. 4. Russia—History—Sources. 5. Cultural pluralism—Russia—History. 6. Imperialism—Social aspects—Russia—History. 7. Rationalization (Psychology)— Political aspects—Russia—History. 8. Self-perception—Political aspects—Russia— History. 9. Language and culture—Russia. 10. Discourse analysis—Russia. I. Gerasimov, Il’ia. II. Kusber, Jan. III. Semyonov, Alexander. IV. Title. V. Series. DK113.E48 2009 947—dc22 2009012418 This book is published with support from Volkswagen Foundation, within the collective research project “Languages of Self-Description and Representation in the Russian Empire.”

ISSN 1877-7791 ISBN 978 90 04 17571 6 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

PART ONE

DEFINING EMPIRE IN A DIALOGUE New Imperial History and the Challenges of Empire ................. Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Jan Kusber, Marina Mogilner, Alexander Semyonov

3

Considerations on Imperial Comparisons .................................... Ann Laura Stoler

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PART TWO

THE CHALLENGE OF UNIFICATION AND RESISTANCE Governance, Education, and the Problems of Empire in the Age of Catherine II ....................................................................... Jan Kusber “Us” and “Them”? Polish Self-Descriptions and Perceptions of the Russian Empire between Homogeneity and Diversity (1815–1863) .................................................................................... Hans-Christian Petersen Siberian Middle Ground: Languages of Rule and Accommodation on the Siberian Frontier ................................ Sergey Glebov

59

89

121

vi

contents PART THREE

THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSFORMATION AND RATIONALIZATION Russian Physical Anthropology of the Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Centuries: Imperial Race, Colonial Other, Degenerate Types, and the Russian Racial Body ..................... Marina Mogilner

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“The Real and Live Ethnographic Map of Russia”: The Russian Empire in the Mirror of the State Duma ........... Alexander Semyonov

191

Redefining Empire: Social Engineering in Late Imperial Russia ............................................................................................... Ilya Gerasimov

229

Name Index ........................................................................................

273

PART ONE

DEFINING EMPIRE IN A DIALOGUE

NEW IMPERIAL HISTORY AND THE CHALLENGES OF EMPIRE Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, Jan Kusber, Marina Mogilner, Alexander Semyonov

Empire: The Effect of “Defamiliarization” In 1917, Viktor Shklovsky, a founding father of the Russian Formalist tradition of literary criticism, coined the concept of “defamiliarization” (literally, “estrangement”), which describes the process of enhancement of the perception of an object’s deeper meaning by alienating it and making the object look strange, unfamiliar, or unpredictable.1 Analyzing a range of recent studies of empires that can be loosely termed “new imperial histories,” we see this mechanism working in both directions: a more nuanced and perceptive analysis of imperial contexts produces a picture of a strikingly strange, indeed, an unfamiliar and alien world. In fact, from our point of view, this world appears to be irrational or at least motivated by a very different type of rationality. Empire expressed itself through its “tensions” and “scandal of empire”; it produced “carnal knowledge,” and was itself, paradoxically, acquired in a state of “absent-mindedness.” Without overextending this argument, we suggest that one common theme of a new variety of otherwise very different studies of historic empires is exactly the “defamiliarization” of empire as a cultural context and a sociopolitical order. This novel trend constitutes a departure from the tradition of negativity in the definition of empire, which perceived social reality through a framework defined by the characteristics of the modern world of nation-states and its historicity.2 Empire within this old trend has been defined as the opposite and the subordinate: a historical archaism before the advent 1 Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem,” in Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka, Vol. 2 (Petrograd, 1917), 3–14; English translation: Viktor Shklovskij, “Art as Technique,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell, 1998), 15–21. 2 For more on the tradition of negativity in conceptualization of empire as an analytic category, see Ilya Gerasimov, Sergei Glebov, Aleksandr Kaplunovskii, Marina Mogilner, and Alexander Semyonov, “In Search of New Imperial History,” Ab Imperio,

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gerasimov, glebov, kusber, mogilner, semyonov

of the age of nationalism, a peripheral manifestation of the main route of historical development of modern state and society, the power for institutionalization of order and maximization of control invited by the gray zones of the modern system of international relations and “seething cauldrons” of interethnic strife in such regions as the Balkans and Caucasus, a by-product of a capitalist economy and a bourgeois society, or the function of an indispensable nest for the emergence of modern nation-states out of the ethnic and regional mosaic of ancient imperial conglomerates. By recognizing empire as a historical phenomenon sui generis, modern historians struggle with the need to express the specific imperial experience in the language of post- and anti-imperial social sciences that emerged in the wake of World War II. At the same time, the estrangement of imperial historical experience seems to produce an enlightening effect on the understanding of present-day realities, and the more we think that classical categories of international relations, territorial state, standardized culture, and national economy do not apply to the twenty-first century, the more familiar and instructive the world of empires appears to be.3 Whether this insight is right or wrong, its verification also requires a scrutiny of the analytical language that scholars use to translate imperial historical experience into insights about and answers to contemporary concerns.

Empire: In Search of a Formula Despite the upsurge of interest in “empire,” it remains the least reflectedupon category of modern social sciences, especially when compared with that of “state” or “nation.” The latter categories generated a considerable number of traditions of their conceptualization in political theory, social thought, and cultural canons. Contemporary trends prompt an attempt to forge the analytical category of “empire” in order to account for the unprecedented movement of capital, commodities, and population, the restructuring of international relations along the lines of power of

no. 1 (2005): 33–56; Alexander Semyonov, “Empire as a Context Setting Category,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2008): 193–204. 3 The critique of thinking about empire as an analogy or metaphor for present-day dilemmas may be found in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore, eds., Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New York: New Press, 2006), 1, 2.

new imperial history and the challenges of empire

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the world hegemon and international intervention, the emergence or reemergence of regional powers such as the Russian Federation, and the evolution of forms of political organization such as the European Union (EU) that constitute a challenge to the historical form and ideal of the nation-state. “Empire” became instrumental in reflecting upon the growing connectedness of the world, which prompted convergence while (re)producing difference, zones of separation, and segregation. Thus “empire,” as a category-in-the-making in the present research literature, stands for themes of hegemony, domination, interconnectedness, and diversity while its referential valence is multiple and contradictory.4 In historical studies, the individual phenomenon of a particular empire and the descriptive function of empire as a category have always overshadowed any attempt to generalize and produce a theoretical view of “imperial formations” (Ann Stoler’s term). To be sure, historical narratives of empires were structured by grand imperial prototypes, which were many, and each empire, unique in its own way, influenced the historical trajectories of other imperial formations. The origins and diffusion of the legacy of classical empires and the Roman Empire— archetypical for the modern historical imagination—have been among the organizing narratives for historical studies.5 The Roman Empire’s

4 The multiple and contradictory referentiality of the concept of empire may be gleaned from the cross-reading of the often-cited and most recent studies, such as Samuel N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empire (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Dominic Lieven, Empire. The Russian Empire and Its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (London: John Murray, 2000); Linda Colley, “What Is Imperial History Now?” in What Is History Now? ed. David Cannadine (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 132–147; Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005); Nicholas Dirks, Scandal of Empire. India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Carole McGranahan, Peter C. Perdue, and Ann Stoler, eds., Imperial Formations and Their Discontents (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007). 5 Lieven, Empire, 7–17; Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, From Greece to the Present (London: Tauris, 2001), 1–12. A more developed argument can be found in Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500– c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), ch. 1, “The Legacy of Rome,” and ch. 2 “Monarchia Universalis”; see also a concise statement of the argument that the Roman concepts of “orbis terrarum” and rulership applied even to the first British Empire,

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distinguishing features became the mark of a polity’s imperial quality in historical definition: the corruption of the republican virtues and order; expansionism and aspirations to encompass the “civilized world;” universalism of language, culture, and citizenship combined with the diversity of the realm centered on the metropole (civitas) and the military leader-ruler (imperator). The rival of the Roman Empire in the domain of imperial blueprints of the Old World was the Mongol Empire, which left its impact on the Russian, Persian, Muhgal, and Chinese polities. Yet, despite enormous territorial expansion and a range of legacies (postal systems, taxation, religious tolerance or pragmatism), it produced a negligible influence on the ideological construction of the phenomenon of empire in modern times.6 At the same time, the invention of “Tartary” in early modern Europe powerfully contributed to the formation of European views of the “despotic” and “eternal” Oriental Other in need of discovery, classification, and rationalization.7

pp. 5, 8. For perceptive observations on the role of the Roman legacy in producing imperial sovereignty in the history of the Russian monarchy, see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 13–14, 26–27. 6 Though, no doubt, the Mongol images of political power endured in greater Eurasia and mixed with Greco-Roman legacies (see Michael Cherniavsky, “Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian Mediaeval Political Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 4 [October–December 1959]: 459–476), it is only recently that historians have attempted to conceptualize the legacy of the Mongol Empire in terms of a distinct political tradition compatible with reflexive political theory; see Stephen Kotkin, “Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance in Post Mongol Space,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 487–531; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Imperskie traektorii,” Ab Imperio, no. 4 (2007): 47–85; see also Jan Kusber, “ ‘Entdecker’ und ‘Entdeckte’: Zum Selbstverständnis von Zar und Elite im frühneuzeitlichen Moskauer Reich zwischen Europa und Asien,” in Expansionen in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Renate Dürr, Gisela Engel, and Johannes Süssmann (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005), 97–115. On problems of finding a reflexive political tradition in the Mongol imperial legacy, see an exchange between Richard Wortman and Andreas Kappeler reproduced in: Alexander Semyonov, “Obzor raboty mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii ‘Istoria imperii: sravnitel’nye metody v izuchenii i prepodavanii,’ ” in Rossiiskaia imperiia v sravnitel’noi perspektive, ed. Marina Batalina and Aleksei Miller (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2004), 20–21. 7 An illustrative example of persistent analogous thinking about empire as closely associated with oriental despotism may be found in Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, originally published in 1954 and revised in 1964). Pipes writes: “Russia’s empire displayed some unique features. Unlike the Western colonial empires, which were separated from the metropolitan areas by oceans, it was territorially contiguous. Furthermore, Russian domination extended over several European nations—the Poles, the Finns, and the three Baltic peoples—which violated the unwritten law that Europeans did not conquer and reduce to colonial status fellow-Europeans” (v).


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Although historical studies of empires are organized by narratives based on classic prototypes, they also introduce analytical tools to deal with the historically constituted diversity of imperial formations and historical change. Thus historians emphasize the distinction between premodern and modern empires. Premodern empires are characterized by formal rule, conquest, and a lack of powerful contenders in the form of sovereign-territorial states and nationalism.8 Modern empires are conceived as new forms of organization of space and hegemony that emerged after the Westphalian peace and the French Revolution, whose modus operandi is based on informal colonial domination, commercial networks, and modern technology.9 This type of empire appears to be compatible and even interdependent with the idea of the sovereign nation-state that projects military and economic power beyond its borders.10 In introducing modern sovereignty in Europe, this type of imperial polities also presupposed divided or incomplete sovereignties beyond the “civilized” continent.11 Another typology rests on the distinction between overseas and land-based empires. Despite the evidently geopolitical origins of the typology, it was in fact based on the assumption of overseas empires’ technological and cultural superiority, the experience of the modern political revolution, and the presence of bourgeois society—in a nutshell, on their more modern character (vis-à-vis land-based empires). Colonial overseas empires, until recently, provided historians with a model of imperial rule by advanced European states over the colonial periphery, thus merging the modern/premodern dichotomy with that of the land-based/overseas

Although Pipes himself acknowledges that he faced a choice of analytical categories: “empire” or “multinational state”; he chose empire because it better captured the despotic and non-European character of Russian and Soviet rule. 8 John H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present, no. 137 (November 1992): 48–71; Pagden, Lords of All the World; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Susan E. Alcock et al., eds., Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56; Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 10 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For a more pointed explication of simultaneous and interdependent processes of empire and nation-formation, see Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1992): 309–329. 11 Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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empires. Their historical material generated a rich tradition of critical analysis in the field of postcolonial studies, which emphasized discourses and cultural practices of exclusion, domination, and control as well as forms of production of knowledge about colonialism. The new wave of historical studies after the collapse of the twentiethcentury multinational states (Yugoslavia and the USSR) paved the way for the discovery of a different historical pattern of empires in Central Europe and Eurasia (the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires, and the USSR). This type of contiguous or continental empire is characterized by more porous boundaries and less clear-cut distinctions between the imperial center and periphery, by the centrality of dynastic and nondemocratic rule combined with subjecthood and differentiated citizenship, by multiethnic populations, and by the more articulate contestation of the imperial space by national imaginations.12 The new stage of imperial studies in many ways complicated the received wisdom of analytical dichotomies of premodern/modern and overseas/land-based empires. The trend that may be called revisionist postcolonial studies relativized the assumed fixity of boundaries between metropoles and colonial periphery in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch empires and even the impenetrability of the colonizer–colonized divide that was underpinned by race. Frederick Cooper and Jeremy Adelman have recently shifted the focus from studying the forms of informal domination to studying the forms of rule, citizenship, and their lingering constitutive impact on the French and Iberian empires and the political and social spaces created in their wake.13 On the other side of the dichotomy, and despite the temptation of the “slow history view,” the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires together with the ambiguously treated Soviet Union and unresolved controversy about the identification of China as an empire are increasingly cast as dynamic and modernizing imperial polities penetrated by a racialized 12 Lieven, Empire; Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Suny and Martin, A State of Nations; Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Alexei Miller and Alfred J. Rieber, eds., Imperial Rule (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2005). 13 Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 204–230; Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). See also perceptive remarks by Dominic Lieven on the assumptive nature of these typologies, on shared characteristics, and the complex entanglement of historic empires brought about by imperial rivalry (Lieven, Empire, 4, 5, 120–127).


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discourse, Orientalism, modern politics and ideologies, and techniques of the “gardening empire.” The chapters in the present volume provide samples of the critique of the totalizing analytical categorization of the Russian Empire as a land-based, backward, elite-dependent, and patrimonial polity. In contrast, the chapters highlight the omnipresence of modern historical dynamics in imperial Russian history. The story of a “Siberian middleground” as told by Sergei Glebov presents the case for a commercial empire in the seventeenth century and the constitutive impact of Enlightenment-derived technologies of rule. Similarly, the history of the Catherinian reign presented by Jan Kusber recasts the received wisdom on the “long seventeenth century” and points out the rupture in governance and cultural production of individualized subjects of the empire. The axiomatic historiographic pronouncement on the prevalence of nationality and ethnicity in politics and knowledge production in the Russian Empire obviously needs revision in light of Marina Mogilner’s pathbreaking research on the history of physical anthropology and racialized discourses of difference in the second half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. The political history of Polish emigration and Russian liberal alternatives provide an important corrective for the political history of empire as viewed from the top of the monarchy, imperial government, and aristocratic elites. The chapters by Alexander Semyonov and HansChristian Petersen underscore the importance of modern ideological production, the revolutionary experience of dislocation of the old regime and society, and visionary politics of the future. The multifaceted social dimension of imperial experience is reconstructed in the chapter by Ilya Gerasimov, whose analysis defies the simplified vision of failed social modernization in the backward context of the Russian Empire and points to a different model of sociability and social change in a culturally divided society. Moreover, as the tyranny of a totalizing conception of land-based empire is called into question, Ann Stoler also makes clear that the logic of typological distinction adopted by many historians of continental empires and based on the contrasting model of Western colonialism replicates the discourse of exceptionalism, which has been part and parcel of the imperial strategy of “politics of comparison,” legitimation, and recuperation of the “scandal of empire.”

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gerasimov, glebov, kusber, mogilner, semyonov The Imperial Studies Terrain: The Russian Venue

A new stage in conceptualizing Russian history through the prism of empire began in the early nineties. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new nations and national historiographies on its ruins, historians faced a necessity to replace the homogenizing narrative of Russia’s past as nation-state with a more complex model of a polity that included other nations-in-the-making.14 The failure of the Soviet-style concept of the “multinational state” and the tempting convenience of the historical self-descriptive trope of “empire” provided for a rapid takeoff of Russian “imperial studies.” The “prison of nations” or not, from now on Russia was treated as an empire in the broadest possible sense, as a big state dominating diverse populations and exercising ambitious foreign policy. This early stage of the reassessment of Russian history as “imperial” was shaped by the dominant nation-centered approach: if “Russia” itself was no longer conceivable as a single nation (and hence was called “empire”), it was seen as consisting of other nations, developing along the typical path of historical national awakening—liberation movement—self-determination. The ethnic Russians as a nation were no different in this respect, if only less lucky.15 Interestingly enough, the readily available models of colonial empires as developed by British and world historians by the mid-nineties were very reluctantly referenced by historians, who advanced a new paradigm of empire for Russian history. While there are many reasons for the weak popularity of colonial theory among historians of Russian empire (both institutional and ideological), an important exception sheds light on the methodological dilemma of the nineties. Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, published in 1997, represented a clear attempt to redefine tsarist Russia in terms of colonial power imposing metropole-colony relationships onto its subjugated territories.16 While the collection itself became an important landmark in historiography shaping the field of Central Asian and Caucasian 14 In his landmark book Andreas Kappeler offered a concept of “multinational empire.” See Rußland als Vielvölkerreich. Entstehung—Geschichte—Zerfall (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992). 15 See Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 16 Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xiv–xv.


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studies for many years to come, it was not immediately followed by comparable large-scale attempts at presenting the Russian Empire as an analogue of the British or any other overseas empire, and might even have hampered further methodological pursuits in this direction. Taken as a collective research endeavor, Russia’s Orient succeeded in revealing the colonial relationships of domination and politicization of differences in Russia’s history, but encountered difficulties in mapping these relationships and identifying their actors and agents. The Caucasus, and even more so Central Asia, seemed to fit the role of a colony, but what were the boundaries and the nature of the metropole? Siberia, the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine had all been claimed as victims of imperial domination in recent historiography and did not fit the concept of Homo Europeicus, therefore reducing the ranks of colonizers to a handful of top administrators that often were ethnically non-Russian. Thus the transfer of Western colonial theory encountered the same problem of the impossibility of conceptualizing empire in terms of nation-centered metanarratives. Empire remained an elusive concept, more of a rhetorical device, for as long as it was interpreted through the prism of a power struggle between the dominating and colonized “nations.” A paradigm shift began crystallizing at the turn of the millenium: the scandalous excesses of the new national historiographies,17 the methodological novelties of postcolonial and nationalism studies, and the expansion of transnational forms of sovereignty (first of all, the EU), all contributed to the relativization of the nation-centered historical narrative. There emerged a growing understanding among historians of the former Soviet Union that “empire” could no longer be analyzed simply as a constellation of a number of “nations.” There was a need to define Russia as empire in positive terms, as a phenomenon in its own right, but there was no readily available metaframework and analytical language for describing and explaining the imperial past. The search for a new approach to imperial history expanded in different directions

17 In the appalling feats of politically motivated primordialism, post-Soviet historians in newly independent states traced the evolution of the “eternal national body” throughout centuries and even millennia, tracing Russians to Etruscans, and discovering Tatars in the Paleolithic era. See on this Victor A. Shnirelman, Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1996); K. Aimermakher and G. Bordiugov, eds., Natsional’nye istorii v sovetskom i postsovetskikh gosudarstvakh (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1999); Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14–15.

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and took many years. Incidentally, in 2007, almost simultaneously, a number of book collections were published that summarized the results of the paradigm shift in imperial studies of Russian history. It is instructive to look briefly at the most important of these to see the main trends in new history-writing and assess the success of the field’s “imperial turn.”18 Japanese scholars have, perhaps, made the most pronounced attempt at the theorization of imperial studies. Kimitaka Matsuzato, the driving force behind the emergence of Japan as a notable spot on the map of international studies of the Russian Empire, edited a collection of articles under the ambitious title Imperiology: From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire.19 The very title of the collection reveals the goal of offering a new metatheory of empire as a particular political formation (“imperiology”). The strong influence of political science’s approaches on this version of “imperiology” is obvious: a theory is expected to be generated on the basis of a number of empirical case studies that reveal some fixed structural elements and regularities in data series.20 Among these theoretical insights, Matsuzato suggests replacing the “bipolar scheme” of center vs. periphery with a “tripolar” one, involving the imperial center, “aristocratic/dominant nations,” and “peasant/unprivileged” nations of the region. (Note that while the tripolar system itself is presented as an analytical construct, the “nations” are regarded as self-evident, fairly stable entities.) This constellation of “weighty actors” is measured against the background of “macro-regions,” such as Volga-Ural, Left-Bank Ukrainian, Western and Ostsee provinces, Steppe, Western, and Eastern Siberia. Matsuzato believes that all of these regions had “relatively autonomous histories” (and hence genealogies and fixed boundaries), while interactions among the regions themselves and between the regions and the imperial government determined the characteristics of imperial rule. Thus we see that the elusive notion of “empire” is stabilized in this approach

18

In the same year, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) introduced the format of main themes for its annual conferences, with the very first theme dedicated to “The Persistence of Empire” (thirty-ninth annual AAASS conference). This was an acknowledgment of the skyrocketing popularity of everything “imperial” among the experts in the region of the former Soviet Union. 19 Kimitaka Matsuzato, ed., Imperiology. From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007). 20 Matsuzato describes the purpose of the collection as “to summarize the accumulated empirical studies and to abstract widely applicable theories from these studies” (4).


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through a combination of analytical models of political science with essentializing categories of geopolitics (arbitrarily distinguished regions as subjects of historical process and parts in political interaction) and fixed national identities. A different perspective on the spatial foundation of Russia’s “empireness” is demonstrated by the authors of the multivolume publication Okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (The Borderlands of the Russian Empire).21 Not unlike the imperiology collection, this series of volumes, written by a cohort of internationally recognized historians, emphasizes the structures and practices of imperial governance and the interdependent relationship of the imperial center and the regions. However, in this project the regions are not the products of present-day geopolitical mental mapping, but the historical categories that produced rich narratives of self-description and representation in the past, including the substantiation of their boundaries. The usefulness of this analysis is encapsulated in its corrective value for the present nation-centered and Russocentric historiography of the post-Soviet space. It must nevertheless be emphasized that the editors’ decision to follow the historic language of the space’s organization and to stress the centrality of the hardware of the dynastic and bureaucratic empire produced an equally one-sided taxonomy of the imperial space as derived from the optics of the imperial center. Though rich in insights and coverage, telling the nuanced stories of dilemmas of imperial government and the emergence of modern projects of nationalism, these volumes fail to address directly the underpinning structure of this reconstruction of the past, the division of the imperial space between the imperial center and the borderlands. There is no volume on the imperial center, as if its reconstruction from the “margins” is sufficient enough, and yet this imperial center as viewed from the varying perspectives of the series, appears to be congruent either with the dynastic regime, or with the nationalizing project of the “Great Russian nation,” or with bourgeois colonial power, so that this fluctuating representation calls into question the self-evident givenness of the center in the empire and the structure chosen to relay the imperial experience. Moreover, the chosen focus

21 M. D. Dolbilov and A. I. Miller, eds., Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2007); L. M. Dameshek and A. V. Remnev, eds., Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2007); V. O. Bobrovnikov and I. L. Babich, eds., Severnyi Kavkaz v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2007); S. N. Abashin, D. Iu. Arapov, N. E. Bekmakhanova, eds., Tsentral’naia Aziia v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2008).

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on empire as a structure of space and power inevitably confines the framing of historical developments in that space to the emergence of modern nationalisms (both Russian and non-Russian) as the only possible mode of describing historical dynamics. It leaves open the question of whether empire is a meaningful category for exploring the reproduction of asymmetries of power and differentiated space under the challenge of modern conditions.22 While the discussed series of works differentiates the historic reality of contiguous empire from the contemporary political map of nation-states, this reality is held hostage to the conceptual framework produced in the past by the self-reflecting historical actors. The very moment they began defining borderland regions in different terms, redrawing the borders or replacing the entire taxonomy of constituent regions, the whole reconstruction of empire by latter-day historians collapsed. By surrendering to the powerful tropes of geographical self-classification and conceptualization found in the past, present-day historians fail to address the historicity of empire (in Reinhart Koselleck’s sense), as a full-scale analytical category. The editors of the collection Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (published by Indiana University Press) seem to be aware of the methodological dire straits between the Scylla of self-descriptive narratives coined by historical actors and Charybdis of normative abstract models superimposed over the past. While also finding the main constituent element of empire in its territorial structure rather than in any other forms of groupness,23 the editors and contributors to the volume develop three interrelated meanings of territory: the historic and physical geography of imperial governance and social relations; territoriality in the discourse and practice of empire as well as its agents and subjects; and the imagined geography of imperial politics and ideology. Furthermore, there is a dual view of empire as an agency and as a space of experience. The elements underpinning

22 Some volumes in the series, such as the one on Western Borderlands and Siberia, claim that empire withered away with the advent of nationalism and nation-building projects in the modern age. 23 Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). The authors of the introduction assert “the fruitfulness of beginning with territory, rather than with people and their presumed kinds of allegiances. Most empires present complex and incongruent overlays of ethnicity and religion upon territory. Starting out a study of empire with categories of ethnicity, or religion, or nationality shapes the description of people and their aspirations in ways they may not themselves have chosen” (21).


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this definition are state-form and structure of relations. The key to the proposed definition is “differentiated governance of [a] differentiated population.”24 Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and other contributors to the volume emphasize the uncertainty or unevenness of difference as historically refracted in the imagination, policies, and structures of relations and identity. The defining feature of the Russian Empire was shaped by the process of expansion of the empire and the encounter of imperial rule with the variegated forms of difference that at the same time became a “habit of thought” and flexible arrangement of multiple frames of reference.25 However, this insightful definition relativizes the initial focus on territory and territoriality as a metaframework for understanding empire. The suggested multiple frame of reference as a characteristic of imperial governance and identity includes, inter alia, a reference to such nonterritorial forms of groupness as confession and estate. Closer scrutiny of the perspectives of Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen in this volume reveals that territory and territoriality formed just one of the references in the ideology and practice of empire and should be taken as such and not as a metaframework for the study of imperial diversity. Thus the book documents the bifurcation point in the paradigm shift of past years: one direction of studies (represented by the Sapporo and Moscow collections) implies a focus on the most stable structural elements of “empire,” such as the organization of territory. The epistemological vulnerability of this approach as discussed above compels the most attentive scholars to relativize their spatial models and further complicate them, eventually undermining the very idea of structural constants. The other direction of prospective inquiry as revealed in the Indiana collection focuses on empire as a mental construct or a system of thinking that accommodates the different types of human and spatial diversity. This epistemological ambivalence is not resolved in any way in the volume. On the one hand, it radically departs from the teleology of historical development from empire to nation and asserts the definition of empire as a state-form based on difference, not on likeness. On the other hand, while this definition certainly breaks with the bias of nationalism, it is still dependent upon the concept of the state, and the extent to which empire is compatible with the definition of the

24 25

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 7, 16, 17.

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state as the institutionalized public authority, holding the monopoly on legitimate violence, remains unresolved. Because empire is defined as a persistent and reproducible state-form, nation-state becomes defined as almost nonexistent, a “historical rarity, if not an impossibility.”26 Removing nationalism from the analytical equation produces the unintended consequence of underestimating the powerful impact of a “disruptive ideal” and, ultimately, the role of agency in constructing meaning and producing historical dynamics vis-à-vis the structure of territorially derived diversity. Another notable trend in recent historical studies of the Russian Empire that relativizes the constants of imperial diversity and undermines the metareferentiality of nationality or territory for apprehending imperial diversity is represented by historians, who address the history of religious identities and confessional politics.27 These scholars moved from “formal configurations” of the Church to local levels of practice and the institionalization of religiosity, and, beyond studies of Orthodox Christianity, to imperial aspects of religious studies in Russian history. The emerging picture of confessional politics and religious identities suggests the relevance of religion for cultural and social processes and the diversity of empire in the age of modernization and nationalism. Building on this perspective, Robert Crews suggests the concept of “confessional state” as a metaframework for exploring its diversity and Paul Werth argues that the “cultural diversity of Eurasian empires . . . was ordered and institutionalized by confessional criteria.”28 While the diachronic applicability of the confessional grid for understanding

26

Ibid., 2. Robert Geraci and Michael Khodorkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire. Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2000); Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Sergei I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Mikhail Dolbilov and Darius Staliunas, “‘Obratnaia uniia’: Proekt prisoedineniia katolikov k pravoslavnoi tserkvi v Rossiiskoi imperii (1865–1866 gg.),” Slavianovedenie, no. 5 (2005): 3–34. 28 Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Paul Werth, “Imperiology and Religion. Some Thoughts on a Research Agenda,” in Matsuzato, Imperiology, 51–67. 27


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diversity in the age of mass politics and language-centered struggles of nation-builders still needs verification, the proposed emphasis on religion, religiosity, and confession highlights the irreducibility of religious and confessional diversity to territorial and national heterogeneity and further complicates the process of elaborating a stable, structural definition of empire. Thus, recent historical studies of the Russian Empire have demonstrated limited fruitfulness in searching for an objectified marker of “empireness,” such as the structure of center–periphery relations, a taxonomy of the imperial government, or even territory. Instead, we propose to learn from the cognitive disorder in imperial studies by focusing on the historical reflection of empire and consistently taking and advancing the cognitive turn in the construction of empire as a landscape of diversity.

New Imperial History: Empire in a Cognitive Turn Our book further develops the critical analytic of empire by taking a cognitive turn in approaching empire as a category of analysis and a context-setting framework of languages of self-description of imperial experience. This cognitive turn in approaching empire enters into the dialogue with the cognitive turn in nationalism studies proposed by Rogers Brubaker. The vision adopted in this volume underscores the epistemological challenge of an intellectual move to empire as an analytical category for explaining the past and the present. These epistemological reservations seem especially important against the current background of growing demand for a general definition of empire shaped by the generic approach of the social sciences and the universal concerns of a globalized world. This volume argues that the move to a generic metacategory of empire may produce a redundant interpretation of empire as a state-form tailored to the control of vast space and the management of difference with a limited potential for critical reflection on and historic estrangement of empire. Another twist in this approach to empire conceptualizes it as a historical background and legacy that shaped the present-day constellation of hegemony, inequality, and conflict. We suggest a focus on the imperial experience, that is, the actual and semantically constructed encounter with difference and all of the

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inequalities and disbalances of power this usually entails.29 Difference as a norm of sociopolitical reality and its perception takes center stage in our project on the history of the Russian Empire and our reflection on the potential of empire as a critical analytical category. As the point of departure for the study of empire, the authors of this project take the moment of signification of difference and not the historical structure of political, social, and cultural diversity. This perspective advances an understanding of the nature of empire by way of denaturalizing (Ronald Suny’s term) its political and semantic reality and thus forestalls the dangers of empire-realism, that is, seeing the empire as a more real and enduring historical structure than “a powerfully disruptive, unrealizable ideal” of the nation-state. The dangers of empire-realism are everywhere in our field. The impact of constructivist theories of nationalism has denaturalized nation and nation-state. Empire might fill the emerging void of the bedrock structure of historical process. Growing disillusionment with the norm of cultural and political homogeneity might yield the unexpected effect of romanticizing past imperial diversity. A longing for a generic definition of empire and still attendant idiom of imperial archaism help the process of essentialization of empire. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of historical studies of “peripheral empires,” where the narrative of backwardness and otherness is interwoven with negative or positive assertions of imperial destiny or the stigma of empire. The cognitive approach to empire studies also helps to fine-tune the important conception of empire as an ideal type opposed to that of nation. The historically entangled relationship between abstract ideal

29 This approach was in many ways anticipated in the magisterial two-volume study of the Russian monarchy by Richard Wortman. It opened up a perspective on understanding imperial agency and sovereignty in Russian history without reducing it to the normative conception of the state and institutional structure of governance. His conception of “scenarios of power” and “political myth” is indispensable for understanding the peculiarities of imperial sovereignty in the Russian context and from the viewpoint of historical semantics. Wortman’s history of the Russian monarchy demonstrated the irreducibility of imperial mythology, another crucial language of self-description in empire, to the normative concept of ideology and provided an explanation of how imperial agency adapted itself to dynamic contexts and modern challenges (Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 2 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 10–15). Wortman produced an estranged view of imperial power that was based on epos and “rhetorical truth” and turned out to be poorly compatible with the disenchanted world of modern rationality, ideology, and modern politics (vol. 1, 9; vol. 2, 8, 15).


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types of empire and nation necessitates a further elaboration of the language of analytical differentiation of one from the other. The conventional distinction holds that while nation is a stance and perception that produces homogeneity, empire is an instrument that produces difference.30 This distinction misses the interdependent relationship between the production of likeness and otherness that has often been pointed out by theorists of nationalism (Ernst Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Rogers Brubaker, among others). Starting with the late Enlightenment and Herder, Romantic nationalists not only celebrated the organicity and wholeness of their respective nations but also pointed out the omnipresence of difference in the human universe. Among the major idioms of nationalist ideologies in the periphery of Europe are a critique of and a distancing from the menacing “Europe” and its modernity. The dominant pattern of development of “unhistorical nations” in Eastern and Central Europe is dissociation from the homogenizing projects of “historical nations” and nationalizing imperial regimes, while both in Germany and in Russia the search for the spiritual wholeness of nationhood was combined with a celebration of a historical Sonderweg. Indeed, as Rogers Brubaker perceptively indicates, the question is not about the production of difference but the type of difference. In what he calls the “misconception of the Modigliani map,” Brubaker draws on the famous evocation by Ernst Gellner of the Modigliani painterly style as an illustration of the impact of nationalism on social reality. Brubaker suggests that The spatial aspect of the representation—the image of continuous and homogenous blocs situated next to, rather than interspersing with, one another—should not be interpreted too literally; it does not necessarily imply corresponding spatial characteristics of what is represented. The Modiglianesque representation of heterogeneity as the juxtaposition of homogenous blocs does not presuppose that the blocs be territorially concentrated. The constituent blocs may be intermixed in space, for their

30 In his definition of empire as a great power, Dominic Lieven includes rule over “wide territories and many peoples,” “the management of space and multiethnicity” (Lieven, Empire, xiv). Defying the teleological implications and normative frame of the concept of nation-state, Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen suggest that “An unabashed address to empire as a state form allows us to study polities based on difference, not likeness, of their subjects” (Burbank, von Hagen, Remnev, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 2).

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gerasimov, glebov, kusber, mogilner, semyonov “blocness”—their boundedness and internal homogeneity—is conceptually located not in physical but in social and cultural space.31

Brubaker’s message to students of empire is that it is rather easy to mistake the policy and perception permeated by nation-centered logic for the imperial mechanism of production of difference. This is because the logic of nationalism and, in a broader sense, the modern mindset of social sciences and politics are not alien to heterogeneity. They may create and accommodate to the plurality of national claims to the shared or mixed territory, social space, or state. The important distinction between the national and imperial cognitive frames is that the discourse of nationalism and the modern taxonomic mindset can imagine the claimants to be only nations or similar groups constituted as clearly bounded and internally homogenous elements of cultural and social space. For the sake of clarity and differentiation of the ideal type of nation, this discourse and politics may be called strategic essentialism (the term is suggested by Ann Stoler). It is possible to imagine that different elements of imagery and mythology, forms of social and cultural statuses, mental mapping of territory or deterritorialized thinking can be fused together in the stance of strategic essentialism to produce a nation, ethnic group, diaspora, national minority, or cultural group, one or many, as in the nationalizing policy of the USSR. The common effect of this stance is to be found not in the content of signification of groupness, but in the nature of the imagined and projected boundaries of groupness. The opposite case constituting the distinguishing feature of the ideal type of empire is suggested in the chapters of this volume and may be termed strategic relativism, which should be understood as the discourse and stance that relativizes the bounded and internally homogeneous nature of the constituent elements of the sociopolitical space and governance. The latter stance of rule and the cognitive frame of sociopolitical interaction and imagination produces the situation of uncertainty, incommensurability, and indistinction that Ann Stoler so aptly defines as the quintessential characteristic of “imperial formation.” To illustrate the analytical added value of our hypothesis of strategic relativism as a distinguishing cognitive frame for the ideal type of

31 Rogers Brubaker, “Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” in The State of the Nation. Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, ed. John A. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 296.


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empire, we must point to paradoxes of the interpretation of historical imperial properties. Indeed, what is substantially imperial in the vision of “the expansion of the English race and the English state” or the Eurasianist conception of organic territorial and cultural unity? The intentionality of these projects, and not their outcomes, may be properly captured by the notion of homogenization of social and cultural space for the would-be nation. Or is there an intrinsic property in the concept of race that makes it exclusively an element of imperial domination and colonialism? Are we not better off with the notion of the nationalizing state (Rogers Brubaker’s term) when we address the policy of the late tsarist regime to differentiate between “Russians” and “Aliens” in the political space of the Russian Empire? These paradoxes of interpretation prove that the logic of modern rationality and discourse of nationalism powerfully permeate the practice and discourse of historical actors in the modern era. Perceptive students of empires, such as Dominic Lieven and Ronald Suny, have observed the difficulty of separating the ideal type of empire from that of nation in the case of modernizing empires. They suggest that empires under the challenge of modern conditions inevitably adopt a strategy of nationalization or colonialism, both aimed at a clear demarcation of boundaries between the core nation-state and the periphery.32 The hypothesis of strategic relativism proposes a different view of the dynamics of empire under the challenge of modern conditions and takes its point of departure from the rather atypical framework of “imperial questions” of the Russian Empire, which are underreflected in historical studies. These questions, including the Jewish question, the Muslim question, and the Polish question, lack a coherent and comprehensive framework (such as the collective singular of “nationality policy”) for tackling the dilemmas of the space of empire taken in its

32 Dominic Lieven suggests that the adoption of a nationalizing scenario under the modern condition was inevitable: “Undoubtedly the surest way to save an empire was to turn as much as possible into a nation” (Lieven, Empire, 281). Although he sees greater difficulty with the application of the intertwined pair—nationalism and colonialism—to the Russian Empire, he still accounts for the shift in Russian imperial rule from an incorporationist strategy to colonialist exclusion at the beginning of the twentieth century (ibid., 283). Ronald Suny develops an argument about the “dialectics of empire,” in which empire as a form of polity encounters the challenge of nationalism and responds with a program of nationalization and developmentalism, which gradually makes empire irrelevant (Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out! Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” 23–66).

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entirety and interconnectedness. As the expert and practitioner of the Russian Empire, Boris Nol’de, remarked, the empire approached each challenge of diversity individually in its idiosyncratic logic, thus leaving “little sense” of what was created by the imperial regime.33 This phrase closely resembles the famous dictum by John Robert Seeley (whose treatise partially inspired Nol’de’s thinking) on “conquering and peopling half the world . . . in a fit of absence of mind.”34 Both Seeley and Nol’de reflected the incongruity of the sociopolitical logic of empire with the modern mindset and government, but what is remarkable is that the logic of strategic relativism was reproduced despite its irrationality and incongruity and it contributed to reproducing the uneven and multidimensional heterogeneity of empire. In this volume, Marina Mogilner documents the relativizing logic of mixed physical type as advanced by mainstream physical anthropologists of the Russian Empire and their persistent attempts to resist the essentializing logic of conflating racial classification and the mapping of cultural and political community. Russian liberals’ self-professed stature of bearers of a more rational vision of politics was accompanied by the pluralist framework of appeal to the variegated conditions of imperial space. A similar stance is revealed by Ilya Gerasimov in the case of the Russian Progressivist social engineering movements that practiced “small deeds” and “apolitical politics” in the epoch of high modernist utopias. Developing this logic, it is possible to suggest that what made the Soviet Union an empire was the relativizing employment of class and nationality in redefining the spaces of social and political belonging. Perhaps, the contemporary reflection of this cognitive frame is to be found in the linguistic practice of a generation of postcommunist travelers, who habitually responded to the question “Are you a Russian?” with the cunning answer “I am from Russia.”

33

Boris Nol’de, Ocherki russkogo gosudarstvenogo prava (St. Petersburg, 1911),

280. 34 Contemporary historians have discovered the importance of Nol’de’s works for understanding Russian imperial history (Burbank, von Hagen, Remnev, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 3–4). However, they have not noted the ideological and intellectual mirrors of imperial imagination encapsulated in the fact that Nol’de took the inspiration for his thinking about the Russian Empire from the tradition of British political thought, in particular, Seeley (Boris Nol’de, “Angliia i eie avtonomnye kolonii, istoricheskii ocherk,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 5 (September 1906): 5–67).


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The materials in this volume suggest that strategic relativism may be the product of the condition of difference and unintended consequences of policies aimed at homogenization of the social and political space. More important, strategic relativism also captures an intentional stance of divide et impera in a new key, a strategy of representation, and the volition of political acts, which are often obscured by the view of imperial policies as reflecting the given geographic and sociopolitical diversity of empire. Strategic relativism may provide the basis for a network type of horizontal mobilization in a differentiated environment as well as an obstacle to creating an unambiguous sense of belonging. In other words, the analytical construction of strategic relativism allows different normative judgments depending on the point of view of the observer. Proceeding from this analytical reconstruction of the past, it is possible to valorize the policy and conditions that were conducive to the reproduction of difference and opposed to assimilation or to condemn them on the ground of their obstruction of democracy and undisputed nationhood. But this should be perceived as an added value of the language used in this analytical construction together with its capability to account for historical variability in imperial experience and to eschew the Manichean view of empire versus nation.

Empire: Languages of Self-Description Shifting the focus of analysis from the structuralist, essentialist, and functionalist definitions of empire to a more dynamic perspective on the constitution and signification of imperial experience logically leads our historical research to an exploration of the complex of languages of self-description and self-rationalization. Instead of discussing what empire is, we invite our readers to contemplate what makes certain tropes and discourses imperial. Thus we do not strive to offer a universal theory or a generic definition of empire. Instead we suggest working with a model of the imperial situation defined by the tensions, incongruity, and incommensurability of the languages of self-description. By looking closely into the conflicts and overlaps in the polyglossia of explored imperial experience in the Russian Empire we are able to more precisely define the phenomenon of historically constituted diversity as the defining feature of the imperial situation. This diversity appears to be uneven, multilayered, and dynamic and its experiential plane cuts

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through the disjunctions of political, social, and cultural spaces. This uneven and dynamic diversity is both a result and a source of imperial strategic relativism. Because of the nature of its diversity, an imperial situation cannot be described within one noncontroversial narrative or typified on the basis of rational and equally noncontroversial classificatory principles. We find the most elaborate and telling representation of the imperial situation in Jorge Luis Borges’s “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language”: These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.35

Invented by Borges, this “Chinese” imperial irregular, even mindboggling typology describes such a specific and uneven heterogeneity that it escapes regular classifications and produces a unique historical dynamism. The latter is often hard to grasp when a scholar approaches his/her subjects with analytical instruments provided by any single teleology. But this is exactly what the majority of students of empires do when they try to grasp imperial heterogeneity using the analytical instruments of modern social sciences. These instruments are often indebted to selective readings of the historic languages of rationalization of empire and tend to reduce the uneven heterogeneity of imperial experience to a more manageable, one-dimensional diversity of nationalities, regions of empire, or confessions. By reconstructing particular imperial experiences as a set of languages, we limit a vast variety of hard-to-grasp “experiences” to a system of firsthand reflections upon and rationalizations of those experiences, and we also offer a method of capturing imperial strategic relativism within the “linguistic turn” paradigm.

35

Jorge Luis Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language,” In Selected Non-Fictions, trans. and ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), 231. The essay was originally published as “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” La Nación, February 8, 1942.


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In this collection, the authors’ central argument focuses on the epistemological and political conflict of empire meeting the challenges of its more rational organization, and systematization of its diversity—with the purpose of making it more efficient, governable, manageable, controllable, or ideologically fitting new political, philosophic, or scientific ideas. Therefore the collection centers on transformations of imperial political, social, and cultural space under the challenge of Enlightenment, nationalism, modernization, the growth of the modern “gardening state,” and the negativity of languages of self-description of empire. In basing the new imperial history on the archaeology of the languages of imperial self-description, we do not resurrect Leopold von Ranke’s dogma of writing history “as it essentially happened.” Instead we advance a critical approach that takes empire as a context-setting category and focuses on imperial situations, when empire becomes visible either as a result of contradictions emerging from its uneven and unsystematic heterogeneity or as a result of conscious attempts to make it more manageable and thus more rational. To compensate for the inevitable limitations of the language-centered approach, we suggest reading “languages” in the broadest possible way, as any system of conveying meaning that uses the stable repertoire (“alphabet”) of universally recognizable signs. As the chapter by Ilya Gerasimov shows, social gesture, and even variations within the application of conventional practices, may be regarded as a language of self-description, that is, a conveying of one’s historical experience by means of the available instruments of signification. Taking languages of self-description seriously does not mean taking them at face value. Much contemporary scholarship on empire has been written in a critical mode of explicating the hidden power and repressive mechanisms behind the language of great power and civilizing mission of European states toward the periphery. The purpose of our analysis is to broaden the conventional purview in the study of languages of imperial selfunderstanding, to encompass situations in which the imperial cognitive frame is at work although the assertive languages of empires are at large, to find out how the cognitive frame of imperial and tensionridden self-understanding came about historically, and to discover the agency and context that assured the reproducibility of empire under the challenge of modern conditions. Following the logic of postcolonial-style deconstruction of hegemonic discourses, we argue that empire is itself a “subaltern” of modern social sciences and humanities because it is forced to speak in analytical and

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often self-descriptive languages formed by the modernist national canon. The aim of our approach is to rediscover empire’s many voices, genealogies, and contexts of actualization—and their prompt deconstruction. Rather than striving to uncover some unique and fixed forms of social organization in the idiosyncratic idioms of empire’s self-expression, the chapters in this collection cumulatively attempt to reconstruct a sort of analytical “Rosetta stone” telling the same story in different analytical modes: the empire-focused and the nation-centered. The resulting picture overcomes accepted dichotomies such as “empire–nation state,” “metropoly–colony,” “continental–overseas,” and reveal the complexity and even ambiguity of conventional analytical categories, such as citizenship, nationality, race, and sovereignty. It is important to stress that the seemingly universal modern, nation-centered analytical language of social sciences often conceals the actual variety of local academic traditions operating with terms and concepts that only partially coincide with each other when translated. This means that the very analytical models that should be juxtaposed to languages of empire’s self-description may have more than one reading, thus even further complicating the task of narrating the past. We see this complication caused by consistently following “the cognitive turn” in empire studies as a productive challenge (in fact, just one of a number of challenges, as we will discuss below) that makes scholars suspicious of any simple explanations. This epistemological collision is illustrated by a recent upsurge of interest among German scholars in the concept of “Herrschaft.” While English-speaking historians struggle with the task of finding the proper wording to convey premodern, not formally institutionalized forms of authority that are also not based on indirect (cultural and discursive) mechanisms of control available in mass societies with high rates of literacy, their German colleagues seem to have found a universal solution to the problem. The rich semantics of the ancient notion of “Herrschaft”36 allowed the blurring of a clear distinction between premodern and modern empires by questioning the role of the state as the ultimate agent of rule, exercising power and structuring social

36 The entry on the many meanings of “Herrschaft” and their evolution occupies 100 pages in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1982), 1–103.


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order.37 The reassessment of Herrschaft as a set of practices and the discovery of “nations” as organized social bodies before “nation-states”38 contribute to the understanding of “Herrschaftsbildung” as a complex heterogeneous space of diverse groups, practices, and relationships beyond the dissecting normativity of public–private, social–political taxonomies. Thus understood, Herrschaft appears to represent a set of practices framing power very differently from that of the Weberian normative interpretation of social sciences.39 With this understanding of the sphere of premodern politics, German historians engaged in discussions initiated by Nicholas Henshall’s Myth of Absolutism40 by looking into the processes of territorialization and representations of monarchical power at a regional level. Rather than simply acknowledging the existence of composite monarchies (monarchia mixta), they analyzed the whole range of “Lebenswelten” within the early modern empires.41 Special attention was paid to the evolution of the Holy Roman Empire (not even an empire strictu sensu from the vantage point of normative theories), its modes of self-description,42 and, of course, to the Habsburg monarchy.43 In terms of the model advanced in this collection, we may assume that German historians uphold a crucial analytical instrument for estranging the historical reality of empire, while at the same time connecting directly to the old notion of Herrschaft as an authentic

37 Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999). 38 Hartmut Aden, ed., Herrschaftstheorien und Herrschaftsphänomene (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004). 39 Edith Hanke and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, eds., Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie. Studien zu Entstehung und Wirkung (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001). 40 Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism. Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992). 41 Cf. Angela Rustemeyer, Dissens und Ehre. Majestätsverbrechen in Rußland (1600– 1800) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006) (Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 69), who somewhat follows Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 42 Barbara Stolber-Rilinger, Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation. Vom Ende des Mittelalters bis 1806 (Broschiert) (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006), and her Des Kaisers alte Kleider. Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008). 43 Hans-Christian Maner, Grenzregionen der Habsburgermonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Ihre Bedeutung und Funktion aus der Perspektive Wiens (Muenster u. a., 2005); Johannes Feichtinger, Ursula Prutsch, and Moritz Csáky, eds., Habsburg Postcolonial (Innsbruck, 2003).

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element of the languages of self-description of the premodern world. Yet a mere revival of this particular trope of self-description cannot automatically solve the epistemological problems it was expected to resolve: first of all, there is a need for its further instrumentalization, which presupposes, inter alia, its uncontroversial translation into other languages that will not reduce it to the already available local concepts of “sovereignty” or “authority.”44 Even more important, there is still a need for a general analytical model that would explain the operation of Herrschaft: German historians work with concepts of territory, groupness, and social action in order to reconstruct the actors and agencies producing the effect of Herrschaft. In other words, while providing an illusion of semantic continuity through the very rhetoric of historical analysis, the usage of Herrschaft still requires the application of modern analytical models in order to yield a new, more complex understanding of the past. This persistence of the old polysemantic term masks the epistemological collision discussed in the previous sections and feeds the illusion that a historical notion can be automatically employed in modern-day analysis, while our analytical apparatus can be unproblematically applied to a different epoch. Learning from this lesson, in the chapters of this collection we have tried to study the languages of self-description, provide their genealogy, and approach them functionally within their synchronic contexts—with the ultimate task of translating them into analytical models of contemporary scholarship in order to make imperial experiences understandable.

Empire and Its Challenges The chapters presented here are grouped according to a set of “challenges” to the imperial order that, as we tried to explain above, is not just a rhetorical device, but a test for ascertaining the epistemological challenges of constructing empire as a analytical category. For the purpose of organization, the challenges are divided into two large clusters: the challenges of integration and the challenges of transformation.

44 See Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 3, for attempts to locate English analogues of Herrschaft.


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These challenges can be imagined as situations of communication with very limited possibilities for mutual translation and understanding; they generate attempts at elaborating regular grammatical rules and standards for irregular imperial polyglossia. A “challenge” signifies the situation when an uneven and multilayered imperial heterogeneity, an irregular imperial diversity, fails to support the status quo, when the “imperial situation” with its implicit strategic relativist thinking ceases to be taken as something natural, as a norm for a given polity and society. Jan Kusber in the opening chapter of the collection highlights the importance of the eighteenth-century enlightened Catherinian reign for the transformation of the increasingly Westernizing Russian Empire into unnatural and archaic reality, a subject of study and discovery as well as reintegration on the new principles of Enlightenment knowledge and rulership. New science and moral philosophy now started to shape the meaning of empire and provide the ground for legitimization and delegitimization of the imperial order. In the view of Catherine and her immediate circle, the Russian Empire had to acquire specific qualities of an enlightened polity and society, and produce a new integrated, if not universal, imperial subject. This line of inquiry from governing territories to governing collective or individual imperial subjects, who with time learned to use administrative, cultural, and political instruments of the imperial administration for their own purposes, is developed by Sergey Glebov in his longue durée treatment of the dynamics of integration and difference-making in Siberia. Part 2 concludes with the contribution by Hans-Christian Petersen, who shows how taking empire as a context can change conventional perceptions of classical stories of empire, anti-imperialism, or nationalism (such as the story of the Polish political emigration in the nineteenth century). The imperial experience defined the language of nationalism of the Polish émigré elite, their alliances, and sociological and ideological imagination, as much as it defined their explicit political programs. Empire in this chapter emerges neither as an entity defined by stiff internal structures and continual external expansion nor as an oppressor of Poles, or, their ultimate Other. It is shown as a frame of reference for a number of identities, which were continuously negotiated anew and subject to continual change. Moreover, all three cases show that “imperial situation” can be found in empires and in nation-states or nation-oriented communities, and that instruments of imperial politics, especially when appropriated by collective subjects of empires, can lead toward nation-formation.

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The contributors to Part 3, “The Challenge of Transformation,” focus explicitly on situations in which empire is approached as an archaic phenomenon that lacks basic modern qualities and should therefore be transformed and rationalized. Marina Mogilner deals with the midnineteenth to early twentieth-century project of reconceptualizing the Russian empire—with its particularistic systems of identifications by religion, narodnost’, estate, or territory—via a regular and universal language of racial distinctions. This project of modernization of instruments for representing difference in the imperial space brought about a new vision of the Russian empire as a space of mixed and interrelated races. Yet the very application of the modern language of a new science to this imperial terrain that was completely unexplored in scientific and sociological terms—as practitioners of physical anthropology thought about the object of their studies—had a transformative and modernizing effect by itself and led to unexpected consequences. Alexander Semyonov brings this discussion to the level of public politics of the Duma period by focusing on how imperial heterogeneity became reflected in the new political language of the empire. Ilya Gerasimov turns to projects of social engineering in the empire, which assumed a lack of modern social and economic actors. The project of public agronomy that aimed at transforming “Russians into peasants” borrowed the term “social engineering” from the American tradition of Progressivism and correspondingly redefined the reality of the imperial countryside. What emerges from these different case studies is that the challenges of rationalization were vital for producing a historic estrangement of the phenomenon of empire and thus for developing languages of selfdescription of the heterogeneous imperial space. The problem that underlies our collective research is that imperial self-reflection and the languages produced were conveyed in modes that can be characterized as “nonclassical.” Returning to the metaphor used earlier, imperial “subalternity” suggests a particular strategy of analysis. First of all, because of its heterogeneity (or “hybridity” in the parlance of subaltern studies), the study of empire cannot be reduced to one subject, one language, and one speaker. Second, this perspective is effectively limited to “modernity,” however one defines it, as the context suggesting the “norm” and the “other.” Ancient and Medieval empires also confronted great challenges—those of large-scale population migrations or ecological catastrophes—and


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each one sought its own unique solutions; yet the very same challenges cast empire as a “subaltern” where a broad consensus emerged on the “normal” or “civilized” responses to these challenges, which in itself developed under the impact of European grand narratives of “civilization” and “progress.” Ironically, only the rise of the global “empire of knowledge” (and of “world economy,” world political order, etc.) provides a universal and unflattering yardstick against which to measure each imperial formation. The mental map of this humanistic universe was structured by “nations”—the agglomerated human “bodies” consisting of individuals sharing all or some elements of the same culture, faith, and language, rather than of the former-day favorites: regions, dynasties, or provinces. Thus the part and parcel of the era of rationalization was the system of normative criteria that were poorly compatible with imperial situations: as we see from the chapters in this collection, attempts at rationalization in late imperial Russia only increased and reified the existed divisions, instead of contributing to internal cohesion and homogenization. What seemed rational from within the imperial logic appeared absurd to the nation-centered epistema, while rationalization along the lines of modernity proved destructive to empires. The new imperial history deconstructs the alleged homogeneity and universality of “empire,” a perspective resulting from the monologism of the modern “empire of knowledge”: each and every imperial society was firmly rooted in its own historical context. At the same time, the concept of the imperial situation gives us an analytical tool for studying a variety of societies as comparable, because they responded to different challenges in different settings with similar strategies of operationalizing differences. As with more convenient instances of subaltern studies, by looking at empire as a “subaltern” of modern epistema we do not exonerate it from any violence and injustices committed. We just attempt to problematize the historical reality by suggesting that the same way we no longer speak of “bloodthirsty savages” slaughtering white colonists, of “Muslim fanatics,” or “benighted peasants” in Jacqueries, we cannot categorically speak of “imperial rule” or “imperial domination.” There are agents and agencies that form “imperial formations” and “imperial situations,” exercising a different rationality and responding differently to the challenges of the logic of situation. A “subaltern” is not necessarily a particularly attractive or even familiar personage; the moral undercurrent of postcolonial studies aims to create justice for

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those left mute by the dominant discourse. We call for intellectual fairness to the scholarship of the past in order to critically analyze different forms of rationality and rationalization in the past.

CONSIDERATIONS ON IMPERIAL COMPARISONS Ann Laura Stoler1

I have worked for decades on some specific forms and moments of empire, those of the French and Dutch in the nineteenth century in particular while thinking what colonial comparisons might look like that are not constrained by nation-bound historiographies, frames and narratives. Over the last five years that concern has led me to think less about the French vs. the British, but rather about how we might compare patterns and technologies of rule, political rationalities and NOT imperial structures, but imperial effects. My edited volume, Haunted by Empire,2 was an effort to do just that, to engage with U.S. historians about circuits of knowledge production and counter-intuitive comparisons between imperial forms that have always characterized themselves as exceptions. Another edited volume on imperial formations beyond Europe expands that project further.3 Both emerged out of a discontent with the field of colonial studies and its analytic capacity to speak to histories of the present and to the political configurations that imperial forms rely on now. In teaching seminars on The Logos and Pathos of Empire, I have sought to distinguish those structures of feeling and force that empire historically has produced from the range of imperial sentiments pervading our world now. What does it mean to write, in Nietzsche’s sense, an effective history of empire today? How do we distinguish imperial formations that are dominant, residual and emergent (terms I take from Raymond

1 I want to thank the members of the Ab Imperio collective and particularly Ilya Gerasimov for inviting me to the workshop of this collaborative project in Kazan in August 2007. This paper was delivered as a set of informal comments and should be read in that light. It draws substantially on two already published essays, “Refiguring Imperial Terrains” with Carole McGranahan in Imperial Formations (cited in fn. 3) and Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflection on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, 2 (May 2008), 191–219. 2 Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 94–115. 3 Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe, Oxford: School for Advanced Research Press, James Currey, 2007).

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Williams)4 from other macropolities? How much is empire not an epithet but a useful analytic designation of particular forms of political, culture, and economic domination and organization? These are questions of the present volume, but also questions on the table for many of us who have long worked in other imperial contexts and have been both troubled and excited by the different political and intellectual forces that challenge what we think we knew and seem to know less about now. I want to note two at the outset. One is a disturbing shift in colonial and postcolonial studies itself as a field that emerged out of the biting critique Said offered three decades ago. Since then, I would argue, that postcolonial studies has made itself, as Nicholas Dirks once put it, “safe for scholarship.” Critical stances are moving categories that are not longer critical once they are fixed. Issues that muddied the intellectual waters of European history—putting metropole and colony in one analytic field, looking at sexuality at a dense transfer point of power, placing race firmly at the center of our understandings of empire—have been diluted in varied ways. What is most striking is not the presence of postcolonial studies but its eclipse and absence from current political debates. This is not to say that it is absent from scholarship but the features that gave studies of empire their critical edge have less bearing on the current political situation. Along with this is a much stronger presence of a more benign sense of empire. Studies of imperialism and colonial studies that have followed 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq have a very different valence than those of a decade ago to which anyone reading the mainstream press can easily attest. It’s not only Niall Ferguson’s Empire5 that bears such nostalgic weight. A range of work from England and the U.S. emphasizes not the violence of empire but its benevolence and liberal tendencies.6 But there are openings and new ventures as well, evident in the expansion and cross-over between disciplinary domains that have been traditionally kept distinct, studies of American history that are surging

4 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 5 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 6 See The Imperial Tense, ed. Andrew Bacevich for some critiques of this trend (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

considerations on imperial comparisons

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with new attention to its colonial and imperial entailments. And not least there is a turn to looking at empire beyond Europe, unsettling the pervasive European model so entrenched in colonial studies. What are some of the productive trajectories that are emerging in thinking about imperial forms and their technologies of rule, the new questions that are being posed, as once distinct fields of inquiry have sought to transgress some of the well-guarded disciplinary boundaries that protect academic space? How might we broaden our understanding of the enduring social and political relations that imperial formations produce, what features are sustained over time, and what constitutes the material, social, and psychic detritus and debris they leave behind? I see several issues on the table, sorting tasks if you will, that are not academic exercises but part of the very nature of empires not as fixed entities but as moving categories and organizations of recruitment and rule. I am in full agreement with the manifesto of Ab Imperio editors that empire is not a thing, but a situation and a problem.7 I also agree with the critique of comparative analyses that have been confined to a comparison of nation-based empires and that build off assessments of “national character.” I am in less agreement that comparison is a futile exercise. I would argue that there is space for a new understanding of comparison, one that emerges from the historically and politically located understandings of comparison itself as an imperial project in which architects and agents of empire invested themselves. Here I’d like to address several points: (1) some of the ways in which a comparative study of empire might be reframed. (2) why it might be useful for us to think analytically less about empires and even “imperial situations” than about what I have sought to call “imperial formations”, i.e. not fixed macropolitical entities but ongoing processes that produce gradations of sovereignty, not as exceptions to their architecture but as constitutive of them. And (3), what analytic tools can we bring to bear on understanding the current tenses in which imperial formations pervade the contemporary space in which people live—how empires of the past endure, what forms they take, where their residuals reside? How do they converge and diverge from powerful ongoing imperial processes of dispossession, dislocation, and violence? In this regard, and lastly I

7 Ilya Gerasimov et al., “In Search of New Imperial History,” Ab Imperio, 1 (2005): 33–56.

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think we need to think harder about what empire leaves people with, on imperial remains, ruin, and ruination as protracted processes that saturate the material and psychic subsoil of people’s lives—sometimes violently, sometimes subjacently and silently over a longue durée. Each of these impulses squarely calls into question the politics of our times and our frames; each calls into questions the constrained visions that have cordoned off studies of European empire and produced constricted understandings of what forms colonialisms have taken, what forms they are taking now, and may take in the future. How the study of colonial history is constituted as a part of national histories (or assiduously excised from them) is itself a history of contestations and competing claims. In France, where the national archives are bulging with documents on Algeria and Indochina, it is only recently that they have been reanimated in light of the tensions between France’s image of itself as a Republic and colonial racism as a part of the making of modern France. In Britain, that move was far earlier with the emergence of subaltern studies in the 1980s, with the assault of a cultural studies led by Stuart Hall and others, who have insistently sought to trace the colonial coordinates of structures of domination in contemporary Britain, and with the coming of age of a new generation who refuse the nostalgic longings for a British Raj. In the U.S. the long denial that the U.S. was ever a “real” empire and always an “exception” is being met with new work that tracks the genealogy of U.S. imperial interventions as a history of the present. How much the interest of scholars of Russian history in the nexus of empire now reflects the contemporary political battles over autonomies and sovereignties is for the others to assess. But one thing is clear: The marginalization or omission of colonialisms (internal or otherwise) from national histories is political through and through. It is NOT accounted for by amnesia, ignorance, or forgetting. Both forgetting and ignorance are achieved and learned states. They are educated and sanctioned, as W. E. Du Bois and Edward Said both argued. Gayatri Spivak put it most succinctly—that ignorance is what “every critic of imperialism must chart”.8 If we take historiographic operations to be shaped by political and intellectual investments, then one task would

8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Peter J. Cain and Mark Harrison, eds., Imperialism. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, vol. 3 (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 193.


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be to chart the policing of Russia’s history, what has not been written and what conditions—inside and outside of academia—have ensured that imperial interventions are called by other names. For the U.S., what is striking in the current post 9/11 scholarship on empire is how few of the insights from colonial studies have been brought to contemporary debates about the status of the U.S. as an imperial formation. Postcolonial scholars are not just absent from many of these public debates, they seem to be reading the wrong maps. One could argue that this is because establishment-tied political scientists have cornered the market. But that still does not account for why decades of postcolonial scholarship from such a range of fields has so little to say back to what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, and what constitutes its configurations of empire now. The questions raised by the U.S. case may be not unrelated to the issues that confront those grappling with Russia’s multilayered imperial history and the varied force fields of them. Part of the problem in postcolonial studies as I see it is a confinement to a myopic, narrow view of empire, one that looks more at what empires are than at what they DO, a view more rigid than imperial forms actually are. One of the most telling features for those of interested in the genealogies of colonization is how much more diffuse its meaning once was as compared to now. In France in the 1850s for example, “colonization” was a project to deal with an impoverished underclass in France, with the conquest and white settlement of Algeria, and with the removal of political undesirables from the metropolitan center. I don’t expect that these French terms will everywhere carry the same connotations. Rather such an historical inquiry highlights the breadth of comparative political imaginaries that would later be muted and harder to see or assess. In early and mid-nineteenth century France, a “colonist” had multiple referents. It could refer to a “pioneer settler” in Algeria as we might expect but as frequently to a member of a state-subsidized pauper establishment in central France, a penal colony inmate in New Caledonia or Guyana, or an orphan child in a rural residential shelter in Provence, a child in Mettray, the agricultural colony that Michel Foucault defined as the key institution in marking the carceral archipelago of modern discipline. What Foucault missed was that this carceral archipelago of which Mettray was a part, was a “carceral archipelago of empire” through and through—camps, penal colonies, children’s agricultural colonies were linked in multiple ways. The semantic slippage I just noted captures a critical feature of colonization that contemporary studies of

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colonialisms have since discarded or lost: different notions of a colony co-existed, were contested, and actively compared. Imperial expansion and modes of confinement, resettlement of delinquents, poor relief, and the recruitment of empire’s pioneers were not separately conceived and executed ventures with wholly different architects and different names. This spectrum of implicit meanings were diffused across overlapping collaborative projects. Secondly, the French social etymology of colony draws us to a broad breadth of comparison of principles, practices, and technologies between empires in their metropolitan regions and far-flung domains. If etymologies highlight the careers of words, social etymologies reveal the history and contexts of these developments. Social etymologies register the practices these concepts gathered into commensurable form. More important for our purposes, French blueprints for agricultural and pauper colonies drew on strategies of imperial rule that were never European alone. French observers looked to Russian initiatives as exemplary efforts to create a reasoned empire through colonization. As French architects turned to Russia, Russian rulers looked to North America, and early colonial America looked to Spanish and British policies in the Caribbean. Such borrowings mark a competitive politics of comparison that accelerated circuits of knowledge production and imperial exchange. French planners sought models in programs that housed abandoned children in rural “colonies” on St. Petersburg’s outskirts as well as those that recruited the urban poor to colonize Russia’s steppes and vast eastern territories.9 Both were deemed relevant for making an orphaned underclass productive and for producing militant “colonists” suitable for North African homesteads. At issue was how people would be primed for cultivation of the soil, primed to defend their just “right” to land appropriation, and equipped for a disciplined cultivation of the self. Here the colony emerges less as a geographic place than as a political space of confinement and conquest, detention, discipline, and reform. Students of European colonial cultures would find these comparisons of once politically tethered terms, dissonant if not strange for they reference and revive long buried connections. Much of the scholarly space in

9 Le Comte A. de Tourdonnet, Essais sur L’Education des Enfants Pauvres: Des Colonies Agricoles d’Education, vol. 1 (Paris: P. Brunet, 1862), 16–17.


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which studies of the colonial is concentrated, the field of “colonial studies”—with its abiding focus on late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century European empires—misses those untidy connections. Its default model of empire so resolutely committed to the British domination of India, leads us astray: it fails to address the fact that ambiguous terms and opaque criteria for intervention have been fundamental features of European and non-European imperial states alike. As this mid 19th c. French example makes clear, those who planned colonization of North Africa could look at once to the Saratov colonies on the Volga and to Crimean colonies in the Russian south alongside those established in the Amur basin on the Chinese frontier.10 Crossimperial knowledge acquisition and application included a poaching of practices, a searching for new technologies. Such cross-imperial scrutiny shares recognition of the portability of practices and ideas, be it in form or in goal, across imperial systems and within them. Nor did administrative attention to social differentiation necessarily congeal only around racial distinctions so associated with late nineteenth century European colonialisms. Frames of imperial reference in the mid 19th century were mobile and migratory, moving across geographic and political space as well as institutional arrangements. This was true of Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, and U.S. empires as well as European ones. As social imaginaries and political arrangements shifted focus from empire and emperor to empire and nation, they were joined by new programs and policies of containment and expansion. These new projects required both the production and protection of social categories and social kinds, and often anxious defense of such distinctions by those they privileged. There is analytic purchase in staying close to the specifics of these arrangements. They allow us to think beyond the skewed templates that have dominated the study of imperial governance and its acquisitive states. Beginning with this obscure French genealogy is not to dwell in iconic European models but to underscore the range of social experimentation and diversity of imperial forms that would later be narrowed in common convention. Not least, it counters the prevailing narrative of Western Europe as the ultimate model. Instead, the move is toward a shared analytical space for forms of rule not predicated on a West/

10

Tourdonnet, Essais sur L’Education . . ., 17.

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northern Europe vs. the Rest dichotomy. Most critically it provincializes Victorian India as only ONE of many imperial forms.

On An Analytics of Imperial Formations To this end, we might turn our attention away from empires as geopolitical entities and focus more on a range of the forms they take, take on and dissolve into; again, less on empires than imperial formations. The term “imperial formations” is common, but the analytics of this choice are not. Raymond Williams’ sense of a “formation” as that with “variable and often oblique relations to formal institutions” may be helpful.11 The notion of imperial formation is a critical analytic and we should deploy it precisely as that—to underscore not the inevitable rise and fall of empires, but their active and contingent realignments. At issue is less fixed ideologies than the prevalence of multiple genres of rule that are not exceptions to imperial forms but the norm. Empires may be things, but imperial formations are not. They are polities of dislocation, processes of dispersion, appropriation and displacement. They are dependent both on moving categories and populations. Not least they are dependent on material and discursive postponements and deferrals: the “civilizing mission,” imperial guardianship, and protectorates are all promissory notes of eventual release from subjugation. As states of postponement, they manage and produce conditions of delayed sovereignty, temporary intervention, conditional tutelage, military takeover in the name of humanitarian intervention, temporary occupation, states of emergency and violent intervention in the name of order and peace. They thrive on delay, deferred autonomy, meted out to particular populations incrementally, promised to those in whose lives they intervene. They create new subjects that need to be relocated in order to be productive and exploitable, dispossessed in order to be modern, disciplined in order to be independent, converted in order to be human, stripped of old cultural bearings in order to be citizens, coerced in order to be free. Imperial formations then are not steady states, but states of becoming, macropolities in states of solution. Several of the tacit notions that have informed characterizations of European colonialisms over the last two

11

Williams, Marxism and Literature . . ., 117.


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decades distract from appreciating what features imperial forms may share. One such problem is a fixation on empires as clearly bounded geopolities, as if the color-coded school maps of a clearly marked British empire were renderings of real distinctions and firmly fixed boundaries. As Thongchai Winchakul has observed, however, imperial maps were a “model for, rather than model of, what they purported to represent.”12 Imperial ventures are and have been both more and less marked, opaque, and visible in ways scholars of European empires have not always registered or sought to see. It is no coincidence, however, that our models of empire represent a tunnel vision for they are, in part, scripted and endorsed by imperial states themselves. Instead, we might posit these formations as ongoing polities of dislocation, dependent on refiguring spaces and populations, on systemic recruitments, transfers, and promotions of governmental and non-governmental agents, on the reassignment of native military away from their colonies of origin, on a redistribution of peoples and resources in territories, contiguous and overseas.13 Imperial formations may present themselves as fixed cartographies of rule but we should insist that they are not. At any one time, their designated boundaries are not necessarily the sole force fields in which they operated or their limits of governance and authorization.14 One way of identifying this is to attend to a range of imperial actors—to people on their fringes as well as at their centers, to designated subjects as well as colonial administrators, to those with companion and countervailing motivations to empire, and to those who reside in the categorical edges of the imperial. Gradations of sovereignty, and sliding scales of differentiation are hallmark features of imperial formations. British empire was not “in” India; its historical coordinates pass through Wales, Scotland,

12 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 130. 13 Anthony Pagden makes a similar point that empires consist of and rely on mobility; see Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 14 As Carl Schmitt once noted, “every true empire around the world has claimed such a sphere of spatial sovereignty beyond its borders . . . a space far exceeding the boundaries of the state proper.” Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), 281.

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Protestant Ireland, the Caribbean, and North America.15 Nor was French empire located in the colonies; French empire was a single but differentiated France, in which Napoleon’s continental expansion was part of an older and more recent pattern of expansion overseas. As I have argued for sometime, “blurred genres of rule are not empires in distress but imperial polities in active realignment and reformation.”16 The insight of legal historian Alan Aleinikoff that different “semblances of sovereignty” characterize the relationship of both domestic native American peoples and those who inhabit U.S. overseas territories has a wider relevance.17 What is clear from the historical record is not the absence of these liminal and disparate zones but their exceptional treatment and scholarly misrecognition of them. Ambiguous zones, partial sovereignty, temporary suspensions of what Hannah Arendt was to call “the right to have rights,” provisional impositions of states of emergency, promissory notes for elections, deferred or contingent independence, and “temporary” occupations—these are conditions at the heart of imperial projects and present in a broad range of them.18 If the expanse of spatial sovereignty is unstable so are the terms for the inclusion and exclusion of peoples. Imperial formations are founded on sliding scales of basic rights. Such conditions required constant judicial and political reassessments of the criteria for affiliation, distinctions that invariably exceeded any clear division between ruler and ruled. Sometimes empire-states were intent to establish their order by clarifying borders but not always. Agents of imperial rule have invested in, exploited, and demonstrated strong stakes in the proliferation of geopolitical ambiguities. Those terms signaling the unclarified sovereignties of U.S. imperial breadth—unincorporated territories, trustee-

15 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–7. 16 Ann Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 138. 17 Alexander T. Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 18 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 296; see, for example, Christopher T. Sandars, American’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 142–145 on Guantanamo’s history; Ian Hernon, “The Falklands,” Ian Hernon, ed., Massacre and Retribution: Forgotten Wars of the Nineteenth Century (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 1998), 43–48; Louise Richardson, When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations During the Suez and Falklands Crisis (New York: St. Martins, 1996).


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ships, protectorates, possessions—are not the messy edges of what more “authentic,” non-virtual, visible empires look like, but variants on them.19 Uncertain domains of jurisdiction and ad hoc exemptions from the law on the basis of race and cultural difference are guiding and defining imperial principles. Students of colonial history should know this well. Edward Said’s insistence that all empires claim to be unlike all others, critically identifies discourses of exceptionalism as part of the discursive apparatus of empires themselves.20 I would extend Said’s insight: imperial states by definition operate as states of exception that vigilantly produce exceptions to their principles and exceptions to their laws.21 What scholars have sometimes taken to be aberrant empires—the American, Russian, or Chinese should give us pause. What are they aberrant to? I would hold they may indeed be quintessential ones, consummate producers of excepted populations, excepted spaces, and their own exception from international and domestic law. As we expand the notion of imperial force fields to early modern forms of empire, to imperialisms without colonialism, to empires by other names, and to imperial formations outside of Europe, efforts to do so without sacrificing historical specificity and theoretical validity come with risks. If so many of the elements that have been considered imperial are called into question, one might rightly ask what are the attributes that still mark something as imperial? There is consensus on some points but differences in emphasis remain. Most students of colonialisms would agree with Fernando Coronil that the concept of empire identifies “relatively large geopolitical formations that establish dominion by hierarchically differentiating

19 For one protracted contest over degrees of sovereignty see Thomas J. Osborne, “Empire Can Wait”: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893–1898 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981). 20 As Edward Said noted, “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.” Edward Said, “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition,” idem, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003), xxi. 21 Stephen Rosen, professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, makes a similar point when he argues that “the organizing principle of empire rest on the existence of an overarching power that creates and enforces the principle of hierarchy, but is not itself bound by such rules”. See Stephen Rosen, “An Empire, If You Can Keep It,” National Interest, 71 (Spring 2003): 53.

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populations across trans-regional boundaries.”22 Many would also agree that the forms of domination and exploitation go beyond economic exploitation and geopolitical domination; Russian historian Jane Burbank turns to the vast “organizing capacity” of imperial states, to the scope and scale of intervention, violent or otherwise.23 A hierarchical sense of difference organizes as it informs imperial practice. How knowledge is organized and conceived is central. Imperial projects are predicated on and produce epistemological claims and epistemic communities that are powerful political ones. As Coronil aptly sums up a prevailing premise of new scholarship, it is “the privilege of empires to make their histories appear as History.” Just how they do so may vary, but “modalities of representation predicated on dissociations that separate relational histories, that reify cultural differences and turn difference into hierarchy”24 are critical epistemological features with deep political and policing effects. Dissociated histories sometimes appear blatant, once identified, as in the case of Haiti’s part in the French Revolution.25 Sometimes the lineaments that connect remain harder to track as Peter Perdue argues for the unintended endorsements of subsequent racial politics by successive Qing emperors.26 Imperial polities are not, as once imagined, based on secure relations of inequity but unstable relations of colonizer to colonized, of citizen to subject and struggles over forms of difference that serve state interests or subject’s rights. When empires are no longer called empires is always problematic if we look to contexts in which “national interest” and human rights are the terms that replace and efface imperial intervention; or in situations in which unequal rule corresponds to the imperial attributes mentioned above but those polities call themselves by other names. The varied terms empire-states give to their interventions and forms of sovereignty may stymie scholarly attempts at definition but these creative vocabularies too are part of imperial evasions. 22 Fernando Coronil, “After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism from the Americas,” Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, Imperial Formations . . ., 241–274. 23 Jane Burbank, “The Rights of Difference: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Ibid., 77–112. 24 Coronil, “After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism from the Americas . . .”. 25 See Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and idem, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 26 Peter C. Purdue, “Erasing the Empire, Re-racing the Nation: Racialism and Culturalism in Imperial China,” Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, 141–172.


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Claiming exceptionalism and investing in strategic comparison are fundamental elements of an imperial formation’s commanding grammar. By expanding the forms to which we look, it becomes increasingly clear that overt comparison and claims to exceptionalism went hand in hand.27 At the same time that architects and agents of empire sought comparison, they claimed exceptional status for the imperial ventures of which they were a part. In the cases of the Ottoman, Chinese, Dutch, U.S., and Russian empires most notably, searches for comparison and claims to exceptionalism were not contradictions but compatible conventions. Comparison provided the legitimating grounds for exceptional status, immunity, and exemption from international law—hallmark features of imperial statecrafts. The lexical intricacies of colony provide insistent reminders that some of these features taken to be fundamental to late nineteenth century European empires at an earlier moment were particular, distinct, and not long entrenched. Those features that provide the template of European colonial empires and the scholarship about them—sharp distinctions between metropole and colony, an abiding preoccupation with race over other exclusions, the incessant proliferations of distinction in the pursuit of profit—look less like imperial universals when considered across a thicker swath of imperial ground.28 The goal is not to simply turn universals into particulars, but to question the logics 27 As Selim Deringil argues in the case of the Ottoman empire, imperial officials considered the Ottoman state “somehow sui generis and [therefore could not] . . . be compared to any other polity.” Selim Deringil, The Well Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (New York: St. Martin Press, 1998), 5; see also Selim Deringil, “ ‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Slavery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 45, no. 2 (2003): 311–342. For a comprehensive review of American exceptionalism in a range of historical fields, see Ian Tyrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review, vol. 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1031–1055. Also see Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” The Journal of American History, vol. 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315–1353. 28 For a description of some of the features that have defined understandings of European colonial empires see Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56; and Catherine Hall, Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 1–36. For a history of theoretical approaches to European colonialism, see Patrick Wolfe, “History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism,” The American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 2 (1997): 388–402.

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supporting universal claims. Scholars of European and non-European empires—British, Chinese, Dutch, French, Japanese, Ottoman, Chinese, Russian, Soviet, Spanish, and U.S. need to be in more active conversation. Only then can we start re-examining the theories and investments, the histories and politics upon which our understandings of colonies and colonialism, empires and imperialism have and continue to be worked out.29 When imperial agents looked to the practices of other polities, their modeling resembled less a wholesale replication of practices than a refunctioning of practices, a selective bricolage. Imperial architects talked about models, but comprehensive borrowing is rarely what they had in mind. What might be awkwardly termed “modular modeling” more accurately describes what they actually did in specific contexts and at specific times. This term implies piecemeal projects that partially adopted certain practices while carefully leaving others aside. What they retained is as of much interest as what they discarded. The modular quality of political forms, a characteristic Benedict Anderson has identified in the making of nineteenth century nationalisms and that Frederick Cooper and I have used loosely to describe the fashioning of new colonial projects, captures such comparative labor in the uneven stratigraphies and how their elements combine.30 Attention to modularity foregrounds convergence and counterintuitive comparisons: a French empire that looked to Russia and Australia, a Russian one that looked to Spanish creole communities in Latin America, a Qing empire that looked to the Ottomans and the Portuguese, and an Ottoman empire that was keenly aware of American missionary activities in Hawai’i. Attention to such lateral, oblique, and global visions does something more: it undercuts both developmental and linear models. It allows us to think with multi-

29

For a comparable approach, see the collected essays generated by the “Colonialism and its Discontents” conference at Academica Sinica in Taiwan in 1997. As conference organizer Allen Chun argues: “understanding colonialism as an abstraction must begin by understanding colonialism as a concrete, historical experience. Moreover, this is the only basis for understanding colonial experiences comparatively, as well as for understanding what may be considered colonial violence in political regimes not literally defined as colonial (given the conventional definitions of European colonialism).” See Allen Chun, “Introduction: (Post)Colonialism and its Discontents, or the Future of Practice,” Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 3–4 (2000): 382. 30 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York; Verso, 1991) and Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda . . .,” 1–56.


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dimensional movement rather than with the one-dimensional clarity of maps; with different densities of concern and with different surfaces coming into contact. Comparison, however, was strategic and situational, relevant and revelatory in some times, irrelevant and to be avoided at others. This analytic turn does not aim to resurrect a comparative imperial studies based on national character as many of us criticized over a decade ago.31 Nor does it intend to provide a formula for how these comparisons should be carried out. Rather, our sights should be set on comparing as a active political verb. What commensurabilities are required and what differences are effaced? What kinds of new knowledge are mobilized in making new comparative claims? Such questions do specific analytic labor: they insist on reflection on the work that comparison does as an act of governance and as a located act of analysis. Imperial comparisons were not made across the board. Comparisons were invoked to legitimate acts of violence, interdictions, and to counter specific social reforms. As such, the will to compare by scholars may be thwarted by the nature of archival organization—by the idiosyncratic contexts and events for which comparative frames were enlisted in technologies of rule. It is not only nation-state projects that get melded with imperial ones. Those policies, personnel and practices of multinational corporations and globalizing technologies can become so entangled and embedded that they seem indistinguishable as well. However, there is a newness to globalization that no one would want to disavow in its present form. But imperialism is not globalization. Those networks emerging now are animated by new forms of global consumption, marketing, and communication and should not be reduced to earlier forms that depended on different technologies of production and exchange. What Arjun Appadurai calls “the rush to history,” the refusal to reckon with what is located in this moment should grab our collective attention.32 Instead we need to wrestle here with how new innovations make room for and may build on specific recuperations, longer genealogies of which they are a part. U.S. strategies for accumulating global power were dual— first, the generation of new forms of regulation across “transnational

31

Ibid. Arjun Appadurai, “Globalization and the Rush to History,” (Manuscript, Sawyer Seminar, Columbia University, 28 October 1999). 32

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connectivities,” and second, the recuperation of “historical inequalities generated by earlier phases of imperialism” such as those surrounding racial categories. Such connections and recuperations should help us identify which features of earlier imperial forms were most durable and then we need to ask why. In the present day, such connections are made not only through the traces of past imperial circuits, but also through new transnational routes and global networks. The burgeoning field of studies of empire that take as their vantage point the Qing rather than British empire,33 that move from St. Petersburg through the Americas to the Russian Steppe rather than from Amsterdam to Batavia,34 or that start in Korea, Manchuria, or Taiwan and look to Japan do not just rein in European models.35 These vantage points reset temporal clocks as they redirect geographic attention.

33 On the Qing empire, see Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). 34 New work on the Russian empire includes Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: the Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997); Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Daniel Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 35 On Manchuria and Japan, see Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mariko Tamanoi, Dreaming Manchuria: Migration, Colonization, Repatriation and Nostalgia (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); Mariko Tamanoi, ed., Crossed Histories: A New Approach to Manchuria in the Age of Empires (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005); Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).


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Students of European imperial formations have long taken the construction of difference and consolidation of distinctions as central to the political viability and organization of those polities. But from a non-European center, that hallmark feature is more open to question. All empires are composite polities of varied human social forms, but not all are invested in producing differences to the same degree. New studies of Chinese, Russian, and Ottoman empires suggest a tension between the production of difference and its protection, less on exclusion alone than on a principled tolerance of religious, cultural, and linguistic variations. Imperial formations practiced tolerance and discrimination to different degrees. The statement would be less striking was it not for the fact that students of European empire rarely imagine the concept of “tolerance” as a relevant one. Imperial formations neither imagined uniform sorts of rule, nor subscribed to uniform vocabularies. As such, they demand that our analytic lexicon stretch to these shifting spaces as well. Jane Burbank argues that what constitutes a “composite state” or “composite empire” in Russia does just that, offering a compelling vocabulary to think about the enduring and varied politics of difference and particularity that guided some imperial polities more than others.36 Key is recognition of a differential distribution of rights based on the granting of privilege by the state to its various groups. The “pragmatic politics of social inclusion” ensured long life for the empire in ways that demand we ask why and how people chose to participate in it. Even rebellions against the imperial order often only claimed to reassert privileges guaranteed by the Tsar and did not try to overthrow the Tsarist state. What Burbank posits as an “imperial social contract” may account for the enduring qualities of an empire state, a social contract that not only allowed but actively supported social particularity. Writing in a time in which the concept of empire appears and disappears as a political analytic is no easy task. Urgently called upon and debated when the war in Iraq began, empire was then almost abruptly left aside, despite the war’s continued virulence. But such is the strategic invocation of empire at other times as well. Those large territorial states that do dominate different cultures and suppress resistance from them (e.g., China in Tibet; Russia in Chechnya, Israel in Palestine) have claimed and continue to claim these territories as essential parts of the

36

Burbank, “The Rights of Difference. . . .”

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nation, not as imperial possessions. Some might argue that there are few colonies left. But that point should not be conceded too quickly. The histories behind oblique terms often tell different stories. Humanitarism, globalization, and neoliberalism congeal colonial histories that have found quiet refuge within them. Imperial effects occupy multiple historical tenses. They are at once products of the past imperfect that selectively permeate the present as they shape both the conditional subjunctive and uncertain futures. Such effects are never done with in the definitely closed off passé composé. As Frantz Fanon wrote about the mental disorders that followed French rule in Algeria, it is the “tinge of decay”—the indelible smack of degraded personhoods, occupied spaces, and limited possibilities—that were (and remain) hardest to erase.37 They are also the hardest to critically locate. Fanon worked between two poles of decay: at one pole was his rage at the breakdown of persons, their pathologies and mental disabilities as imperial effects. As he argued, it was more than the future of such patients that was already “mortgaged” by the “malignancy” of their psychological states. If French empire bore heavily on Algerians “the tinge of decay” was also “the human legacy of France in Algeria.”38 At the other pole lay the material, tangible and physical destruction of Algeria over a century of French rule and nearly a decade of colonial war. To work between these two poles is to acknowledge both ruins and ruination as processes of our time that reactivate and build upon vestiges of another. Such remainders impinge on the allocation of space, resources and on the contours of material life. The challenge is to work productively, if uneasily, with this tension. “Ruin” is both the claim about the state of a thing and a process affecting it: as in the Latin, ruina, it serves as both noun and verb. To turn to its verbal, active sense is to begin from a location that the noun, “ruin,” too easily freezes into stasis, into inert object, passive form. Imperial projects are themselves processes of ongoing ruination, processes that “bring ruin upon,” exerting material and social force in the present. Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss. These three senses may overlap in effect but they are not the same. Each has its own temporality. Each identifies

37 38

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 249. Ibid., 251–252.


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different durations and moments of exposure to a range of violences and degradations that may be immediate or delayed, subjacent or visible, prolonged or instant, diffuse or direct. By the Oxford English dictionary ruination is a process that brings about “severe impairment, as of one’s health, fortune, honor, or hopes.” Conceptually, ruination may condense those impairments, or sunder them apart. To speak of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance and signs, the visible and visceral senses in which the effects of empire are reactivated and remain. But ruination is more than a process. It is also a political project that lays waste to certain peoples and places, relations and things. To think with ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artefacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations and strategic positioning within the politics of the present. To focus on ruins is to track the production of new exposures and enduring damage. Some elements of this concern are not new. Critical geographers and environmental historians have long taken the relationship between imperial rule and degraded environments as their subject. And the multiple legacies of empire are what postcolonial scholarship has long imagined itself to account for, if not explain. One task is to bring these fields of inquiry into more organic conversation. But notions like “colonial legacy” and “vestige” are deceptive terms that deflect analysis more than they clear the way, conferring overconfidence that we know how colonial histories matter, NOT HOW they do so. They make no distinctions between what holds and what lies dormant, between residue and recomposition, between a weak and a tenacious trace. Asking how people live with and in ruins redirects the engagement elsewhere, to the politics they animate, to the common sense they disturb, to the critiques they condense or disallow, and to the social relations avidly coalesced or shattered around them. Can we think of them as the Agent Orange-infested landscapes of Vietnam, the test sites of the Bikini Atolls, and the decomposed landmarks of unfinished colonial projects? Under what conditions are those sites remanded or left to decompose and disregarded? Some remains are ignored as innocuous leftovers, others petrify, some become toxic debris. Others are requisitioned for a newly refurbished commodity-life for tourist consumption. Melancholy, compassion, and pity nourish imperial sensibilities of destruction and the redemptive satisfaction of chronicling loss. Ruins are less than the sum of the people who live in them.

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Instead we might turn to ruins as epicenters of renewed claims, as history in a spirited voice, as sites that animate new possibilities and new political claims. Some kinds of imperial ruin are easier to identify than others. Projects of cultural salvage—whether of monuments, artifacts, customs and peoples—are available for scrutiny in the way others are not. There are resurrected ruins, part of the World Bank/UNESCO cultural heritage projects designed to “harvest the economic value” and capitalize on the allure of partially restored people and things. Such restorations disperse and redistribute people, making their ways of being vital to national development and productive of new inequalities. Colonialisms have been predicated on guarding natural and cultural patrimonies for populations who needed their guidance in how to value and preserve them. This sort of attention to ruins chronicles a present landscape and people already found wanting. We would do well to remember Renato Rosaldo’s astute observation that imperialist nostalgia is not a postcolonial pleasure but a concerted imperial one, a mourning contingent on what imperial formations have selectively preserved and destroyed.39 Perhaps the most critical task is to address the question prompted again by Derek Wolcott. What constitutes, what he so searingly called “the rot that remains” when the men are gone?40 What are the forms that rot can take? What corrodes, from what interior spaces does it take hold, and where does it remain? His language is poetic, but what he looks to is not. There may be remnants that slip from immediate vision, detritus that is harder to grasp—intimate injuries that appear

39 Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Becon Press, 1989), 68–87. 40 “Ruins of a Great House” . . . A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone, Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. The world’s green age then was a rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. The rot remains with us, the men are gone. But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind That fans the blackening ember of the mind, My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne. Derek Walcott, The Arkansas Testament (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 20.


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as only faint traces, or deep deformations and differentiations of social geography that go by other names. Is the moral economy of illegality and how Jews and Tatars are marked within it something we can understand in these ruinous terms? Elsewhere, there are social dislocations that are labeled “urban decay,” “aboriginal backwardness,” those who “can’t keep up,” or are swept aside as the refuse of a capitalist market that since moved on. To identify these as ruins of empire makes connections that are not otherwise readily visible. Such renaming relocates processes dislodged from their specific histories, disjointed from the connections that made some people and places susceptible to abandon. Those who live on the toxic edges of oil refineries and in the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa make this clear. These are zones of vulnerability which the living inhabit and to which we should attend. Ruins can take on a political life of their own. As Nadia Abu El Haj writes about Jerusaleum, ruins are not just found, they are made.41 They become repositories of public knowledge and of new concentrations of public declaration. The overgrown ruins in Haiti’s northern mountains, that Michel Rolph Trouillot has so powerfully described harbors a suspended history of inequities of the Haitian Revolution wedged between mortar and crumbling stone.42 Ruins are made but not just by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Large scale ruin-making takes resources and planning that may involve forced removal of populations and new zones of uninhabitable space, the reassignment of inhabitable space and how people are suppose to live in them. As such, these ruin-making endeavors are typically state projects, ones that are often strategic, nation-building, and politically charged. Ruins draw on the residual to make claims on futures. But they can also create a sense of irretrievability or of futures lost, showcases what could have been rather than what was. This sense of arrested rather than possible futures and the ruins they produce, is one way to convey the problematic processes of development policies. Looking to imperial ruins not necessarily as monuments but as ecologies of remains opens to wider social topographies. Such infrastructures of large and small

41

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 164. 42 Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press 1995).

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scale bear what captivated Walter Benjamin, the “marks and wounds of the history of human violence.”43 Ruins can be marginalized structures that continue to inform social modes of organization but that cease to function in ways they once did. What happens at the threshold of that transformation when unfinished development projects are put to other use, when test sites are grown over; when military camps are abandoned and put to new use? What happens when island enclaves, no longer a declared nuclear zone, as in the Bikini Atoll become repositories of vulnerabilities that are likely to last longer than the political structures that produced them? Each of these, points not to ruins set off from people’s lives but what it might mean to live in ruins—both through and with them. In thinking about imperial debris, it is not war zones to which this intervention is addressed but to the opposite—to zones of extended abandonment to track the “concrete trajectory” of exclusions that colonial structures of domination prepared for the structures of privilege today. This is not to suggest that complex histories of capitalism, communism, and empire should all be folded into an imperial genealogy. It is, however, to attend to the evasive history of empire that disappears so easily into other appellations and other, more available contemporary terms. It is to recognize that the “bio” in biopolitical degradations is not haphazardly joined with histories of imperial forms. Colonial subjugations mark off specific sites of ruination and who is trapped within them. Faisal Devji aptly refers to colonial ruins as the “scene of a crime,” but also as an ungraspable moment, a vanishing point that can never come into clear view.44 As documents to damage, they can never be used to condemn the colonial alone. Nor should this be the point. As Fanon predicted, what French rule imposed, would not only wreck havoc on those colonized. Those relations, as he put it, would “haunt French believers in democracy.”45 And it does. It took fifty years for the French government to officially acknowledge the use of the term “Algerian war,” the same amount of time it took some French scholars

43 Susan Buck Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991), 163. 44 Faisal Devji’s comments at the Scarred Landscapes/Imperial Debris Conference, October 2006. 45 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans., Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963).


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to acknowledge that the French Republic was from its start a racialized colonial one. Resentment is essential to a critical view of the past. As Jean Amery put it, “resentment nails every one of us onto the cross of this ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone.”46 Ruination defines both a process and sustained project on which imperial states did and continue to deeply depend. It does not produce passive or docile subjects but political and affective states of sustained resentment that redirect what will be in ruins and who will be living in them. Some of us argue that empire is in the details of the everyday. As I’ve long held, such details are embedded in the changing social, intimate, and affective lineaments of quotidian life. The human and material face and frailties of imperialism at home and abroad haunt the present in ways that imposes new methodological demands: to recognize both the complex interiorities of those living in and off empire, of what kinds of sensibilities imperial dispositions call up and upon, and the creative terms of critique of those living under the imperial spotlight or in its shadows. By staying resolutely aware that a sliding scale of rights is at the heart of imperial practice and a key site of its instabilities, Russian history may emerge as a key site to examine the layered quality of imperial formations and the uses to which knowledge of them is and should be put.

46 Amery quoted in Winfried G. Sebald, On The Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003).

PART TWO

THE CHALLENGE OF UNIFICATION AND RESISTANCE

GOVERNANCE, EDUCATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF CATHERINE II* Jan Kusber

I One characteristic of empires in comparison with nation-states is the preponderance of heterogeneity, diversity, and a multiplicity of flowing transitions, which do not fit in the legal framework of empires. This was the case with the Russian Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century as well. Attempts to adjust social, ethnic, and religious “realities” from “above” or “below” were always full of tension. We see attempts at such as an adjustment throughout the existence of the Muscovite and Petrine empires. In the measures of territorializing the Muscovite empire, one might see an attempt to do this from above.1 Russian empire under Peter I applied a number of utilitarian approaches to the management of human and natural resources in order to achieve the status of a great power and an effective state machine.2 On the other hand, the popular uprisings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were but the visible tip of an iceberg of the popular frustration and attempts “from below” to cope with the incongruities of the legal framework and fiscal arrangements.3 One can interpret the epoch of Catherine as a “saddle period of history” (Sattelzeit) insofar as she tried to figure out a more scientific

* Translated from German by Gregory Ferguson-Cradler. 1 Hans-Joachim Torke, Die staatsbedingte Gesellschaft im Moskauer Reich. Zar und Zemlja in der altrussischen Herrschaftsverfassung 1613–1689 (Leiden: Brill, 1974); Valerie Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 2 Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); idem, Peter the Great. A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Evgenii V. Anisimov, ed., Petr Velikii (Moscow: O.G.I., 2007). 3 See Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels: Four Great Rebellions Which Shook the Russian State in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Peter Julicher, Renegades, Rebels and Rogues under the Tsars (London: McFarland & Company, 2003); Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, ed. Volksaufstände in Russland. Von der Zeit der Wirren bis zur “Grünen Revolution” gegen die Sowjetherrschaft (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006).

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mode of governance for her empire. This mode of governance was founded on the introduction of general principles of “good policy” ( gute Polizei),4—including regularity and centralization—on the one hand, and a more attentive attitude toward individual and regional needs on the other. The notions of order and regularity (reguliarnost’ ) appeared to be the dominant guidelines of her politics. Klaus Gestwa, echoing Christopher Ely, has suggested that the configuration of imperial space as a well-ordered landscape was a guideline of absolute monarchy intended to impose a uniform shape on the empire. The idea of a well-ordered landscape was enacted not only in the gardens of the European elite but also in newly acquired territories. Just as every plant had its own place in a European-style garden, so every subject of the empire had his own place.5 Gestwa and Ely have also suggested the tsarist gardens as a metaphor for the empire in which changes became increasingly apparent as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The position of imperial subjects, specifically of the individual, within the political and social order of the empire can be visualized against the background of this image of the imperial garden, which shifted from a regulated baroque style to a landscape that allowed for liberal ideas and individual solutions. A similar shift occurred in ideas concerning the significance of the individual. Ways of understanding the significance of the individual in the empire were as numerous as the political and social practices that governed it. This article examines the arguments found in public debate about individual and group-oriented education at the time of Catherine II at the level of discourse and legislation. As always, the historian must position himself with respect to the paradigm of state-initiated Europeanization: discourse and, moreover, legislation proceeded from the autocrat. Questions of education concerned Catherine II continuously throughout her thirty-four-year reign. The empress’s interest in this was initiated by what she read and thus became an element of her own educational biography—what she

4 Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 5 Klaus Gestwa, “Der Blick auf Land und Leute. Eine historische Topographie russischer Landschaften in Zeitalter von Absolutismus, Aufklärung und Romantik,” Historische Zeitschrift 279 (2004): 63–125, here 66–74; Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 8–10; and Andreas Schönle, “Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea,” Slavic Review 60 (2001): 1–23.

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experienced and what her advisers brought to the table. Of course, stress was inevitable between such ideals and the resulting conceptions that were proposed or enacted as law. This has led historians to accuse the empress of manipulating educational policy, reflecting either pure vanity or shrewd propaganda.6 This problem has already been discussed in terms of the analytical and typological category of enlightened absolutism, of which Catherine was long considered a typical representative. But even after the scholarly discussion on this topic had cooled down, the tension between one’s will and actively carrying out one’s will remained under scrutiny.7 This concerned the establishment of a state framework in which society could be organized into different institutions. It also involved the activation of public administration and the deeper penetration of the state into society simultaneously with the vast outer expansion of the tsarist state that occurred during Catherine’s era. These issues played out in various ways,8 and, as elsewhere in the study of early modern states, the centralizing grasp of the ruler was met with persistence and sometimes open opposition.9 The history of the Catherinian age can also be understood as a process of negotiation between the expansion of practices of rule and administration that were not uniform throughout the empire and regional or group privileges. Isabel de Madariaga has stated in

6 Claus Scharf, “Tradition, Usurpation, Legitimation. Das herrscherliche Selbstverständnis Katharinas II,” in Rußland zur Zeit Katharinas II. Absolutismus, Pragmatismus, Aufklärung, ed. E. Hübner et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 41–101. 7 Gottfried Niedhardt, “Aufgeklärter Absolutismus oder Rationalisierung der Herrschaft,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 6 (1979): 199–211; Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, “Aufgeklärter Herrscher oder aufgeklärter Absolutismus? Eine notwendige Begriffserklärung,” in Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Festschrift für Karl Bosl zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Ferdinand Seibt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 78–87. On the Enlightenment in Russia, see the seminal article by Marc Raeff, “The Enlightenment in Russia and the Russian Thought in the Enlightenment,” in The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. John G. Garrard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 25–47. For an example of attitudes toward poverty, see Ludwig Steindorff, “Izmenenie otnosheniia k bednosti v Rossii v XVIII–XX vekakh,” in Vostochnokhristianskaia tsivilizatsiia i problemy mezhregional’nogo vzaimodestviia, ed. M. N. Gromov (Moscow: Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2004), 407–426, here 407–411. 8 Jan Kusber, “Grenzen der Reform im Rußland Katharinas II,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 4 (1998): 509–528. 9 For the Habsburg monarchy, see Hans-Christian Maner, ed., Grenzregionen der Habsburgermonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Ihre Bedeutung und Funktion aus der Perspektive Wiens (Muenster u. a.: Lit-Verlag, 2005); idem., Galizien. Eine Grenzregion im Kalkül der Donaumonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: IKGS-Verlag, 2007), 27–58; for examples from the Ottoman Empire, see also Alexei Miller and Alfred J. Rieber, eds., Imperial Rule (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004).

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her path-breaking book that Catherine was interested in a “national dialogue.”10 I would argue that Catherine indeed was in permanent “dialogue”—one may also say discourse—with the elite. New studies contribute toward efforts to interpret Russian history in light of its imperial dimension,11 to obtain a better understanding of how sophisticated a view the functional and power elites of the Catherinian era had of the heterogeneity of their state and how they perceived groups, subjects, and individuals. Generally, study of imperial history of the eighteenth century and the so-called saddle-period of Reinhardt Koselleck—that is, Russia up to the time of Nicholas I—has not been the focus of research that attempts to identify the analytical power of the category “empire.” This article contributes to the diverse overall “imperial” picture and raises questions concerning the ways in which the individual became visible in the discourse on the obligatory education of imperial subjects, which expanded in significance in the eighteenth century.12 The collective element in thinking and the accompanying features of this phenomenon of collectivity remain current topics in Russian intellectual history.13 Here the opposition of group versus individual has been transposed to the

10

Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 137. Cynthia Whittacker spoke of a “political dialogue” in Russian Monarchy. Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), with reference to Catherine, see 99–118. 11 Dominic Lieven, Empire. The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); Alexei I. Miller, ed., Rossiiskaia Imperiia v sravnitel’noi perspektive. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2004); Ilya V. Gerasimov et al., eds., Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva (Kazan: TsINI, 2004); Alexander J. Motyl, Revolutions, Nations, Empires. Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Geoffrey Hosking, Russland, 1552–1917. Nation oder Imperium? 1552–1917 (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 2000); Ricarda Vulpius, “Das Imperium als Thema der Russischen Geschichte,” Zeitenblicke 6, no. 2 (2007); available at www.zeitenblicke.de/2007/2/vulpius/index_html, URN: urn:nbn:de:0009–9–12382 (accessed January 26, 2008); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds., Russian Empire. Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007); see also editorials in the journal Ab Imperio. 12 For more, see Jan Kusber, Eliten- und Volksbildung im Zarenreich während des 18. und in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Studien zu Diskurs, Gesetzgebung und Umsetzung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004). 13 For example, Valeri Afanasjev, Russische Geschichtsphilosphie auf dem Prüfstand (Muenster: Lit-Verlag, 2002), 147–164.


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opposition of Russia versus Europe. I argue that the analytical power of this dichotomy is limited and primarily the result of auto- and heterostereotypes, which are carried over to academic history. Of interest here is the discussion of what kind of place, if any, the individual occupied in the Russian Empire of the late eighteenth century, following as it did an era of forced and unsystematic modernization during which the individual was treated as a person only in terms of his functional use to the state. Therefore I try first to identify what measures Catherine took to enter into a dialogue with various strata of the society of the Russian Empire. Second, I take a closer look at the work of the legislative commission as the highpoint of its work in bringing together an imperial public. Here the attitudes of citizens and/or individuals toward education is of special interest. Third, I look at the legislative outcome of her dialogue with reference to education.

II The dialogue that Catherine began at the moment of her rise to power relied on communication with the empire’s diverse group of elites. Richard Wortman has recently shown that, with the unfolding of the “scenarios of power” designed for her, Catherine rushed to Moscow for her coronation in September 1762, upon assuming power of the empire, and used a repertoire of instruments that combined tradition and innovation to legitimize her power.14 While her predecessor Peter III had rejected the idea of such a “guided” dialogue, the celebrations of Catherine’s coronation were already less about gathering information and more a demonstration of her readiness for dialogue. The sequence of guests received after her actual coronation on September 22, 1762, is instructive in this light.15 After coronation Sunday, courtiers were received on Monday in the Palace of Facets, joined by the diplomatic corps. On Tuesday, the reception continued with Russian and Baltic German nobility as well as guard officers, her loyal 14 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony. Vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). On the relationship of innovation and tradition, see also Vera Proskurina, Mify imperiii. Literatura i vlast’ v epochu Ekateriny II (Moscow: NLO, 2006), 33 f. 15 For more detail about the sequence, see B. v. Bilbassoff, Geschichte Katharinas II. Vol. 2: Vom Regierungsantritt Katharinas 1762–1764 (Berlin: Cronbach, 1893), 218–223.

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supporters. On Thursday, she received officials of Moscow University who exalted her in odes as the “wisest mother of the fatherland,” followed by delegations of merchants. On Friday, deputies of the Armenians, Tatars, Kalmyks, and Cossacks from the Volga, Don, and Yaik were invited to pay their respects. All social classes and ethnic groups of the multinational empire made their courtesy call to the newly crowned tsarina in the Palace of Facets—only “burghers” and peasants were not granted the opportunity to be received by the empress. They were to make do with the sight of Catherine on the parade grounds and they were granted entrance to the Kremlin as well. After further balls and dinners, exactly a week after coronation Sunday, the festivities concluded as fireworks lit up the city. Catherine remained in Moscow until June 1763. Up to the end of the tsarist period no other ruler was crowned so quickly after coming to power or remained in Moscow after coronation as long as Catherine did. In the course of these months, she became acquainted with the social structure of the old capital, learned about the university, and toured the areas around Moscow not only to partake in religious ceremonies but also to receive various briefings and reports.16 In the same year, she visited Yaroslavl and Rostov.17 One year later she toured the Baltic provinces in the summer.18 Clearly, it was her political intention not only to acquaint herself with the provinces but also to reinforce the unbreakable ties of the provinces to the Russian state. Catherine conducted her speeches in Revel and Riga notably in Russian;19 she had already signaled her intentions in an instruction to A. A. Viazemskii that the western peripheries, Ukraine, Livonia, and Finland,20 were to be provinces with confirmed privileges, which could 16 She behaved in this way during her next stay in Moscow in 1767 for the opening of the Legislative Commission, in a year-long visit in 1775, which was focused on outlining a building policy for Moscow, and during one final, short stay in 1785. See Lindsey Hughes, “Seeing the Sights in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Moscow Kremlin,” in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers from the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2007), 315–331, here 325–327. 17 N. I. Pavlenko, Ekaterina Velikaia (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1999), 113. 18 Bilbassoff. Geschichte Katharinas II. Vol. 2, 408–415; Hubertus Neuschäffer, Katharina II. und die baltischen Provinzen (Hannover-Döhren: V. Hirschheydt, 1974), 379–387. 19 Claus Scharf, Katharina II. Deutschland und die Deutschen (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1995), 174 f. 20 Meaning, after the Peace of Nystadt in 1721, the newly acquired territory of Karelia.


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not be repealed ad hoc and which, therefore, were not to be designated or treated as foreign.21 The goal of tighter integration was clear. These trips, like others including one in the summer of 1765 to the Ladoga Canal, took her to areas of the empire with which she was culturally well acquainted. Thus, her grand tour of 1767 was a particular challenge, as on this trip, which took her on the Volga from Tver to Simbirsk and by land back to Moscow, she encountered the culture of “Russia’s first nationalities”22 and came into contact with Islam. This trip, like those previous, was a means for political communication with her subjects as well as a way to become culturally acquainted with other populations. Catherine’s famous letter to Voltaire from Kazan, the old capital of the Volga Tatars, serves as testimony to this: In this city there are twenty different peoples who are nothing like each other. And nevertheless one must make them a suit that will fit them all. General principles can be easily established, but what about the details? And those are quite the details! I almost said: one has to create, unite and preserve the entire world. Of course, I won’t master this task, as I’ve had my work cut out for me.23

For all the self-dramatization inherent in her correspondence with Voltaire, these words touch upon the political thought contained in the already-mentioned instructions given to Procurator General Viazemskii: “To make a suit that will fit them all” as she wrote to Voltaire. This implied centralization through unification of administration and tax institutions as well as the education of the individual in order to create a developed citizen who was to serve the social whole (although with significant reservations). Before Catherine traveled to Kazan on the Volga in 1767 to realize that she was now in Asia, the empress had categorically stated, in her well-known Great Instructions of 1767 for the compilation of a new

21 Sbornik Imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva (henceforth SIRIO) 7, 368. 22 The phrase “Russia’s first nationalities” is used by Andreas Kappeler in the title of his Russlands erste Nationalitäten. Das Zarenreich und die Völker der Mittleren Wolga vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 1982). 23 Catherine to Voltaire from Kazan, May 29/June 9, 1767, in Hans Schuman, ed. Katharina die Grosse—Voltaire, Monsieur—Madame. Der Briefwechsel zwischen der Zarin und dem Philosophen (Zurich: Manesse, 1991), 54; SIRIO 19, 204. Similar to and also from Kazan to Nikita Panin: SIRIO 10, 206.

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code of laws, that “Russia is a European power”24 and she had intended this to be a primary goal for Russia. Her Instructions can be read as a manual for achieving this goal. Not only in various legislative arenas but also in categorizing her subjects Catherine dedicated herself to the corporate-judicial ordering—nobility, peasants, merchants as well as ethnic groups. This too was a subject of her above-quoted letter to Voltaire: The laws of which so much has been said, unfortunately still do not exist. And who can guarantee their goodness? . . . Please consider that they must be of use to Europe as well as Asia and how different the climate, people, traditions, and ideas are!25

This concern also reveals itself also in her Great Instructions, which take into consideration the many levels of education and different prerequisites for the functioning of the state: 57. The legislation should follow the general framework of the nation. We do nothing better than what we undertake to do voluntarily, unenforced, and according to our disposition. 58. In order to institute better laws, it is necessary that the minds of the people be ready for this. To get beyond the excuse that nothing useful can be established because the people’s disposition is not yet prepared for this, an effort will be made to prepare them. Thus they will be oriented.26

Catherine only vaguely elaborated on what these “preparations” would look like, however. She did not consider all “nations” to be worthy of preparation. Discussions on ideas related to education and practical implementation began with the elaboration of a model for the western provinces.27 Thus, despite her skepticism about regionalism in Ukraine and the Baltics, Baturin and Dorpat played a role in developing plans to open other universities.28 She also recognized in Islam and educational institutions associated with it a potential to further the interests of the state. Her permission after 1767 to build mosques and open educational

24 See Article 16 in the translation provided by August Ludwig Schlözer: Katharina der Zweiten, Kaiserin und Gesetzgeberin von Rußland, Instruction für die zu Verfertigung des Entwurfs zu einem neuen Gesetzbuche verordnete Commißion (Riga: Hartknoch, 1768), 4. 25 Schuman, Katharina die Grosse—Voltaire, Monsieur—Madame, 54; SIRIO 19, 204. 26 [Catherine], Instruktion, 14. 27 Scharf, Katharina II., Deutschland und die Deutschen, 167–180. 28 Kusber, Eliten- und Volksbildung, 138.


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facilities associated with houses of worship to be founded in Kazan followed against the backdrop of a sedentary Islam with what were, for Catherine, immediately recognizable cultural traditions that appeared to be compatible with the meaning of the state from an Enlightenment point of view. In one part of her Instructions on education of children she wrote the following: 348. The rules of child-raising are the first principles that prepare us to become good citizens. 349. Every individual family must be governed according to the plans of the large family, which encompasses everyone. 350. It is not possible to give every single person among a large number of people a broad education and to raise all children in institutions designated for this purpose. Thus it is necessary to establish general rules that parents, in place of an institution, can follow.29

At the beginning of this section of the document30 it was thus made clear that she was interested in the first place in good citizens, an interest she had consistently expressed since the beginning of her reign. At the same time, the establishment of a far-reaching school system was not initially intended. The first duty of citizens was not participation in politics, where they could make use of their education, but in the recognition of authority and, in this case, the authority of the autocrat. The fundamental principles of upbringing and education were based on this axiom: fear of god,31 deference to the laws, and love of the

29

[Catherine], Instruktion, 101. In research on the manuscript, N. D. Chechulin concluded that the few passages about education in Section 14 had been corrected, which was previously unknown. Admittedly, this section was not the most controversial from a sociopolitical standpoint. It began, like others, with a direct adaptation of Montesquieu from “The Spirit of the Laws,” namely, from Chapter 1 of the fourth book “On the Laws of Education.” See N. D. Chechulin, ed., Nakaz Imperatritsy Ekateriny II, dannyi kommissii po sochineniiu proekta novogo ulozheniia (Moscow: Tip. Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1907), LII, LXXVII–LXX, CI, CV, CXX; Charles de Montesquieu, Vom Geist der Gesetze (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 132. 31 Fear of God ranked ahead of respect for the Orthodox faith. This was enunciated in various parts of the Instructions, for several reasons. On the one hand, it was necessary to appease the Orthodox clergy who were not directly allowed to influence education policy throughout the reign of Catherine, and who skeptically resisted the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Catherine herself had advocated her rise to the throne by her “Respect for Orthodoxy,” and her repeated mention of this served the purpose of legitimizing her rule and consolidating state structures by emphasizing traditional elements. See the “Manifesto on the Occasion of Her Ascension to the Throne,” from June 18, 1762, in Polnoe sobranie zakonov (henceforth PSZ) 16, no. 11.582: See also 30

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fatherland.32 In the context of comparisons of the family and state that were often made in the early modern period, the admonition of parents by the state33 was perceived as the voluntary commitment of the sovereign to create a good, moderate government. As it becomes evident from another chapter of the Instructions (Chapter 16), Catherine was also interested in creating a middle-class (tretii rod ) in the empire and suggested the particular relevance of such an undertaking. Among the qualities characteristic of the would-be middle class were, among other things, education and the resulting skills obtained from educational institutions, be they secular or religious.34 At the same time, it was clear that Catherine did not see all her subjects as equally eligible for membership in such a class. The tense relationship between members of religious and ethnic groups and the values of a universal Enlightenment beholden to legislation remained. As vague as the expressions of Chapter 14 were, in Chapter 22 the school and education system were clearly considered to be state endeavors.35 “Fear of God” was linked not only to Orthodoxy and other Christian confessions but also to Islam. As historians have shown, by the second half of Elizabeth’s reign in the 1750s forced conversion in the middle Volga region had already been recognized as an impractical measure for promoting integration of ethnic groups into the state.36 During the Catherinian period, the dominant Enlightenment opinion37 considered forced conversion to be impossible due to both practical and

G. A. Veselaja, ed., Put’ k tronu. Istoriia dvortsovogo perevorota 28 iiunia 1762 goda (Moscow: Slovo, 1997), 490 f. 32 [Catherine], Instruktion, 101 f. 33 Ibid., 102. 34 Ibid., 107. Essentially Catherine’s definition of the “middle class” was a definition ex negativo as all those not included in the nobility or peasantry were to belong to this estate (ibid., 106–108). 35 While the first twenty chapters of the Instructions were published by 1767 and the authorized translations into German and French appeared, the additional Chapters 21 and 22 were only ready by 1768, when the “Great Debate” in the Commission had already begun. L. P. Panteleev, ed., Nakaz Eia Imperatorskogo Velichestva Ekateriny Vtoryia Samoderzhitsy Vserossiiskiia dannyi Kommissii o sochinenii novogo Ulozheniia (St. Petersburg, 1893), 182–201. 36 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 194–201; Paul Werth, “Coercion and Conversion. Violence and Mass Baptism of the Volga Peoples, 1740–1755,” Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003): 543–569. 37 Christoph Schmidt is extremely positive in his appraisal of the intentions of enlightened politics. See “Aufstieg und Fall der Fortschrittsidee in Russland,” Historische Zeitschrift 263 (1996): 1–30.


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ideological considerations. Sedentary life and a written culture, as was possessed by the Volga Tatars, were viewed as prerequisites of gradual integration and hence arguments in favor of tolerant treatment by the authorities.38 So it was not accidental that some (including Islamic) nationalities were among the deputies of the Legislative Commission, though not all of them.39 In total there were—strictly arranged—223 representatives of the nobility, followed by 168 merchant deputies, 42 representatives of the gentry, 20 representatives of state peasants, 42 representatives of nationalities from the Volga region and Siberia, 35 representatives of Cossack communities, and 29 representatives of central state institutions. It is conspicuous that while 35 representatives of the expanding group of raznochintsy (people of various ranks) had already been selected to the commission, only serfs and the clergy (the latter represented by just two deputies from the Synod) remained essentially shut out of the process.40 In the first years of her reign, Catherine had thus undertaken an inspection of her empire and its subject population to the extent possible in light of the situation and her role as a ruler who was building her power at a distance. In her “Great Instruction” she had touched upon one facet of the possibility for enlightened reforms through legislation and education. This was less concrete in the proposed instructions but led to the next level of the “dialogue:” the Legislative Commission. There has been a prolonged controversy over the goals and results of this well-known undertaking.41 In historiography, the nakazy (instructions)

38 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar. Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 38. On Catherine and Islam, see Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II,” Slavic Review 27 (1968): 542–553. 39 Kappeler, Russlands erste Nationalitäten, 299. A special commission dealt with the laws and duties of nomadic peoples, which according to some studies paved the way for the statute of the inorodtsy, to be codified by M. M. Speranskii. On this, see M. M. Federov, Pravovoe polozhenie narodov vostochnoi Sibiri (XVII–nachalo XX v.) (Yakutsk: Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1978), 169–177. 40 On the legal selection and material basis of the deputy corps, see M. T. Beliavskii, Krestianskii vopros v Rossii nakanune vosstania E. I. Pugacheva (formirovanie antikrepostnicheskoi mysli) (Moscow: MGU, 1965), 72–85. Slightly different figures can be found in Kappeler, Russlands erste Nationalitäten, 298. 41 For the “classic” critical viewpoint, see Georg Sacke, Die gesetzgebende Kommission Katharinas II. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Absolutismus in Rußland (Breslau: Priebatsch, 1940); for a positive view (once again), see Oleg A. Omelchenko, “System of State and Law in Eighteenth-Century Russia and the Political Culture of Europe: Some Historical Interactions,” Slavonic and East European Review 80 (2002): 217–234.

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submitted by the above-mentioned deputies were long considered to be self-evident primary sources. In fact, they also raise some interesting questions pertaining to the focus of this article. The transformation of Russia into a European power required a group of skilled subjects, and the composition of the Legislative Commission revealed the strata of the population from which the empress expected them to come—that is, not only from the nobility. The significance of education, upbringing, and schooling for state service and self-education was no longer scrutinized in the nakazy of the nobility. The necessity and justification for it was widely recognized. Opinions still differed over the form of the educational institutions to be built as well as over the curriculum. In the nakaz of the Pskov nobility, gymnasia were to be established in every city and maintained by the nobility itself. In every such establishment, despite high expenses, pupils would receive stimulating lessons, so that the government could place “good and enlightened people” in all positions in the military and state administration. In this way, the empire would “develop knowledge in a very short period of time.”42 This demand for gymnasia as a type of first-rank and very expensive schooling can be explained by the proximity to the Baltic provinces, in which, by this time, all major cities either had gymnasia or aimed to develop such institutions. Some Baltic regions asked for the establishment of new educational institutions, as the Livonia nobility did in their petition.43 Catherine found in the noble nakazy an amalgamation of interests in education and state service. In the eyes of the nobility, the Infantry Gentry Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg was living proof of the usefulness of education for the advancement of state interests.44 Catherine’s close attention to the southwest periphery was not accidental, as the theme of education played a particularly prominent role in the nakazy of the

42 SIRIO 14, 401. As well as the demands of the nobility from the Novgorod uezd, see ibid., 346. 43 SIRIO 18, 257. They also demanded the establishment of “more nonprofit gymnasia” (SIRIO 68, 72). The petitions of Baltic cities also mentioned requests for the restoration of pre-1721 statutes of gymnasia and academies. See S. V. Rozhdestvenkii, Ocherki po istorii sisteme narodnogo obrazovaniia narodnogo prosveshcheniia v XVIII–XIX vekakh (St. Petersburg, 1912), 287. 44 This can be seen in the nakazy of the Belev noblemen (administration of Belgorod), Dorogobuzh, and Smolensk, Kashin in the administration of Moscow. See SIRIO 8, 484; SIRIO 14, 327, 422, 433; SIRIO 68, 388, 610 f.


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nobility from Moscow and the “Little Russian” Ukrainian regions.45 In these petitions, education was presented as based on regional traditions but aimed at state consolidation. The nakaz from Sumy emphasized that the fatherland would profit from the establishment of educational institutions not only for the gentry but also for children of other ranks. Education was expected to cure ignorance, corrupt morals, superstition, and schisms(!).46 The upbringing of children for the common good of the entire state—for example, where the danger of schisms might have been identified in view of the confessional mélange in Ukrainian regions, though in the end they did not come to pass—and for the benefit of the individual coalesced around one project. One submission from Achtyr demanded that Kharkov College, which reproduced the Jesuit educational tradition of the Kiev Academy, expand its curriculum to embrace modern civil and military subjects.47 In Ukrainian lands there was a demand not only for local schools for the nobility, who had no money for costly education,48 but also for a university characterized by the close integration of research and teaching. It was argued that the much needed institution of higher education would share the fruits of scholarship with the entire empire. Furthermore, these demands were framed in the dominant discourse of the epoch: education would raise the people’s morals, thus making them truly enlightened. Without enlightenment a person could not hope to become a brave soldier, a smart state servant, a just judge or a prudent head of the household.49 It was a given in the nakazy of the nobles not only that exclusive noble educational facilities would be organized in the form of corps but also that local schools would be built.50 What should be taught depended on the contemporary understanding of education. Among those who supported the ideal of general education, there was agreement that certain knowledge was needed for those entering the civil service at least at an officer’s level.51 There were a number of opinions about which groups of the population, in the view of the nobility, should be

45 For submissions of nobles from Ukraine dealing with education, see SIRIO 68, 130, 150 f., 176 f., 193. 46 Ibid., 276. 47 Ibid., 257. 48 For example, the Kursk (see SIRIO 68, 549) or Chernigov nobility (ibid., 236 f.). 49 Ibid., 137. 50 Ibid., 289. 51 SIRIO 68, 130, 150. In the nakaz of the Tula noblility discussions centered around qualifications for attending the university or academy. See SIRIO 4, 406.

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eligible to enjoy the fruits of education. In the nakaz of the Serpukhov nobility, schools for noble children as well as for clerks ( prikaznye) and merchants (kupecheskie deti) were discussed, where arithmetic, geometry, German, and French were to be studied.52 The Sumy nobles came out in favor of creating additional institutions for non-noble children, as already existed in some cities. Here the establishment of Moscow University was explicitly mentioned,53 from which it was clear that the university and its gymnasium for non-noble children as an educational institution had been well-known. In addition, while in many noble nakazy the question of education for one or another social group was not mentioned at all, for Catherine it was nevertheless clear from the general tone of this “feedback” that discourse on education, at least in some regions of the empire, had spread to people who would potentially be affected by it. The same went for the burghers (posadskie liudi), and their nakazy. In submissions from Arkhangel‘sk, Vologda, Moscow, Tver, and Novgorod stressed the necessity to open schools for training and upbringing of children.54 The petition of Arkhangel’sk merchants accommodated the needs of doing business in Europe and embraced the idea of a commercial college for the city of Arkhangel‘sk that V. V. Krestinin (1729–1795) had expressed in 1764.55 To replace the practice of sending selected children of merchants engaged in the international trade to study abroad,56 for the city on the North Sea a request was made for a merchants’ gymnasium, in which the curriculum would include accounting, foreign languages, and so on.57 To create a foundation for these merchants’ gymnasia, Krestinin suggested creating elementary schools for both sexes in all cities of the country. He was the first

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SIRIO 4, 63. SIRIO 68, 276. 54 SIRIO 123, 431, 464; 134, 105; 107, 225, 238, 537; 93, 134. 55 Kresitinin made a name for himself with his books on local history at the end of the eighteenth century as well as with pedagogical works (see Antologija pedagogicheskoi mysli XVIII v. [Moscow, 1985], 371–377). 56 About the small impact made by the proposal of the commercial college in the 1750s and 1760s to send children of merchants abroad, see N. N. Firsov, Pravitel’stvo i obshchestvo v ikh otnoshenii k vneshnei torgovle Rossii v tsarstvovanii imperatritsy Ekateriny II. Ocherki iz istorii torgovoi politiki (Kazan, 1902), 167–172. 57 N. N. Repin, “Kommercheskoe obrazovanie v Rossii: sostoianie i perspektivy (po materialam “predstavlenii” arkhangelogorodskich kuptsov v komissii o komertsii nachala 60–kh godov XVIII stoletiia,” in Russkii sever i zapadnaia Evropa, ed. Iu. N. Bespiatykh (St. Petersburg, 1999), 388–400, here, 398. 53


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person in the Russian context to suggest a completely coeducational school system.58 The nakaz of the merchants in the Arkhangel’sk township also requested lessons for the offspring of merchants, both male and female.59 Like the nobility, some merchants also demanded that their educational institutions be socially exclusive.60 The burghers were willing to shoulder the cost and undertake self-financing of city school systems, whereas nobles in some regions had requested stipends or total state support for educational institutions to teach their young. The merchants and town commoners (meshchane) were prepared to come up with support for their children’s education as long as there were some visible economic advantages.61 Catherine paid as much attention to submissions to the commission as to the minutes of the sessions of the general debate. At least in three sessions the issue of education as a prerequisite for participation in society came up for discussion. Above all, and this was of particular interest to the empress, non-noble members of the population were discussed. In the sessions of March and May 1768, various deputies again underlined the significance of an education that goes beyond reading and writing—not only for merchants but also for soldiers and bureaucrats. In terms of the utility that would later come from having educated segments of the population, the need for schools in which subjects such as German, English, and shipbuilding would be offered figured highly.62 It was requested that Cossack children in the Kazan gymnasium also be accommodated.63 Apparently, and this was an important signal for Catherine, the idea of education for burghers and Cossacks did not produce any controversy. Controversy began over the question of elementary schooling for the landed population. The Simbirsk deputy Afanasii Larionov called not only for the children of merchants to be trained in arithmetic and accounting, but also for peasant children to be taught how to read and write. Similarly he stated that a Christian education was necessary for the “newly baptized” among the Chuvash and Mordovans (to use the lexicon of the time) so that they would not return to their previous state 58 Quoted in detail in A. A. Kizevetter, “Shkol’nye voprosy nashego vremeni v dokumentakh XVIII veka,” in Kizevetter, Istoricheskie ocherki (Moscow, 1912), 103–114. 59 Ibid., 95; SIRIO 123, 464. 60 SIRIO 107, 537; SIRIO 144, 251. 61 SIRIO 134, 105; SIRIO 123, 431, 480–481; SIRIO 144, 50, 107, 211. 62 SIRIO 8, 36. 63 SIRIO 14, 116. Via education a rise to nobility might have been possible.

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of unbelief. School education in combination with missionary work was, thus, to make them more closely integrated with the state—here we clearly see the effect of the lasting legacy of the Elizabethan era.64 Other deputies firmly demanded lessons for peasant children in which the notion of “great social benefit” (obshchestvennaia velikaia pol’za) would be underscored.65 It was just this kind of demand that did not go unchallenged. A deputy of the city of Penza, Stepan Liubavtsev, stated in no uncertain terms that the “farmer should not be learning anything beyond reading and writing in the native language, which is appropriate for his place in society, and this only if desired.”66 For Catherine, the outcome of the legislative commission was a polyphonic choir. In a way she again stood at square one. After taking power, she was heavily interested in the project of Ivan Ivanovich Betskoi, the master of her coronation festival in Moscow.67 In the spirit of the newest fashion of French enlightenment, Betskoi outlined a project, which favored the development of the individual. Every child should be educated based on his needs and abilities. Only through forming the individual was it possible to have a citizen, who was not cultivated to perform obligations for the empire, but who knows from his individual background how to find his place in society.68 Betskoi’s plans, although interesting to Catherine in the 1760s, did not work in

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Ibid., 201. SIRIO 32, 397. The representative of the gentry from Tambov Province, Vedeneev, made a similar statement. See SIRIO 4, 176. 66 SIRIO 32, 411 f. 67 On Betskoi, see I. A. Chistovich, ed., “Materialy ob Ivane Ivanoviche Betskom,” Chteniia v Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiskikh 4 (1863): 81–156; P. M. Maikov, Ivan Ivanovich Betskoi—opyt ego biografii (St. Petersburg, 1904). A critical engagement with Maikov’s work can be found in A. A. Kizevetter, “Odin iz reformatorov russkoi shkoly,” in Kizevetter, Istoricheskie ocherki, 119–149; [A. S. Lappo-Danilevskij], I. I. Betskoi i ego sistema vospitaniia. Otzyv Akademika A. S. Lappo-Danilevskogo o sochineniia P. M. Maikova (St. Petersburg, 1904); E. N. Medynskii, Istoriia russkoi pedagogiki (Moscow: Uchpedgiz, 1936), 47–105; David L. Ransel. “Ivan Betskoi and the Institutionalization of the Enlightenment in Russia,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 14 (1980): 327–338; A. N. Eroshkina, “Deiatel’ epokhi prosveschennogo absoliutizma: I. I. Betskoi,” in Voprosy istorii, no. 9 (1993): 165–169; eadem., “Administrator ot kultury (I. I. Betskoi),” in Russkaia kul’tura poslednei treti XVIII veka—vremeni Ekateriny vtoroi, ed. L. N. Pushkarev (Moscow: Institut istorii RAN, 1997), 71–90. 68 Polnoe sobranie zakonov 16, No. 12.103: 668–671; [I. I. Betskoi], “Allgemeiner Erziehungsplan, von der Kaiserin den 12. März 1764 bestätigt,” in [J. J. Haigold, d. i. A. L. v. Schlözer], Neuverändertes Rußland, oder Leben Catharinä der Zweyten. Kayserinn von Rußland. Aus authentischen Nachrichten beschrieben, vols. 1–2. 3. Aufl. Riga, 1771–1772, vol. 2, 95–106. 65


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practice, as the history of the Moscow orphanage shows.69 The ideas articulated by the deputies of the Legislative Commission, who came to Moscow without the background of enlightened education, gave her the impression that the stratified Russian society sought education for the egoist corporate needs but not for the individual subject. This milieu was too conservative for the kind of projects advocated by Betskoi, and the empress again had to make up her own mind.

III On another note, it is not incorrect to observe, as first argued in the 1980s, that in the Catherinian era the pace of the legislative process was in no way unusually fast. Indeed, the monarch and her circle of advisers engaged in intense thought on how realizable their goals were. Their government reform of 1775 is an example of a legislative project that had been prepared long in advance. To assure its success, the empress closely studied the documents of the Legislative Commission and corresponding subcommittees as well as the political literature of the time, and actively discussed these matters.70 These reforms restructured the administrative units of the empire in a more close-knit fashion through the reclassification of provinces (gubernii) and districts (uezdy) and the simultaneous abolishment of the Petrine provincial system of administration. In addition, institutions of local governance were established in which members of the population, especially the nobility but also including the urban merchant class, were brought together in elected office. These institutions lasted until the time of Alexander II, and partially even until 1917.71 A question that is still contentiously debated in the scholarly literature is whether this was an attempt to strengthen autocratic power under the cloak of ostensible decentralization of the state: arguably, the state was trying

69 H. v. Blumenthal, “Rückblick auf die hundertjährige Wirksamkeit der Moskauischen Erziehungsanstalt,” Baltische Monatsschrift 9 (1864): 348–365, here, 354, 362. 70 For more detail on this, see R. E. Jones, Provincial Development in Russia. Catherine II and Jacob Sievers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), esp. 81–119; Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, 227 f. Catherine’s adviser in these questions was, first and foremost, Jakob Johann von Sievers, governor general of Novgorod. 71 A. B. Kamenskii, Ot Petra do Pavla: Reformy v Rossii XVIII veka. Opyt’ tselostnogo analiza (Moscow: RGGU, 1999), 416–433.

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for the first time to take control of different parts of the empire at the local level and had to assure itself the cooperation of the local elites in the absence of a qualified bureaucracy.72 The provincial reform was also fundamentally significant for the imperial system of education. The general framework for the founding of schools in the countryside was given in Chapter 25 of the legislative act.73 In Catherine’s outlines (nachertaniia) as well as in drafts of the project in the subcommittee of the Legislative Commission, a direct connection had already been established between the question of education and concepts of public welfare.74 It was in keeping with this concept that both these areas were now associated with one institution, the Administration for Public Welfare (Prikaz obshchestvennogo prizreniia), with the idea of “good public policy” (gute Polizey) acting as a guideline for implementation of the reforms as a whole.75 As per the prikaz, in every guberniia, a district office was to be set up and managed by a board composed of two members from the higher regional court as representatives of the nobility, two representatives of the newly created provincial administration to embody the interests of merchants, two members of the highest peasant court as representatives of the free peasantry, and, finally, the governor as the presiding member of the council. The establishment and maintenance of peasant schools (narodnye shkoly), orphanages for children of both sexes, hospitals and infirmaries, institutions for welfare and employment as well as asylums were made the responsibility of this council.76 Apparent here is the basic approach of an empire that was concerned for its well-being and coming down on the side of social self-initiative.

72 For the older view, see Medynskii, Istoriia russkoi pedagogiki, 93; J. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class. The Formation of the Russian Political Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 112–118; for the contrary view, see R. E. Jones, “Catherine II and the Provincial Reform of 1775: A Question of Motivation,” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies 4 (1970): 497–512; O. A. Omel’chenko, “Zakonnaia monarchiia” Ekateriny Vtoroi: Prosveshchennyi absoliutizm v Rossii (Moscow: Iurist, 1993), 267; A. B. Kamenskii, “Pod seniiu Ekateriny . . .”: vtoraia polovina XVIII veka (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1992), 295–297. 73 A critical edition of the statutes on provincial reform can be found in E. I. Indova, ed., Rossiiskoe zakonodatel’stvo X–XX vekov, Vol. 5: Zakonodatel’stvo perioda rastsveta absoliutizma (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1987), 170–321. 74 Kusber, Eliten- und Volksbildung, 137–163. 75 Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State, 229. 76 Ibid., 259 f.


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The target audience for these institutions were groups that were represented in their management, in other words, the Catherinian “middle class” that was to be created through educational efforts. Concern about the serfs and the possibility of their education at home remained unchanged within the purview of the paternal structures of the aristocratic landowner. In the legislation, the peasant did not come to the fore as a possible object of individual education.77 To finance such public institutions, which at the time barely existed even in the capital cities, an order was given in Article 382 for a onetime 15,000 ruble payment to come out of the provincial budget. While this money could not be spent directly, it was suggested that the sum be invested in the Bank of the Nobility78 in order to cover the running costs of the institutions through money earned on a high rate of interest.79 Therein not only was a clear, local authority in the form of a council created for the first time, but also a concrete sum of money was allocated and responsibility for investing it was given to local councils as partially elected representatives.80 Admittedly, however, the sums of money in proportion to overall expenditures of the state and the local administration in the provinces were meager.81 Compared with the articles on institutions of public welfare, which were partially the result of a particular educational impetus, Article 384 on the peasant schools was restricted and narrow.82 While such schools were to be opened in all cities and larger villages, attendance was not obligatory, and it was particularly emphasized that it would not be required against parental will. Nonetheless, as an incentive, free instruction was to be offered to the needy. Writing, reading, arithmetic,

77 Jan Kusber, “Leibeigenschaft im Rußland der Frühen Neuzeit. Aspekte der rechtlichen Lage und der sozialen Praxis,” in Leibeigenschaft. Bäuerliche Unfreiheit in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Jan Klußmann (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 135–154, here, 135–137; 151 f. 78 On the establishment of the Bank of the Nobility in 1769, see K. Heller, Die Geldund Kreditpolitik des Russischen Reiches in der Zeit der Assignaten (1768–1839/43) (Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des östlichen Europa, 19) (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983), 43. 79 The prikazy were to lend money at profitable rates and could thus act as quasilocal banks (on this, see S. Ia. Borovoi, Kredit i banki Rossii (Moscow: Gosfinizdat, 1958), 67, 71 f. 80 Indova, Rossiiskoe zakonadatel’stvo, 260. 81 S. M. Troitskii, “Finansovaia politika russkogo absoliutizma vo vtoroi polovine XVII i XVIII vv.,” in Absoliutizm v Rossii (XVII–XVIII vv.), ed. N. M. Druzhinin et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 281–319, here, 303–319. 82 Indova, Rossiiskoe zakonadatel’stvo, 261 f.

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drawing, and morals were to be taught, and the curriculum also included Orthodox subjects such as instruction in the Decalogue and Catechism.83 What was standard in the West European pedagogical literature and promoted by Betskoi and others in the Russian Empire as necessary components of education became law. The prikaz was responsible for conditions in the classroom in terms of cleanliness, good ventilation, and adequate lighting, and for the orderly appearance of pupils. And, as in the Great Instructions and Betskoi’s statutes, corporal punishment by the teacher was forbidden. The school calendar was precisely determined. Oversight of teacher performance, designation of salary increases, and salary payment was assigned to the prikaz. While the Act of 1775 was a foundational law for the tsarist state, it was a long way from the three-level school system, consisting of elementary school, gymnasium, and university.84 However, with a more connected administrative network and the adoption of differently developed and structured areas of the empire, it would ideally have been possible to create a comprehensive school system. Nevertheless, for Catherine, the Act of 1775 was only an interim measure in the area of education. In February 1775, Catherine wrote “. . . je suis fort en peine d’avoir une idée d’université, de sa régie de gymnases et de sa régie d’écoles” to an acquaintance of hers, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, in a request that he send her any materials on schools or systems of education that he could possibly get his hands on.85 Presumably this request was a reaction to the suggestion of the governor of Astrakhan, who had initiated the creation of schools for soldiers and for orphaned children in order to teach foreign European and Oriental languages. Catherine had responded that the governor should wait for the general directive on establishment of schools in the provinces, which was forthcoming.86 This decision was not necessarily aimed at the provincial reform of 1775. With respect to establishing a universal school system and its

83 The explicit mention of confessional affiliation suggests that the choice of schools for inorodtsy, Uniates, Protestants, and others was limited to those where this subject was omitted. 84 However, the subcommission wanted to engage in such ideas for school systems in several laws (see Ch. 3.1.2; projects for schools in villages and of inorodtsy, see Chteniia v obschestve istorii i drevnostei Rosiiskikh, 3 (1858): 51–102). 85 “I am painfully in need of an idea of university, its control of gymnasia, and its control of schools.” SIRIO 23, 19, 25. 86 SIRIO 13, 294–297.


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implied image of humanity as well as the instructional materials and methods that would make up such a system, the empress had developed absolutely no course of action. The provisions of the provincial reform project, in which the problem was shifted from the center to the provinces, offered her the chance to catch her breath. She was able to observe how schools were developing under the supervision of the prikazy. This also furthered discussion of the form in which an empirewide multilevel educational system could be implemented. Thus, in the constant discourse on education, the European Enlightenment and the changing Russian society offered suggestions for reform. In addition, the empress repeatedly called for principles and concepts inspired by the Enlightenment, which she had publicly formulated to be brought to bear on imperial administration. Against this background, her own literary production is significant. Whether in theatrical productions of plays authored by her, such as the satirical premiere of O vremia, or in her journal entries, which from 1769 emerge as a significant source, at issue for her was “modernization through literature.”87 On the other hand, these works were also characterized by a call to pursue a discourse on the further enlightenment of the country and, in this way, also she was also demanding acceptance of and obtaining further suggestions for her activities. The empress was perhaps more successful in this than she at first intended. Around 1770 she involved herself in a discourse that, prior to her monarchical involvement through literary articles, had been limited to a small circle of elites. Nikolai Novikov is one who stimulated and encouraged discourse, and a person with whom Catherine shared the same ideas about the characterization of people who were backward-looking and unwilling to change.88 But the dramatist Denis Fonvizin (1744–1792) and other authors can also be placed

87 A. Engel-Braunschmidt, “Modernisierung durch Literatur: Ch. F. Gellerts ‘Betschwester’ und Katharinas ‘O Zeit,’ ” in Rußland zur Zeit Katharinas II. Absolutismus, Aufklärung, Pragmatismus, ed. E. Hübner et al. (Beiträge zur Geschichte Osteuropas, 26) (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 235–252; on her place in literature in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Engel-Braunschmidt, “‘Der Nation gefallen . . .’ Katharina als Autorin und die Literatur ihrer Zeit,” in Katharina die Große. Katalogbuch, ed. H. Ottomeyer et al. (Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1997), 45–52. See also H. Fleischhacker, Mit Feder und Zepter. Katharina II. als Autorin (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978). 88 In his moral weekly The Drone (Truten’) published in Satiricheskie zhurnaly N. I. Novikova, ed. P. N. Berkova (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1951), 49–51, 100–103, 257–262. On his biography, see W. G. Jones, Nikolay Novikov. Enlightener of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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in this context.89 Literature became an increasingly strong driving force in the demand for an improvement in society’s educational level as the century drew to an end. Authors, scientists, and scholars also moved the discourse forward. Various Moscow University professors came forward with writings on pedagogical and methodological literature,90 and the Academy of Sciences also undertook and promoted projects.91 Literary production and science converged in the second half of the eighteenth century in capital city circles where one’s own language was simultaneously a research topic and a medium. The Russian language became a topic of private and public learned societies,92 which for their part influenced the discourse on educational policy. Other groups dedicated themselves generally to the circulation of knowledge and enlightenment whereby the traditions of “learned societies” and reading groups in Western Europe were adopted, though thoroughly modified in a prenational sense that sought to build an imperial identity.93 To speak of an absolute paradigm shift within the elite in regard to the status of education would be to exaggerate the actual circumstances of the 1760s and 1770s. But the very different currents within society led to propagation and initiation of the phenomenon of founding

89 R. Lauer, Geschichte der russischen Literatur. Von 1700 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), 51–95. 90 In a short article under the title “Sposob ucheniia,” Professors Barsov and Ch. A. Chebotarev summarized the discussions on teaching methods that had been taking place since the founding of the university. See Dokumenty i materialy po istorii Moskovskogo universiteta vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka, vol. 1, ed. N. A. Penchko (Moscow: MGU, 1960), 50, 135, 320. See also publications of articles on instruction, which hint at an expanded literary canon for specific subjects. The first edition was published in 1771 and an expanded edition in 1790. M. V. Sychev-Mikhailov, Iz istorii russkoi shkoly i pedagogiki XVIII veka (Moscow: APN RSFSR, 1960), 160–172. 91 G. I. Smagina, Akademiia nauk i russkaia shkola. Vtoroia polovina XVIII veka (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1996), 83–86; G. A. Tishkin, “E. R. Dashkova i uchebnaia deiatel’nost’ Peterburgskoi Akademii nauk,” in Ocherki po istorii Leningradskogo universiteta, vol. 6 (Leningrad: LGU, 1989), 190–207; and Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova. Issledovaniia i materialy, ed. A. I. Vorontsov-Dashkova et al. (St. Petersburg: Dm. Bulanin, 1996). 92 N. D. Kochetkova, “Dashkova i ‘sobesednik liubitelei rossijskogo slova,’ ” in Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, 140–146; B. I. Krasnobaev, “On a Society of Learned Friends in the Late 18th Century ‘Druzheskoe uchennoe obschestvo,’” in Beförderer der Aufklärung in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Freimaurer, Gesellschaften, Clubs, ed. E. Balász et al. (Berlin: Camen, 1977), 257–270. 93 See the documents of the “Society of Lovers of Russian Learning at Moscow University,” in L. B. Svetlov, “Obshchestvo liubitelei Rossiiskoi uchenosti pri Moskovskom universitete,” Istoricheskii Archiv, 5 (1950): 300–322. This society “sought to support the spread of science and increase its influence on Enlightenment of the people (see ibid., 304).


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schools through self-initiative. The above-mentioned proposal of the Astrakhan governor was declined by Catherine merely because of an administrative deficit. In Astrakhan, translators were needed to administer a multiethnic population and for international trade relations. At this juncture, the state did not want to finance the preparation of such skilled employees. However, when Prokofii A. Demidov and other noble entrepreneurs made financing available to establish an elite institution for the education of merchants,94 the empress willingly gave her blessing. The result was the establishment in Moscow in 1772 of a commercial gymnasium, which, despite some initial difficulties, developed in an enormously positive way throughout the nineteenth century. And in the legislative commission, when low-income nobility demanded that they be allowed to utilize existing educational institutions, the government was ready to expand the original target groups. Thus, in 1774 it was resolved that garrison schools, which until then had been designated exclusively for soldiers’ children, were now open to the low nobility as well. In addition, 1,000 noble children were to be accepted on a tuitionfree basis as a way of honoring the performance of their fathers who had served in the Turkish war.95 And when, finally, economic interests could be bound up with political projects, the empress not only opened her own wallet but also provided for long-term state contributions. In November 1774, General Mordvinov informed Catherine II that Aleksei Orlov had returned to Russia, bringing with him 200 Greek youths from the Turkish war to receive their education in Russia. Catherine anticipated the establishment of a Greek school for these boys.96 The Greek Gymnasium that was opened in April 1775 near St. Petersburg became a building block in Catherine’s plans—driven by her interest in classicism—to expand in the Mediterranean area. A short time later, this enterprise would become known as the “Greek Project” and was to preoccupy European politics.97

94 Hugh D. Hudson, The Rise of the Demidov Family and the Russian Iron Industry in the Eighteenth-Century (Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1986), 102 f. He came into conflict with Betskoi regarding the curriculum, as Betskoi had also sought to instate a general plan of studies (Maikov, Betskoi, 400–402.) 95 George K. Epp, “The Educational Policies of Catherine II,” Ph.D. diss., University of Manitoba, 1976, 96. 96 SIRIO 27, 5. 97 E. Hösch, “Das sogenannte ‘Griechische Projekt’ Katharinas II. Ideologie und Wirklichkeit der russischen Orientpolitik in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 12 (New Series 1964): 168–206; H. Ragsdale,

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The lavish construction of the Greek Gymnasium98 showed the lengths to which Catherine was prepared to go when personal interest in education policy and political ambition coalesced. In 1783, following the annexation of the Crimea, the Gymnasium was transferred to the curatorship of Grigorii Potemkin and moved to Kherson.99 It was accurately assessed that the largest influx of school children would be from among the Greek population of the Crimea. Catherine was cautiously opposed100 to private and only sporadically occurring initiatives in which an individual not acting for any personal benefit was the driving force, unless there was an apparent benefit to the state of such projects, as in the case of commercial gymnasia. The provincial reform of 1775 proceeded, among other things, from the understanding that the state must have more presence in the provinces and with this presence a local elite must be developed. The planned schools were, however, only rarely established and thus the goal of establishing the grounds on which a “society as a creation of the state”101 would form was not achieved. “The apple is no good until it is ripe,” wrote Catherine II at the beginning of February 1780 to Friedrich Melchior Grimm102 to illustrate that the last line in educational legislation had not yet been written. The accelerated professionalization of various social levels and the allocation of subjects to a concrete place in the state hierarchy had been fundamental ideas in the school statute of 1786. To implement this school reform, Catherine II attracted the Serbocroat Theodor (Fedor) Jankovich de Mirievo, who had launched a school system on the basis of the pedagogical ideas of Johann Ignaz Felbiger in Timişoara of the Banat region (present-day Romania) and therefore had experience in the (south) Slavic area.103 “Evaluating the Traditions of Russian Aggression: Catherine II and the Greek Project,” Slavonic and East European Review 66 (1988): 91–117. 98 On financing and a curriculum comprising instruction in Turkish, Armenian, and Greek, see D. A. Tolstoi, Ein Blick auf das Unterrichtswesen Russlands im XVIII. Jahrhundert bis 1782., Aus dem Russischen übersetzt von P. v. Kügelgen (St. Petersburg: Emperor’s Academy of Sciences, 1884), 73–76. 99 SIRIO 27, 230 f. 100 W. G. Jones, “The Morning Light Charity Schools, 1777–80,” Slavonic and East European Review 56 (1978): 47–67. 101 Dietrich Geyer, “Gesellschaft als staatliche Veranstaltung. Bemerkungen zur Sozialgeschichte der russischen Staatsverwaltung im 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 14 (1966): 21–50. 102 SIRIO 23, 173. 103 P. J. Adler, “Habsburg School Reform among the Orthodox Minorities, 1770– 1780,” Slavic Review, 33 (1974): 23–45; Peter Polz, “Theodor Janković und die Schul-


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Catherine had thus definitively set aside the ideas of Ivan Betskoi and settled on older pedagogical traditions with roots in the seventeenth century. As the leading figure on the “Commission for Establishment of Schools,” organized in 1782, Jankovich wielded wide-ranging influence as the person working in closest consultation with the empress. He emphasized the importance of one standardized teacher-training process and proposed a unified system of elementary schools while stressing the significance of standardized study. Shortly after the commission met, a road map for establishing a school system, approved by Catherine, was promulgated.104 This plan was to be tried out initially in existing schools and those to be founded in the province of St. Petersburg. After a successful trial period of the “Plan for Establishment of Folk Schools in the Russian Empire,”105 extensive adoption of the interlocking, multiphased system was planned, whereby methods were once more presented in detail through charts, repetition, learning the Catechism, and other individual subjects. For the first two grades, the curriculum included the subjects of writing, reading—here still treated as separate subjects—Catechism, and arithmetic, similar to the Austrian system. In contrast, in the third and fourth grades an expanded curriculum was planned. In the third grade (grammar school), the subjects of history, geography, and church history were to be integrated; included in the two-year fourth grade (for secondary schools) were natural history, mechanics, physics, drawing, calligraphy, and German.106 Natural sciences were to be taught much more extensively than in Austria and education was to be tailored to preparing administrators through the teaching of German and calligraphy, which suggests that the true goal was to produce a functionary elite in the provinces. For the publication of the ukaz Catherine added an appendix that made this goal even more manifestly apparent. Contrary to a first draft worked out by the commission, the empress made critical changes with regard to the teaching of foreign languages. In the future, French was to remain reserved solely for education within the home because Catherine did not believe its use to be critically important in service reform in Rußland,” in Die Aufklärung in Ost- und Südosteuropa. Aufsätze, Vorträge, Dokumentationen, ed. Erna Lesky (Vienna, 1972), 119–174. 104 PSZ, no. 15.523: 685. The draft for this road map was made by Jankovich within three days: RGIA. F. 730, Op. 2, D. 1, Ll. 3–16; ibid., Op. 1, D. 5, Ll. 5–9. 105 The Commission’s plan is available in German as D. A. Tolstoj, Die Stadtschulen während der Regierung der Kaiserin Katharina II (St. Petersburg, 1887), 186–195. 106 Tolstoi, Stadtschulen, 190.

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to the state. If the nobleman desired his offspring to have a knowledge of French, he was to cover the cost of such education out of his own pocket. Catherine believed, however, that it was a state necessity to incorporate the ethnic particularities of her multinational empire. Thus, the Greek language was to be taught in the provinces of Kiev and Azov, and in Novorossiia, Chinese in the province of Irkutsk, and Arabic and Tatar in areas inhabited by Muslim nationalities.107 The uniformity of the course of instruction was thus compromised in the area of foreignlanguage teaching. But the education of translators answered the needs of linguistic communication in the multiple regions of the empire and was thus beneficial to the state.108 An examination of the main textbook that was to be used in primary schools gives the clearest illustration of the spirit of school reform and the educational climate in schools. The school commission adopted a work of Johann Ignaz von Felbiger that had been translated in short order by Jankovich. Instructions of Virtuousness, published in Russia under the title On the Duties of People and Citizens, was to be used in the schools to impart a foundation for the correct life and comportment of subjects.109 In four chapters, the education of the soul (including a catalog of virtues), personal hygiene (passages in which the natural pedagogy of the Enlightenment were most apparent), duties toward the state and society, and management of the home and family were covered—each part, at times, specifying very detailed rules of conduct. Overriding significance was assigned to love of the Fatherland. This love manifested itself for artisans and peasants in hard work and respect for

107 She allocated 5,000 rubles for the creation of corresponding classroom materials (PSZ 21, no. 15.523: 685). 108 The idea of this alignment of objectives led Kniazkov and Serbov in their prerevolutionary work to label the 1780s as a prakticheskii period [practical period] of public education. See S. A. Kniazkov and N. I. Serbov, Ocherk istorii narodnogo obrazovaniia v Rossii do epokhi reform Aleksandra II (Moscow, 1910), 113; see also the general considerations of Vodarskii in Ia. E. Vodarskii, “Ekaterina II ot frantsuzskoi filosofii k rossiiskoi real’nosti,” in Reformy i reformatory v istorii Rossii. Sbornik statei, ed. A. N. Sacharova et al. (Moscow: Institut istorii RAN, 1996), 48–61. 109 O dolzhnostiakh cheloveka i grazhdanina. Kniga k chteniiu opredelennaia v narodnykh gorodskikh uchilishchakh, izdannaia po vysochaishemu poveleniiu tsarstvuiushchei Imperatritsy Ekateriny vtoryi (St. Petersburg, 1783). Through 1814 there were eleven printings of this book and over 100,000 printed copies (Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), F. 730, Op. 2, D. 19, Ll. 43–47; M. I. Demkov, Istoriia russkoi pedagogiki, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1897), 382–391).


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their fellow man; for members of the clergy110 in the Christian upbringing of people entrusted to them; for the nobility in model behavior toward the rest of the population and in service to the Fatherland. The element of discipline was thus prominent at every level of society. According to the Felbiger/Jankovich handbook, all groups were to be good subjects in their own individual positions in society. This was to be imparted to the people ideally through collective education with noble children and through the use of a mandatory textbook, which differed in intent and mode from the moral guidance given to sons of the nobility or even instructions for princely upbringing.111 With all of this subordination to the state, despite rigorous attention toward the child, and in view of the importance of regulation of thought, this represented an innovation in the educational landscape of the tsarist state (despite the conservative tenor, which Max Okenfuss defined as submission to the monarch based on the Orthodox religion).112 Nevertheless, it did not meet with unanimous acceptance. One criticism was that the forms of government of a monarchy and a republic were juxtaposed, thus leaving open the argument that the intensity of patriotism was not dependent on them. In the age of European revolutions, such thoughts appeared to be dangerous to the state. Thus, Minister of Education Golitsyn in 1816 dispensed with the work On the Duties of People and Citizens. However, the catalog of virtues and the commentary on character and disciplining of the human soul was so attractive to his successor, A. S. Shishkov, that the latter proposed the reintroduction of this book that could be replaced by no other.113

110 For this reason, the archbishop of Novgorod, who had authorization to print the Catechism and books on church history, agreed to publish the work On the Duties of People and Citizens. See PSZ 21, no. 15.507: 663 f. 111 Among Catherine’s instructions for the education of her grandsons, see the older, revealing text V. V. Tatishchev, Dukhovnaia moemu synu (St. Petersburg, 1896). 112 He arrived at this assessment after finding Biblical quotations in the text. See M. J. Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early Modern Russia. Pagan Authors, Ukrainians, and the Resiliency of Muscovy (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 206–213; Okenfuss, The Discovery of Childhood in Russia: The Evidence of the Slavic Primer (Newtonville, 1980), 62, 65. 113 RGIA, F. 1673, Op. 1, D. 30, Ll. 1–4.

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The school system introduced in 1786 provided for the establishment of local and central provincial schools. In 1786 alone, 165 primary schools were founded, and a similar number in the following years. Catherine, a skillful self-propagandist, sought to use this success for publicity. But by the late eighteenth century not only had the wave of school openings evened out, but the overall number of schools had even begun to decline. On the occasion of Alexander’s accession to the throne in 1801, the school commission published a report stating that in its 315 schools, only 790 teachers were working and barely 20,000 pupils studying, of whom 1,780 were girls.114 Only some 1.4 percent of the expanding Russian national budget in 1796 was allocated for education and social welfare. Janet Hartley has shown in detail, on the regional example of St. Petersburg,115 how regular day-to-day schooling, despite outwardly favorable conditions, was in danger of failure. After 1786, there was only a marginal appropriation of funds above the basis set in the provincial statute. The center in St. Petersburg, on the contrary, suggested the mortgaging of capital investments in order to increase funds, or, in contemporary language, to fundraise, which at that time was possible more for prestigious educational projects than for the establishment of elementary schools.116 Catherine herself certainly knew that the establishment and continuation of an educational system and, with its help, the creation of social groups, would take time, even in the center of the empire, and more so in the periphery.117 The issue here is less about the number of schools constructed or the number of students than about the image of humanity that stood

114 RGIA, F. 730, Op. 2, D. 23, L. 296; D. 24. Ll. 210–212. The population was roughly 41 million people. V. M. Kabuzan, Narody Rossii v XVIII veke. Chislennost’ i etnicheskii sostav (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 230. 115 J. Hartley, “The Boards of Social Welfare and the Financing of Catherine II’s State Schools,” Slavonic and East European Review 67 (1989): Pp. 211–227; Hartley, “Katharinas Reformen der Lokalverwaltung—die Schaffung städtischer Gesellschaft in der Provinz?” in Katharina II. Rußland und Europa. Beiträge zur internationalen Forschung, ed. C. Scharf (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2001), 457–477. 116 For more details, see Kusber, Eliten- und Volksbildung, 239–275. 117 [A. V. Khrapovitskii], Pamiatnye zapiski A. V. Khrapovitskogo, stats-sekretaria imperatritsy Ekateriny vtoroi (Moscow, 1862; reprint 1990), 4. On the peripheries, however, schools functioned fairly well. For the example of Siberia, see Kusber, Elitenund Volksbildung, 259–264.


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behind this system. As in the book On the Duties of People and Citizens, from the state perspective, the subject was to behave in a useful manner. This system was fully based on such a world outlook. This guideline is certainly not to be confused with total regulation of the curriculum and uniform drills for students. A school system that banned corporal punishment and whose guidelines likewise disallowed “making a student stand in the corner wearing a dunce cap,” was modern for its time in that it respected the person. In still another sense this was an advancement over the era of Peter I, when the connection between education and a person’s benefit to the state was seen in much narrower terms. Thus, the school system was intended to be open to all social groups. When enserfed children of peasants and members of groups that would later be known as inorodtsy could go to school, the network at the level of the province as well as the empire as a whole became broadly interconnected. For ethnic groups, a proposal for education in foreign languages was made corresponding to the regional realities from which the state profited. Here further study is needed to enable a discussion of whether the empire required schools as a vehicle for colonization.118 Some factors suggest that this was not the intention of such efforts and instead point to a cultural arrogance contained within the Enlightenment ideal. And finally, as opposed to what followed with the reforms of Alexander I, the system was coeducational. According to this notion, the education of girls was to consist not only of knowledge they would need to manage a household but also of general subjects of education. As Bianka Pietrow-Ennker has suggested,119 these educational elements were not simply geared to the domestication of women. These tendencies are suggestive of the modernization of the “saddleperiod” in the Russian Empire, which was confronting the reguliarnost’ of the (older) absolutism. There were already elements that symbolized freedom in the regulated Baroque gardens of an empire that was ordered on the concept of gute Polizei. Ivan Betskoi represented a solitary avantgarde figure with his deliberations, influenced by Rousseau, that went much farther than the elements of individualism. To a certain extent, 118 Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists versus Nation: Eighteenth Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” Russia’s Orient. Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, ed. Edward J. Lazzerini and Daniel R. Brower (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 27–57; Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 38–56. 119 Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, Rußlands “neue Menschen:” Die Entwicklung der Frauenbewegung von den Anfängen bis zur Oktoberrevolution (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1999), 131.

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Catherine attempted to combat the spirit of Betskoi’s plan, which had been taken up by Nikolai Novikov and others.120 But these figures were already engaged in a discourse on education, and the empress herself was ready to meet them halfway, suggesting that imperial subjects be educated not just through drills but through an individual developmental psychological education. Thus, from her perspective as well, childhood acquired an intrinsic value that was new and initially adopted only among the functionary elite. This is evidenced in the school statute, for example, on the topic of the reconciliation of uniform and regionspecific ideas. Contrary to her predecessors, Catherine maintained an understanding of the diversity of the empire and her subjects. This also implied an acceptance of the individual and his or her education. This concerns not merely a functionalist education, but an education through the formation of the individual as a person. Her educational policy was an example of a more enlightened attempt to balance her plans of modernization, the individual needs of the subjects and the heterogeneity of the Russian empire. From the viewpoint of those who judge history by the yardstick of modernization, the outcome may have been insufficient,121 but in a way it corresponded to the divergent realities of empire. It would be worth reexamining the history of the eighteenth-century Russian Empire from this perspective.

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Thomas Barran, Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762–1825 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 121 For example, Jörg Baberowski,” Was war die Oktoberrevolution?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 44–45 (2007): 7–13, here, 8.

“US” AND “THEM”? POLISH SELF-DESCRIPTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE BETWEEN HOMOGENEITY AND DIVERSITY (1815–1863) Hans-Christian Petersen1

In historiography “123 years” has been repeatedly mentioned because it describes the time between the last partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1795 and the proclamation of the Second Polish Republic in October 1918. Developments during this time span belong to the most intensely explored chapters of Polish history and have been established in today’s perception of history in the form of certain, standard, and charged images, such as descriptions of a specific Polish tradition of uprising or the modernization of a nation in a time of statelessness. The greatest number of these images and descriptions are based on a nation-centered perspective. These 123 years have been described as a time when continuity was preserved within a teleological narration, which vanished with the regaining of statehood, as a rule, at the end of World War I.2 From this point of view the partitioning powers under whose supremacy the population of the former Nobleman’s Republic lived in this “interim time” were mostly perceived as something exterior, a foreign “Them” as opposed to the national “Us.” Therefore, the long-dominant “top-down perspective” of the research of empire was contrasted with a “bottom-up perspective”—a national master story of sacrifice that largely neglected alternative paths of development and possible interactions with other groups of the empire. This resulted merely in a reversal of perspectives, but it did not overcome the opposition between center and periphery as the basic frame of analysis.3

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I would like to thank Diana Weilepp (Munich) for assistance in translating the text from German to English. 2 Norman Davies draws the line of statelessness and restricted sovereignty even up to the year 1990. Only with the collapse of the People’s Republic of Poland could one talk of “genuine independence” again: Norman Davies, God’s Playground. A History of Poland. Volume II: 1795 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. 3 See also the research report by Ricarda Vulpius, “Das Imperium als Thema der Russischen Geschichte. Tendenzen und Perspektiven der jüngeren Forschung,” Zeitenblicke 6, no. 2, December 24 (2007); available at: www.zeitenblicke.de/2007/2/vulpius/ index_html; available at urn:nbn:de:0009-9-12382.

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Additionally, the basic ideological conditions during the time of the People’s Republic of Poland have to be considered in the case of Polish historiography. While the picture of antagonism of “the Poles” against “the empire” dominated the historical narrative of the interwar period, the official line after 1945 demanded a description of the collective heroic fight of Poland and Russia against tsarist rule. The perspective had changed but it nevertheless remained rigid, hardly leaving leeway for the investigation of heterogeneities in and between the different “camps.” The concept of “Empire” was replaced by that of “tsarism”—which was equated with a lack of freedom and with suppression as a matter of principle.4 Of course, this does not mean a total absence of publications of valuable studies and source editions during this time5—but as a whole the picture of the Russian Empire remained very schematic and offered little space for differentiations. Since the mid-1980s, and especially since the breakdown of the People’s Republic in 1989, change has occurred. Indeed, in the Polish context as well as in other post-state socialist societies there was and still is a strong turn toward national-centered perceptions, on the one hand, which in part are strongly reminiscent of interpretations during the interwar period; on the other hand, there is nevertheless a range of publications that have left behind a dichotomous perspective and have questioned the mutual conditionality between the Polish gaze at the empire and the imperial policy of the center. Among the authors of these works, besides the French historian Daniel Beauvois,6 the field

4 For an extensive survey of the respective Polish historiography see, Andrzej Nowak, “Walka o kresy, walka o prztrwanie: XIX-wieczne Imperium Rossyjskie wobec Polaków, Polacy wobec Imperium (przegląd historiograficzny),” Idem, Od imperium do imperium. Spojrzenia na historię Europy Wschodniej (Kraków: Arcana, 2004), 109–147. 5 For example, see the studies of Stefan Kieniewicz, Ruch chłopski w Galicji 1846 roku (Wrocław: Wydawn. Zakładu Narodowego im. Ossolińskich, 1951); Idem, Społeczeństwo polskie w powstaniu poznańskim 1848 roku (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1960); idem, Historia Polski, 1795–1918 (Warsaw: Patnstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1968). 6 See, for example, Daniel Beauvois, Le noble, le serf, et le révizor. La noblesse polonaise entre le tsarisme et les masses ukrainiennes (1831–1863) (Paris and Montreux: Archives Contemporaines, 1985); Idem, La bataille de la terre en Ukraine 1863–1914 (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1993); Idem, Pouvoir russe et noblesse polonaise en Ukraine 1793–1830 (Paris: CNRS, 2003). The studies have recently been published in a cumulative Polish translation: Idem, Trójkat ukraiński. Szlachta, carat i lud na Wołyniu, Podolu i Kijowszczyźnie 1793–1914 (Lublin: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2005). For an extensive, critical review, see Tadeusz Epstein, “W poszukiwaniu nowego obrazu dziejów ziem południowo-wschodnich dawnej Rzeczy-

“us” and “them”?

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of Polish research on empire includes works by Leszek Kuk,7 Urszula Kalembka,8 Wiesław Caban,9 and, above all, Andrzej Nowak,10 the author of numerous books and articles. The following explications are based on these works. By the example of the Kingdom of Poland, launched in 1815 and because of its genesis and the connection to the Russian Empire often called Congress Poland (Kongresówka), as well as by the discussions of émigrés in Paris, it is asked how the Russian Empire was perceived by its Polish-speaking inhabitants and what impact this had on their self-concept. This article will therefore deal with the different definitions of “Self” and “Other.” Who is defined by whom, by what, and as what? For this reason the focus will be not only on the relation of center and periphery but also on that among the different regions of the empire. In the Polish case this concerns, above all, the perception of the non-Russian population of the former eastern territories’ of the Nobleman’s Republic. At the same time, we examine which criteria were referred to in each case for the founding of identity—did self- and foreign description really occur largely along ethnic-national categories, or did supranational criteria play a more important role than has been estimated to date? Therefore, the focus will shift from the antagonistic narration of the putatively unchanged Polish-Russian hereditary hostility to the investigation of heterogeneities and interactions. Following the postulates of the recently developed New Imperial History (Novaia pospolitej w IX. w. w Trójkącie ukraińskim Daniela Beauvois,” Kwartalnik Historyczny, vol. 114, no. 2 (2007): 159–171. 7 Leszek Kuk, Wielka Emigracja a powstanie słowianofilstwa francuskiego. W kręgu działalności Cypriana Roberta, Roczniki Towarzystwa Naukowego w Toruniu, Rocznik 84, Zeszyt 3 (Toruń: TNT, 1991); Idem, Orientacja słowiańska w myśli politycznej Wielkiej Emigracji (do wybuchu wojny krimskiej). Geneza, uwarunkowania, podstawowe koncepcje (Toruń: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1996). 8 Besides a wide range of articles concerning the Polish view on the partitioning powers see the monograph Urszula Kalembka, Publicyści Wielkiej Emigracji o rządach zaborców na ziemiach Rzeczypospolitej 1832–1862, Rozprawy i Materiały Ośrodka Badań Naukowych im. Wojciecha Kętrzyńskiego w Olsztynie, no. 188 (Olsztyn: OBN, 2000). 9 In addition to a wide range of articles see the monograph Wiesław Caban, Służba rekrutów z Królestwa Polskiego w armii carskiej w latach 1831–1873 (Warsaw: Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii, “DiG”, 2001). 10 In addition to a wide range of articles and the already mentioned collection Od imperium do imperium, see Andrzej Nowak, Między carem a rewolucją. Studium politycznej wyobraźni i postaw Wielkiej Emigracji wobec Rosji 1831–1849 (Warsaw: Inst. Historii PAN & Gryf, 1994); Idem, Jak rozbić rosyjskie imperium? Idee polskiej polityki wschodniej (1733–1921) (Warsaw: Gryf, 1995); Idem, ed., Rosja i Europa wschodnia. “Imperiologia” stosowana/Russia and Eastern Europe. Applied “Imperiology” (Kraków: Arcana, 2006).

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Imperskaia Istoriia), the empire is understood not as an entity defined by rigid internal structures and continuous outward expansion, but as a frame for a an enormous number of identities, which were constantly negotiated anew and were subject to persistent change.11 The questions are pursued diachronically, from the foundation of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815 to the January Uprising in 1863. This timeframe offers the possibility to pursue self- and foreign descriptions across several central contemporary events and also to indicate changes and breaks as well as continuities. So the question arises: What were the consequences of the situation of exile on discourses after the “Great Emigration?” How did one try to position himself in the new sphere far from the actual reference area? In this connection, the analysis takes place at the textual level, and also includes the respective situation of the author and his intentions. Periodicals, pamphlets, and memoranda are understood as expressions of strategies that are pursued by concrete individuals or groups but cannot be grasped sufficiently by nationalcollective explanation patterns.

1815–1830—Kingdom of Poland About 82 percent of the territory of the former Kingdom of PolandLithuania belonged to the domain of the Russian Empire after the Congress of Vienna. While the former eastern areas of the Nobleman’s Republic were supposed to be integrated in the imperial order of gubernias, the western parts including the capital of Warsaw were granted separate status. Under the official name “Kingdom of Poland,” Alexander I created an entity that enclosed about one-seventh of the territory and approximately one-fifth of the population of the former Poland-Lithuania. He also granted the new state a constitution, which

11 In addition to numerous articles in Ab Imperio and Kritika, see the volume by the editors of Ab Imperio: Ilya Gerasimov, Serguei Glebov, Alexander Kaplunovski, Marina Mogilner, and Alexander Semyonov, eds., Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovestkogo prostranstva. Sbornik stateji (Kazan’: Biblioteka zhurnala Ab Imperio, 2004). For followup see also, Alexander Semyonov, “Empire as a Context Setting Category,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2008): 193–204. For an interesting volume that questions established views on the Russian Empire, see Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds., Russian Empire. Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007).


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was considered not only an absolute novelty for the Russian Empire itself but also one of the most liberal constitutions its time for Europe as a whole. Indeed, the Kingdom of Poland remained connected to the Russian Empire in personal union and its foreign affairs were likewise determined from St. Petersburg; nevertheless, the constitution guaranteed fundamental civil rights and freedoms and created self-government, which followed Polish traditions to a large extent and also opened it beyond the nobility for other social classes.12 The “Kingdom of Poland” did not constitute the reestablishment of the former Polish-Lithuanian Empire, but it did offer a projection screen for Polish hopes concerning further steps toward comprehensive independence. Its position within the empire exemplifies the typology of imperial forms of cooperation with the elites of the periphery developed by Andreas Kappeler—in this case it represents the second type defined by Kappeler, which is characterized by external control of the area by the center as well as the simultaneous allowance of internal freedoms.13 This strategy of stabilization of governance, focusing on cooperation instead of confrontation, was not without impact on the attitudes of Polish elites toward the Eastern partitioning power. In 1819/20 “Ród ludzki” (the human race) was published—a historical-philosophical interpretation of the history of mankind from its beginnings up to the present.14 The author, Stanisław Staszic, one of the most prominent representatives of the Polish enlightenment, had been among critics of mismanagement in the state during the divisions of Poland-Lithuania and had warned repeatedly against the results of another absence of reforms. In the course of the Napoleonic wars Staszic

12 There is an abundant literature on this topic. See, for example, Piotr Stefan Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland: 1795–1918 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1974); Angela Theresa Pienkos, The Imperfect Autocrat. Grand Duke Constantin Pavlovich and the Polish Congress Kingdom (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1987); Arnon Gill, Freiheitskämpfe der Polen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main: P. Lang, 1997); Andrzej Chwalba, Historia Polski 1795–1918 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000); Hanna Dylągowa, Historia Polski, 1795–1990 (Lublin: Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 2000); Kieniewicz, Historia Polski; Davies, God’s Playground. 13 Andreas Kappeler, “Tsentr i elity periferii v Gabsburgskoi, Rossiiskoi i Osmanskoi imperiiakh (1700–1918 gg.),” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2007): 17–59. 14 Stanisław Staszic, Ród ludzki. Wersja brulionowa po raz pierwszy ogłoszona drukiem według zachowanego rękopisu. Opracował Zbigniew Daszkowski, przedmowę napisał Bogdan Suchodolski, 3 vols., reprint (W Krakowie: Państwowe Wydawn, Naukowe, 1959.; first published in 1819/20).

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and other representatives of the enlightenment, such as Hugo Kołłątaj, argued for an orientation of Poland toward Western Europe that presumed the country’s capability to reestablish its own state in the wake of the French emperor. An ardent condemnatin of Russia accompanied this: The Russian empire embodied “Asia” and “Barbarism” against which in the tradition of Polish antemurale conceptions only a strong Poland can form the prewall of the “West” and “Civilization.”15 After the establishment of the “Kingdom of Poland,” Staszic became a member of the newly created council of state. At the same time, his perception of Poland’s position in Europe and his posture toward the empire changed. In his “Annotations to ‘the Human Race’” as well as in “Thoughts about the Political Balance in Europe,” he developed a concept that explained “doubtless the most ambitious manifesto of political Slavism [słowianofilstwo] in the Kingdom of Poland,”16 according to Andrzej Nowak. Instead of evoking a basic, civilizing contrast between Poland and Russia as before, Staszic now saw Europe as divided between three big powers: Gallic-Latins, Teutons, and Slavs. He did not place much hope in the Gallic-Latins, who were definitively represented by France, as the Ducal of Warsaw established by Napoleon had failed, and furthermore, the division powers of Prussia and Austria represented the Teutonic aim of Germanization and suppression of the Polish nation. In contrast to this and to his own former concepts Staszic started to see the inheritance of a common past between Russians and Poles, which fully derived from their defenses against “the Asian people striving toward Europe.”17 In addition, the empire under Alexander I had proved his

15 For an authoritative account of the tradition of antemurale Christianitatis, see Janusz Tazbir, Polska przedmurzem Europy (Warsaw: Twój Styl, 2004). For conceptions of the Polish enlightenment, see Andrzej Walicki, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood. Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kościuszko (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989); Idem, Poland between East and West. The Controversies over Self-Definition and Modernization in Partitioned Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1994), 9–26; Tomasz Kizwalter, Ludzie i idee Oświecenia w Polsce porozbiorowej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1987); Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe. Nineteenth Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 3–51; Andreas Lawaty, “Polen und Europa in der Aufklärung,” Claudia Kraft and Katrin Steffen, eds., Europas Platz in Polen, Einzelveröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Warschau, vol. 11 (Osnabrück,: Fibre, 2007), 105–131. 16 Nowak, Między carem a rewolucją, 20. 17 Stanisław Staszic, “Myśli o równowadze politycznej w Europie, czytane w Wydziale Literatury Towarzsystwa Przyjaciół Nauk w roku 1815 w miesiącu sierpniu,” in Idem, Pisma filozoficzne i społeczne, ed. Bogdan Suchodolski, vol. 2 (Kraków: Państwowe


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intention that the Poles would retain their traditions and laws through the creation of the Kingdom of Poland. This would offer the basis for a future “unification of the Slavs within the Russian Empire,” which he saw as the prerequisite for the “unification of Europe”18 and lasting peace. Therefore, Staszic assigned the Slavs a pan-European mission, led by Poland and Russia. Indeed, Staszic accepted the political primacy of Russia among the Slavic people in view of contemporary power relations, but this was on no account synonymous for him with Poland as a second-rate entity. In a letter to the poet and literary critic Kajetan Koźmian, Staszic wrote: “Let us join Russia, let us enlighten, we take its power and it may take our enlightenment . . . people bend, may the civilization not bend.”19 This citation well summarizes Staszic’s understanding of Poland’s role within the empire: for him Russia stood, above all, for external power, for politically realistic strength. In contrast to this he saw Poland as characterized by internal strength, by values like “Enlightenment” and “Civilization.” The pan-European mission that he claimed for the Slavs was therefore based on role allocation: the Russian empire as executor, and Poland as bearer of the intrinsic idea. Staszic’s concept combined different currents of the Polish discussion about the empire. On the one hand, his emphasis on common Polish-Russian characteristics as well as his invocation of a common mission were substitutes for widespread hopes that were connected to the “Kingdom of Poland” and the person of Alexander I in the first years. The traditional antemurale conceptions were broken through a combination of disappointment about the West and an awareness of the true political circumstances.20 At the same time, his example shows that the traditional images of “We” and “Other” that had been handed down for centuries did not lose their impact within a few years: The common mission that Staszic conjured rested on the traditional image of Poland as the incorporation of the true idea that should be brought to the East. He had thus already formulated the central component of

Wydawn. Naukowe, 1954), 301–321, here, 317. See an analogous argument in “Uwagi do Ród ludzki,” in Ibid., 181–245, here, 214–224. 18 This and the following quote are from Staszic, Myśli, 321. 19 Staszic in a letter to Kajetan Koźmian, quoted from: Nowak, Między carem a rewolucją, 21. 20 See also Janusz Tazbir, Polskie przedmurze chrześcijańskiej Europy. Mity a rzeczywistość historyczna (Warsaw: Wydawn. Interpress, 1987), 105–117.

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specific Polish Slavism, which would have a decisive influence on the discussion of empire in emigration after 1831. Appearing a few years after Staszic’s considerations was another central text about the future shape of Europe and the Polish-Russian relationship: prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski’s Essai sur la diplomatie. Written between 1824 and 1827 and anonymously published in 1830 for the first time,21 it was not only a comprehensive analysis of international relations but also one of the last appeals for peaceful Polish coexistence with the Russian empire before the November uprising in 1830. Unlike any other author, he stood for the attempt to implement Polish interests by exerting influence on St. Petersburg policy after the disappearance of Poland-Lithuania from the map. Czartoryski—who, among other things, as a member of Alexander I’s secret committee had worked on plans for reforms of the Empire and had held the post of the Foreign Secretary from 1804—was considered a determined advocate of diplomatic methods of resolution and a European policy of alliances.22 While this also finds expression in his “Essai sur la diplomatie,” at the same time, a growing distance to imperial politics becomes apparent. In this essay, Czartoryski appeared to be deeply disappointed about the status quo of Europe after 1815. The Viennese Congress had led to a division of power among the victorious coalition forces in the name of Christianity and the European nations—and had completely ignored the rights of these very nations. The most drastic example for him was the division of Poland-Lithuania.23 In contrast, Czartoryski insisted on the universal validity of certain natural laws, including nations’ right to their own identity. Based on this, with reference to the “Grand

21 Essai sur la diplomatie. Manuscrit d’un Philhellène, publié par M. Toulouzan (Marseille and Paris: F. Didot, 1830). The posthumously published edition, which is not totally identical, was published in 1864, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Essai sur la diplomatie (Paris: Amyot, 1864). 22 For details on this topic, see Hans-Henning Hahn, Aussenpolitik in der Emigration. Die Exildiplomatie Adam Jerzy Czartoryskis 1830–1840 (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1978) (Studien zur Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. 10); Wacław Hubert Zawadzki, A Man of Honour. Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and Poland 1795–1831 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 1993); Jerzy Skowronek, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski 1770–1861 (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1994). 23 Czartoryski, Essai, 80–95. For details on the content of the essay, see also M[arian] K[amil] Dziewanowski, “Czartoryski and His Essai sur la Diplomatie,” Slavic Review 30, no. 3 (1971): 589–605; Andrzej Nowak, “Europa narodów—wizja księcia Adama jerzego Czartoryskiego,” Polski Przegląd Dyplomatyczny 1, no. 3(3) (2001): 179–206.


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Dessein” of the Duke of Sully, he developed the concept of a Europe consisting of federal states with a senate at their head.24 One of these federal states was supposed to be under Polish guidance, namely, within the borders of the Nobleman’s Republic of 1772. Claiming the former Eastern areas was for Czartoryski not only a natural part of the reparation for historical wrongdoing but also the logical conclusion of his description of the Russian Empire. He regarded constant expansion as its central sign, which did not lead, however, to internal stabilization, but rather decomposed the empire slowly from the inside. Rule and control over more and more non-Russian areas had led to an outward imperial policy and an internal autocratic system. For this reason Russia had become the victim of its own expansionism and a danger to Europe. As a way out of this development, Czartoryski appealed to the empire to turn away from its expansionist policy and to renounce the conquered Polish-Lithuanian areas. This step would win internal stability and a positive foreign-policy reputation: “It could, by apparent losses, in reality win and increase its moral and federal strength without losing anything of its material power. . . . This empire could become the benefactor instead of the horror of humanity.”25 Czartoryski defined the reemerged Poland as a potential ally of Russia: In terms of foreign policy it could be a connection to Western Europe, and internally the constitution of the kingdom represented the nucleus of a reform movement that could lead to the successive liberalization of the whole empire. In the long run, “A friend is worth more than a slave.”26 The essay marked a clear change in Czartoryski’s attitude toward the empire. The adviser to emperor Alexander I had become a sharp critic of imperial policy who no longer believed in the ability of the system to reform unless the basic course changed. Conditio sine qua non was the reestablishment of the Polish state, which he saw, as Staszic had, as a starting point for liberalization. At the same time, however, Czartoryski formulated no fundamental antagonism in his analysis. At that time he did not see Poland as showing a civilizing antemurale against another power. His positioning vis-à-vis the empire was based on state-political categories, on an analysis of international relations.

24 25 26

Czartoryski, Essai, 251–308. Ibid., 324–325. Ibid., 206.

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Hopes that the imperial system could be reformed, which were strongly tied to Alexander I and had weakened in the last period of his reign, visibly imploded in 1825. The death of the creator of the Kingdom of Poland, linked to suppression of the Decembrist uprising, led to lasting shifts within the Polish discourse about empire. Afterward, the Sejm, a central institutional symbol of Polish statehood, took up inquiries against the Polish “Patriotic Society” (Towarzystwo Patriotyczne) in 1827, because of the allegation of connections with Decembrist circles, Maurycy Mochnacki appealed for a determined fight against the empire in a text circulating anonymously in the kingdom. As long as Polish society stands under Russian sovereignty, there will be an omnipresent feeling of “the political and economic inconsistency of our existence.”27 This situation can be overcome only by the reestablishment of an independent Poland within the borders of 1772—with Russia, however, no agreement will be possible. “Russia” was not given any other differentiation by Mochnacki on this occasion—it was synonymous with tsarist rule, and therefore with hostility. The fundamentalist nature of Mochnacki’s statement lent vehement expression to the fury of wide circles of the population about the policy of the new emperor Nicholas I—it should nevertheless not obstruct the fact that other positions toward the empire still existed. This became clear in the first weeks of the November uprising in 1830/31. One of the central documents of this phase was Joachim Lelewel’s (1786–1861) “Draft for an Appeal of the Sejm to the Russians.”28 The text, published on January 25, 1831, in Warsaw and accompanied by an explanation of the dismissal of Nicholas I as ruler of Poland by the Sejm, showed an attempt to tie together the uprising against the imperial rule with the forging of new alliances. Lelewel’s draft expressed a bitterness that was equal that of Mochnacki. The hopes of 1815 are disappointed continually—the history of the rulers of Russia is a history “Despotism,”29 which emanated first from

27 Maurycy Mochnacki, “Głos obywatela z Poznańskiego do senatu Królewstwa Polskiego z okazji Sądu Sejmowego,” in Mochnacki, Powstanie narodu polskiego w roku 1830 i 1831. Opracował i przedmową poprzedził Stefan Kieniewicz, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1984), vol. 1, 337–346, here, 341. 28 “Projekt odezwy sejmowy do Rosjan,” in Polska. Dzieje i rzeczy jej. Rozpatrywane przez Joachima Lelewela, vol. 20 (Poznań: Nakł. Ksieg. J. K. Zupańskiego, 1864), 64–70. 29 Ibid., 66.


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Moscow, and later in imperial form from St. Petersburg. The response to such a policy could only be in the form of an armed uprising. However, it is interesting that Lelewel noted an “injustice” at the same time—it was actually the “Family Holstein-Gottorp” that had reached the throne “under the name of Romanov.”30 This enabled him to exclude the Russian population from the accusation, to include them as victims of the status quo, and thus to call for a collective revolt against the ruling injustice: “Rise for the sake of yourselves!”31 The hope to be able to forward one’s own, Polish, case in an alliance with the “other Russia” was also expressed in the emphatic acknowledgment of the Decembrists. They were described as “martyrs” for freedom who had risen against the “despotism of the tyrant” and had also been treated “barbarous”32 afterward just like the Poles. Along with this attempt to win the Russian population as a partner, the text appealed to the Ruthenians (Rusiny) as well as the Ukrainian and Belorussian inhabitants of the empire. They were approached as “brothers” just as the Russians and furthermore they were valued as “people” who had been “free from the beginning.”33 The time of the Rus’ was characterized by Lelewel as a phase of national freedom, which had been suppressed by “Muscovites with the help of the TatarsMongolians.” And his description of the Nobleman’s Republic was equally positive: While the life of the Ukrainians in Poland-Lithuania had been marked by the mutual granting of freedom, by “fraternization” and “amalgamation,” the Russian policy had always striven for dominance and suppression: “Poland never had in mind annexations or the expansion of borders as the Moscow tsardom had in mind. It never thought about dispossessing the subjects of the Moscow tsar of their rights and freedoms.” The argumentation corresponds to Lelewel’s basic political concept, his thesis of a primal democracy (gminowładztwo), which corresponds to the real being of all Slavs, whereas autocracy and despotism are something alien.34 In this respect, the differences to aristocratic-state-political

30

Ibid., 67–68. Ibid., 68. 32 Ibid., 67. 33 This and the following quote, ibid., 64. 34 For the history of the term “Gminowładztwo” see Franciszek Bronowski, Idea gminowładztwa w polskiej historiografii. Geneza i formowania się syntezy republikańskiej J. Lelewela (Lodz: LTN, 1969). For Lelewel see, among others, Joan S. Skurnowicz, Romantic Nationalism and Liberalism. Joachim Lelewel and the Polish National Idea 31

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strategies as represented by Czartoryski are not unexpected or surprising. In light of the timing of the appeal, however, it must be pointed out at the same time that Lelewel tried to build a bridge to potential allies by emphasizing the primal democracy of the Rus’ and the Polish-Ukrainian “common case” in a time of turmoil. Just as his differentiation of Russian population and “un-Russian” rule, this generates the perception of an empire that purposefully tried to use its internal heterogeneity. The strategic view should not be overlooked: criteria such as language or religion that would have pointed to differences between Poles and Ruthenians are not mentioned—their place is taken by the invocation of a common historical inheritance and a common “characteristic trait”: the quest for freedom. Despite this indeed selective and interest-focused perspective, Lelewel’s text makes quite clear that in the course of the November uprising there was increased attention to the ethnic heterogeneity of the empire. Indeed, the romantic literature had already turned toward the “Annexed Territories” (Ziemie Zabrane) after 1815 and had evoked the ideal of a complete unity of Poland by means of an eloquent description of the “Polish East.”35 But a selective political-strategic reference to the nonRussian population of the empire is hardly to be found in the memoranda and appeals of those years—the perception of Poland as the only victim of the empire dominated to a great extent. This generally typical

(Boulder: East European Monographs; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1981); Kornelia Hubrich-Mühle, Geschichtsauffassung und Geschichtsschreibung bei Joachim Lelewel, Magisterarbeit (Münster: Münster (Westf.), Univ., Mag.-Arb., 1986); Raszard Dorożyński, Joachim Lelewel. Człowiek—obywatel—uczony (Toruń: Oficyna Drukarska Ksiaznicy Miejskiej im. M. Kopernika w Toruniu, 1986); Stefan Kieniewicz, Joachim Lelewel (Warsaw: Ksiazka i Wiedza, 1990); Violetta Julkowska, “Lelewel i romantycy—spór o rozumienie prawdy historycznej,” in Przemysław Matusik and Krzysztof Marchlewicz, eds., Swoi i obcy. Stduia z dziejów myśli Wielkiej Emigracja (Poznań: IH UAM, 2004), 27–41. 35 Nina Taylor, “Adam Mickiewicz et la Lituanie: genèse du mythe litéraire,” in Beauvois, Les Confins, 69–83; Jacek Kolbuszewski, Kresy (Wroclaw: Wydawn. Dolnoślaskie, 1996); Stanisław Elie, Literature and Nationalism in Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, in association with School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 2000), 30–46; Werner Benecke, “Die Kresy—ein Mythos der polnischen Geschichte,” in Heidi Hein-Kirchner and Hans-Henning Hahn, eds., Politische Mythen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2006) (Tagungen zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, vol. 24), 257–267.


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“neglect of minorities”36 for the Europe of that time started to change now in the Polish discourse—a process that continued in exile.

1831–1863—Exile The failure of the uprising in 1831 led to a process that made history as the “Great Emigration” (Wielka Emigracja). From 1831 to 1847, about 11,000 Polish inhabitants left the empire. Most of them came from the Kingdom of Poland that had been under a permanent state of emergency since 1833. Paris turned out to be the emigrants’ center, as between 4,000 and 5,000 people gathered in the French capital. The phrase “Great Emigration” refers in this case less to the purely numerical size of exile than to its social composition and the claims that accompany it. Among those who left their own land (kraj) were the leading intellectual minds of Polish society as also reflected sociohistorically in the fact that about 75 percent of them belonged to the Szlachta. Despite one’s distance to the kraj one saw oneself as an embodiment of the Polish nation, as the center of the national discourse. Exile in the West was looked upon as a temporary state according to this self-image, as a national accumulation intending a quick return.37 In spite of the national concern that connected all of them, there were basic differences in the political concepts that were pursued, so that the emigration itself was divided into larger and smaller groups who sharply attacked each other from the beginning. The two largest ones were, on the one hand, the constitutional-monarchist camp led by Czartoryski, mostly subsumed after its domicile on Paris Île SaintLouis under the term “Hôtel Lambert,” and whose most important publication was the Third of May (Trzeci Maj, in 1839–1848). On the other hand, on the left spectrum of the emigration was the “Polish

36 Johannes Remy, Higher Education and National Identity. Polish Student Activism in Russia 1832–1863 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2000) (Bibliotheca Historica, vol. 57), 25. 37 There is an extensive literature on the “Great Emigration.” See, for example, Hans-Henning Hahn, “Die Organisation der polnischen ‘Grossen Emigration,’ ” in Theodor Schieder and Otto Dann, eds., Nationale Bewegung und soziale Organisation I. Vergleichende Studien zur nationalen Vereinsbewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts in Europa (Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1978), 131–281; and Sławomir Kalembka, Wielka emigracja. Polskie wychodźtwo polityczne w latach 1831–1862 (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1971).

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Democratic Society” (Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Polskie, TDP), the largest union that stated its positions primarily through the Polish Democrat (Demokrata Polski, in 1837–1862). Besides these two large antipodes were many other organizations. One of these, the Union of Polish Emigration (Zjednoczenie Emigracji Polskiej, ZEP), was founded by Joachim Lelewel in 1838, and concentrated a very heterogeneous spectrum of political points of view and strove to overcome the disunity of Polish exile. Its most important mouthpiece was the White Eagle (Orzeł Biały, 1839–1848).38 Two additional publications dedicated especially to the “Slavic question” are of interest in the context of this article: the Slav (Sławianin), which appeared for a period of three years, and the French-language Slavic Revue (Revue Slave), which was published solely in Paris in 1839. What cognitions about Polish self- and foreign descriptions in the empire can be extracted now on the basis of statements from the emigration community? This will be shown in summary in the four following points. Altogether against the “Russian Colossus?” Positioning toward the Empire as Criterion for Inclusion and Exclusion It is remarkable that at first the debate concerning the multiethnic empire was, primarily, a debate about Russia. In this connection, “Russia” meant the continuation of traditional anti-Russian clichés and antemurale conceptions that be found in all publications, accordingly corresponding to a positive self-description. Pairs of concepts such as “Asia” versus “Europe,” “barbarism” versus “civilization,” and “freedom” versus “northern despotism” formed oppositions that only

38 For the different organizations of the emigration and their political objectives, see (besides the literature already mentioned), for example, Peter Brock, Polish Revolutionary Populism: A Study in Agrarian Socialist Thought from the 1830s to the 1850s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); Alina Barszczewska-Krupa, Reforma czy rewolucja. Koncepcja przekstałcenia społeczeństwa polskiego w myśli politycznej Wielkiej Emigracji 1832–1863 (Lodz: Wydaw. Łódzkie, 1979); Stanisław Szostakowicz, Z dziejów Wielkiej Emigracji (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1991); Tomasz Kizwalter, O nowoczesności narodu. Przypadek Polski (Warsaw: Semper, 1999); Matusik and Marchlewicz, Swoj i obcy; Roland Gehrke, “Die polnische Nationalbewegung vor 1914 zwischen Individualismus und Kollektivismus,” in Karsten Brügemann, Thomas N. Bohn, and Konrad Maier, eds., Kollektivität und Individualität. Der Mensch im östlichen Europa. Festschrift für Prof. Dr. Norbert Angermann zum 65. Geburtstag (Hamburg: Kovac, 2001), 271–299.


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made “sense” through their mutual reference. They formed a coordinate system in which one was able to position oneself. Also belonging to this context was the repeatedly used image of the empire as a “colossus on feet of clay” whose current power position is based only on external strength, while Poland will win in the long term due to its “inner,” moral strength. Thus in an analysis of European relations, a February 1845 article in Demokrata Polski stated that Russia had dominated the power structure of the continent after 1815, while other governments had looked anxiously at the “northern colossus.”39 Only the Polish uprising in November 1831 had made clear that the “Russian colossus stands on feet of clay.”40 And the same could be read almost word for word in Trzeci Maj in a multipart series of articles about Russia a few months later: the empire has shown its whole “nakedness” before the eyes of Europe during the November uprising; therefore one should make use of this and furthermore open the eyes of the “official opinion of Europe”41 about the true Russia and its regime. The example of the topos of the “colossus on feet of clay” shows that certain decisive attributions between “we” and the “others” embodied by “Russia” existed across all political differences. This was also true for a statesman like Czartoryski, arguing stringent pragmatically until 1830. With the increasing duration of exile and in view of the repressive policy carried out at home under Nicholas I, increasingly essentialist revaluations of the character of Russia “as such” emerged in the Hôtel Lambert. While one remained loyal to the policy of alliances with West European governments, now, in the conservative discourse, the empire also stood for “barbarism” and “despotism.”42 At the same time, the parallels of the rigid self- and foreign descriptions to older positions in the imperial frame are remarkable. This is exemplified in the previously outlined considerations of Staszic about the allocation of roles between Poland as a bearer of the “inner idea” and Russia as an exterior executor of a Slavic “mission.” However, in exile the common Russian-Polish leadership described by Staszic became a specific Polish “mission” (posłannictwo)—the image common to all camps was that Poland was called to lead an All-Slavic

39 “Położenie względne głównych mocarstw europejskich,” Demokrata Polski, February 22, 1845, Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris (BPP), no. 9561. 40 Ibid. 41 “Rossia,” Trzeci Maj, July 26, 1845, BPP, no. 8267. 42 For details on this topic, see Nowak, Jak rozbić, 55–113; Hahn, Aussenpolitik.

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movement on account having suffered injustices as well as its position as the “traditional bearer” of enlightenment and civilization among the Slavic people.43 This finding also applies to the two explicit All-Slavic aligned magazines. Indeed, gradual differences can be spotted here—in particular, a stronger emphasis in the Revue Slave on the “foreign” character of the autocratic ruling form in the empire. One pointed out the alleged coinage of Russia through the Varangians, the rule of the Tatars, and, completely in the tradition of Lelewel, “German”-dominated rule by the Romanovs and contrasted this to the “Slavic idea,” which was presented as “Christian, grand, and civilized,”44 based on the mutual guarantee of freedom and independence. Eventually there was also no doubt here that only Poland would be able to help such an “idea” to take hold. As published in the Sławianin, in 1842, by Antoni Alfons Starzy, “Poland always watches over them [the Slavs] and their future, it is the center around which the friends of freedom will assemble by the agreed upon signal.”45 The self-historization of the emigration was part of this increasingly schematic discourse. With growing duration of the exile one began to conjure a specific Polish tradition of uprising, considering oneself as the last element of this. For instance, the Trzeci Maj evoked a string of three uprisings in the programmatic editorial of its first issue in 1839—the reform movement of the May 3, 1791, the 1794 Kościuszko uprising, and the 1830 November uprising—which was described as an ascending line because of growing support throughout the population. Now one was waiting for “one last mass war,” which, headed by the emigration, would lead the historical Polish duty to its destination: “Who believes in Poland, believes in uprising. Who does not believe in one, does not believe in the other. He has seceded from Poland and it has rejected him.”46 And in the Demokrata Polski one could read after the failure of the Cracow uprising: “Poland will carry out its duty. The confederation of Bar, Kościuszko, the year 1809, 1812, 1830, and 1846 are witnesses

43 44 45 46

Kuk, Orientacja; Nowak, Między carem a rewolucją. Revue Slave (Paris, 1839), BPP, no. 8298, 5. Sławianin, 3 vols. (Paris 1841–43), BPP, no. 16826, here vol. 2 (1842), 42. Editorial, Trzeci Maj, December 10, 1839, BPP, no. 8267.


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that the Polish spirit is alive and that Poland will not deny the great mission that was entrusted to it by destiny.”47 In view of such an extensive consensus about its own vocation among the Slavic people, a sharp line was drawn against the term “Pan-Slavism,” which was associated with Russian dominance. Statements pleading for a Polish-Russian balance under the aegis of St. Petersburg were banished using terms like “apostasy”;48 their authors were not only excluded from the discourse but also used to argue points in debates between the different groups. Thus the open letter of Adam Gurowski to Nicholas I, which appeared in the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung in September 1834, proved to be a real shock for the emigration because the author asked the emperor for amnesty, at the same time condemning the uprising in 1830/31 and denying Poland’s right to state independence.49 This was particularly true for Gurowski’s former companions, the TDP. Still more than twenty years later they emphasized their distance with him, calling him a “deserter from the national flag” who had defected to “the enemy camp.”50 In 1843, the Orzeł Biały did not miss the occasion of the appearance of Wacław Jabłonowski’s work La France et la Pologne, le Slavianisme et la dynastie polonaise,51 which was a plea for a great Slavic empire under the guidance of a reformed Russia as a bulwark against the Western degeneration of values, to point out the fact that the author was a coeditors of Trzeci Maj at the same time. With undisguised malicious pleasure, one thanked Jabłonowski for demonstrating “more frankly

47 “Demokracya Polska do Europy,” Demokrata Polski, January 16, 1847, BPP, no. 9561. 48 Trzeci Maj, “Lettre d’un gentilhomme polonais au prince de Meternich,” August 14, 1846, BPP, no. 8267, and Demokrata Polski, “O renegacji Jabłonowskiego,” vol. 5 (1842–1843), BPP, no. 9561, 203–204. 49 For details on this topic, see Andrzej Nowak, “Między narodową zdradą a “rossyjskim socjalizm”—myśl polityczna Adama Gurowskiego,” in Studia z dziejów polskiej myśli politycznej, vol. 5 (Toruń: Dom Wydawniczy ELIPSA, 1992), 123–147; Kuk, Orientacja, 174–192, and, recently, on the basis of sources from Russian archives Henry Głębocki, “Adama Gurowskiego patriotyzm rosyjsko-słowiański (o kontekstach apostazji narodowej—w świetle materialów z archiwów rosyjskich,” Arcana 74–75, no. 2/3 (2007): 6–54. 50 “Rossya i Europa—Polska prez X.Y.Z.,” Demokrata Polski, December 7, 1858, BPP, no. 9561. 51 Wacław Jabłonowski, La France et la Pologne. Le Slavianisme et la dynastie polonaise (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1843).

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than others” the true purposes of the “politics of the Polish royalists.”52 The so-accused camp of Czartoryski reacted to the theses of Jabłonowski as vehemently as the TDP had in the case of Gurowski—in a whole flood of articles dissociating themselves very resolutely from the present comrade-in-arms.53 The examples demonstrate an increasing severity and dogmatization of the emigration discourse. In this black-and-white point of view, there was no place for gray areas—the position that one took toward the empire had become a highly ideologically charged criterion for inclusion and exclusion, a strategic argument to position oneself in the struggle for the leading opinion. In this sense, the Polish discourse approximated the West European debate, where categorizations were often linked to the position someone took toward Russia as well. An anonymous text from 1833 formulated the point: “The dangers from Russia that threaten Europe and first of all Germany have almost become a fixed term in recent political writings. . . . He [the author] protests in advance against the opinion that his text pretends to be of official or semiofficial nature or that it did not result from one’s own free will. . . . But certainly, such protest and refusal will hardly be recognized in our days, clouded by controversy and partiality. The one who stands up for a foreign cause has to accept being accused of serving a foreign purpose, being paid by the authorities, and having an unpatriotic attitude. Those agitating against Russia and causing quite a stir strive to be regarded as friends of the fatherland and freedom; so the one who contradicts them and speaks for the accused might seem to be the enemy of the fatherland!”54

52 “La France et la Pologne. Le Slavianisme et la dynastie polonaise. Par le Comte Vinceslas Jablonowski,” Orzeł Biały, February 20, 1843, BPP, no. 8929. 53 Andrzej Nowak, “The Concept of Russian Panslavism in the Political Thought of the Great Emigration,” Acta Poloniae Historica 73 (1996): 29–54; Kuk, Orientacja, 202–212. Concerning the development and the position of pan-Slavic approaches in the Polish discourse, besides the literature already mentioned, see also Daniel Beauvois, “U źródeł panslawizmu: Polskie oświecenie i słowiańszczyzna (1795–1820),” Revue des etudes slaves 51, no. 1–2 (1978): 33–41. 54 Russland und die Civilisation (Merseburg, 1833), 3–4. In the preface to this anonymously published text, the author reveals only that he “is from Germany” (ibid., 6). The explanatory statement emphasizes once more the rigid climate of opinion: “He [the author] had reservations about signing his name and strictly preserved his anonymity, partly because that alone enables him to avoid suspicions that he intended to gain something for himself, that some kind of selfishness had led him to these examinations, partly because his official position demands that he not expose himself to accusations against his person by the despotic liberal criticism, which relentlessly


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Terminologically this endeavor toward separation from any appearance of cooperation with the empire found its expression in the term “Slavism” (słowianofilstwo), associated with the liberation of all Slavic peoples under the guidance of Poland, opposing and sharply distinct from the term “Pan-Slavism,” defined as imperial-Russian.55 Limits of Common Ground: Internal Diversity and the Relationship to the “Other Russia” This very static picture of a dominating antagonism between a “Polish idea” and a “Russian idea,”56 as the Demokrata Polski strikingly termed it in an article on “The Position of Poland in the Slavic World” in 1844, illustrates only one part of Polish self- and foreign descriptions in the empire. Although this dominates the picture because of its constancy, it should not conceal heterogeneity within and between the allegedly homogeneous camps of the emigration. On the one hand, the connection between basic political concepts and the respective positioning vis-à-vis the empire must be considered here. Indeed, by reading comparatively, it is not difficult to constitute common terms such as a Polish “mission” or a description of Russia as “uncivilized.” However, if we contextualize these common terms, then it becomes clear that they were connected in part with fundamentally different things. The “mission” of a rebellion of the “suppressed European peoples” against the existing status quo, how it was supported amongst others by the TDP, had nothing in common with the “mission” of a state supporting Catholicism and the restoration of monarchy except for the outside label. While, for example, the Demokrata Polski saw the reason for the failure of the 1830 uprising in the circumstance that it was no social, antifeudal upheaval,57 according to the Trzeci Maj, the

disapproves of views and attitudes and is addicted to persecution, which is not unusual in our times” (ibid., 5). The book should not be mistaken for the translated edition of Adam Gurowski’s La civilisation et la Russie, which was published for the first time in 1840 in French in St. Petersburg, and the following year in a German edition, Adam Gurowski, Russland und die Civilisation (Leipzig: H. Hunger, 1841). 55 See, for example, Joachim Lelewel, “Der Panslavismus und Polen. Sendschreiben an die Grenzboten,” Der Grenzbote 2 (1843): 681–691. 56 Demokrata Polski, “Stanowski Polski w Słowiańczyznie,” November 16, 1844, BPP, no. 9561. 57 “Charakter przyszłego powstania,” Demokrata Polski, October 25, 1845, BPP, no. 9561.

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main shortcoming was the absence of a “visible king,”58 who would have fought back against the external enemies and would have served as an integrating center in the interior. There was a unity in the opposition to autocratic Russia—but no common positive self-description existed. On the other hand, the picture differentiates itself if we look at the reference of the left and democratic spectrum of the emigration to the “other Russia.” Repeatedly, commemoration ceremonies were held in France and England to honor the Decembrist revolt. The speeches there differentiated between tsarism on the one hand and the Russian population as a potential ally on the other hand, as had already been reflected in Lelewel’s draft appeal to the Russians in 1831. One writer in the Orzeł Biały in August 1845 recalled the “Russian martyrs,” who rendered outstanding service not only to their native country “but also to all mankind in their striving to throw off the outrageous yoke of the Germanic-Mongolian despotism under which the Russian people groan.”59 Besides this, the press of the TDP and the ZEP willingly published active exchanges with prominent Russian émigrés such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen. In this context, a question arises concerning the extent to which there were actually common elements in content beyond this verbal fraternization or whether it was primarily rhetoric, which was far distant from a material core. In what respect did Herzen or Bakunin primarily function as Russian “principal witnesses,” who confirmed their own theses about the character of Russian rule and to whom one could refer at the same time, to respond to the reproach of an overall disparaging of the entire Russian Empire? An example of this presumption is the breach that came between Demokrata polski and Herzen’s publication Kolokol (The Bell) at the end of the 1850s. Responding to Herzen’s initial agreement with the reform politics of Alexander II, Demokrata polski denounced the revolutionary alliance. However, interestingly, in justifying the national differences that had been deemed irrelevant before, Demokrata polski stated in January 1859: by hoping for improvements on the part of autocratic power, Kolokol proved to be “truthful Russian.”60 Herzen’s behavior was described

58

Editorial, Trzeci Maj, December 10, 1839, BPP, no. 8267. “Dziewiętnasta rocznica śmierci męczenników rossyjskich,” Orzeł Biały, August 18, 1845, BPP, no. 8929. 60 “Kołokoł,” Demokrata Polski, January 15, 1859, BPP, no. 9561. 59


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as typical of the Russian hope for “crowned reformers”61—the Poles, however would be cured of this faith for a long time, and if the time for change came, the people themselves would act. The position taken by the Kolokol would show that there could be an alliance only in the face of a “rude tsar”62 such as Nicholas I—after his death this obviously would no longer be possible. The breach between the TDP and Herzen marks the limits of the often sworn Polish-Russian revolutionary alliance after nearly thirty years of exile.63 National categories, previously declared secondary to the common striving for a social revolution, rapidly regained their power of interpretation. Specifically, for the Polish side an obvious hardening of the situation has to be acknowledged. While hopes for a reform “from above” were associated with Alexander I after 1815, now this no longer seem conceivable. The liberalization of imperial policy under Alexander II did not resonate in the Polish discourse anymore. Heterogeneity as a Strategy: The Perception of a Multiethnic Empire First of all, if one seeks a more in-depth look at the empire beyond the dominant debate about Russia, the multiethnic structure of the Russian empire is clearly second-ranked in comparison with the attention paid to the “Russian question.” Nevertheless, this does not mean that it played no role—in particular the Ziemie Zabrane, the former Eastern areas of the Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita, became a central subject of emigration discourse. This was caused, on the one hand, by the failure of the November uprising. It was necessary to find potential allies for the fight against imperial rule after 1831—and this role fell primarily to the “Polish East”. On the other hand, the increased attention was a reaction to the national manifestations that arose in Ukrainian areas in 1840.64 From the perspective of the emigration they represented

61

Ibid. Ibid. 63 On this topic, see also Andrzej Walicki, Aleksander Hercen, kwestia polska i geneza pewnych streotypów (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1991). 64 See, for example, Kerstin S. Jobst, “Die ukrainische Nationalbewegung bis 1917,” in Frank Golczewski, ed., Geschichte der Ukraine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 156–172; Andreas Kappeler, Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994); Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 62

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opportunity and risk at the same time—but, in any case, they demanded the articulation of attitudes toward this new phenomenon. There was broad mutual consent among all decisive groups of the emigration that Poland could become reestablished only in the borders of 1772. Those who opposed this consensus were quickly accused of “apostasy.” For example, Michał Kubrakiewicz favored a Piast, westward-directed concept including the renunciation of the Ziemie Zabrane.65 Maurycy Mochnacki expressed this self-image soon after the suppression of the November uprising: “Poland was the republic of the territories of the crown, of Lithuania and of Ruthenia. In borders other than these it is not conceivable for us! To reconquer, to retrieve Lithuania and Ruthenia will be the purpose of every uprising on the shores of the Vistula. . . . Today, everlasting Poland in its eternal borders is of as much concern for the masses of the crown as for the nobility in the so-called Annexed Territories. . . . Northern and Southeastern Poland, that is, Lithuania and Ruthenia.”66 The justification of the continuous claim of the lost Eastern areas of the Nobleman’s Republic was based on the building of a positive tradition as a general rule—one evoking a common, “golden” past that was in contrast to the present “joke” of Russian-imperial rule. Thus in Paris on March 25, 1832, Joachim Lelewel gave a speech in memory of the previous year’s uprising in the Lithuanian and Ruthenian territories. On this occasion, he appealed to those present to remember the “ties”67 that connected Poland and Lithuania with the Ruthenians. He praised the former Rzeczpospolita as the “close unification of two peoples”68 who would historically always have defended their freedom against the German crusaders and the Muscovites. At the same time, the historical role of the Szlachta in the camp of democratic and left groups was severely criticized. The Polish great land owners were accused of having pursued their own interests exclusively and thus of having considerably contributed to the Polish-Ruthenian conflicts. The developing national consciousness in the Ukrainian areas led to the conclusion that one had to learn from earlier errors and that

65 Michał Kubrakiewicz, Uwagi polityczne i religijne (Bordeaux: W. Drukarni Henryka Faye, 1839). See also Kuk, Orientacja, 197–202. 66 Mochnacki, Powstanie narodu polskiego, vol. 1, book 1, 61–62. 67 “Mowa na obchodzie rocznicy powstania Litwy i ziem Ruskich, miana w Paryżu 25 marca 1832 roku,” Polska. Dzieje i rzeczy jej, vol. 20, 118–122, here, 118. 68 Ibid.


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the future strategy would have to include positive offers to the Ukrainian farmers. A common link was seen in the allegedly original quest of “the Ukrainian farmer” for a “Slavic primal democracy,” whose counterpart was the topos of the “Muscovite autocracy.”69 A similarly decisive criticism of the role of the Szlachta cannot be found in the publications of the Hôtel Lambert. The constitutionalmonarchist basic orientation caused an alternation between the promise to give land to farmers and assurances to protect the traditional rights of the nobility concerning the farm question, which was especially crucial in the former Eastern areas in terms of possible mobilization of the population there.70 Besides, the Lithuanians and Ruthenians still received no special attention in the activities of the Czartoryski camp in the first years. Indeed, in the 1834 essay “De l’avenir de la Russie et de l’Europe,” they were mentioned amongst others as potential allies against the empire;71 nevertheless, not until the 1840s did the prince’s decidedly “Ukrainian policy”72 develop. In 1845, on the occasion of the anniversary of the November uprising, Czartoryski expressed himself for the first time in detail: There are millions of inhabitants in our country against whom some among us have unjustified prejudices. We must remove these prejudices and get rid of them. . . . Let us respect their rituals, their customs, and their ethnic languages, which are so similar to ours. The Ruthenians, just as the Lithuanians, are our brothers and form one nation with us, even if they groan under the foreign yoke. . . . Our histories have been tied together for centuries; mutual helpfulness, the instinct of the noble mind, of friendship and justice have united our tribes as one people; mistakes committed on both sides and fatal misunderstandings have unsettled these marvelous and spontaneous bonds, but the old memories and traditions have not lost their power; the mistakes will not recur anymore and now the common sufferings, the common interests,

69 On this, see also “O ludzie ukraińskim,” Demokrata Polski 4 (1842), BPP, no. 9561, 69–72. The directed separation of the Rus’ from Russia is also emphasized by Jiří Vykoukal, “Territorial Contexts of the Polish Reflection on Russia,” in Tadayuki Hayashi and Hiroshi Fukuda, eds., Regions in Central and Eastern Europe. Past and Present (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007) (21st Century COE Program Slavic Eurasian Studies, no. 15), 109–121. 70 See Hahn, Aussenpolitik, 145–150. 71 See Nowak, Europa narodów, 199–206. 72 Marceli Handelsman, Ukraińska polityka ks. Adama Czartoryskiego przed wojną Krymską. Rozwój narodowości nowoczesnej, vol. 2 (Warsaw: Nakł. Gebethnera i Wolffa, 1937).

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hans-christian petersen and the same hope for freedom in harmonious brotherliness will unite us more narrowly than ever before.73

Czartoryskis admission of mistakes as well as his call for respect for the independent traditions of the Ruthenians and the Lithuanians represented a remarkably liberal position in the Polish discourse in which the existence of these peoples had long been considered merely a marginal note. But at the same time there was also no doubt for him that the one “nation” and the one “people” he had spoken about was the Polish one. On another occasion he declared: “It is for sure that above all, I am Polish, and my whole life may serve as proof of this; but at the same time I am also Ruthenian and Ukrainian.” The day will come, Czartoryski continued, when “our swords will unite in one Polish bunch.”74 The increased perception of the peoples of the Ziemie Zabrane in the emigration discourse was not synonymous with equivalence. Until the 1850s there was broad consensus about the fact that the Poles formed the real nation (naród), while the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians were regarded not as nationalities on their own but as parts of that one real nation.75 From a paternalistic perspective there was an unspoken consensus about the cultural superiority of the Polish nation under whose care one promised certain autonomy rights to the Ukrainians. This “paternal” view was articulated in an 1851 article published in Demokrata polski: In the beginning, the behavior of Ruthenian subjects of the Austrian Empire during the revolution of 1848 was severely criticized and confronted with the topos of “the Polish freedom fighter”: “We went from the battleground into exile, while the Ruthenians expressed their gratefulness for the reestablishment of peace in a deputation to Vienna. This already exceeds the borders of insanity—it is a crime!”76 This insistently clarified the point that the future of the Ruthenians could only be on the side and under the custody of Poland. In this context, criticism of the former role of the Szlachta was

73 Adam Czartoryski, 1845, quoted in Handelsman, Ukraińska polityka, 108. On this, see also Leszek Kuk, “Le ‘slavisme polonais’: la cohabitation des Polonais, des Russes et des Ruthènes,” in Beauvois, Les Confins, 157–173. 74 Adam Czartoryski, May 3, 1855, quoted in Sławomir Kalembka, “Les territoires de l’Est dans la pensée politique polonaise de 1831 à 1870,” in Beauvois, Les Confins, 145–157, here, 150, n. 10. 75 This appraisal is also made by Kalembka, Les territoires, 149. 76 “Znaczenie rewolucyjne Rusi,” Demokrata Polski, May 11, 1851, BPP, no. 9561.


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connected with an insistence on a Polish leading role: “The farmers wait for a handshake from the Szlachta, they wait for this one expression: Brothers, . . . moved by the magical sound of this expression, they will rise like one man, and with one voice they will proclaim: ‘Against the Muscovites! Against the Muscovites!’” At the end of this common fight there should be “social individuality” (indywidualność społeczna) for the Ruthenians—“political individuality” (indywidualność polityczna) for a reestablished Poland. Strategic exposure to the subject proved to be common among the different camps, oriented toward the development of the basic external conditions. Revision of the announcements of the emigration shows a clear conjuncture of the “fraternal peoples” as well as Slavism in general in phases of Polish (1830/31 and 1846) or all-European (1848/49) uprisings. Thus, Lelewel himself not only turned toward the “Ukrainian compatriots”77 from his exile in Brussels in February and March 1846, but also toward the “Serbs, Czechs, and other Slavs.”78 During the European revolution of 1848 as well as at the time of the Slavic Congress in Prague, several articles concerning the question of Slavism appeared in the Demokrata Polski; they strictly rejected Austro-Slavic concepts and instead propagated an uprising of the Slavic people under the guidance of Poland.79 And within the scope of his diplomatic activities, in the same year Adam Czartoryski sent several emissaries to Galicia to establish local contacts and to promote the concepts of the Hôtel Lambert. He gave instructions to collect information about the Ruthenian national movement and to isolate those who would fuel hatred against Poland. The aim was to emphasize common interests and the fact that the

77 “Komitet narodowy Polski. Rodacy Ukrainy i innych ziem ruskich,” March 3, 1846, Polska. Dzieje i rzeczy jej, vol. 20, 478–482. 78 “Komitet narodowy Polski do Słowian,” March 25, 1846, ibid., 423–424. 79 “Słowianizm, Polacy i inni słowianie,” December 19, 1848; “Słowianie,” December 23, 1848, Demokrata Polski 11 (1847–1848), BPP, no. 9561, 147, 179–180, 187–188. On the Slav Congress and Austro-Slavism, see, among others, Lawrence D. Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Andreas Moritsch, ed., Der Austroslavismus: ein verfrühtes Konzeptz zur politischen Neugestaltung Mitteluropas (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995) (Schriftenreihe des Internationalen Zentrums für europäische Nationalismus- und Minderheitenforschung, vol. 1); Mortisch, ed., Der Prager Slavenkongress 1848 (Vienna: Bóhlau, 2000) (Buchreihe des Institutes für den Donauraum und Mitteleuropa, vol. 7), including a focus on Polish positions toward the congress (see Antoni Cetnarowicz, “Die Polen und der Prager Slavenkongress,” 103–114).

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Ruthenians “will find solicitousness only in Europe . . . under a Polish flag, without which they will only become the prey of Moscow.”80 The course of the 1846 uprising as well as the year following the 1848 European revolution made it clear that the strategic considerations of the emigration did not reach the consignees. The relationship between the Polish Szlachta and the Ukrainian farmers remained distant and was characterized by dependency on the great land owners.81 Despite this, they played an important role in the considerations of the Polish exile, albeit from a selective and strategic perspective. In contrast to the Ziemie Zabrane, those areas of the empire lying east of the Urals experienced almost no specific attention. Geopolitically, they lay beyond the territories which Poland claimed for itself. And at the level of descriptions of “Us” and “Them,” they were usually summarized under the term “Asia,” which not only represented a geographical demarcation but also carried a determined negative connotation at the semantic level. Only the Third May dedicated a series of more detailed articles in 1845 to the internal and external conditions of the Russian Empire; Siberia was described as a “colony” of Russia, which was the object of economic-military exploitation, and at the same time as an “empty,” uncivilized area: “However, East of the Urals extends another immeasurable, enormous desert (pustynia). . . . That is the area of Asian Russia, segregated and isolated from the remaining state by the natural barrier of the Urals, closed and separate in its natural borders, and, at the same time, as a convenient tool serving despotism, indispensably for the existence of Russia . . . one can comprehend it in no other way than as a colony (kolonja).”82

80

Adam Czartoryski, December 1848, quoted in Handelsman, Ukraińska polityka,

119. 81 For details on this topic, see Beauvois, Le noble, le serf, et le révizor; for the imperial discourse and politics on the “Ukrainian question,” see, for example, Henryk Głębocki, Fatalna sprawa. Kwestia polska w rosyjskiej myśli politycznej (1856–1866) (Kraków, 2000); Głębocki, Kresy Imperium. Szkice i materiały polityki Rossji wobec jej peryferii (XVIII–XXI wiek) (Kraków: Arcana, 2006); Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question. The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2003); Michail Dolbilov and Aleksej Miller, eds., Historiia Rossika. Okrainy rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2006). 82 “Rossia,” Trzeci Maj, August 9, 1845, BPP, no. 8267.


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The Common Concept of the Empire as the Enemy: The West as the Third Party The overall picture sketched in the publications of the Russian Empire reveals remarkable parallels to the picture of Russia in Western Europe. From the beginning, the term “Eastern Europe,” in general understood as a synonym for “Russia” and developed in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, denoted not only a geographic category but also included certain other connotations, mostly representing degradation in the sense of “backwardness,” compared with the West European model of development, which was understood as the norm.83 Central elements of this contemporary West European view on “Eastern Europe” respectively “Russia” can also be found in the publications of the “Great Emigration.” Therefore a question arises concerning the extent to which purposeful attempts were made to tie in with this discourse in order to reach a higher level of understanding for their own claims by stressing a common concept of the enemy. The active reception of West European publications on the empire can be rated as an indication of this assumption. Travelogues such as Astolphe de Custine’s La Russie en 1839 (Russia in 1839) were discussed in detail and cited as allegedly authentic voices approving their own theses. Demokrata Polski published a six-page review of Custine’s book, which while pointing out some historiographical mistakes in the work, thus advising readers not to “look for historical facts”84 in the text, but that nevertheless, did not change the very positive tone summarized in the estimation that one had to be “grateful” to the author for the “interesting details that he presents with broad knowledge.”85 The Trzeci Maj was likewise affirmative, calling for “distribution” of

83

Among others, see Dieter Groh, Russland und das Selbstverständnis Europas. Ein Beitrag zur europäischen Geistesgeschichte (Neuwied: H. Luchterhand,, 1961); Hans Lemberg, “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom ‘Norden’ zum ‘Osten’ Europas,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985): 48–91; Egbert Jahn, “Wo befindet sich Osteuropa?” Osteuropa 40 (1990): 418–440; Larry Wolf, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Michel Cadot, La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle francaise 1839–1856 (Paris: Fayard, 1967); Kuk, Orientacja, 12–68; Kuk, Wielka Emigracja, 50–94. 84 “Rossja przedstawiona przez P. Custine,” Demokrata Polski 14, October 20, 1843, BPP, no. 9561. 85 Ibid.

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the book “between the Western peoples” so that they “may see against which regime Poland will soon rise up again.”86 Moreover there was a constant striving to present one’s own demands as part of a common European request, whereupon one addressed oneself primarily to the main arena of the “Great Emigration” to France. An example of this is the Slavic Revue. Explaining why a French-language periodical would publicize the “Slavic question,” it referred, on the one hand, to French society’s low level of knowledge about the Slavic peoples; but, on the other hand, it especially emphasized the common goal that would exist between the French people and the Slavs: France would stand for many years at the “head of the European movement,”87 at the peak of “civilization” and the “Christian idea,” and it would therefore gain the attention of the Slavic peoples, who might be hindered in their development at the moment, but would in principle be carriers of the same ideas. There were numerous efforts to build such ideological bridges in all camps of the emigration, whether in the lectures of Adam Mickiewicz at the Collège de France in which he appealed for a view of “the matter of Slavdom with the eyes of the French,”88 or in appeals to the “German nation” to defend as one the “light of the European civilization” against the “absolutism and obscurantism of northern despotism,”89 or in the numerous diplomatic initiatives of Czartoryski to reach an international arrangement with the Western powers90—it was always a matter of finding allies by stressing both common concerns and a collective image of the enemy. Herein may also lie an explanation for the inflexibility

86 “Dzieło Margrabiego Custina, o Rossyi. Tajemnice Rossyjskie (Mystères de la Russie),” Trzeci Maj, July 6, 1844, BPP, no. 8267. 87 Revue Slave (Paris, 1839), BPP, no. 8298, 1–2. 88 Adam Mickiewicz, Literatura słowiańska. Kurs trzeci i czwarty (Dzieła, Tom XI) (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1955), 332. On this topic, see also Krzysztof Rutkowski, “Frankreich im Denken von Mickiewicz,” in Zdzisław Krasnodębski and Stefan Garsztecki, eds., Sendung und Dichtung. Adam Mickiewicz in Europa (Hamburg: Krämer, 2002), 171–187. 89 “Das Polnische Nationalkomitee in Paris. An die deutsche Nation” (Paris, April 30, 1832), in Krzysztof Dybciak, ed., Polen im Exil. Eine Anthologie (Frankfurt/Main: Polnische Bibliothek, 1988), 97–102, here, 97, 100. 90 Hahn, Aussenpolitik; Hans-Henning Hahn, “Die Diplomatie des Hôtel Lambert 1831–1847,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 21 (1973): 345–375. See also appeals to French politicians on the occasion of the 1846 uprising, for example, on Zygmunt Krasiński, Jerzy Fiećko, “Obraz Rosji w ‘francuskich’ memoriałach Zygmunta Krasińskiego,” Grzegorz Kotlarski and Marek Figura, eds., Oblicza wschodu w kulturze polskiej (Poznań: Wydawn. Poznańskie, 1999), 419–437.


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of some attributions, recalling, for example, the categorical rejection of Alexander II’s reforms by Demokrata polski: Only a demonized Russia served the purpose, which it should have for the mobilization of the West. Therefore the focus was on emphasizing homogeneity, the empire became a strategic argument for Western public opinion, which in the situation of exile had developed into a third party in the relationship between the Polish emigration and imperial rule.

“Us” and “Them?” Homogeneity and Diversity The topics of Polish self- and foreign descriptions in the empire examined in this article are part of a much broader spectrum. Polish subjects not only emigrated from the empire to the West but also they migrated within the cities of the empire that were already developed during the partitions of Poland-Lithuania and then increasingly after 1831. Above all, at the universities in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan’ numerous students and teachers were Poles91—and it would be a most interesting task to compare their understanding of the empire to that of the Paris emigration. However, interesting conclusions also result from considerations of the Kingdom of Poland and the “Great Emigration,” not least because Western exile was the only place after 1831 where Poles could speak freely without being censored by imperial policy. Self- and foreign descriptions moved between the opposite poles of homogeneity and heterogeneity. At first glance, overall, especially anti-Russian, common characteristics appear to dominate. Against the relatively homogeneous description of Russia as a place of “barbarism” and “despotism,” there seems to exist an equally closed self-description as a bulwark and outpost of “European civilization.” Moreover, unity dominated the appearance of the Ziemie Zabrane: the demand for a restoration of the borders of the old nobility republic was for the most

91 Remy, Higher Education; Pol’skie professora i studenty v universitetach Rossii (XIX-načalo XX v.), Kazan, October 13–15, 1993 (Warsaw: UN-O, 1995); Jan Kusber, Eliten- und Volksbildung im Zarenreich während des 18. und der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Studien zu Diskurs, Gesetzgebung und Umsetzung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004); Trude Maurer, Hochschullehrer im Zarenreich. Ein Beitrag zur russischen Sozialund Bildungsgeschichte (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), 223–230; for 1864–1915, see also Andrzej Chwalba, Polacy w służbie Moskali (Warsaw and Kraków: Wydawn. Nauk. PWN, 1999).

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part undisputed among the leading groups of the Polish discourse. While the developing national articulations in the “Polish East” were indeed pursued carefully, they were eventually examined from a utilitarian perspective. On closer inspection, however, cracks appear in this seemingly clearly arranged picture. Above all, the diachronic perspective makes this clear: during the first years after the founding of the Kingdom of Poland, the cooperative strategy of Alexander I continued to resonate broadly in the Polish population—imperial policy and the Polish perception of the empire were in agreement. The deterioration of this relationship after 1825 thus led to downright rigidification in exile: positions such as Staczic’s concept of a common Polish-Russian “mission” were now proscribed with terms like “apostasy.” The empire was no longer seen as a reference framework for possible change, but instead became a negatively occupied concept per se whose assessment could decide about inclusion or exclusion from the discourse. The discussions in exile became noticeably static, while the concepts of “empire” and “Poland” became normatively charged. One reason for this rigidification is the situation of the emigration. Distance to the actual reference area, the kraj, also grew with the cumulative duration of exile; knowledge about events at home decreased; and images, now perceived from a distance, hardened. This phenomenon, which can also be observed in other emigration experiences92 became explicit in 1846 and 1848—expectations connected with the upheaval in the exile debates no longer had much in common with their actual course. Instead those in emigration began to historicize themselves, which meant turning their eyes away from the present and toward an evocation of the past. On the other hand, the situation of the emigration led in reverse to localization in the political coordinate system of the host country—not for the purpose of a lasting establishment (this was not intended in the self-concept of the “Great Emigration”), but to influence public opinion in service of their “own cause.” And this drew the focus likewise to the construction of homogeneity instead of to the search for

92 See, for example, Jerzy Kochanowskis, “Analyse der Erinnerungen an die Kresy nach 1945: Kochanowski, Jerzy, Paradoxe Erinnerungen an die Kresy,” in Hein-Kirchner and Hahn, Politische Mythen, 267–278.


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heterogeneities—a very explicit picture of the enemy was seen as the basis of successful persuasion. Nevertheless, at the same time, solidification of the discourse came along with the “discovery” of imperial heterogeneity. During the years of the emigration the multiethnic structure of the empire experienced increasing attention, even if from a paternalistically strategic perspective as a rule. This confirms that the question of Polish positions within the empire is one not only of the vertical relation between periphery and center but also of the horizontal level, the relations between the different imperial regions. In addition, there were fights for positioning within “one’s own.” The social concepts of the different groups of the Polish emigration were too differentiated to simply place an equal sign between certain concepts used by all. Moreover, there were repeated endeavors, at least in the democratic and left spectrum, to build a bridge to the “other Russia”—even though initially Alexander II’s government made it clear how fragile this alliance was. However, this does not change the fact that a high degree of heterogeneity appeared and that the conflict lines were along not only national allocations. The same can be said about the concepts of Czartoryski, who, at least until the time of the November uprising, argued not with essentialist concepts about “the Russians” and “the Poles” but instead thought in the supranational categories of a European balance of power. The categories of self-descriptions and foreign descriptions in the discourse of the Polish elites were complicated and cannot be simply forced into the model of a Polish-Russian antagonism.93 “Us and “Them” did not concern clearly separable collective group contrasts but ascriptions that resulted from the strategies of individuals or groups, and therefore were subject to constant processes of change and struggle for the leading opinion.

93 For example, this image still dominates in the anthology Polen und der Osten. Texte zu einem spannungsreichen Verhältnis (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp-Verl, 2005), ed. Andrzej Chwalba. In another example, Klaus Zernack’s monograph on the history of interrelations between Poland and Russia emphasizes national differences, for instance, stating that “Polish-Russian antagonism” could be focused on the contrast between an “imperial and an emancipatory concept of the nation” after 1815. Zernack opposes Pushkin and Mickiewicz as well as Lelewel and Karamzin as representatives of these two concepts. See Klaus Zernack, Polen und Russland. Zwei Wege einer europäischen Geschichte (Frankfurt/Main and Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1994), 327.

SIBERIAN MIDDLE GROUND: LANGUAGES OF RULE AND ACCOMMODATION ON THE SIBERIAN FRONTIER Sergey Glebov

In recent years historical studies of Siberia have experienced a degree of rejuvenation. Benefiting from new interest in imperial borderlands and a rich historiography, these studies were also strengthened by the newly accessible archives in the case of the Western scholars, and by the emergence of local interest in the history of governance in the case of their Russian counterparts. The emerging field of “new Siberian studies” can roughly be divided into three large blocks. The first, taking stock of political history of governance in late imperial Russia, focuses on the regimes of governors and general-governors; the second, inspired by regional history and the history of symbolic geography, explores the transformations of the image of Siberia through studies of travelogues, exhibitions, visits and deputations. The third, most exciting in its promise, is the emergence of Russian “indigenous studies,” which explore the relationships between the native peoples of Siberia and the state and society of both imperial Russia and the USSR.1 The problem of the collision of languages of self-description and description in the Russian Empire can be well illustrated by examples from the history of the native peoples of Siberia. In his path-breaking work, Yuri Slezkine explored representations of the so-called “small

1 To name but a few recent studies engaging historical material: James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia. Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors. Russia and the Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Caroline Humphrey, Marx Went Away—But Karl Stayed Behind (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999); Andrei Znamenskii, Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820–1917 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999); Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture. A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Tenacity of Ethnicity. A Siberian Saga in the Global Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1999); Petra Rethmann, Tundra Passages: Gender and History in the Russian far East (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); David Anderson, Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia. Number One Reindeer Brigade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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peoples of the North” in the course of three hundred years, suggesting that the native peoples functioned as a “mirror” of the modernizing and civilizing discourses produced by governments, missionaries, bureaucrats, travelers, scholars, writers and revolutionaries. As Slezkine noted, throughout the modern period the native populations of the North were categorized on the basis of certain criteria, such as, for example, nomadism and the “hunter-gatherer” complex. Only peoples that qualified under these terms were considered “small” enough, “primitive” enough, “northern” or “circumpolar” and therefore “native” enough.2 This categorization long ago made its way into modern studies of indigenous peoples and formatted the way in which scholars thought of Siberian natives. In institutional and disciplinary terms, it subdivided the native peoples of Siberia into those who fit the class of “small peoples” (malye narody) and those who do not. Soviet ethnography might have studied both but it was widely expected that larger and more “developed” ethnic groups, such as the Iakut (Sakha) and the Buriats, endowed with their own Soviet quasi-statehood, would qualify as full-fledged Soviet nationalities, and therefore native intelligentsias will have studied their past and culture. As “semi-settled,” “more advanced,” and more numerous, the larger ethnic groups of Siberia came to occupy a strange position between the “primitive” reindeer pastoralists and sea hunters, on the one hand, and “developed” nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, the Georgians, or the Tatars, on the other. These larger native groups were often referred to as “indigenous peoples” (korennye narody). The application of the categorization based on an ethnic group’s level of “civilization,” which was determined by the way they appropriated natural resources, privileged studies of some Siberian experiences and virtually excluded others. Siberian peoples are imagined almost exclusively as small, scattered, economically and politically powerless pawns in the game of imperial administration; their participation in the imperial borderland military service, as was the case with the Buriat Cossacks or with the Tungus regiment of the Gantimurov Princes, or their administrative projects and initiatives, as was the case with Iakut princelings Arzhakov and Syranov discussed in this chapter, are not usually invoked to describe historical experiences of native Siberians. This interesting outcome of categorization also had an impact on the focus of Western or post-Soviet studies of Siberian history. Thus, for

2

Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors. Russia and the Peoples of the North . . ., 2.

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instance, a recent volume on Siberia in imperial Russia, while dedicating 40 pages or so to the native peoples of Siberia in general, does not mention a single name of a native Siberian person.3 While European governors, administrators, scholars and exiles appear as personalities in that study, “native peoples” are described as collectives without a single native Siberian worth of mentioning by name. In Western scholarship, the politics of comparison often defined scholars’ attention. Explicitly interested in comparative perspectives on the native peoples of America, the study of indigenous Siberian peoples focused on the “small peoples of the North,” and generally excluded the larger nationalities of Siberia.4 While nineteenth-century Russian scholars debated whether Russian expansion into and exploitation of Siberian lands led to the extinction (vymiranie) of native Siberians, Western, and especially North American scholars often sought alternatives to the seemingly doomed fates of Native Americans. Nevertheless, while in Native American studies the focus has shifted from the study of what Europeans had done to Native Americans to a more complex and nuanced story of interactions between Europeans and Native Americans (and, more recently, to interactions between Europeans, Native Americans and African-Americans), in Russian history the established view that Russians met no hurdles in their expansion beyond the Ural mountains remained virtually unchallenged. In most cases, scholars stress how numerically weak and scattered native Siberian populations were at the time of the Russian arrival and how great the difference was between their capability to resist the invaders and the Russian military power. Such a focus, more anthropological than historical, produced unflattering evaluations of the fate of Siberians under imperial rule, which amounted to not much more than “three centuries of adaptation to Russian colonial rule.”5

3

A. Remnev and L. Dameshek, eds., Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2007). 4 Such studies include Anderson, Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia . . ., Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors . . ., Znamenskii, Shamanism and Christianity . . ., Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture . . ., Balzer, Tenacity of Ethnicity . . ., Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People. Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), Gail A. Fondahl, Gaining Ground? Evenkis, Land, and Reform in South-Eastern Siberia (Wilton, CT: Allyn and Bacon, 1998). Some exceptions include Dittmar Schorkowitz, “Gesellschaftliche Emanzipation und Nationale Politik der Burjiaten, 1825–1925,” Periplus: Jahrbuch fur Aussereuropaische Geschichte, 17 (2007): 175–199, Humphrey, Marx Went Away. . . . 5 Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture . . ., 22.

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By the time the Russian imperial regime collapsed in the revolution of 1917, the ethno-national model had become a well-entrenched mode of self-description for the diverse populations of the Empire. A good measure of the broad appeal of that rhetoric was that even in Siberia, where the socio-economic development of native peoples could hardly be compared to that of developed “full” nations of the European part of the Empire, representatives of the Buriats and Iakuts thought of themselves as “nations” characterized by specific ethnic differences and entitled to a degree of self rule based upon these distinctions.6 Given this remarkable proliferation of the language of nationality in the most remote areas of late imperial Russia, one of the key questions in the history of the Russian empire concerns how the imperial polity was integrated and woven together. While I am not arguing that the rise of the ethno-national paradigm in the twentieth-century Russian Empire was inevitable,7 I concur that “imperial formations are macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation.”8 Given the nature of empires with their regimes of exceptions and unique pockets of legal and social difference, understanding imperial integration remains a challenge to historians. So far, historical studies have focused on the administrative apparatus, ethnic and national elites, and socioeconomic policies of the imperial center.9 The recent discussions of “Russification” demonstrated that this term covers a wide array of responses (both local and from St. Petersburg) to cultural and social diversity of the Empire, from

6 Boris Chichlo, “Histoire de la formation des territories autonomes chez les peuples turco-mongoles de Sibérie Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique, vol. 28, nos. 3–4 (1987): 361–401; Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question 1917–23 (New York: Macmillan, 1999); a Iakut perspective reflecting the ethno-national paradigm see in E. E. Alekseev, Natsional’nyi vopros v Iakutii (1917–1972) (Iakutsk: Bichik, 2007). For general works on the nationalities problem in the Revolution and first Soviet years see Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954); Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 7 Such a suggestion is implied in Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvoelkerreich. Entstehung. Geschichte. Zerfall (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001) which treats Russian imperial history as a collection of ethno-national histories. 8 Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 1 (2006): 128. 9 Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia . . ., Anatolii Remnev, “Vdvinut’ Rossiiu v Sibir’: Imperiia i russkaia kolonizatsiia vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX vv,” Ab Imperio, 3 (2003): 135–158; George Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century: a Study of the Colonial Administration (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1943).


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attempts to achieve administrative uniformity to elements of nationalizing practices. In any event, “Russification” has little heuristic value for the period prior to the rise of nationalism and for the region where Europeans were not strong enough, numerically or economically, to absorb and assimilate native cultures. In this chapter, I explore how in the period from the first decades of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian imperial state encountered and ruled over one of its most remote territories, and how the people who populated that territory responded to imperial rule. In studying imperial languages of description and selfdescription in North-Eastern Siberia in the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries, I hope to reconstruct an original semantics of imperial historical experiences that cannot be reduced to simple formulas of colonization, domination, or resistance. In the Siberian case, this original semantics of imperial experiences appears to have been no less complex than in the European part of the Russian Empire. In Siberia, Alfred Rieber’s concept of “sedimentary society” developed in application to European Russia’s layers of social and institutional memory acquires geopolitical and chronological dimensions as Siberian practices retained elements drawn from the Mongol, Muscovite, and imperial periods of Russian history.10 Yet, as I intend to demonstrate, it was the eighteenth-century rationalization of imperial space that produced discursive ruptures in the languages of historical actors and led to unintended consequences for the imperial authorities. Attempts to rationalize the fabric of imperial society and establish streamlined and clear legislative and administrative processes, in short, attempts to bring a degree of uniformity into the ad hoc governance of empire, provided ample opportunities for the elites of the larger native Siberian peoples to express their political concerns. The emergence of a new, rational, scientific view of human diversity—the product of large scale defamiliarization of the Empire through scholarly enterprise of mapping and describing—revealed not only that social reality was less prone to being molded according to scales devised in European academies and salons but also that the very language of rationalizing the imperial social and political space

10 Alfred Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” Edith Clowes et al, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 343–366.

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contained the potential for unraveling differences the imperial state was not prepared to deal with other than by fixating and reproducing those differences. Richard White, a prominent scholar of Native American history, suggested the concept of “middle ground” to describe the geopolitical and cultural space that Native Americans of the Great Lakes region carved out for themselves in the midst of competing empires and republics.11 White’s “middle ground” became a profoundly important concept in Native American history as it was increasingly applied to situations in which non-European peoples balanced off various intrusions and appropriated social and other kinds of knowledge from the Europeans to maintain a degree of independence, and in which Europeans borrowed from the Native peoples similar kinds of knowledge. In the process, a space of common meanings was constructed. Without suggesting the possibility of comparing Native Americans to native peoples of Siberia—hopefully, the futility of such comparison will become obvious from this paper—I would like to borrow White’s concept in order to describe both policies directed at the native peoples of Siberia and the Siberians’ responses to conquest and taxation, imperial “rationalization”, administration and colonization. Albeit there is no doubt that imperial regimes profoundly transformed the native Siberian societies in question, I want to stress that the outcomes of imperial initiatives were more often than not unintended, and that these outcomes were modified by native responses, which often appropriated and transformed languages of description into languages of self-description. These appropriations and transformations represent a notable case of “Eurasian globalization,” as the native peoples of Siberia experienced both post-Mongol and modern European ideas and practices brought to them by the conquerors.

11

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); see also The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. LXIII, no. 1 (2006): 3–95 for a recent debate on White’s conceptual work, including White’s own revisiting of his work.


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Notes on Geography, Colonization, and Pre-Contact Indigenous Peoples Prior to the arrival of Muscovite conquerors, North-Eastern Siberia was home to a range of diverse populations.12 In the forested areas of the taiga and on the border between the taiga and the Arctic tundra lived the Tungus tribes, predecessors of contemporary Evenks, whose language was distantly related to Manchu and whose economy was centered on nomadic reindeer herding, hunting, and fishing. The Tungus inhabited areas that stretched from the West to the East, from the basin of the Enisei, to the Pacific. Along the coastal areas of the Arctic and the Pacific lived the Chuckchi (Luorovetlan), Koriaks, Kamchadals, as well as Siberian Yupik, who shared linguistic and cultural traits with their ethnic cousins across the Bering Strait. Small and scattered groups of Yukagir, apparent autochtones of North-Eastern Siberia, were rapidly declining in numbers even before the arrival of Russians. Various Manchu-related groups occupied the area along the Amur (Heilongjiang) River, while the steppe and forest around the Lake Baikal were home to Mongol-speaking (and, from the seventeenth century on, Tibetan Buddhist) Buriats and a unique branch of nomadic cattle pastoralist Tungus.13 While, strictly speaking, not part of North-Eastern Siberia, Dzungars, the Khanates of Khalkha, and especially the state of Altyn Khans in Mongolia were important international players of the greater region along with Manchu and China.14 The whole of the North-Eastern Siberian region is tied together by the flow of the Lena River and its enormous basin. Exactly in the middle of Lena’s flow, in the arid, steppe-like valleys of the Lena itself and of its tributaries formed the highly eclectic culture of the world’s northernmost cattle and horse pastoralists, the Iakuts.15 It gradually took shape

12

A. P. Okladnikov, Yakutia Before Its Incorporation into Russian State (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1970). 13 A. P. Okladnikov, ed., Istoria Buriat-Mongol’skoi ASSR, vol. 1 (Ulan-Ude: Buriatskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1954). 14 On the relationship between Moscow and Mongol khanates in the seventeenth century see Materialy po istorii russko-mongol’skikh otnoshenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1974); on the politics of the region including China see Peter Perdue, China Marches West. The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 51–93; 133–173. 15 Marie Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Waldemar Jochelson, The Yakut (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1933); Yakut Ethnographic Sketches (New Haven: Human

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in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium as groups of Turkic and Mongol nomads moved north escaping the steppe warfare in the south and mixing with Tungusic and Paleoasiatic populations.16 Connected by a myriad of ties to the Arctic and circumpolar civilization on the one hand, and to the nomadic civilization of the Eurasian steppe on the other, the Iakut culture represents a remarkable case of pre-European cosmopolitanism that emerged out of the processes of centuries-long exchanges on the Eurasian continent. Its Turkic legacy is reflected in a massive oral epic tradition, the Olongkho, similar to the epos Manas of the Central Asian Kirghiz.17 Unlike the latter, though, Olongkho incorporated numerous elements of Tungus and Paleoasiatic folklore. Iakut material culture similarly combines elements derived from the horse centered pastoralist economy of Eurasian steppes with those borrowed from the circumpolar peoples.18 Archeological and historical evidence suggests the existence of political and commercial ties between North-Eastern Siberia and China, which was also reflected in Chinese chronicles.19 In many respects, North-Eastern Siberia remained a resource colony of the Russian state throughout its modern history, and the non-native population there was always at the minimum necessary to maintain power and extract local resources. The relative importance of the area for the Russian imperial state was not static. In the seventeenth century, Relations Area Files, 1953); a good source of general information on the Iakuts is Bella Bychkova-Jordan and Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, Siberian Village: Land and Life in the Sakha Republic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). A classic and exhaustive ethnographic work on the Iakuts is Waclav Sieroszewski, Iakuty. Opyt etnograficheskogo issledovaniia (St. Petersburg, 1896). On Iakut language and its brief history see P. A. Sleptsov and E. I. Korkina, Iakutskii literaturnyi iazyk: istoki, stanovlenie norm (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1986); also the fundamental Otto von Boehtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten. Grammatik, Text und Wörterbuch (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk, 1851). 16 A. I. Gogolev, Etnicheskaia istoriia narodov Iakutii (Iakutsk: IaGU, 2004), 54–99. 17 V. V. Radlov, Obraztsy narodnoi literatury severo-tiurkskikh plemen (St. Petersburg, 1885); A. A. Popov, “Materialy po shamanstvu iakutov. Kul’t bogini Aiysyt u iakutov,” in Kul’tura i pis’mennost’ Vostoka, book 3 (Baku: VTsK NTA, 1928), 125–133; Iakutskii fol’klor (Moscow and Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1936). 18 I. S. Gurvich, “Iakutsko-iukagirskie predaniia ob ospe (k voprosu o putiakh formirovaniia demonologicheskikh obrazov),” in Sotsial’naia organizatsiia i kul’tura narodov Severa, eds. B. O. Dolgikh, I. S. Gurvich (Moscow: Nauka,1974); Idem, Kul’tura severnykh iakutov-olenevodov (Moscow: Nauka, 1977). 19 N. V. Kiuner, “Kitaiskie istoricheskie dannye o narodakh Severa,” Uchenye zapiski Leningradskogo universiteta. Seria vostokovedcheskikh nauk, vyp. 1 (Leningrad, 1949): 92–102.


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it provided the bulk of the fur revenue of the imperial treasury, largely due to the largest concentration of native population in Siberia. In the eighteenth century and well into the middle of the nineteenth century, it was also an important springboard for further expansion eastwards, as well as the favorite playground for European explorers, both Western and Russian. In both instances, the presence of large native populations capable of being mobilized for transportation services played an important role. With the incorporation of the Amur region into the Russian Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, the relative importance of North-Eastern Siberia rapidly declined.

The Terms of Steppe Politics: The Conquest and Beyond In the first decades of the seventeenth century, brigades of Moscow servitors, Cossacks, trappers and merchants began penetrating the greater basin of the Lena River from the three bases in Mangazeia (the northern route via river Viliui), Tobol’sk and Tomsk (via Enisei and Tunguska onto upper Lena and Aldan).20 The pre-European cosmopolitanism of North-Eastern Siberia was overtaken by another cosmopolitan venture. Having absorbed most of the former territories of the Golden Horde in the sixteenth century, the Moscow state was emerging as a new imperial power in Northern Eurasia.21 The conquest of Siberia was not a “Russian” expansion: seventeenth century Siberian towns and fortresses were home to a diverse imperial population, which included Ukrainian Cossacks and Polish szlachta (known commonly as Litva), a variety of Tatars, both converted and Muslim, Bukharan merchants, and Swedes and Germans, war prisoners resettled in Siberia and enlisted in “the sovereign’s service.”22 Driven by a mixture of private initiative and state support, the expansion followed concentrations of native Siberian 20 A typical and influential “Romantic” account of the conquest of Siberia in English see in Bruce W. Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Soviet historical-ethnographic work is V. Bakhrushin and S. A. Tokarev, eds., Iakutiia v XVII veke (ocherki) (Iakutsk: Iakutskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1953), 10–45. 21 See Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier. The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 46–75. 22 Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century . . ., Bakhrushin and Tokarev, Iakutiia v XVII veke . . ., 15, 17, 20; I. R. Sokolovskii, Sluzhilye “inozemtsy” v Sibiri XVII veka (Novosibirsk: Sova, 2004).

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populations, who were turned into providers of precious furs through mercilessly violent subjugation, trade and taxation.23 The traditional view of the conquest of Siberia as an exclusively “state-sponsored” project can also be complicated by pointing to the fact that major Siberian expansion occurred during and in the immediate aftermath of the same time when central state authority collapsed in Moscow during the Time of Troubles. While collection of tribute for the Tsar remained an important ideological and legitimizing factor in the expansion, it was independent fur procurement by means of taxation, trade, or robbery that really drove Cossacks and trappers to new lands. Fur was exported through Russian cities on the Volga to Archangel, at which point it was taken to Western European markets by the English and, especially, by the Dutch.24 Another, much less studied direction of fur trade points to the South, to Central Asian states, Persia, and China. This trade had most likely been in existence long before the Muscovite conquest of Siberia and a large presence of Bukharan merchants in early Siberian towns testifies to the importance of commercial ties between Siberia with the South. While the groups that conquered Siberian peoples for Moscow were characterized by ethnic diversity, the terms on which the conquerors operated in Siberia were derived from the Muscovite political tradition that had emerged in the context of steppe politics.25 Ironically, Moscow brought these terms back to where they originated. Anyone who could not put up sufficient resistance to the Tsar was subject and had to pay iasak, tribute (usually in fur) that the Chingizids had demanded from the conquered populations. The loyalty of subjects was ensured either by the amanaty (singular “amanat,” from Arabic “hostage”) taken to the Russian fortresses and forts, or through shert’ (oath of allegiance administered on native terms and invoking native deities, spirits, and

23

See also a new study of the Russian conquest of the extreme North-East of Asia in A. S. Zuev, Russkie i aborigeny na krainem severo-vostoke Sibiri vo vtoroi polovine XVII—pervoi chetverti XVIII vv. (Novosibirsk: NGU, 2002). 24 For seventeenth-century Siberian trade see Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness. Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 86 ff.; Pervoe stoletie osvoeniia Sibiri russkimi. Novye dokumenty (Tomsk: TGU, 1999). See also Erica Monahan Downs, “Trade and Empire: Merchant Networks, Frontier Commerce and the State in Western Siberia, 1644–1728,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2008 for a discussion of the role of Bukharan merchants in Siberian commerce. 25 For a more traditional view of seventeenth-century Siberia as a “colony” of a “European” state see Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century. . . .


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punishments).26 The nature of the conquest of Eastern Siberia—the search for fur by semi-independent brigands (sometimes) supported by local officials—defined the course of events. As competing groups of servitors, trappers and Cossacks from Mangazeia, Tobol’sk, Eniseisk and Tomsk began converging on Iakut, Buriat and Tungus settlements and encampments, the native populations suffered brutality, oppression, and the collapse of order. The documents of the first decades of conquest reveal stories of extortion, double and triple taxing, and infighting between the groups of conquerors and their native allies.27 The newcomers, whose task was to collect tribute for the Tsar’s treasury “by caress and kindness,” helped themselves to the fur before they collected for the Tsar; native women and children were kidnapped; the payment of fur was insured by military defeat of the natives and by hostage taking. Almost three decades of robbery, disorder and lawlessness ended in relative stabilization as Moscow appointed the first voevodas to Iakutsk fort in 1638 and established the Iakutsk district (uezd). Although the establishment of the uezd signified inclusion in the over-arching Muscovite administrative system, the region was often referred to as a “razriad,” a term used in seventeenth-century Muscovy for borderland regions.28 In fact, as late as 1724, the head of Iakutsk Cossacks Afanasii Shestakov referred to his place of service as “borderland town” (ukrainnyi gorod) due to its military insecurity.29 The corruption and extortion did not end with the administrative regularization, and virtually every single voevoda from 1639 to 1767 ended his tenure with an investigation of abuses. The latter included extortion, bribe-taking, enslaving and brutalizing natives, usury, and theft of fur destined for the treasury. Siberian investigations (rozyski), such as the well-known mission of Likharev to investigate Prince Matvei Gagarin’s misdeeds as the governor of Siberia became proverbial. Eastern Siberian fur proved to be of paramount importance for the reconstitution of the Moscow state after the Time of Troubles and for its imperial expansion in the seventeenth century as it significantly

26 Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier. . . . See an example of the Tungus shert’ recorded in Eniseisk in 1700 in Pamiatniki Sibirskoi istorii XVIII v., vol. 1 (Moscow, 1882), 24–25. 27 Bakhrushin and Tokarev, Iakutiia v XVII veke . . ., 24–25, 43–45. 28 F. G. Sofronov, Russkie na Severo-Vostoke Azii v XVII—seredine XIX vv. Upravlenie, sluzhilye liudi, krestiane, gorodskoe naselenie (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 23. 29 L. A. Goldenberg, Mezhdu dvumia ekspeditsiiami Beringa (Magadan: Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1984), 11.

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boosted the Tsar’s treasury deficit of domestic silver and gold. Moscow’s need for an uninterrupted influx of fur from North-Eastern Siberia led to repeated orders to local administration that the natives should be treated kindly. In 1666 Iakutsk voevoda Ivan Boriatinskii, following orders from Moscow, forbade servitors, trappers and merchants to purchase fur from the natives, as well as to enslave native women and children for later sale.30 In 1699, the Siberian Prikaz freed native petitioners from paying dues on their petitions, in an apparent attempt to encourage complaints.31 While plaintiffs were freed from dues, defendants were supposed to pay double. The government established forts on the rivers, which might have been used by native populations to escape South, to “Dauria,” into the lands under the nominal control of the Manchu, and Cossacks were sometimes sent to pursue and return those who did escape. Yet, abuses proliferated: there was no set amount of iasak to be paid by natives for at least half a century, and many collectors of tribute forced the natives—to whom any selling of firearms was strictly forbidden—to pay various kinds of gifts, dues, and bribes. Even officially, the tribute (iasak) was divided into that destined for the treasury and to the local officials (pominochnyi iasak). To be sure, there was wide-spread resistance and fighting against tribute-seeking expeditions and even sieges were laid to the forts. Many Tungus clans attacked collectors of iasak and trappers, while in 1633–34 and in 1638–1639 Iakut toions gathered between six and eight hundred warriors and besieged the Lenskii fort for several months.32 Moscow servitors successfully broke this resistance through punitive expeditions, taking of hostages, and exploiting divisions among the natives. Although clashes and attacks on punitive expeditions persisted into the 1670s, and in the extreme North-East well into the eighteenth century, gradually Moscow control over the area (at least around the forts and along the major rivers) solidified. While some Iakut toions continued resistance into the 1670s, most realized the promise of the new situation. Russians (and others) were prohibited from trading with the iasak people individually (a prohibition that was always effectively evaded by powerful merchants), and

30 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov (henceforth RGADA), f. 1177, op. 3, ch. 2, d. 1560, ll. 1–2. 31 RGADA, f. 214, op. 4, d. 160, l. 2. 32 Bakhrushin and Tokarev, 32–38. See also RGADA, f. 1177 (Iakutskaia prikaznaia izba), op. 3, d. 2, “Otpiska syna boiarskogo Parfena Khodyreva,” ll. 1–6.


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settlement on their lands was forbidden by a special decree of the Tsar. Although initially the taking of hostages ensured loyalty of the iasak paying population, gradual incorporation of clan leaders into the system of administration eventually made hostage taking obsolete.

The Making of Social Difference Seventeenth-century Russian documents described native population as “princelings,” “princes,” “best people,” and “ulus peasants,” suggesting at least three different social groups within Iakut and Tungus societies. Yet, research into iasak books confirms that titles of “princelings” were used inconsistently, and were apparently applied to anyone who appeared to the Cossacks and servitors as a leader of the natives.33 As iasak books often list wealth of “princelings,” we can see that not all of them were rich, and some of them were actually much poorer than some “ulus peasants.” Given that the Tungus were organized into patrimonial clans and the Iakuts into large (sometimes several thousand people) federations of extended families with memories of common descent, each head of an extended family appeared as a hereditary “prince” to the Moscow servitors. They negotiated with groups of such native leaders regarding the payment and the size of iasak and feasted these leaders as the latter brought the required tribute to the collectors in the forts. The very process of iasak collection, though, tended to reify particular families as hereditary representatives of their compatriots. The logic of Moscow servitors—the logic of all empire-builders—required incorporating native elites into the process of administration of the newly conquered area. By the end of the seventeenth century iasak collection helped create a privileged group of mediators between the native populations and the Moscow tax collectors. Initially, this group was dominated by the hereditary leaders of the Iakuts: in 1676–77, three representatives of the largest Iakut federations, the Megin, the Khangalas, and the Nam, traveled to Moscow, where they requested the right to try their co-ethnics and received confirmation of their rights as “princelings.”34 The Tsar’s decree recommended that Moscow

33 34

A. A. Borisov, Iakutskie ulusy v epokhu Tygyna (Iakutsk: Bichik, 1997). Pamiatniki prava Sakha, ed. M. M. Fedorov (Iakutsk: Bichik, 1994), 12–16.

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voevodas dealt only with criminal offences, and only in exceptional circumstances with cases of common law (such as bride payments).35 All other cases were supposed to be tried by native “princelings,” who were also increasingly involved in collecting tribute and given some local policing authority.36 Symbolic regalia given to princelings, such as medals, swords, and, especially in the reign of Peter I, charters confirming their “princely” titles and authority over their co-ethnics, boosted the prestige of the native leaders. Large Iakut federations gradually acquired territorial characteristics and were termed “volosti ” (districts) in the Muscovite administrative topography. Although iasak was still collected by imperial collectors (sborshchiki) traveling to native settlements for most of the eighteenth century, at least in theory native “princelings” were supposed to take part in the process. Peter I gave Savva Raguzinskii, a Southern Slavic adventurer in the Tsar’s service, extensive powers to issue decrees regarding Siberian administration as he sent Raguzinskii as his ambassador to China. Raguzinskii’s instructions issued in 1727 became the legal basis for administering the native peoples of Eastern Siberia for almost half a century. Apart from allowing the payment of iasak in cash, these instructions delegated all judicial powers except the right to try heavy criminal offences and murder to native leaders, who were supposed to try their co-ethnics by common law.37 This delegation of judicial power was meant to ease local tensions and facilitate the collection of iasak. In fact, it posed the challenge of the lack of reliable guidelines for the administration of the area. Imperial administrators still had to intervene in the area of common law of native peoples if native “princelings” failed to resolve the issue. Sometimes native communities petitioned against their own “princelings.” The separation between the “Russians” and the “Iakuts” or “Tungus” proved to be difficult as no clear lines of demarcation existed between Russian peasant settlers and those Iakuts who began to settle and engage in agricultural activities or transportation services. Both groups spoke Iakut, were formally Orthodox Christians, and combined elements of

35

See S. A. Tokarev, Istoriia russkoi etnografii (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 57. S. A. Tokarev, Z. V. Gogolev, I. S. Gurvich, Istoriia Iakutskoi ASSR, vol. 2 (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1957), 67. 37 “Instruktsiia Grafa Savvy Lukicha Vladislavicha-Raguzinskogo Selenginskomu dvorianinu Grigoriiu Firsovu i tolmachu Stepanu Kobeiu 27 iunia 1727 g.,” Pamiatniki prava Sakha . . ., 9–10. 36


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Russian and native economies. To add to the challenge of governance, canonical law that at least in theory regulated the marriages, births, and deaths of Russians (and more importantly, the land holdings of churches and monasteries), as well as Tsar’s decrees and the Ulozhenie of 1649 that governed the Russians’ social lives, often had little agreement with the natives’ common law, which continued to be applied despite conversions to Orthodoxy. The legal problem was addressed in an ad hoc manner by merging different pieces of legislation and administrative rules into a document inconspicuously titled “Extract about iasak peoples” (Vypiska o iasashnykh). This document, which gained wide circulation in eastern Siberia by the end of the eighteenth century, for all intents and purposes constituted a codex combining imperial and Senate decrees, instructions and ukazes pertaining to the administration of Siberian “inozemtsy,” with the common law of Siberian natives (recorded on case by case basis by generations of officials and administrators). Two hand-written copies of this codex dating from 1790s survived in the archives of the local administration in Iakutsk.38 One of the copies was found in the 1890s by an exiled revolutionary/ethnographer Nikolai Vitashevskii and was preserved in his personal archive.39 Although the lowest level of native administration was not required to maintain any bookkeeping until 1784, at the level of volost’/ulus native administrators kept records of iasak payments and correspondence with Russian authorities regarding police matters from at least the 1730s (the earliest ulus documents recording iasak payments from Baiagantai volost’).40 Wherever there was lack of literate natives, Iakut uluses hired Russian Cossacks to serve as scribes. Needless to say, knowledge of Russian and especially literacy became a convertible form of social capital, and wealthy Iakut families tried to either send their children to literate Cossacks for education, or to adopt, according to a 38 In the 1860s a special commission of the Iakut Oblast’ administration destroyed a significant amount of “non-essential” archival documents. In particular, many documents from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were burned or given to the people. Some exiles in the 1890s reported, for example, that one could still find an eighteenth century document used to wrap fish at the market in the city of Iakutsk. One result of the commission travails is that we know much more about the seventeenth century eastern Siberia than we know about the eighteenth. 39 Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburgskogo Filiala Instituta Vostokovedeniia Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk (henceforth ASPb IV RAN), f. 11, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 1–45. 40 Arkhiv Iakutskogo Nauchnogo Tsentra Sibirskogo Otdeleniia Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, f. 4, d. 14, ll. 2–6.

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native custom, a literate Russian-speaking youth. Nevertheless, some Iakuts of humble backgrounds managed to become native princelings due to literacy. The ability to communicate with authorities acquired the same value as wealth or origin, and in the course of the eighteenth century the iasak regime generated a new elite in native societies. This elite included descendants of families that had been prominent before contact with Russians and tribal chiefs, as well as those whose authority depended on literacy and knowledge of Russian. Some belonged to that elite—described by Russians as “rodonachal’niki,” or clan leaders, and by Iakuts themselves as “princes”—on hereditary terms; others were elected to offices of elders. One of the unintended consequences of the iasak regime was the spontaneous generation of a written form of some native languages. Already in the eighteenth century native administrations recorded oaths and payments in Iakut using Cyrillic alphabet. No doubt, this creation of a written form was helped by the rapid nativization of small Russian populations in North Eastern Siberia. Cut off from their linguistic homeland by enormous distances and unable to practice European agriculture, Russian peasants, merchants, and even bureaucrats switched to Iakut. When Otto von Boehtlingk decided to write an academic study of Iakut, his main informer was Afanasii Uvarovskii, a young Russian servitor from Viliuisk. Uvarovskii’s text (written in the form of memoirs) became the first published Iakut text and an invaluable source of information on the extent of Russian linguistic assimilation.41 By 1840s, wealthy families of Iakut toions and merchants used Cyrillic alphabet to write not only private letters but also to circulate among their co-ethnics texts or petitions and proposals pertaining to the administration of the natives.

The Defamiliarization of the Empire While native society was transformed by the iasak regime, the system of tribute collection came to a stall. Depletion of biological resources meant that procuring fur was more and more complicated. As it turned out—to the Russians—the most numerous ethnic group, the Iakuts, were not hunters but cattle pastoralists, and detested going into the

41

A. Ia. Uvarovskii, Akhtyylar (Iakutsk: Gosizdat, 1947).


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forest to hunt sables. The remoteness of the area from Moscow and minimal control from the higher authorities meant massive abuses of the system—and especially of the natives—by local administrators and iasak collectors. As the region was gradually being turned into the government’s favorite place of exile, some formerly high officials came to witness these abuses first hand and reported them to the court.42 In the 1720s and 1730s two Kamchatka expeditions put a very heavy burden on extremely volatile and fragile native economy, as Iakuts and Tungus were required to provide transportation for the expedition carrying people and goods to the Pacific.43 The second expedition in particular demanded more than five thousand horses, severely undermining Iakut economic life. Military expeditions by Shestakov and Pavlutsky into Kamchatka led to a virtual genocide of the natives there, and were met by massive uprisings,which in turn were severely suppressed by military force. By 1730s, the government was reacting by sending officers with extraordinary powers to deal with abuses.44 The stall of the imperial venture in Siberia occurred against the background of Europeanization of Russia, which unleashed a third kind of cosmopolitanism upon the populations of North-Eastern Siberia. The establishment of the Empire began during the reign of Peter I.45 Inspired by inquiries and requests from the European scholars such as Nikolaas Witsen and Isaak Leibnitz, Peter ordered the geographical exploration of the easternmost parts of his domain.46 North-Eastern Siberia quickly became the favorite playground for German explorers, frantically classifying and describing the area’s populations and transportation routes, minerals and landscapes, flora and fauna. The list of scholars who participated in the massive effort to defamiliarize and objectify 42 One such document, rich in details of local tradition of abuse, was produced by Heinrich Fick, an associate of Peter I, who was sent into exile in Verkhneviliuisk after the failed coup of 1730. Fick’s memorandum is published in full in: Ab Imperio, 1 (2006): 241–265. 43 On the expeditions see L. S. Berg, Otkrytie Kamchatki i ekspeditsii Beringa (Moscow and Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1946); Goldenberg, Mezhdu dvumia ekspeditsiiami Beringa. . . . 44 Such officers were sent to Siberia in 1733 (Pavlutsky), 1749 (Vul’f ), 1763 (Shcherbachev). For a discussion of eighteenth-century investigations of Siberian abuses and taxation see Natalia Platonova, “Les commissions d’enquête, l’administration sibérienne et l’impôt sur les peuples autochtones en Russie aux XVIII siècle,” Histoire, Economie et Société, vol. 26, no. 4 (2007): 27–50. 45 P. P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za, 1862), especially vol. 1, 25–33. 46 Berg, Otkrytie Kamchatki. . . .

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Siberian peoples and cultures included Daniel Messerschmidt, Johann Eberhardt Fischer, Gerhardt Friedrich Müller, Johann Georg Gmelin, Jakob Lindenau, Stepan Krasheninnikov, and others.47 The complexity of the ethnic makeup of Siberia could not be entirely catalogued by the meager resources of these explorers (even if the Kamchatka expedition was the most grandiose scholarly effort undertaken by any European state to that time), and often imperial institutions dispatched questionnaires to local Siberian administrations, demanding precise information on geography, ethnography, economy and history of the native peoples.48 By the mid-eighteenth century, the unprecedented effort to explore, describe, catalog and classify natural phenomena and human populations of Siberia was underway, turning Siberia into one of the most important arenas for the study of nonEuropean peoples. This “conceptual conquest”49 of Siberia was impressive: Gerhard Friedrich Müller, one of the founders of Siberian studies in eighteenth-century Russia, issued an instruction to the members of the Second Kamchatka expedition to guide their efforts in describing Siberian populations. The instruction consisted of 923 questions to be answered about each particular people, from their language to physical features to the minutiae of everyday life.50 Siberia was emerging as one of the crucial terrains in which the art of describing was utilized to make sense of what was now seen as unprecedented human diversity.51 As Brian O’Gilvie demonstrated, by

47

See, for example, Walter Kirchner, ed., A Siberian Journey. The Journal of Hans Jakob Fries, 1774–1776 (London: Frank Cass, 1974). Especially useful is the Introduction (3–47) with its excellent overview of major travelers and explorers. Kirchner lists 34 (sic!) European and Russian travelers and explorers before 1775 who left Siberian travel accounts. 48 Müller in particular left numerous questionnaires during his many years of travel in Siberia. See J. L. Black and D. K. Buse, eds., G.-F. Müller and Siberia, 1733–1743 (Kingstone, Ontario: The Limestone Press, 1989). Such questionnaires were composed by scholars such as I. Kirillov and Vasilii Tatishchev. By the end of the eighteenth century the Senate requested descriptions of territories in Siberia following specific questionnaires. See, for example, Opisanie Irkutskogo namestnichestva 1792 goda (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1988), 3–24 for an overview of questionnaires and descriptions of Siberia in the eighteenth century. 49 The term “conceptual conquest” was used by Francine Hirsch to describe how modern scholarly knowledge was used to managed Soviet populations. See Francine Hirsh, The Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 50 RGADA, Portfeli Millera, no. 508, ll. 1–140. 51 For the origins of the science of describing see Brian O’Gilvie, The Science of Describing. Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago


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the seventeenth century studies of classic texts had been superseded by efforts to catalog and classify natural objects among European scientists. In the science of human diversity, a similar process was underway, with the watershed marked by the publication of Nicolaes Witsen’s famous study of “Tartary,” which provided the first taxonomic (linguistic) grid for the peoples of North-East Asia.52 Often developed in the context of what Larry Wolff called “philosophical geography,” a vision of the world informed by increasingly global and comparative map of “civilization,” the mapping of Siberia produced different but equally de-familiarizing discourses. John Ledyard, an American traveler who managed to reach as far as Iakutsk in Siberia before being deported by suspicious Catherine II simply and unequivocally equated Siberian native peoples to their American counterparts: “the Tartars resemble the aborigines of America: they are the same people—the most antient, & most numerous of any other, & had not a small sea divided them, they would all have still been known by the same name. The cloak of civilization sits as ill upon them as our American Tartars—they have been a long time Tartars & it will be a long time before they are any other kind of people.”53 While Ledyard’s view of civilization was pre-determined by race, a crucial category for his native country,54 German scholars often utilized other measures of civilization. It is also to this process of de-famliairization of the empire that we owe the ethnic taxonomy of Siberia. The key concept of the eighteenth-century ethnography (Voelkerbeschreibung) in Siberia was “Volk.” Defined by language and customs, each “Volk” had to have its own past and heroes, rulers and battles. In his Beschreibung der Jakuten, Jakob Lindenau suggested that there existed among the Iakuts a ruling family, Toion Usa, and tracked its lineage. According to Lindenau, Russian power over the Iakuts

Press, 2006); Han F. Vermeulen, “Early History of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment: Anthropological Discourse in Europe and Asia, 1710–1808,” Ph. D. diss., University of Leiden, 2008. 52 Nicolaes Witsen, De Noord en Oost Tartarij (Amsterdam, 1696). 53 John Ledyard’s Journey through Russia and Siberia 1787–1788: The Journal and Selected Letters, ed. by Stephen Watrous (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 127. Quoted in Larry Wolff, “The Global Perspective of Enlightened Travelers: From Siberia to the Pacific Ocean,” European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’Histoire, vol. 13, no. 3 (2006): 437–453. 54 Edward Grey, “Visions of Another Empire: John Ledyard, an American Traveler Across the Russian Empire, 1787–1788,” The Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 24, no. 3 (2004): 347–380; Edward Grey, The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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was consolidated as Tygyn, the ruler of the land, was captured and imprisoned by the conquerors.55 Iakuts were a distinct, separate people, conquered by the Russians and included into the catalog of imperial populations.56 In this catalog, Siberian peoples were re-imagined as entities with a degree of political and cultural unity. For the native peoples of Siberia this new development also meant that their position on the mental map of civilization was now defined by what they did, what kind of tools they used, and how warlike they were.57 While Russia itself was re-imagined as an Oriental power, in the more and more hierarchical and temporal view of civilization, the difference between native peoples of Siberia and the Russians came to signify distance in time from the European point of high development.58 Indeed, it was in Siberia that one could still observe the primitive stone tools of the Yukagir, the clan structure of Iakut society, or, even, the group marriage among the Giliaks of the Sakhalin, the discovery of which by Lev Shternberg would substantiate Engels’ argument about the evolution of family. Whether a particular people could be defined as “settled” or “nomadic” could now be interpreted as a degree of maturity and usefulness to the state and thus define the form of government most suitable for that people.

Iasak and Polizeistaat The intellectual transformation of Siberian human diversity from something taken for granted into an object of intense scholarly inquiry (defamiliarization of empire) was linked to and informed the increasingly rationalist and legalist approaches to governance, which created hierarchical groups to be managed by legislation. As Marc Raeff has demonstrated, one of the central ideologies imported by Peter I’ reforms into Russia was cameralism, which developed in Western Europe towards the end of the seventeenth century and posited as the goal of government the mobilization of economic and military resources of the state 55 Ia. I. Lindenau, Opisanie narodov Sibiri (pervaia polovina XVIII v.) (Magadan: Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1983), 21. 56 Such a catalog was published by Johan Gottlieb Georgi as Opisanie vsekh v Rosiiskoi mperii obitaiushchikh narodov (St. Petersburg, 1776). 57 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors. . . . 58 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).


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in order to ensure peaceful and progressive development of the state’s subjects.59 Linked to German Aufklärung, cameralism was distinctly rationalist and maintained strong belief into what we would call today “institutions.” The main instrument of change in society, according to the cameralists, was law. Appropriate and timely legislation combined with streamlined, structured and efficient administration would ensure the achievement of a perfectly functioning state machine, the regulierte und ordliche Polizeistaat, where the rule of law, the Rechtstaat, is a universal obligation and the absolute condition for common good. One of the key concepts of this ideology was Polizey, which in the fifteenth—seventeenth centuries had two related meanings: first, the state of good order in societal life, and second, a law, whose main goal is to establish, maintain (or restore) the state of good order in society.60 It was above all in Siberia that cameralist visions of regulating diversity came to fruition in the course of several decades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.61 As Jan Kusber demonstrated in this volume, the reign of Catherine II saw the peak of the process of defamiliarization of the Empire. The Empress’ reign also represented an administrative rupture in Siberia as she undertook the sustained and multifaceted effort to improve the conditions of the native peoples and to eliminate scandalous abuses. On January 4, 1763, Catherine issued instructions to Major Shcherbachev, who was sent to Siberia with extraordinary powers. Shcherbachev was supposed to form a commission and explore abuses and administrative problems. Apparently, the state of affairs was so dismal that Catherine even provided Shcherbachev with two signed blanks of decrees ordering commuted death penalty to faulty officials (adding, though, that

59

Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State. Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 60 Franz-Ludwig Knemeyer, “Polizei,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. by von Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, Vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 877–86. 61 See also Marc Raeff, “Patterns of Russian Imperial Policy Toward the Nationalities,” Edward Allworth, ed., Soviet Nationalities Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 22–42; idem, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822 (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1956); John Slocum, “Who and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review, vol. 57, no. 2 (1998): 173–190.

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she hoped there would be no need to use those).62 She also issued a Manifesto (on June 13, 1763), which announced Shcherbachev’s mission. Unlike any previous decrees directed at Siberian natives, Catherine’s manifesto announced the Empress’s care about all her subjects (vernopoddannye), among whom were the iasak paying natives. Moreover, the manifesto called the natives “poor and voiceless” (bednye i bezglasnye), while iasak collectors were termed “robbers of our subjects’ calm and happiness”. Major Shcherbachev was instructed to conduct general census of iasak peoples, and to impose iasak to the extent that would be acceptable to these peoples.63 In fact, Catherine instructed the commissioners to take into account the native peoples’ interests first, and the interests of the treasury second. Although Shcherbachev’s mission was quickly bogged down by local Siberian administrators in Tobol’sk (in a year Catherine shifted all powers for the Siberian revision from Shcherbachev to the Governor in Tobol’sk), in 1764 a commission was established, with departments in major Siberian towns, with the purpose of revising and reforming the iasak regime. In North-Eastern Siberia, the local branch of the commission was headed by the former Iakutsk voevoda, Miron Cherkasheninov, who was made independent from the local administration and given extensive powers. Cherkasheninov’s measures, in the course of the commission’s seven years of operation, included demarcating native lands, establishing norms for iasak payment, introducing of the so-called “class system” (which made land use dependent on the amount of iasak paid) and prohibiting local administrators, as well as merchants, to travel into native settlements without special permission from the governor.64 Cherkasheninov’s time left a lasting impact on the native memory. As Vitashevskii and Levental’ noted, tickets and notes on land issued by Cherkasheninov were considered as indubitable proof of right to land by the Iakuts and the Tungus even in the late nineteenth century.65 Scholars of folklore noted the presence of Cherkasheninov in many tales

62 “Instruktsii Maioru Shcherbachevu,” I. D. Bulychev, Puteshestvie po Vostochnoi Sibiri (St. Petersburg, 1856), 251–267. 63 Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Sakha (henceforth NARS), f. 1–I, op. 1, d. 2, l. 9. 64 The Iasak Commission decrees are in NARS, f. 1–I, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 3–5; f. 1, op. 1, d. 130, ll. 11ob. 65 D. M. Pavlinov, N. A. Vitashevskii, L. G. Levental’, Materialy po obychnomu pravu i po obshchestvennomu bytu iakutov (Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1929), 12–18.


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(interestingly, he is not at all remembered as a voevoda but always as the problem-solving head of the commission). What is probably even more important, the commission established two-level administration of the natives: clans and settlements elected their princelings for the term of three years, whereas these “princelings” elected the head of the volost’ or ulus. The new system stressed not so much the native participation as the hierarchical responsibility of each level of government and strict adherence to rules and regulations under police authority. Increasingly, the administration of the native peoples of Siberia was brought in line with contemporary ideals of the orderly Polizeistaat. The administrative and legislative initiatives of Catherine’s reign produced consequences that the government had hardly intended. The works of the First Iasak commission generated a lot of interest among Iakut and Tungus “princelings.” As the preparation to the Legislative Commission was announced, Iakut uluses sent their representatives to an improvised gathering that elected the head of the Khangalas ulus, Sofron Syranov, as their deputy to the Legislative Comission. The State Council, though, rejected the election on the grounds that Iakuts were a nomadic people not entitled to representation in the Commission. Yet, Syranov traveled to St Petersburg, armed with “nakazy” from his electors, and managed to receive an audience with the Empress, who personally intervened to allow his participation (‘. . . It is truthfully known to me that those Iakuts are not entirely nomadic, but spend most of the year in their permanent dwellings . . .,” noted the Empress in a letter to the Secretary of the Legislative Commission).66 Instructions to Syranov from the five Iakut uluses, as well as his own additions to those instructions, set forth “Iakut” demands to the government for years to come: native lands ought to be permanently confirmed as Iakut; princelings should receive confirmation of their full police rights in their uluses; Iakuts should be allowed to pay iasak both in kind and in cash; Iakut princelings should receive the rights of the Russian nobility; and transportation dues imposed upon the Iakuts (such as maintaining roads and providing horses) should be either transferred to peasants specially settled on those roads or be paid for by the government if the Iakuts were to continue these dues.67 As is well known, the Legislative Commission was quickly dissolved. One

66 67

Pamiatniki prava Sakha . . ., 24–42. Ibid.

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crucial outcome of Syranov’s trip, though, was that the government abolished the transportation dues and agreed to pay Iakut uluses for transportation services, which was provided by the Iakut toions, who monopolized the trade with significant cash income.68 Even with the dissolution of the Legislative Commission, the reforming frenzy of Catherine’s government and the vocal native elite ensured the emergence of new projects on the government of the remote area. To be sure, the incorporation of Russian America and the importance of the Okhotsk and Aian ports for Pacific communications again turned the Iakut lands (which risked falling into oblivion because of the depletion of fur-bearing animals) into a strategic asset, as Iakut horses kept dragging people and goods further east, while securing the flow of cash into the hands of the Iakut toions. In 1788–1791 Aleksei Arzhakov, the head of the Borogon ulus, traveled to St Petersburg, where he presented to Catherine his “Plan of Iakuts to Demonstrate the State’s Interests and Their Profitable Situation.”69 Arzhakov, who grew up serving a Russian merchant and was allegedly educated by an exile, opened his proposition by a general description of the Iakuts (“Iakuts are a people occupying a special region between empty places (sic!) in Siberia and Kamchatka;” “they voluntarily submitted in the last century to the Russian state;” “many of them were given the honor of nobility at the time of Peter the Great and keep charters confirming that . . .”). The document described problems ensuing from the transportation dues of the Iakuts and suggested economic measures to lighten their burden. The central part of the document, though, dealt with specifically political demands. Arzhakov proposed the establishment of the office of the Iakut head, to be elected from the native “princelings,” who was to be made responsible for all dues and economic life of the Iakuts, as well as to perform judicial functions as the Iakuts’ supreme judge. Importantly, Arzhakov requested that the proposed office be made independent of the Iakutsk Russian administration and placed under the supervision of the vice-roy in Irkutsk. Arzhakov reiterated Sofronov’s demand that the rights of Russian nobility be extended to Iakut “princelings.” On October 1st 1789, the State Council declined all of his requests apart from the establishment of schools for native children, despite Catherine’s agreement with

68 69

Pavlinov, Vitshevskii, Levental’, Materialy po obychnomu pravu iakutov. . . . SPbFA IV RAN, f. 11, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 4–16.


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these demands. As she wrote on the “Plan . . .,” election of the Iakut Marshall may be allowed in accordance with the rules for the election of the guberniia marshal of the nobility.70 Although the elections were conducted, Arzhakov failed to establish any support among the local Russian administrators and his project was not realized.

The Steppe Duma: The Height of the Polizeistaat The Polizeistaat in Siberia was formalized in 1822, when M. M. Speranskii, tasked by Alexander I with improving Siberian governance, sponsored the issuance of the famous “Statute for the Administration of Aliens” (Ustav ob upravlenii inorodtsami) in 1822.71 The preparation for the edict announcing the Ustav included extensive consultations with Buriat and Iakut “princelings,” who were repeatedly called to Irkutsk and submitted several documents outlining their native common law along with various suggestions and proposals invariably in favor of increasing their own authority over their co-ethnics. The collection of customary law sources that was produced in the process of preparing the Statute clearly illustrates that concerns of Arzhakov or Syranov, while not completely addressed, were definitely taken into account by Speranskii and his staff.72 While the Statute was meant as an imperial regulation, de facto it was negotiated by Speranskii with native Iakut and Buriat princelings over the heads of the local Russian administrators. The Ustav divided Siberian natives into several categories according to their way of life. While settled inorodtsy were made equal to Russian peasants in terms of administration, and the “wandering” inorodtsy, like the Tungus, were made subject to their “clan administrations” (rodovye upravy), the nomadic inorodtsy received a tri-level system of administration. At the bottom of the system were “clan administrations,” roughly equal in status to Russian “sel’skie obshchestva” and headed by elected elders (called “kniazets,” or princeling, among the Iakuts).73 Clan

70

SPbFA IV RAN, f. 11, op. 1, d. 3, l. 2. Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1922 . . ., 112–128. 72 The collection of customary law derived from Iakut princelings’ reports was published as D. A. Samokvasov, Sbornik obychnogo prava Sibirskikh inorodtsev (Warsaw: Imperatorskii Varshavskii universitet, 1876), 199–244. 73 Interestingly, the Iakut language does not know the diminutive form of “prince,” such as Russian “kniazets.” Clan elders were called “kynees” (obviously an appropriation of the Russian “kniaz’ ” or prince, while heads of larger administrative units, uluses, 71

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administrations reported to “inorodnye upravy” (alien administrations), which among the Iakuts and the Buriats were called “ulusnye upravy” (ulus administrations). The alien administrations were directed by the “head” (ulusnyi golova), who was elected for three years, and consisted of two “candidates” and a scribe. On top of the new administrative structure was the Steppe Duma, which in the Iakut case consisted of seven heads of alien administrations, seven elected “candidates,” and a scribe. The Duma was directed by an elected “glavnyi rodonachal’nik,” or chief clan head. The establishment of the Duma among the Iakuts on March 11, 1827 was a matter of some controversy. According to the Ustav, the Duma could not be organized in a city and was supposed to reside in the steppe. In the Iakut case, though, it was established in the city, which, eventually, was the official reason for its dissolution. Moreover, the local administrators went out of their way to stress that the Duma’s prerogatives are strictly economic and judicial, and that it is subjected to the supervision of the land court in the latter, and the Iakutsk governor in the former cases.74 Despite the local administration efforts, though, the Duma proved a very powerful stimulus for group consciousness among the Iakuts. Elections of the Duma head or of the deputies were very well attended (apart from the regular 15 members of the Duma, 482 Iakuts traveled from their settlements to witness the elections of three members of the deputation to St Petersburg) in 1830.75 It became the focal point for all issues pertaining to land use, which was increasingly the key problem of native societies. Increasingly, members of the Duma and especially its head, Ivan Migalkin, challenged the local administration, with whom they shared the city. Obligatory bureaucratic reports on the service of Duma members boasted of their “princely” and noble (dvorianskie) origins.76 Old oral genealogies were revived to prove descent from either the semilegendary Iakut warlord Tygyn, or from his grandchildren, to whom Peter I had granted princely titles. Duma members used their offices to engage in lucrative fur trade with the Tungus, officially forbidden to

were either called “kuluuba,” from Russian “golova,” head, or “ulahaan kynees,” or grand prince.) In general, Iakut elite seem to have never accepted the diminutive term “princeling.” 74 NARS, f. 486–I, op. 2, d. 1, ll. 8–9. 75 NARS, f, 486–I, op. 2, d. 2, ll. 4–5. 76 Ibid., l. 20.


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both Iakuts and Russians.77 For instance, Migalkin ordered the exploration of uninhabited lands along the eastward tract to Okhotsk in order to study the possibility of resettling landless Iakuts there. As it turned out, the explorers mainly engaged in selling alcohol to the Tungus living on the Pacific coast. Amid Russian concerns of the Iakut toions overtaking transportation services and trade, this affair contributed to the notion that the Duma was a dangerous experiment. More and more, the Duma assumed the position of the institution entitled to speak on behalf of the Iakuts and to bypass local administration in order to report directly to the Governor-General in Irkutsk or even the Emperor himself. In 1830, the Duma sponsored the election of three deputies to be sent to the Emperor in St Petersburg in order to deliver Iakut complaints and concerns. The local administration, now very suspicious of the Iakut toions and fearful and envious of their successes in trade, prevented the deputation by opening legal procedures against the elected deputies accusing them of minor economic crimes. The deputies sent a complaint to St Petersburg, where the Siberian Committee sided with the local administration. Nicholas I, though, overrode the Siberian Committee recommendation and ordered the deputation to proceed. In response, the local administration arrested the deputies and initiated large-scale investigation of “abuses” by the Steppe Duma.78 In 1838, after 11 years of existence, the Duma was dissolved under the pretext of its illegal location in the city. The short-lived history of the Steppe Duma among the Iakuts of Siberia illustrates the existence of a deep-seated conflict between the expectations of the native Iakut elite and those of the Russian local administrators. While the former attempted to regularize their authority over the co-ethnics, secure government support for their position, and possibly even forge hereditary privileges for themselves, the latter was eager to eliminate any independent political body among the Iakuts. This conflict was an outcome of many factors, economic, political, administrative, and even cultural. Yet, the frenzied reforming activities of the late eighteenth century and the imperial attempt to rationalize and streamline the management of Siberian native peoples powerfully contributed to the consolidation of the native elites’ position. Surely, the reforms of 1822, like many other imperial initiatives, relied on the

77 78

NARS, f. 520–I, op. 1, d. l. 2. NARS, f. 486, op. 2, d. 2, ll. 2–6.

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notion of incorporating the native elites into the process of administration. However, the imperial government did not envision Siberian natives demanding the rights afforded to the nobility, nor did it plan for any autonomous institutions claiming power in competition with local Russian authorities. The conflict that arose around the Steppe Duma demonstrated the unintended consequences of the attempts to deal with ethnic diversity in the context of defamiliarization of empire through modern scholarly exploration and rationalist governance.

The End of the Steppe Duma: The Language of Weakness and Defense The abolition of the Steppe Duma revealed growing concern among local imperial administrators about Iakut prominence in North-Eastern Siberia. 1887, Vladimir Korolenko, a Populist revolutionary exiled to North-Eastern Siberia, wrote a story “Stanochniki” (“Postmen”), in which he described an encounter with a Russian peasant settler on the Lena. The peasant told Korolenko that all Russian peasants were made slaves to the Iakuts. This enslavement resulted from the first Russian Cossacks killing the Iakut “Tsar,”a crime that angered the Russian Tsar back in Moscow. Since then, the peasant argued, as a punishment for the murder of the Iakut ruler, Russian peasants had to work for the Iakuts, attend to their cattle, and cut hay for them. They also had to put up with the Iakuts occupying better lands, and with the prohibitions to settle on the native lands in Siberia.79 Apart from illustrating the extent to which Iakut folklore penetrated that of the Siberian Russians, this story highlights the economic and even cultural power held by the Iakuts. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Iakut language became a lingua franca in Siberia, assimilating not only the smaller peoples of the North but also Russians. Spoken widely by peasants and urban dwellers alike, Iakut became an object of study by the Academician Otto von Boehtlingk in 1844. Materials for Boehtlingk were provided by Afanasii Uvarovskii, a Russian bureaucrat from Siberia and a native speaker of Iakut.80 As many visitors to the

79 Vladimir Korolenko, “Stanochniki,” Idem, Sibirskie rasskazy i ocherki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980). 80 Uvarovskii, Akhtyylar. . . .


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area, from the American John Ledyard (disappprovingly) to Russian writer Ivan Goncharov (excitedly) noted, Iakut economic practices, dress, and diet were copied by the newcomers from the West. In yet another example of unintended outcomes, efforts to evangelize among the Iakuts by translating the Scriptures into their language using the Cyrillic alphabet, which were undertaken in 1855–1867 by Archbishop Innokentii of Kamchatka, the baptizer of the Aleutians resulted in the wide-spread use of written Iakut.81 Already in 1822, Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel had noted in his travels on the Lena how much better off Iakuts were as compared to Russian peasants, and attributed this fact to the former’s better adjustment to local climate. Still, Wrangel disapprovingly reported that one cannot find a single craftsman among the Russians. On the contrary, “local Iakuts, who used to just hunt and attend to their cattle, have taken up various crafts and deliver all necessities to their former teachers, the Russians, extracting significant profit from this.”82 When Adolph Erman, a German scholar and traveler, passed through North-Eastern Siberia during his journey around the world, he noted that “Siberian Russians have found it advantageous in many cases to adopt the usages of the indigenous tribes, because, these usages being founded on the long experience, they harmonise completely with the nature of the country and climate.”83 Commenting on the superb commercial skills of the Iakuts, Erman cited a local Russian, who told him that “when he first came here, every Russian passed with the Iakuts for a superior being,—they have even stood to salute him at a respectful distance; but matters were at last nearly come to that pass that he would have to bow to the Iakuts.”84 As Erman noted, “Siberian Russians differ from Iakuts only by their physical features and poorer clothing.”85

81 Ivan Goncharov, Fregat “Pallada”, 2 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986). On Ledyard, see Grey, “Visions of Another Empire,” and idem, The Making of John Ledyard. . . . On missionaries efforts, F. G. Sofronov and V. F. Ivanov, Pis’mennost’ iakutov (Iakutsk: Iakutskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1992). 82 Ferdinand von Wrangel, Puteshestvie po severnym beregam Sibiri i po Ledovitomu moriu, sovershennoe v 1820, 1821, 1822, 1823 i 1824 g. ekspeditsieiu, sostoiavsheiu pod nachal’stvom Flota Leitenanta Ferdinanda fon Vrangelia (St. Petersburg, 1841), 165, 170. 83 Adolph Erman, Travels in Siberia: Including Excursions Northwards, Down the Obi, to the Polar Circle, and Southwards, to the Chinese Frontier, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 280. 84 Ibid., 343. 85 Ibid.

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These developments fed into the growing insecurity of Russian imperial bureaucrats. The Russian peasant settler, the colonist meant to build and maintain the Empire was giving way to the supposedly weaker and less developed semi-nomadic and half-Christian Iakut, the object of almost half a century of scholarly study and rationalist governance that were supposed to bring him to the level of the Russians.86 While earlier in the century Russian observers commended Russian peasants for their ability to absorb local customs and gradually mix with local populations, by the middle of the century many saw Russian assimilation into Iakut language as a sign of cultural and even racial degradation.87 These concerns reflected the insecurity felt by educated Russians about their peasants’ ability to perform as empire builders, casting the very nature of the imperial project in doubt. The administrative response was to back down on any institutions that might help already empowered Iakuts and to maintain their legal separation from the estate of the Russian peasants. And yet, despite the reaction to the administrative frivolities of Speranskii’s time in Nikolaevan Siberia, the outcome of the two centuries of imperial rule in North-Eastern Siberia was not a uniform administrative regime. The encounter with imperial diversity in the eighteenth century and the subsequent attempts to regularize it through administrative arrangements reflecting contemporary notions of “civilization” brought forth institutions created through exchange and accommodation. In the process of that exchange, it was not just the Russian imperial administrators who learned to speak the language of rationalist governance but the native elites as well. The latter participated in the creation of the system that by and large governed Siberian native peoples until the Revolution of 1917 by re-casting themselves as good and reliable subjects of the Empire, utilizing the need of the “civilizers” to rely on customary law in order to advance their own interests and concerns. If in the Great Lakes region of North America the native peoples and Europeans created a world where common meanings were possible because competing empires helped neutralize the gravitation force

86 For a discussion of the “weakness” of the Russian peasant colonist, see Anatolii Remnev and Natalia Suvorova, “‘Russkoe delo’ na aziatskikh okrainakh: ‘russkost’’ pod ugrozoi ili ‘somnitel’nye kulturtregery’,” Ab Imperio, 2 (2008): 120–163; Willard Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts? ‘Going Native’ and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s–1914,” Slavic Review, vol. 55, no. 4 (1996): 806–825. 87 Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts?. . . .”


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of one government, in the remote parts of Siberia “Middle Ground,” albeit unintended, was created by attempts to forge uniformity and reliable governance. Lacking economic and demographic resources to simply impose new structures upon the native populations, those who governed asked their subjects to explain how this governance ought to proceed by producing accounts of customary law and local regulations. Although certain institutions, like the Steppe Duma, did not survive the fear of empowering the native elites, ultimately, these elites contributed to the very technology of imperial rule which produced and reproduced special regimes and exceptions even when the eventual purpose of imperial policies was the creation of a Kulturgemeinschaft out of the imperial mix.

PART THREE

THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSFORMATION AND RATIONALIZATION

RUSSIAN PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NINETEENTH–EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES: IMPERIAL RACE, COLONIAL OTHER, DEGENERATE TYPES, AND THE RUSSIAN RACIAL BODY Marina Mogilner

Russian history for decades has tempted historians with Sonderweg explanations.1 Only relatively recently has the anti-Sonderweg, normalizing trend in historiography come to dominate the field. This major reconsideration of the Russian past as part of a European modernity that inspired scholars only a decade or two ago, today forms the background against which new historiographic battles unfold. One of them, and probably the most exciting, is evolving around different visions of Russia as an imperial state and imperial society, which has provided space for the clash of Sonderweg explanations, structural approaches, and typologies (especially in the comparative history of empires) with a new postcolonial agenda in its application to the Russian imperial context.2 This chapter advances a contextualized and historical approach 1 See the discussion of the implications of the Sonderweg paradigm for Russian history in Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2002): 15–101; contributions by Carl E. Schorske, Hans van der Loo, Gunilla-Friederike Budde, Jurgen Kocka, and Manfred Hildermeier. 2 For illustrations see Danie Brower and Edward Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997); Catherine Clay, “Russian Ethnographers in the Service of Empire, 1856–1862,” Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 45–61; Nathaniel Knight, “Grigor’ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 74–100; Adeeb Khalid, Nathaniel Knight, and Maria Todorova, “Ex Tempore: Orientalism and Russia,” Kritika 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 691–728; Forum: Modernization of Russian Empire and Paradoxes of Orientalism: David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “A Subtle Matter—Orientalism”; Alexander Etkind, “The Saved Man’s Burden, or the Inner Colonization of Russia”; Nathaniel Knight, “Was Russia Its Own Orient? Reflections on the Contributions of Etkind and Schimmelpenninck on the Debate on Orientalism”; Elena Campbell, “On the Questions of Orientalism in Russia (in the Second Half of the 19th–early 20th Centuries),” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2002): 239–311; Discussion: Eric Weitz, “Racial Politics Without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges”; Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics”; Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty;” Alaina Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice”; Eric Weitz, “On Certainties and Ambivalences: Reply to My Critics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 1–65; Forum: The Multiethnic Soviet Union in Comparative Perspective: Adeeb

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to the issues that informed the current stage of discussions in the field of imperial history, an approach that focuses on the original semantics of imperial experiences and on analysis of particular imperial situations that defined and influenced this semantics. Such an approach makes structural comparisons and imperial typologies largely irrelevant, while shifting our attention to an analysis of the situations when Russia—represented by different collective and individual actors—behaved “as an empire” (or not), “spoke as an empire” (or not), reflected herself as an empire (or not), was forced to react to the challenges that made her imperial qualities and corresponding limitations and/or advantages evident (or not). In this chapter I deal with the conscious project of modernization of the Russian empire by means of rationalization of its self-representation with the help of modern knowledge. This project was perceived by its participants as a real, scientific, discovery of the Russian empire, which led to its “normalization”: within the framework of modern knowledge, the Russian empire as “regular” and comprehensible was no longer a civilization that could be considered “Other” in the context of Western nations; it was transforming from an archaic polity of the past into a “project in the making.” As Jan Kusber’s contribution to this collection shows, empire as a “project in the making” emerged in all its complexity during Catherine’s reign, when new scientifically grounded political discourses and moral philosophies suddenly resulted in empire’s “defamilization.” The irregular and multilayered imperial heterogeneity began to be seen as unnatural, as something that had to be rediscovered, learned, transformed, and reintegrated on new principles. In the course of the nineteenth century, the sciences became increasingly important suppliers of such principles or languages of imperial rationalization, and among them was the science of physical anthropology. As Neil MacMaster notes, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “race” became a dominant epistemology, an instrument unlocking all social, cultural, and political phenomena

Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective”; Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective”; Peter A. Blitstein, “Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative Context”; Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance,’ Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 231–303; Novaia imperskaia istoria postsovetskogo prostranstva, ed. I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovskii, M. Mogilner, and A. Semyonov (Kazan: TsINI, 2004).

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in the world.3 Race was a key concept of both academic and popular discourses of Western imperialism and nationalism as well as social reformism.4 Against this background the exclusion of Russia from the world of race science remains the most striking and long-lasting feature of the vanishing Sonderweg perception of its history. According to the widely accepted historiographic wisdom: Not only did the racial paradigm fail to take hold in a substantial way in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Russia, the importance of ethnicity was reinforced by the adoption of narodnost’ as a marker of ethnicity. Deeply rooted in the world view of romantic idealism, narodnost’ provided a model of ethnicity that was both essentialist—derived from a concept of immutable identity—and at the same time cultural rather than biological in its manifestations. This is, perhaps, one reason why the racial obsessions of Western Europe throughout the late nineteenth and

3

Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe. 1870–2000 (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 14. On the history of race in the European context, see George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968); Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York and London: Free Press and Collier Macmillan, 1987); John Burke, “The Wild Man’s Pedigree: Scientific Method and Racial Anthropology,” The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. E. Dudley and M. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 259–280; Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Oxford: Macmillan Press, 1982); George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); G. W. Stocking, Jr., Ed., Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 180–205; Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism. Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the Science of Culture in Germany, 1840–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity. Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race. Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Ernest Gellner, Anthropology and Politics. Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Hans Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldan, eds., Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of European Anthropology (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); H. Glenn Panny and Matti Bunzl, eds., Wordly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Martin Staum, “Nature and Nurture in French Ethnography and Anthropology, 1859–1914,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 3 (2004): 475–495; Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman, One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. The Halle Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and many others. 4

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marina mogilner early twentieth century, evoked (with a few significant exceptions) only a limited response in Russia.5

Even Russian anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century is deemed a nonracial phenomenon by many historians.6 Regardless of the emerging concern with racial thinking, especially among students of the Soviet period,7 “Russian race” remains an element of the Sonderweg discourse, indicating a fixation on the “archaic” attributes of empire and allowing for a conceptual “orientalization” of the Russian past. The reasons for this can be found in the ambiguities of those cultural distances that are theoretically objectified and fixed by the category of “race”: it is hard indeed to draw an impassable line between the Russians and the inorodtsy (non-Russians) in the empire. For many centuries they were involved in intensive cultural contacts that included wars, economic cooperation, missionary activities, mixed marriages, and bilateral assimilation. It is equally problematic to conceptualize Russian professionals (or even entrepreneurs) and the Russian proletariat as representing two opposing political classes (and thus potential “social races,” thereby “naturalizing” and justifying the whole range of political, cultural, and economic differences and disadvantages in terms of social Darwinism).8 The Russian autocracy was persistent in its refusal to share its “real” and discursive authority with modern elite social groups, thus preventing 5 Nathaniel Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Masses: Narodnost’ and Modernity in Imperial Russia,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffman and Yanni Katsonis (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 57–58. 6 For the most consistent representation of this approach, see Eli Weinerman, “Racism, Racial Prejudice and Jews in Late Imperial Russia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 3 (1994): 442–495. For an opposing tendency that problematizes “race” in the context of Russian Jewish history, see Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Eugene M. Avrutin, “Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika 8, no. 1 (2007); Marina Mogilner, “Evreiskaia antropologiia v Rossii v kontekste evropeiskikh rasovykh issledovanii” (Jewish anthropology in Russia in the context of European studies of race), in Istoriia i kul’tura rossiiskogo i vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva. Novye istochniki i novye podkhody, ed. O. Budnitskii et al. (Moscow: Dom Evreiskoi Knigi, 2004), 116–143. 7 Discussion, see ft. 2. See aslo Forum: The Multiethnic Soviet Union in Comparative Perspective: Adeeb Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization”; Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation”; Peter A. Blitstein, “Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture”; Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance’”; Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). 8 For the most elaborated discussion of this argument, see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).


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society from strong polarization along the new class lines. While new practices of societal differentiation had been hampered by the imperial regime, a fundamental cultural distance between the upper social estates (and cultural elites) and the peasantry that represented the bulk of the country’s population persisted up to the beginning of the twentieth century. This sociocultural gap stood in the way of the homogenization of the population into the “social mass” of the “national body,” which was needed to enable racial imagination. This complexity of the imperial social structure did not fit into any single historical metanarrative, be it a trope of “eternal tradition,” a modernization/undermodernization paradigm, a poetics of national liberation from the “prison of peoples,” or а revolutionary narrative. The extremely dynamic period following the reforms of the 1860s combined imperial “archaic” features with a multitude of new forms of political, social, and cultural life. Much in Russian history in general, and in the postreform period in particular, can be interpreted as attempts to find answers to the same challenges as those experienced by other European societies. Moreover, educated Russians were able to identify some situations as problematic precisely because they saw themselves as acting within the general European context. They internalized European experience as their own, and “naturally” discovered in Russia the same problems as in the West. Only for these obvious reasons Russian intellectual elites in the nineteenth century could not ignore “race”—an extremely visible and important category of Western political and scientific language. However, in the Russian imperial situation (“context”), “race” acquired connotations and social functions quite different from those in West European societies. Andrew Zimmerman in his Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany tells the story of the emergence of race science against the background of the crisis of a “humanist paradigm” of European culture.9 He traces the change from the self-referential interpretation of “culture” as a particular textual tradition of thinking about humankind in ideal-typical categories and as an elite system of knowledge production and transmission, to a more democratic, practice-oriented and universalist notion of “culture.” In this perspective, “race” emerged as one of the modern languages for describing the ever-increasing social

9 Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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dynamism that resulted from intensified communications, travel, and migrations. This language responded to the challenges of changing historical landscapes and perceptions of time and space, and to the demands of emerging proto-mass societies with their growing number of nonelite consumers of culture. By turning its attention to those who had been excluded from the highbrow “humanist” world of culture, physical anthropology was able to provide a kind of knowledge about humans and societies that was not mediated by “texts.” The same methods and concepts had to be used to study race outside of Europe and inside European societies. The crisis of the old moralistic notions of “pure” aristocratic blood and upbringing was compensated with “precise” biological concepts of social stratification. In the words of Paul Weindling, “individuality was removed from the moral sphere, and redefined in scientific terms with the individual subsumed in a ‘race’ (a category equivalent to a biological sub-species).”10 Thus the old cultural notion of individuality was sublimated in the discourse of biologically equal and rationally cognizable individuals, which together formed a common social body characterized by certain racial traits. Physical anthropologists in the nineteenth century tended to distance themselves both from linguists who constructed language families on cultural foundations and from ethnographers who stressed cultural peculiarities and differences (especially between the “primitive” and “civilized” European peoples).11 Many European physical anthropologists reacted negatively to overt attempts at constructing racial hierarchies, to the “scientific” glorification of the Aryan race, and later on to crude social-Darwinist schemes.12 The politicization of scientifically established human distinctions was incompatible with a liberal ethos of the universalist anthropological paradigm and its new, much more

10

Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 49. Ibid., 50–51; Leon Poliakov, The Arian Myth. A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974); Joy Harvey, “Evolutionism Transformed: Positivists and Materialists in the Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris from Second Empire to Third Republic,” in The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, ed. D. Oldroyd and J. Langham (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 289–310; Michael Hammond, “Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 118–132; and others. 12 Joy Harvey, “Races Specified. Evolution Transformed: The Social Context of Scientific Debates Originating in the Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983; George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution. A History of European Racism (London: Dent, 1978), 50–62; Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 48–52; and others. 11


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democratic and egalitarian practices of professional socialization. Methodologically, this “liberalism” included the monogenist view of human evolution and the universalist natural-science language of its description—as opposed to the polygenist views and the classifying and differentiating language of culture. Politically, this “liberalism” perceived rational knowledge as the only precondition for any political action; it held a very cautious attitude toward scientifically unjustified state intervention in social politics; it propagated a moderate and generally optimistic political “evolutionism” and antiracist worldview. This very general snapshot of the intellectual gestalt of European anthropologists in the second half of the nineteenth century should not be completely overshadowed by the horrible culmination (or degradation) of racial science in the subsequent colonial excesses and racial cleansings and genocides of the 1930s and 1940s. The liberal routes of physical anthropology should not be outright dismissed, but rather problematized. This conclusion is applicable to the Russian empire as much as to other world empires and nation states. In Russia, as I intend to show, “race” not only became a category of the opposition liberal discourse, while being virtually ignored by the state and state-sponsored science. Russian “liberal race” also proved to be the most influential academic and political concept when compared with other interpretations of “race” advanced by Russian scientists and politicians. Although European “liberalism” in the nineteenth century was a multifaceted and highly contextualized phenomenon, Russian liberalism, not least due to the constraints imposed on political life in imperial Russia, was an even less coherent set of ideological beliefs. Political parties and organizations were outlawed in Russia up to the first Russian revolution of 1905–1907, when liberalism finally became a distinctive political force represented by parties participating in parliamentary (Duma) politics.13 But even then liberalism continued to preserve its character of a general “state of mind” par excellence and retained a very broad definition of

13 Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Klaus Fröhlich, The Emergence of Russian Constitutionalism, 1900–1904: The Relationship between Social Mobilization and Political Group Formation in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981); Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Kornelii Fedorovich Shatsillo, Russkii liberalizm nakanune revoliutsii 1905–1907 gg.: Organizatsiia, programmy, taktika (Moscow: Nauka, 1985).

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political values without a clearly defined political program.14 Russian liberals supported (sometimes financially, more often with moral confirmation) the uncompromising Russian leftist political terrorism on the grounds that all means were justified against the Russian autocracy; they also deeply mistrusted the influential Russian conservative elite and compromised their liberal principles to minimize the scale of the conservatives’ political representation.15 Moreover, through the cluster of related, synonymous, or interchangeable notions of “progressivism,” “Europeanness,” “Westernization,” “modernization,” “populism,” and so on, “Liberalism” was appropriated by modernist nationalists as well as enlightened conservatives, and by the leftist opponents of the latter from the nonradical political camp (the Party of Constitutional Democrats). In a society without the actual tradition of liberal politics, a vaguely defined “liberalism” stood for open-mindedness, rationalism, and efficiency. This may partly explain why a liberal anthropological paradigm in late imperial Russia dominated over the colonial and nationalizing “schools” in anthropology that were equally alienated from the state.16 Different currents within Russian liberal anthropology shared a common agenda of rational reconceptualization of the empire, of finding an objective and universal language of its representation as a modern European country with potential for the future other than revolution or disintegration along national lines.

14 The utterly amorphous nature of Russian liberalism of the second half of the nineteenth century is discussed in Konstantin Shneider, “Was There an ‘Early Russian Liberalism’? Perspectives from Russian and Anglo-American Historiography,” Kritika 7, no. 4 (2006): 825–841. In his review of the historiography of liberalism, Terence Emmons noted that the result of the fuzziness of the concept “has been to equate ‘liberalism’ in Russia with the reformist or nonviolent opposition movement as a whole, a designation that is much too broad. It has hindered the study of liberal thought and values on the one hand, and on the other has led to a nonsensical denial that this opposition was in any sense a real force for change” (Terence Emmons, “Liberation or Liberalism?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 [2004]: 111). 15 B. S. Intenberg and V. V. Shelokhaev, eds., Rossiiskie liberaly: Sbornik statei (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001). 16 This statement will be illustrated later in the article, but readers seeking a more detailed treatment of all three paradigms and the “technologies of leadership” exercised by the leaders of liberal anthropology can find it only in my book because, until recently the history of Russian physical anthropology has been a virtual historiographic black hole; Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii. Istoriia fizicheskoi antropologii v Rossiiskoi imperii (konets XIX–nachalo XX vv.) (Moscow: NLO, 2008).


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The first Russian university chair of anthropology was set up in Moscow University in 1879—the same year that the first German chair was established in Munich with Johannes Ranke as its first occupant.17 The only difference was that this first major Russian university chair in anthropology existed on private donations, as did the Anthropological Division of the Moscow-based Society of Lovers of Natural Sciences, Anthropology, and Ethnography (founded 1863) that had arranged a successful fundraising campaign for the official university chair.18 The Moscow Anthropological Division was the real center of Russian anthropology, connected with other anthropological academic societies and individual professionals involved in anthropological research in different regions of the empire. This was by no means a uniquely Russian form of anthropology’s institutionalization.19 What really distinguished the case in Russia was a clear differentiation of various types of anthropological discourse elaborated within different academic societies, incorporating both methodological approaches and political visions of imperial modernization that they advanced using the language of race science. The Russian Anthropological Society at St. Petersburg University (founded in 1884, but truly active after 1888) chose for itself a model of colonial anthropology and the ethos of scientific experts; it demonstrated loyalty to the regime and the desire to embody the official science of the modern empire. Although its membership and ideology evolved with time, its contempt for public opinion and proclivity toward elitist, expert-oriented discourse as well as its focus on the anthropology of imperial minorities remained unchanged up until the eve of the Great War.20 The state proved to be absolutely disinterested in the expertise 17 The detailed history of the chair is reconstructed on the basis of many published and archival materials from the Moscow Central Historical Archive (henceforth TsIAM), F. 418. Op. 48. D. 422; F. 428. Оp. 46. d. 339; etc. in Mogilner, Homo Imperii. See also N. G. Zalkind, Moskovskaia shkola antropologii v razvitii otechestvennoi nauki o cheloveke (Moscow: Nauka, 1974). 18 The society received the donation from industrialist K. O. Von Mekk. See TsIAM. F. 428. Op. 46. D. 339. Ll. 2–10; 67–67 оb. 19 On the German pattern of anthropological institutionalization in the form of professional “movement” and the network of societies and museums, see Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany; Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics. 20 On the Russian Anthropological Society, see The Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg (henceforth TsGIASPb), F. 14. Op. 1. D. 8591; Op. 1. Vol. 4. D. 9045; “Ustav Russkogo Antropologicheskogo Obshchestva pri S.-Peterburgskom Universitete,” in Protokoly zasedanii RAO pri IPU za 1895/6 god, ed. V. Ol’derogge

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offered by St. Petersburg anthropologists, and unwilling to support their initiatives to modernize imperial rule. Paradoxically, the imperial Ministry of Education eagerly funded the Moscow Anthropological Division’s Russian Anthropological Journal (RAZh)—the major mouthpiece of liberal anthropologists, spreading their discursive influence empire-wide,21 while the St. Petersburg Russian Anthropological Society was denied even small subsidies for its publications.22 Kiev University became the main center of Russian national anthropology, with psychiatry professor Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii (father of the renowned aircraft designer) as the leading proponent of Russian racial nationalism.23 Sikorskii aspired to scientifically reimagine the empire as a dual system, with the “Russian” racial core surrounded by the racially inferior “non-Russian” periphery. His school of anthropology was less interested in mass anthropometric studies or prehistoric archaeology, preferring instead socially oriented research, medical experiments on humans, psychiatric speculations, and the advancement of a general proto-eugenicist agenda. All other multiple local versions of Russian imperial anthropology can be grouped on a virtual anthropological map together with one of (St. Petersburg, 1898), 3–6; L. P. Nikol’skii, “Pamiati Professora Eduarda Jul’evicha Petri,” Trudy Antropologicheskogo Obshchestva pri Voenno-Meditsinskoi academii, vol. 6 (za 1899–1900 uchebnye goda) (St. Petersburg, 1900): 3–8; “Russkoe Antropologicheskoe obshchestvo pri Peterburgskom universitete,” RAZh, 7–8, no. 1–2 (1904): 233; I. L. Tikhonov, Arkheologia v Sankt-Peterburgskom universitete. Istoriograficheskie ocherki (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2003), Appendix and other. For an extensive treatment, see Mogilner, Homo Imperii. 21 The first issue of RAZh came out in 1900. Its predecessor was “The Diary of the Anthropological Division” (Dnevnik Antropologicheskogo otdela) published in 1890–1893 in three volumes (twenty issues). RAZh remained a regular publication until 1906 when a fire in the printing shop and financial problems hampered its regular production. The journal was not published in 1908–1911 and then again in 1914–1915. It reemerged in 1916, was interrupted by the revolution of 1917, and again returned to a regular schedule in 1924. 22 Russian State Historical Archive (henceforth RGIA), F. 733. Op. 144. D. 3, “O naznachenii posobii uchenym obshchestvam, uchrezhdeniam i litsam,” (1904); RGIA. F. 733. Op. 145. D. 3, “O naznachenii posobii uchenym obschestvam, uchrezhdeniam i litsam,” Ll. 1–92; and others. 23 On the history of Sikorskii’s anthropological initiatives in Kiev, see Kiev City Archive (henceforth GAK), F. 16. Op. 465. D. 255. Ll. 25–28; and also Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine (henceforth TsGIAU), F. 707. Op. 262. D. 8. 8 ll.; Mogilner, “Entsiklopediia russkogo natsionalisticheskogo proekta,” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2003): 225–240; V. Menzhulin, Drugoi Sikorskii. Neudobnye stranitsy istorii psikhiatrii (Kiev: Sfera, 2004). All of Sikorskii’s major works have recently been reprinted in new adaptations of Russian racial nationalism in Russkaia rasovaia teoria do 1917 goda, ed. and preface, V. B. Avdeev (Moscow: FERI-V, 2002).


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these three major loci.24 The constant intracommunal dialogue and overt or implicit references to one of the major paradigms makes it possible to approach Russian imperial anthropology as a coherent and discrete phenomenon. It was characterized not only by a shared focus on the territory and peoples of the Russian empire but also by the self-organizing nature of the anthropological movement, which was left to its own devices by a largely indifferent (or at best inconsistently curious) state. Such an attitude on the part of the state did not allow for the establishment of a single dominant paradigm of race science as an instrument of imperial politics. Another effect of the Russian state’s indecisiveness regarding the practical application of anthropology for the empire was an especially strong role of popular initiative, public networking, and oppositional ideologies in the anthropological community. The Moscow Anthropological Division was the stronghold of this self-organizing and self-mobilizing anthropological movement that was rhetorically coded as the movement for the rational exploration of the empire. Starting from 1900, the Russian Anthropological Journal, published by the division became the principal instrument of its discursive control and an effective tool for the marginalization of other (nonliberal) versions of anthropology. The journal set professional standards for hundreds of amateur anthropologists in the provinces, offering them not only direct instructions but also an elaborated discourse of belonging to the grand project of building the “empire of knowledge.” Moscow’s liberal anthropology attracted Russian as well as non-Russian university professors, medical doctors, teachers, and other educated people from all corners of the empire, as its ideological outlook was very broadly defined in terms of general progress and rational self-cognition within the given imperial borders, while its institutional setting was uniquely inclusive by Russian academic standards. Polish political exiles in Siberia, Jewish doctors, Georgian

24 About different centers of Russian physical anthropology, see Mogilner, Homo Imperii. For more or less general contemporary accounts, see Fedor Volkov, “Antropologiia i ee universitetskoe prepodavanie (K peresmotru universitetskogo ustava),” In Ezhegodnik RAO pri Imperatorskom Petrogradskom universitete, ed. S. I. Rudenko (Petrograd, 1915): 99–107; “K voprosu o prepodavanii antropologii v Kazanskom universitete,” Zhurnal Kazanskogo Mediko-Antropologicheskogo obshchestva, no. 1 (1921): 272; E. G. Landau, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k izucheniiu antropologii (Jur’ev, 1912); R. L. Veinberg, “Glavneishie priemy sovremennoi antropologicheskoi tekhniki (Iz antropologicheskoi laboratorii Jur’evskogo anatomicheskogo instituta),” RAZh 17–18, no. 1–2 (1904): 79–120; and all issues of RAZh.

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teachers—all of them had equal chances, among many things, to be admitted to the Moscow or provincial anthropological societies based on Moscow’s model, to publish the results of their studies in RAZh, to receive instruction, literature, or technical assistance from the secretary of the Moscow Anthropological Division, and to be nominated to compete for two major national anthropological awards.25 In one case, like many other Jews, Aleksandr El’kind (1868–1921), a medical doctor who defended his anthropology dissertation at Moscow University (“Jews: A Comparative Anthropometric Study, Mostly of Polish Jewry”),26 could not pursue a formal academic career without converting from Judaism to Christianity. However, in the informal Moscow-controlled anthropological hierarchy, he achieved great recognition in 1914 when he became the editor of RAZh. Moscow-oriented anthropologists developed an extremely influential liberal paradigm, which I would characterize as an anthropology of imperial diversity. It clearly differentiated between race and nation, and in general—between “race” and “culture.” Terminologically, liberal anthropologists of the Moscow school preferred a less totalizing and rather unexcited “physical type” to “race.” They studied both “Russian” (in an ethnic/national sense) and non-Russian “physical types” in the empire. The technical language of their anthropological analysis neutralized nationalizing tendencies of individual research projects even when they were present in the initial research design. The school pursued a utopian project of total anthropological description of the

25 The Anthropological Division of the Moscow Society of Lovers of Natural Sciences . . . every two years rewarded the best anthropological projects with two money awards and a gold medal. One award was introduced to commemorate two congresses that took place in Moscow in 1892—one on anthropology and the other on (prehistorical) archaeology. The award was named after the Moscow general-governor Grand Prince Sergei Aleksandrovich. Interestingly, this instrument of official legitimization of physical anthropology in the empire was used by the Anthropological Division to support anthropologists representing the nationalities most hated by the Grand Prince, such as Jews (e.g., A. D. El’kind and S. A. Waisenberg) and Poles (e.g., Ju. D. Tal’koGryntsevitch). For more on the prize, see “Izvestiia i zametki,” RAZh, 1, no. 1 (1900): 122–124. The second prize and the gold medal were established by an Anthropological Division member, Professor A. P. Rastsvetov, and named after him. This award supported young scholars and professionals working in a liberal anthropological paradigm of imperial diversity. Candidates for awards were nominated in Moscow and thus the national awards helped to spread the influence of the liberal paradigm. 26 A. D. El’kind, “Evrei (Sravnitel’no-antropologicheskoe issledovanie, preimuschestvenno po nabludeniiam nad pol’skimi evreiami),” Izvestiia Imperatorskogo Obshchestva Liubitelei Estestvoznaniia, Antropologii i Etnografii, vol. 104 (1903).


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entire population of the Russian empire, establishing not hierarchies but “degrees of kinship” and types of interaction. Its mantra was a “mixed physical type”—the most common result of empirical anthropometric measurements carried out according to the Moscow research program and instructions. Representatives of Moscow-sponsored anthropology viewed the existing imperial borders as the natural limits of a yet to be “anthropologically rationalized,” and thus a Russian empire re-created as a modern state. In their utopian pursuit they had to rely on the existing official prenational (ethnic) and confessional nomenclatures of peoples (e.g., Velikorusy—Great Russians, Malorossy—Little Russians or Velikorusy of a given district—instead of the accumulated “Russians”; or the Orthodox or Muslim population of a given region). Liberal anthropologists recognized the problem of the incompatibility of biological “race” or “physical type” with premodern ethnic or confessional definitions, but preferred to resolve this difficulty by stressing their awareness of the danger of this uncomfortable compromise, and restrained from constructing new groupings and larger national entities for the purposes of their research.27 The Moscow school was responsible for the marginalization in the Russian imperial context of the sanitary and criminal branches of anthropology, criticizing their inclination toward empirically unsubstantiated speculations and for a tendency to arbitrarily homogenize the representation of a “social body” in order to make it an unproblematic object for scientific (and hence social) engineering. The leading Russian liberal anthropologist, a Moscow University professor, Dmitrii Anuchin, on behalf of his “school,” criticized criminal anthropology for its antiuniversalist and antievolutionist predisposition, and for its scientifically unconvincing Eurocentrism. For Russia, which itself was a questionable member of “Europe,” this was an especially sensitive issue: [An] “Anthropological” school should use real anthropological data and consider all known different human types. Anthropological data prove . . . that morphologically a normal man can belong to white or

27 The opposite tendency was demonstrated by the military anthropologists who demanded the inclusion of the category of “nationality,” immanent for “European modernity,” in the official military-medical statistics. For an analysis of their academic and political discourse and the story of Russian military anthropology as the only branch of applied anthropology partially recognized and used by the state, see Mogilner, Homo Imperii; Mogilner, “Doing Anthropology in Russian Military Uniform,” in Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones, ed. Reinhard Johler (Tübingen, 2009 forthcoming).

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marina mogilner black races, have wooly hair—as a Negro or a Hottentot does, or straight hair—as a Mongol or an American does; he can be tall as a Polynesian, a Patagonian or a Kafr, or short as a Negritos, a Japanese or a Lopar’.28

Anuchin concluded that generalizations based on the characteristics of the Europeans were as wrong as generalizations that “consider only white [men] to be normal, while regarding Negroes, Mongols and other types as abnormal, degenerative and enfeebled representatives of the family Homo.”29 The objections of Russian liberal anthropology to the approach of criminal anthropology indeed went beyond conventional criticism of the Lombrosian school in other countries. This can be seen even in the works of Russian criminal anthropologists who in fact embraced the Lombrosian method and applied it to the Russian “material.” Among them was Praskov’ia Tarnovskaia, whose studies of Russian female murderers and prostitutes became a recognized “Russian” contribution to the European canon of criminal anthropology.30 Laura Engelstein gave the most thoughtful interpretation of Tarnovskaia’s legal thinking and anthropological method,31 however she understood the latter as merely an extension of Western criminal anthropology and gendered social imagination onto the Russian undermodernized political and social context—hence Tarnovkaia’s tendency to stress social causes of crime over biological ones. While this interpretation itself can be disputed, what Engelstein missed completely is the simple fact that while “transmitting” Lombroso to Russia, Tarnovkaia—contrary to many followers of Cesare Lombroso from other countries—was most anxious about the racial uniformity of her material. From a perspective inside the Russian intellectual and political context, she saw how hav28 D. Anuchin, “Izuchenie psikhofizicheskikh tipov. D. A. Dril’. “Psikhofizicheskie tipy v ikh sootnoshenii s prestupnost’iu i ee raznovidnostiami”. М. 1890,” Vestnik Evropy, vol. III, no. 5 (1890): 337–338. 29 Ibid. P. 338. 30 P. N. Tarnovskaia, Zhenshchiny-ubiitsy. Antropologicheskoe issledovanie s 163 risunkami i 8 antropometricheskimi tablitsami (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Petersburg Izd-vo T-va Khudozhestvennoi Pechati, 1902); Tarnovskaia, “Antropometricheskie issledovaniia prostitutok, vorovok i zdorovykh krest’ianok—polevykh rabotnits (zasedanie 21 noiabria 1887 g.),” in Protokoly zasedanii obshchestva psikhiatrov v S.-Peterburge za 1887 god (St. Petersburg, 1888); Tarnovskaia, “Vorovki (antropologicheskoe issledovanie),” Zhurnal russkogo obshchestva okhraneniia narodnogo zdravia, no. 6/7 (1891); Tarnovskaia, Novye raboty po kriminal’noi antropologii (St. Petersburg, 1892); Pauline Tarnowsky, Etude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Paris: Aux bureaux du Progrés; E. Lecrosnier et Babe, 1889). 31 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 138–139 and ff.


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ing developed outside or on the margins of the liberal anthropology’s paradigm,32 Russian criminal anthropology displayed a tendency toward racializing not “criminal” individuals or “criminal types,” but whole ethnic groups, turning them into “criminal” and “degenerate” races of the empire. Moreover, Tarnovskaia knew very well that “Russian criminal type” as a concept was understood differently by her Russian and her European colleagues. Indeed, the concept of “Russian race” was a scientific anomaly from the point of view of liberal anthropology and the most debatable notion politically. Hence, striving for high academic objectivity and trying to distance herself from criminal anthropologists and the authors of textbooks in “her” discipline—such as the vanguard of Russian nationalists and influential psychiatry professors V. F. Chizh and P. I. Kovalevskii33—Tarnovskaia had to exclude from her analysis all “speculative” cases in which at least one of the parents of her murderers and prostitutes was not “Russian” by birth, or was of uncertain ethnicity as a migrant to inner Russia from Finland, or the Baltic lands,

32

Among leading Russian criminal anthropologists were representatives of modern Russian nationalism and modern science such as psychiatry professors V. F. Chizh and P. I. Kovalevskii. See V. Chizh, Kriminal’naia antropologiia. V ispravlennom i dopolnennom vide (Odessa, 1895); Chizh, “K ucheniiu ob organicheskoi prestupnosti,” Arkhiv psikhiatrii, neirologii i sudebnoi psikhologii, no. 1 (1893): 137–176; Chizh, Prestupnyi chelovek pered sudom vrachebnoi nauki (Kazan’: Tip.—litografiia Imperatorskogo Universiteta, 1894); and others; P. I. Kovalevskii, Psikhologiia prestupnika po russkoi literature o katorge (St. Petersburg, 1900); Kovalevskii, Vyrozhdenie i vozrozhdenie. Prestupnik i bor’ba s prestupnost’iu (St. Petersburg: Tipogr. V. I. Akinfieva i I. V. Leont’eva, 1903); Kovalevskii, Vyrozhdenie i vozrozhdenie. Sotsial’no-psikhologicheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1899); Kovalevskii, Sudebnaia psikhopatologiia. Psikhologiia prestupnika (St. Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo meditsinskogo vestnika, 1901); and others. There were liberal attorneys who resented the tendency to “racialize” and criminalize the empire’s non-Russian ethnicities. See, for example, A. D. Margolin, Rol’ i znachenie Lombrozo v evolutsii poniatii o prestuplenii i nakazanii (Kiev, 1910). There were also scholars who developed criminal anthropological interpretation of crime compatible with Marxist historical and economic explanations. As an example, see D. A. Dril’, Prestupnost’ i prestupniki (Ugolovno-psikhologicheskie etudy) (St. Petersburg: Izd. Ia. Kantorovicha, 1895); Dril’, “Nauka ugolovnoi antropologii, ee predmet i zadachi,” Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal’noi antropologii i gipnotizma 1 (1904): 12–20; Dril’, Uchenie o prestupnosti i merakh bor’by s neiu (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1912); and others. In any case, while they differed significantly by professional training, ideological agenda, and political views, all of these people called themselves “criminal anthropologists” and studied “criminal types” of the Russian empire. No dominant school or mechanisms of control of their applications of Lombrozo emerged. 33 For more on these “criminal anthropologists,” see Mogilner, “Degenerate Type” in Russian: Criminal Anthropology of an Imperial Society,” in Homo Imperii, Part 3, ch. 9, 358–396.

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or the Western borderlands (whether Poles or Byelorussians or “Little Russians”). Any suspicion of the presence of a drop of non-Russian or rather non-Great Russian blood in her sample group of “Russian” female murderers had to be eliminated, because otherwise Tarnovskaia could have been accused of ideologically motivated constructivism (to use contemporary academic slang), that is, of constructing Russianness out of different Slavic peoples of the empire who might have had their own national identities. Tarnovskaia therefore wanted to be as careful and as “objective” as possible. She imposed the same limitations on her control group of Russian peasant women.34 Tarnovskaia harshly criticized her fellow criminal anthropologists for working with racially mixed material—not because they crossed boundaries between the colonizers and the colonized, but because, as a Russian anthropologist, she knew that only vulgar unscientific speculations allowed one to distill pure physical types from the Russian population, while unreflective arbitrary mixing of anthropometric data of different physical types was equally academically unacceptable.35 The diversity of the imperial population was the starting point of her thinking about the empire, while “population” was a term that automatically required qualifications. The logic of criminal anthropology commanded Tarnovskaia to reduce different anthropometric features to a fixed “criminal type,” while the imperial logic inevitably made this an ethnically marked type. Serious Russian anthropologists found in the empire only mixed physical types with anthropometric characteristics hardly reducible to one distinct set of degenerate or normal indicators. In order to sound convincing in the Russian academic context, Tarnovskaia needed to resolve this contradiction between the normative approach of criminal anthropology and the relativizing approach of Russian liberal anthropology. Yet even the most accurately calculated Russian national/racial norm and deviation, while convincing to her European colleagues, was hardly acceptable to Russian anthropologists—both for nationalists who saw Russians as the tripartite unity of Great Russian, Little Russian, and White Russian groups and for liberals who rejected categories like “Russian” as being scientifically unsubstantiated. The above-mentioned leader of the Russian school of liberal anthropology of imperial diversity, Dmitrii Nikolaevich Anuchin (1843–1923), criticized criminal anthropology

34 35

Tarnovskaia, Zhenshchiny-ubiitsy, 1. Ibid., 44.


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precisely for its tendency to establish the discourse of a racial norm.36 Anuchin’s argumentation was demonstratively “scientific” and not “ideological.” However, his methodological universalism and suspicion of any culturally constructed discourse of the “norm” and “deviation” had important ideological implications for the liberal anthropological paradigm. The latter was immunized from an obsession with racial and cultural hierarchies and projects of direct state intervention. Politically, many representatives of this very influential (in Russia) school of imperial anthropology were liberal opponents of the regime. Their ranks incorporated, among others, the Petersburg University professor Fedor Volkov (known in Ukranian as Fedir Vovk, 1847–1918). His biographical data include membership in the Ukrainian Gromada, years of political exile, a Ukrainophile “brand” of ethnography, and a major anthropological project—constructing the “Ukrainian race” as a homogeneous and the historically most authentic Slavic race.37 A liberal anthropological paradigm was the natural choice for leftist intellectuals such as Aleksandr Vorob’ev (1875–1905), a Moscow University professor and leading specialist on the anthropology of the Great Russian population (as a “physical type” of the empire but not as an element of the titular “great Russian nation”). He was gunned

36 On Anuchin’s “anthropological biography,” see V. V. Bogdanov, “Dmitrii Nikolaevich Anuchin,” in Sbornik v chest’ semidesiatiletiia professora Dmitriia Nikolaevicha Anuchina (Moscow, 1913), vii–xl; “Formuliarnyi spisok o sluzhbe zasluzhennogo ordinarnogo professora Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo universiteta deistvitel’nogo statskogo sovetnika Anuchina (Sostavlen po fevral’ 29 dnia 1908 г.,” TsIAM, F. 418. Оp. 86. D. 547. L. 10 оb (L. 9–20); V. V. Bunak, “Deiatel’nost’ D. N. Anuchina v oblasti antropologii,” RAZh, 13, no. 3–4 (1924) 1–18; L. S. Berg, “Dmitrii Nikolaevich Anuchin (1843–1923)” in Ocherki po istorii russkikh geograficheskikh otkrytii (Moscow and Leningrad: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1946), 282–318. For the list of Anuchin’s anthropological publications up to 1913, see Sbornik v chest’ semidesiatiletia professora Dmitriia Nikolaevicha Anuchina, xxiv–xxvii. Anuchin’s works of the period from 1913 to 1923 are more or less fully listed in the bibliography composed by N. A. Sinel’nikov for RAZh 13, no. 3–4 (1924): 17–18. 37 On the Ukrainophile “ethnographic” period of Vovk’s life, see M. Hrushevskii, “Pam’iaty Fedora Vovka. 29 chervnia 1918,” Ukraina (Kyiv), no. 1–2 (1918): 5–10 (in Ukrainian). For his most detailed bibliography and his biography written by his daughter, see Halyna Vovk, Bibliografia prats’ Fedora Vovka (1847–1918) [Ukrains’ka bibliografia. Vyp. 3] (Kyiv: Vseukrains’ka AN, 1929). On his anthropological project, see F.K. Volkov, “Antropologicheskie osobennosti ukrainskogo naroda,” in Ukrainskii narod v ego proshlom i nastoiashchem, ed. F. K. Volk, M. S. Hrushevskii, M. M. Kovalevskii, F. E. Korsh, A. E. Krymskii, M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii, and A. A. Shakhmatov, vol. 2 (Petrograd: Obshshestvennaia pol’za, 1916), 427–454. For more on Volkov-Vovk in the context of Russian imperial and Ukrainian anthropology, see Mogilner, Homo Imperii.

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down by a police officer in 1905 for providing free medical assistance to wounded street fighters during the December Moscow uprising.38 Among his colleagues in the informal anthropological community were people such as Samuil Abramovich Weissenberg (1867–1928), an internationally recognized Jewish anthropologist and native of Elisavetgrad in Ukraine. His anthropological, sanitary, ethnographic, and folklore studies of Jews and especially of Russian Jewry had serious implications for the project of constructing a separate Russian-Jewish identity.39 The list of different “types” constituting the inclusive liberal anthropological community and its liberal paradigm of imperial diversity continues into the thousands due to amateur local members. A typical example of the latter category is provided by the two zemstvo medical doctors of the Kobyliak district (uezd) in Little Russia (present-day Ukraine), V. Emme and T. Mahmandarov, whose obvious non-Slavic origin (considering their respectively German- and Tatar-sounding family names) did not prevent them from studying the type of the “little Russian” population of the Kobyliak district according to the instructions supplied by the

38

About Vorob’ev as a scholar and a liberal intellectual, see D. Anuchin, “Pamiati V. V. Vorob’eva,” Russkie vedomosti, no. 328, December 21, 1905, 16; A. El’kind, “Pamiati Vorob’eva,” RAZh 25–26, no. 1–2 (1907): 243–235; A. Ivanovskii, “Pamiati V. V. Vorob’eva,” RAZh 25–26, no. 1–2 (1907): 224–234. Examples of Vorob’ev’s publications include V. V. Vorob’ev, “Materialy k antropologii velikorusskogo naseleniia nekotorykh uezdov Riazanskoi gubernii,” Izvestiia IOLEAE 90 (1899). Trudy Antropologicheskogo otdela 19: 47–84; “Ob antropologicheskom izuchenii slavianskogo naseleniia Rossii,” RAZh 9, no. 1 (1902): 102–110; “Velikorussy (Ocherk fizicheskogo tipa),” RAZh, 1, no. 1 (1900): 36–49. 39 Weissenberg was a notable Jewish anthropologist. He was socialized in Russian as well as in German anthropological communities, published in both languages, and won German anthropological awards (in 1908 he received a stipend from the Rudolf Virchow Foundation to travel to Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine). While a member of the Moscow Anthropological Division, he was also an active member of the Russian Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society and a supporter of Simon Dubnow’s idea of national-cultural autonomy for Russian Jews. He is very poorly studied by Russian Jewish historians, and almost unknown to the non-Jewish historiography of Russia. At the same time, John M. Efron dedicated a whole chapter to “Samuel Weissenberg” in his book, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siécle Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 91–122. Efron treats Weissenberg as a German-Jewish anthropologist and completely ignores his Russian context; it is very important who studies Russian Jewry: a German emancipated and integrated Jew, or someone from the midst of Eastern European Jewry who thinks in terms of modern identity building for his people within the Russian imperial context. Russian Jewish anthropology and the whole issue of Jews as subjects and objects of anthropological discourse in Russia cannot be discussed in any detail in this article. For more on Samuil Weissenberg and Russian-Jewish anthropology, see, for example, Mogilner, “Evreiskaia antropologiia v Rossii.”


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Moscow Anthropological Division. Quite predictably, they found in their little district a “mixed physical type”—a result that would have created problems for nationally inclined Ukrainian anthropologists but was welcomed by their Moscow-based patrons.40 Moscow liberal anthropology did not consider an expert’s ethnicity as an influence on her or his scientific results, allowing non-Russian researchers to study the “Russian” population and vice versa: the universal and objective language of the discipline was thought to be a major guarantee against its overt politicization. The leading Russian liberal anthropologist, Dmitrii Anuchin, may justifiably be called a “Russian Virchow” for the similarity of their scientific approaches, political temperament, and ability to keep the anthropological community within the limits of the liberal anthropological paradigm.41 Institutionally, Anuchin was positioned at the very top of the liberal anthropological hierarchy: he practiced “normal science” as a Moscow University professor and developed an alternative academic network as chair of the Moscow Anthropological Division; his influence in RAZh was decisive; at the same time as coeditor of one of the major Russian liberal newspapers, Russkie vedomosti, he used the paper to promote his understanding of liberal politics and the role of progressive “national science” in it; beginning in the 1890s, he routinely served as the elected chair of anthropology and geography (or joint anthropology, ethnography, and geography) sections of the yearly conventions of the Russian Natural Scientists and Physicians—an enormous public arena for spreading his influence in the professional community;42 his students also held leading positions in formal and informal anthropological hierarchies. 40 V. Emme, Antropologiia i meditsina. Doklad pervomu gubernskomu s”ezdu zemskikh vrachei Poltavskoi gubernii 1882 goda (Poltava, 1882). 41 For more on the liberal paradigm in German physical anthropology and Virchow’s liberalism, see the article by Andrew D. Evans, “A Liberal paradigm? Rasce and Ideology in late-nineteenth-century German Physical Anthropology,” Ab Imperio 1 (2007): 113–138; See also Andrew D. Evans, “Anthropology at War: Racial Studies of POWs during World War I,” in Penny and Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism, 198–229. On the liberal paradigm, see especially pp. 202–207. 42 See, for example, VIII S”ezd Russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei v SPb. ot 28 dekabria do 7 janvaria 1890, ed. A. N. Beketov, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1890), 1–59; Dnevnik IX-go s”ezda Russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei, ed. D. N. Zernov (Moscow, 1894), 9; Dnevnik X-go s”ezda Russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei v Kieve, ed. L. L. Lund (Kiev, 1898); Dnevnik XI-go s”ezda Russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei (s SPb. 20–30 dekabria 1901 g.), ed. B. K. Polenov (St. Peteresburg, 1902), 80, 227, and others; Dnevnik XII-go s”ezda Russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei (v Moskve s 28 dekabria

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Anuchin was a monogenist, evolutionist, and empiricist, as well as a consistent proponent of differentiation between “race,” “nation” and “ethnicity” (narodnost’). He insisted on these principles in his articles on physical anthropology in major Russian encyclopedic dictionaries (thus shaping a normative Russian discourse on race science) and in many of his scholarly publications: Racial qualities do not coincide with tribal and national ones (language, religion, a way of life, belonging to a particular state); representatives of different racial types can form parts of the same people (narod), and representatives of a race can be spotted among different tribes and peoples. Race types represent more or less abstract concepts of [physical] traits.43

Anuchin was a committed evolutionist and Darwinist, which was an important factor in academic as well as the public ideological divide. In the 1850s, when the Moscow Society of Students of Nature (Obshchestvo Ispytatelei Prirody) embraced Darwinism, it juxtaposed itself to the Petersburg academic establishment of the Academy of Sciences that earned official recognition and hence status for works written in a pre-Darwinian paradigm.44 The mobilization of Moscow scientists around Darwinism and “modern scholarship” in general resulted in the crystallization of a group of intellectuals from the ranks of the Moscow Society of Students of Nature, who in 1863 initiated the Imperial Society of Lovers of Natural Sciences, Anthropology, and Ethnography. Their academic and political rift with St. Petersburg colleagues was so serious that from the very beginning they started cultivating a popular myth of Moscow as a Russian anthropological mecca genealogically connected directly with Paris and Berlin, rather than

po 6 janvaria 1910), ed. F. N. Krasheninnikov (Moscow, 1910), 7, 295; and so on. Not only medical doctors and natural scientists participated in the anthropology and geography sessions of the congresses but also historians, archaeologists, and many high school teachers. Thus, Anuchin indeed had direct access to scores of enthusiasts of anthropology at the local level. To get an idea of their ranks, see, for example, “Ob otpuske i komandirovke prepodavatelei i dr. lits, sluzhashchikh v Kievskom uchebnom okruge na s”ezdy estestvoispytatelei i vrachei,” TsGIA of Ukraine, F.707. Оp. 64. D. 52. L. 1, 2, and others; D. 57 and others. 43 D. Anuchin, “Rasy,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ F. A. Brokgauza i I. E. Efrona (St. Petersburg, 1899), vol. 26, half-volume 51, 359. 44 Alexander Vucinich was among the first to point out the connection between the institutional inertia of the Petersburg academic establishments, the aristocratic culture of Petersburg academic societies, and their members’ negative perception of Darwinism. See Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), 31.


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with St. Petersburg.45 Similarly, in the third oldest Russian institution of higher learning, the Imperial Kazan University, the same collision of scientific “traditionalists” and “modernists” took shape in the form of two different academic societies: the Society for Archaeology, History, and Ethnography (1878) and the Society of Natural Scientists (1869). The first society developed an ethnography of the “Russian civilizing mission” among the Volga region’s non-Russian population,46 while the latter advanced physical anthropology in the forms ranging from prehistoric archaeology to anthropology of the “living population.”47 Leading members of the first society were scholars with conservative political views who generally did not believe in a universal path of development for the (ethnically) advanced Russians and the inferior minorities (inorodtsy). The latter needed the assistance of a more civilized and gifted Russian people to proceed along the evolutionary path. On the contrary, the ranks of the “Natural Scientists” were staffed by politically more “vanguard” academics such as professors P. F. Lesgaft,

45 Moscow anthropologists explicitly wrote that their science was transplanted directly from Western Europe to the Russian “soil,” and that an analogue of the French anthropological society (1860) was established in Moscow in 1864. A. Ivanovskii, “Ob antropologicheskom izuchenii inorodcheskogo naseleniia Rossii,” RAZh 9, no. 1 (1902): 113. The standard and most authoritative version of the genealogy of Russian anthropology is D. Anuchin, “Na rubezhe polutora i polustoletii,” RAZh 37–38, no. 1–2 (1916): 1–15. 46 On the society, see various materials from the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART), F. 977. D. 6289. Ll. 666–676; D. 6279. Ll. 1–11; D. 13319. Ll.–10, and many others files (D. 6534; D. 6960; D. 7079; D. 7099; D. 7258; etc.). See also G. R. Nazipova, Universitet i muzei: istoricheskii opyt gubernskoi Kazani (Kazan: KazanKazan’, 2004); I. B. Sidorova, “Obshchestvo archeologii, istorii i etnografii pri Kazanskom universitete: nekotorye problemy izucheniia,” in Istoriia i istoriki v Kazanskom universitete. Sbornik, ch. II (Kazan: Iz-dvo KGU, 2005), 7–21. A most interesting and profound analysis of the scientific and ideological priorities of the society’s members can be found in Robert P. Gerasi, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), ch. 5, “Kazan University, Civic Life and the Politics of Regional Ethnography,” and ch. 6, “Ivan N. Smirov and the Multan Case.” 47 For the society’s history, see Nazipova, Universitet i muzei; see also the regular Proceedings (Trudy) of the society that reflect its broad understanding of the object of anthropological study. For example, N. M. Maliev, “Materialy dlia sravnitel’noi antropologii (K ucheniiu o stroenii cherepa i k sravnitel’noi anatomii ras. Materialy dlia vostochnogo kraia Rossii),” Trudy Obshchestva estestvoispytatelei pri Imperatorskom Kazanskom universitete, vol. 4 (Kazan, 1874); P. F. Lesgaft, “Instruktsiia dlia izmereniia zhivogo cheloveka. Pervoe prilozhenie k protokolam zasedanii,” Obshchestva estestvoispytatelei pri Imperatorskom Kazanskom universitete (1870–71) (Kazan, 1872); M. M. Khomiakov, “O kraniologicheskom tipe chepetskikh votiakov v sviazi s obshchim razvitiem votskoi narodnosti,” Antropologicheskoe issledovanie (Kazan, 1910); etc.

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V. M. Bekhterev, and later B. N. Vishnevsky, and many others. They were biologists, medical doctors, chemists, and physicists by training rather than historians or ethnographers. Their worldview had been informed by a peculiar post-1861 opposition of “fathers and sons” in Russian educated society, which can be interpreted in their case as a clash between the old-type humanist generation of traditional nobility and the classless intellectuals developing a post-humanist version of culture inspired by positivism and a natural scientific outlook. Attitudes toward Darwinism formed an epistemological and ideological split that often divided not only “fathers and sons” but also peers from the same university excavating the same archaeological site in search of old skulls (as happened in Kazan). This split was an element of a more general polarization based on one’s acceptance (or nonacceptance) of the freedom of scientific inquiry as part and parcel of other “natural” freedoms, such as the freedom of opinion, speech, assembly, press, and religion (the fundamentals of the liberal program). Among Russian scholars were conservatives and antimodernists, who, like the modernists, stood for progress and enlightened values, except that their understanding of “progress” was different. The conservatives’ conception of academic autonomy and freedom of research was linked to the ideal of the enlightened and rationally ordered absolutist Rechtsstaat, and not to the liberal (and equally rational) state and society. Yet the influence of the conservatives in the Russian academy was relatively modest: lacking the status and institutional security of German “Mandarins,” conservative academics could not compete with the informal authority of the so-called progressive professors, because that authority was based not only on “modern science” but also on the popularity of the “liberal” and “democratic” political agenda.48 As the leading proponent of the new science and liberal political values, the central figure in the liberal anthropological community, Dmitrii Anuchin, was a devoted Darwinist,49 yet as a Darwinist he was very

48 On Fritz Ringer’s concept of Mandarins (The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community. 1890–1933 [Hannover and London: University Press of New England, 1990]) and its applicability in the Russian context, see D. Aleksandrov, “Fritz Ringer, nemetskie mandariny i otechestvennye uchenye,” NLO, no. 53 (2002): 90–104. On “progressive professors,” see also Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 49 One of his major works was a study of anthropomorphous apes. See D. N. Anuchin, “Antropomorphnye obez’iany i nizshie rasy chelovechestva,” Priroda, no. 1 (1874): 185–280; no. 3, 220–276; and no. 4, 81–141.


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critical of social Darwinism and any “abuses” of evolutionism beyond its broadest and most progressive interpretation. He was seriously bothered by Virchow’s anti-Darwinism, as Virchow was evidently an important role model for Anuchin. Being an almost ideal representative of anthropological liberalism, Virchow, in Anuchin’s view, combined in his personality a strong ability for scientific research and discoveries in a special discipline with a broad responsiveness to the issues of knowledge in general, with a critical attitude toward phenomena of life and thought, and with the readiness to serve his people and society in all spheres where special knowledge and ideals of higher culture could be useful.50

Struggling with the only—but in the Russian context so painfully apparent—deficiency of his hero, Anuchin insisted that Virchow did not reject evolutionism in principle, but only the idea of man’s evolution from the forms of primates known to contemporary science.51 This interpretation became standard in the Russian liberal anthropological discourse.52 Parallel to the sphere of scholarship and academic politics, a symmetrical process of consolidating different opposition agendas into a more or less coherent program of liberal political evolutionism was going on in the post-1905 liberal political discourse. Anuchin—in his capacity as the liberal publicist for Russkie vedomosti—personally went to one of the most authoritative Russian proponents of peaceful development, Leo Tolstoy, to convert him to his liberal Westernism. He told the great writer that in order to correctly understand nature and humans one had to study their origins and development—in other words, the natural history of humankind. This was exactly the way liberal anthropologists defined the objective of their discipline. Only a natural history of humanity, as Anuchin told Tolstoy, could provide 50

D. Anuchin, “Rudolf Virchow (Po povody ego 80–letiia),” Russkie vedomosti, no. 270 (1901): 4. 51 D. N. Anuchin, “R. Virchow kak antropolog,” RAZh 7–8, no. 3–4 (1901): xxvii–xxix. 52 See, for example, the treatment of Virchow’s “anti-transformism” by an associate of Anuchin both in the Anthropological Division and in Moscow University, Aleksandr Ivanovskii (in the speech delivered at the division’s meeting on September 25, 1902): “If Virchow indeed was not a great proponent of the transformist theory, the reasons for this were only his insistence on a critical evaluation of this theory’s arguments and conclusions.” To support this statement, Ivanovskii quoted Anuchin’s work discussing the controversial task of determining exact types of primates—the direct ancestors of humans. A. Ivanovskii, “Nekrolog,” RAZh 11, no. 3 (1902): 100–104.

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“justification for many phenomena” in the people’s lives. To this Tolstoy remarked that science was not necessary for understanding, and that one had to turn to a holistic worldview (miroponimanie): “Everything good does not need a historical explanation, while everything bad cannot be justified by history.”53 In this remarkable conversation, a great Russian writer and a prominent Russian scientist discussed the origins of human species, a theory of the evolution of humans from the animal world (“I especially despise Darwin’s teaching,” confessed Tolstoy), prehistoric man, cell theory, and other issues absolutely critical for Anuchin (but probably irritating to his interlocutor). Tolstoy rebuffed Anuchin’s rational arguments by remarking that all these scientific theories were incapable of explaining the “meaning of life.” However, they finally found a common ground, or, to be more precise, Anuchin found a way to incorporate Tolstoy’s antirationalism into his own liberal positivist worldview. They both recognized that humans in all parts of the world were moving in the same direction (and scientific progress helped to speed up this movement) toward a universal humanity: While rejecting science and so-called progress, L. N-ch. [Tolstoy] cannot though deny that, for example, improved ways of communication, accelerated exchange of ideas among different peoples, the spread of knowledge and education help to bring people together. . . . L. N-ch. himself recognizes that the epoch of nationalism and narrow patriotism is passing away, and in the minds of progressive people a more broad understanding of man began to emerge; and these people value and respect others not for their belonging to this or that class, nationality, or religion, etc., but for their spiritual development and moral qualities.54

The liberal idea of evolution through education and the progress of science toward a better understanding of “objective” laws of development, and correspondingly toward better forms of political coexistence had universal implications for all peoples in the empire. Evolutionism in Russian liberal anthropology also meant equal developmental opportunities for ethnic “Russians” (who in the discipline’s narrative did not exist as a category of analysis and were allowed only as a category of practice/mass discourse that was to be deconstructed on purely scientific grounds) and for the non-Russians of the empire. Such an evolutionism

53

D. Anuchin, “Neskol’ko chasov v Iasnoi Poliane (okonchanie),” Russkie vedomosti, no. 275, November 27, 1908, 3. For the first part of the article, see Russkie vedomosti, no. 273, November 25, 1908, 3. 54 Ibid., 3.


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encouraged a vision of the empire as a developing organism progressing in a single direction. This progress depended not on assimilation into the “Russian race” or acculturation into Russian culture, but on a mixture of many different races producing “mixed physical types” and multiple cultural norms. The role of scientists-experts was to objectively study these natural processes as the precondition for rational and just governance. This model offered an ambitious liberal interpretation of an empire that “by itself ” (as articulated by its ruling political class) lacked any distinct modern agenda: for many contemporaries it remained a dynastic state even when in the course of the nineteenth century the dynasty itself began developing a more national and even nationalist self-perception. Part of the imperial elite shared colonial dreams and the idea of Russia’s civilizing mission, especially in the Caucasus, although this colonial model could not be applied universally, for instance, to the economically more advanced Western borderlands of the empire where Russia’s modern “mission” remained undefined. Besides, Russia was a contiguous empire whose ethnically non-Russian population sometimes retained a higher social status and lived economically better off than the majority of Russians (e.g., the peasantry). Non-Russian nationalisms of the early twentieth century threatened the very existence of the empire, while Russian nationalism suffered from the difficulties of distilling a homogeneous Russian national body from the ethnically and socially mixed population. Under such circumstances, the liberal political discourse could not comfortably envision as two separated domains the metropolitan sphere of political freedom and equality versus the sphere of a particularistic colonial legal order. Russian liberalism had to advance some kind of universalistic legal and political paradigm for the entire empire, and this proved to be an immensely difficult task. In Anuchin’s political “headquarters,” Russkie vedomosti, “liberals” of different sorts shared their ideas on empire as an object of liberal reforms: Let us imagine a Caucasian mountaineer who discusses some articles of the Criminal Code while being convinced that blood should be wiped away only by blood or compensated with cows and sheep. . . . When a circuit court sentences the murderer-Circassian to hard labor in Siberia, the closest relative of his victim follows him there to exercise the duty of revenge. Such facts are often mentioned in the courts’ minutes and administrative correspondence.55

55 Maksim Kovalevskii, “Otnoshenie Rossii k okrainam,” Russkie vedomosti, October 9, 1905, 2.

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The author of this article, Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii (1851– 1916), was a university professor, sociologist and historian, student of British political tradition and Caucasian customary law, founder of the Party for Democratic Reforms, and a member of the Russian Duma, also broadly known as a personal acquaintance of Karl Marx for whom he was a source of knowledge about the history of communal ownership of land.56 Kovalevskii was in fact drawing a map of the imperial society of universal legal rights and civic participation, and excluding from it the population of the Caucasus as well as some groups of Russian inorodtsy such as “Chukchees, Kamchadals, and Yakuts” who were, in Kovalevskii’s view, at a very low stage of evolutionary development. For them he recommended reservations on the American model. Kovalevskii’s article was published with editorial remarks in the margins—a rare practice in the newspaper. The content and style of these editorial comments allow us to attribute them to Anuchin, who usually supervised materials published in Russkie vedomosti on imperial diversity, especially if they professed to provide scholarly expertise. In one comment Anuchin explains that educated inorodtsy, especially from the Caucasus, as well as Yakuts and Kirgiz had already proved their capacity to discuss legal issues and relationships between “labor and capital” on an equal level, which implied that they were not racially inferior to any other peoples of the empire. In yet another comment, Anuchin ironically deconstructed Kovalevskii’s group of inferior inorodtsy: Yakuts and Kamchadals can hardly be put on the same scale as Chukchee. If the latter are only partly touched by culture (Russian and American), Kamchadals had forgotten their language and turned into Russian peasants, while Yakuts, firmly defending their ethnicity (narodnost’), cultivate land, develop trade, and demonstrate interest in education.57

The refusal of liberal anthropologists to accept a hierarchical racial or cultural language, and to scientifically validate larger national political entities, as well as their mantra of the preponderance of a “mixed physical type,” alongside the ideology of rational cognition of all peoples

56 For more on this, see, for example, M. M. Kovalevskii, “Dni zhizni,” Vestnik Evropy, July 4, 1909, 10–19; Henry Eaton, “Marx and the Russians,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 41, no. 1 (1980): 89–112. Kovalevskii’s book Obshchinnoe Zemlevladenie (Moscow: F. B. Miller, 1879) served Marx as a basic source for his own studies of land ownership in Asia. 57 Editorial comments in Russkie vedomosti, October 9, 1905, 2.


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of the empire, was a complex answer to the challenges of the imperial situation. Moreover, Anuchin firmly believed that in a remote evolutionary perspective distinct physical types as well as political nations all over the world would melt into a common humanity, thus making the Russian anthropological situation almost archetypal. The “mixed physical type” and racial interaction model automatically made the Russian empire a “normal” European country—of course, only so long as the norm was represented by Virchow’s type of anthropology, equally antiracist, progressive, and interested in racial mixture. RAZh quoted Virchow as saying that Russia possessed the keys to the whole range of the most important questions advanced by modern European anthropology.58 Indeed, only Russia was able to combine within the European continent the anthropologies of “national self-cognition” and of diversity and interaction; and only Russia brought together Europe and Asia—the “cultured” and the “others” who were opposed to it.59 Virchow was working in the context of German national unification, but his obvious German liberal patriotism had to encompass his Slavic background. The problem must have occupied him very early: as a student he had corresponded with his father about “our ancestors” from the “Polish tribe” of Pomerania.60 The problem of the complex composition of the German people, and the combination of racial origin, cultural representations, and state loyalties inspired many of his anthropological projects that resulted in the picture of racial intermixture of the European population beginning from prehistoric times. This kind of anthropology was very appealing to those who developed a liberal paradigm of imperial diversity in Russia. For them the difference between a German nationalizing context and a Russian imperial context was not a problem, as both contexts “naturally” required focus on interaction and “mixed physical types,” and did not provide grounds for constructing racial hierarchies. Anuchin interpreted the programmatic task of Virchow’s anthropology as:

58 Ivanovskii, “Ob antropologicheskom izuchenii inorodcheskogo naselenia Rossii,” 112. 59 The original expression is from D. N. Nikol’skii, “Novyi antropologicheskii organ,” Trudy Antropologicheskogo obschestva pri Imperatorskoi Voenno-Meditsinskoi akademii, vol. 7 (za 1901–1904 uchebnye goda) (St. Petersburg, 1912), 7. 60 Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Rudolf Virchow. Doctor. Statesman. Anthropologist. (1953),” in E. H. Ackerknecht, Rudolf Virchow and Virchow-Bibliographie 1843–1901, ed. by J. Schwalbe (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 207.

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marina mogilner the study of the type of the German people, or, to be more precise, determining those different types that participated in its formation and, after having mixed in the course of many centuries, caused the contemporary diversity of its physical traits.61

Paradoxically, Russian liberal anthropologists regarded this model of anthropological analysis as more suitable for Russia than an explicitly colonial anthropology. Anuchin’s colleague at Moscow University and the Anthropological Division, and later a professor of anthropology in Khar’kiv University, Aleksei Arsenievich Ivanovskii (1866–1934),62 praised the diversity of the imperial population that “has no parallels in any western-democratic state.” He saw the task of Russian anthropologists as to break down this diversity to its component “physical types,” and to “find their similarities and differences, to establish the level of their kinship.”63 Ivanovskii personally attempted to accomplish this immense task in his dissertation defended at Moscow University “On the Anthropological Composition of the Russian Population.”64 He invented a comparative method of anthropological classification that was based on a number of major racial indicators, and included a wide array of metrics such as the color of hair and eyes, height, the skull’s form, “height-longitudinal” skull index, facial index (a ratio of the maximum width of the face to its length), nasal index (a ratio of the maximum nasal width to nasal length), body length, and length of arms and legs. Having calculated these indicators for all population groups studied by Russian anthropologists within the borders of the empire, Ivanovskii coded them and established three degrees of racial kinship: the highest degree of kinship had a ratio of differences between the indicators of less than one; the second degree—less than two; and the third—no more then three.65 The classification itself was organized

61

Anuchin, “R. Virchow kak antropolog,” xviii. About Ivanovskii’s life and career, see L. P. Nikolaev, “A. A. Ivanovskii (Obituary),” Antropologicheskii zhurnal, No. 1–2 (1934); see also a biography prepared for the public defense of Ivanovskii’s doctoral dissertation at Moscow university published in, “Opyt novoi antropologicheskoi klassifikatsii i disput A. A. Ivanovskogo,” Zemlevedenie, no. 1–2 (1913): 335–360, esp. 335–336. 63 Ivanovskii, “Ob antropologicheskom izuchenii inorodcheskogo naseleniia Rossii,” 112. 64 For the full text of the dissertation, see A. A. Ivanovskii, “Ob antropologicheskom sostave naseleniia Rossii,” Izvestiia IOLEAE. Trudy Antropologicheskogo otdela, vol. 22 (Moscow, 1904), 1–287, 4 maps. 65 A. Ivanovskii, “Opyt antropologicheskoi klassifikatsii naseleniia Rossii,” RAZh 15–16, no. 3–4 (1903): 107–165. 62


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in alphabetical order starting with Afghanis and followed by Aisors, Armenians, Bashkirs, Buriats, Byelorussians, Great Russians, and then to other peoples in the alphabetical order down to Yakuts at the end of the list. The Russian alphabet was the only organizing principle of Ivanovskii’s classification. Overall, it produced an impression of the absence of pure “races.” The level of racial heterogeneity in the Slavic group was simply unprecedented. Ivanovskii distinguished the “Slavonic anthropological group” that included Great Russians, Little Russians and Byelorussians, Poles, and Lithuanians, but also Kazan Tatars, Bashkirs, and Kalmyks (yet excluded Little Russians of Kyiv Province and the Kuban’ Kazaks).66 As a result of this principle of grouping, a key concept of the imperial social order, the inorodets, lost its function of embodying the “Other” and hence any sense: if Tatars belonged to the “Slavonic racial group,” how could they be viewed as literary aliens (inorodtsy)?67 However, Ivanovskii’s deconstruction of the accepted ethnolinguistic divisions did not stop here. The groups making up the Great Russian people (narodnost’ ) demonstrated only a third degree of racial kinship with each other.68 At the same time, “Great Russians” measured at a provincial level showed the highest degree of kinship with Poles, and only second and third degrees of kinship with Belorussians. Ukrainians (“Little Russians” in the classification of the epoch) were even more diversified than Great Russians. “Regional differences of the Little Russian type are so sharp that they have no parallels either among the Great Russians, or among the Belorussians,” writes Ivanoskii, Little Russians of the Kiev province stay absolutely by themselves, Little Russians (kozaks) of the Kuban’ district belong to an entirely different group (the Ossetians) and only Little Russians of the Volyn’ Province have a third degree of kinship with the Little Russians taken as a group and with Belorussians.69

Despite its surprising conclusions, the classification of Ivanovskii was adopted, with some reservations, by the anthropological community and served as a general scholarly framework for the realization of the

66

Ibid., 153. On the changing meaning of “inorodtsy,” see John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (1998): 173–190. 68 Ivanovskii, “Opyt antropologicheskoi klassifikatsii naseleniia Rossii,” 153, 155. 69 Ibid., 156. 67

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Russian imperial liberal anthropological utopia. It was perceived as an expression of the universal, objective, positivist science, and the most elaborate materialization of the liberal paradigm of imperial diversity. Ivanovskii’s classification made sense of the seemingly chaotic ethnolinguistic map of the Russian empire. It naturalized the borders of the empire and presented diversity as a natural and positive phenomenon, undermining any claims to racial purity or superiority by any population group in the empire. In the absence of any alternative equally ambitious taxonomic representation of the Russian empire, Ivanovskii’s model of interconnected physical types became an effective instrument for sustaining the preponderance of the liberal paradigm within the anthropological community. Every anthropologist had to project the results of his or her study over Ivanovskii’s grand scheme in order to demonstrate the scholarly relevance of an individual case study to the “big science.” In other words, every anthropological project, regardless of a scholar’s political orientation, had to be formulated in the language and format of the mainstream liberal anthropology in order to be seriously considered. When the Georgian anthropologist A. N. Dzhavakhov (Dzhavakhishvili), a member of the Moscow Anthropological Division and a nationally thinking Georgian intellectual, designed his research project, he definitely intended to pursue an anticolonial academic and political agenda. First of all, he insisted on the authenticity of the original Georgian toponymy as opposed to the official imperial one: instead of such categories as “Georgia” and “Georgians,” he used categories such as “Kartveli” and “Sakartvelo,” which were “sanctified by the worldview of the nation.”70 Dzhavakhov’s choice of language clearly marked the Russian categories as external and even alien, and associated with the imperial domination. The “native” Georgian categories were opposed to them not only as self-descriptive but also as more accurate categories needed for an “objective” scientific study of Georgia aimed at the decolonization of the scientific discourse. In addition, Dzhavakhov violated liberal anthropology’s taboo and attempted to construct a specific “Georgian territory” (instead of following the accepted pattern of studying “peoples of the Caucasus” or the population of a certain province or district). Dzhavakhov called this unreal

70 A. N. Dzhavakhov, “Antropologiia Gruzii. I. Gruziny Kartalinii i Kakhetii,” Izvestia IOLEAE, vol. 116 (1908). Trudy Antropologicheskogo otdela, vol. 26, iii.


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territory “the country” (strana), and described it in the language of the original Georgian toponymy, thus producing an impression of its inner homogeneity, symbolically cleansing the non-Georgian peoples from the “pure Georgian” territories. The “Georgian country” included the following provinces: Kartli, Kakheti, Imereti, Samegrelo, Guria, Svaneti, Pshaveti, Khuvusureti, Tusheti, Mtiuleti (Kheva), Adzhara, Sakhtse, Sanigilo, and Dchaneti.71 Dzhavakhov’s imagination crossed the borders of the Russian empire and included within the “Georgian country” (the population of which had to be studied from an anthropological point of view), the “Georgian provinces in southern Persia” and the “Georgian territories” in Northern Asia Minor. On the basis of his anthropometric data, Dzhavakhov posited a special Georgian anthropological group encompassing all types that populated the “Georgian country.”72 This explicitly nationally oriented (in fact, nationalist) project was nevertheless sponsored by the Moscow Anthropological Society that published Dzhavakhov’s findings in the official News of the Imperial Society of Lowers of Natural Sciences, Anthropology, and Ethnography. The reason for such an amazing tolerance toward Dzhavakhov’s ideological agenda was his fundamental methodological dependence on the premises of Moscow liberal anthropology. Eventually, Dzhavakhov had to restore the imperial borders as a major frame of reference in order to compare his Georgian “physical type” with other “types” of the empire included in Ivanovskii’s classification. At the end Dzhavakhov concluded that: The typical Georgian brunette type with a dash of mixed and partly a light type is quite widespread among the different peoples of Russia; according to the comparative research by Ivanovskii, this type—as represented by the color of hair and eyes—characterizes the following peoples: Armenians, Bashkirs, Jews, Ingushes . . .,

so on and so forth in alphabetic order, up to the Turkmens.73 In terms of eye color, Dzhavakhov’s Georgians were related to Kumyks and Polish Jews, while based on the height index they belonged to the same group as the Great Russians of Moscow, Riazan’, Kursk, Tambov, and Tula provinces, and to the Jews of Southern Russia and Kazan Tatars.74 Regardless of the fact that these “racial relatives” had only a

71 72 73 74

Ibid., vi. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 222.

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third degree of kinship, together they belonged to the liberal “imperial race” constructed by the Moscow-oriented anthropologists. This single “imperial race” obviously had no political equivalents in late imperial Russia, in the form of a single political community of universal citizenship, or a single cultural sphere. Politically, Dzhavakhov had no reasons to be satisfied with his own anthropological conclusions, since they did not justify his idea of the “Great Georgia” and contradicted his own anticolonial rhetoric. And yet, only the liberal anthropological paradigm prevented people like Dzhavakhov from using science to justify policies that would later in the twentieth century become firmly affiliated with studies of race, such as ethnic and racial cleansing, population displacement, mandatory “medicalization” of the “national body,” and others. Until the very end of the empire, liberal anthropology in the Russian imperial context remained an important resource for an inclusive evolutionary political imagination that had to compete politically with numerous exclusionist national and social doctrines. It took the catastrophic turmoil of the Great War, the revolution of 1917, and subsequent civil war to make any liberal (open-ended, evolutionist, nonauthoritarian) intellectual and political schemas look insufficient in the Russian academic and social context. The crisis of liberalism during the interwar period was a panEuropean phenomenon, although in revolutionary Russia it took a particularly radical form. The disappearance of liberalism as a political and epistemological frame of reference for Russian educated society had absolutely grave consequences for physical anthropology. At first glance, the Soviet version of Modernity offered splendid opportunities for a rational science of human diversity. The early Soviet “affirmative action empire,”75 or according to another interpretation, the “empire of knowledge,”76 made the study of human resources a state priority.77

75

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 76 The metaphor is borrowed from Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917–1970) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); for the historical model of the “empire of knowledge,” see Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). 77 Juliette Cadiot, “Organiser la diversité: la fixation des catégories nationales dans I’Empire de Russie et en URSS (1897–1939),” Revue d’études comparatives Est/Ouest 31, no. 3 (2000): 127–149; Cadiot, “La constitution des catégories nationales dans l’Empire de Russie et dans l’Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques (1897–1939): Statisticiens, ethnographes et administrateurs,” Ph.D. diss., EHESS, Paris, 2001.


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However, this new knowledge was based on a very different type of episteme. Soviet evolutionism was much more consistent and radical in its implications: it did not view peoples as cultural entities that had to be studied anthropologically and described (and thus fixed) as “physical types.” From the Soviet point of view, peoples were dynamic evolving “projects” developing into nations (as a necessary evolutionary stage), classes, and eventually into the new “Soviet people.” They were to be manipulated by the state in order to accelerate the pace of evolution, or to correct its trajectory. Social determinism and a peculiar version of national primordialism effectively defined the agenda of any further studies of biological variety.78 Physical anthropology was not outlawed in the USSR, and its leaders, including pupils of Anuchin, attempted to enhance its status and visibility by stressing its progressive character as a most modern science. In the early 1920s, anthropologists got a research institute of their own (named after Anuchin) and a few university chairs and laboratories.79 At the same time, a previously independent field was transforming into a set of auxiliary methods of measurement and classification. This was true for all prerevolutionary versions of Russian anthropology. Criminal anthropologists could not argue against the official doctrine of the efficient transformation of criminals by physical labor and a healthy collective—they could only offer their expertise in producing measurements for immediate police needs. Military anthropologists before the revolution worked with the concept of the “army as empire” and discussed different scenarios of the most efficient utilization of the human resources available for mobilization in different corners of the empire.80 Although the Red Army encountered the same problem of utter heterogeneity with its personnel, it was a given that every soldier could cultivate the required level of civic (revolutionary) conscience, while a political commissar was expected to solve any human resources problems better than an expert in racial types. Similarly, the liberal anthropology of imperial diversity lost its raison d’être, which could be formulated as the mapping of human variety in a spacious

78 On this, see a very convincing analysis in Peter A. Blitstein, “Nation and Empire in Soviet History, 1917–1953,” Ab Imperio 1 (2006): 197–219. 79 For the details of postrevolutionary institutionalization of physical anthropology, see Mogilner, Homo Imperii, especially the last chapter, “Instead of a Conclusion: Has Physical Anthropology Become Soviet?” 80 Mogilner, “Doing Anthropology in Russian Military Uniform.”

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country. However, unlike criminal or military anthropology, which were fundamentally practice-oriented, the shift from conceptual to narrowly defined practical tasks was particularly destructive to liberal anthropology, which claimed to offer a particular worldview if not a social theory. The older generation of anthropologists, many of whom died or emigrated, continued their research, trying to find a new impetus for their discipline. It was not comprehensively “Sovietized” until the Stalinist cultural revolution in the late 1920s through the early 1930s. During the 1920s, representatives of the prerevolutionary Moscow-oriented liberal anthropology were engaged in a partial deconstruction of the old liberal paradigm,81 and self-legitimization through focusing on sanitary and eugenicist agendas.82 With the advent of the cultural revolution and the rise of a new generation of scholars, physical anthropology had finally become a “soviet” science that recognized the supremacy of the social over the biological, and concentrated mostly on the prehistoric (presocial) epochs.83 Rather than putting forward a new explanatory paradigm,

81

This conclusion can be substantiated by a close reading of the Russian Anthropological Journal revived by Anuchin’s pupils in Moscow in 1924, and by reviewing the anthropological projects carried on mostly in the old and new university centers, from Kiev to Kazan, and from Khar’kiv to Samara. The anthropologists of the St. Petersburg school were more successful in adapting to the demands of the new epoch, they took a lead in the state-sponsored Commission for the Study of Human Resources and in the expeditions designed to provide information on human resources in the wake of the introduction of the first Five-year Plan. For more on this, see “Ob uchrezhdenii Komissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii,” Izvestiia Komissii po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia Rossii, vol. 1 (Petrograd, 1917), 3–4; Hirsch, Empire of Nations; D. Zolotarev, “Komissiia po izucheniiu plemennogo sostava naseleniia SSSR (KIPS) pri Akademii Nauk SSSR,” Etnografiia, no. 1 (1927): 213–219. 82 On Soviet eugenics, see Susan Gross Solomon, “Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health, 1921–1930,” in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Solomon and John F. Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 175–199; Mark B. Adams, “Eugenics as Social Medicine in Revolutionary Russia: Prophets, Patrons, and the Dialectics of Discipline Building,” in Solomon and Hutchinson Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, 200–223; Mark B. Adams, “Science. Ideology and Structure: The Kol’tsov Institute 1900–1970,” in The Social Context of Soviet Science, ed. Linda Lubrano and Susan Gross Solomon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), 173–204. Regardless of the fact that a pupil of Anuchin and his successor as chair of anthropology at Moscow University, V. V. Bunak, was very active in the Moscow eugenicist circle, the ideology of Soviet eugenics was defined not by those with an anthropological background, but by representatives of the last prerevolutionary generation of biochemists and zoologists interested in the problems of inheritance and genetics. 83 On the “cultural revolution” in physical anthropology of the early 1930s, see Yuri Slezkin, “N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (1996): 826–862; T. A. Trofimova and N. N. Cheboksarov, “Znachenie ucheniia


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a reduced version of Russian anthropology “froze” the already outdated concepts and approaches of the old liberal anthropology without retaining the original liberal conceptual framework. Liberal anthropology thus became a “dead language,” similar to Latin in prerevolutionary Russian high schools (gymnasiums). Yet Soviet science (and parascientific ideologies) did not solve or even address the problem that was central to the liberal anthropological paradigm—that of elaborating a modern language to name, describe, and politically legitimize the human diversity in the imperial situation. This was indeed a key problem of modern science that became redefined and partially marginalized worldwide by the established monopoly of nation-centered epistema. The Russian case shows that attempts to synthesize a multiethnic and multicultural inclusive “imperial race” were neither a part of the subaltern revolt against the empire nor a product of some nationalist anti-imperial discourse. On the contrary, they were expressions of liberal imperialism, which, while having adopted the modern national epistema, viewed an empire reorganized on the basis of greater rationality and justice as a more advanced form of polity than a nation-state or an “archaic” empire. As Alexander Semynov shows in his chapter, Russian liberals shared a conception of politics as based on objective and socially relevant knowledge, and physical anthropology was one reservoir of such knowledge. The resulting liberal imperialism failed as a political program because it did not deliver workable political solutions for many problems of imperial developments at the turn of the century. However, this does not mean that imperial modernization was a doomed academic and political project by definition—only that concrete political and social conjunctures of the beginning of the twentieth century made it look inadequate both scientifically and politically.

o iazyke N. Ia. Marra v bor’be za marksistskuiu antropologiiu,” Antropologicheskii zhurnal, no. 1–2 (1934): 28–54; “Za sovetskuiu antropologiiu,” Antropologicheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1932): 1–8; A. I. Iarkho, “Protiv idealisticheskikh techenii v rasovedenii SSSR,” Antropologicheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1932): 9–23; M. S. Plisetskii and B. Ia. Smulevich, “Rasovaia teoria—klassovaia teoria,” Antropologicheskii zhurnal, no. 1–2 (1934): 3–27; A. I. Iarkho, “Osnovnye problemy sovetskoi antropologii: ocherednye zadachi sovetskogo rasovedeniia,” Antropologicheskii zhurnal, no. 3 (1934): 3–20. On the preference of the social over the biological in the deterministic language of the Soviet state in the 1930s (in a comparative perspective), see Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden. Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

“THE REAL AND LIVE ETHNOGRAPHIC MAP OF RUSSIA”: THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE MIRROR OF THE STATE DUMA Alexander Semyonov

According to many observers, the first Russian parliament was a moment of truth and discovery. The rhetoric of truth and discovery in accounts of elections and political representation sprang from the persistent idiom of alienation from the people in the discourse of the liberal opposition. This alienation was attributed to the political regime of autocracy. Now, with the constitutional reform and introduction of political representation, the barrier fell and the “terra incognita” of the people, in the words of Fedor Rodichev,1 was about to reveal all of its secrets. Significantly, the oft-quoted phrase about the “live ethnographic map of Russia”2 in the first Duma stresses the eventful and experiential dimension of the process of making sense of Duma politics. This phrase, along with other contemporaneous accounts, underscores the birth of this political reform in the context of the Revolution of 1905 and the accelerated production of political culture triggered by revolutionary change.3 The first Duma was the articulation and discovery of

1

Fedor Rodichev, Vospominaniia i ocherki o russkom liberalizme (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1983), 91. The analysis of the rhetorical formula of sredosteniie (separating barrier of bureaucracy between the tsar and the people) and its ideological foundations in the context of the liberal opposition movement is given in: Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 2 This expression belongs to Viktor Petrovich Obninskii (1867–1916), a zemstvo activist, participant in the movement of the Union of Liberation, radical-wing Kadet, member of the First State Duma, in which he entered the caucus of Autonomists and was greeted there as a representative of the “Great Russian nationality.” With these words Obninskii described his impression from the first gathering of the State Duma in 1906 (K 10-letiu pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Sbornik statei pervodumtsev (Petrograd, 1916), 212, see also V. Obninskii, “Pervye shagi russkogo avtonomizma,” Ukrainskaia Zhizn’, no. 4 (1913), 14–22; Idem, Poslednii samoderzhets. Ocherk zhizni i tsarstvovaniia imperatora Rossii Nikolaia II (Moscow: Respublika, 1992. Originally published: Berlin, 1912.)). 3 The centrality of event, spontaneity, ideological creativity and the primacy of political agency versus structure is stressed in historical studies of revolutions (Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution. Essays o French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Idem, “Revolution,”

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the heterogeneous social and political space of the Russian Empire in the public personae of the Duma members and their claims, notwithstanding the widespread homogenizing notion of “the representation of the people” (narodnoe predstavitel’stvo) and “people’s representatives” (narodnye predstaviteli). A number of memoirs from the year of the first Duma include impressionistic recollections on appearances and manifestations of difference. It is important to note that the first Russian parliament was in the spotlight of publicity and how the representatives appeared became a symbolically endowed gesture. The high symbolism and theatrically of the first Russian parliament was particularly well understood by Russian liberals (Constitutional-Democrats or Kadets), who seriously debated the question of whether to appear dressed in civilian clothes to underscore their opposition to the court rules at the time of the Throne Speech or to abide by the court rules and appear dressed in frock coats.4 So the diversity of cultural visages of the corpus of the first Duma was perceived in this climate of high theatricality and symbolism of public politics. It was noted that some of the members of the Duma attended the Throne Speech of Nicholas II in the Winter Palace in “national costumes.”5 By “national costumes” different observes understood

The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2: The Political Culture and the French Revolution, ed. by Colin Lucas (Oxford: Pergamon Press 1988), 41–62), including the historical studies of Russian revolutions (Boris Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti i bor’ba za vlast’ (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2001); Orlando Figes, Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Alexander Semyonov, “Wither the Liberal Alternative?” in Jan Kusber, Andreas Frings (Hg.), Das Zarenreich, das Jahr 1905 und seine Wirkungen. Bestandsaufnahmen (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007), 351–381). 4 Fedor Rodichev, “Iz vospominanii,” Poslednie Novosti, May 10, 1931. In the end, they decided in favor of frock coats. The Kadet discussion about the frockcoats reverberated in the realm of rumors for some time. It gave the ground for assertions that Constitutional-Democrats intended to dress all peasants in frockcoats so that they would have appeared as citizens (Sergei Kryzhanovskii, “Zametki russkogo konservatora,” Voprosy istorii, no. 2 (1997): 123). For the theatrical effect in perception of the Duma’s work, see Ya.V. Glinka, Odinnadtsat’ let v Gosudarstvennoi Dume (Moscow: NLO, 2001), 43. 5 N. A. Borodin, “Lichnyi sostav Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, ee organizatsiia i statisticheskie svedeniia o chlenakh,” in Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Vol. 1: Politicheskoe znachenie pervoi Dumy (St. Petersburg, 1907), 11; N. Ogorodnikov, “Pervyi den’,” K 10 letiiu pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy . . ., 53. Borodin further notes that, although many deputies appeared in “national costumes” for the Throne speech in the Winter Palace, they subsequently changed them for civil clothes for the sessions of the Duma. For circulation of “national costumes” in the realm of public representation of the First Duma, see: Gosudarstvennaia Duma v portretakh (Moscow: K. A. Fisher, 1906),

“the real and live ethnographic map of russia”

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different things. First of all, the attention of the observers was seized by the colorful and richly decorated attire of the deputies from the regions of the former Kingdom of Poland. The priestly garbs of the Catholic clergy were particularly conspicuous. The theme of “national costumes” returned in public representations of the first corpus of deputies and in reflections about the nature and significance of the first Russian parliament. The colorful presence of “national costumes” was imprinted on the image of the first State Duma as the representation of the Empire’s diversity. However, the theme of diversity was not limited to representations of “national costumes.” Observers also noted the peculiarity of the spatial organization of the diverse body of the Russian Empire’s representatives in the hall of the Taurida Palace. Muslim deputies tended to sit together, despite the fact that they were elected from different regions of the Empire. More powerful was the marker of shared locality that caused many peasant deputies to group according to their province ( guberniia) provenance. Their social status determined the occupation of back benches of the Taurida hall, while the front benches were taken by the leadership of organized political party caucuses, all of them coming from the higher rungs of the social ladder. Representatives of South Western (Ukrainian) region initially tended to take seats near the representatives from the “South of Russia.” Deputies from western provinces grouped together and took seats next to the deputies from the Polish provinces (Privislenskii krai or Kingdom of Poland), with whom some of the former shared the common Polish language.6 The initial seat taking by the deputies was spontaneous and the emerging groupings in the hall of the Taurida Palace was based on uneven combination of regional, linguistic, and confessional markers of affinity. A perceptive observer and advocate of imperial diversity in the first Russian parliament, Viktor Obninskii, concluded that the Duma “appeared to be the

50–51 (See especially the photographic portraits of I. V. Ostrowski, I. M. Nakonechnyi, M. T. Manteris). 6 Viktor Obninskii recalled that initially the deputies took their seats “according to the affinity of language, tribe, or faith.” (K 10 letiiu pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, 212). Borodin recalls that the distribution of seats in the Duma according to caucuses was largely finalized by June 26 (Borodin, “Lichnyi sostav Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, ee organizatsiia i statisticheskie svedeniia o chlenakh,” 27). For a visual representation of the distribution of groupings in the first Duma, see V. Obninskii, Polgoda russkoi revoliutsii. Sbornik materialov k istorii russkoi revoliutsii (oktiabr’ 1905–aprel’ 1906), vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Moscow: I. N. Kholchev, 1906).

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imperial parliament of the constitutional federal state” dominated by “local, regional, and national interests.”7 The cultural frame of the Empire’s diversity enveloped regional, ethnic, and confessional attributes. But the notion of cultural difference in the Duma was applied with almost equal rhetorical zeal to the appearance of peasant deputies. The perception of cultural difference of peasant deputies was seized by their visual appearance in the Throne Hall of the Winter Palace, while its discursive articulation stressed the estate and social nature of the cultural boundary. Both the liberal minded and conservative observers noted the symbolic confrontation in the Throne Hall between the courtly style of the imperial suite and the “grey mass” of peasant deputies.8 Whereas for conservatives the “grey mass” of peasants was a synonym of incompetence of the first Russian parliament, for liberal observers the peasant appearance was the sign of authenticity of “people’s representation.” Commenting on the strategy of reception of Duma members in the Winter Palace, a conservative member of the bureaucratic elite, Vladimir Gurko, remarked that it betrayed the culture of an Oriental empire insofar as it was intended to impress the Duma members with the grandeur and opulence of the court and thereby inculcate respect to the bearers of power.9 Characteristically, another member of the bureaucratic elite, Vladimir Kokovtsov, sympathetically observed the cultural diversity of “national costumes” and was shocked by the “inappropriate” appearance of urban lower

7

K 10-letiiu pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, 213. Kryzhanovskii, “Zametki russkogo konservatora,” 123–24; D. I. Shakhovskoi, “Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma,” Narodnaia Svoboda, Dumskii Listok, no. 1, 20 February 1907, 1; Grigorii Petrov, Pis’mo sviashchennika Grigoriia Petrova predsedateliu Gosudarstvennoi Dumy i opisaniie pervogo zasedaniia pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy (St. Petersburg, n/d [1907]), 2, 4, 11. Petrov’s account includes recollections about what peasant deputies said when they encountered the imperial court in lavish attire and regalia. He mentions that these deputies were particularly struck by naked shoulders and barely covered breast of ladies-in-waiting. Petrov also registered the diversity of appearance of peasant deputies, including those wearing gowns, but continued to classify them in the same group of peasantry. 9 V. I. Gurko, Cherty i siluety proshlogo (Moscow: NLO, 2000), 551–552. Gurko’s memoir includes information on deliberate preparations of the reception of Duma deputies in the Throne Hall of the Winter Palace. He mentions that the Imperial Regalia were fetched from Moscow for this occasion. The significant presence of national costumes in the Throne Hall was registered by V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo. Vospominaniia, 1903–1919, part 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 156. 8


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class and workers’ deputies who represented for him the real cultural divide in the Duma.10 Thus, the theme of the diversity of the new political body of empire as represented in the anthropological observations of contemporaries was referenced with a number of alternating categories, which included socio-cultural status, ethnicity, confession, and region. Significant is the fact that multiple markers of difference presented in these impressionistic accounts. Also worth noting is the fact that these multiple markers of diversity did not amount to a clear hierarchy and did not evolve into a systematic taxonomy of signification of difference. Taking these anthropological evidences seriously, I ponder the question of how empire was reframed under the challenges of revolution, public politics, and politically articulated diversity. Attending to the symphony or cacophony of voices of public politics in late imperial Russia also reframes the persistent “top-down” structural definition of empire in Russian history as a system of rule based on dynasty, bureaucracy, and cooptation of elites.11 The crisis of imperial sovereignty during the revolutionary upheaval of 1905 and the emergence of a new sphere of public politics highlights the importance of exploring political experience and its articulations in the divided and contested space of empire. This experience prompted the notion of politics to lose its exclusive association with imperial government and to acquire new dimensions of representation, mobilization, and negotiation.12 Hence the disenchantment of the concept of politics and the shift from a vertical conception of government to a horizontal one of political community and the opening of the question of its boundaries, structure, and territorial dimensions.13 Hence the growing relevance of rationalizing 10

Ibid. For a sample of this approach, see Alexey Miller and Alfred Rieber, eds., Imperial Rule (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 1–8; Kimitaka Matsuzato, ed., Imperiology. From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007). 12 This semantic shift is observable in the dictionaries of the revolutionary epoch that were tasked with the spread of “political enlightenment” to the masses and to be their guidance in the avalanche of new terms and political realities. For a sample of these dictionaries from the left to liberal center, see: Slovar’ politicheskikh, sotsial’noekonomicheskikh i nekotorykh drugikh slov. Posobie pri chtenii gazet, zhurnalov, i knig po obshchestvennym voprosam (Moscow: Narodnaia Mysl’, 1906), 204; Politicheskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: P. I. Kalinkov, 1906), 117–122. 13 For the purpose of the present analysis I use a reformulated Weberian thesis of disenchantment of the world (which Weber understood as the progress of secularization) with a stress on the shift from the formal (mostly captured in the discourse of 11

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and normative visions to order the social space through categories of class and nationality capable of embracing political agency.14 The acute relevance of the question of what constituted the political community was demonstrated by the fact (stressed and explored by the Russian jurist Boris Nol’de) that in 1906 Russian law for the first time defined the nature of the political space of the Russian Empire (“The Russian state is one and indivisible”).15 Not accidentally, the language of The Fundamental Laws drew on a long and twisted political tradition, which originated in the French revolutionary idea of national sovereignty. Even in a more acute form the question of what constituted the political community was faced by new political actors, whose appearance on the political stage was also conditioned by the crisis of the imperial regime. These new political actors included ideologues, intellectuals, Duma deputies, and political parties wedded to elections and

modern law) to substantive and this-worldly rationality, which includes the sociological grounding of politics in territoriality, economics, national competition, and social interests (Max Weber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy” and “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” Idem, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–28, 309–369; Idem, On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 81–94). My understanding of rationalization is derived from Weber’s theory of the necessity of modern rationality in the moment of dynamic opening of the field of mass politics and loss of instruments of social closure. My definition of rationalizing visions includes the moment of growing connexity or interrelatedness of culturally divided space of empire and the lack of instruments of political closure. 14 Ronald Suny stressed the interlocked and competing relationship between the categories of class and nationality in the revolutions of 1917 and Civil War: Ronald Suny, The Baku Commune: 1917–1918. Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972; Idem, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1–19). 15 B. E. Nol’de, Ocherki russkogo gosudarstvennogo prava (St. Petersburg: Pravda, 1911), 225–244. Nol’de writes that the formula of “one and indivisible” could not exist in the laws of the Russian Empire before 1906 because: “The whole building of the old laws rests on the logical foundation, which identified the state with the ruler. The monarch in this system of legal thinking was not ‘an agency of the state’ as in constitutional monarchy, nor was he ‘the first servant of the state’ as theorists of enlightened absolutism liked to say, he was ‘the monarch absolute and autocratic’. . . .” Nol’de further states that “the legal formula of the first article of the Fundamental Laws of 1906 [. . .] is of western provenance. It describes the legal system that was created by centuries of Russian history with words borrowed from the lexicon of the Great French Revolution.” (Ibid., 227). For the history of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, see M. Szeftel, The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906: Political Institutions of the Duma Monarchy (Brussels: Editions de la Librarie encyclopédique, 1976). For a biography of Boris Nol’de, see: Peter Holquist, “Dilemmas of Progressive Administrator. Baron Boris Nolde,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 2 (2006): 241–73.


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parliamentary politics. They rarely came from the established ranks of imperial rulers or corridors of power. But even if they did, their praxis was defined not by the hierarchy of rank or given status, but by their real or imagined function as representatives of a political community. As such they evolved into a non-classical political subject of empire. It was so not only because by historical tradition the classical political actors of the Russian Empire were those wearing the crown or epaulettes or those standing next to them. The non-classical nature of a new political subject was largely due to the fact that these actors embodied in their activities the “tensions of the modern empire,” i.e. the tension between the universalistic and rationalistic discourse about power and political community and the challenge of difference coming from the space of imperial experience and encapsulating the relativistic challenge to the normative and rationalizing conceptions of modern politics.16 The process of creation of the first Russian parliament and its political experience was the site of developing “tensions of the modern empire” and the search for strategies of accommodating these tensions.

The Constitution of the State Duma and the Question of Imperial Diversity The State Duma, the lower chamber of the first Russian parliament, was conceived of in the process of reforms from above and came into life after the breakdown of authority and revolutionary violence in 1905.17 It is now regarded by historians as an imperial parliament and a window into late imperial society and politics. The conventional view holds that

16 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56. 17 Historians pointed to the bicameral structure of the first Russian parliament and that the existence of the State Council was often ignored in studies of Russian political history of the early twentieth century, cf. Alexandra Korros, A Reluctant Parliament: Stolypin, Nationalism, and the Russian Imperial Council, 1906–1911 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002; A. P. Borodin, Gosudarstvennyi Sovet Rossii (Kirov: Viatka, 1999). I do not focus on the reform of the State Council because the way it was formed (through appointment and corporate elections) did not allow this new political body to reflect the challenges of defining political community in the space of mass and contested politics. Its role in the process of legislative review of the lower chamber was not prominent during the first and second Duma.

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this institution was “imperial” because it reflected the multinational population of the Russian Empire and its political composition was also multinational or, at the very least, ethno-confessional.18 Viewed from this perspective the State Duma appears to be a definitive transformation of empire as a political space differentiated on the basis of legal and administrative-territorial divisions into a space of correlate ethnic and national divisions. I argue that this view of the State Duma, though emphasizing the transformative nature of this institution, obliterates the question of the nature of imperial diversity and the question of imperial experience. Instead of asking the question about the regimes of difference, this view presupposes the one-dimensional nature of this difference, and instead of asking the question of representation (and construction) of difference, it assumes that the State Duma reflected the given boundaries of ethnic divisions in the space of empire. I agree with the view that the State Duma was a window on late imperial society and politics, but I also argue that the nature of imperial diversity and the act of its political representation has to be further enunciated on the basis of the history of the first Russian parliament. The formation of the State Duma started as a bureaucratic response to the growing socio-political discontent and liberal opposition movement. It was initially conceived of as a consultative assembly that would work as an addendum to the imperial government. Moreover, fearing the revolutionary overtones of political representation (in view of its possible transformation into a constituent assembly), discussions of the Duma projects repeatedly stressed that the new institution would be an integral part of the imperial government, a product of evolutionary expansion of the existing structure, rather than a radical departure

18 V. A. Kozbanenko, Partiinye fraktsii v 1 i 2 gosudarstvennykh Dumakh, 1906–1907 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996); A. F. Smirnov, Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossii, 1906–17. Istoriko-pravovoi ocherk (Moscow: Kniga i Biznes, 1998); V. Iu. Zorin, D. A. Amanzholova, S. V. Kuleshov, Natsional’nyi vopros v Gosudarstvennykh Dumakh Rossii (Moscow: Russkii Mir, 1999); Rustem Tsiunchuk, Dumskaia model’ parlamentarizma v Rossiiskoi imperii: etnokonfessional’noe i regional’noe izmerenie (Kazan: Fen, 2004); Idem, “Peoples, Regions, and Electoral Politics: The State Duma and the Constitution of New National Elites,” in Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 366–397. The first study of the electoral law and political representation in the Russian empire acknowledged the dimension of ethnic heterogeneity but its primary focus was on political and social differentiation: Terrence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1983).


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and restructuring.19 This initial logic of the projects for the so-called Bulygin Duma with consultative functions was not drastically changed, even though the character of the institutions was changed after the October 17 Manifesto from consultative to legislative.20 Therefore, the new institution of political representation reflected the nature of imperial government in its most fundamental premise, i.e. the notion of imperial sovereignty. As has been noted by several historians, the logic of imperial government was characterized by simultaneous inclusion and differentiated treatment of various parts of the empire.21 Boris Nol’de traced the origins of this inclusivist treatment of imperial space to the nineteenth century Russian reception of the modern concept of sovereignty. In his seminal treatise Nol’de remarked that the French

19 This was the main reason for promulgation of The Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire right before the convocation of the first State Duma. This act was supposed to prevent the first Russian parliament from embarking on an agenda of constituent assembly and limit the purview of the Duma discussions with respect to the burning political questions of the time. Indicative of the government’s vision of the nature of the State Duma is the provision in the “Rules of Implementation and Introduction of the State Duma and Statute of Elections,” according to which the Duma was supposed to be divided into a number of departments with chairs and secretaries and these departments were supposed to work as the main framework for the organization of the parliamentary work and voting (N. I. Lazarevskii, ed., Zakony o vyborakh v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu (St. Petersburg, 1906), 68). Of course, this vision derived from the structure of the State Council (before the reform of 1906), Senate, and ministries. It betrayed the intention to fully integrate the Duma into the framework of imperial government on the level of structure and culture of decision-making and the lack of understanding of the impact of political parties and ideologies on the phenomenon of political representation. 20 The paradoxes arising from the transformation of functions of the Duma with the simultaneous preservation of the initial designs of the consultative assembly were manifold and were noted in public debates. This gave the impetus for the heated polemics about whether to participate in the elections to the State Duma or boycott them and about the nature of the mandate of deputies elected to the first Duma. This question almost divided the Constitutional-Democratic party in the period of elections to the first Duma, see the discussion of the question at the second (January 5–11, 1906) and third (April 21–25, 1906) congresses of the Constitutional-Democratic party: S’ezdy i konferentsii Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskoi partii, vol. 1 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), 63–70, 78–114, 217–251. See also the discussion of the effect of boycott of the Duma on the left: Russkaia Mysl’, no. 3 (1906), 204. The paradoxes of this transformation pertaining to the internal legislative procedure of the third State Duma are discussed in: Andrei Shingarev, “Zakonodatel’naia initsiativa chlenov Gosudarstvennoi Dumy i Gosudarstvennogo Soveta,” Russkaia Mysl’, no. 9–10 (1912): 1–26. 21 See Frederick Starr, “Tsarist Government: The Imperial Dimension,” in J. Azrael, ed., Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New York: Praeger, 1978), 3–38. For a more recent and articulated statement of differentiated space of empire, see Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen, “Coming into the Territory: Uncertainty and Empire,” Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, 1–29.

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revolutionary idea of “one and indivisible” nation was transformed in the German context into the concept of indivisibility of government, including its territorial titles, and in such a form was received in the Russian Empire.22 Thus the notion of the unity of political space was seen through the prism of the unity of government and not in the affinity of lands or population. Consequently, the State Duma as an integral part of the imperial government was supposed to reflect the underpinning inclusivist logic of the dynastically and bureaucratically run empire. The origin of the first Russian parliament in the bureaucratic-autocratic setting helps explain the main peculiarity of this institution, that is, the inclusive nature of the first parliament with regard to the diversity of legal-administrative, social, and cultural spaces of the Russian Empire. The fact that the right for political representation was extended to the territories of the former Kingdom of Poland as well as to the Caucasus, Siberia, and Turkestan betrayed the logic of contiguous empire and the inclusive conception of imperial sovereignty. This main peculiarity of the first Russian parliament may better be seen in the comparative light of colonial maritime empires, where the right of political representation was clearly separated from the inclusion of a colony into the overarching system of imperial rule.23 The definitive exclusion from political representation in the Russian Empire occurred only with regard to the Grand Duchy of Finland and Central Asian protectorates. The former still enjoyed political autonomy with the right of political representation, however diminished it was under the pressure of “Russification” at the end of the nineteenth century.24 The Central Asian protectorates of the Emirate of Bukhara

22 Nol’de, Ocherki russkogo gosudarstvennogo prava, 239, 242. Tracing the spread and reception of the formula of revolutionary national sovereignty, Nol’de observed that the “ ‘unity’ of the country” was gradually replaced with the “‘unity’ of the order of government” and “[this formula] was transformed into the slogan of the monarchy in its struggle with the revolution.” 23 This argument refers to the colonial empires after the American and French revolutions, whose historical impact was encapsulated in grounding of the political community and rule by consent in the right of political representation. I am aware of the argument that early modern maritime empires resembled European composite states and therefore the disjunction between the colonial and contiguous empires cannot be stretched too far. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and, especially, David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 24 Tuomo Polvinen, Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898–1914 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).


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and the Khanate of Khiva (often neglected in studies of the Russian Empire) were the latest acquisitions in the course of imperial expansion. They were ruled through a distinct system of partial sovereignty.25 It is tempting to conclude that this aspect of outright exclusion in political representation amounted to an element of colonialism as a practice of using cultural or civilizational difference for instituting political exclusion and inequitable relations. Yet, the simultaneous presence of Central Asian protectorates and the Grand Duchy of Finland in the same category of exclusion defies the notion of a rigid colonial boundary as constitutive of Russian imperial rule. This is not to say that the discourse of cultural and civilizational hierarchy was lacking in late imperial Russia,26 it simply means that this discourse failed to destabilize the formal rationality of government-focused conception of imperial sovereignty and failed to substantively penetrate the political logic of inclusion and exclusion in the process of re-shaping the political space of the Russian Empire from above at the beginning of the twentieth century. The principle of an inclusive political space of empire does not exhaust the discourse and practice of the early twentieth century political reform from above. As has been noted, the peculiarity of the dynastically and bureaucratically ruled Russian Empire comprised not only the inclusive conception of the political space, but also the differentiating approach to the space of empire. Different historians, beginning with Boris Nol’de, observed that the policies of the imperial center toward regions or groups of population followed a persistent differentiating or individuating logic of treating the “questions” of empire in their particular circumstances: “The system was formed historically and retained the diversity as a characteristic of the historic formation. [. . .] The Russian law never systematically made sense of what was created. [. . .] Our law

25

Seymour Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia, 1865–1924 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), especially chapter 8; Sergei Abashin et alia, eds., Tsentral’naia Aziia v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2008), 293–312. See ibid., 309–310 for a post-1905 discussion of whether to persist with plans to fully integrate the protectorates into the political, administrative, and legal space of the Russian Empire. 26 Daniel Brower, Edward Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient. Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire. North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2002).

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was premised on the existence of separate lands and determined their relations to the whole of the Russian state in an individual manner.”27 The persistent logic of a differentiating approach to the space of empire had been accompanied by the rationalizing visions and designs of the imperial government since the eighteenth century. The latter received a disproportionately large attention from historians, which led to the image of the Russian Empire as a ruthlessly centralizing and unification-driven state. While evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries furnish the ground for skepticism with regard to the image of a centralizing empire, the early twentieth century is believed to be sufficiently modern, disenchanted, and ideological to accommodate a more rational and systematic approach of the imperial center to the space of empire, including the dominance of the category of nationality in the government’s discourse and policy. There is much evidence to support the view that the Empire made a transition from the muddle of differentiating and exceptional regimes to the rational grid of difference-making of the “gardening state”:28 the nationalizing rhetoric of Stolypin’s government and its support for Russian nationalist parties, the promulgation in 1907 of a new electoral law that eliminated or reduced the representation of empire’s borderlands and ended the period of democratic experiment of the first Russian parliament, the emergence of categories russkie and inorodtsy to operate as a dichotomy in the description of political stakes and visions of the space of the Russian Empire.29 Still, other evidences point in the direction of continu27 Nol’de, Ocherki, 280–281. See also Marc Raeff, “Patterns of Russian Imperial Policy Toward the Nationalities,” Idem, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 126–140; Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983); John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews. The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia 1772–1825. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986); Raymond Pearson, “Privileges, Rights, and Russification,” in O. Crisp, and L. Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989), 86–102; Alfred Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” in Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, James West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 343–366. 28 This is, of course, an invocation of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modern rationality, political agency, and socio-political order, which he in turn borrowed from Ernst Gellner’s metaphor of the state as a gardener of modern national cultures (Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)). 29 The shift from pluralism and particularlism to the dichotomy of Russians vs. non-Russians (inorodtsy) is analyzed in: Charles Steinwedel, “The 1905 Revolution in Ufa: Mass Politics, Elections, and Nationality,” The Russian Review (October 2000):


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ing struggle between the habitus of the differentiating approach and the rationalizing trends in the Russian Empire of the early twentieth century.30 The discussion of the electoral law for the first Russian parliament in the Council of Ministers, the Bulygin committee, the Sol’skii Special Commission, and later at the Peterhoff and Tsarskoe Selo conferences demonstrated the survival of the differentiating approach to the space of empire and the presence of a conflict between this habitus of imperial governance and the new rationalizing disposition of the ideological age. The use of abstract and aggregate categories is a clear evidence of the rationalizing approach of the higher echelons of imperial government to the issue of the future political representation. One of the earliest proposals with regard to the formation of the State Duma advocated the use of the estate principle as the universal foundation of the electoral law.31 Estates were understood by the advocates of this proposal as the universal and transparent categories that could unambiguously work to the effect of clearly marking off the targeted groups of population. The right wing defenders of the estate principle contemplated that the future Duma would consist of the nobility and peasantry. The choice for these population groups in the proposal was determined by the perception of estates as traditional or modernity-resistant elements of the

555–577. See also, Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire. The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens During World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Juliette Cadiot, “Searching for Nationality: Statistics and National Categories at the End of the Russian Empire (1897–1917),” Russian Review 64:3 (2005): 440–55. 30 Richard Wortman argues that the major obstacle on the way of modern nationalizing and systematic government in the Russian Empire was the Russian monarchy. Even though Nicholas II leaned toward ethnic Russian nationalism, this nationalism was at odds with the political vision of Stolypin’s government. Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 392–438. See also Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23–66. 31 Kryzhanovskii, “Zametki russkogo konservatora,” 121–122; Korros, A Reluctant Parliament: Stolypin, Nationalism, and the Russian Imperial Council, 16; Smirnov, Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossii, 1906–17, 47–48. On nobility in the dynamic context of turn of the century’s social and political transformation, including differing interpretations of social change and politicization, see Robert Edelman, Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1907–1917 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980); Roberta Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985).

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old regime, which allegedly made them inherently loyal to the dynastic political order. The use of aggregate and abstract category of estate, though not new to the imperial government since counter-reforms of Alexander III, was also determined by the attendant intention of these high placed decision-making bodies to make a reliable political prognosis. The discussion constantly revolved about the question of how to assure the political loyalty of would-be elected representatives to the Russian monarchy. What distinguished these disenchanted prognostic discussions from the earlier projects and policies of the imperial government was the attendant understanding that the representatives in question would one day cease to be metaphorical figures of imperial ceremonies or bureaucratic rhetoric and come to speak and act in the hall of the State Duma. So, the real question faced in these discussions was about how to connect the attitude of political loyalty of the future political actors to their social position. The use of aggregate and abstract categories, such as estate, made it possible to present the diverse social space of the Russian Empire in logically related and comprehensive terms and establish a relationship between social position and political attitude. The proposal of the right wing group fell through and the constitution of the future Russian parliament did not unambiguously follow the principle of estate. The estate proposal fell victim to the tripartite criticism: that the legal category of estate did not make any sense in view of dynamically changing social fabric of late imperial society; that the evidence from the liberal-opposition movement suggested that nobles were not a coherently loyal social group and some of them were leaders of the political opposition; that the estate principle violated the premises of Russian dynastic nationalism. Similarly, the concern about assuring the “Russian nature” of the future political representation betrays the logic of ideologically driven, abstract, and aggregate categories of the rationalizing approach to the space of empire. The assumption of these decision-making bodies and of Nicholas II himself was that the Russian Empire was founded and sustained by the core Russian nationality.32 Russian nationality was 32 For the vision of the core nationality and the monarchy held by Nicholas II, see Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 365–391. For different Russian nationalisms as visions adopted by various political forces on the part of the political spectrum from radical right to conservatism, see Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), especially chapter 8; Daniil Kotsiubinskii, Russkii natsionalism v nachale XX v. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001); Iu. I. Kir’ianov, Pravye partii v Rossii, 1911–1917 (Moscow:


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supposed to be inherently loyal to the Russian tsar. The interests of the Russian nationality were supposed to be safeguarded by the composition of the Duma. This was supposed to be the general rule for the formation of the first Russian parliament. However, the principle of Herrenvolk failed to unambiguously translate into the content of the electoral law for it was unclear how to relate the ideological and aggregate category of the Russian nation to the actual legal and administrative grid of imperial categories.33 In the end, the abstract and aggregate category of the Russian nation found only a partial translation into a number of often contradictory electoral preferences: it helped the argument against the noble privileges; it aided the expansion of the electoral rights for the “Russian” peasantry; and it fostered the wager of the electoral law on the “internal” provinces marked as such by the presence of the zemstvo institutions of self-government. The inadequacy of the translation of the aggregate and ideologically charged concept of the Russian nation into these electoral preferences was vividly demonstrated by the composition of the first State Duma. The expansion of the electoral rights of the “Russian” peasantry in the form of the volost’ curiae, or, as Miliukov called it, the “wager on the ‘grey’ mass of peasants,” produced a left and socialist leaning Labor (Trudovik) group in the Duma.34 It also aided a more thorough representation of non-Russian national movements in the Duma.35 The wager on the “inner” provinces with the zemstvo ROSSPEN, 2001); M. N. Luk’ianov, Rossiiskii konservatizm i reforma, 1907–1914 (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2006). 33 Sergei Kryzhanovskii was invited as an expert to elaborate the electoral law for the Bulygin Duma. He himself shared one of the guiding ideas of these meetings, that the Russian nationality should be given a predominant role in the future Russian parliament. Yet, he also acknowledged that these abstract principles lacked the connection to the legal and administrative categories that could be worked into an electoral law: “The difficulty of the situation was exacerbated by the fact that all proposals were essentially made in the blind. Without the existence of political life it was impossible to know the physiognomy of the population, nobody knew the moods and opinions of different groups of population. Consequently, nobody knew which layer of the population should be chosen as the basis for the Duma. Once one deviated from the well trodden path of the zemstvo elections, one was bound to find himself in the dark forest” (Kryzhanovskii, “Zametki russkogo konservatora,” 126). 34 See, the discussion of the preferences in the electoral law and the outcome of the first elections in an exchange between Pavel Miliukov and Sergei Witte: The Bakhmetev Archive, Columbia University. P. N. Miliukov Collection. Box 13. Folder “Notes for Granat Encyclopedia’s Biography of Witte.” L. 4–7. 35 For example, with respect to the electoral rules for the Estland province the decision was made to ignore the lack of the peasant commune (the basis for the volost’ elections) in the province and include the whole population without regard to the nature of landholding into the volost’ curiae (Russian State Historical Archive (henceforth

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institutions extended the electoral preferences to such provinces as Chernigov and Ufa and bounced with a numerically larger base of deputies of the first and second Duma for the articulation of cultural and national diversity of the Russian Empire. The presence of such a rationalizing approach to the problem of political representation in the high echelons of imperial bureaucracy tends to obscure the persistence of the differentiating and individuating logic of late imperial government. The differentiating approach was premised on the historically constituted and particularistic grid of estate (sostoianiia), territorial, and legal categories that were operational in the praxis of bureaucratic imperial rule. These categories were often incommensurable and incongruent with one another. Their incommensurability and incongruence could be made evident only when they were faced with a more rational grid of ideological categories or put into a single framework, such as the imperial parliament. The actual electoral law of the Bulygin Duma, later modified into the electoral law on the basis of which the first and second Duma were elected, was, to a great extent, a product of this differentiating and individuating approach to the space of empire. At the foundation of the electoral law laid the electoral principles of the 1864 zemstvo reform, i.e. the property and tax-paying qualifications. They were combined with multi-tiered elections structured by curiae, whereby the urban vote was separated from the rural vote, while twenty six cities were granted the right of separate representation in the Duma. The remnant of the estate logic was preserved in the electoral law, the result of which was the exclusion from suffrage of everyone but the peasant in volost’ curiae and the right for the guaranteed peasant representation (electors from the peasant communes elected their representative separately in the provincial electoral college, while participating in vote for other deputies

RGIA), f. 1327, op. 2, d. 1, L. 8–10). This sanctioned the extension of the electoral preference of the volost’ curiae to land tenants. As a result, the elections to the first Duma in the Estland province did not produce a single representative of the Baltic German elite but returned three deputies associated the caucus of Autonomists, two of whom were members of the Estonian national movement (see biographies of K. P. Gellat and Ia. K. Lubi in: Gosudarstvennaia Duma v portretakh . . ., 47). This was likely to be an unintended consequence of the principles that were put into the electoral statute. The deliberations of the electoral rules for the Estland province demonstrate that there was no intention to exclude the German Baltic nobility from representation in the State Duma. These deliberations are discussed below.


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of the province together with electors from the landowning curiae and urban curiae).36 Once the hybrid combination of the electoral principles were found and agreed upon, they were represented by the imperial bureaucracy as the general principles “with respect to which exceptions should not be considered as desirable.”37 The high-pitched and routinely reproduced rhetoric of “general principles” often masked the logic of particularistic and differential treatment in legal documents and bureaucratic exchanges associated with the promulgation of the electoral statute. This was the case with the creation of a separate Duma seat for the Orthodox population of Kholmskaia Rus’ (Chelm region).38 It was discussed at the Tsarskoe Selo conference along with other amendments to the electoral statute and represented an attempt to boost the representation of the core Russian nationality understood in religious (Orthodox) terms. However, the Kholmskaia Rus’ was not an administrative-territorial category. Moreover, the principle of differentiating the population according to religion was alien to the agreed upon general principles of Bulygin Duma election law. The separate Duma seat was created but the warning against exceptions was heeded and the language of the electoral statute did not contain any reference to religion as the grounds for constituting such an exception.39 In other numerous instances, the language of “general principles” coexisted with explicit statements about exceptions (iz’iatiia) in the normative documents pertaining to the elections. The very first article of the Statute for the Elections to the State Duma made a provision for exceptional treatment of the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland, the Urals and Turgaiskaia regions, provinces and regions of Siberia, the general-governorships of Turkestan and the Steppe region, and the viceroyship of the Caucasus. The distinct legal and administrative-territorial

36

Lazarevskii, Zakony . . .; Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia, 237–352. 37 “Tsarskosel’skie soveshchaniia,” Byloe, no. 3 (1917), 263–265. 38 For the history of projects to administratively separate the Kholm/Chelm contested region from the grid of the Kingdom of Poland’s provinces and the history of creation of the Kholm province in 1912, see Theodor Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 172–192. 39 The addendum to the “Statute of the Elections to the State Duma” simply stipulated that a select number of gminy (communes-municipalities) of the Siedlce and Lublin provinces would elect their own deputy to the Duma. The list of the gminy were said to be published later (Lazarevskii, 97).

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status of these regions of the Empire was the basis for differentiating them from the provinces and regions that either were run by zemstvos or could be thought of as compatible with the zemstvo-run provinces (such as Estland or the region of the Don Cossack Host). But even in the administrative units that did not fall into the category of exception there were circumstances of heterogeneity that could not be adequately captured by the “general principles” of the electoral statute. These conflicting circumstances ought to have been rhetorically harmonized with the “general principles” and the “general principles” had to be adapted to the peculiar circumstances of each case. This situation, along with other explicitly exceptional cases, was tackled by the Special Executive Council for the Election to the State Duma of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the period between October of 1905 and April of 1906.40 The deviations (otstupleniia) from the general rules turned out to be quite numerous and substantial. The Northern provinces, the Urals region, and Siberian regions lacked a sufficient group of landowners to form the electoral curiae. In the Urals and Stavropol’ region there was an urban deconcentration of merchants, who otherwise were supposed to be enfranchised in the urban curiae.41 The conception of volost’ curiae could not be applied to a number of provinces without a significant modification of the provision to accommodate the non-communal landholding of the local agricultural population.42 The presence of the non-territorial legal category of Cossackdom complicated the conception of the volost’ curiae in a number of regions. In the region of the Don Cossack Host the desire of the Cossack service elite to claim the territory of the administrative unit exclusively to the Cossacks led to a clash with the wager of the electoral statute on the peasant communities as the metaphorical embodiment of the core Russian nationality.43 The discussion of the elections from the Cossack hosts also revealed the tension in the hybrid combination of the

40 RGIA, f. 1327, op. 2, d. 1. “Delo osobogo deloproizvodstva ministerstva vnutrennikh del po vyboram v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu.” This collection contains correspondence between the head of the Special Executive Council, A. G. Bulygin and local authorities, that included governors and general-governors. 41 RGIA, f. 1327, op. 2, d. 1. (Pi’smo N. V. Rodzianko, voennogo gubernatora Ural’skoi oblasti. L.19–20 ob). 42 RGIA, f. 1327, op. 2, d. 1. L. 8–13, 18, 38–41. 43 RGIA, f. 1327, op. 2, d. 1. (Pis’mo ot Ministra vnutrennikh del A. G. Bulygina na imia N. N. Odoevskogo-Maslova Nakaznogo atamana voiska donskogo. L. 3–7 ob).


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“general principles” of the electoral statute. The distinction made in the statute between the curiae of landowners and volost’ curiae produced a difficult question of how to classify the Cossack nobles: whether to put them into the volost’-stanitsa curiae on the ground of shared service estate status or to evict them from this curiae on the ground of their non-communal landowning. Even more divulged in the process of negotiation of the actual electoral law became the tension between the tendency of the “general principles” to relate suffrage to territorial boundaries of administrative units and the ex-territorial status of the Cossack service estate. The territorial boundaries of Astrakhan’ Cossack Host stretched to three provinces (Astrakhan’, Saratov, and Samara) and thus necessitated the change of the electoral logic from territorial to exterritorial and estate-based.44 The logic of differentiating and individuating treatment of the social landscape of empire extended even to the core zemstvo provinces that were described in the language of the top imperial councils with the categories of “internal Russia” and of the core nationality.45 The statute’s

44 Rustem Tsiunchuk contends that the allocation of separate seats in the Duma for the Cossack population was part of the design to promote the representation of Russian or Great Russian nationality (Tsiunchuk, Dumskaia model’ parlamentarizma v Rossiiskoi imperii, 72; Idem, “Peoples, Regions, and Electoral Politics: The State Duma and the Constitution of New National Elites,” 369–370). This is an example of the analysis that is based exclusively on the ideological and rationalizing visions in the process of drafting the electoral statute. The internal bureaucratic correspondence reveals that the most important argument in the deliberation of electoral regulations for the provinces populated by Cossacks was the Cossack population’s distinctiveness and non-territorial status. Thus, the major concern of the governor of the Astrakhan’ province was the dispersed settlement of the stanitsas of the Astrakhan Cossack Host in three neighboring provinces. He argued that the allocation of a Duma seat on the basis of tax-paying qualification of the Cossack population in the Astrakhan province only (where the administrative center of the Cossack Host was located) would run counter to the legally recognized fact of the exterritorial and distinct nature of the Cossack Host (RGIA, f. 1327, op. 2, d. 1, L. 52–53). 45 For a cultural construction of the symbolic geography of “internal Russia,” see Leonid Gorizontov, “The ‘Great Circle’ of Interior Russia: representations of the Imperial Center in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, 67–93. For a different interpretation of this symbolic geography with a stress on role of the modern Russian nationalism and its assimilatory function, see Alexey Miller, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 161–180. For a different conception of the “internal Russia” on the basis of the structure of imperial rule, see Kimitaka Matsuzato, “General-gubernatorstva v Rossiiskoi imperii: ot etnicheskogo k prostranstvennomu podkhodu,” Ilya Gerasimov et alia, eds., Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva (Kazan: TsINI, 2004), 427–458.

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notion of a homogenous peasantry, of the communal landholding as the basis for the volost’ electoral curiae, did not coincide with reality. The application of the electoral statute required a number of rulings by the Senate to determine the suffrage of those peasants who purchased the land on their own or with the aid from the Peasant Bank, or those who were ascribed to a rural commune without appertaining the rights of members of the commune, or those who graduated from the university but remained inscribed in the peasant estate.46 The correspondence between A. A. Lopukhin, the Estland Governor, and A. G. Bulygin, the head the Special Executive Council, provides a rare possibility to reconstruct the hybrid and multivalent discourse that included elements of the differentiating and individuating approach and the rationalizing and increasingly ideological vision about the shape of the future State Duma.47 Responding to Bulygin’s assertion that local peculiarities of the Estland province did not necessitate a significant alteration of “general principles” of the electoral statute and defending the interests of his administrative realm (and not those of claimed nationality), Lopukhin challenged a number of generalizing assumptions of the statute and, most importantly, the key assumption of equivalence of the price of land throughout the empire, on which one of the foundational principles of tax-paying qualification was based. Furthermore, Lopukhin produced an elaborated discourse about the peculiarity of the region entrusted to his power and the need of making exceptions in the electoral regulations. He argued against the allocation of one seat in the Duma for the whole of the Estland province. Lopukhin claimed that the Estland province had been “the most culturally developed region in the empire,” while it was supposed to send the same number of representatives as “the least cultured Olonets province.” The governor considered this situation to constitute “a contradiction to the principle of fair representation of the interests of the population of different localities.” The principle mentioned by Lopukhin was not to be found in the official documents about the elections. It was a reflection of the bureaucratic praxis of the imperial government to which the governors were accustomed but which they rarely articulated with such eloquence. Lopukhin also noted that one seat in the Duma could not fairly repre-

46 See the list of these rulings in: Lazarevskii, Zakony o vyborakh v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu, 17–18. 47 RGIA, f. 1327, op. 2, d. 1. L. 8–10, 33–37.


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sent the interests of three “nationalities” of the province, two of which, German and Estonian, were the prevailing ones. He observed that the interests of German and Estonian “nationalities” were contradictory to each other and represented, respectively, the “aristocratic-capitalist” and “democratic” trends of historical development. “Whichever group acquires the seat in the Duma,” wrote the official, “it would be equally ruinous to the interest of both the locality and of the state” because it will be a choice “between the obliteration of people’s interests to the effect of development of the revolutionary movement in the masses or the triumph of democracy that would erase to the ground the fruits of the nobility’s many ages of cultural work.”48 Echoing the logic of elite based indirect rule, Lopukhin concluded his letter with a note that “the Germans now face the awesome ghost of Social-Democracy and they are beginning to abandon the aspiration to make the Baltic provinces distinct from the rest of empire—[the Germans] are now the pillar of order and of autocracy, too.”49 The hybrid premises of the electoral statute of the first and second State Duma produced an imperial parliament of the Russian Empire. It was imperial because it reflected the residual logic derived from the praxis of imperial government and built in to the electoral statute, i.e. that of a territorially contiguous empire and the differentiating and individuating approach of the government to imperial space. The rationalizing and ideological visions and, in particular, the substantive and normative rationality of the state as based on the core and homogenous nation were also part of this electoral and representative experiment, though, as I hope to have demonstrated, these visions failed to overcome the predicament of imperial differentiating policy. Being part of the discourse of political reform from above, these rationalizing visions made the empire visible by way of producing tensions in the definition of loyalty and political community, which was premised on the attempt to order the space of empire through application of a single, lateral, and comprehensive frame of estate and social structure, territorial divisions, and binary dissection of the population of the Empire on the principle of core Russian nationality. The notion of imperial diversity as the main distinguishing characteristic of the historical phenomenon of empire may be at this point

48 49

Ibid. Ibid.

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further enunciated. What made the State Duma a microcosm of empire was not its diversity in the space of national or ethno-confessional distinctions as has been routinely and uncritically stated by historians of the State Duma, but its uneven or multidimensional heterogeneity. The unevenness of imperial heterogeneity included the alternating references to territorial, national, and confessional markers or combinations of them in group identification and articulation of political allegiance. In other words, both group identifications and articulations of political allegiance did not correlate, but were asymmetrical, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory.

The Duma Politics of Rationalizing Visions and Uneven Heterogeneity Nowhere was the phenomenon of uneven and multidimensional difference more evident than in the structure of political groupings of the first and second State Duma.50 The alignments of deputies in the first and second Duma were defined on the basis of incongruous and asymmetrical criteria and in this they strikingly resembled the logic of differentiating approach of the imperial government. However, in the space of Duma politics they were taken by new political actors not as structural determinants, but as a resource for different political strategies in the process of contesting the boundaries and structure of the political community. The caucuses of political parties with a distinct political platform in the first and second Duma included: right-wing parties ( pravye) and monarchists; the Union of October 17; moderate progressives; the Party of the Democratic Reform; the Constitutional-Democratic party; the Labor group (Trudoviks); the Populist-Socialists; the Socialist-Revolutionaries; the Social-Democrats (which in the first Duma was formed in its core by Georgian Mensheviks elected from the Caucasus, who did not display interest in articulating culturally, nationally, or regionally particularistic agenda). Shortly before the dissolution of the first Duma and in the second Duma the caucus of deputies without 50

Although there was a distinction between a caucus and parliamentary group, I treat all groupings together for the purpose of the present analysis and point out when this distinction was perceived as important and mattered to political articulation of groupness and its boundaries.


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party affiliation (largely peasants) was formed, who refrained from taking on a distinct political platform but still deemed it important to institutionalize themselves in the form of a caucus. The structure of political caucuses also included the confessional caucus of Muslim deputies; regional caucus of representatives of Siberia; regionalist and estate caucus of Cossack deputies; national caucuses of Polish Koło, Ukrainian hromada, Estonian, Armenian, Latvian, and Lithuanian groups, groups of deputies from North-Western and South-Western regions; and national, confessional, and regionalist group of Autonomists that comprised collective (groups and caucuses) and individual members with a strong affinity to the political program of national and territorial autonomy and federalization of the Empire.51 It is important to note that the structure of politically articulated diversity manifested in the formation of a parliamentary caucus did not always reflect the statistical distribution of Duma deputies according to social status, confession, or nationality.52 While Dmitriev-Mamonov busied himself with the task of singling out Jewish deputies in the elected corpus of the Duma, thus projecting the existence of a homogenous group united in their political purpose, the Jewish deputies themselves refrained from forming a distinct Jewish caucus and entered into the caucuses of the Kadet party and Labor group.53

51 Borodin, “Lichnyi sostav Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, ee organizatsiia i statisticheskie svedeniia o chlenakh”; Idem, “Raspredelenie golosov vo vtoroi Dume,” Dumskii listok, no. 8, 31 march 1907, 2; Kozbanenko, Partiinye fraktsii v 1 i 2 gosudarstvennykh Dumakh, 1906–1907. . . . 52 Remarkably, in the autobiographic questionnaires filled out by the deputies of the first Duma none of the Polish deputies from the Kingdom of Poland marked himself as Polish, while Gabriel Shershenevich elected on the Kadet ticket in the Kazan province identified his Polish nationality. Gosudarstvennaia Duma pervogo sozyva. Portrety, kratkie biografii, i kharakteristiki deputatov, part 1 (Moscow: Vozrozhdenie, 1906), 30. Shershenevich’s self-description read as follows: “A nobleman, a Pole, and a Catholic.” 53 Dmitriev-Mamonov was entrusted by Witte with the task of surveying the political moods and the background of elections. His reports were compiled on the basis of newspapers. In the final survey the elected deputies of Jewish origin were marked as such. This was the only national group of population that was the target of systematic profiling in this survey (Russian National Library, Manuscript Division, F. 1072, Materialy po istorii vyborov v pervuiu Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu, sobrannye po porucheniiu predsedatelia Soveta Ministrov grafa S. Iu. Witte V. A. Dmitrievym-Mamonovym, vol. 15, L. 322 ob, L. 341 ob–342, L. 363 ob–364). For the analysis of Jewish representation and the problem of forming a distinct Jewish caucus in the first Duma, see Christoph Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900–14 (London: Macmillan Press, 1995), 36.

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The tumultuous transition from the first to second Duma through the dissolution and the signing of the Vyborg manifesto changed the landscape of political groupings of the second Duma. The change was brought about by the participation of socialist parties that had boycotted the elections to the first Duma. The change also occurred within the part of the political spectrum to the right of the Kadets. The elections to the second Duma witnessed the mobilization of conservative, right wing, and Russian nationalist political movements. The entrance of these forces in larger numbers to the second Duma diminished the chances of the Kadets to form a parliamentary majority.54 Other changes included the attendance of deputies from the remote borderlands that did not hold elections in time to send the deputies to the first Duma, the consolidation of all Polish deputies on the basis of ethnicity into the Polish Koło,55 the split of nationally and confessionally defined caucuses over the question of social reform,56 and the formation of a much reduced caucus of Autonomists with participation of only nationally defined Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonia groups.57 The cases of caucus formation in the second Duma exhibited contradictory trends, some of

54 An analysis of electoral losses of the Constitutional-Democratic party due to the entrance of left socialist parties into elections is given in: A. Smirnov, Kak proshli vybory vo vtoruiu gosudarstvennuiu Dumu (St. Petersburg, 1907). For mobilization of conservatives in the context of growing primacy of ethnic politics, see the description of the electoral battle with Polish noble electors in the Volyn’ province in: V. V. Shul’gin, Gody. Vospominania byvshego chlena Gosudarstvennoi Dumy (Moscow: APN, 1979), 1–30. 55 E. Chmielewski, The Polish Question in the Russian State Duma (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1970), 36, 37. See the assessment of the “cooling down of relations with the Poles” given by Miliukov: Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 8 (1907), 508. Given the fragmentation of the second Duma structure, the Polish votes started to play an important swing role in passing major parliamentary decisions. 56 The group of Muslim deputies in the Second Duma, instead of forming a consolidated Muslim caucus as they had in the first Duma, split into the Muslim caucus and the socialist leaning Muslim Labor Group. The latter group was against the majority’s alliance with the Kadets and its agreement with the Kadets’ vision of agrarian reform. Still, the Muslim caucus experienced tensions over the question of language of caucus meetings because the deputies did not share a common language and those from the remote borderlands could not understand the Russian speaking Muslims from the Volga-Kama region (Diliara Usmanova, Musul’manskie predstaviteli v Rossiiskom parlamente, 1906–1916 (Kazan: Akademiia Nauk RT, 2005), 167, 175; Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 11 (1907), 773; no. 12 (1907), 814). A similar process of splitting over the question of social reform was experienced by the group of Lithuanian representatives (Nerijus Udrenas, “Book, Bread, Cross and Whip: The Construction of Lithuanian Identity in Imperial Russia,” Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2000, 396). I thank Darius Staliunas for bringing this dissertation to my attention. 57 Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 8 (1907), 571.


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them pointed in the direction of growing primacy of ethnic identification of political groupings and its exclusiveness, others pointed in the opposite direction of growing primacy of class identification on the basis of the attitude toward the social reform. Still, the overlapping and asymmetrical nature of group identification and its ideological articulation remained the persistent feature of both convocations of the Russian parliament. Even though the leadership of the second Duma attempted to formally define the status of a Duma parliamentary caucus on the basis of a distinct political program and exclude the particularistic criteria from its definition, the actual structure of the council of parliamentary caucuses continued to be shaped by the pluralist and particularistic landscape of the Duma.58 Therefore, the notion of a pluralist nature of political representation of the Russian Empire before the Stolypin coup of 1907 has to be further ascertained in the milieux of its emergence; that is in the first Duma. In general, the formation of political parties and institutionalization of party groupings in the first Duma was both an underdeveloped and dynamic process. The caucuses of the Social Democratic party, Constitutional-Democratic party, the party of Democratic Reform, the Polish Koło, groups of North-Western and South-Western deputies (mainly Polish landowners) were formed before the convocation of the Duma but their relational position and membership in Duma changed in the course of the first parliamentary session. Many of the caucuses were formed already in the Duma and did not reflect the party-ticket elections. This was the case of the caucus of Autonomists and the Labor group, the latter was next to the caucus of the Constitutional-Democratic party in terms of the number of deputies and consisted largely of peasant deputies.59 The practice of party caucus politics in the Duma was

58 RGIA, f. 1278, op. 1 (II), d. 667. “Soveshchaniia chlenov presidiuma i predstavitelei parlamentskikh fraktsii.” The proposal stipulated the exclusion of national caucuses unless they present a distinct political platform. In the end the only criterion put forward by the presidium of the Duma was “the number of deputies in the group.” See also Borodin, “Raspredelenie golosov vo vtoroi Dume,” 2. 59 While at the beginning of the first Duma the Kadet caucus comprised around 120 deputies (out of the total of 478), toward the end of the Duma it included 179 deputies. The Labor Group declined from 107 to 94 deputies (Borodin, “Lichnyi sostav Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, ee organizatsii i statisticheskiie svedeniia o chlenakh.”). For the history of the Labor Group, see L. M. Bramson, K istorii Trudovoi gruppy. Trudovaia gruppa v pervoi Gosudarstvennoi Dume (Petrograd: Edinenie, 1917). The Labor group was internally unstable, partly due to the Kadets’ effort to split it, see the targeted statistics compiled by Nikolai Borodin, himself a Kadet, and stressing

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made difficult by the manifold or vaguely articulated political allegiance of many deputies. The commission for the elaboration of the statute of the Duma reported that upon the convocation of the parliament 1/3 of its members did not decide on the party affiliation, while the survey of the existing caucuses displayed “considerable plurality” and “lack of clear cut boundaries.”60 It must be added that the very definition of a party caucus was very imprecise. Echoing his sociological critique of modern political parties in Great Britain and the US, one of the founders of political sociology and a deputy in the first Russian Duma, Moisei Ostrogorskii even suggested that the underdevelopment of party politics was providential for the Russian parliamentary experiment for it allowed the Duma to escape the corruption of political spirit and retain freedom. Curiously, Ostrogorskii was speaking not as an individual scholar, but as a key-note speaker of the Commission for the Elaboration of the Statute of the State Duma.61 The caucus of Autonomists was one the cases of imprecise and loose parliamentary group or at least it was viewed as such by the Constitutional-Democratic near-majority because it lacked a definite political platform. Indeed, the group was divided over the agrarian question with the Polish deputies from the Kingdom of Poland and Western Borderlands being in opposition to the principle of expropriation of noble lands. However, it is possible to detect a definite political platform in the early development of the caucus of Autonomists. Its history can be traced to the 1905 congresses of non-Russian professionals and civic activists in St. Petersburg that represented non-Russian national movements (Azerbaijani, Armenian, Byelorussian, Georgian, Jewish, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Tatar, Ukrainian, and Estonian) from different regions: the Baltic region, western borderlands, King-

internal tensions in the Group (Borodin, “Lichnyi sostav Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, ee organizatsiia i statisticheskie svedeniia o chlenakh,” 25–26). 60 RGIA, f. 1278, op. 1 (I), d. 151, “O sostavlenii nakaza Gosudarstvennoi Dumy.” 61 For the seminal contribution by Ostrogorskii to the formation of the discipline of political sociology, see: Moisei Ostrogorskii, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, with a foreword by Seymour Lipset (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982, originally published in French in 1898). The assessment and acknowledgment of the influence of Ostrogorskii’s contribution to political sociology, comparative politics, and critique of modern democracy is in: Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” Idem, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 340; A. Macmahon, “Ostrogorskii,” The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. XI (New York: Macmillan, 1933): 503–4.


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dom of Poland, South Caucasus, and Central Asia (steppe region).62 Elections to the first Duma produced a variegated representation of national movements or different fractions of these national movements. The process of crystallization of political caucuses in the Duma and growing significance of preliminary agreements between the Kadets and Labor group on voting and schedule of debate made it imperative to coordinate the activity of scattered national caucuses and groups.63 Their presence in the Duma contributed to the growing cognizance of the diverse space of the Russian Empire, but even more importantly, it brought about an understanding of connexity between different aspirations for distinctiveness in the space of empire. Moreover, issues of local peculiarity surfaced in the parliamentary debate on numerous occasions. Thus the debate on the agrarian question provided the basis for a rethinking of the agrarian question as a series of different agrarian questions in different regions of the Empire.64 These factors were duly observed by the intellectuals and national activists who were acting as an expert community for the Autonomists. Their reflection on how

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Ilya Shrag, “Soiuz avtonomistov,” Ukrainskii Vestnik, no. 1 (1906): 64–68, note that while the Ukrainian perspective conceptualized the Muslim representatives in the congresses with reference to their nationality (Tatars), the Muslim representatives themselves stressed a confessional dimension of their politics; Zurab Avalov, Nezavisimost’ Gruzii v mezhdunarodnoi politike, 1918–21 (New York, 1982), 5–6; Andrew K. Wise, Aleksander Lednicki: A Pole Among Russians, A Russian Among Poles. Polish-Russian Reconciliation in the Revolution of 1905 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2003). 63 M. M. Vinaver, Konflikty v pervoi Dume (St. Petersburg: V. S. Solov’yova i V. G. Nikol’skaia, 1907), 8. The preliminary debate on voting and agenda of the Duma took place in the Kadet Club, which was organized by Prince D. I. Bebutov. Vinaver mentions that Autonomists had not organized by the time of the opening of the Duma. The perceived necessity to coordinate the Duma’s work in an orderly manner led the Kadets to help the organization of the Group of Autonomists and even provide a special room in the Kadet club (Hoover Institution of War, Peace, and Revolution, Boris Nikolaevsky Collection, Box 106, David Iosifovich Bebutov Papers, Folder 3, “Zapiski,” L. 363). 64 Polish deputies from the Western borderlands fought the principle of expropriation of noble land with a rhetorical formula that the generic principle of agrarian reform proposed for consideration of the Duma did not adequately capture the local peculiarity of western provinces, including the social and cultural customs of Byelorussian peasants (Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Pervyi sozyv. Stenograficheskie otchety. 1906 g. Sessiia pervaia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1906), 321). Representatives of Cossack population and the Baltic provinces supported the idea that questions of socio-economic reforms should be “dealt with in concrete terms, after taking into account particular territory and nationality” (Ibid., 130, 197–99.). There was even a more radical proposal that the agrarian reform “should take into account not only the differences between provinces and regions, but also the differences between districts and counties” (Ibid., 82).

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different claims of distinctiveness were connected in the parliamentary discussions paved the way for the declaration of a path toward federalization of empire.65 The plan of federalization differed from claims of autonomy on the basis of distinctiveness in that it contained a universal principle that was bound to reframe the question of political reform from the view point of multinational composition of the Russian Empire or rather “empire of nations” as one of the advocates put it.66 Significantly, the principle of federalization was based in this proposal on the symmetry of constituent elements of the federation, all of them being nations.67 However, in the short run course of the first Duma, the impulses of particularlism prevailed over symmetric and rationalizing visions. The caucus of Autonomists evolved into a pluralist association of different particularlisms. The notion of rather unqualified autonomy appeared to be the only common ground that could unite deputies from the Cossack regions (Don Oblast’, Orenburg, and Astrakhan’ Cossack Hosts), Mus65 Jan N. Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay, “K voprosu ob avtonomii,” Ukrainskii Vestnik, no. 1 (1906), 26–33, Baudouin de Courtenay reported that he changed his views from insisting on the principle of autonomy to embracing the principle of federalism in the period between the congresses of autonomists and the convocation of the first Duma; Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia. Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto: the University of Toronto Press, 2005), 48–61. For history of federalist ideas in the Russian Empire, see Mark von Hagen, “Federalisms and Pan-movements: Re-Imagining Empire,” Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, 494–510. 66 “It would be a historical mistake and a sin before the eyes of future generations not to use the moment to fixate legally, and according to a regular plan, the union of peoples, that became brothers in the field of revolutionary struggle. Because the hour has come [. . .] to transform the collapsing centralist Russian Empire into a strong an united empire of nations” M. Slavinskii, “Imperiia narodov,” Ukrainskii Vestnik, no. 1 (1906 ), 38. I insist on translating “imperiia narodov” as “empire of nations” because in the course of his argument Slavinskii introduces a dichotomy of the “national empire” (natsional’naia imperiia), that is the empire founded by the core nationality, and the “empire of nations” (imperiia narodov). This points to the disjunction between a populist and nationally exclusive concept of narod. Of course, the concept of narod remained ambiguous in the early twentieth century and continued to be referenced in a populist frame, such as in the case of adding the name of “Party of People’s Freedom” to the name of the Constitutional-Democratic party, which was allegedly incomprehensible for the common people (S’ezdy i konferentsii Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskoi partii, vol. 1, 150). 67 Consequently, the group of Ukrainian deputies attempted to transform the loose structure of the Ukrainian parliamentary club into a Ukrainian caucus. This move caused a split in the Ukrainian parliamentary club as Kadet members of the club and caucus of Autonomists could not agree on exclusive definition of political articulation of Ukrainianness (Olga Andriewsky, “The Politics of National Identity: The Ukrainian Question in Russia, 1904–1912,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1991, 198).


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lims, territorial group of Polish deputies from the western borderlands and representatives of national movements. Up to forty members of the caucus of Autonomists also belonged to the Constitutional-Democratic party, which recognized the principle of autonomy but stopped short of recognizing federalism.68 The interpretation of autonomy in the frame of political and territorial collective rights of a nationality was essential for Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian groups. For example, the entrance of the Lithuanian group into the caucus of Autonomists should be seen against the background of earlier unsuccessful negotiations with the “group of western borderlands” made up of Polish deputies in the attempt of the latter to draw the Lithuanian deputies into the territorially defined caucus of western borderlands.69 At the same time the notion of territorial autonomy was central for the program of Polish deputies from Western Borderlands who did not enter into the Polish Koło because some of them were part of a movement that opposed Polish National Democrats and their stance of exclusive Polishness and national egoism in the western borderlands.70 Their program was based on the demand of territorial autonomy and the recognition of the mixed national composition of the region, including the rights of the Polish nationality.71 On the other hand, a number of deputies from the Cossack regions (Don Oblast’, Orenburg and Astrakhan’ Cossack Hosts) joined the caucus of Autonomists because

68 Borodin, “Lichnyi sostav Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, ee organizatsiia i statisticheskie svedeniia o chlenakh,” 6. 69 Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Aleksandr Lednicki Collection, Folder 22 [Minutes of the meeting of the group of western borderlands] 1/14 maja 1906, L. 81–82. 70 “Khronika,” Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 9 (1906); For the history of Polish National Democracy, see Alvin Fountain, Roman Dmowsky, Party, Tactics, Ideology, 1895–1907 (Boulder: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1980); Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 71 Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Aleksandr Lednicki Collection. Folder 22. Gruppa zapadnykh okrain. Osnovnaia programma. See also Alexander Lednitskii, “Natsional’nyi vopros v Gosudarstvennoi Dume,” Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 39 (1906), 2069–2070. Lednicki explained that the decision to remain outside of the Polish Koło for Polish deputies of western provinces was underpinned by their status of “representatives of the whole region with mixed population.” He also observed that the land question for Poles was not just an economic question, but “the question of national existence.” For an example of polemics of the Kadet allied regionalist movement of kraiowcy against National Democracy, see the reports on Tadeusz Wroblewski’s electoral tours in western provinces (“Khronika,” Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 9 (1906)).

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the stress on regional-territorial autonomy in the platform of that caucus was congenial to the aspirations of the Cossack deputies, who, unlike other groups in the union of Autonomists, lacked a developed discourse of the cultural distinctiveness of Cossackdom.72 Even though the rationalizing vision of a federalized empire and “empire of nations” did not prevail in the State Duma, the public discourse in the first State Duma was still far away from the monologue of a homogenous political community, even though some of the leaders and ideologues of the Kadet near-majority, like Petr Struve, conceived the Duma as a metaphor of different peoples “ ‘merged’ into a nation, into a spiritual whole, conscious of itself, self-determined and sovereign.”73 Instead, it was dominated by the growing assertiveness of expressions of distinctiveness or particularlism on behalf of different groups and territories of the Empire. Sometimes, this assertiveness was simply a reflection of the entrenched localism of social and political culture or conservative attitudes.74 Sometimes, it was triggered by the desire to obtain recognition of a political claim or claimed identity with the public medium of the Duma. In that case, the uneven heterogeneity of the imperial space and its constituent language of distinctiveness and particularlism acquired a performative and instrumental function in the interrelated space of Duma politics. In the public space of Duma politics an omission of reference to the diverse nature of the Russian Empire began to be regarded as a politically endowed gesture that suggested the continuation of the policy of the ancien régime. This was the case with the government’s response to the first expression of the political will of the Russian parliament, which was elaborated by the Duma in the form of the Reply to the Throne Speech.75 The Duma’s Reply stipulated an intention of the first Russian parliament to embark on a broad program of reforms, including the introduction of equal civic and political rights and the 72 S. G. Svatikov, Rossiia i Don, 1549–1917. Issledovanie po istorii gosudarstvennogo administrativnogo prava i politicheskikh dvizhenii na Donu (Belgrad: Donskaia Istoricheskaia Komissiia, 1924), 496. 73 Petr Struve, “Narod i Duma,” Gazeta Duma, no. 1, 27 april, 1906, 1. 74 V. I. Ger’e (Guerrier), Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Politicheskie vozzreniia i taktika ee chlenov. (Moscow: S. P. Iakovlev, 1906), 51. Assessing the Duma from a conservative viewpoint, Ger’e accused the Kadets and the left deputies of Jacobinism and criticized them for rhetorical excesses in appealing to the undifferentiated name of the “people.” 75 RGIA, f. 1218, op. 1 (I), d. 4. “Po sostavleniiu adresa Gosudarstvennoi Dumy v otvet na privetstvennoe slovo.”


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freedom of cultural development of nationalities. The fact that the first government’s response to the Duma neglected these parts of the Reply to Throne Speech was interpreted by Alexander Lednicki, who spoke on behalf of groups of Autonomists, as equal to the “division of deputies of the Duma into the first and second rate.”76 Thus he made it clear that silence had become a political statement. Moreover, even the generalizing statement about the composite nature of the Russian Empire in legislative proposals was not sufficient. As the discussion of legislation on civil equality revealed, many deputies in the Duma deemed it important to emphasize the peculiarity of their nationality or confessional group in the symbolic competition for recognition of their suffering from the discriminatory measures of the previous era. It was even more important insofar as the left wing deputies of the Duma continued to share the Russian populist conception of justice as centered on the suffering of the peasantry as the metonymy for the political community of the “people.”77 That is to say that even the Jewish demands of negative liberty, to use Isaiah Berlin’s expression, or the introduction of universal civil equality by way of abolishing the discriminatory measures, required the political articulation of distinctiveness in order to overcome the silencing or neglect of their case for negative liberty. In other cases the choice of the language of distinctiveness by some caucuses during this discussion was underpinned by the desire to expand “the imperial rights regime”78 to their constituency or seek a sort of “affirmative action.” The Muslim deputies showed interest in recognition of the mullahs’ clergy status

76 Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Pervyi sozyv. Stenograficheskie otchety. 1906 g. Sessiia pervaia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1906), 321. See also perceptive remarks by Olga Andriewsky on the symbolic value of recognition or non-recognition of national distinctiveness from the viewpoint of national movements: Olga Andriewsky, “The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse and the Failure of the ‘Little Russian Solution’, 1782–1917,” Andreas Kappeler, Zenon Kohut, Frank Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen, eds., Culture, Nation, and Identity. The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600–1945 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2005), 182–214. 77 Observing the crescendo of national and confessional representations of suffering in the Empire, an ideologue of the Labor group Timofei Lokot’ intervened in the debate to remind the national and confessional groups that the supreme injustice of the old regime fell not on national and confessional groups, but on “the tax-paying population” (Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Pervyi sozyv, Stenograficheskie otchety . . ., vol. 2, 1052–53). 78 Here I follow the hypothesis of “imperial rights regime” proposed by Jane Burbank in: “An Imperial Rights Regime. Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 397–431.

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instead of the abolition of estate rights and privileges for the sake of universal equality.79 Muslim deputies from the Volga-Kama region were also interested in promoting the colonization of Turkestan by the Muslim-Tatar population.80 The discussion of the question of Polish autonomy was another case of performative employment of the language of distinctiveness. In the case of the Polish Koło’s claim it is possible to see how the language of distinctiveness could be geared to the language of exceptionalism whose register could no longer accommodate the connexity and interrelatedness of plural political articulations of imperial diversity. During the discussion of the Duma’s Reply to the Throne Speech, the Polish Koło submitted to the Duma a declaration that questioned the applicability of general constitutional reform of 1906 and its outcome, the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire to the former lands of the Polish Kingdom, on the ground of legal history of these lands in the Russian Empire.81 Arguing the case of unbroken legal tradition of dynastic union of Polish lands with the Russian Empire had existed since 1815 and questioning the legality of subsequent legislation, the declaration demanded the restoration of Polish autonomy: “Our rights are sacred and inalienable, they provide the grounds for the autonomy of the Kingdom of Poland, this autonomy is the cherished demand of the whole population of our region . . . [and the possibility seems to be opening] to defend these inalienable rights before the Russian people.” Significantly, the declaration singled out the Kingdom of Poland as the subject of autonomy and was signed only by the deputies elected from the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland. Deputies from the Suvalki province of the Kingdom of Poland, who were members of the Lithuanian caucus, and Poles of the western borderlands did not sign the declaration.82 Employment of the language of distinctiveness and particularlism in the space of Duma politics was not limited to the activists of confessional, national, or regional identity alone. The political stance of Constitutional-Democratic party that stood behind a near-majority in the 79

Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Pervyi sozyv, Stenograficheskie otchety . . ., vol. 2, 1052. Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Pervyi sozyv, Stenograficheskie otchety . . ., vol. 2, 1111. 81 Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Pervyi sozyv, Stenograficheskie otchety . . ., vol. 1, 50–51; RGIA, f. 1218, op. 1 (I), d. 4. “Po sostavleniiu adresa Gosudarstvennoi Duma v otvet na privetstvennoe slovo.” 82 Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Pervyi sozyv, Stenograficheskie otchety . . ., vol. 1, 50–51. 80


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first Duma was premised on instrumentalization of the view of empire as a composite space of particularistic and asymmetrical national, confessional, regional, and social “questions.”83 The discourse of emerging political nation that has been cited earlier was also part of the Kadet political imagination and rhetoric. But it is important to situate this discourse in the context of intense debate about the nature of the liberal party and the platform of this party in the early stages of its formation and not to examine this discourse in the terms it described itself. What brought the particular and asymmetric “questions” of the Russian Empire into the midst of the Constitutional-Democratic party and then into the Kadet parliamentary caucus was the open ended acceptance of the principle of social justice and ensuing from it logic of collective rights alongside with the classical liberal demand of political freedom and individual rights.84 Introducing the logic of collective rights into the liberal vision of the Russian Empire opened the liberal platform, much as the first State Duma to the field of diverse and particularistic articulations of collective rights and exposed it to the rival taxonomy of collective rights as being national in their nature. The platform of the Constitutional-Democratic party was a snapshot of political imagination linked to the constitutional and democratic future and the attempt at mediating in the dynamic and composite space of particularistic and asymmetric national, confessional, regional, and social “questions.” In the platform of the party the individualistic principles of civil and political equality for all citizens of the empire

83 William Rosenberg was the first to perceptively note the peculiar and persistent stance of nadklassovost’ in the history of the Constitutional-Democratic party, that is the positioning of the party as a mediating force above the lines of class divisions in late imperial society. Analyzing this stance Rosenberg arrived at the conclusion of political weakness of the Kadets resulting from the problem of relating of a liberal political program to social agency. See: William Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974, 11–46) and idem, “Representing Workers and the Liberal Narrative of Modernity,” Slavic Review, vol. 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 245-270. Following Rosenberg’s approach, I take note of another peculiar and persistent frame of self-description of the Kadets, that of nadnatsional’nost’ (standing above the lines of division of society into nationalities), see Osvobozhdenie, no. 1 (1902), 1, 2; S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 1, 158–164. 84 See S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 1, 18–22. For an ideological explication of non-classical platform of the Constitutional-Democratic party and of social reformism, see Paul Miliukov, Russia and Its Crisis. Crane lectures for 1903 (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1905); P. Struve, “Rabochie i Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaia partiia,” Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 4 (1906), 201–03.

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were accompanied by the collective rights of cultural self-determination for all nationalities of the empire. The universal principle of local selfgovernment for all territories was supplemented with the particularistic stipulations of the political autonomy for the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland. Moreover, the platform included the clause on the possibility of the formation for unspecified territories of regional (larger than one province) self-government with legislative functions as well as autonomous coalitions between different provincial self-governing units. The Kadets concerned themselves not only with the constitutional principles of meta-organization of the imperial state but also with the introduction of local autonomy down to the volost’ level, thus assuring that large autonomous and administrative units of the future state would not be centralized.85 In other words, the platform of the Kadet party was tailored to respond to the uneven diversity of the Empire and its political articulations. The platform of the Constitutional-Democratic party was not just a theoretical design for the future of the Empire born in the ivory tower of theoretical and applied social sciences of the “brain of the nation.”86 The structure of the party during the constitutional experiment in the Russian Empire very much resembled the uneven composition of the political platform of the party. While in the center the party groups followed the administrative-territorial grid of provinces,87 the formation of the party group in Odessa and Kiev from the very beginning evolved into a regional scope88 and continued to pursue the regional framework

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S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 1, 189–196. This is how the Kadet party was referred to by Stolypin and this phrase was approvingly adopted by the Kadets themselves, see: V. A. Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Vospominania sovremennika (Paris, n/d), 230. 87 See the report of the secretary of the Central Committee of the party A. A. Kornilov on the history of the party from 1905–1907 (S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 1, 500–582). See also the statute of the party that stipulated the province as the unit for the organization of the structure of the party (Ibid., 196–197). At the same time the party structured its propaganda activity on the basis of the regional and not provincial grid, see P. Dolgorukov, “Agitatsionno-lektsionnaia deiatel’nost’ Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskoi partii,” Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 17 (1906). 88 V. I. Vernadskii National Library of Ukraine, Manuscript Division, f. 66 (I. V. Luchitskii), ed. khr. 228, “Protokol vtorogo soveshchaniia chlenov partii narodnoi svobody po oblastnomu voprosu.” The minutes of the meeting include a report on the history of the founding of the regional Kiev party group comprising Kiev, Volyn’ and Podol provinces. The documents also contains a discussion of prospects for Odessa and Khar’kov groups to acquire a regional scope. See also: The State Archive of the Russian Federation (henceforth GARF), f. 523, op. 1, d. 216, “Kievskaia guberniia.” 86


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in the case of the Kiev oblastnaia organization well into 1917. The Kiev regional party group remained one of the most active groups that stayed in touch with the Central Committee and parliamentary caucus of the party during the period of political demobilization after 1907 and challenged the leadership of the party with plans of federalizing the party structure.89 During elections to the first Duma in Kiev the Kadets could come up with largely their own ticket of candidates “that could be only envied by True-Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews.”90 In Warsaw nine Kadets that comprised the Warsaw Kadet group could only provide briefs of competition between Polish political parties and services of translation of political materials related to elections and politics of their allies-the Polish Progressive Democratic Union.91 The party leadership firmly declared that the party stood above the dividing lines of class and nationality, but it also accepted the formation of exclusively Jewish group in Wilno.92 The pressures coming from the structure of the party shaped the Kadet’s political strategy of instrumentalization of uneven diversity.93 Writing after the fall of the monarchy in 1917, Fedor Kokoshkin, the senior legal expert on questions of autonomy of the ConstitutionalDemocratic party, found a discursively thick formula of condominium

89 The first proposal to federalize the party structure was made by the founder of the Kiev regional group, Ivan Luchitskii and then raised repeatedly after 1907 (S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 1, 256–57; S’ezdy i konferentsii Konstitutsionno-Democraticheskoi partii, vol. 2 (Moscow; ROSSPEN, 2000), 159, 230). Although the party rejected plans for federalization of its structure, it pursued the policy of meeting “individual demands” and enlargement of the Central Committee through cooptation (S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 1, 354–55; S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 2, 343–45). It is important to bear in mind that in the elections to the third Duma the main constituency of the party was located in urban population and “borderlands.” Thus the reliance on a network of regional and national groups was vital for the survival of the party (Ibid., 267). 90 Svobodnaia Mysl’, no. 9, 13 march 1906, 1. 91 GARF, f. 523, op. 1, d. 174. “Varshavskaia guberniia.” For the discussion of the Progressive Democratic Union by Russian liberals, including the acceptance by the Union of ethnographic boundaries of Poland and a broad democratic program, see N. I. Kareev, Polonica. Sobrnik statei po posl’skim delam (1881–1905) (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1905), 232–249. For the history of the Progressive Democratic Union, see Maciej Janowski, Polish Liberal Thought Before 1918 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 220–244. 92 GARF, f. 523, op. 1, d. 175, “Vilenskaia guberniia.” 93 See also studies that stressed the regional dimension of the party in Saratov and the Urals region, see Igor’ Narskii, Kadety na Urale (Sverdlovsk: Izdatel‘stvo Ural‘skogo Universiteta, 1991); Dittmar Dahlmann, Die Provinz Wählt: Russlands Konstitutionell-Demokratische Partei und die Dumawahlen, 1906–1912, Beiträge zur Geschichte Osteuropas (Cologne: Böhlan, 1996).

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building to describe the strategy of Kadets in their encounter with imperial diversity.94 In an updated argument in defense of the party’s platform, Kokoshkin insisted on separating the question of national cultural rights from the question of territorial autonomy and the question of autonomy from that of federalization on an ethno-territorial basis, invoking in his argument the British policy of devolution.95 The nationalities that insisted on blurring these questions into the program of ethno-federation were, according to Kokoshkin, making a mistake: Nationalities claim the necessity of creating in Russia a federation on the basis of ethnic boundaries. By doing so each nationality wants, so to say, to occupy a room for itself that would suit its needs. They want to do it well before the future building of the state of Russia is finished. They are mistaken because they do not fully comprehend the conditions under which the whole of the building will be erected. Advocates of national autonomies do not propose an exact and detailed plan of how to create in Russia a federation based on the principle of nationality. They address the All-Russia’s parties with a claim: . . . we want to have such and such room in the future building of Russia. The task of erecting the whole of the building is yours. . . . But the construction of the entire building turns out to be impossible in view of all these particular (italics added, A.S.) demands. Building separate rooms first, according to separate plans, makes it impossible to erect buttresses and lay main beams, secure the roof and the walls.96

Characteristically, Kokoshkin did not argue in favor of the “Great Russian nationality” and its separate room in the condominium building, he argued out of fear of a mobilization of Great Russians in a symmetric

94 F. F. Kokoshkin, “Avtonomiia i federatsiia,” S’ezdy i konferentsii, vol. 3, part 1 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 559. This was a report given to the 8th Congress of the Constitutional-Democratic party (May 9–12, 1917). Kokoshkin was a known jurist, veteran of the Constitutional-Democratic party, member of the Central Committee, and professor of different universities. 95 Ibid., 562. For growing interest among the Kadets in the British political experience of responding to the challenges of uneven imperial diversity, see Boris Nol’de, “Angliia i ee avtonomnye kolonii, istoricheskii ocherk,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 5 (September 1906): 5–67 and idem, Natsional’nyi vopros v Rossii. Doklad, prochitannyi na IX delegatskom s’ezde Partii Narodnoi Svobody (Petrograd: Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, 1917). 96 Kokoshkin, “Avtonomiia i federatsiia,” 559. This image is, of course, reminiscent of the metaphor of the communal apartment borrowed by Yuri Slezkine from Iosif Vareikis and used to make sense of the Soviet nationalities policy (Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, vol. 53, no. 2 (1994), 415). Despite similarities, the image of the condominium building stresses relativism as a strategy of a new political subject of empire over unintended consequences of encountering and acting upon diversity.


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response to non-Russian nationalism.97 He saw the problem from the view point of those engineers, who were supposed to erect the whole building. By way of conclusion it is necessary to return to the point of departure of this chapter. In reconstructing the history of the formation of the State Duma and its political experience I stressed the notion of uneven diversity that came to be reflected and articulated by new political actors in the shared and public space of Duma politics. Historians of the Russian Empire indeed need not to start their exploration of difference as the key element in the definition of historical phenomenon of empire with the preconceived notion of nationality as a homogenous and bounded space of exclusive political loyalty and constructed social solidarity.98 This, of course, does not mean that they should ignore ethnic diversity and the impact of modern nationalism in favor of another universal and one-dimensional taxonomy of difference, such as one based on confession or territory. As I argue in my analysis of rationalizing visions of empire in the Duma period, an act of cognitive reframing of empire on the basis of one or another one-dimensional taxonomy of difference was an epistemic claim on power and political stance in pursuit of political agency. So historians need to take them as such and explore their performative functions in relationship to the praxis of imperial diversity. Historians also need to attend to the “tensions of the modern empire” resulting from the encounter between the rationalizing visions of empire, the universalistic conception of modern politics and representation and the praxis of uneven imperial diversity. The language of particularlism and claiming an exception in its different registers was one of the ways to accommodate these tensions in the shared and interrelated space of Duma politics. In the context of the Russian Empire the language of particularlism could be easily mistaken for the idiom of authentic representation and valorization of plurality and diversity of its space. However, as I attempted to explicate on the basis of the case of the Constitutional-Democratic party, the language of particularlism was an important political technique and part of the imperial strategy in a new key and under the challenge of the modern condition. Returning to the 97

Ibid., 558. Jane Burbank and Mark von Hagen, “Coming into the Territory: Uncertainty and Empire,” Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, 2. 98

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metaphor of condominium building suggested by Fedor Kokoshkin, it is possible to see how the reference to particularity of different demands for autonomous “rooms” relativized plural political claims on national autonomy by pointing out incongruence and asymmetries between these claims. Instrumentalizing the idiom of particularity and pointing out asymmetries in the interlocked and contested space of the Russian Empire, Kokoshkin was discursively creating a political vacuum to be filled with the authority of “beams” and “buttresses” that would intervene to mediate the conflicts and contradictions between different identity claims.

REDEFINING EMPIRE: SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA Ilya Gerasimov

The dialectics of the complicated relationships between the languages of self-description by historical actors and the analytical models of latter-day researchers can be most vividly seen in the Russian public modernization campaign of the interrevolutionary decade of 1906–1916. A truly mass-scale social movement involving tens of thousands of educated Russians (professionals, cooperative activists, educators, etc.) and millions of their clients now becoming their partners (first of all, peasants) did not produce a coherent metanarrative of self-description until very late.1 As a result, it was virtually ignored by historians preoccupied with readily available powerful narratives of revolutionary movement, government (“Stolypin”) reformism and counterreformism, and wartime mobilization and triumphant statism. Thus a discursively underreflected sphere of social politics and practices of modernization beyond administrative measures has found itself in the blind zone of historiography. The notion of “public agronomy” that was broadly used in the early twentieth century as a catchword for a particular type of social activism sounds too obscure for contemporary historians, and indeed had become somewhat outdated by 1913. The “agronomist crisis” of 1913, resulting from the extension of social activism and far exceeding the resources of professionally trained agricultural specialists, stimulated discussions of the nature and methods of this activism among educated Russians. Before long, the new concept of “social engineer” was introduced in the Russian public debates in November 1915 in the pages of Cooperative Life magazine, a mouthpiece of the booming Russian cooperative movement:

1

For an attempt to reconstruct this movement beyond conventional isolated stories of “cooperative movement” or “zemstvo activism,” see Ilya Gerasimov, “Russians into Peasants? The Politics of Self-Organization in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern European History 2, no. 2 (2004): 232–253.

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ilya gerasimov The state organization, as any other, may embark on the path of new social construction [sotsial’nogo stroitel’stva]. Only one has to note that so far this construction goes on beyond the state. One should be aware that whole cadres of social engineers by vocation are available. It is sufficient to look in the midst of our modern village life. (I am not even talking about the city.) How many male and female teachers, agronomists, physicians, priests, and young peasants have rushed into the cooperative business?2

The author of the article “Social Engineers” (signed by A. Ufimskii, possibly a pen-name) claimed that he had synthesized the term himself after reading writings by Herbert Wells and Lester Frank Ward, and applied it to the realities of the Russian cooperative movement. The term “social engineering” sounds so familiar to the ear of modern social scientists that many would not even question its meaning, once more appropriating a historical concept as a category of analysis, with its particular methodological and ideological connotations.3 While the article by Ufimskii raises questions for a historian, it provides few answers: the term apparently did not become popular in Russia, and it had no evident prehistory of development in the Russian context. Where then did it come from, and why? Ufimskii referred to the texts that inspired him, all published in Russian translation before 1905, but what happened in 1915, more than a decade later, to make them so relevant? Last, but certainly not least, who actually coined the term “social engineering” and what did this term mean in the 1910s outside Russia? By answering these questions, we will be able to reconstruct, how social practices were acquiring and changing different modes of their articulation and description, and how latter-day scholars struggle to critically incorporate the narratives of self-description into their analytical metanarratives. In order to avoid the epistemological trap of mixing up categories of practice with categories of analysis, let us clarify the historical and modern-day semantics of “social engineering.” The history of the

2 A. Ufimskii, “Sotsial’nye inzhenery,” Vestnik kooperatsii, nos. 21–22 (November 1915): 309. 3 The ideologically overburdened notions of “social engineers,” “experts,” or “professionals” cannot be uncritically applied to the seemingly “appropriate” social groups of another epoch and social regime. Cf. Ilya Gerasimov, “On the Limitations of a Discursive Analysis of ‘Experts and Peasants’,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52, no. 2 (2004): 261–273.

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concept of “social engineering” is a startlingly understudied a topic. It seems that we are dealing with some sort of twentieth-century psychotic reaction to the trauma of social dislocations and ethnic cleansing, resulting in the displacement of the very genealogy of the idea of rational manipulation of human capital. The names of the apostles of the new approach to social relations are forgotten or unrecognized by modern scholars,4 while some reference sources (including leading dictionaries and encyclopedias) either ignore the term5 or emphasize the newest information technology-related meaning of “social engineering” over its historical connotations.6 The abundant poststructuralist criticism of “governmentality” (from Michel Foucault to James Scott) has revealed the repressive and manipulative essence of social engineering and the network conspiracy of professionals and intellectuals who pose as social engineers trying to validate and enhance their authority and power.7 For this or some other reason, “social engineering” is more often referred to as a self-evident and self-referential label rather than as a problematic historical phenomenon that has changed meaning over time.

4 The name of William Howe Tolman, a sociologist, philanthropist, and social activist, who apparently coined the term, is absent in major biographical reference books on American history, or in such a recent comprehensive study of the topic as that of John M. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). One can look in vain for any mention of Tolman in another book on the origins of social engineering in the United States by Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996). At best, he is referred to as an “American publicist.” Cf. Sven Ove Hansson, “A Note on Social Engineering and the Public Perception of Technology,” Technology in Society 28 (2006): 389. As Daniel Rodgers put it, “William Tolman . . . was in many ways typical of those now forgotten figures who shaped the early years of American social politics.” Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 16. 5 For example, the Encyclopedia Britannica instead features an article on “HumanFactors Engineering,” which it dates back to the 1920s and 1930s (when, it should be noted, a very specific version of social engineering was exercised in the Soviet Union or United States). On the contrary, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary mentions “social engineering” as “management of human beings in accordance with their place and function in society” and identifies its origins in 1899. 6 As do many Internet resources, including the Wikipedia. A Google search for “social engineering” predictably produces more links referring to computer security than to social reformism. 7 Cf. Scott’s attack on “social engineering” treating indiscriminate state-sponsored and social activist-backed projects alike. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

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Karl Popper made an early attempt to clarify the meaning of “social engineering” in the wake of the New Deal in the United States and social experiments in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. He juxtaposed “piecemeal social engineering” to “Utopian social engineering” as “the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.”8 The former was about locally applied rationalization within the existing socioeconomic system, while the latter would demand a general overhaul of the entire society. The subsequent criticism of social engineering tended to largely ignore this distinction, which seemed to be about a degree of interventionism and manipulation and not about the very essence of social politics.9 Recently, the epistemological premises of this mainstream criticism of social engineering were denounced as inaccurate and erroneous,10 which certainly could not undermine the very validity of political opposition to any organized social transformations that may or may not be called “social engineering” by their proponents or external observers. The real problem is that too many things were called “social engineering” in the twentieth century, and the meaning of the term before the Great War different significantly from anything described by these words in the 1920s, 1940s, or 1990s. The very phrase “social engineering” was coined sometime in 1899 by William Howe Tolman (1861–?).11 When in summer 1898, Tolman, a former professor of history at Dr. Julius Sach’s Collegiate Institute in New York, with subsequent experience as a manager and collaborator in several philanthropic and municipal reform public initiatives, announced the foundation of the League for Social Service and Promo8 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th ed., Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1966), 161. 9 See Scott, Seeing Like a State; Zigmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 10 Cf. Hansson, “A Note on Social Engineering and the Public Perception of Technology,” 391. While justly revealing the inaccurate application of “social engineering” as a self-referential label, Hansson cannot defuse the very suspicion that experts may exercise power by affecting the process of formulating general political goals or their manipulation and alternation in the process of “technical” application. 11 Tolman, one of the “now forgotten figures,” does not even have a known date of death, although he lived until at least 1936. He is mentioned among the “prominent citizens” who signed a collective statement published by the New York Times in 1936: “Aid to Hospitals Urged by Leaders,” New York Times, October 16, 1936, 12.

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tion of Good Citizenship under his direction, there was no mentioning of any social engineering.12 One year later, the New York Times story about the League’s activity characterized it as “social engineering” and hailed it as “the latest of the professions.”13 On October 14, 1899, William Tolman told the newspaper journalist: We are really social engineers, and that is the youngest of the professions. We had a firm faith in the practicability of the work. . . . We go from place to place and see what employers are doing for the betterment of their help. . . . The members of the league are our clients, and we improve their property on social lines. . . . A department storekeeper in Boston wants us to provide a private secretary for him, male or female, whose duty it will be to get in close with the help, learn their individual “hobbies,” and to do all that can be reasonably done to gratify them. . . . The position, really, that of a social engineer.14

In the New York-based Century Magazine Tolman wrote in 1900: “Social engineering . . . is a new profession, and the . . . facts show that there is already a demand for experts in this line.”15 Addressing the meeting of the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association in 1903, Tolman further explained: The business of the social engineer is the institution and supervision of all sorts of movements that will improve the condition of the wage earner. . . . Large industrial establishments are being forced to a knowledge that is to their mutual advantage to better the condition of their employees. . . . In order to carry out such a work, however, they must have “the one who knows.” That “one” appears in the social engineer.16

Judging from the press coverage inspired by Tolman and his own numerous publications, he was a genius of marketing, actively and boldly promoting himself and the institutions he created, with “social engineering” being the ultimate gem in his rhetoric edifice. Tolman coined a captivating slogan exploiting the technocratic obsession of that industrial age without actually going beyond a superficial play on

12 See an extensive exposé of Tolman’s plans in “Dr. W. H. Tolman,” New York Times, July 17, 1898, MS 7. 13 “New Profession Appears,” New York Times, October 15, 1899: 8. 14 Ibid. Identical text was reproduced by papers throughout the country, cf. “A New Profession: Promoters of ‘Social Engineering’ Find a Fruitful Field,” Minneapolis Journal, October 21, 1899, part 2, 4. 15 Quoted from: “The Social Engineer,” Review of Reviews (December 1900): 564. 16 “Hails a New Profession. The “Social Engineer” Discussed by Dr. Tolman Before Mount Holyoke Alumnae,” New York Times, April 5, 1903, 2.

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words. After a decade of preaching “social engineering,” in his 1909 voluminous book under the same title and with an introduction written by Andrew Carnegie himself,17 Tolman was only able to repeat the same very general words about “a new professional calling” and a need to personalize and rationalize relationships between the employer and employees. Moreover, the very concept appears only several times in the entire book (despite its title). Instead, Tolman dedicates a whole chapter to “The Social Secretary: A New Profession.” He ascribes to the “social secretary” the exact task formerly attributed to the “social engineer” (“to improve the conditions of life and labor for the individual”),18 and clearly the new name was much more appropriate for the job. Tolman described in detail the functions of “social secretaries” in all major types of business without ever mentioning “social engineering.” He even created a new genealogy for the term claiming that This idea of the Social Secretary I brought to the United States in 1900, as a result of my studies in social economy in that section of the Paris Exposition of that year. I found that the idea had originated in France . . . but the credit for its application to the practical affairs of business is due to our country.19

As we saw, in 1900 and later, Tolman was still preoccupied with the “social engineer.” In 1905, he contributed a standard text on the social engineer as mediator for the authoritative collection The Making of America,20 but already in 1906 he claimed that his American Institute of Social Service “has created a new profession, that of social secretary, a person . . . to be the point of contact between employer and employed.”21 Thus, for some reason William Tolman preferred to distance himself from the term that he had coined, widely advertised, and made his personal brand, but that he now may have felt sounded too ambitious 17 This “Introduction” promptly advertised on the title page of the book was another public relations success of Tolman, in fact presenting just a half-page long and very general endorsement by Carnegie, written in the “holiday spirit” on Christmas Day 1908. See Andrew Carnegie, “Introductory,” in William H. Tolman, Social Engineering: A Record of Things Done by American Industrialists Employing Upwards of One and One-Half Million of People (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1909), v. 18 Ibid., 49. 19 Ibid. 20 William H. Tolman, “The Social Engineer,” in Robert Marion La Follette, William M. Handy, and Charles Higgins, eds., The Making of America, vol. 8: Labor (Philadelphia: J. D. Morris and Co., 1905), 319–325. 21 Mary Rankin Cranston, “What Is the American Institute of Social Service,” New York Times, May 20, 1906, SM 3.

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for the type of social reformism that he advanced.22 Indeed, as one can see, the original understanding of “social engineering” was closer to the task of today’s human resources specialist than to anything else. Yet the formula found by Tolman had tremendous potential and a power of its own. Indeed, the power was so strong that Tolman had to refer to “social engineering” in the title of his publications long after he had ceased using the concept. In 1909, if not earlier, the term was imported by (or reexported to, if we believe the genealogy constructed by Tolman) France, where a prominent collaborator of the Musée social (the leading French organization of public reformists),23 Georges Benoît-Lévy, published an article on the “Human Machine and the Social Engineer.” This first version of the French “social engineer” was explicitly modeled after Tolman’s writings.24 Meanwhile, Tolman’s 1909 book resonated in the United States with many book reviews, making the formula “social engineering” a household name.25 A new stage in the early history of the notion of “social engineering” was opened by Edwin Earp (1867–1950), professor of Christian

22 One explanation for the change of heart can be found in the strong gender connotations of the engineering profession: at that time, this was exclusively a men’s occupation. However, the first positions of “social engineers” in companies in Providence, New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and in the South were filled by women. Therefore, despite Tolman’s insistence on the gender neutrality of the new vocation, the reality required an adjustment of terminology, making it more women-friendly. Cf. “What the Social Secretary Does for the Working Girl,” Idaho Statesman, March 29, 1903, 4. While in the article there is no mention of “social engineers,” speaking to the Mount Holyoke alumnae just a few days later Tolman spoke about social engineers rather than “secretaries.” Apparently, “engineers” were more popular with newspapers and sponsors than with actual candidates for the job and employers. A few months later an attempt was made to resolve the conflict: it was said that a successful “social secretary” can be “promoted to the next grade in sociology, which is that of ‘social engineer,’ a sociological expert capable of giving instructions in the matter of improved conditions for the race.” See Elizabeth Lee, “Mary Rankin Cranston, Sociological Engineer,” Macon Telegraph, August 16, 1903, 8. This scheme did not work out and eventually Tolman must have decided to choose a more practical term. 23 See Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France. The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002). The Musée Social sponsored Benoît-Lévy’s trip to the United States, where he could not have missed Tolman in New York (ibid., 246). 24 See “The Social Engineer: A Happy Idea,” Review of Reviews, vol. 39 (June 1909): 532. 25 The catchy titles of reviews reproduced the book’s title, while ignoring the book’s focus on the “social secretary” as a redundant entity. Thus, Tolman’s attempt to assign a new name for the phenomenon originally described as “social engineer” failed. Cf. “Social Engineering,” New York Times, May 28, 1910, BR 11.

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sociology at Drew Theological Seminary. In 1911 he published a book, The Social Engineer, in which he treated the subject in the broader context of moral betterment and social reform.26 Even though, according to one reviewer, the “book offers no new social philosophy nor any new solution for social problems,”27 it puts the social engineer, whose task as seen by Tolman was to increase the efficiency of human resources at an individual enterprise, in charge of the entire society. For the first time social engineering appears as a universal instrument for fixing the defects of “social machinery” and for the “organization and direction of social forces,” with a special emphasis on the role of church. A few years later, a conference of social-minded church leaders in New York recommended the organization of a National Committee on Church and Social Problems, with a primary function to “organize a corps of social engineers.”28 The ultimate embodiment of this new type of social engineer that replaced Tolman’s “social secretaries” was Rev. Charles Stelzle (ca. 1889–1941). The son of German emigrants raised on New York’s East Side, he had worked for eight years as a mechanic at a factory before becoming a Presbyterian minister.29 He became head of the Bureau of Social Service of the Presbyterian Board but after a decade of service suddenly quit a well-paid job: soon after the publication of Earp’s book, Stelzle started a new career. He proclaimed himself “doctor to sick churches,” customarily adding “social engineer” as a title after his name (as a physician would add “MD”).30 Basically, he acted as a freelance consultant promising to improve the financial situation and attendance of any church that asked his assistance. Stelzle seemed to understand “social engineering” quite literally, declaring in 1913:

26

Edwin L. Earp, The Social Engineer (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1911). Beatrice Sheets, “Social Problems and Reforms,” American Economic Review 1, no. 4 (December 1911): 879. 28 “The Church and Social Questions,” Charlotte Observer, February 13, 1916, 21. 29 On Stelzle see George H. Nash, “Charles Stelzle: Social Gospel Pioneer,” Journal of Presbyterian History 50 (1972): 206–228. 30 Cf.: “Charles Stelzle, social engineer, . . . will speak Thursday at 4 p.m. . . .”; “Charles Stelzle, social engineer and sociological counselor, will hold a one-day conference.” See “Stelzle to Address Pastors and Laymen,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, March 15, 1914, 12; “Stelzle to Discuss Church Advertising,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, March 18, 1914, 16. 27

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This is the first time that I have had the opportunity to apply the principles of engineering that I gathered in the machine shops to church, and I want to see if it will not do a lot of good.31

Naturally, “real doctors” followed suit, changing the traditional rhetoric of philanthropy into the discourse of social engineering: The modern doctor is much more than a medical attendant of sick persons. He is a social engineer. This aspect of the profession was emphasized . . . by Dr. R. L. Sutton in his fine presidential address before the Jackson County Medical Society. Doctor Sutton discussed the duties of the physician to the great social problem with which he is brought in contact—the problems of pure milk, of better housing, and the like.32

Another new direction of work for “the social engineer, who, according to some, may in the future be the same person as the minister, at least in the country communities,”33 was agriculture. The Massachusetts State Agricultural College became prominent for advocating a new vision of agricultural extension work: not just the dissemination of scientific knowledge and modern techniques among the farmers, but complex social engineering. Its rural sociology professor, E. L. Morgan (1879–1937), called himself “Community Agent” (paraphrasing the title of agricultural specialists, “county agents”) “of the community, by the community and for the community.”34 Social engineering, as applied to rural life—the application which gives social engineering its present recognition—is the science of helping country people to help themselves, a definition which tempts the remark that, like other sciences, it is complemented by an art. Social engineering represents the constructive approach to the problems of rural life.35

Thus, on the eve of the Great War “social engineering” finally emerged as a professional service to society by private practitioners or public associations of trained specialists, with a strong component of spiritual revival and moral improvement. The war would bring about a further evolution of “social engineering,” for the first time granting

31 “Doctor for Sick Churches Is the Newest Profession,” Sunday Oregonian, September 14, 1913, 7. 32 Kansas City Star, January 7, 1914, 6. 33 “College Promotes Social Engineering,” Dallas Morning News, October 26, 1913, Part 3, 4. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

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the government an active role in the process, but for the purpose of our study it is important to limit the reconstruction of the context to its application by the early 1910s. This context was predetermined by the intellectual and political climate of American Progressivism with its dual concerns of the moral betterment of society and the higher efficiency of its functioning (hence, the two distinct versions of social engineering advanced by William Tolman and Edwin Earp). While the Progressive Age has been the topic of a whole library of studies of its various manifestations, two main aspects of Progressivism defined the nature of early twentieth-century social engineering. First of all, the proverbial “optimism” of the progressives and their belief in the rational solution of many individual problems of society (i.e., the “technocratic approach”) related to, and partially resulted from, their indifference or even hostility toward politics. The general mood was that “[p]olitics as a governing device had become outdated, falling prey to the mass appeals and backroom deals frequently thought to characterize it.”36 “Antitheoretical theory begat apolitical politics.”37 We will discuss this problem in the context of Russian history in detail below, but the main implications of this attitude must be clarified outright. The dramatic influx of emigrants to the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the massive dislocations produced by rapid industrialization and urbanization seriously challenged the traditional boundaries of political community. A mass-scale political mobilization along the lines of conventional party politics would have required finding common grounds for the utterly diverse constituency. Not that this task was impossible, but Progressivism advanced a more efficient scheme of “network mobilization” as a system of multiple campaigns for individual causes. This “apolitical politics” implied a de facto different concept of citizenship, based not on guaranteed formal belonging to the enfranchised political community, but on optional and active participation in a public self-mobilization campaign. This version of citizenship was institutionalized in the form of grassroots associations and clubs, and the high visibility of church in the reform movements can be explained by its role as a community center as much as by the nineteenth-century tradition of moral reform.

36 37

Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology, 7. Ibid., 13.

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The second important aspect of Progressivism was its “internationalism.” American social thinking had developed in close dialogue with French social scientists and activists since at least the mid-nineteenth century.38 Moreover, American Progressivism “was of a part with movements of politics and ideas throughout the North Atlantic world,” where “university debates and chancery discussions in Paris, Washington, London, and Berlin formed a world of common referents.”39 As Daniel Rodgers aptly points out, “Atlantic-era social politics had its origins not in its nation-state containers, not in a hypothesized ‘Europe’ nor an equally imagined ‘America,’ but in the world between them.”40 “Nowhere in the North Atlantic world was social policy to be made in national isolation. Through rivalry and exchange, every one of the social policy clusters . . . had taken shape, and through those processes each would change—not the least for those latecomers . . ., the Americans.”41 To be sure, the “North Atlantic world” is itself an arbitrary aggregation and a metaphor, which does not include Italy, quite prominent in the debates described by Rodgers, or even Berlin, which he mentions. The important thing is that the “culture of modernization” that took shape in the United States in the form of Progressive movement(s) was a broad turn-of-the-century phenomenon that despite national specificities allowed for an intensive exchange of ideas and experiences. Thus, “social engineering” was a concept coined in the United States under the impact of American and international “Progressivism”; it had been debated and developed in the United States for a decade, and then, in the early 1910s, was ready to engage local national contexts of social reformism. The Russian Empire, though hardly a part of the “North Atlantic world,” was actively engaged in this process of intellectual exchange and dialogue. Every major theme debated by the international reformer community found its prompt response in Russian progressive educated society (obshchestvennost’ ). Sometimes it is possible to measure the intensity of this rapport: Georges Benoît-Lévy, whom we already

38 Cf. Stanford Elwitt, “Social Science, Social Reform and Sociology,” Past and Present, no. 121 (November 1988): 211 and passim. 39 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 3. 40 Ibid., 5. 41 Ibid., 20.

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mentioned, in 1903 founded the Association française des cités-jardins (French Association of Garden Cities) to develop and promote the new ecology-friendly urbanization models. The first mention of “garden cities” in Russia can be found in an anonymous magazine article as early as 1904, after which the theme became central for several periodicals dedicated to architecture and town management.42 We find the same motif of “apolitical politics” in these publications, literally praising “socialism without politics.”43 Returning to the acknowledged sources of inspiration for the Russian discoverer of social engineering, we should note the prompt Russian translations of the original English-language texts. Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913) was the dean of U.S. sociologists, the first president of the American Sociological Association, and one of the main ideologists of American Progressivism (now remembered mostly by historians of the era). He did not actually use the term “social engineering” but in his writings described and advocated the process of social reformism initiated and conducted by the active and conscious elements of society. He stopped short of coining the concept, referring to the “artisan” rather than the “engineer”: Every wheel in the entire social machinery should be carefully scrutinized with the practical eye of the skilled artisan, with a view to discovering the true nature of the friction and of removing all that is not required by a perfect system.44

Ufimskii, who admitted borrowing the idea of a particular type of social reformism from Ward, might have read this passage published by Ward in 1893 in the 1897 Russian translation of the book.45 The second key referent mentioned by Ufimskii was H. G. Wells, who in his 1901 visionary book Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (the Russian

42 Zodchii (Architect) and Gorodskoe delo (Town Affairs). See Mark Meerovich, “Rozhdenie i smert’ goroda-sada: deistvuiushchie litsa i motivy ubiistva,” Vestnik Evrazii, no. 1 (2007). 43 Cf. V. Dodonov, Sotsializm bez politiki: goroda-sady budushchego v nastoiashchem (Moscow: Kushnerev and Co., 1913). 44 Lester Frank Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization (Boston: Ginn, 1893), 309. 45 Lester Ward, Psikhicheskie faktory tsivilizatsii (St. Petersburg: F. Pavlenkov, 1897).

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translation appeared already in 1902)46 announced the advent of a new middle class of “educated specialists” that would incorporate the different categories of engineers: . . . the emergence, from out the present chaos, of this social element equipped, organized, educated, conscious of itself and of distinctive aims . . . replacing and enormously larger and more important than the classes of common workmen and mechanics of today, a large fairly homogeneous body . . . of more or less expert mechanics and engineers, with a certain common minimum of education and intelligence, and probably a common-class consciousness—a new body, a new force, in the world’s history. For this body to exist implies the existence of much more than the primary and initiating nucleus of engineers and skilled mechanics. If it is an educated class, its existence implies a class of educators.47

Replacing the old middle class of bourgeoisie, the new educated middle class should change the social composition of society, including the countryside, for The process of attraction will not end even there; the development of more and more scientific engineering and of really adaptable operatives will render possible agricultural contrivances that are now only dreams, and the diffusion of this new class over the country side . . . will bring the lever of the improved schools under the agriculturist.48

This will lead to “the development of a type of agriculturist as adaptable, alert, intelligent, unprejudiced, and modest as the coming engineer.”49 (Cf. the already-mentioned conviction of Morgan that “[s]ocial engineering, as applied to rural life . . . is the science of helping country people to help themselves.”) Thus, H. G. Wells almost called the new middle class “social engineers,” and pointed out their special mission of reforming the countryside, which so resonated with Ufimskii’s focus on Russian “village life” as being actively modernized by “many male and female teachers, agronomists, physicians, priests.” This reconstruction of a possible genesis of the term “social engineer” up to its appearance in Russian public discourse suggests that

46 G. Uells (H. Wells), Predvideniia o vliianii progressa mekhaniki i nauki na chelovecheskuiu zhizn’ i mysl’ (Moscow, 1902). 47 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, 2d ed. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 88, 92. 48 Ibid., 93. 49 Ibid., 95.

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Ufimskii could have used a ready concept that was just developed in United States (in 1911–1914) to denote the social reformism exercised by educated specialists and professionals. Instead, he reached a similar understanding of social engineering by synthesizing the writings of key ideologists of Anglo-Saxon Progressivism in a strange “bypath,” apparently ignoring the contemporary debates in the “North Atlantic world,” and in the absence of any local tradition of discussing the figure of the “social engineer” in Russia. If that was really the case, then why did it take so long, well over a decade, for this constructive reception of the ideas of Ward and Wells? To answer this question, we must step aside from the traditional history of ideas understood as a study of evolving self-referential semantic entities. The term “social engineering” was used by Ufimskii and many of his American contemporaries as a trope of the language of self-description that could not function without a proper object. Hence, the term emerges in Ufimskii’s article to describe and clarify the already existing reality. On the other hand, the initial and parallel context of the notion’s functioning was the analytical and normative language of description and the projection of some preexisting meaning. William Tolman invented his “social engineers” without actually having seen one in real life, and later opted to use a more suitable term “the social secretary” to make his language of description more adequate. H. G. Wells described the imagined society of the year 2000, and thus could use the term “engineer” quite arbitrarily, underlying the contrast with the actual status of this profession in 1901. These two modes of employing the same term explained and even predetermined certain differences in its functioning, perception, and application. Thus in the Russian context it was quite possible to employ the concept of “social engineering” as a self-reflective metanarrative without previously developing a normative model of social engineer, but only under the condition that certain social realities would be easily recognized as fitting the ready analytical concept. By 1915, the reality of “whole cadres of social engineers by vocation” was common knowledge in Russia, and Ufimskii suggested quite a proper name for it. As we shall see below, actual practice seriously corrected the initially well-intentioned fantasies, which led to the emergence of the very idea of social politics as opposed to centuries-old patterns of social paternalism (administered by the monarch, the state, or the enlightened lords). Moreover, the international Progressivist “culture of modernization” became an integral part of the Russian public sphere. It was in the

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summer of 1915 that the majority of the Fourth State Duma deputies managed to unite in a coalition called the “Progressive Bloc.” Both the origins of this bloc and the fact that nobody questioned its name testify to the wide dissemination of Progressivist political discourse and imagery in late imperial Russia.50 Perhaps the new term would have attained prominence in Russian society, if not for the revolution of 1917 that was to upset the entire worldview of the preceding decade just one year after the publication of Ufimskii’s article. Ufimskii’s name was not wellknown (or perhaps was even not real) and carried no weight to support the new term, and there was not enough time for the term to take root in the public discourse, but most important, the social movement that Ufimskii called “social engineering” had already been conceptualized in a powerful local language of self-description, namely, the language of the obshchestvennost’ and the intelligentsia. The very concept of obshchestvennost’ was firmly built into the discourse of educated Russians of the early twentieth century, and only the related notion of intelligentsia could be compared with it in terms of universal acceptance in all quarters of Russian society. Reconstructing the intertextual context of its usage is equivalent to reproducing texts by Duma deputies, revolutionary leaflets, minutes of professional congresses, and resolutions of public associations.51 The preponderance of this notion left many scholars quite indifferent to its content, at best equating obshchestvennost’ with the public associations and formal institutions of civil society.52 Yet there are grounds to believe that the trope

50 The leader of the Russian Party of Constitutional Democrats, Paul Miliukov, was widely regarded as the chief architect of the bloc. Miliukov was known for his political connections in the United States, which he had visited three times before the war and where he had socialized with leading American Progressivists. On the other hand, the core of the bloc was comprised of former Moscow City Council members known as the “Progressive Group” who pioneered urban reforms in Moscow at the beginning of the century, quite in line with (and keeping an eye on) urban reformers in the United States and Europe. P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 1859–1917, vol. 2 (New York, 1955), 24–27, 207–216; Robert W. Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia’s Urban Crisis, 1906–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 51 The Bibliography of Russian Obshchestvennost’ published in 1927 mentioned over 2,500 books and articles specifically dedicated to this phenomenon on sixty-two pages of tiny print. N. M. Somov, ed., Bibliografiia russkoi obshchestvennosti (Moscow: Published by Author, 1927). 52 Cf. Anastasiia Tumanova, Obshchestvennye organizatsii goroda Tambova na rubezhe xix–xx vekov (Tambov: Izdatel’stvo Tambovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1999); Anastasiia Tumanova, Deiatel’nost’ Ministerstva vnutrennikh del Rossiiskoi

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of obshchestvennost’ embodied a certain social and political agenda. Genealogically, it accommodated the semirational sociopolitical imagery of social self-organization, previously characteristic of anarchist-Bakuninists and populists of the 1870s with their concept of ideal society composed of autonomous public associations. Leading Russian legal experts in the fields of administrative and civil law during the post-1905 decade acknowledged the fundamental nature of the rivalry between the state and obshchestvennost’, which “in fact limits the sovereignty of the state” and steals “part of its influence and loyalty.”53 In this respect, Russian lawyers followed their European peers, including luminaries such as Georg Jellinek, who regarded the state and self-organized society as two parallel and even alternative institutions.54 A partial explanation for the outstanding status of obshchestvennost’ in Russian politics and culture may be found in its universal pan-imperial character. While administration, the legal system, and the economy of the empire only nominally covered its entire space, being in fact merely a hodgepodge of “special regulations” and semiisolated economic systems, obshchestvennost’ was one and the same in Tiflis and Harbin, at a district zemstvo board and in the capital, using the Russian language as the universal medium of communication and regarding the boundaries of the Russian empire as its natural boundaries. This universalism of obshchestvennost’ made it the most modern social institution in the Russian empire, and thus authoritative even for

imperii po osushchestvleniu svobody soiiuzov (Tambov: Izdatel’stvo Tambovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2003); Joseph C. Bradley, “Voluntary Associations, Civic Culture and Obshchestvennost’ in Moscow,” in Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, and James West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 131–148; Bradley, “Russia’s Parliament of Public Opinion: Association, Assembly and the Autocracy, 1906–1914,” in Theodore Taranovski, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (Washington, DC and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1995), 212–236; Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (October 2002): 1094–1123; Lutz Häfner, Gesellschaft als lokale Veranstaltung. Die Wolgastädte Kazan’ und Saratov (1870–1914) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2004). The scholar of Russian public associations, Tumanova explicitly equates the history of Russia to the history of Russian statehood. See Tumanova, Deiatel’nost’ Ministerstva, 3 and ff. 53 Words of the renowned lawyer, S. A. Kotliarevskii, quoted by Tumanova in Deiatel’nost’ Ministerstva, 29. 54 Ibid., 29–31.

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those who objected to the leftist political connotations of the broadly defined “Progressivism” of obshchestvennost’. The dominant and persistent pan-imperial discourse of obshchestvennost’ reconfigured and reconstructed the empire as a homogenous space of equal citizenship in the Russian-language “republic of letters.”55 Unlike the imperial schooling system, there was no numerus clausus to limit one’s access to this emerging national compound;56 unlike the imperial army, there did not exist any prejudice against certain groups regarded as “unfit” or undesirable for common civil service,57 and certainly no privileges for the “well-born.” For a while, the universality of the obshchestvennost’ sphere supported the illusion of a similar universality of the Russian empire itself. Substituting the formal unity of the empire, secured by the figure of the autocrat who himself held almost fifty regional titles,58 by the single community of civic-minded educated public implied that any initiative supported by obshchestvennost’ had an empire-wide application and meaning. The project of radical populism embraced by the emerging obshchestvennost’ in the last decades of the nineteenth century was a case in point: how else to explain the “ethnic blindness” of Jewish activists that would agitate for socialism among the Ukrainian peasants, posing as Tsarist officials?59 The dominant mental map of obshchestvennost’ was some unqualified “Russia,” where the universal ideals of enlightenment and modernity were to be put into practice. This unconscious or at least underreflective imperialism of obshchestvennost’ greatly facilitated its

55 This space did not coincide with the political borders of the empire because there were territories dominated by local separatist elites that did not participate in the common projects of Russian-language obshchestvennost’ (in Finland, much of the Polish territories, and the Baltics). The geographic localization of Russian obshchestvennost’ and its dynamic transformation throughout the last decades of the old regime is a largely unstudied topic. 56 See James C. McClelland, “Diversification in Russian-Soviet Education,” in Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., The Transformation of Higher Learning 1860–1930: Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening, and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia, and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 180–195. 57 Cf. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Evrei v Russkoi Armii, 1827–1914 (Moscow: NLO, 2003); Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii. Istoriia phizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (Moscow: NLO, 2003), esp. chapter 10 “Army as Empire.” 58 As was reflected in the legislation: Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii. Sobranie Vtoroe, vol. 3, 331. 59 As was the case during the notorious “Chigirin affair” in Poltava Province in Ukraine in the late 1870s. See Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

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rise as a pan-Russian phenomenon, but made it ill-prepared for the challenge of brewing and (for a time) much less-articulated and lessvisible alternative nationalist projects. The abortive revolution of 1905 brought about the system crisis of the previously dominant Russian public culture of political radicalism.60 The new strategy of social reformism that attained obshchestvennost’-wide prominence in Russian society by 1910 was developed on the basis of the so-called small deeds program, or “piecemeal social engineering” as we would qualify it in the language of modern scholarship. An element of the late populist period legacy, the “small deeds” approach toward the improvement of the people’s (primarily peasants’) conditions did not challenge the existing regime directly. In the nineteenth century, the “small deeds” theory was mocked by the opposition leaders for opportunism, the lack of a grand strategy and big goals, and was denied any political significance (except for a negative role in distracting the scarce human resources of the educated elite from radical opposition to the authorities).61 “Small deeds” became a major synonym for an apolitical venue of social activism. Meanwhile, the famine relief efforts of the obshchestvennost’ in the early 1890s inaugurated a new stage in the ideology of “small deeds.” Previously, the program of small deeds was seen as an alternative to the great “going to the people” campaign of the Land and People Party, or the “big terror” of the People’s Will Party, while pursuing the same goal of rescuing the common folk, first of all, the peasantry, from the dark of an unenlightened life without knowledge and ideals. In the 1890s, the idealistic movement of the intelligentsia acquired quite a materialistic and even pragmatic goal—to save people from starvation.62 It took more 60

Marina Mogilner, Mifologiia podpol’nogo cheloveka (Moscow: NLO, 1999). Populist journalist, Nikolai Shelgunov, expressed this position in the series of essays Sketches of Russian Life, particularly in those written in the late 1880s. See N. V. Shelgunov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg: O. N. Popova, 1904), 651, 677, 683. 62 In the words of a contemporary Russian historian, “‘The small deeds theory’ of Ia. V. Abramov, which substantiated the necessity of cultural work in zemstvos, significantly changed the ideological orientation of Populism. The idea of apolitical ‘going to the people’ was concrete in the selecting of its forms, ways, and character, and it was realistic.” See V. V. Zverev, “Marksizm i genezis neonarodnichestva: Po materialam perepiski V. M. Chernova s N. F. Danielsonom v kontse 90-h godov XIX v.,” in N. V. Samover, ed., Rossiia i reformy: Sbornik statei, Vyp. 4 (Moscow, 1997), 123–124. Ia. V. Abramov was one of the original ideologists of the “small deeds,” see his Chto sdelalo zemstvo i chto ono delaet (St. Petersburg, 1889). 61

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than a decade for the “small deeds” modernization discourse to enhance its position among the obshchestvennost’, which until the defeat of the 1905 revolution was very reluctant to give up its political radicalism in favor of economic reformism.63 The rising popularity of “apolitical politics” in Russia was parallel to Progressive-age trends in U.S. political culture. Despite drastically differing political systems, parts of society in both countries were frustrated by the existing political machine, or at least believed that there were ways more efficient than conventional political strategies to bring about social transformation in the country. If obshchestvennost’ posed de facto as a cohort of social engineers, the “small deeds approach” was the Russian domestic equivalent of social engineering as social practice. The new post-1905 cohort of social activists was formed by people who instead of sacrificial “service to the common folk” were engaged in professional, “bourgeois forms of the intelligentsia service.”64 They saw their task in assisting the presumably archaic peasants to integrate into the modern society and economy: If before the introduction of the constitutional regime, progressive elements of society, including many even bourgeois elements, were thinking in a revolutionary way, now an evolutionary point of view begins to prevail even where hitherto the most radical solution for the agrarian question was perceived as possible during the lifetime of one generation.65

The grand project of transforming the village through the total “black repartition” was put on hold, at least for the foreseeable future. The post-1905 program of social activism—a focused and more elaborated version of the “small deeds” theory—was a program of modernizing the peasant mentalité, rather than the public institutions. When in December 1909 the prominent Russian economist and political philoso-

63 The patriarch of the Russian cooperative movement, Vakhan Totomiants, recalled in his memoirs how at the beginning of the twentieth century he signed an article propagating the “small deeds” as “Economist,” instead of using his real name because he was afraid to compromise himself in the eyes of the St. Petersburg radical intelligentsia. “So great was the desire among not only Marxists but also the leftist Populists to distance themselves from the ‘small deeds,’ which could interfere with the ‘great deeds,’ i.e., the preparation of revolution in Russia.” See Vakhan Totomiants, “Iz moikh vospominanii,” manuscript in Bakhmetev Archive, Vakhan Totomiantz Collection, 40. 64 A. Grigorovskii, “Na rasput’i (K sovremennomy zemskomy krizisu),” Agronomicheskii zhurnal, no. 3 (1913): 10. 65 “Vnutrennee obozrenie,” Agronomicheskii zhurnal, no. 8 (1913): 121.

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pher, Petr Struve, stated that “The question of the economic revival of Russia is first of all a question of creating the new economic man,”66 he merely summed up public discussions of the previous half decade. They resulted in the rise of a whole new niche of “agrojournalism” that held a firm third place in popularity, after belles-letters and religious literature,67 and the creation in Russian educated society of a particular “culture of modernization,”68 or rather a variety of “cultures of modernization” that shared some basic principles and assumptions. The role of the educated activists was that of “social engineers,” who, working as rural professionals, attempted to trigger mechanisms of self-propelled modernization among the peasants (as American Progressivists formulated the task of countryside modernization, “to help people help themselves”).69 Any administrative and even legislative measures were perceived as futile by the adherents of a new program of the “apolitical” politics of public (self-)modernization, who saw in the organized educated public the subject of the politics of Modernity.70 The classic formulation of the goal of that politics was produced in 1911 by Alexander Chaianov. In a speech delivered at the Moscow regional congress of rural professionals, he suggested that all of them should strive “[b]y means of impacting upon the mind and will of the economic people [khoziaistvennykh ludei], to awaken initiative in their milieu, and . . . to

66

P. B. Struve, “Ekonomicheskie programmy i ‘neestestvennyi rezhim’,” in P. B. Struve, Patriotica: politika, kultura, religiia, sotsialism (Moscow: Respublika, 1997), 96. 67 See Ilya Gerasimov, “Rossiiskaia sel’skokhoziaistvennaia periodika kak indikator obshchestvennogo interesa k problemam sel’skogo khoziaistva v mezhrevoliutsionnyi period (1906–1917),” in Istorik sredi istorikov (Kazan, 2001), 112–120; Gerasimov, “Russians into Peasants?” 68 See Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4. 69 See Wayne D. Rasmussen, Taking the University to the People: Seventy-Five Years of Cooperative Extension (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1989), vii. 70 As a prominent ideologists of a new movement put it, “Essentially, no legislative form by itself can determine the direction of a this or that cultural process. It is been energized by the creative forces that instill a certain social and cultural content into it. [This content] can be different, depending on the . . . tasks these forces choose.” K. S. Ashin, “Obshchestvennaia agronomiia i zemleustroistvo,” in Ashin, Obshchestvennoagronomicheskie etudy (Kharkov: Izdatel’stvo Iuzhno-russkoi sel’skokhoziaistvennoi gazety, 1911), 4–5. By “creative forces” Ashin meant the movement of public modernizers in countryside.

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direct this initiative in a most rational manner. In a word, to change old ideas into new in the minds of the local population.”71 The emerging new ideal type of the social activist was a professionally trained person, who applied received knowledge to serve the people and who transcended the notorious “unsurpassable gap” between educated society and the “common folk.” The embodiment of the Russian version of “social engineer” was the agronomist in the zemstvo service, whose major task was to educate peasants in new technologies of land cultivation and rational farming, ideally creating the new economic man in the village. The seemingly obscure profession of the precinct agronomist (serving a county or even a smaller territory), who was supposed to live and work deep in rural Russia far away from the city centers that formed public opinion, became highly visible during the interrevolutionary period. To a great extent, that visibility was produced by the numbers of precinct agronomists, or, more precisely, by their rapid increase. Between the First Russian Revolution and World War I, the number of precinct agronomists had increased by a factor of sixty-four, as can be seen in Table 1. Table 1. The number of agronomy precincts in Russia, 1906–1913.72 Year Number of precincts

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

1911

1912

1913

27

56

109

177

395

760

1,139 1,726

Together with district (uezdnyi) and provincial ( gubersnkii) agronomists, veterinarians, specialists in various branches of agriculture, small credit, and so on, by 1914 had formed an army of rural professionals tens of thousands strong. The paradigm shift of social reformism strategies can be traced even at the level of individual biographies.73

71 Moskovskii oblastnoi s’’ezd deiatelei agronomicheskoi pomoshch’i naseleniiu. Trudy S’’ezda, Vol. 1 (Moscow, 1911), pp. 50–51. 72 Base on data derived from E. Zaremba, “Uchastkovaia agronomiia v Rossii,” Agronomicheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1914): 143; V. V. Morachevskii, ed., Agronomicheskaia pomoshch’ v Rossi (Petrograd: Department of Agriculture, 1914), 168. 73 To illustrate this point, we shall mention just two similar life stories of two very different people. Ivan Emel’ianov was born in 1880 in Siberia to the family of a poor priest. After graduation from the Tobol’sk Seminary in 1900, he rejected the career of clergyman and enrolled in the History Department of the Iuriev University. In 1903, however, he changed his mind for the second time and became a student of the

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Besides providing individual consultations to peasants, the educational efforts of rural professionals were institutionalized in two major forms: one-day village lecturing by a precinct agronomist or an agricultural specialist on a particular subject, and short-term (usually fortnight) courses taught by a number of specialists. Between the First Russian Revolution and World War I, the funding for such educational activities increased almost fortyfold.74 In 1913, some 1,580,782 peasants attended 43,763 one-day lectures in 11,762 villages.75 During the same year, almost 100,000 peasants studied in 1,657 short-term courses, and in 1914, 2,500 courses were planned (because of the war, only half of them actually took place).76 On the eve of the World War, the annual growth in the number of popular agricultural schools reached 5 percent.77 The early 1910s witnessed a radical change in the pattern of employment of peasants who graduated from the agricultural schools. Early reports sent alarming messages, later repeated by historians, that educated

Agronomy Department of Kiev Polytechnic. In 1907, he graduated from Kiev Polytechnic with the Diploma of Agronomist of the First Degree, and played an important role in the Russian community of agricultural specialists-modernizers during the next two decades. See “Curriculum Vitae uchenogo agronoma i razriada Ivana Vasil’evicha Emel’ianova, 1921,” in San Francisco Museum of Russian Culture Archival Collection, I. V. Emel’ianov Collection, box no. 2. Ekaterina Sakharova, six years younger than Emel’ianov, was born in Moscow to a wealthy middle-class family. Yet, after her graduation from a gymnasium in 1904, she also chose the Department of History and Philology to continue her education. Two years later she decided to become a professional agricultural specialist and entered the Moscow Agricultural Institute, from which she successfully graduated with the Diploma of Agronomist of the First Degree in the class of 1910. See E. N. Sakharova-Vavilova, “Dnevnikovye zapisi,” in Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE); f. 328; E. N. Sakharova-Vavilova; Op. 1; ed. khr. 8, l. 30. Both Emel’ianov and Vavilova experienced the same series of life choices, which constituted the basis of a common generational experience for hundreds of their colleagues. Their secondary education was predetermined by their social origin. Their first choice in favor of higher education in humanities can be explained by a desire to transcend all class and estate boundaries to become members of the Russian classic intelligentsia of belles lettres and humanist political discourse. However, this step was also socially predetermined by the legacy of the intelligentsia as a self-conscious group. It was the sudden turn from humanities to agriculture (apparently, indicating disillusionment with the old intelligentsia ways) that made the young intelligenty Emel’ianov and Vavilova representatives of the emerging New Generation of the Russian intelligentsia. 74 A. Lazarenko, “Rasprostranenie sel’skokhoziaistvennykh znanii vneshkol’nym putem,” Sel’skokhoziaistvennoe obrazovanie, no. 10 (1915): 485. 75 Ibid., 487. If every peasant represented one household, then agricultural specialists directly contacted 6.5 percent of all farms. 76 Ibid., 490, 493. 77 Ia. Nekludov, “Sel’skohoziaistvennye uchebnye zavedeniia v 1913 godu,” Sel’skohoziaistvennoe obrazovanie, no. 10 (1913), 497.

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peasants tended to abandon agriculture.78 However, the data for 1913 showed the opposite trend.79 These “new peasants” recruited directly from the ranks of the “object of modernization” were evolving into a new type of “indigenous modernizers,”80 changing traditional peasant farming81 and becoming not only partners, but sometimes colleagues of the city-born professionals (as agricultural assistants or cooperative instructors and managers). These developments resulted from a combination of factors: the changing political and intellectual climate in Russia, the crisis of agriculture, the cumulative effect of peasant schooling over the preceding decades, the booming job market for rural professionals, and the institutional rivalry between the government agencies and zemstvos (i.e., the first and second “elements” of society in a popular sociological model of that epoch) that benefited the “third element” of educated specialists in zemstvo service. But the key role was played by the reform-minded obshchestvennost’ and the new project of professional assistance to those

78 Cf.: Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1986), 464–465. Eklof used incomplete statistics, and limited the scope of his analysis to 1909. 79 “Vypusk uchenikov,” Sel’skokhoziaistvennoe obrazovanie, no. 5 (1914): 286; Sel’skokhoziaistvennoe obrazovanie, no. 10 (1914): 502. Depending on the type of the agricultural school, only 1–9 percent of the graduates left the sphere of agriculture. 80 The phenomenon, which we denote as the “new peasantry,” was known to the villagers of the interrevolutionary period as the peasants “of today” (“iz nyneshnikh”). Here is a firsthand description of the “peasants of today” by the peasant S. Matveev: “They do not drink vodka. Good, ambitious managers, they are close-fisted, tough people, and they assess all phenomena in the world by their economic value. They look at the world with hungry-curious eyes. They are much involved in public activity, so to speak—‘big shots.’ They like to reason very much.” “They do not know how to sing songs, for it does not suit them to sing songs, and they do not have songs of their own yet.” See S. V. Matveev, “V volostnykh starshinakh,” Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 2 (1912): 76; and Matveev, “Iz zhizni sovremennogo krest’ianskogo ‘mira’,” Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 9 (1913): 117. 81 Every agronomist knew the names of all the peasants of his or her precinct who had introduced a multifield system of crop rotation or experimented with fertilizers, which information was promptly mentioned in their annual reports. Probably, all records were beaten by the Samara Society for Improving the Peasant Economy, which in its 1913 account reserved over a hundred pages for detailed lists of peasants who had begun planting corn, beets, or fodder grass as part of an intensive crop rotation scheme. It is worth noting that one can find the same people on different lists, which means that those peasants were radically changing the pattern of farming. See Otchet o deiatel’nosti i sostoianii sredstv Samarskogo obshchestva uluchsheniia krest’ianskogo khoziaistva za vtoroe trekhletie ego sushchestvovaniia sushchestvovaniia (s 7/XI 1910 g. po XI 1913 g.) (Samara, 1914), 47–155.

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who needed it, thus resembling the general worldview of American Progressivism.82 The immediate model for social engineering, Russian style, was found initially in the Italian Cattedra ambulante di agricoltura (pl., Cattedre ambulanti), or the mobile consulting bureaus staffed by two or three agricultural specialists.83 (Note the belief in the universality of the international Progressivist social engineering techniques, equally applicable in Italy and in various corners of the vast Russian empire.) Such a mobile bureau of agriculture would stay at a place for a few years, establishing contact with the population and propagating rational techniques of agriculture. To adopt the advanced techniques and to purchase “the necessary tools and seeds, . . . good sires,” poor peasants needed money, which they could not obtain through regular bank credit. Hence, mobile bureaus organized agricultural cooperatives among the propagated peasants, and taught them how to run those organizations. Cooperatives as registered corporations could guarantee the repayment of bank credit and hence accumulated much-needed money at a modest rate. Furthermore, buying wholesale was cheaper, and the quality of goods was secured by official contracts. When the cycle of teaching—organizing—implementing was completed in the course of a few years, a mobile bureau moved to a new location, where the fame of its accomplishments had already prepared grounds for a new magical transformation.84 Contemporary statistics showed the remarkable

82

In fact, Lester Ward described a process very similar to social engineering in the sense of the 1910s: “this word simply implies the organization through which society expresses and enforces its collective will . . .” this is “an organization of individuals into a limited body . . . for some specific purpose . . .”, “through social ingenuity and social machinery.” Lester F. Ward, “Collective Telesis,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 2, no. 6 (May, 1897): 802, 803, 821. 83 The first Cattedra ambulante di agricoltura was established in Rovigo in 1886. By the turn of the century, there were 30 mobile bureaus of agriculture in Italy, and in 1910—112 bureaus with 79 additional branches. In 1910, mobile bureaus employed 309 specialists in agriculture, 95 percent of whom had received agricultural education in the institutions of higher learning. See V. Sazonov, “Populiarizatsiia sel’skokhoziaistvennykh znanii v Italii,” Sel’skokhoziaistvennoe obrazovanie, no. 1 (1914): 10. 84 This is how contemporary British observers described the Cattedre ambulanti, which they translated as the Traveling Schools: “. . . the Traveling Schools . . ., subsidized to some extent by Government, but founded by private initiative and chiefly supported by the Provincial Councils and private Savings Banks, are bringing a very practical kind of teaching to the peasant’s door. Entirely the creation of the last ten years, they number thirty-nine, chiefly in the North, but including a few in the Center and South. The duties of the traveling teacher are multiform. He gives fifty or sixty lectures in the year in different centers; he has practical demonstrations; he supervises experimental

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effectiveness of Cattedre ambulanti, hence Russian intellectuals found them to be the key to success in modernizing the peasantry.85 Thanks to the mobile bureaus of agriculture, the knowledge of the few was able to change the lives of the many. The secret was to awaken the initiative of the masses and to mobilize them by means of cooperative organizations. Although, after a number of experiments with different forms of institutionalization, Russian social engineers made a stake on the network of permanent agronomist precincts under the auspices of zemstvos, the “method” of social engineering remained the same as in Cattedre ambulanti: education of peasants—assistants in founding cooperatives—technological improvements in peasant farming, subsidized and coordinated by local cooperative associations. The implementation of the initial plan (widely discussed in both the general and agricultural press and at professional conferences and zemstvo board sessions) was as successful as it was unpredicted. Intra- and interprofessional rivalries (including comical-sounding episodes such as a “revolt” of veterinarians against the hegemony of agronomists in 1911–1912), occasional political pressure from the government agencies, intrigues within zemstvo boards, and the varying realities of actual village life all interfered with the initial vision of social engineering as the purely technological implementation of a certain program. The very success of its eventual implementation produced new challenges, as was the case with the skyrocketing rise of rural cooperative associations.86 The plots; he sits in his office every market-day for oral consultation; he has classes in special subjects, such as grafting and pruning; he trains elementary teachers to lecture in their turn on agricultural subjects; sometimes he publishes an agricultural journal; he keeps an outlook for phylloxera and superintends the measures to stamp it out, if it appears; sometimes he has nurseries to supply American vine-stocks, or introduces bulls and rams of improved breeds; he organizes fruit shows; he introduces, where he finds it possible, Village Banks and Cooperative Dairies, or preaches the advantages of joining the local Syndicate. It is a work, that probably has no parallel either in France or England, and its practical usefulness is matched by its popularity. The cost of each ‘chair’ varies between £184 and £750.” See Bolton King and Thomas Okey, Italy Today (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1901), 188–189. 85 Cf.: Alessandro Stanziani, “Russkie ekonomisty za granitsei v 1880–1914 gg.: Predstavleniia o rynke i tsirkuliatsii idei,” in Iu. Sherrer and B. Anan’ich, eds., Russkaia emigratsiia do 1917 goda—laboratoriia liberal’noi i revolutsionnoi mysli (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii Dom, 1997), 165; Alessandro Stanziani, L’Économie en révolution: Le cas russe, 1870–1930 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 136. 86 In 1911, almost 84 percent of all the existing rural consumer societies emerged during the six postrevolutionary years, which is five times more than during the previous forty years. In absolute figures, in 1906–1911, 4,807 rural consumer societies were

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emerging stratum of cooperative activists (cooperative association managers, instructors, educators, journalists) presented a new cohort of conscious social engineers.87 It was a genuinely mass phenomenon, challenging the authority of the bureaucracy and zemstvo leaders on different grounds than had the rising stratum of rural professionals a decade earlier. While professionals could not survive en masse without the favorable attitude of the state agencies and a solid budget of the zemstvos as their employers, cooperatives were much more independent of the government and the zemstvos. Cooperative ideologists claimed that only the voluntary economic associations really met the needs and aspirations of the population, while the zemstvo was a compulsory institution built upon a highly restrictive franchise system. Hence, leadership in representing the interests of the rural population must belong to the cooperatives.88 While virtually all intellectuals conceptualizing the cooperative movement paid tribute to the ideology of cooperativism as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism,89 only the most fanatical representatives of the traditional, ideology-minded intelligentsia subordinated economic rationality to theoretical daydreams.

registered, 6.3 times more than all other types of consumer cooperatives combined. A. Merkulov, “Kooperativnoe dvizhenie v Rossii,” Vestnik kooperatsii, no. 4 (1912): 130. 87 On the dynamics of the cooperative movement during this period, see K. V. Kim, “Krest’ianskaia kooperatsiia Dal’nego Vostoka: 1908-fevral’ 1917 gg.,” Ph.D. diss., Gorky, 1988); Yanni Kotsonis, “Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914, Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1994), esp. chapter 5. 88 A typical set of arguments in support of these claims of the cooperative movement can be found in I. Kudriashev, “Otnoshenie kooperativov k zemstvu,” Kostromskoi kooperator, no. 20 (November 1915): 8–9. Such claims and complaints against zemstvos were common during the mid-1910s at cooperative meetings at all levels. The competition for government procurement orders during the war added a strong economic component to this political battle. See S. Pichkurov, “Kooperativnyi s”ezd v Odesse 21–25 oktiabria (vpechatleniia uchastnika),” Iuzhnyi kooperator, no. 2, January 31, 1916, 44. 89 This vision of a future “cooperative republic” was very much influenced by the writings of Charles Gide, the leader of the so-called Nimes, or cooperative economic school, and an active participant in the cross-Atlantic dialogue of European and American “Progresivists.” In his books, Charles Gide described a future democratic society as a world of cooperative producers and consumer associations acting in a regulated economy, which virtually eliminated the figure of the middleman. While Gide himself put a major emphasis on proving the vitality of a small-scale business in the age of monopolies, his Russian readers were more interested in the theory of the cooperative socioeconomic system. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, almost twenty titles of works by Charles Gide were published in Russia, some of them in over a dozen editions. See Iurii V. Latov, “Knigi zapadnykh ekonomistov XVIII–nachala XX veka, izdannye v Rossii,” THESIS 1 (Winter 1993): 242.

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Still, a subculture of “cooperative” norms and habits of socializing,90 and even political correctness was emerging.91 If in 1903–1905 young people would quit the sphere of political radicalism (and academic studies of history or philology) for agronomy, ten years later a new trend was to go from radicalism and books to practical cooperative work (as agronomy had lost part of its romantic attire by becoming a well-paid and well-established profession).92 The cooperative movement was even more a “network” phenomenon than was the public agronomy campaign, still integrated in, and (to a degree) manipulated by, the agriculture-concerned obshchestvennost’. When the cooperative movement gained momentum as a powerful grassroots self-mobilization force, it became a potential resource for a variety of protonational communities of active participation that could challenge the pan-imperial dominance of obshchestvennost’ and the very imperial unity. Indeed, the renowned Siberian creamery cooperative unions or the cooperative network of South Russia would become prominent supporters of the anti-Bolshevik/separatist regimes after 1917.93 Rural professionals, on the other hand, could act as a distinctive group of modernizers only on behalf of the progressive (or Progressivist) obshchestvennost’. 90 Cooperative activists actually addressed each other as “Gentlemen Comrades.” See V. F. Shvets, “K tovarishcham,” Iuzhnyi kooperator, no. 1, January 13, 1913, 4. There emerged a new tradition of cooperative festivals, characterized by a mixture of the town commoners’ leisure culture and new elements of ideological rallies. See Kooperativnyi prazdnik. 26-oe noiabria 1912 g. (Ekaterinburg: Ekaterinburgskoe obshchestvo potrebitelei, 1913); N. Ch., “Prazdnik kostromskoi kooperatsii,” Kostromskoi kooperator, no. 4, February 23, 1914, 3. 91 In 1912, a certain M. Vystavkin asked in a letter to the Elets cooperative magazine whether it was permissible to build a cooperative store adjacent to a merchant’s shop, or a certain distance was required from the capitalist enterprise. “Pochtovyi iashchik,” Nashe khoziaistvo, no. 1, January 17, 1912, 31. 92 The story of A. Gusakov, a Petersburg librarian turned Viatka inspector of small credit, is very characteristic in this respect. Until early 1913 he was socializing exclusively within the community of socialist parties’ members, who always spoke with contempt about cooperatives. Out of curiosity, he decided to be trained as a small credit inspector for two months. He was impressed by the atmosphere in the Administration of Small Credit. In his opinion, this agency was completely apolitical and oriented toward actual economic assistance to the population. In June 1913, he was sent to Viatka Province as inspector of credit associations, and worked in this capacity at least until the outbreak of the civil war. See A. Gusakov, “Zapiski inspektora melkogo kredita,” Viatskii kooperator, no. 3, March 15, 1918, 11–17. 93 The alternative “national” solidarity of cooperative activists was not necessarily ethnic or cultural. The rationality of economic region prevailed over the bonds of linguistic or “ethnic” identity. See Alexander Dillon, “The Rural Cooperative Movement and Problems of Modernizing in Tsarist and Post-Tsarist Southern Ukraine (New Russia), 1871–1920,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2003, 457–458.

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Cooperators were spokesmen for the local economic interests, and agricultural specialists performed in the common sphere of the universal knowledge. Thus by 1915, when Ufimskii wrote about Russian “social engineers by vocation,” there indeed existed a highly visible group (or rather several groups) of practitioners consciously striving to reform rural Russia, and the dominant culture of modernization was that of social engineering in the sense of pre-World War I Progressivism. Though the term itself was introduced into Russian only in 1915, we can claim that notions such as Kulturträger, “public activist” (obshchestvennyi deiatel’), or “social agronomist” (obshchestvennyi agronom) were used in exactly the same meaning. At this point, a further clarification is due as regards the usage of the concept of “social engineering.” So far, we have discussed it as a “category of practice,” as something actually existing and bearing that name, or as an idea reflecting certain aspects of the realities of the epoch. In this sense, up to approximately 1915, “social engineering” meant the reformism of “engineers” (agronomists, cooperative managers) as private practitioners or members of a professional corporation or a broad public association. This usage should not be confused with the application of the concept as a “category of analysis” current in modern social sciences. In the latter and more familiar sense, “social engineering” means any rational scheme of improving society, most often produced by government reformers or revolutionaries seizing power. Hence, in this sense a phenomenon does not have to be called “social engineering” to be recognized as such, be it the reforms of Peter the Great or the politics of the Italian Fascists. From this point of view, public modernizers among the agricultural specialists and cooperative managers held no monopoly on social engineering in late imperial Russia, with different government agencies pursuing sometimes even more ambitious plans. Not unlike the reformer-minded obshchestvennost’, the social engineers acting on behalf of officialdom sought to ameliorate certain socioeconomic conditions as an alternative to the popular revolution. While the cooperative activists were focusing on the needs of the local community, and the rural professionals acting on behalf of global modernity, the reformers in government service wanted to preserve the existing Russian empire by rationalizing certain elements of its structure and performance. Compared to the open-ended projects of obshchestvennost’ and cooperators, this was a particularly

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challenging task that involved proving the validity of Hegel’s famous dictum: everything existing is rational. The most famous example of such social engineering in Russia was the notorious “police socialism” associated with the name of the member of the intelligentsia-turned-gendarme, Sergei Zubatov (1864–1917). As head of the Moscow secret service (Okhrana) branch, in 1901–1902, Zubatov initiated the foundation of a network of workers’ unions in Moscow, under control of the police. The unions included about 2,000 members, who were allowed to defend the economic interests of workers and control their treatment by employers (from whom a hail of protest arose).94 While the secret service provided union members with legal counseling and administrative support, organized public lectures, it also gathered information about any subversive activities. By 1904, Zubatov unions functioned in a dozen Russian towns, including both capitals (Moscow and St. Petersburg), Kiev, Odessa, and Vilnius. By sponsoring the foundation of the Independent Jewish Labor Party, Zubatov attempted to split the powerful Bund, and supported the First Zionist Congress in Russia (Minsk, 1901).95 Zubatov initiated the infamous Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg of Father Gapon.96 Zubatov’s creative counterrevolutionary activity was more than a mere police defense of the existing regime. As a police officer, he became famous for his attempts to rationalize the organization and operation of the Russian police. Thanks to Zubatov, the Russian police were among the first to introduce in 1903 anthropometric measurements of all arrestees and the taking of their fingerprints and photographs (the latter measure practiced since 1879). He reformed the system of undercover surveillance and work with informers.97 For Zubatov, the modernization of police was just an element of modernizing the entire society. Claiming to be a Social Democrat himself and not supporting revolutionary methods,98 Zubatov shared with the progressive obshchestvennost’ and even revolutionaries the discourse of modern social analysis. He spoke in the language of social classes and class conflict, describing the social 94 See Madhavan K. Palat, “Casting Workers as an Estate in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika 8, no. 2 (2007): 337–338. 95 Iu. F. Ovchenko, “Sergei Vasil’evich Zubatov,” Voprosy istorii, no. 8 (2005): 61. 96 Palat, “Casting Workers as an Estate,” 340. 97 Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege. Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), esp. chapter 5. 98 Ovchenko, “Sergei Vasil’evich Zubatov,” 55.

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tensions of the epoch as a combination of struggles for individual, social, and national emancipation.99 Quite in line with the general ethos of the emerging social engineering movement, Zubatov attempted to identify concrete problems that could be solved by means of better management, while leaving the general system intact. To Zubatov, empire was a viable form of statehood, the only option fitting Russia, and he believed that it could be improved by making it more “just” toward its “minority” groups, social or ethnic. Even more prominent was an attempt at global social engineering undertaken by the daring prime minister, Petr Stolypin. The system of measures sanctioned by Stolypin in 1906–1909 and known as the “Stolypin agrarian reforms” had a clear political task of breaking the structural solidarity of the Russian peasant land commune, which, in the wake of the revolution of 1905–1906 was blamed for the high level of unrest in the countryside.100 However, besides the reactive and reactionary aspect of the reform, there was a large-scale positive program of social reconstruction leading to the creation of the new class of capitalist farmers and in general, the appearance of the new economic man in the village. The fact that Stolypin had formed his ideas about the priority of the agrarian problem in Russia and ways of solving it well before the revolution of 1905 (for instance, during his tenure as governor of Grodno Province)101 proves that the reform was rather a well-conceived social engineering plan.102 Moreover, as David Macey has demonstrated,

99

Ibid., 58–59. This point had been excessively overstressed by Soviet historians. Cf. A. IA. Avrekh, P. A. Stolypin i sud’by reform v Rossii (Moscow: Izd-vo politicheskoi literatury, 1991); V. Diakin, Stolypin i dvorianstvo. Problemy krestianskogo zemlevladeniia i vnutrennei politiki Rossii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972). 101 Cf. Abraham P. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin; The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 29–31. 102 As David Macey summarized his extensive studies of the origins and implementation of the Stolypin reforms: “Let me begin by pointing out what the Stolypin Reforms most definitely were not: they were not an ad hoc and fundamentally misconceived policy designed to create private property and a small class of individual prosperous (kulak) peasant farmers by force in the shortest possible time in order to preserve the nobility’s social status, its economic wealth and its political clout, thereby to save the tsarist regime. The superficial persuasiveness of such an interpretation has ensured that versions of it continue to be widely held even today. What, then, were the Stolypin Reforms? In simplest and broadest terms, they were a remarkably sophisticated and consistent programme of rural social and economic development with broad domestic and foreign policy implications.” David A. J. Macey, “‘A Wager on History’: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms as Process,” in Judith Pallot, ed., Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930: Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of 100

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the reforms were not a one-man social crusade but a result of the “perceptual revolution” in the governmental spheres that took place at the turn of the twentieth century, brought about by the appearance of “a new generation of enlightened or liberal bureaucrats.”103 The new governmental social engineering approach toward the “peasant question” was not “utopian” (in Karl Popper’s classification) even in its radical treatment of the peasant commune: by forcefully disintegrating the land commune, the government acted as a “midwife” (or a manager) not only of the general historical process but also of the actual trends empirically detected in the Russian village. The future chief ideologist and executor of the Stolypin land reforms, the Danish emigrant C. A. Koefoed (1885–1948), was serving as assessor to the State Noble Land Bank in 1901 when he took a business trip to the Mogilev Province (in present-day Belarus) and discovered a village that by its own initiative had replaced communal land holding with individual farmsteads.104 Koefoed wrote a memorandum and later a book advocatCentral and East European Studies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 149. See David Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906. The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987). 103 David A. J. Macey, “Agricultural Reform and Political Change: The Case of Stolypin,” in Theodore Taranovski, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (Washington, DC and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1995), 168, 169, 170–172. 104 “I had found the Russian village, where farms had been consolidated on the peasants’ own initiative, and for which I had searched in vain for twenty years. I had found my mission in life. . . . It transpired that several villages had carried out land consolidation in the neighborhood of Somonovo, and by driving from one to the next of them I at last found the starting point of the movement—the village of Sagorodnaja in the neighboring province, Vitebsk. The peasants in this village had wished to join together to buy a farm, the fields of which adjoined their village land. They had bargained and haggled for years, and one fine day in 1876, a group of Latvian peasants had arrived, who had outbid them and snatched the farm from under their noses. Since the Latvian peasants, wherever they have settled in the world, run their farms as individual farms, like their forefathers from Arild’s times have done in their home country, it was only natural that these buyers shared the land between them in such a way that each of them received the share due to him, in the form of a well-rounded holding, on which he then settled. The peasants in Sagorodnaja, who would have bought the farm which the Latvians had now shared between them, eyed the newcomers with anything but kind feelings, but nevertheless they observed their behavior closely. They were extremely interested in the Latvian peasants’ method of farming, and soon after, at the commune gathering, they began discussing the question of whether it could pay them to follow the Latvians’ example—share their village land between them and move out, each on his own holding, instead of continuing with the system of sharing the land between them which they had inherited from their ancestors, and which meant that each man received his share split up in bits and pieces. . . . Three years later, the neighboring village followed their example. After that, land consolidation increased to some extent, but a

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ing peasant land consolidation and the dissolution of the peasant commune as a short path toward a more efficient agriculture and a better peasantry. Eventually, he was put in charge of government legislation on the agrarian question, in which capacity he significantly influenced future measures. It was very important for Koefoed to stress that his plan offered nothing new or radically alien to the peasant routine. On the contrary, the proposed measures just fostered and facilitated processes already under way in the countryside. He (and most of his associates in the government) did not deny the peasantry’s rationality nor did he claim that peasants could not learn and adapt to new ways of life. He just questioned the pace at which innovations spread among the peasantry. Judging from his case study in the Mogilev Province, we can estimate this pace at about a mile per year. Given the size of Russian empire, this progress was not too encouraging. Thus, the architects of Stolypin reforms appeared to be even more concerned with legitimating their actions by peasants’ natural predisposition toward proposed measures than were their critics dreaming about Cattedre ambulanti and Danish dairy technologies. Stolypin’s attempt to modernize Russian empire is a separate complex topic. Focusing just on the “social engineering” aspect of his politics reveals how in his striving to rationalize and universalize the government and economy of the entire empire, he relied on the imperial practices of preferential treatment of some groups at the expense of the others, of the differentiating application of the legislation. Stolypin’s social engineering was fundamentally “imperial” in its clearly modernizing and, in a sense, “progressive” goals. Characteristically, the social engineering of the government was not recognized as such by the Russian obshchestvennost’, which treated it as another campaign of ruthless administration, an extremist state intervention that had nothing to do with the spirit of “small deeds.” Stolypin reforms were severely criticized by a broad range of public figures, including the majority of agricultural experts. To offset this criticism, in 1908, a new initiative was launched that was expected to gain support for the unpopular Stolypin land reforms by utilizing serious impediment had first to be overcome, before its spread could really accelerate. The soil in these regions was of very uneven quality, and it was twenty years after the consolidation in Sagorodnaja before the peasants, helped by a surveyor, worked out a method of counter-balancing the inequalities in the quality of the soil, which was easy for them to understand, and satisfied their sense of justice.” C. A. Koefoed, My Share in the Stolypin Agrarian Reforms, ed. Bent Jensen, trans. Alison Borch-Johansen (Odense University Press, 1985), 36–37.

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some techniques and rhetoric of the obshchestvennost’ modernizers. On September 2, 1908, the “Society for the Assistance of Revival of Agriculture and Popular Ability to Work, Russian Grain” was registered in St. Petersburg.105 Alexander Stolypin (1863–1925), the journalist writing for the conservative newspaper Novoe vremia (New Time) and brother of the prime minister, Petr Stolypin, became its chairman. His close associate in the Russian Grain was Dmitry Vergun (1871–1951), editor of the magazine Slavianskii vek (Slavic Century) and émigré from the Habsburg Empire, where he was prosecuted as a leader of the Russophile Ruthenian movement. Among the board members and close associates of the new society were the spouses of politicians such as the former director of the Department of Agriculture and chairman of the Third Duma, son of the famous Slavophile, Nikolai Khomiakov, and the Duma deputy and leader of Russian nationalists, Count Vladimir Bobrinskii.106 Russian enlightened bureaucracy and the rising nationalist movement constituted the dual social base of the new association. The formulated goal of the Russian Grain was to assist peasants in improving their farming skills through firsthand experience on the most advanced farms in Russia and abroad, mainly in Slavic countries.107 In this way peasants would be easily convinced about the advantages of intensive farming on private property and without the potentially subversive mediation of Russian rural specialists. From the very beginning, the Russian Grain intended to use its political weight, get control over the public initiative, and distribute government and zemstvo funds in accordance with its own vision, as no provisions were made to secure the starter capital for the organization: there was no endowment grant and the wealthy founders and members of the new association were required to pay the symbolic fee of one ruble (although donations were welcomed).108 However, within two years the budget of Russian Grain had reached 30,000 rubles109—an amount comparable to the budget of a zemstvo agronomist organization in a midsize province. The chairman, Alexander Stolypin, used one of the

105

Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), Fond 403 “Russkoe zerno,” op. 2, d. 1. E. P. Serapionova, “Kul’turno-ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo ‘Russkoe zerno’ v nachale XX veka,” Slavianskii al’manakh, 2000, 178. 107 RGIA, F. 403, op. 2, d. 2. 108 RGIA, F. 403, op. 2, d. 2. Article 11 of the Society’s charter stated that 1 ruble was a standard annual membership fee; those who paid at least 25 rubles were exempt from any subsequent membership fees for life. 109 Serapionova, “Kul’turno-ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo ‘Russkoe zerno,’” 177. 106

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largest newspapers in the country, Novoe vremia, as a mouthpiece of the new society, its affiliates in the government and provincial administrations mobilized the resources that they could control.110 The case of three local chapters of the Russian Grain provides a close-up portrait of this peculiar version of modernization politics, and explains, to quote James Scott, why “certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed,” while others have not. The first chapter of the Russian Grain opened in Perm Province, often regarded as a cradle of the public agronomy movement, one year after the registration of the St. Petersburg society. Probably sometime in the spring of 1909 the provincial governor, Alexander Bolotov, joined the Russian Grain, and this became a decisive factor for the success of the society in Perm. The official provincial newspaper, Permskie vedomosti (the Perm News) was used as a free advertisement resource that also automatically gave a stamp of official approval and sanction in all its publications.111 When the Perm chapter opened on October 22, 1909, the entire provincial administration joined it following the suit of their governor, including the vice-governor, member of the Provincial Office for Peasant Affairs (po krest’ianskim delam prisutstviia), manager of the Peasant Land Bank, manager of the State Property Administration, and others.112 These people guaranteed the “proper behavior” of the new public body but could not secure its bold goals: to establish throughout Russia “sample schools, farms, moving agricultural exhibitions . . ., distribution of agricultural publications in hundreds of million copies . . ., giving comprehensible lectures, etc. . . . Today [the society] has just a thousand members, while tens and hundreds of thousand members

110 The government encouraged the provincial governors to support the activities of the Russian Grain. Local official periodicals published press releases on the activities of that formally nongovernmental association, sometimes revealing the paper’s ignorance about the actual goals of the Russian Grain, despite the utterly enthusiastic tone of an article. That was the case with the official Perm News (Permskie vedomosti), which in its first article dedicated to the new Society suggested that its goal was to teach Russian peasants how to produce complex agricultural machines themselves by studying abroad. “Russkoe zerno,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 110 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno (Perm, 1910), 5. 111 In 1909 alone thirteen extensive (up to 3,000 words) articles were published. When the provincial administration attempted to use the zemstvo-run Zemskaia nedelia for the same purposes, its move was not supported, to the dismay of the administration. See A. V. “V ‘Russkom zerne’,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 228 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno (Perm, 1910), 75. 112 “Otkrytie Permskogo gubernskogo otdela obshchestva ‘Russkoe zerno’,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 226 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno (Perm, 1910), 56–57, 59.

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are needed!”113 To replicate or appropriate the program of “public agronomy,”114 to become a broad movement, the new society needed the organizational and financial support of the zemstvos and the expertise of rural professionals. Quite predictably, the peasant-dominated zemstvo and third element of Perm Province were reluctant to support a rival project at their own expense.115 Luckily for the Perm Russian Grain, the personality of Governor Bolotov and his sincere enthusiasm116 won the cautious support of some district zemstvos: chairmen of three (out of twelve) district zemstvos became members of the society, and their combined zemstvos contributed a few hundred rubles to its budget.117 As a result, the Perm chapter of the Russian Grain not only assisted four local peasants to travel to Moravia at the expense of the central organization but also financed the trip of four other peasants from its own budget.118 113 “Kak podniat’ russkoe zemledelie,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 183 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno (Perm, 1910), 20. 114 The discourse of the society’s proponents presented the initiative of the Russian Grain as the only response of Russian educated society to the government modernization campaign, thus totally ignoring the rising public agronomy initiative. “Russkoe zerno,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 147 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno (Perm, 1910), 7. 115 The Provincial Zemstvo Board and the annual provincial agronomist conference in July 1909 decided to abstain from supporting the Russian Grain’s initiatives until the actual results and direction of its actions became clear. See “Kak podniat’ russkoe zemledelie,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 183 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno (Perm, 1910), 19. 116 A. V. Bolotov could be regarded as a representative of a “new generation” of Russian bureaucrats, both in terms of age and service ethos. He was only thirty-nine when he became governor of Perm Province in the stormy December of 1905. He curtailed political extremism in the province regardless of its ideological orientation, which led him to a bitter conflict with a chief sponsor of the local Union of Russian People, charismatic preacher, and high-ranked Orthodox monk Seraphim (Georgii Kuznetsov). Tatiana Bystrykh, “Gubernator ushel v monastyr’,” Permskie novosti, May 10 (Perm, 2001). Similarly, Bolotov did not subscribe to the Slavophile rhetoric of the Russian Grain. “I am not a supporter of political interference with purely economic matters, and therefore do not quite share the society’s view that preference should be given to studying agriculture in Slavic lands. I think that one should learn everywhere and from whomever.” He also was against any discrimination in the treatment of peasants who had not left their communes in the activities of the Russian Grain. See “Otkrytie Permskogo gubernskogo otdela obshchestva ‘Russkoe zerno’,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 226 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno (Perm, 1910), 59, 66. 117 Ibid., 62, 63. This was much less than the organizers of the Perm Russian Grain expected to receive from zemstvos: they estimated that each district zemstvo could contribute 400 rubles to its budget, and the provincial zemstvo would donate 1,000 rubles, thus accumulating about 6,000 rubles. “Kak podniat’ russkoe zemledelie i ‘Russkoe zerno’,” Permskie vedomosti, no. 186 (1909), reprinted in Russkoe zerno” (Perm, 1910), 27. 118 Pis’ma krestian, vol. 2, Part 2 (Petrograd: Russkoe zerno, 1915), 710–713.

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With eight peasants sent to study advanced farming techniques between 1909 and 1914, Perm Province occupied tenth place among forty-four provinces that participated in the initiatives of the Russian Grain.119 By contrast, Samara Province sent only two peasants abroad over the same period. This underrepresentation is easily explained by the profile of the local chapter of the Russian Grain society that was established in Samara in April 1911. This was a purely bureaucratic endeavor—the first sixty-three members of the society included virtually the entire top stratum of the Samara “first element,” featuring such officials as the provincial factories inspector, head of the Samara Post and Telegraph District, and the manager of the Samara Branch of the State Bank. Governor Nikolai Protasiev was, of course, the chairman. District and provincial Marshals of Nobility played a prominent role in the society, but not a single representative of the zemstvo, so prominent in modernizing the countryside in Samara Province, joined the local chapter of the Russian Grain. It comes as no surprise then that the society with 107 members by 1912 had a very tiny budget and could afford on its own only to send small groups of peasants for one-day excursions to the local Bezenchuk agricultural experimental station. The two peasants who actually went abroad were funded by the St. Petersburg office of the Russian Grain, and the sole responsibility of the local chapter was to select the right candidates. It failed on both occasions: one peasant was sent to Denmark but apparently could not overcome the language barrier and cultural shock and returned home in less than two months. The second peasant spent the whole term of eleven months in Moravia, but coming from a family that owned 200 hectares of land, he received hardly any relevant experience in that region dominated by small-scale farms.120 The Perm and Samara cases represented an attempt to arrange for a broader public initiative by purely bureaucratic means. The relative success in Perm and the complete failure in Samara can be explained by differences between key personalities.121 While Samara was at the

119

Ibid., 748. Ibid., 674–677. 121 Governor Bolotov, who was forty-three years old when he initiated the establishment of the Russian Grain chapter in Perm, had personal interest in its success. Furthermore, when he retired from the governorship soon afterward, Alexander Bolotov became a full-time executive at the St. Petersburg office of the Russian Grain (he was the vice-chairman of the society and head of its Peasant Commission). Ibid., 568–592. 120

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very bottom of the list of provinces sending peasants abroad with the assistance of the Russian Grain, and Perm somewhere in the middle, Voronezh Province was second only to Tver in terms of its activity: twenty-one peasants from the province participated in programs of the Russian Grain. This number still seems insignificant given the size of the empire and even of the province alone. Obviously, with all its local chapters, the Russian Grain still embodied the model of a philanthropic or educational society. It could not be used as the basis for a truly massive modernization campaign. However, it is hardly accidental that Voronezh’s share in the Russian Grain’s activities was several times greater than the majority of the other forty-three involved regions could boast. Unlike Perm and Samara, Voronezh district zemstvos supported the Russian Grain both organizationally and financially: two-thirds of the peasants participating in its programs received grants from local district zemstvos. St. Petersburg paid for only four Voronezh peasants. The unprecedented responsiveness of the Voronezh zemstvo can be explained by the same human factor that accounted for hostility in Samara and elsewhere: the founding father of the Russian Grain, Evgraf Kovalevsky, had served for twenty years as district, and then provincial zemstvo deputy, and was elected to the State Duma from Voronezh Province.122 Apparently, his personal and political ties with the local second element secured support for the new St. Petersburg initiative. The local chapter of the Russian Grain also differed from a typical, bureaucracy-dominated provincial branch. It was founded in 1911 by Voronezh ultranationalist leader and head of the local division

Governor Protasiev probably belonged to another generation or another type of Russian bureaucrats. He was fifty-six by the time he opened the Samara chapter of the Russian Grain, and he probably did so just because it was the right thing to do for an active governor, and Protasiev was a “professional governor”: he had served as the Olonets governor in 1902–1910 before coming to Samara, and in 1915 he was transferred to the position of the Kharkov governor. 122 E. P. Kovalevsky (1865–1941) served as a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Education, was a member of multiple commissions on reforming primary and secondary schooling in Russia. In the third and fourth Dumas he was deputy head of the Commission for Public Education, then chairman of the permanent conference elaborating the legislation on universal education. In 1900, he organized educational excursions to the World Exhibition in Paris for Russian schoolteachers, thus joining the convention of would-be social engineers, along with William Tolman and Benoît-Lévy. “Evrgaf Kovalevskii,” in Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 22 (Petrograd: Izdatel’skoe delo byvshee Brokgauz-Efron, 1917), col. 35–36.

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of the All-Russian National Union, Vladimir Bernov.123 That was only one of his initiatives staged before the election campaign to the Fourth State Duma, and apparently not the most important in his eyes.124 The budget of the Voronezh Russian Grain was probably even more modest than that of its Samara counterpart. It did not allocate any subsidies to peasants and could serve only as an intermediary between the central office and local zemstvos. However, even though Bernov himself was a mid-level official in the provincial administration, the opening of the Voronezh Russian Grain was not a formal bureaucratic act. The combined efforts of the nationalist-dominated local Russian Grain and Octobrist zemstvo turned out to be quite efficient compared with other branches of the society. An element of grassroots (nationalist) mobilization proved to be a far more powerful tool than the combined manpower of provincial officialdom (which would be called the “administrative resource” in twenty-first-century Russia). While some 250 peasants who had been sent by the Russian Grain abroad and to advanced farms in the Russian empire between 1909 and 1914 had a truly remarkable experience and documented it in their letters to the society, the Russian Grain was just a well-funded educational enterprise without a clear agenda. Even Russian nationalism and the Slavophilism of some of its founders and local chapters remained a low-key issue, as the Russian Grain sent many peasants to non-Slavic regions, such as the Russian Baltic provinces or Denmark, and was establishing contacts with Argentina and the United States.125 The hybrid social engineering project of the Russian Grain got stuck between modernist exclusive Russian nationalism and conservative pan-imperial patriotism. Its activists had not even realized the implications of their Kulturträger program, nor had they shown any solidarity of opinion. While even the Voronezh branch of the Russian Grain demonstrated the same character of pre-mass-politics public initiative (it also depended

123 V. Iu. Rylov, “ ‘My, voronezhskie natsionalisty . . .’ Deiatel’nost’ Vserossiiskogo natsional’nogo soiuza v Voronezhskoi gubernii (1908–1913),” unpublished paper; available at http://conservatism.narod.ru/juni/rylov.doc (accessed on April 5, 2008). 124 Reportedly, he was more interested in the opening of a “national school” or “national credit union,” and succeeded in founding the Union of Russian Women and a nationalist newspaper. See Rylov, “ ‘My, voronezhskie natsionalisty.’” 125 See RGIA, F. 403, Op. 2, d. 70, “Perepiska s agentom GUZiZ v Amerike Kryshtofovichem,” and d. 139, “Perepiska ob organizatsii i otpravke krestian v Argentinu na zarabotki.”

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on the benevolence of local administration, and was sustained by and spread through personal networks),126 its relative success suggests an important criterion in the analysis of social engineering projects. The different projects advanced by Colonel Zubatov, Prime Minister Stolypin, or the founders of the Russian Grain had one key feature in common: they were designed to transform people’s lives without recognizing the people’s right to control the change. The whole point of this reformism was to take all possible preemptive measures in order to refuse the “beneficiaries” of social engineering the role of the true subjects of the transformation. It is the agency and subjectivity of social engineering rather than its political agenda (revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, socialist, capitalist, etc.) that distinguishes the three above-mentioned projects from the public agronomy or cooperative movements. The social engineer in the latter cases is an expert serving the needs of the community that hires him or her, and often he or she is a part of the community, its most active and educated member. This is the understanding that was ascribed to the original concept of the social engineer in the early 1910s. A cooperative manager had to win the vote of the board members (or even of the general meeting) in order to implement a new initiative; agricultural specialists had to prove the validity of their advice empirically, and could be taken by peasants to court for their mistakes (or simply be expelled from the village).127 The power of knowledge gave them influence, which is not the same as political authority. Being in a state of constant dialogue with their clients, social engineers representing the obshchestvennost’ had to adjust their initial blueprints to the actual situation on the ground and to the demand of their clients. The true subject of transformation in this 126 There were other important personal connections involved, besides Kovalevsky’s ties with local zemstvos. Apparently, it was an active member of the All-Russian National Union in St. Petersburg and a close affiliate of the Russian Grain, Count Bobrinsky, who gave his Voronezh colleague the idea if not a request to open a local branch there. This makes the case of Voronezh similar to the otherwise quite different cases of Perm, Samara, and even St. Petersburg itself. 127 In 1913, the peasant Nal’chenko sued a young zemstvo veterinarian, S. Mikhailov, for 200 rubles to compensate for a stallion that died during an unsuccessful castration by a veterinarian assistant in the presence of Mikhailov. This, and a few similar incidents made the veterinarian Mikhailov very uneasy about performing his duties and keeping his authority as an educated modernizer in the countryside: “In approaching the performance of a castration after that, you tremble in the hope of a positive outcome.” Veterinarian Mikhailov learned the reciprocal nature of dialogue the hard way. See S. M. Mikhailov, “O kastratsii v zemskoi praktike,” Vestnik obshchestvennoi veterinarii, no. 1, January 1, 1914, 15.

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version of social engineering is the mobilized population itself, which has a say in both agenda setting and the implementation of change. A channel of upward social mobility is built into both the public agronomy and cooperative movements, which allows for the recruitment of “engineers” from the ranks of “clients” (through schooling or just intensive “shop-floor training”).128 The social engineering born within Russian officialdom is closer to the understanding of social engineering that emerged in the wake of the Great War, and that for many critics embodies the essence of any type of social engineering. The “reactionary” nature of those projects resulted not from their attempt to save the status quo of the tsarist regime (after all, the public agronomy movement was not revolutionary in its goals either), but from their stubborn desire not to allow the “objects” of social engineering to become its “subjects.” Characteristically, these benevolent schemes of improving people’s conditions without mobilizing them failed. The Russian Grain demonstratively appropriated the program of public agronomists aimed at creating the new economic man in the village, while attempting to keep both public and peasants outside the bureaucratic process of decision making and planning. With its branches distributed all over Russia and its almost unlimited administrative support, it was the mountain that brought forth a mouse, engaging just a few hundred peasants in its activities. Its major impact on the peasants was not through direct participation but through the publication of tens of thousand copies of peasant letters, written by those sent abroad by the Russian Grain, who had witnessed the advanced farming of European petite agriculturists.129 These books made readers more responsive to the mobilization campaign of public agronomists. Zubatov’s program of “police socialism” ended up a true catastrophe, at least from the point of view of its sponsors: the pet workers’ associations very soon became the loci of genuine social mobi-

128 The number of agronomy assistants, or “agricultural elders,” increased tenfold between 1909 and 1913. N. A. Alexandrovskii, M. M. Glukhov, N. F. Shcherbakov, and V. N. Shtein, eds., Mestnyi agronomicheskii personal, sostoiavshii na pravitel’stvennoi i obshchestvennoi sluzhbe v ianvaria 1914 g. Spravochnik (Petrograd, 1914), i–ii. 129 Between 1911 and 1914, 15,000 copies of the first volume of Pis’ma krestian were sold: Pis’ma krestian, vol. 2, Part 1 (Petrograd: Russkoe zerno, 1914), xx. The second volume, in two parts, was published in 1914–1915. Individual letters were published in thin brochures, in print runs of up to 4,000 copies each (cf. RGIA, F. 403, op. 2, d. 253, l. 1). Many peasants admitted that they had read various editions of Pis’ma krestian and were impressed by what they read.

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lization, breaching the artificial limits of the moderate trade-unionist movement imposed by their police supervisors and toppling the system that Zubatov attempted to protect.130 Finally, the Stolypin reforms were seen as a failure by contemporaries and many historians alike, at least when judged by their achievement of the proclaimed goals: the peasant commune did not disappear and the class of capitalist farmers did not emerge, while the large-scale government agronomist network had been largely surrendered to the zemstvos by the mid-1910s. It is more difficult to provide a formal assessment of the relative success of the alternative social engineering schemes, those that made a stake on public mobilization. To begin with, due to the interactive nature of these projects, the initial goals were subject to serious adjustment in the course of the implementation (or rather unfolding) of social engineering projects. For many decades, since the 1860s, Russian Populist-minded activists attempted to stage a broad cooperative movement as the basis for a new, noncapitalist mode of production.131 They failed once and again, and when the virtual boom of cooperative associations actually took place in Russia after 1907, the first “engineers” of this boom did not believe it was for real.132 However, this time the cooperative movement was not relying entirely on the enthusiasm of intelligentsia activists, as in the nineteenth century. While the proliferation of credit associations could be explained by government financial

130

In 1903, the Jewish workers associations in the south engaged in political strikes, while in St. Petersburg the Gapon-led workers would spark the revolution in January 1905. “Social engineering” going out of the control of its chief engineer cost Zubatov his splendid career. 131 On this issue, see M. L. Kheisin, Istoriia kooperatsii v Rossii: vse vidy kooperatsii s nachala ee sushchestvovaniia do nastoiashchego vremeni (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo “Vremia,” 1926); L. E. Fain, Otechestvennaia kooperatsiia: istoricheskii opyt (Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1994). 132 As late as the winter of 1910, a prominent cooperative activist, Vasilii Khizniakov, did not expect the cooperative movement to take off in the near future without state and zemstvo assistance. V. V. Khizhniakov, “K sovremennomy polozheniiu kooperativnogo dela v Rossii,” Vestnik kooperatsii, no. 2 (1910): 20–21. For a while, seasoned veterans of the cooperative movement thought that it was just another short-term fashion that would soon disappear without a trace, as had often happened before. Cf.: N. Gibner, “Kak ukrepit’ nashi potrebitel’skie obshchestva,” Vestnik kooperatsii, no. 2 (1909): 27. Retired colonel Nikolai Gibner was one of the founding fathers of Russian consumer cooperatives and the founder of the Russian cooperative periodical press. For a biographical sketch of N. P. Gibner, see V. V. Kabanov, “Kooperatory Rossii: shtrikhi k portretam,” in Kooperatsiia: stranitsy istorii, Vypusk 4 (Moscow: Institut ekonomiki RAN, 1994), 122.

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and political intervention,133 the skyrocketing rise of consumer cooperatives testified to the emerging economic initiative of the masses. While the economic mobilization structured by the cooperative movement was only partially induced by the ideology of cooperativism, it made millions of people better adjusted to the realities of the market economy. On the other hand, among the unexpected consequences of the success of cooperatives was the rapid and ever-more profound “nationalization” of the lower population strata.134 The institutionalization of social solidarity in the cooperative movement, the bottom-up building of new socioeconomic networks and hierarchies found a useful resource in national solidarity, while the hitherto isolated groups of nationalist activists rather unexpectedly found a broad social basis and financial support in the local cooperative associations. After the secession of Ukraine in 1917, the network of cooperative associations and unions provided the popular basis for the Central Rada regime, whose administration included cooperative leaders on various levels.135 The prominent Ukrainian cooperative leader, Borys Martos, characterized the regime of independent Ukraine in 1917–1918 as a “Ukrainian cooperative order.”136 This was hardly the exact initial plan of the pioneers of cooperation in the Russian empire, but by unleashing the forces of mass mobilization and self-organization the social engineers in cooperative movement revolutionized the people. Millions of them realized themselves as rational economic subjects, not irrational objects, of societal transformation. The same is true as regards the public agronomy movement. Peasants were indifferent to the abstract knowledge of agronomists and demanded recommendations tailored to their unique circumstances.137

133 Kotsonis, “Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question,” 121, 159–166, and ff. See also A. P. Korelin, Sel’skokhoziaistvennyi kredit v Rossii v kontse XIX–nachale XX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1988). 134 Alexander Dillon made this “infusion of nationalism into the [cooperative] movement” in Ukraine the main theme of his Ph.D. dissertation, “The Rural Cooperative Movement and Problems of Modernizing in Tsarist and Post-Tsarist Southern Ukraine (New Russia), 1871–1920.” 135 Ibid., 466, 576. 136 Ibid., 576. 137 As a villager from Samara Province put it in 1913 speaking about the agronomy schemes applied in neighboring districts, “other localities are alien to us, the people of Semenovka.” See Otchet o deiatel’nosti i sostoianii sredstv Samarskogo obshchestva uluchsheniia krest’ianskogo khoziaistva za vtoroe trekhletie ego sushchestvovaniia (s 7/XI 1910 g. po XI 1913 g.) (Samara, 1914), 29.

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The very idea of a technological attitude toward land cultivation was shocking to many of them, while agricultural specialists learned that there could be rationality in seemingly archaic peasant economic patterns. The ideological schemes advocating the preservation or dismantling of the peasant commune played no role in the activity of those rural professionals who survived for more than a year in the village and established a dialogue with the peasants. As soon as the movement took off and became dominated by practitioners rather than city-based ideologists, the key task of their social engineering activity was recognized as educating the new economic man, that is, making the peasants conscious subjects. Institutions were thought to be of a secondary importance. In many instances this rising peasant subjectivity and initiative proved fruitful in the context of the old regime’s market economy and legal regime.138 The question was, what patterns of social practice those peasant-subjects would employ if those familiar institutional frameworks had disappeared. Paradoxically, the failed social engineering projects backed by the government also left a lasting legacy of popular mobilization of varying intensity. Zubatov mobilized the workers, while Stolypin brought the entire countryside into motion, injecting considerable human and financial resources into its modernization. The failure of the government resulted in the triumph of the public initiative. As Ufimskii wrote in 1915, the “new social construction” was under way, and the major problem that began seriously worrying the social engineers was “that so far this construction goes on beyond the state.” The imperial state failed either to accommodate or to curtail the mass mobilization of the population. That was not a revolutionary mobilization in the strict sense, as the cadres of all revolutionary activists in the empire numbered several times fewer than the veterinarians alone, not to mention agronomists or cooperative managers. This mobilization was not just about making people committed to certain social, economic, or even political goals, as some government-sponsored projects would envision. The dominant version of public-led social engineering in late imperial Russia was aimed at turning the population into subjects—members of the national compound. There was not a single understanding of the

138 On the peasants’ remarkably active use of the legal system to their advantage, see Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court. Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004).

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nature and boundaries of that future nation: to some it was a universal pan-imperial democratic regime, and many saw that nation in ethnocultural terms (i.e., Ukrainian, Georgian, etc.).139 The major menace to triumphant social engineering in its democratic, public-oriented version of obshchestvennost’ came from the very success of this movement and from the total failure of the imperial state to provide a durable framework for the emerging community of mobilized subjects. Russian social engineers succeeded in assembling a social mechanism far exceeding the capacity of the old-fashioned factory.

139

For a detailed discussion of the different trajectories of “nationalization” of Russian obshchestvennost’ civic projects see Ilya Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

NAME INDEX

Abramov, Ia. V. 246–247n62 Abu El Haj, Nadia 53 Ackerknecht, Erwin 181n60 Adams, Mark B. 188n82 Adelman, Jeremy 8 Aden, Hartmut 27n38 Adler, P. J. 82n103 Afanasjev, Valeri 62n13 Aimermakher, K. 11n17 Alcock, Susan E. 7n8 Aleinikoff, Alan 42 Aleinikoff, Alexander T. 42n17 Alekseev, E. E. 124n6 Alexander I (Russian Emperor) 87, 92, 94–98, 109, 118, 145 Alexander II (Russian Emperor) 75, 108–109, 117, 119 Alexander III (Russian Emperor) 204 Alexandrovskii, N. A. 268n128 Amery, Jean 55 Anan’ich, B. 253n85 Anderson, Benedict 19, 46 Anderson, David 121n1, 123n4 Andrzej Nowak 90n4, 91, 94, 96n23, 105n49, 106n53 Anisimov, Evgenii V. 59n2 Anuchin, Dmitrii 167–168, 170–171, 172n38, 173–174, 175n45, 176–182, 187, 188nn81–82 Appadurai, Arjun 47 Arendt, Hannah 42 Armitage, David 7 n, 8, 42n15, 200n23 Arzhakov, Aleksei 144–145 Arzhakov, Princelings 122 Ascher, Abraham 258n101 Ashin, K. S. 248n70 Avdeev, V. B. 164n23 Avrekh, A. Ia. 258n100 Avrich, Paul 59n3 Avrutin, Eugene 158n6 Baberowski, Jörg 88n121 Babich, I. L. 13n21 Bakhrushin, V. 129n20, 129n22, 131n27, 132n32 Bakunin, Mikhail 108

Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam 121n1, 123n4 Barkan, Elazar 157n4 Barkey, Karen 8n12, 48n34 Barran, Thomas 88n120 Barszczewska-Krupa, Alina 102n38 Barth, Fredrik 157n4 Bartlett, Roger 64n16 Bassin, Mark 48n34 Batalina, Marina 6n6 Beauvois, Daniel 90, 91n6, 100n35, 106n53, 112nn73–74, 114n81 Beissinger, Mark R. 156n2, 158n7 Beketov, A. N. 173n42 Bekhterev, V. M. 176 Beliavskii, M. T. 69n40 Benecke, Werner 100n35 Benoît-Lévy, Georges 235, 239, 265n122 Berg, L. S. 137n43, 137n46, 171n36 Berkova, P. N. 79n88 Berlin, Isaiah 221 Bernov, Vladimir 266 Bespiatykh, Iu. N. 72n57 Betskoi, Ivan Ivanovich 74–75, 78, 81n94, 83, 87–88 Black, J. L. 138n48 Blitstein, Peter 156n2, 158n7, 187n78 Blumenthal, H. V. 75n69 Bobrinskii, Vladimir (Count) 261 Bobrovnikov, V. O. 13n21 Boehtlingk, Otto von 128n15, 136, 148 Bogdanov, V. V. 171n36 Bolotov, Alexander 262–263, 264n121 Bordiugov, G. 11n17 Borges, Jorge Luis 24 Boriatinskii, Ivan 132 Borisov, A. A. 133n33 Borovoi, S. Ia. 77n79 Bradley, Joseph 244n52 Breyfogle, Nicholas 16n27 Bristow, Nancy 231n4 Brock, Peter 102n38 Brokgauz, A. A. 174n43 Brower, Daniel 10n16, 48n34, 87n118, 155n2, 201n26

274

name index

Brubaker, Rogers 17, 19–21 Brunner, Otto 141n60 Budde, Gunilla-Friederike 155n1 Budnitskii, Oleg 158n6 Bunak, V. V. 171n36, 188n82 Bunzl, Matti 157n4, 173n41 Burbank, Jane 6n6, 14n23, 15, 19n30, 22n34, 44, 48n34, 49, 62n11, 92n11, 198n18, 199n21, 209n45, 218n65, 221n78, 227n98, 271n138 Burke, John 157n4 Buse, D. K. 138n48 Bychkova-Jordan, Bella 128n15 Bystrykh, Tatiana 263n116 Caban, Wiesław 91 Cadiot, Juliette 186n77, 203n29 Cadot, Michel 115n83 Cain, Peter J. 36n8 Calhoun, Craig 4n3 Campbell, Elena 155n2 Cannadine, David 5n4 Carnegie, Andrew 234 Catherine II (Catherine the Great, Katharina II, Russian Empress) 60–61, 62n10, 64–65, 66n27, 69n38, 70, 75, 76n72, 79, 81–83, 86n115, 88, 139, 141–143 Chaianov, Alexander 248 Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri 36n8 Cheboksarov, N. N. 188n83 Chebotarev, Ch. A. 80n90 Chechulin, N. D. 67n30 Cherkasheninov, Miron 142 Cherniavsky, Michael 6n6 Chernova, V. M. 246n62 Chichlo, Boris 124n6 Chistovich, I. A. 74n67 Chizh, V. F. 169 Chun, Allen 46n29 Chwalba, Andrzej 93n12, 117n91, 119n93 Clay, Catherine 155n2 Clowes, Edith 125n10, 202n27, 244n52 Colley, Linda 5n4, 7n10 Conze, Werner 141n60 Cooper, Frederick 4n3, 5n4, 6n6, 7n9, 8, 45n28, 46, 197n16 Coronil, Fernando 43–44 Cranston, Mary Rankin 234n21, 235n22 Crews, Robert 16, 69n38, 87n118 Crossley, Pamela Kyle 48n33

Csáky, Moritz 27n43 Czaplicka, Marie 127n15 Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy 96–97, 100–101, 103, 106, 111–113, 114n80, 116, 119 Daly, Jonathan 257n97 Dameshek, L. M. 13n21, 123n3 Danielsonom, N. F. 246n62 Dashkova, Ekaterina Romanovna 80nn91–92 Davies, Norman 89n2, 93n12 de Custine, Astolphe 115 de Madariaga, Isabel 61, 62n10 de Montesquieu, Charles 67n30 de Tourdonnet, Le Comte A. 38n9 Demidov, Prokofii 81 Demkov, M. I. 84n109 Deringil, Selim 45n27 Devji, Faisal 54 Diakin, V. 258n100 Dillon, Alexander 255n93, 270n134 Dirks, Nicholas 5n4, 34 Dodonov, V. 240n43 Dolbilov, Mikhail 13n21, 16n27, 114n81 Dorożyński, Raszard 100n34 Downs, Erica Monahan 130n24 Doyle, Michael 5n4 Dril’, A. A. 168n28, 169n32 Druzhinin, N. M. 77n81 Du Bois, W. E. 36 Duara, Prasenjit 48n35 Dubnow, Simon 172n39 Dubois, Laurent 44n25 Dudley, Edward 157n4 Dürr, Renate 6n6 Dylągowa, Hanna 93n12 Dzhavakhov, A. N. 184–186 Dziewanowski, Marian Kamil 96n23 Earp, Edwin 235–236, 238 Eaton, Henry 180n56 Edgar, Adrienne 156n2, 158n7 Efron, I. E. 174n43 Efron, John 157n4, 172n39 Eisenstadt, Samuel 5n4 Eklof, Ben 251n78 El’kind, Aleksandr 166, 172n38 Elie, Stanisław 100n35 Elizabeth (Russian Empress) 68 Elliott, John 7n8 Elliott, Mark 48n33 Elwitt, Stanford 239n38

name index Ely, Christopher 60 Emel’ianov, Ivan 249–250n73 Emme, V. 172, 173n40 Emmons, Terence 161n13, 162n14, 198n18, 207n36 Engel, Gisela 6n6, 140 Engel-Braunschmidt, A. 79n87 Engelstein, Laura 158n8, 168 Epp, George K. 81n95 Epstein, Tadeusz 90n6 Erman, Adolph 149 Eroshkina, A. N. 74n67 Etkind, Alexander 155n2 Evans, Andrew 173n41 Fanon, Frantz 50, 54 father Gapon 257 Federov, M. M. 69n39 Feichtinger, Johannes 27n43 Felbiger, Johann Ignaz 82, 84–85 Ferguson, Niall 34 Fick, Heinrich 137n42 Fiećko, Jerzy 116n90 Field, Daniel 245n59 Firsov, N. N. 72n56 Fisher, Alan W. 69n38 Fischer, Johann Eberhardt 138 Fleischhacker, H. 79n87 Fondahl, Gail 123n4 Fonvizin, Denis 79 Forsyth, James 121n1, 124n9 Foucault, Michel 37, 231 Franciszek Bronowski 99n34 Fröhlich, Klaus 161n13 Gagarin, Matvei 131 Galai, Shmuel 161n13, 191n1 Garrard, John 61n7 Gehrke, Roland 102n38 Gellner, Ernest 19, 157n4, 202n28 Georgi, Johan Gottlieb 140n56 Geraci, Robert 16n27 Gerasimov, Ilya 3n2, 9, 22, 25, 30, 33n1, 35n7, 62n11, 92n11, 156n2, 209n45, 229n1, 230n3, 248n67, 272n139 Gestwa, Klaus 60 Geyer, Dietrich 82n101 Gibner, N. 269n132 Gide, Charles 254n89 Gill, Arnon 93n12 Gingrich, Andre 157n4 Głębocki, Henry 105n49, 114n81 Glebov, Sergei 3n2, 9, 29, 92n11, 156n2

275

Glukhov, M. M. 268n128 Gmelin, Johann Georg 138 Gogolev, A. I. 128n16 Gogolev, Z. V. 134n36 Goldenberg, L. A. 131n29, 137n49 Golitsyn, prince 85 Goncharov, Ivan 149 Grant, Bruce 121n1, 123nn4–5 Grigorovskii, A. 247n64 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 78, 82 Groh, Dieter 115n83 Gromov, M. N. 61n7 Gross Solomon, Susan 188n82 Gurko, Vladimir 194 Gurowski, Adam 105–106, 107n54 Gurvich, I. S. 128n18, 134n36 Gusakov, A. 255n92 Häfner, Lutz 244n52 Hagen, Mark von 8n12, 14n23, 15, 19n30, 22n34, 48n34, 62n11, 92n11, 198n18, 199n21, 209n45, 218n65, 221n76, 227n98 Hahn, Hans-Henning 96n22, 100n35, 101n37, 103n42, 111n70, 116n90, 118n92 Hall, Catherine 45n28 Hammond, Michael 160n11 Handelsman, Marceli 111n72, 112n73, 114n80 Handy, William 234n20 Hanke, Edith 27n39 Hansson, Sven Ove 231n4, 232n10 Hardt, Michael 5n4 Harrison, Mark 36n8 Hartley, J. 86 Harvey, Joy 160nn11–12 Heller, K. 77n78 Henshall, Nicholas 27 Herder 19 Hernon, Ian 42n18 Herzen, Alexander 108–109 Higgins, Charles 234n20 Hildermeier, Manfred 155n1 Hirsch, Francine 48n34, 138n49, 155n2, 158n7, 186n76, 188n81 Hoffman, David 158n5 Horne, Janet 235n23 Hösch, E. 81n97 Hosking, Geoffrey 10n15, 62n11 Hostetler, Laura 48n33 Hrushevskii, M. 171n37 Hubert Zawadzki, Wacław 96n22 Hubrich-Mühle, Kornelia 100n34 Hudson, Hugh 81n94

276

name index

Hughes, Lindsey 59n2, 64n16 Humphrey, Caroline 121n1, 123n4 Hutchinson, John 188n82 Iarkho, A.I. 189n83 Indova, E. I. 76n73, 77n80 Innokentii, Archbishop of Kamchatka 149 Intenberg, A. S. 162n15 Ivanovskii, A. 172n38, 175n45, 177n52, 181n58, 182–185 Jabłonowski, Wacław 105–106 Jahn, Egbert 115n83 Jankovich de Mirievo, Theodor (Fedor) 82–84 Jarausch, Konrad 245n56 Jedlicki, Jerzy 94n15 Jellinek, Georg 244 Jobst, Kerstin 109n64 Jochelson, Waldemar 127n15 Johler, Reinhard 167n27 Jones, R. E. 75n70, 76n72 Jones, W. G. 79n88, 82n100 Jordan, John 231n4, 238n36 Jordan-Bychkov, Terry G. 128n15 Julicher, Peter 59n3 Julkowska, Violetta 100n34 Kabanov, V. V. 269n132 Kabuzan, V. M. 86n114 Kalembka, Sławomir 101n37, 112nn74–75 Kalembka, Urszula 91 Kamenskii, A. B. 75n71, 76n72 Kaplunovskii, Alexander 3n2, 156n2 Kappeler, Andreas 6n6, 10n14, 65n22, 69nn39–40, 93, 109n64, 124n7, 221n76 Karamzin, Nikolai 119n93 Kassow, Samuel 176n48, 202n27, 244n52 Katsonis, Yanni 158n5 Keene, Edward 7n11 Khalid, Adeeb 48n34, 155–156n2, 158n7, 201n26 Khans, Altyn 127 Kheisin, M. L. 269n131 Khizhniakov, V. V. 269n132 Khodarkovsky, Michael 68n36, 129n21, 131n26 Khomiakov, M. M. 175n47 Khomiakov, Nikolai 261

Khrapovitskii, A. V. 86n117 Kieniewicz, Stefan 90n5, 93n12, 98n27, 100n34 Kim, K. V. 254n87 King, Bolton 253n84 Kingston-Mann, Esther 248n68 Kirchner, Walter 138n47 Kiuner, N. V. 128n19 Kivelson, Valerie 59n1 Kizevetter, A. A. 73n58, 74n67 Kizwalter, Tomasz 94n15, 102n38 Knemeyer, Franz-Ludwig 141n60 Kniazkov, S. A. 84n108 Knight, Nathaniel 155n2, 158n5 Kochanowskis, Jerzy 118n92 Kochetkova, N. D. 80n92 Kocka, Jurgen 155n1 Koefoed, A. A. 259–260 Kokoshkin, Fedor Fedorovich 225–226, 228 Kokovtsov, Vladimir 194 Korelin, A. P. 270n133 Korkina, E. I. 128n15 Korolenko, Vladimir 148 Korsh, F. E. 171n37 Koselleck, Reinhart 14, 62, 141n60 Kotkin, Stephen 6n6 Kotliarevskii, S. A. 244n53 Kovalevskii, M. M. 171n37, 179n55, 180 Kovalevskii, P. I. 169 Kovalevsky, Evgraf 265, 267n126 Kramer, Paul 45n27 Krasheninnikov, F. N. 174n42 Krasheninnikov, Stepan 138 Krasiński, Zygmunt 116n90 Krasnobaev, A. I. 80n92 Krestinin, V. V. 72 Krymskii, A. E. 171n37 Kubrakiewicz, Michał 110 Kudriashev, I. 254n88 Kuhn, Franz 24 Kuk, Leszek 91, 104n43, 105n49, 106n53, 110n65, 112n73, 115n83 Kusber, Jan 6n6, 9, 29, 61n8, 62n12, 66n28, 76n24, 77n77, 86nn116–117, 117n91, 141, 156, 192n3 La Follette, Robert Marion 234n20 Landau, E. G. 165n24 Lantzeff, George 124n9, 129n22, 130n25 Lappo-Danilevskij, A. S. 74n67

name index Larionov, Afanasii 73 Latov, Iurii V. 254n89 Lauer, R. 80n89 Lawaty, Andreas 94n15 Lazarenko, A. 250n74 Lazzerini, Edward J. 10n16, 48n34, 87n118, 155n2, 201n26 Lednicki, Alexander Robertovich 217n62, 219n69, 219n71, 221 LeDonne, J. 76n72 Ledyard, John 139, 149 Lee, Elizabeth 235n22 Lehmann-Carli, Gabriela 64n16 Leibnitz, Isaak 137 Lelewel, Joachim 98–100, 102, 104, 107n55, 108, 110, 113, 119n93 Lemberg, Hans 115n83 Lemon, Alaina 155n2 Lesgaft, P. F. 175 Levental’, L. G. 142, 144n68 Lieven, Dominic 5nn4–5, 8nn12–13, 19n30, 21, 62n11 Lincoln, Bruce 129n30 Lindenau, Jakob 138–139, 140n55 Liubavtsev, Stepan 74 Lombroso, Cesare 168 Lopukhin, A. A. 210–211 Löwe, Heinz-Dietrich 59n3 Lund, L. L. 173n42 Macey, David 258, 259nn102–103 MacMaster, Neil 156, 157n3 Magocsi, Paul Robert 109n64 Mahmandarov, T. 172 Maikov, P. M. 74n67 Maliev, N. M. 175n47 Maner, Hans-Christian 27n43, 61n9 Margolin, A. D. 169n32 Marr, N. Ia. 188–189n83 Martin, Janet 130n24 Martin, Terry 5n4, 21n32, 124n 6, 186n75, 203n30 Martos, Borys 270 Marx, Karl 180 Matsusaka, Yoshihisa Tak 48n35 Matsuzato, Kimitaka 12, 16n28, 195n11, 209n45 Matveev, S. V. 251n80 Maurer, Trude 117n91 McClelland, James 245n56 McGranahan, Carole 5n4, 33n3, 44n22, 44n26 Medynskii, E. N. 74n67, 76n72

277

Meerovich, Mark 240n42 Menzhulin, Vadim 164n23 Merkulov, A. 254n86 Messerschmidt, Daniel 138 Mickiewicz, Adam 100n35, 116, 119n93 Migalkin, Ivan 146–147 Mikhailov, S. M. 267n127 Miliukov, Pavel Nikolaevich 205, 214n55, 223n84, 243n50 Miller, Alexei 6n6, 8n12, 13n21, 61n9, 62n11, 114n81, 195n11, 209n45 Millward, James A. 48n33 Mochnacki, Maurycy 98, 110 Modigliani 19 Mogilner, Marina 3n2, 9, 22, 30, 92n11, 156n2, 158n6, 162n16, 163n17, 164n20, 164n23, 165n24, 167n27, 169n33, 171n37, 172n39, 187nn79–80, 245n57, 246n60 Mommsen, Wolfgang 27n39 Moore, Kevin 4n3 Morachevskii, V. V. 249n72 Mordvinov, General 81 Morgan, E. L. 237, 241 Moritsch, Andreas 113n79 Morss, Susan Buck 54n43 Mosse, George 157n4, 160n12 Motyl, Alexander 8n12, 62n11 Müller, Gerhardt Friedrich 138 Nash, George 236n29 Nazipova, A. R. 175nn46–47 Negri, Antonio 5n4 Nekludov, Ia. 250n77 Neuschäffer, Hubertus 64n18 Nicholas I (Russian Emperor) 63n14, 98, 103, 105, 109, 147, 202n27 Nicholas II (Russian Emperor) 192, 203n30, 204 Niedhardt, Gottfried 61n7 Nietzsche 33 Nikol’skii, A. N. 181n59 Nikol’skii, L. P. 164n20 Nikolaev, L. P. 182n62 Nol’de, Boris 22, 196, 199, 200n22, 201, 202n27, 226n95 Northrop, Douglas 48n34 Novikov, Nikolai 79, 88 O’Gilvie, Brian 138 Okenfuss, Max 85 Okey, Thomas 253n84

278

name index

Okladnikov, A. P. 127nn12–13 Ol’derogge, Vladimir 163n20 Omelchenko, Oleg 69n41 Orlov, Aleksei 81 Orton, Lawrence 113n79 Osborne, Thomas J. 43n19 Ostrogorskii, Moisei Iakovlevich 216 Ovchenko, Iu. F. 257n95, 257n98 Pagden, Anthony 5n5, 7n8, 41n13, 200n23 Palat, Madhavan 257n94, 257n96 Pallot, Judith 258n102 Panin, Nikita 65n23 Panny, Glenn 157n4 Panteleev, L. P. 68n35 Parkin, Robert 157n4 Pavlenko, N. I. 64n17 Pavlinov, D. M. 142n65, 144n68 Pekarskii, P. P. 137n45 Penchko, N. A. 80n90 Perdue, Peter 5n4, 33n3, 44, 48n33, 127n14 Peter I (Russian Emperor) 59, 87, 134, 137, 140, 146 Petersen, Hans-Christian 9, 29 Petri, Eduard Jul’evich 164n20 Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan 245n57 Pichkurov, S. 254n88 Pienkos, Angela Theresa 93n12 Pietrow-Ennker, Bianka 87 Pipes, Richard 6–7n7, 124n6 Plisetskii, M. S. 189n83 Polenov, A. K. 173n42 Poliakov, Leon 160n11 Polz, Peter 82n103 Popper, Karl 232, 259 Potemkin, Grigorii 82 Proskurina, Vera 63n14 Protasiev, Nikolai 264, 265n121 Prutsch, Ursula 27n43 Pugacheva, E. I. 69n40 Pushkarev, L. N. 74n67 Pushkin, Alexander 119n93 Radlov, V. V. 128n17 Raeff, Marc 60n4, 61n7, 75n70, 76n75, 140, 141n59, 141n61, 145n71, 202n27 Ragsdale, H. 81n97 Raguzinskii, Savva 134 Ranke, Johannes 163 Ranke, Leopold von 25

Ransel, David 48n34, 74n67 Rasmussen, Wayne 248n69 Rastsvetov, A. P. 166n25 Reinhard, Wolfgang 27n37 Remnev, A. V. 13n21, 14n23, 19n30, 22n34, 62n11, 92n11, 123n3, 124n9, 150n86, 198n18, 199n21, 209n45, 218n65, 227n28 Remy, Johannes 101n36, 117n91 Repin, N. N. 72n57 Rethmann, Petra 121n1 Richardson, Louise 42n18 Richter, Melvin 28n44 Rieber, Alfred 8n12, 61n9, 125, 195n11, 202n27 Ringer, Fritz 176n48 Rivkin, Julie 3n1 Rodgers, Daniel 231n4, 239 Rogger, Hans 158n6, 204n32 Roldan, Arturo Alvarez 157n4 Romanov (Russian Emperor) 99, 104 Rosaldo, Renato 52 Rosen, Stephen 43n21 Rousseau 87, 88n120 Rozhdestvenkii, S. V. 70n43 Rudenko, Sergei 165n24 Rustemeyer, Angela 27n41 Rutkowski, Krzysztof 116n88 Ryan, Michael 3n1 Rylov, V. Iu. 266nn123–124 Sacharova, A. N. 84n108 Sacke, Georg 69n41 Said, Edward 34, 36, 43 Sakharova, Ekaterina (E. N. Sakharova-Vavilova, Vavilova) 250n73 Samover, N. V. 246n62 Sandars, C. T. 42n18 Sazonov, V. 252n83 Scharf, Claus 61n6, 64n19, 66n27, 86n115 Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David 155n2 Schlözer, August Ludwig 66n24, 74n68 Schmitt, Carl 41n14 Schönle, Andreas 60n5 Schorkowitz, Dittmar 123n4 Schorske, Carl 155n1 Schuman, Hans 65n23, 66n25 Scott, James 231, 232n9, 262 Sebald, W. G. 55n46

name index Seeley, John Robert 22 Seibt, Ferdinand 61n7 Semyonov, Alexander 3–4n2, 6n6, 9, 30, 92n11, 156n2, 192n3 Seraphim (Georgii Kuznetsov, monk) 263n116 Serapionova, E. P. 261n106, 261n109 Serbov, N. I. 84n108 Sergei Aleksandrovich, Grand Prince 166n25 Shakhmatov, A. A. 171n37 Shatsillo, Kornelii Fedorovich 161n13 Shcherbakov, N. F. 268n128 Sheets, Beatrice 236n27 Shelgunov, Nikolai 246n61 Shelokhaev, V. V. 162n15 Sherrer, Iu. 253n85 Shields Kollmann, Nancy 27n41 Shishkov, A. S. 85 Shklovsky, Viktor 3 Shneider, Konstantin 162n14 Shnirelman, Victor 11n17 Shtein, V. N. 268n128 Shternberg, Lev 140 Shvets, V. F. 255n90 Sidorova, A. B. 175n46 Sieroszewski, Waclav 128n15 Sikorskii, Ivan Alekseevich 164 Silverman, Sydel 157n4 Sinel’nikov, N. A. 171n36 Skowronek, Jerzy 96n22 Skurnowicz, Joan 99n34 Sleptsov, P. A. 128n15 Slezkin, Yuri 87n118, 121–122, 123n4, 140n57, 188n83, 226n96 Slocum, John 141n61, 183n67 Smagina, G. I. 80n91 Smirov, Ivan 175n46 Smith, Jeremy 124n6 Smith, Woodruff 157n4 Smulevich, B. Ia. 189n83 Sofronov, F. G. 131n28, 144, 149n81 Sokolovskii, I. R. 129n22 Somov, N. M. 243n51 Speranskii, M. M. 69n39, 145, 150 Staliunas, Darius 16n27, 214n56 Stanziani, Alessandro 253n85 Starzy, Antoni Alfons 104 Staszic, Stanisław 93–97, 103 Staum, Martin 157n4 Steindorff, Ludwig 61n7 Stelzle, Charles (Rev.) 236 Stepan, Nancy 74, 138, 157n4

279

Stocking, George Jr. 157n4 Stocking, George W. 157n4 Stolber-Rilinger, Barbara 27n42 Stoler, Ann 5, 7n9, 9, 20, 33nn2–3, 42n16, 44n22, 44n26, 45n28, 46n30, 124n8, 197n16 Stolypin, Petr Arkad’evich 197n17, 202, 203nn30–31, 215, 224n86, 229 258–259, 260–261, 267, 269, 271 Struve, Petr Berngardovich 220, 223n84, 248 Sunderland, Willard 48n34, 150nn86–87 Suny, Ronald Grigor 5n4, 8n12, 18, 21, 196n14, 203n30 Süssmann, Johannes 6n6 Sutton, R. L. (Dr.) 42n18, 237 Suvorova, Natalia 150n86 Svetlov, L. B. 80n93 Sychev-Mikhailov, M. V. 80n90 Syranov, princelings (see also Syranov, Sofron) 122, 143–145 Syranov, Sofron 143–145 Szostakowicz, Stanisław 102n38 Tal’ko-Gryntsevitch, Ju. D. 166n25 Tamanoi, Mariko 48n35 Taranovski, Theodore 244n52, 259n103 Tarnovskaia, Praskov’ia 168–170 Tatishchev, V. V. 85n111, 138n48 Taylor, Nina 100n35 Tazbir, Janusz 94n15, 95n20 Teng, Emma 48n33 Thurston, Robert 243n50 Tikhonov, I. L. 164n20 Tishkin, G. A. 80n91 Todorov, Tzvetan 157n4 Todorova, Maria 155n2 Tokarev, S. A. 129n20, 129n22, 131n27, 132n32, 134nn35–36 Tolman, William Howe 231n4, 232, 233–236, 238, 242, 265n122 Tolstoi, A. A. 82n98, 83n106 Tolstoy, Leo 177–178 Torke, Hans-Joachim 59n1 Totomiants, Vakhan 247n63 Trofimova, T. A. 188n83 Troitskii, S. M. 77n81 Trouillot, Michel Rolph 53 Tugan-Baranovskii, M. I. 171n37 Tumanova, Anastasiia 243–244n52, 244n53 Tyrell, Ian 45n27

280

name index

Ufimskii, A. 230, 240–243, 256, 271 Uvarovskii, Afanasii 136, 148 Uvarovskii, Aleksei 136, 148 van der Loo, Hans 155n1 Veinberg, R. L. 165n24 Vergun, Dmitry 261 Vermeulen, Hans 139n51, 157n4 Veselaja, G. A. 68n31 Viazemskii, A. A. 64 Viazemskii, general 65 Virchow, Rudolf 172n39, 173, 177, 181, 182n61 Vishnevsky, B. N. 176 Vitashevskii, N. A. 135, 142 Vitebsky, Piers 123n4 Volkov, Fedor 165n24, 171 Voltaire 65–66 von Aretin, Karl Otmar Freiherr 61n7 von Mekk, K. O. 163n18 von Sievers, Jakob Johann 75n70 Vorob’ev, Alexander 171, 172n38 Vorontsov-Dashkova, A. I. 80n81 Vovk, Halyna 171 Vucinich, Alexander 174n44, 186n76 Vulpius, Ricarda 62n11, 89n3 Vykoukal, Jiří 111n69 Vystavkin, M. 255n91 Waisenberg, S. A. 166n25 Walcott, Derek 52n40 Walicki, Andrzej 94n15, 109n63 Wandycz, Piotr Stefan 93n12 Ward, Lester Frank 230, 240, 242, 252n82 Watrous, Stephen 139n53 Weber, Max 27n39, 195–196n13, 216n61

Weinberger, Eliot 24n35 Weindling, Paul 157n4, 160, 163n19 Weiner, Amir 155n2, 189n83, 232n9 Weinerman, Eli 158n6 Weitz, Eric 155n2 Wells, H. G. (Uells, G.) 230, 240–242 Werth, Paul 16, 68n36 West, James 202n27, 244n52 White, Richard 126 Whittacker, Cynthia 62n10 Wilkins, John 24 Williams, Raymond 34, 40 Wilson, Kathleen 7n9, 62n11 Winchakul, Thongchai 41 Witsen, Nikolaas 137, 139 Wolcott, Derek 52 Wolfe, Patrick 45n28 Wolff, Larry 115n83, 139, 140n58 Wortman, Richard 6n5, 18n29, 63, 203n30, 204n32 Wrangel, Baron Ferdinand von 149 Yekelchyk, Serhy 11 n. 17 Young, Louise 48n35 Zaremba, E. 249n72 Zernack, Klaus 119n93 Zernov, A. N. 173n42 Zhuk, Sergei 16n27 Zimmerman, Andrew 159, 163n19 Znamenskii, Andrei 121n1, 123n4 Zolotarev, A. 188n81 Zubatov, Sergei 257–258, 267–269, 271 Zuev, A. S. 130n23 Zverev, V. V. 246n62

Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Russian History and Culture)

Libertinage in Russian Culture and Literature (Russian History and Culture)

The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire

The Russian Empire 1801-1917 (Oxford History of Modern Europe)

Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire

Russian Masculinities iIn History and Culture

Gender in Russian History and Culture (Studies in Russian & Eastern European History)

Encyclopedia of Russian History

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