SUMMARY:

Mikhail Dolbilov’s article focuses on what can be called a “bureaucratic history” of the 1865 ban and the parallel official Cyrillization of the alphabet. These issues are analyzed in relation to the government’s nationalist agenda and as a kind of window on the bureaucracy’s mentality, the “inner world” of the Empire’s managers serving in the Western borderlands.
Dolbilov seeks to reveal the rather intricate mechanics of bureaucratic decision-making on the question of introducing the ban. Based on a range of archival sources, the study challenges the widespread historiographical notion that the Vilnius higher administrators, Mikhail Murav’ev and Konstantin Kaufman, were the principal initiators of this ban (Murav’ev even seems to have tolerated the preservation of the Latin script for religious publications) and demonstrates the crucial role that lower officials affiliated with the Ministry of Public Education, especially the inspector of the Vilnius Educational District in Kaunas Province (gubernia) and Slavophile-oriented journalist Nikolai Novikov, played in the prohibition process. The excessive influence of this local middle-ranking official has come to be treated as a reflection of a broader political and cultural phenomenon in terms of a liberalized model of administrative subordination, which emerged during the Great Reforms, and the growing interaction of enterprising, energetic bureaucrats with the nationally-minded segment of public opinion.
The article goes on to discuss the notions Novikov and his fellow officials were developing about the significance of the alphabet’s Cyrillization for the “Russification” of the Lithuanians. Dolbilov argues that these Russifiers were definitely interested in dealing with the Lithuanians in this way, paying a lesser share of attention to fighting the perceived threat of Polonization (i.e., the concept of Lithuanians as potential Poles). Moreover, thanks to such activities, the educational branch of Imperial administration for decades became an informal centre for the provision of special expertise on the Lithuanians and more influential, in this individual instance, than the Ministry of the Interior.
Novikov’s attitudes were shaped far less by a linguistically-based knowledge of how to transform Lithuanian peasant children into loyal, Russian-speaking subjects than by the populist and anti-elitist values of the Great Reform era. He heavily accented the social aspects of assimilating the Lithuanians, who he saw as part of the Empire’s liberated peasantry. In this light, Cyrillization was intended to help overcome the divergence of the Samogitian and Lithuanian dialects, which had probably been exaggerated by the officials. This unification, for Novikov and his collaborators, was particularly important in that it meant a step towards a supposedly civilizing and integrating social homogenization of the rural masses in Kaunas Province, making them receptive to Great Russian communal (obshchina) ways and practices. Such a vision strongly affected the Russifiers’ ideas about teaching methods and, moreover, the teaching objectives in the so-called ‘people’s schools’ in Kaunas Province. Even when the Imperial government’s reformist spirit began to evaporate, the Cyrillic script continued to be viewed as both a tool and a sign of the benevolent liberation of the peasantry en masse from the domination of a selfish and backward elite, namely the Catholic clergy: the overriding official myth of emancipation having come from the tsar proved to be tenacious.
Until the turn of the nineteenth century, the combination of bureaucratic inertia and lack of co-ordination between the different branches of the administration, on the one hand, and the legacy of the 1860s reformist aspirations, on the other, prevented the Lithuanian case from being thoroughly considered in the bureaucracy from an ethno-linguistic perspective beyond the realm of social stereotypes. In 1881, Lev Makov, the director of the Department for the Religious Affairs of Foreign Faiths under the Ministry of the Interior, supported an attempt by Telљiai Bishop Aleksandr Beresniewicz to lift the 1865 ban, pointing out that it was not the Latin alphabet but its prohibition that was facilitating the assimilation of the Lithuanians by the Poles. However, the attempt was killed by the Ministry of Public Education which saw this concession as a dramatic and compromising break in the continuity of the policies it had been pursuing since the mid-1860s, including restrictions on the Catholic clergy’s educational activities.