The Russian empire – the boundless, loosely structured and relatively undergoverned unity of lands, jurisdictions, and peoples – was perceived by many educated contemporaries, as well as by contemporary historians, as an archaic and underdeveloped political and social space. With so many obvious, sometimes even legally defined demarcation lines of social estate, class, confession, and language, why would such an empire need “race” – one of the key categories of Western modernity in its encounter with human diversity which helped to conceptualize new social stratifications in a crystallizing mass society and to distance the colonial “Others”?^[1] The Russian empire differed from the type of the overseas empire, and its course of modernization in many ways diverged from a “typical” Western path (the latter understood both as a practical scenario and an analytical model). Various groups, institutions and establishments within and outside the empire described it simultaneously in the categories of dynastic authority, romantic nationalism, imperial civic loyalty, collective citizenship (through social and confessional corporations), and cultural “Russification,” among others. According to a 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 early twentieth century, evoked (with a few significant exceptions) only a limited response in Russia.”^[2]

Even Russian anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century is deemed a non-racial phenomenon by many historians.^[3] Recent historiograhic discussions aimed at the “normalization” of Russian history within the broader European context tended to reject the rigid opposition of Russia and “the West” (the latter seen as the norm). These discussions inspired the critique of the Sonderweg paradigm of Russian history,^[4] and stimulated interest in the understudied projects of modernization of the imperial self-representation and practices of the management of differences.^[5] Still, regardless of the emerging concern with racial thinking, especially among the students of the Soviet period,^[6] “Russian race” remains an element of the Sonderweg discourse, indicating the fixation on the “archaic” attributes of empire and allowing for the conceptual “orientalization” of the Russian past. The reasons for this can be found in the ambiguities of those cultural distances that theoretically are to be 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. Equally problematic would be conceptualizing 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).^[7] The Russian autocracy was persistent in its refusal to share its “real” and discursive authority with modern elite social groups, thus preventing 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,” modernization/undermodernization paradigm, poetics of national liberation from the “prison of peoples,” or a 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. The complexity of historical reality of the period and pluralism of explanatory models describing this reality can be characterized as an imperial situation. It is this epistemological constellation rather than the formal status of an empire that makes the Russian Empire a peculiar research subject. Hence, the status of the “science of race” in Russia differed from situations in most other colonial empires, particularly “overseas empires,” precisely because “race” was perceived in a peculiar Russian sociopolitical and cultural context.
The unusual complexity of this social context had nothing to do with the “mysterious Russian soul”: its individual components could be easily identified and described in terms of conventional categories of archaism and modernity as developed in the European public discourse of the epoch. Much in Russian imperial history 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. Russian intellectual elites in the nineteenth century simply 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.
As I intend to show in this article, in the Russian empire “race” became a category of the opposition liberal discourse, while being virtually ignored by the state and state-sponsored science. 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.^[8] But even then liberalism continued to preserve its character of a general “state of mind” par excellence and retained a very broad definition of political values without a clearly defined political program.^[9] 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 gravely mistrusted the influential Russian conservative elite and compromised their liberal principles to minimize the scale of the conservatives’ political representation.^[10] Moreover, through the cluster of related, synonymous, or interchangeable notions of “progressivism,” “Europeanness,” “Westernization,” “modernization,” “populism,” etc., “Liberalism” was appropriated by modernist nationalists as well as enlightened conservatives, and by the leftist opponents of the latter from the non-radical 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.^[11] Different currents within Russian liberal anthropology shared a common agenda of rational re-conceptualization of the empire, of finding an objective and universal language of its representation as a modern European country with a potential for the future besides revolution or disintegration along national lines.
In my analysis of the Russian liberal anthropological paradigm I will not address the old and complicated debate of how “liberal” or “illiberal” the very “essence” of anthropology was (this science in time became firmly affiliated with colonial politics, radical social engineering, and racism). Going beyond our retrospective projections, we may better grasp the specific agenda of liberal anthropology by focusing on the rise of race science under specific historical circumstances. Equally important is the role of individuals that actually determined the final outlook of each anthropological paradigm in different national (and “multinational”) contexts.
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.^[12] 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 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 non-elite consumers of culture. By turning its attention to those who had been excluded from the high-brow “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.^[13] 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).”^[14] 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).^[15] 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.^[16] The politicization of scientifically established human distinctions was incompatible with a liberal ethos of the universalist anthropological paradigm and its new, much more 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 anti-racist world-view. 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 the 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. What happened to liberalism that had been immanent to the new racial science at its inception, and so attractive to the educated middle-class and bourgeois professionals who filled the ranks of amateur and professional anthropologists? Why, by the 1910s, had liberalism become marginalized in European anthropology, and what kind of settings favored the persistence of the liberal anthropological paradigm in the Russian imperial context? These are the general questions that frame my study of Russian physical anthropology.

* * *

The first Russian university chair of Anthropology was set in Moscow University in 1879 – the same year 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 the 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 different 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 of 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 on its part proved to be absolutely disinterested in the expertise offered by St. Petersburg anthropologists, and unwilling to support their initiatives at modernizing the 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 major center of Russian national anthropology, with psychiatry Professor Ivan Alekseevich Sikorsky (father of the renowned aircraft constructor) as the leading proponent of Russian racial nationalism.^[23] Sikorsky aspired to scientifically re-imagine 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 pre-historic archeology, 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 these three major loci.^[24] The constant intra-communal 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” (RAZh) published by the Division became the major instrument of its discursive control and an effective tool for the marginilization of other (non-liberal) 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 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, Alexander 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 carrier 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 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 recreated-as-a-modern-state Russian empire. In their utopian pursuit they had to rely on the existing official pre-national (ethnic) and confessional nomenclatures of peoples (e.g., Velikorossy – Great Russians, Malorossy – Little Russians or Velikorossy 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 pre-modern 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 anti-universalist and anti-evolutionist 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 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 generalization 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] 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 received immunization from the 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 Hfedir Vovk, 1847-1918). His biography included membership in the Ukrainian Gromada, years of political exile, a Ukrainophile “brand” of ethnography, and a major anthropological project of constructing the “Ukrainian race” as a homogeneous and historically the most authentic Slavic race.^[30] A liberal anthropological paradigm was the natural choice for leftist intellectuals such as Alexander 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 down in 1905 by a police officer for providing free medical assistance to wounded street fighters during the December Moscow apprising.^[31] Among his colleagues in the informal anthropological community were people such as Samuil Abramovitch 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.^[32] 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 “little Russian” population of the Kobyliak district according to the instructions supplied by the 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.^[33] Moscow liberal anthropology did not consider an expert’s ethnicity as influencing 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 leader of the Russian school of liberal anthropology of imperial diversity was the Moscow University professor and Chair of the Moscow Anthropological Division, Dmitry Nikolaevitch Anuchin (1843-1923).^[34] He may be justifiably called a “Russian Virchow” for the similarity of their scientific approaches, political temperament, and the ability to keep the anthropological community within the limits of the liberal anthropological paradigm.^[35] 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 the Chair of the Moscow Anthropological Division; his influence in RAZh was decisive; at the same time he used one of the major Russian liberal newspapers – Russkie Vedomosti – as its co-editor to promote his understanding of liberal politics and the role of the progressive “national science” in it; beginning from 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;^[36] his students also held leading positions in formal and informal anthropological hierarchies.
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…”^[37]

Anuchin was a committed evolutionist and Darwinist, which was an important factor in academic as well as in the public ideological divide. In the 1850s, when the Moscow Society of Students of Nature (Obschestvo 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.^[38] 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 the Lovers of the 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 with St. Petersburg.^[39] 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 Archeology, History and Ethnography” (1878) and the Society of Natural Scientists (1869). The first society developed the ethnography of “Russian civilizing mission” among the Volga region’s non-Russian population,^[40] while the latter advanced physical anthropology in the forms ranging from pre-historic archeology to anthropology of the “living population.”^[41] 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 advanced (ethnically) 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 Professor P. F. Lesgaft, Professor V. M. Bekhterev, and later on Professor 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 that 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 natural scientific outlook. Attitudes toward Darwinism formed an epistemological and ideological split that often divided not only “fathers and sons,” but peers from the same university excavating the same archeological site in search of old skulls (as it happened in Kazan). This split was an element of a more general polarization based on one’s acceptance (or non-acceptance) of the freedom of scientific inquiry as being a 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, there were conservatives and anti-modernists who, like the modernists, stood for progress and enlightened values, only 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 – not 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.^[42]
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,^[43] yet as a Darwinist he was very critical of social Darwinism and any “abuses” of evolutionism beyond its most broad and 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.”^[44]

Struggling with the only deficiency (but so painfully obvious in the Russian context) 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.^[45] This interpretation became standard for the Russian liberal anthropological discourse.^[46]
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 the 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 how liberal anthropologists defined the objective of their discipline. Only a natural history of humanity, as Anuchin told Tolstoy, could provide “justification for many phenomena” in the peoples’ 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….”^[47] 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, cells theory, and other issues absolutely critical for Anuchin (but probably irritating for 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 anti-rationalism into his 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….”^[48]

The liberal idea of evolution through education and progress of science toward a better understanding of “objective” laws of development, and correspondingly toward better forms of political coexistence had universal implication 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 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 a 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.”^[49]

The author of this article, Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii (1851-1916), 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 and a source of his knowledge about the history of communal ownership of land,^[50] 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 on 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 in the Russkie Vedomosti (“Russian News”) the materials on imperial diversity, especially if they pretended to provide a scholarly expertise. In one comment Anuchin explains that educated inorodtsy, especially from the Caucasus, but also 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 decomposed 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….”^[51]

The refusal of liberal anthropologists to accept a hierarchical racial or cultural language, and scientifically validate larger national political entities, as well as their mantra of the preponderance of a “mixed physical type,” alongside with the ideology of rational cognition of all peoples 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 anti-racist, progressive and interested in racial mixture. RAZh quoted Virchow as presumably saying that Russia possessed the keys to the whole range of the most important questions advanced by modern European anthropology.^[52] Indeed, only Russia was able to combine within the European continent the anthropology of “national self-cognition” and the anthropology of diversity and interaction; and only Russia brought together Europe and Asia – the “cultured” and those “others” who were opposed to it.^[53]
Virchow was working in the context of the German national unification, but his obvious German liberal patriotism had to encompass his Slavic background. The prob-lem must have occupied him very early: as a student he already corresponded with his father about “our ancestors” from the “Polish tribe” from Pom-erania.^[54] 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 the pre-historic times. This kind of anthropology was very appealing for 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:

“…the study of the type of the German people, or, to be more precise, determining those different types which participated in its formation and, after having mixed in the course of many centuries, caused the contemporary diversity of its physical traits.”^[55]

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 on a professor of anthropology in Khar’kiv University, Aleksei Arsenievich Ivanovskii (1866-1934),^[56] praised the diversity of the imperial population that “has no parallels in any western-democratic state.” He saw the task of Russian anthropologists in breaking this diversity down to its component “physical types,” and to “find their similarities and differences, to establish the level of their kinship….”^[57] Ivanovskii personally attempted to accomplish this immense task in his dissertation defended at Moscow University “On the Anthropological Composition of the Russian Population.”^[58] He invented a comparative method of anthropological classification which 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 than three.^[59] The classification itself was organized 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 the 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 among the Slavic group was simply unprecedented. Ivanovskii distinguished the “Slavonic anthropological group” that included Great Russians, Little Russians and Byelorussians, Poles, Lithuanians, but also Kazan Tatars, Bashkirs and Kalmyks (yet excluded Little Russians of the Kyiv province and the Kuban’ Kazaks).^[60] 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 (ino-rodtsy)?^[61]
However, Ivanovskii’s deconstruction of the accepted ethno-linguistic 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.^[62] At the same time, “Great Russians” measured at a provincial level showed the highest degree of kinship with Poles, and only the 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 Byelorussians,” 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 Byelorussians.”^[63]

Despite its surprising conclusions, the classification of Ivanovskii was, with some reservations, adopted by the anthropological community and served as a general scholarly framework for the realization of the 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 for 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 the grand scheme of Ivanovskii in order to demonstrate the scholarly relevance of 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 anti-colonial academic and political agenda. First of all, he insisted on the authenticity of the original Georgian – as opposed to the official imperial – toponymy: instead of such categories as “Georgia” and “Georgians,” he used “sanctified by the worldview of the nation” categories such as “Kartveli” and “Sakartvelo.”^[64] 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 as not just self-descriptive, but also as more accurate categories needed for an “objective” scientific study of Georgia aimed at the de-colonization 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 territory “the country” (strana), and described it in the language of the Georgian original 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.^[65] Dzhavakhov’s imagination crossed the borders of the Russian empire and included within the “Georgian country” (whose population 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.”^[66] 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 Lovers 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 for Georgians brunet type with a dash of mixed and partly of 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.^[67] 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 with the Jews of Southern Russia and Kazan Tatars.^[68] Regardless of the fact that these “racial relatives” had only a 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 poli-tical 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 anti-colonial rhetoric. And yet, only the liberal anthropological paradigm prevented people like Dzhavakhov from using science to justify policies which would later in the twentieth century become firmly affiliated with studies of race, such as ethnic and racial cleansing, population displacements, mandatory “medicalization” of the “national body,” and others. Liberal anthropology in the Russian imperial context remained until the very end of the empire 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, non-authoritarian) intellectual and political schemas look insufficient in the Russian academic and social context.
The crisis of liberalism during the inter-war period was a pan-European 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,”^[69] or according to another interpretation, the “empire of knowledge,”^[70] made the study of human resources a state priority.^[71] 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 speed up 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.^[72]
Physical anthropology was not outlawed in 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), a few university chairs and laboratories.^[73] 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 pre-Revolutionary 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.^[74] 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 problems with human resources better than an expert in racial types. Similarly, the liberal anthropology of imperial diversity lost its raison d’кtre that could be formulated as the mapping of human variety in a spacious country. Only unlike criminal or military anthropology which were fundamentally practice-oriented, the shift from conceptual to narrowly defined practical tasks was especially destructive for 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 pre-revolutionary Moscow-oriented liberal anthropology were engaged in a partial deconstruction of the old liberal paradigm,^[75] and self-legitimization through focusing on sanitary and eugenicist agendas.^[76] 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 pre-historic (pre-social) epochs.^[77] Rather than putting forward a new explanatory paradigm, a reduced version of Russian anthropology “froze” the already outdated concepts and approaches of the old liberal anthropology without keeping the original liberal conceptual framework. Liberal anthropology thus became a “dead language,” similar to Latin in pre-revolutionary Russian high schools (gymnasiums). Yet Soviet science (and parascientific ideologies) did not solve or even address the problem that was central for the liberal anthropological paradigm – the problem of elaborating a modern language to name, describe and politically legitimize the human diversity in the imperial situation.