Ethnographic maps delineating nationalities (Ger. Nationalitäten, Fr. nationalités, Rus. narodnosti) were not a Soviet innovation. Modern political uses of nationalities maps date at least to the mid-nineteenth-century borderland policies of autocratic sovereigns in the Habsburg and Romanov dynastic empires. The maps first emerged intellectually in the context of German romantic nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, as a response to the rhetoric of Enlightenment universalism.^[1] Field cartographers working for states nevertheless shared in the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason and scientific progress, for the conflicting purposes of territorial governance and state-led modernization. Institutionally supported cartographers imagined that they could rationalize subjects living in enclaves or designated areas, all the while guarding the state center against political mobilization by a “historical” nation (Poland, Hungary) or “non-historical” nationality (Czechs, Ruthenians/Ukrainians, etc.) as they understood these constructs in the nineteenth century.^[2] At first glance, ethnographic maps would seem tailor-made for comparisons in comparative empire studies and nationalism studies. After the 1848 revolts and the Polish uprising of 1863-1864, classificatory grids of nationalities became increasingly useful as tools of empire-saving and nation-building in contested borderland provinces between Vienna and St. Petersburg. The durable Vienna Congress system, which lasted from 1815 to 1914, favored the status quo of dynastic empires in East-Central Europe, and rested on the presupposition that military and ethnographic cartography were required for the administration of borderlands. Grids were applied by state sovereigns and bureaucracies to control minority populations in an ad hoc manner, through the reductionist ascription of racial/ethnic kinship categories of “spoken language” (gesprochene Sprache) or “native tongue” (rodnoi iazyk) as markers of identity.
In the article, I argue that in a late-nineteenth-century Turnerian epoch, when pundits agonized about the closing of frontiers and the end to colonial aggrandizement, the construction of space was a geopolitical project deeply rooted in the history and epistemological structures of European cartography in East-Central Europe. The use of maps by imperial states and nonstate borderland actors to make modern political claims to closed territorial spaces signaled an age in which “metageography” became thoroughly unbound. By metageography, I mean the discursive practice of territorial revisionism, by which agents call for radical alterations of state borders, the rewriting of the history of lands and peoples into new, totalizing grand narrative, and, as if often the case, the forced assimilation, marginalization, and/or prescribed transfer of so-called “ethnic” populations. Applied to the borderlands of East-Central Europe in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, metageography was especially precarious since most borderland provinces were demographically mixed, and truth-claims to land using mainly state-sponsored maps were not only that of nations against empires, but nations against nations. Across fixed borders, self-identifying “ethnic” nationals adhering to state-ascribed labels sought unification with co-national kin, usually judged by the association of language with communal identity. Scientific accuracy was emphasized by sovereigns to their military personnel and bureaucratic officials in conjunction with a state’s “historical” mission; but one could never really know what the actual population distribution was like on the ground.^[3] Consequently, maps as knowledge were as much blueprints for geopolitical standardization and revision – thus means of propaganda, as they were verifications of what was actually “out there.” Using the nationalities maps of empires, metageographical discourse was adapted by proponents of “historical” and “non-historical” nations for various state-building efforts in borderlands.^[4]
For understanding the nature of geopolitical projects, any comparative analysis of ethnographical maps between Vienna and St. Petersburg must tread lightly, since the category of nationality can be easily reified as a “scientific” fact. Four caveats must be kept in mind in the case studies that follow. First, in order for comparisons to work, the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires generally have to be postulated with a problematic negative teleology, as declining empires and generally weak states over dynastic lands that are sprawling and patchwork. The Habsburgs and Romanovs used maps with a similar purpose in mind: to claim and hold in perpetuity the early modern “historical” lands of Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine, and subsume the populations of these borderlands into their own respective state-building efforts, respectively. Second, state-affiliated cartographers working between the Habsburg and Russian Empires, in the lands of former Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine, had little regard for the fluidity of borderland identities. At the nonstate level toward the end of the nineteenth century, this fluidity included forced conversions, mixed marriages, language shifts, déclassé affinities, and patterns of in- and out-migration from impoverished borderland regions (Pol. kresy), where political affiliations among non-landowning populations were mostly local in nature.^[5] As we shall see, even cartographers’ identities themselves had multiple components; many came from the borderlands of early modern Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine. Third, late nineteenth-century ethnographic cartographers at the state and sub rosa national levels operated in a transformative colonial, and not just imperial milieu, in which the reception-side of map texts and images as an imposed form of knowledge was mostly ignored. In the territorial settlements to the Russo-Turkish War of 1875-1878 and the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which envisioned the parceling of Africa, the great powers employed military, pedagogical, and ethnographic maps to justify expansion and self-aggrandizement at the expense of indigenous, or simply local, populations. Fourth, science was overwhelmingly championed by state cartographers and their national imitators prior to World War I. From the seats of power in dynastic lands, errors in depicting physical landscapes or demographic composition could be potentially fatal to state security. Nation-building elites, furthermore, had to offer knowledge of their country as their own, especially for the purpose of making truth-claims to land in an international arena, among competing states. Cartographic scientists did not merely confirm the identities of people inhabiting an objective reality contained by provinces and regions; they had a complex, and rather flawed, role in applying as “determinate” the concepts and categories that ordered lands and peoples geospatially.

ROMANOV/HABSBURG STATE MANAGEMENT AND MAPS AS TOOLS OF EMPIRE

Taken comparatively, the Habsburg and Romanov empires certainly can be considered multiethnic, since they had substantial minority populations within their borders. But this study brackets ethnicity, considering it as a by-product of specific state prerogatives, geographical circumstances, and historical contingencies. Indeed, if ethnicity is projected backward and applied “scientifically” to map all linguistic minorities, nearly every defunct empire could be called multiethnic. In juxtaposing empires for the sake of ostensible comparison, the term should be used carefully, taking into account the indeterminate formation of polycentric empire/nation trajectories in Central and Eastern Europe after 1848. As conservative pillars of the Vienna Congress system, Vienna and St. Petersburg had transformed the Polish-Lithuanian estate and crownland system into dynastic lands, which tsars and monarchs administered as their own provinces. Sovereigns faced intractable problems of political, religious and linguistic loyalty, and pursued largely inept, ad hoc minority policies when dealing with incorporated early modern nations. As relatively weak and hardly homogeneous states, they devised nationalities’ policies most suitable to maintaining their own “unique” status, culturally and politically; but this projection of power-knowledge could not be applied across all state territories in the same manner. In locales where legal representation was lacking, social inequality was striking, and a kind of representative and egalitarian “multicultural” pluralism was never practically obtainable, state rulers and loyalist bureaucratic officials used maps to guard against the growing national consciousness of elites and the people they claimed to represent.
As Theodore Weeks and Witold Rodkewicz each have shown in their extensive archival research on “Russification” and “Rossification” in the nine “northwestern” provinces of the empire after the 1860s, “Poles” were generally regarded by Russian administrators as political subversives par excellence, in consideration of their claim to early modern statehood and high culture, and their propensity for revolt against the tsar. The Russian (rossiiskii) state administration and bureaucracy had no systematic “master plan” to russify other narodnosti in the provinces, among which they considered the Poles, for the express purpose of ensuring russkii loyalty. Blanket russification was not possible for a weak rossiiskii state that lacked a strong russkii affiliation to the Fatherland in borderlands; as Weeks makes clear, even the word itself was not used regularly in Russian official documents. The treatment of minorities in the sprawling empire tended to be on a case-by-case basis.^[6] A similar point could be made of Austro-Hungarian nationalities’ policy after the Ausgleich of 1867. In the case of autonomous Galicia, the Habsburgs granted administrative power and linguistic and confessional primacy to the Poles, and the de facto right to discriminate against Ruthenian/Ukrainian cultural and political demands.^[7] Polish noble federalism, which laid claim to a “historical” rather than “ethnic” definition of the Polish nation until Dmowski’s proto-fascist Endecja movement, appeared all but dead after the failed 1863 uprising, both in terms of Europe’s existing international system and in relation to the difficult-to-differentiate minority peoples – Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, etc. – of the borderlands.^[8]
The Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO), established by edict (ukaz) in 1845 via the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), demonstrated Russian imperial priorities for the ordering of borderlands. It became the world’s fourth geographical society, after those in Paris (Société de Géographie de Paris, 1821), Berlin (Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1828), and London (Royal Geographical Society, 1830). The IRGO functioned as a civil institution, but was within the military, bureaucratic and colonialist framework of empire, and subject to the direct interference of the Romanov tsars through the MVD. Patriotic scientists like Pyotr Semyonov worked as “enlightened bureaucrats,” in Bruce Lincoln’s designation, while also retaining an amateurish interest in all things cultural and scientific, especially the natural sciences.^[9] They were inspired by the Decembrists’ zeal for ethnographic study, and realized the need for Russian socioeconomic improvement. Work for the IRGO naturally presupposed a loyalty to Russian imperial governance and to tsarist power in St. Petersburg as the political creator of the grid, therefore its center. After the failed Polish uprisings, Russian scientists followed tsarist policy in limiting the incorporated territory of Poland to an isolated and provincial “ethnographic” domain within “European Russia,” with a demographic majority of Poles who could not spread their culture, language or religion eastward into “Russian” territories. Russian imperial logic dictated that the Poles’ claim to being part of a “historic” nation had to be discredited somehow. From the standpoint of central state security, regional peripheries were perceived as incapable of assimilation, and therefore dangerous. As a result, no “separatist” or even alternative territorial maps could be published in Moscow or St. Petersburg. In cartography, issues of separatism – the Polish Question or the incorporation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – could never be acknowledged by the state. The IRGO incorporated the functional research of its members as they were dispatched from Moscow and St. Petersburg into three larger regions, namely the Western provinces, Central Asia, and Siberia.^[10]
Ethnographic cartographers of the IRGO included the academician Pyotr von Köppen (1793-1864), a corresponding member from a German-speaking family in Kharkov. Russia’s very first “nationalities” expert, he was one of the intellectual forebears to the first All-Russian Census of 1897. Von Köppen approved of the state-imperial incorporation of western territories, and proceeded from there to lend support to state modernization and administration as he saw it. In gathering intelligence about enclave minorities in the borderlands for the purpose of estimating their potential for disloyalty, he promoted the integration of the former territories of Poland-Lithuania into a paper classificatory grid that held together the vast and linguistically diverse empire. His Ethnographic Map of European Russia was printed by the central St. Petersburg branch of the IRGO in 1851, after years of extensive research. Lithographed in color, the map included an accompanying text and key to the thirty-eight “non-Russian” nationalities in alphabetical order, with Moscow at the center and the population of Russia’s European territories, including Estonians, Finns, Germans, Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Livonians, Poles, Swedes, and Tatars. Von Köppen found that the most convenient way to label the Poles (poliaki) in the western provinces was by confession, since they were (supposedly) all Roman Catholic. He considered the Lithuanians a tribe (plem’ia), and he defined the Jews (evrei) as inorodtsy.^[11] The Poles, if defined (as he did) as a “non-historical” rather than historical group, could be considered part of the “Baltic Sea Region” (Pribaltika) together with the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Livonians (litovtsy, latyshi, esty, livy). The Little Russians (malorossiiane) and Belarusians were included as Russians. The Russians (russkie), he concluded, had “a mixture of blood” (smeshenie krovi). Therefore, “it would be very difficult to purely define the borders of the Slavic Great Russians.” His categorization scheme of nationalities, which he researched exhaustively, presupposed a racial/ethnic foundation for minorities based on perceived language usage. He therefore set a major precedent for Russian imperial census takers in the last half of the century.^[12] The map went through many editions, received nothing but favorable reviews, and the IRGO awarded him their grandest prize. In 1893, von Köppen’s son proudly claimed in his father’s biography that the three original copies were located in the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and the personal library of the Emperor. For later Soviet nationalities policy, it is also especially revealing that his work was celebrated in the USSR as Russia’s first “scientific” ethnographic map.^[13]
The first Habsburg state ethnographic maps were researched and drawn as a response, if not a direct reaction, to the 1848 national upheavals. Pro-imperial scientists and aristocratic officials took the lead, producing intelligence-based ethnographic maps for non-German Nationalitäten. Aiming to maintain order and stability, it was the Habsburgs who initiated attempts to devise a systematic classification system of peoples, even before von Köppen’s work. By the late 1840s, the early modern lands of former Poland-Lithuania became an imperial laboratory in which militarily supported scientists and civil servants could operate politically. Examples of early Habsburg maps of Nationalitäten, which ordered “non-historical” borderland peoples by spoken (enclave) language, included Rudolph Alois Fröhlich’s 1848-1849 Newest National and Linguistic Map of the Austrian Imperial State and the Bordering Lands with a More Precise Classification of Individual Language Families, and Baron Karl von Czoernig’s 1855-1856 Ethnographic Map of the Austrian Monarchy.^[14] Largely because the empires felt that such maps were useful for knowing, and potentially controlling, their Nationalitäten or narodnosti, in the 1850s and 1860s the totalizing practice of mapping became a scientifically legitimated research endeavor subsidized by the two East-Central European autocracies. After the Ausgleich of 1867, the imperial powers used maps for decennial census-taking purposes. On an official level, the year 1869 was the first one when Austria-Hungary used language as a proxy for ethnicity.^[15] The Habsburg bureaucracy became a massive collector and assembler of information. Vienna used unit categories of language instead of unit categories of combined language and primordialist national/territorial enclave (as would be the later Soviet practice). Cartographers developed maps for census inventories, gazetteers, and other major administrative compilations of statistics.
The Russian bureaucratic mode of cartographic representation, like the Habsburg one, was improvised for the purpose of ensuring territorial integrity and state security, at least on paper. After the inauspicious Polish uprising of 1863, the logic of Russian political and cultural imperialism – rossiiskii and russkii – dictated that “Little Russian” and “White Russian” peasants were to be included as fellow Orthodox, or (according to pan-Slav ideology) designated under the linguistic, and also racial/ethnic, banner of Eastern Slavdom.^[16] In imagining their “European” borderlands, Russian mapmakers used terms such as the “Baltic Sea Region” (Pribaltika) and the “Vistula River Land” (Privislenskii krai) in the 1850s and 1860s, which offered a geographically determinist justification for incorporating former Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine within the empire’s “natural” boundaries.^[17] Russian imperial ethnographers, anthropologists, and other social scientists counted and described the languages, along with everyday customs (byt) and primordial features of minorities inhabiting the empire. Once the scientifically legitimated categories of race/ethnicity arrived on European maps after 1848, they were there to stay.
The extent to which mapped populations could become agents of their own self-categorization heavily depended on the imperial borderlands in which they lived in East-Central Europe, and their relative access to a capital city with the necessary human and technical resources for producing maps. If the militarily stronger Russian tsars responded to each Polish insurrection with de-Polonizing measures, directly and indirectly, the weak Austrian monarchy meanwhile granted considerable concessions to Polish élites in Galicia in exchange for their political loyalty.^[18] The Ausgleich granted autonomy de facto to landowning Poles supporting the Austro-Hungarian autocracy and nobility. Right up until 1914, Galicia served a provincial center whereby the Poles working as civil servants had unprecedented access to state bureaucratic resources and a pathway to Vienna. With Kraków as its center, the provincial administrative zone of Galicia was the political milieu having the least centralized state interference in the production and dissemination of maps. Foregoing insurrection, Polish positivists accordingly upgraded their nationalism to meet the needs of autocratic statecraft and government. Galician Polish literary and scientific contacts with official Viennese cartographic publishing firms – publishing mainly in German – increased substantially. Maps were often edited by bilingual or trilingual Austrian, Polish, and Austro-Polish school teachers for use in provincial classrooms. In 1879, geography was introduced formally as a science in the curriculum of all Galician schools; and consequently, more Polish-language maps and atlases proliferated in Galicia.^[19]
Aware of the volatility of their nationalities’ policy elsewhere in dynastic lands, the Habsburg administration generally allowed the Poles to have their autonomy and produce Polonizing cultural works as long as they did not make another push for independence. In 1865, the regionally based Krakow Scientific Society (Towarzystwo Krakowskie Naukowe), consisting of mainly Austrians and Poles, established a commission to oversee all administrative geography and cartography of Galicia. In 1872, the Society formally became the Polish Academy of Learning (Polska Akademia Umiejętności), the direct predecessor to the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1875, Austro-Polish member scholars passed a motion to research all of Galicia according to six scientific departments of knowledge: topography and orography (the study of mountain ranges), geology, botany, zoology, chemistry (of land and waterways), and climatology and meteorology.^[20] Habsburg authorities entrusted loyalist Polish statisticians to carry out the research, and even to print the topographical and ethnographic maps for the region.^[21] The bottom line for the relationship between Vienna and Galicia was that the political status quo had to be maintained in counting the populations of this demographically mixed area. The 1875 Statistical Atlas of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria with the Grand Principality of the Krakow had six separate maps for the relative number of inhabitants, local urban area, population density of settled Poles, population density of Rusyns (Ruthenians), ratio of Jews to Christians, and ratio of sexes to each other. Two Austro-Polish cartographers, Maksymilian Bodyński and Jarosław Michałowski produced the Statistical Map of Galicia and Bukowina in an inventorying style as part of the Austrian census projects, with symbols and statistics for everything in the territory. It was the first administrative demographic atlas of Galicia with specifically ethnic categories, and also included a cartouche which, predictably, emphasized the benevolence of the Habsburg crown. Ultimately, by participating in, and interfering with, Habsburg statecraft, loyalist pro-imperial Poles learned how to use state-centered cartography for their own political purposes.

LITHUANIA, UKRAINE, POLAND: THREE CASE STUDIES IN GEOPOLITICAL SCHEMATIZING

1. IULII KUZNETSOV’S LITHUANIA

From its establishment in 1845, the IRGO gathered and assembled information about “European” and “Asiatic” Russia. It had the aim of serving an autocratic imperial state by working toward its socioeconomic improvement, while simultaneously preserving and expanding its borders, and collecting data from and about the provinces. Although these aims could seem contradictory in hindsight, for the state-centric and pro-modernization IRGO members and civil servants they made perfect sense. The IRGO and the Russian imperial administration established a Northwest Department in Vil’na in 1867, paralleled by the formation of the Southwest Department in Kiev in 1872. Officials thought it was possible to properly categorize the Lithuanian lands and peoples by language, culture and history, and therefore, at least on paper, define them as belonging to the state. The Russian imperial administration had understood the Ukrainians and Belarusians to be united with Russians in the Eastern Slav “family,” but things were assuredly more complicated with the Lithuanians and Jews in the Pale of Settlement. By language and religion/confession, the Lithuanians and Jews defied their classification schemes. The Lithuanians also did not fit because of national claims to be both “historical” (referring to medieval or early modern statehood) and “non-historical”; the Jews because of their restricted place in primarily cities and towns, i.e., non-contiguous territories, rather than so-called “ethnic” enclaves in provincial areas.
Modern Lithuanian nationalists asserted that the Lithuanian peasantry, not the Polonized szlachta, constituted the authentic Lithuanian nation. Lithuanian peasant populists like Jonas Basanavičius and Vincas Kudirka ignored large parts of “Polonocentric” early modern history in order to look back to the ancient and medieval period before the 1569 Union of Lublin.^[22] In aiming at the mobilization of the Lithuanians outside of a Polish framework, their modern Lithuanian version of history as applied to Poland-Lithuania starkly resembled the early modern imperial and modern Russian national versions. Without a supply of maps of the Duchy before 1569, or for that matter 1386, to document a completely independent statehood from Poland, such Lithuanian nation-builders focused on rewriting historical grand narratives, but often followed German or Russian imperial lines in order to distance themselves from Polish romantic national variants. In this way, they formed unintended alliances against the Poles with the Russians, and this showed how difficult it was for them to leave the grid.^[23] In part because of lack of access to cartographic resources and personnel, and imperial censorship of language or “dialects,” maps of Lithuania in Lithuanian and Belarus in Belarusian were not printed at this time. The Ukrainians had access to imperial cities such as Vienna, Lemberg, and Kiev, while the Lithuanians and Belarusians only had a Russian-controlled Vil’na.
It was actually Russian imperial cartographers, mostly state-assimilated Germans and army officers, who drew topographical maps of the Grand Duchy’s lands following the Napoleonic wars. An intriguing account of such practices of scientific cartography vis-а-vis the political absorption of the Lithuanian-Belarusian borderland in the former demographically mixed territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The case of Iulii Kuznetsov (1840-1905) illustrated the problems of ethnographic cartography. Kuznetsov was an ethnographer, statistician, and devoted imperial civil servant who attempted to promote Great Power imperialism without altogether Russifying the Lithuanians.^[24] An opportunistic believer in science and modernizing Russian administration, Kuznetsov was rather naпve; an intelligence officer of sorts for an empire whose policies he barely seemed to grasp, he does not seem to have been a conscious agent of cultural or political Russification.
The original members of the IRGO branch in Vil’na consisted largely of governors-general and state researchers fresh out of postgraduate state university studies. With a letter of recommendation from Fyodor Lütke, the head of the IRGO himself, Kuznetsov, a candidate of St. Petersburg University in the field of ethnography, belonged to the latter group. After some bookish learning about the languages and customs of the peoples in the northwestern provinces of the empire, he began his empirical work for the Imperial Russian Geographical Society in 1868. The next year, in 1869, he and others of the IRGO Northwestern Branch embarked on a project to collect information about the “nationalities” in the provinces and how they related to Russian Orthodox peasants. At first, he neatly divided his objects of study into nationalities of Great Russians, Little Russians, White Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Zmuds, and Latvians. Kuznetsov based his research on field interviews, and what one might call Decembrist-inspired ethnographic questionnaires about peasant economy and customs.
Full of idealism in the spirit of the Great Reforms, Kuznetsov received a variety of empirically based tasks to fulfill. But the project became massively disorganized and impeded by the state and its bureaucracy. IRGO officials all had a common devotion to modernizing science, and met regularly to discuss the division of labor for research agendas in statistics, ethnography, and archaeography. Members of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), Ministry of Transportation and Communication (MPS), and Ministry of Finance (MF) regularly sent letters to Lütke and Semyonov, who were on the organizational board of the IRGO. For example, in an MVD circular on January 12, 1870, Kuznetsov was instructed to determine “the physical particulars of the type of tribe” and to compile a “table for anthropological marks of reference.” “Everyday customs,” or byt’, was the organizing concept.^[25] The scientists would have to catalog the color of hair, type of breasts, hands, legs, etc., and then come to a conclusion about national character and customs. Kuznetsov read all the circulars. In his journal entries for March-April 1871, he recorded the detailed instructions to determine in his statistical surveys: (1) the borders and dispersals of the Lithuanians and Latvians in the West-Russian (zapadno-russkii) region; (2) their demographic quantity; (3) a complete ethnographic description of the population according to physical patterns and peculiarities, clothing, everyday living patterns, language, national dialect, and national names for things; (4) the influence of the Lithuanians and Latvians on their neighbors and vice versa, insofar as they related to each other by tongue, geographical names and cultural interfacing; and (5) the economic status of the population up to the present. Kuznetsov was paid by the MVD for his work, although the sum was rather paltry.
On May 4, 1872, at the commemorative five-year anniversary of the local IRGO branch in Vil’na, one of the organizers, N. A. Sergievskii, spoke of the institution as a “living organism,” and the data collected by the members as “invaluable material for compiling a complete picture of the everyday life of the local peasant population.”^[26] But Kuznetsov began to think that the Lithuanians could not be classified anywhere. In a letter of November 30, 1873, he fluctuated between the assumption that he was investigating a “tribe” (plemia), and the idea that the Lithuanians might be “historical” in a different sense than the Russians. In a letter of December 22, 1874 to his supervisor, he described the “study of the Lithuanian and in part Latvian nationality, from the perspective of the inner unity of their character and way of life.” Then, in his professional journal, Kuznetsov recounted the pressure for empirical results. From 1874-1876, for every occasion when he asked for more time from his supervisors in the IRGO departments of statistics and ethnography, they grew more and more suspicious that he was not doing the required work. Privately, he wrote in frustration at the bureaucracy, “It is possible to say that this broad and detailed scientific project is completely endless.”
Finally, on December 13, 1876, Kuznetsov received an official letter from the MVD, not the IRGO, informing him that he was released from his service, and that the northwestern office was to be closed. Completely in the dark, he followed with letters of protest, at first thinking that it was because of his lack of results. But instead of demanding a reason from the Russian bureaucracy, he politely stressed the progressive scientific goals of the IRGO. He had worked on the mapping of Lithuania for nearly 10 years, and now had neither maps, nor anything else, to show for his labors. Stranded in the Suvalki/Suwałki region, Kuznetsov appealed to Pyotr Semyonov, asking for reinstatement, and the publication of his extensive, albeit scattered, data. The response was sympathetic, and Kuznetsov would become a member of the IRGO in 1880. But he was not allowed to publish, nor return to his old post in Vil’na. In a letter to another IRGO official on December 17, 1881, Kuznetsov declared the need to do research “for the sake of Russian antiquity.” On January 4, 1887, he again referred to the need “to define the Lithuanian-Latvian national territory in ancient times.” From the center to the periphery, Kuznetsov served as an opportunistic, and yet idealistic and progressive Russian bureaucratic scientist. In the final analysis, only the Russian central topographic agencies had the power, and the knowledge, to map Lithuania and ascribe territoriality and identities between official borders.^[27] Confident of the independence of empirical science from politics, Kuznetsov never would have claimed that he was “constructing” nationality by trying to squeeze peoples into fixed categories on a map; rather, he was applying the scientifically grounded nationality principle to Russian statecraft. In Lithuania, Kuznestov worked to continue the Petrine and Catherinian rossiiskii state-building projects of the eighteenth century. He assumed that everything had a place in the grid, but he strove for ten years, and ultimately failed, to superimpose a Russian statist model which would match adequately the psychological reality of the borderlands.

2. HRYHORII VELYCHKO’S UKRAINE

Although Polish émigré activists after 1831 had been producing maps in order to commemorate and claim “historical” Polish lands, the Ruthenians/Ukrainians strove to make a different set of claims. Not surprisingly, sets of Polish and Ruthenian or Ukrainian nation-builders each ultimately adopted the practices and social-scientific vocabulary of “non-historical” ethnographic mapping. As a result, their territorial claims clashed with each other, using identical forms of knowledge. The career of Hryhorii Velychko (1863-1933), a history teacher in Galicia and Polish-dominated Lwów/L’viv/Lemberg, may be taken as an example of the dynamics of Ukrainian cultural and political cartographic projects. Born in Mykolaпv, Velychko matriculated at the University of Jan Kazimierz in 1883 and taught at gymnasia at various outposts in Galicia while writing about geography as a science, in both Polish and Ukrainian. He aimed to gather sources and draw an ethnographic map of the Ruthenian/Ukrainian “homeland” that might be suitably historical. In Velychko’s search for sources, he followed Habsburg policy and accepted a priori the category of nationality. Velychko’s work aimed to be equal in quality with all the scientific representations by map- and atlas-makers in Western and Central Europe. The original plan was for him to consult not only with national Galician Ukrainian scholars of the national journal Prosvita, but also with Austrian professionals at the Military Institute in Vienna. As one of the editors of Prosvita, Mykola Drahomanov spent three fruitless years from 1889 to 1892 trying to get the map right. He had gathered sources and raised funds for its publication, which, he imagined, would accurately depict the Ukrainians in their national homeland, dispersed between the boundaries of the Visla, Bug, Dnipro, Donets Basin, Azov Sea, Kuban and Caucasus regions.
Velychko finished the map by 1893, and the map was sent to the journal Prosvita. But an important delay ensued. The two editors, Drahomanov and Ivan Franko, fretted about being unqualified critics of the map’s content in qualifying and quantifying the Ruthenian/Ukrainian population. With reluctance, Drahomanov agreed to write the review privately. Seeking to depict accurately demographic presence of Ukrainians, he criticized Velychko for relying on Great Russian (moskali) statistics which minimized their numbers, thus blindly respecting imperial claims and nomenclature. Ultimately, the journal delayed the final production of the map by two years, for reasons not entirely clear. Perhaps Velychko took Drahomanov’s criticisms harshly, but the delay was more likely for editorial or political reasons. In any case, the map was lithographed in L’viv, and the final Ukrainian-language version, Ethnographic Map of the Ukrainian-Rus’ Nation was finally printed by Prosvita in 1896. There appeared nineteen nationalities on the map, starting with the “Ukrainians-Rusyns.” Velychko’s conception of Ukrainian territoriality outlined the “ancient” lands settled and colonized under Polish and Russian rule. In 1897, also in L’viv, Prosvita published ten thousand copies of a reduced variant of the map and used it for its annual lithographed calendar. In 1899 Velychko became an active member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and in 1902 he published part of an unfinished work on the geography of Ukraine-Rus’.^[28] His map showed the need to delineate Ukrainian national aims while calculating Romanov and Habsburg (in Galicia, Austro-Hungarian, as well as Polish) policies.
Velychko’s map of Ukraine was important politically and intellectually. The delay in production, in my estimation, was due to the nation-builders’ internalization of the confusing social-scientific paradigm for understanding nationality, and the notion that “proof” of claim to lands and peoples could be visually represented by a westernizing technology of power. The map represented a Ukrainian acceptance of the nationality principle in order to identify a distinctive, mutually exclusive “non-historical” modern Ukrainian ethnolinguistic nation, consisting principally of the Ukrainian people. In Eastern Galicia, the Ukrainian “non-historical” assertion of the scientific basis for nationality was a leveling assertion which would de facto deny the Polish “historical” claim to the region, since the nationality principle could offer visual evidence in maps to substantiate the claim to a demographic (ethnolinguistic and cultural) majority in Eastern Galicia. In the 1890s, Ukrainian national activists more strongly distanced themselves from the labels of Ruthenian or “Rus’kyi” (which, they thought, had too much of a family resemblance to “Russian”) by calling themselves “Ukrainian” in the early modern sense. As an expression of the modern conception of nationality, Velychko’s map broke away from a Polish cultural assimilationist interpretation of “Ruthenian people of the Polish nation” (gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus) and from Russian imperial notions of Ukrainians as “Little Russians.” In Habsburg Galicia, Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv became the primary scientific outpost for a modern Ukrainian national cartography, and a pathway to Vienna. Nation-building activists like Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, who put forth a new historiographical scheme of East European history to account for Ukraine’s place in it, used maps to express this point. Late nineteenth-century nationalists like Velychko creatively appropriated imperial models in order to document their origins and apply the nationalities grid to cover in toto their homelands, which at least for Habsburg Eastern Galicia, was defined by “ethnic” language and affiliation.

3. EUGENIUSZ ROMER’S POLAND

Eugeniusz Romer (1871-1954), unquestionably the most influential Polish cartographer in the years surrounding World War I, also emerged from Austro-Hungarian Galicia in the 1890s.^[29] Unlike his Ukrainian counterpart, he had access to state resources and institutions which Velychko did not.^[30] Under amenable Habsburg auspices, Romer became the chair and first head in the newly founded Department of Geography (est. 1911) at the University of Jan Kazimierz (est. 1882) in Lwów/Lemberg. Selectively combining positivist state-building and romantic national commemorative tropes, he published technically sound Polish-language maps to refer to “historical” territories. Romer’s work showed that in the context of fin-de-siècle geopolitics and global territorial coverage, it was not possible to describe a region without an explicit political aim. No matter how objective maps seemed in the years before World War I, they were also indistinguishable from propaganda.
In Galicia, Romer had been an underground activist and geography teacher who supported linguistic and cultural, but not religious, Polonization in schools. He was convinced that science could be of great service to the Polish political cause, especially within an international context. Referring to a synthesis of physical geography, climatology, and statistics, Romer in 1912 defined what he called the “bridge position” (pomostowy położenie), which favored the renewal of Polish political independence as a strong state, stretching “naturally” from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Romer advanced this deterministic notion, a mirror image of eighteenth-century rossiiskii foreign policy, as a geopolitical challenge to tri-autocracy, and as a means to deny Ukrainian national aims for independence and “Ruthenian” (in his designation) demographic claims to Eastern Galicia. One year later, at the International Geographical Congress in Paris in 1913, Romer was appalled to see that Albrecht Penck’s völkisch representations of German irredenta in Polish “historical” territories. After that revelation, he set to work on revising maps and atlases of the Polish nation in its “natural” borders.
The year 1914 brought an opportunity for the renewal of the “historic” early modern nation, but it was unclear who would belong to it, or even where it was.^[31] Romer summarily rejected the Germanocentric cultural and political idea of Mitteleuropa, Romanov state claims, and the claims of “non-historical” nationalities (Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belarusians, linguistically defined) to the pre-1772 lands of “Poland.” He was cognizant of the necessity of science for making national claims, and the importance of maps and atlases of Poland as history, publicity, and propaganda. Politically conscious of his diplomatic audience in the alliance system, Romer insisted that Poland was a non-imperial Great Power, and that the nation needed to be re-established as a buffer state at the center of Europe in order to offset German and Russian aggression.
Romer’s maps indicated his selective adaptation of imperial/national currents in East-Central European ethnographic cartography. First was his all-important 1916 Geographical-Statistical Atlas of Poland, printed in Vienna, Warsaw and Kraków with text in Polish, French and German, and an astounding sixty-five maps and thirty-two tables. Information dealt with hypsometry, geology, climate, vegetation, history and economics. Romer paid attention to borders, population density, and demographics, and offered separate tables for “Poles” (Polacy), “Roman Catholics” (Rzymsko-Katolicy), “Jews” (Żydzi), “Poles in the Borderlands” (Polacy na Kresach), “Poles in Lithuania and Rus” (Polacy na Litwie i Rusi), and “Churches” (Kościóły). He compiled the data mainly from Habsburg sources: the Habsburg Central Statistical Committee, the House of Trade and Industry, the University of Vienna, privately from Austrian ministers and publicly from Austrian libraries, from the Jagiellonian library in Kraków and the city’s statistical office, and from collections of professors, priests, and antiquarians.
Second, Romer’s 1916 Military-Political Map of Poland was published as a propaganda brochure in Vienna and Lwów, on the occasion of the “Two Emperors’ Declaration” of November 5, 1916. Following defeats on the Western front, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Emperor Franz Joseph nominally agreed to the restoration of an independent Poland, although within undefined borders and uncertain constitutional limits. Picked up and published in popular Polish papers and geography newsletters in 1917, Romer’s map outlined pre-1772 borders from sea to sea. He included maps indicating Polish historical and (quantifiable) linguistic boundaries. Romer applied categories of nationality in listing “Polish Ethnographic Area with Greater Than 50% Poles,” “Sphere I and Sphere II of Polish Interests,” and “The Polish Crownlands under German and Austrian Occupation,” with indications of military fronts.
Third, Romer’s 1916 Lands of Old Poland: A Hypsometric Map, printed in Lwów and Vienna, was considered a direct threat because of its Polish national claims to Russian imperial lands. Evidently, the map was confiscated and placed under protection of the Russian imperial military censors in Petrograd on April 11, 1916, and had its title changed to Polish, Lithuanian, Rus’, and Bordering Lands. Romer’s romantic framing device for territory and “natural” boundaries extending to the Baltic Sea was an unmistakable reference to a “historical” Poland. Images referred back to the Jagiellonian dynasty. At the top of the map appeared the Wawel castle and statue to Mickiewicz, also with images of famous city landmarks, landscape views, and ethnographic types.
Fourth, Romer’s 1917-8 propaganda map in the form of a postcard, Just think! There are 30 million Poles! And until a united and independent Poland is reestablished… made a demographic claim to lands for the Polish “nationality,” and an early modern reference to the historical Poland in order to justify Polish independence to an English-speaking audience. Printed in Lausanne, the explanatory text for the map read in English, “Ancient Polish Republic Dismembered by Prussia, Russia and Austria 1772-1795.” Understanding the importance of science and international publicity, the Romerian imprint was scientific and geopolitical. His cartographic works were distributed and reprinted on the Eastern front as well, from Habsburg imperial territories in Vienna, Kraków, and Lwów to Russian imperial territories in Kiev and Minsk.^[32]
Romer’s work showed the extent to which ethnic maps had become useful as “scientific” propaganda. Romer himself sent the 1916 version of the geographical-statistical atlas through neutral Sweden to the United States and Woodrow Wilson in particular, and it generated such a storm of protest from Austria-Hungary’s German allies that the Berlin cartographer Albert Penck alerted the German military staff, which in turn ordered that the Austrians arrest its author.^[33] Romer’s maps became a standard documentary source and an imitated model at all the diplomatic congresses and peace negotiations after WWI – places where “scientific” nationalities maps were enormously influential blueprints for a future territorial order.^[34] Geographers, officials, diplomats and state leaders, particularly in the United States and Soviet Union, internalized the social-scientific approach of mapping nationalities/ethnicities according to categories of identity by the start of the twentieth century.^[35] A cartographer and political activist, Romer’s grand synthesis made national/imperial claims to territory in the language of history and nationality (in borderland enclaves). His maps adopted European great power conventions, but also had to tow an uneasy balance with the ostensibly “anti-imperial” Wilsonian rhetoric of national self-determination for the sake of Polish (but not Ukrainian) independence.

POLITICAL PURPOSES AND INTELLECTUAL GROUNDING OF NATIONALITIES MAPS

Nationalities maps were, in fact, a tool of empire coveted alike by nation- and state-builders. The proliferation of such maps before World War I showed the extent to which the acquisition of knowledge and the perception of closed space mattered locally and on a geopolitical scale. Epistemologically, grids of nationalities fulfilled at least three central functions. First, on a basic level, the maps were models for making borderland space seem measurable and rational for empires, and therefore progressively governable. A borderland can be defined as a contested territory incorporated by a state, adapted by loyalists to its official, or dominant, version of history, and transformed eventually into a “historical” and administrated region where national/state identities might be emphasized for the purpose of commemoration and/or mobilization.^[36] In polities with substantial minorities, the imposition of an ethnographic “totalizing classificatory grid” was vital to the process of state-sponsored modernization.^[37] Second, although cartographers clothed their sources and aims in the vocabulary of social-scientific objectivity, maps enshrined tendentious studies and demographic fantasies, sometimes in propaganda form, and were carefully adapted to suit political agendas. Third, maps offered categorical keys and reductionist labels for quantifying and qualifying generally silent “non-historical” borderland peoples, with less access to state resources, and who might have lived regionally or provincially even in large towns and cities.
Since minority collectives were more likely to be mapped as objects rather than engaged in the costly, and somewhat secretive, production of maps in the existing international system, it should come as no surprise that “non-historical” nation-builders also sought to acquire cartographic knowledge for modern political purposes, particularly after 1848 and 1863. Mapmaking required proper equipment and trained personnel, which usually only states could provide. Minorities had to play by the unwritten rules of the great power game, since they had few means of avoiding politically driven state categorizations. Stories abound of how some encountered confusing “place of origin” or “language spoken” questions about national identity only after they had migrated to another country and were registered as part of the citizenry there.^[38]
Nationalities maps developed out of an early modern European military and colonial mapping tradition, in which cartography was inherently political. Renaissance and early modern cartographers had worked on commission for kings and queens, but with the dawn of state bureaucracies in the eighteenth century, cartographers entered into state service, as military officers, engineers, and surveyors, to fulfill the basically unlimited aims of state and commercial expansion.^[39] Ethnographic cartographers after 1848 were no longer preoccupied simply with triangulating lands and charting waterways, based on geodesic calculations, but with the categorical emplotment of “enclave” peoples within existing states. As some postcolonial critics have noted, ethnographic cartographers also applied classificatory grids to minorities within overseas and overland empires, imagining their work as sources of state intelligence, and as projections of imperial and colonial power.^[40] Given the historical record of ethnic cleansing in the borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe, maps indeed are a dangerous business. Maps are referred to by state-builders or state-seekers in search of political legitimization, as evidence of a primordial heritage, demographic presence, or landed estate claims that “prove” which territory belongs to which person or politically ambiguous group of people. Working within the parameters of European statecraft and Western science, imperial/national cartographers between the Romanov and Habsburg empires by convention treated maps in a “progressivist” problem-solving manner, which tended to disallow ambiguity, anomaly or indeterminacy when mapping lands and peoples.^[41]
Not merely on political but intellectual grounds, mapping borderland peoples into paper grids was an enormous westernizing enterprise, and a major aspect of Russia’s own Enlightenment project. Ethnographic cartography as a geopolitical construction of space followed from at least four philosophical antecedents in European intellectual history. First, ethnographic cartography was based on mathematical conceptions of measurable and categorizable space, from Pythagoras through Descartes and Leibnitz to Kant. Second, it was based on the encyclopédisme of Enlightenment philosophy and science, conceived in a Eurocentric cultural and, а la Montesquieu, environmentally deterministic manner to classify civilization against barbarism.^[42] Third, ethnographic cartography was based on a Rankean historicist gathering and procedural assembly of sources, which might enhance consciousness of national identity in search of statehood (old or new), and thereby validate the existence of a larger specific cultural and/or political collective. Fourth, ethnographic concerns were advanced by a Herderian preoccupation with “historical” versus “non-historical” national essence or spirit (Volksgeist), as opposed to rhetorical appeals to an all-encompassing humanity.^[43] This intellectual perspective places the imperial/national cartographers on an even footing for analyzing the framework, and the sources, which they themselves generated in an age of ubiquitous empires.

CONCLUSION

In 1892, while Frederick Jackson Turner prepared his famous thesis to announce the closing of the American frontier, Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), the Polish völkisch ethnonationalist and leader of National Democracy (Endecja), recently defended his degree in biology from the Imperial University in Warsaw. Dmowski published obscure articles announcing the arrival in Poland, and East-Central Europe more broadly, of a racially deterministic Social Darwinian geopolitical world among stronger and weaker “ethnic” nations. The modern nations, so claimed the scientist, were locked into a territorial struggle for survival; compromise with other “non-historical” Nationalitäten was useless as a starting point since the Polish nation’s existence required geopolitical patronage.^[44] Across the ocean divide, both Turner’s thesis and Dmowski’s pro-Russian modern ethnocentric Polish nationalism, which especially after 1905 excluded Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians from being integral parts of the Polish “organism,” came at the end of a long line of imperial and national mappings of lands and peoples based on the reifications of identity made by ethnographic maps. As space closed for further territorial expansion, cartographic measurements of “objective reality” became more and more problematic, and right-wing views of Polishness (polskość) reached new and more terrifying degrees of nationalist insularity and intolerance.
Accepting the reality of the modern nationality principle as put forward by Habsburg and Russian imperial scientists, and supported by the existing diplomatic system in Europe, Dmowski rejected any reference to the “historical” pre-1772 boundaries of former Poland-Lithuania as having anything to do with the realities of modern political mobilization, in what he viewed as a Social Darwinian world of great power nations and states. He became the founding Polish geopolitician, mapping out “ethnic” (Polish-speaking) Poles as the target of mass-mobilization in the most anti-assimilationist of terms. As one historian of political geography writes, “The prospect of a world in which all regions were explored, mapped and allocated politically was a central preoccupation of fin-de-siècle geography.”^[45] Dmowski’s right-wing national constructivism, strictly ahistorical in nature, represented the internalization not just of national identity, but the imperial reduction of the Polish population to a Nationalität within the boundaries of the so-called Congress Kingdom, established in 1815. Dmowski’s ideal of Polishness was inspired by Germanocentric romantic nationalism, bolstered by Enlightenment projects of state rationalization, and ultimately, promoted by the tsarist bureaucracy in St. Petersburg. Dmowski, as an ethnonationalist, narrowly defined a Pole not by historical belonging to the early modern nation, but by the “scientific” conjunction of language and racial/ethnic kinship, as a claim to state territory.
Late nineteenth-century ethnographic maps in East-Central Europe were geopolitical projections that employed the category of nationality/ethnicity endemic to empirecraft, a specific type of knowledge promulgated by the Habsburgs and Romanovs to sort out their claimed borderlands. Iulii Kuznetsov, a dedicated fieldworker for the Russian tsars and their elephantine bureaucracy, grew despondent over the impossible categorization of Lithuania. Hryhorii Velychko, a Ukrainian teacher, struggled to apply a scientific paradigm of the nationalities grid for mapping an “ethnic” homeland. Eugeniusz Romer, a Polish geographer and cartographer, drew from the political and intellectual currents of Austro-Hungarian statecraft in Galicia to make Polish imperial claims in borderlands (kresy). Habsburg monarchs and Romanov tsars each applied policies that called for the sorting of state lands and peoples into reified quantitative and essentialized qualitative categories.
As more cartographers became professionalized as civil servants and academic experts, they offered practical counsel for the benefit of statecraft. Demographers and census-taking statisticians, who depended on states for the funding their research, not to mention their livelihood, remained convinced that scientific research was beneficial and self-sustaining, attached as it was to the projects of European imperialism. Needing to maintain hegemony in their dynastic lands, Russia and Habsburg Austria (later, Austria-Hungary) in their ad hoc nationalities’ policies may have been differentialist, but they were hardly pluralist or multiculturalist. They shared the administrative need to develop labeling strategies, in a hierarchical manner, for rationalizing lands and peoples, and thereby to thwart cultural alternatives or attempts at political separatism. Ethnographic cartographers envisioned grids of nationalities as necessary tools to minimize or maximize populations in borderlands. The nation-builders of East-Central Europe, even when they opposed great power imperialism politically, were not necessarily “anti-imperial” in naming and claiming territories for the states they imagined building or restoring. In comparison, nation-gathering, state-building elites (the terms are not exclusive) directly copied, and sometimes creatively adapted, the form and content of imperial maps as a means of collective empowerment. Before hazarding parallel trajectories of nations-in-formation or empires-in-decline, however, one needs to take into account the imperium of knowledge; namely, the polycentric context in which knowledge was produced and power was projected. Geopolitically fixed on the need to plant a flag in closed space, nation-builders struggled to locate state resources and trained personnel in order to produce their “own” cartographic works borrowed from empires, and thus make metageographical claims across existing borders.