The capital of Transcaucasia is a type of the country. [Tiflis] is a city of contrasts and mixtures, a melting-pot into which elements have been poured from half Europe and Asia, and in which they as yet show no signs of combining…. [I]n Tiflis it is not the particular things to be seen in the city that impress themselves on one’s memory: it is the city itself, the strange mixture of so many races, tongues, religions, customs. Its character lies in the fact that it has no one character but ever so many different ones. Here all these peoples live side by side, buying and selling, and working for hire, yet never coming into any closer union, remaining indifferent to one another, with neither love, nor hate, nor ambition, peaceably obeying a government of strangers who annexed them without resistance and retain them without effort, and held together by no bond but its existence.

James Bryce, 1877.^[1]

Much as for the British traveler James Bryce, Russia’s remarkable multiethnic, multiconfessional character has long amazed observers of the world’s largest country. For just as long, these same observers have disagreed with one another over how best to understand the meaning and importance to the larger Eurasian region of this disorienting diversity. Bryce’s picturesque and sympathetic view of the marvels of Tiflis/Tbilisi has hardly been shared by all. Historians and analysts alike have debated to what degree the peoples of Russia remained separate and “indifferent” to one another or “peaceably” responded to the state’s rules, or to what degree the Russian government was able to “retain them without effort” or whether “bonds” did in fact grow up among the diverse peoples and their tsarist rulers. And the debate on these and so many other questions will long continue.
Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, it almost goes without saying, the study of Russia/Soviet Union/Eurasia as a polyethnic, polyconfessional space has taken on new life and new directions. The break up of the Soviet Union, the newly open archives (especially in the so-called periphery), the explosion of publications on imperial, colonial, and multiethnic issues – even the creation of new journals like Ab Imperio specifically designed to be forum for these issues – and the rapid expansion of new institutional homes for such scholarship, such as the Association for the Study of Nationalities and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, have all lead to a proliferation of new writings and new thoughts on this old topic. Together, they have combined to augment and, in many cases, to change what we know about Eurasian history writ large.^[2]
This article attempts a synthesis of a small number of the recent trends in North American historical writing on the enduring “Russian” imperium.^[3] As an exercise in historical “lumping,” the essay strives to underscore the ways in which this multiethnic, multiconfessional conglomeration, for all the specific and substantial changes over time and place, retained a core cluster of characteristics and persistent patterns that defined it from the reign of Catherine the Great through the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Rather than seeing 1914/1917 or 1991, say, as moments of “speciation” in which entirely new forms of the imperium came into being, I argue here for a durable continuity in overall patterns, relationships, choices, and configurations, even while the specifics of geography, population, ideology, and leadership might change.
The topic is both broad and deep and by necessity I focus my attentions here on four specific trends in the field that I see as particularly noteworthy, leaving other equally important topics aside for the moment: 1) the imperium as an integrated and interconnected entity, like a living body; 2) the imperium as a creative, transformative space; 3) the three “types” of state officials and imperial policy (bureaucrat-policemen, landscapers, and referees); and 4) the imperium as lived experience.
Some points of definition are in order before embarking. There has been a great deal of debate of late as to whether, and how, Russia and especially the Soviet Union should be called an “empire,” and whether the notion of “empire” has much analytical value for this part of the world.^[4] Rather than “empire,” which as both a political entity and an analytical category holds multiple meanings (and starkly different valences) over time and space, I use the term “imperium” here in its most general understanding as “sovereignty,” or, according to the OED, “Command; absolute power; supreme or imperial power.”^[5] In part, I choose this terminology to sidestep the “empire” debate, which at times turns unproductive when the discussion becomes too much an effort to fit Russia/Soviet Union into extant definitions or typologies rather than exploring what was actually taking place (and then to revise, or build new, definitions).^[6] In other part, I find “imperium,” with its focus on power (legal, administrative, and military) over extended territories and diverse peoples, as well as its more neutral meanings and associations in current English, more appropriate language through which to understand the Russian/Soviet case. More specifically, the more flexible notion of imperium helps to incorporate under one umbrella the multiple systems of imperial power and control that Russia/Soviet Union manifested: including peoples and territories brought within the borders of the state (to be governed often in quite distinct ways over time and place) to areas of more indirect or informal power, such as in Manchuria and the CER region, the Central Asian protectorates, and Northern Iran during the late Imperial period, or the Warsaw Bloc, Mongolia and briefly Afghanistan during the Soviet period.^[7]
Lastly, as an effort in synthesis and the laying out of long-term patterns, the article leaves itself open to a great deal of criticism for downplaying the many undeniable historical changes that obviously left the world of Yeltsin-era Russia incomparably different from that of Catherine the Great. It is on many levels a fool’s errand to try to privilege the embedded continuities and connections over the changes and regional specificities in an imperium that spanned from Estland to Chukotka to Turkestan (and for a time into North America), contained so startling a diversity of humanity, and spent much of the 20th century in the Bolshevik experiment. Clearly, there are moments of big change in policies: with Catherine the Great, in the 1860s to 1890s, with World War I, the early Soviet years, World War II, and then the post-Soviet period, to mention some of the more important ones. Terry Martin distinguishes three major shifts in policy in the course of less than twenty years of the early Soviet period alone. Bruce Grant writes about “a revolving door of state policy” towards the people of Sakhalin, oscillating from one government to the next.^[8] There were qualitative differences too: the Soviet regime was a great deal more activist, interventionist, vigorous, brutal, and (relative to its tsarist predecessor) coherent in its policies, a process that began with World War I, if not before. In the 20th century, we start to see territorially based ethnic and religious homogenization as a result of war, revolution, the Soviet government’s indigenization programs, and the Nazi invasion.^[9]
There were other broader changes too in the world within and around the tsarist/Soviet states. The rise of nationalism and the idea of the nation-state as the normative ethno-political unit in Europe certainly transformed the region. So too did the growth of ideas of human rights; ecological movements and the discourse of nature protection (a less assailable vantage from which to attack colonialism); the development of nuclear weapons and repeated changes to the international system; the changes in communication networks, whether railroads, airplanes or roads, or through printing, telephones and television (and now internet), allowing much freer movement of people and information; and the rural to urban, agrarian to industrial to post-industrial transformations.
Yet, for all these changes and the many others not mentioned here, we can lay out broad patterns and themes in the policies and lived experience of empire across such diverse terrains, peoples, and ways of life.

I. EMPIRE, EMPIRE EVERYWHERE

It is perhaps unnecessary to delve into the ways that recent scholarship on the multiethnic, multiconfessional characteristics of Russia/Soviet Union has affected our general historical narrative. Yet, the impact has been in many cases dramatic and worthy of a little attention. For much of the Cold War, study of the so-called nationalities tended to be peripheral to the larger historical agenda in the United States regarding Russian and Soviet history (whether to understand the origins of the revolution or to make sense of the Soviet system). And the scholars carrying out this sort of research tended to focus on specific ethnic or national groups, and often (although not always) with a political or ideological axe to grind.^[10]
Scholarship on empire, nationalities, ethnicity, and confession are now mainstream, to say the least. And, if it was really ever in doubt, it has become increasingly clear that one cannot understand Russian/Soviet/Eurasian history outside of its heterogeneous context. As Mark Beissinger wrote in his recent Presidential Address to the AAASS, “empire has played a major role – perhaps even the major role – in shaping the region’s history, politics, and culture.”^[11] The “persistent factor” of multiethnicity and multiconfessionality transformed Russia, Russians, and Russian history as well as those who came within its orbit. It was an inescapable component of the lived experience of the people in Eurasia. All rulers, Russian or otherwise, had to come to terms with this unavoidable diversity in their policy development. Among myriad topics, recent scholarship has underscored the role of nationality and nationalities in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 – not just as those storming the barricades but in the subtle ways that diversity complicated the agendas of both the revolutionaries and those who wished to maintain or restore order. The fate of the Provisional government, of the February and October revolutions, of the Civil War, and of the later collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are often explained, in whole or in part, by reference to Eurasia’s multiethnic reality.^[12]
The question of why Russia did not develop patterns of democratic politics similar to Western Europe has received new attention when viewed from the perspective of multiethnicity. Russia under Gorbachev ran into these problems in the 1980s. Efforts to extend his version of democratic practice through the Soviet Union foundered, in part, in the case of Azerbaijan and local Armenian demands to have Nagorno-Karabakh included in the Armenian SSR. As Ronald Suny writes, “The pull toward democratizing Azerbaijani society faltered on the Karabagh issue, because no important Azerbaijani intellectual or politician would agree to self-determination in Karabagh.”^[13] Similar problems of ethnic and confessional diversity bedeviled the tsarist government a century earlier during the Great Reforms (especially regarding zemstvo, local court, and municipal government) and in the post-1905 Duma period. Russian elites in Tashkent, for example, hurtled headlong into a political paradox when they called after 1905 for increased political participation for themselves yet tried simultaneously to restrict the political participation of Central Asian elites. Such tensions destabilized the whole process of expanding suffrage and political participation within the autocracy.^[14] Local governing institutions were often paralyzed, if not prevented from ever existing, because of ethnic factors. The creation of town dumas in the western borderlands, for example, ran into obstacles because of Polish opposition to the possibility that a town’s Jewish inhabitants might take control of the local governing body. In Tbilisi, similarly, in the early 1900s, Georgian frustration that Armenians dominated the town duma forced the duma closed as a result of street demonstrations. Efforts to apply the judicial reforms in the non-Russian regions of the tsarist realm ran into a variety of obstacles: both from Russian perceptions that the non-Russian peoples (like the Russian peasants also) were not yet ready for such reforms, or from the response of non-Russians that they often preferred not to have Russian laws – whatever their format – governing them.^[15]
Expansion made the imperium and its rulers rich through furs, minerals, forests, oil, and people, yet along with the staggering benefits there were also huge costs that affected the overall direction of Eurasian history. Here I think of Michael Khodarkovsky’s comment that Russia was immeasurably impoverished by the process of fighting and integrating the peoples of the steppe, leading possibly to Russia’s relative under-urbanization (as compared to Western and Central Europe). Similarly, the costs of the two recent Chechen wars (in terms of people, materials, wealth, and human rights) have also opened a quickly sucking drain on the resources of the Russian state, thereby restricting the state’s choices for other investment, and, as importantly, devastating more than one generation of the country’s young men.^[16]
The ethnic and confessional diversity of the region transformed Russian art, literature, and culture. The outpouring of literature in the nineteenth century on Caucasia (from Pushkin to Lermontov, Griboedov, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and Tolstoy, for instance) was paralleled by the popularity of Kalashnikov’s early nineteenth-century writings on Siberia and, later, the role of Siberian authors (like Rasputin) in the village prose movement. Gogol, we learn from Edyta Bojanowska, wrote “between Russian and Ukrainian nationalism.” “Oriental” themes flavored much of 19th – and 20th-century ballet, and world changing choreographers, such as the Georgian Ballanchine, hailed from the non-Russian regions. Tales of Przhevalsky in “Inner Asia” or the riches and promise of the Amur captured the imaginations of a broad section of educated Russian society.^[17]
The fact of multiethnicity and multiconfessionality molded the formation of a Russian “nation” and Russian national identity. Through much of the nineteenth century and beyond, “Russians” debated hotly who was to be included in the category “Russian” and how should it be comprised: a smaller nation based solely on the Russkie, or a larger, pan-ethnic nation of Rossiane? What role should Orthodoxy have in the formation of Russianness? What of language? Was conversion to Orthodoxy a sufficient to signal a change of nation? What was to be done with people, like the sektanty, who were in all other ways “Russian” yet did not adhere to Orthodoxy? What to do with non-Russians who were Orthodox, such as the Mari, for instance?^[18]

II. AN INTERCONNECTED, INTEGRATED IMPERIUM

One clear pattern emerging from recent studies is the interconnectedness and interactivity of the different ethnic, confessional, regional groupings in the empire: both as a characteristic of Eurasian peoples as well as a conceptual framework in which scholars can and should approach the study of Russia/Soviet Union/Eurasia. The focus on an integrated empire has been most marked on two levels. First, there were significant linkages across the imperium as a whole: that is, every ethnic or confessional grouping in Eurasia was connected either directly or indirectly to other groupings in the empire. To paraphrase John Donne, no one people were an island separate from the main, or to take a biological metaphor, no matter how distinct they might appear, experiences of one part of the body almost always affected other parts of the body.
Second, the Russian imperium was integrated on a more “regional” or “situational” level, in which the different communities in a specific bloc of territory became integrated into larger, interactive entities.^[19] To use the biological metaphor again, separate organs in the body often combined into more complex organ systems in which the larger system performed functions greater or different than the individual parts separately. Indeed, as theorists of group dynamics will remind us, any group is more than the sum of its parts: in any complex set of interactions of different groups or individuals, the very process of interaction will itself produce new and unexpected outcomes at the same time that it changes those who were part of the interaction. Thus, to write the history of any one ethno-confessional group requires knowledge of all of them and particularly of their interactions; and the focus on interconnectedness unveils historical patterns that were generally hidden when a mono-ethnic approach was applied.

A) ENTANGLED IMPERIUM

Activities, events, or policies in one region or one group often transformed other parts of the empire and other imperial minorities. From the perspective of governance, the tsarist and Soviet leaderships did not look at events on the “periphery’ of the empire in separate terms. Different regions might be governed in different ways and with different administrative structures, yet central officials approached the imperium with a more integrated, bird’s-eye view. Reports from the Baltic States and the Altai might be examined in the same meeting, each influencing the other. Tolstoy offers a literary rendering of this characteristic in Hadji Murad, when a grumpy and hung-over Nicholas I cast judgment on both the Polish and Caucasian portfolios back-to-back with ideas and feelings concerning one affecting his views of the other.^[20] As Francine Hirsch details in Empire of Nations, the process of drawing up (and repeatedly re-compiling) the list of official nationalities in the Soviet Union – with the attendant rights and benefits for each group – was done with all the peoples of the Union in mind. Whether one group was officially recognized or not resulted from the politics of how just many ethnicities there could be (sometimes based on Stalin’s whims), and the very existence of an officially recognized group therefore depended on other groups within the Soviet Union.^[21] Similarly, extremely diverse and distant “Muslim” communities across the empire were often tied together in tsarist and Soviet policy making, in terms of religious policy but also in areas such as literacy campaigns and alphabet reform.^[22]
The very make-up of officialdom was usually multiethnic and multi-confessional, bringing ideas and approaches from one region and community to another. In the tsarist period, we see the development of a cohort of administrators who came to comprise a form of colonial service corps. Individual officials might serve in a variety of different non-Russian regions at different times, and brought with them to each new posting political ideas and understandings from one context to the next. Here I think, for instance, of Vorontsov, Speranskii, Miliutin, Paskevich, or Dondukov-Korsakov, to name but a modest handful.^[23] Similarly, individuals from non-Russian regions played important roles in governing various parts of the imperium, bringing with them their own views and approaches to the governance of the realm. Baltic Germans disproportionately populated the ranks of military, civilian, and diplomatic authorities. The minister of nationality affairs of the short-lived Far Eastern Republic, Karl Ivanovich Luks, was from what is now Lithuania.^[24] Most famously, “men of the borderlands” like Loris-Melikov, Stalin, Mikoian, and Beria came to lead the imperium itself.^[25]
Policies that grew out of specific local events often led to broader policy implications for the entire polity. Terry Martin argues that Ukraine played the dominant role in Soviet nationalities policy and, in particular, that a “Ukrainian-Jewish polemic led to an all-union decree calling for the formation of national soviets.”^[26] Similarly, the Polish rebellion of 1863 changed policy throughout empire. Paul Werth notes, for example, that the uprising, along with other state-wide factors such as the Great Reforms and the “Great Apostasy of 1866” among baptized Tatars, helped to redirect religious policies towards the Tatars, Mari, Udmurts, Mordvins, and Chuvash in the Middle Volga region from the late 1860s on.^[27] Structures of governance towards the Islamic communities in the Middle Volga came to be applied later – in modified forms – to Muslims in other regions.^[28] Missionary practices and policies in Siberia or the Middle Volga, for instance, often affected missionary practices throughout the imperium.^[29]
The political-legal interconnectedness of empire operated also at the group and individual level. Especially in the tsarist period – when differential laws were applied to different peoples and regions – subjects in one part of the realm were often acutely aware of the rights and obligations offered to others elsewhere in the realm. They could then utilize these differences in law and administrative practice instrumentally in their dealings with the Russian state. For example, in their efforts to receive permission to open their own church, Molokans living in Baku petitioned the emperor indicating the disparity between “inovertsy,” who had long had the right to their own religious structures, and the Molokans, for whom any form of permanent, dedicated prayer house was forbidden.^[30] Similarly, when lobbying for greater liberties within the imperium, Muslim clerics pointed to the broader set of rights that Orthodox clergy enjoyed. A proposed official structure to manage Kazakh marriages was based on a similar configuration for Old Believers.^[31]
The linkages and intermingling of diverse and distant peoples in Russia also took place on a social and cultural level, outside of government or legal forums. Communities in one region often affected communities in other regions throughout Eurasia by their actions and pronouncements. The peoples of the Baltic republics and western borderlands of the Soviet Union after World War II looked very intently to events in the “Eastern Bloc” for cues and models. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had immediate influence in western Ukraine and the Baltics, producing frustration, agitation, and unrest. There were hopes of a chain reaction that would weaken or remove Soviet power, including “mass eruptions” in Lithuania that involved tens of thousands for whom the events in Hungary were front and center in their minds.^[32] On a less incendiary, more day-to-day basis, “in L’viv, Polish-language media, contacts with Poles, and contacts with Ukrainians living in the capitalist West, undermined official Soviet culture and provided more insight into cultural and social developments taking place in the rest of the world.”^[33]
The interconnectedness of oppositional forces, enhanced through new forms of media, is especially clear in the era of glasnost’/perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mark Beissinger examines what he calls the “tide of nationalism”: “multiple waves of nationalist mobilization whose content and outcome influence one another” and “the clustering and linkage of acts of contention.” For Beissinger, the collapse of the Soviet Union “could not have taken place without the effects of tidal influences of one nationalism on another… Within the glasnost’ tide of nationalism the boundaries of the conceivable altered dramatically; the cross-case influences and unraveling of order that accompanied the tide created opportunities for the expression of nationalist demands which, in normal times, were unthinkable.”^[34] Moreover, in one curious example, events in restive Estonia influenced the future Chechen leader, Djohar Dudayev, who was stationed in the Baltics as an air force commander. Georgi Derlugian argues that the use of culturally very important zikr in Chechen political rallies developed in part from Dudayev’s experiences in Estonia. “In all likelihood, Dudayev witnessed Estonian nationalist rallies where the participants roused themselves by singing folksongs in mighty choruses. In revolutionary Chechnya zikr was consciously reinvented for a similar function.”^[35]
These sorts of cross-empire influences were by no means limited to the Soviet period. Georgian socialists were actively involved with, and transformed by their Polish, Russian, and Jewish counterparts, for example, in trans-regional communities. Just as tsarist policy was transformed by the Polish rebellion of 1863, so too was Georgian socialism. Georgian socialists, many of whom came to lead independent Georgia after 1917, were “deeply affected” by Polish teachers exiled to Caucasia and from personal experience studying in the Polish lands. As Stephen Jones writes, “We know little about Georgian student activity in Warsaw, but it was here in the whirlwind of Polish politics that some of the basic ideas of the daselebi were generated.”^[36]

B) IMPERIUM OF REGIONS

In addition to the interconnected nature of multiethnic, multiconfessional Eurasia across the stretches of the empire, the imperium was also integrated and mutually influencing on a more regional level as well. The Russian and Soviet imperia were composed of meaningful local conglomerations of different cultural, religious, and socio-ecological groupings. These constellations of communities lived together in webs of daily interaction and intersection and functioned together as discrete subsystems within the larger imperial whole. The peoples within these webs were especially meaningful one to the other in terms of grassroots interactions (social, political, religious, economic, and cultural) and also in terms of how the state administered them.^[37]
In this vein, on the pages of this journal, Andreas Kappeler called for a regional approach to scholarship. More recently, Aleksei Miller defined what he calls “situational” categories: “a particular system of ethno-cultural, ethno-confessional, and interethnic relations. Our task is to identify those participating in their interaction and to understand the logic of their behavior, to reconstruct the context of the interaction as fully as possible… The focus shifts from the actors as such to the process of their interaction and to unveiling the logic, including the subjective logic, of their behavior and their reactions to the contexts and activities of other actors.”^[38] As Miller implies, one should not reify or solidify these groupings/subsets of the empire because they were by no means static, in part because of the tendency towards ethno-territorial homogenization over time and also the formation of independent states out of former Russian imperial territories after World Wars I and II.
Examples are plentiful of these regional groupings. In the Baltic region in the pre-revolutionary period, the Baltic Germans, Latvians, and Estonians (among others, including Swedish peasants and Jews) formed a multiethnic conglomeration. The history of the region (and the history of any one of these groups) is difficult to understand outside of the context of the interaction of all of these groups together – whether in the social relations among German landlords and Baltic peasants, in religious conflicts over the Lutheran church, or in the German role in fostering Latvian and Estonian identity. Ultimately, the interactions of these people as a complex social system were more important to their lived experience of the tsarist imperium than their separate interactions with the Russian government or with other state powers near them (especially Germany and Sweden).^[39]
We also see these meaningful inter-communal relations among Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Jews in the western borderlands (and this connection continued, albeit in different form, even after Polish independence following World War I).^[40] Belorussian or Lithuanian peasants were a great deal more concerned about their relations to the Polish nobles or Jewish traders than to the distant Russian state power, and the relationship between Poles and Jews in the western cities was a defining component of urban life. For their part, Lithuanians were concerned about the “restoration and defense of the rights of the Lithuanian languages in Roman Catholic churches of ethnographic Lithuania” when that language had, in their view, “been banished by the Polonizing clergy.”^[41] Kate Brown, in her study of the kresy in the twentieth century notes “the daily interconnectedness” of Jewish and Christian (whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant) life in the region. Recent histories of the region, she asserts, may have been “purified” and “nationalized into separate narratives about Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews, in effect turning memory into distinct ghettos.” Yet, “in the kresy, religious cultures fused at the edges, blended and mutated to create an environment where spirits and dybbuks were shared, as well as amulets and healing wells.” And, on the paths between villages and shtetls, “a trail of footprints and hoof marks… stitched a visible link between the Christian and Jewish worlds.”^[42] This integrated world remained largely outside the influence of Soviet rules or governance until the late 1920s, and was then forever crushed by the Nazi Holocaust.
These subsets are important to the history of the imperium for a number of reasons. First, in examining ethno-confessional systems – and the interactions and mutual influences of multiple groups simultaneously – we move beyond reifying specific national groupings and national narratives of history. Second, these relations and interactions were often a great deal more important to the lived experience of these groups – to what the Russian imperium really meant on a human level – than the presence or activities of the tsarist/Soviet state (which might be tangential to the events transpiring in a given location). Many of these conglomerations were linked through a series of social, political, economic, and religious ties that predated the appearance of Russian state power and proceeded with their own internal dynamics.
Third, given the highly integrated and interactive nature of these constellations, Russian policy was often directed at the interaction of these different groups, not at any one group in particular. Thus, the “Russification” in the Baltic provinces in the 1870s-1890s was not simply an effort to foster or impose Russian administrative, legal, linguistic, religious, and cultural norms on the region’s people, but also an effort to prevent what tsarist officials and Russian conservatives saw as the potential Germanification of the Latvians and Estonians. Here, the Russian state was intervening in great part to meddle in German-Latvian/Estonian relations.^[43] Similarly, accelerated religious policies and efforts at conversion in the Volga-Kama region in the nineteenth century were intended in great measure to prevent the (re)Islamicization of the region’s Kriashens and Finnic peoples by Muslim Tatars.^[44] Anna Zelkina reports that, in the late 18th century, one of the principal reasons for Russia’s strong response to the opposition movement of Sheikh Mansur was the fact that his forces were involved in the active conversion of the Ingush and Ossetians to Islam. Since the Russians considered the Ossetians to be (historically at least) Christian, and the “semi-pagan” Ingush to be good candidates for conversion, they opposed Mansur.^[45]

III. THE IMPERIUM AS CREATIVE SPACE

The story of multiethnic, multiconfessional Russia/Soviet Union has very often been told in negative, destructive terms. Russian conquest destroyed preexisting societies and polities – communities that had often quite happily been going about their own business before the Russians barged in. The empire that followed conquest was the “prison house of peoples,” in which “divide and rule” was the standard approach and in which the legitimate desires for freedom of the non-Russian peoples – and their national development broadly – were taken away or stunted by the Russian presence. In this model, the understanding of the relations between Russians and non-Russians is usually seen in terms of “highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”^[46]
Yet, while there is clearly much truth to these negative depictions, the recent wave of scholarship has spotlighted, both intentionally and not, the many ways in which multiethnic and multiconfessional Eurasia could be a constructive, creative space. The Russian/Soviet imperium – with its peculiar combination and commingling of different peoples and landscapes, and the changing polices and ideologies of changing states – provided new contexts in which a wide range of transformations might take place. Indeed, rather than being solely a sorry state of oppression, the mixing/melting pot that was and is the Eurasian landmass came together to produce all sorts of hybrids and new social and political realities. Whether in conflict or coexistence, whether in intimate interaction or studied isolation, the throwing together of so many different peoples and groups into the soup resulted in the formation of “new worlds” forged together by the interaction of different peoples.
This approach requires a suspension (somewhat at least) of value judgments; not to seek out solely who won and who lost and then to assign positive or negative values to these events, but rather to explore what was in fact produced in the meeting of all these different peoples and cultures. One may (rightly) lament the impact of expanding empire and the damages of tsarist/Soviet rule on the lands and people of the region, but nonetheless the enforced interaction of the Russian and Soviet states forged all sorts of new, vibrant, and influential forms of human experience – generating opportunities and possibilities with which the “colonized” were often content. In this sense, for the purpose of this essay, “creative” is to be understood as the formation of something new without the usual positive value judgments attached.
There were multiple individuals and groups involved in the process of “creation.” Recent studies, following (among other influences) the trends in subaltern and post-colonial studies, have highlighted the very active participation of the “colonized” in the formation of these worlds. Even the seemingly most disempowered groups in Russian and Soviet society are now considered active participants in – not just recipients of – the creative process. Thus, as Bruce Grant points out, the much put-upon Nivkhi of Sakhalin “were far from passive or tragic figures at the hands of the Soviet State. From World War II on, Nivkhi considered themselves active participants in the design and implementation of state policy, and many of the nascent activists speaking out against the state in 1990 had been its most ardent supporters only decades earlier.”^[47] Similarly, political prisoners (such as Germans, Poles, Chechens, Ingush, and Koreans) sent to Kazakhstan before and during World War II took on important roles in forging the social and cultural reality of the tselina during the Virgin Lands campaigns.^[48] Of course, this type of argument can only be pushed so far. Groups like the Nivkhi experienced the much more destructive side of “creation.” Soviet authorities (at different stages) ultimately succeeded in convincing the Nivkhi that they were cultureless, combining, at times substituting, an official “Soviet” culture for a more “traditional” Nivkh one. At the same time, forced resettlements ripped the Nivkhi from their lands and broke bonds of place, leaving scores of ghost towns scattered through north Sakhalin. With the collapse of the Soviet system, the Nivkhi found themselves with a “double loss”: bereft both of their “traditional” culture and of the hybrid “Soviet” one that developed over the course of the twentieth century.^[49]
Nonetheless, there are numerous examples of how the formation and existence of the imperium opened new political and cultural possibilities. For instance, Georgian socialists in late 19th and early 20th centuries produced a distinctive and original version of socialism – with its agrarian, inclusive, and multiethnic approaches – that had a marked influence on the development of socialist thought and practice not only in Imperial Russia but across the globe in the twentieth century. Here the confluence of the goals of a certain segment of Georgian educated society, the nature of tsarist imperial control in the region, the bringing together of Georgian with non-Georgian socialists across tsarist Russia, the multiethnic nature of Georgia and especially Tbilisi (here the tensions between Georgians and Armenians in particular), and the impact of Georgian agrarian concerns (most notably, the Gurian revolt) all came together to produce this novel and influential version of socialism.^[50]
Similarly, we have the example of the Jadids in Central Asia. Here the potent combination of late-tsarist colonialism (and its distinctive formulation under von Kaufman), international Muslim reformist movements, the impact of the framework, institutions, and infrastructures of “modernity” (such as print technologies, transportation networks, and global capitalist/market economic systems and trade routes), and the connections that inclusion in the Russian empire offered Central Asians to other Muslim communities in Russia (especially the Tatars), helped to bring to life the influential Jadidist movement in Central Asia.^[51]
After 1917, the meeting of Eurasian multiethnicity with the Bolshevik ideology of ethno-territorial indigenization helped to design new national groupings and ethno-territorial geographic units – to transform the entire ethno-confessional makeup of the region. Thus, ethnographers and politicians sat together and devised (and repeatedly revised) lists of approved ethnic communities. Others worked to delimit the boundaries of ethnically based Union Republics, ASSRs, and local autonomous units. In the process, they transformed the very ethnic makeup of the region, changing what it meant to be a “Pole” or “Turkmen” or “Yakut”. More significantly, it also changed the very meanings of ethnicity as a category of human experience and political control. To bring the creative process to its ultimate conclusion, once peoples and their geographic homes had been created, then their cultural traditions were redefined (and at times created) in order to fit the ideological parameters of the regime.^[52]
In a related process, the focus of the Bolsheviks on education helped to bring Soviet-style education and literacy to a large segment of the Eurasian population: to transform numerous primarily peasant, rural, agricultural societies into increasingly urban, literate, and sometimes white collar groups; and to do so for both men and women. The educational and knowledge foundations of the Eurasian world could not have been more different over the course of the twentieth century – just what was “knowledge” and how it was to be transmitted (if at all) underwent a revolution. To take the Turkmen example, the 1897 census guessed Turkmen literacy to be 0.7%, and almost entirely male. By 1940, literacy was estimated at 75% and was much more equally spread among both sexes.^[53] Similarly, we see the development during the Soviet period of the idea of culture as an object. Nivkhi, like many of other nationalities in the Soviet Union, “talked of having ‘traded in’ their culture for a pan-Soviet one. Like an automobile, culture appeared as a thing that could be repaired, upgraded, and, if necessary, exchanged.”^[54]
The movement of millions of people, especially Slavs but also so many others, to the “frontiers” made possible the creation of alternative lives not possible in the central Russian provinces. Settlement in New Russia, Caucasia, Siberia, Central Asia, or the Baltic states offered the settlers opportunities for jobs, adventure, and the chance to recast and redefine themselves in a new locale, often with less direct state control, and in interaction with the many non-Russian peoples and different environments around them. Elena Shulman’s work on the Khetagurovite movement in the Soviet Far East, for instance, reflects the new opportunities offered to women through migration to distant parts of the realm. There was tremendous enthusiasm on the part of these women as they set off eastward to forge new worlds and new selves. At the same time – and as the flip side of these possibilities of migration – decisions of peasants and others to pick up and move, or decisions on the part of state authorities to cleanse certain regions of “undesirables” (however defined), meant a sudden transformation of the region into which they moved. The Khetagurovites’ new lives often came at the expense of the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean laborers who had lived there before them. The religious persecution (at least intolerance) in the central provinces diffused Old Believers to the north, the Urals, and Siberia, for instance, confronting the local people with the challenge of new neighbors; for their part, Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks went down to the new lands in New Russia, South Caucasia, and the Far East. The dismantling of the Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region in Ukraine in 1935 resulted in their relocation to Kazakhstan, where they were joined by North Caucasians, Germans, Virgin Landers, and many others. Throughout, new multiethnic communities were forged (often through violence) and an ever-changing “Kazakhstan” was transformed by the arrival of these people. Finally, the expulsion or out-migration of groups from within Russia to neighboring states similarly shaped the social and political fates of those states and communities there, such as the North Caucasians who moved in the nineteenth century to the Ottoman Empire.^[55]
Such synthesizing of new cultural and political formations was by no means restricted to groups, but took place on the level of individual development. The life and professional experiences of Nikolai F. Katanov, ultimately an ethnographer-linguist at Kazan University, reflects the ways in which the creative, blending forces of the multiethnic, multiconfessional imperium coalesced to generate new types of people. Certainly, this sort of biological and cultural merger produced extraordinarily complicated and painful social experiences for the individual who struggled as both part of, and not part of, multiple worlds at once. Nonetheless, people like Katanov were the results of the creative forces of incorporation in the imperium, and their existence affected such broad historical patterns as the very definition of “Russianness” and the hierarchies and boundaries of ethnic and cultural difference.^[56]
The religious world of Eurasia was noticeably transformed in the Russian/Soviet imperium, both on the level of human spiritual practice and in the institutions of religious administration. In the Volga-Kama region, for instance, the meeting of Mari and Orthodox missionaries produced new forms of Mari religious experience (such as the “Kugu-Sorta” sect and its “Mari animist reformation”) and new forms of Orthodox Christianity (notably Mari monasticism).^[57] In terms of the former, Paul Werth notes, “In response to religious challenges and rapid social and economic change, small groups of Mari peasants chose to initiate radical reform of their native beliefs, rather than practice Christianity or Islam. This reform entailed the articulation of a more coherent theology and the recasting and presentation of their teachings in the idiom of religion employed by official Russia, in particular the forwarding of their cause as a matter of faith.”^[58]
The case was similar in Siberia, where the meeting of Shamanism and Orthodoxy in the Altai and in Alaska produced vibrant new spiritual synergies – particularly in the form of Burkhanism, with its sharp attack on shamans and Orthodox missionaries alike. Andrei Znamenski writes, “The sudden influx or the Russians [as colonists, traders, and missionaries] resulted in a radical reshaping of the entire native life. In such a situation traditional medicine men and women were unable to find instant healing remedies to maintain the stability of nomadic communities. Many natives viewed this inability to face the challenge as the proof that there were no more “strong shamans” left.”^[59]
In Southern Ukraine, the meeting of German Protestant settlers, Evangelicals, Russian sectarians, Orthodox and Catholic peasants, Islamic Nogais, and Jews produced an explosive religious mix, surging forth a wide range of new religious movements, what Sergei Zhuk has called “Russia’s Lost Reformation.” This religious vibrancy and innovation continued through the twentieth century in the power of the evangelical movement in Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s “Bible Belt.” Moreover, Dukhobor exiles to South Caucasia, after generations of interactions with the tsarist state, Caucasian neighbors, and an initially unfamiliar ecology and climate, erupted in a messianic religious revival and pacifist rebellion that grabbed the attention of both Tolstoy and Quakers around the world, and led ultimately to their emigration to Canada.^[60]
The multiconfessional world of Russian Eurasia also produced new forms of religious administration and institutionalization, especially the development of hierarchies and “clergies.” We see the creativity of the Eurasian experience perhaps most markedly in the creation of new forms of Muslim spiritual administration beginning with Catherine the Great. Arguing against the more common view of a “nearly continuous antagonism between the Russian state and Islam,” Robert Crews has recently asserted that tsarist efforts to use approved religious authority, beginning with the Orenburg Assembly, as a tool of imperial control and administration led to the transformation of Islamic religious life in Russia, particularly by placing the tsarist regime squarely in the middle of disputes over the proper forms of Islam and acceptable Islamic orthodoxy.^[61] The result was a new form of Islam, a religion that generally was not characterized by centralized, institutionalized, Church-like structures of this sort. “The establishment of a mufti as the single voice of religious orthodoxy had initiated a radical break with the past” and local religious life was transformed. Muslims generally welcomed this form of state intervention. As Crews writes, “the regime instrumentalized Islam, but Muslims captured the state, applying its instruments of coercion to the daily interpretive disputes that divided Muslim men and women.” Indeed, “to whom could pious Muslims turn when their neighbors refused to attend mosque prayers, drank alcohol, or performed mystical Sufi rites in error?”^[62] Here, diverging or dissenting forms of Islam were cut off by the Spiritual Assembly, with the help of tsarist state power. Thus certain branches of Islam were pruned in the Russian case while others were permitted to grow strong.
This process of forging a different form of Islam in the context of the Russian/Soviet imperium continued throughout the twentieth century, albeit in the different, more violent context of the Soviet experiment. As Adeeb Khalid argues, the Soviet assault on Islam meant that “the meaning of being Muslim changed quite radically. Central Asian Islam, cut off from its own past and from Muslims outside the Soviet Union, became a local form of being rather than part of a global phenomenon… Being Muslim came to mean adherence to certain local cultural norms and traditions rather than adherence to strictures that were directly validated by the learned tradition.”^[63]
It was not just Islam that experienced these sorts of changes. Buriat Buddhists found themselves with a new, tsarist-sponsored spiritual head, in the form of the Bandido-Khambo-Lama.^[64] Moreover, tsarist sponsoring of Islam among the Kazakhs in the eighteenth century, or of Lamaism among the Buriats east of Lake Baikal, transformed not only the religious world of those peoples but also the very nature of the religions themselves by adding new ethno-cultural and geographical characteristics to the broader amalgam of believers and practitioners. Such changes came at the expense, of course, of other animist or shamanist forms of spirituality that were pushed out in the process.^[65]
A corollary of this creative imperium was that many non-Russians were generally content with Russian rule – or at least not actively opposed. Russian/Soviet rule offered important opportunities and possibilities – not to mention resources – that could be used to push local agendas. They may have wanted more rights or more autonomy (in the way that many constituencies in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union wanted expanded rights), but did not oppose the actual state structure. Estonians and Latvians in the nineteenth century, for instance, saw the Russian state as a potential ally in their dealings with the Baltic Germans (although after World War II their opposition was much clearer and stronger). Indeed, Estonians and Latvians were in many respects supporters of the processes we now call Russification as they saw it as a way to use the power of the state – and the opportunities of integration into a Russian world – to reduce the authority of their Baltic German rulers. Only when the state did not come through in the ways they had hoped did they become disgruntled with tsarist authority. For their part, the Baltic Germans, for all their frustration with the heavy-handed policies under Alexander III, remained strong supporters of the regime, as they proved repeatedly between 1905 and 1917. Even in the period of the 1917 revolutions, the initial tendency of Estonians was to stay within some form of a loser Russian federation, but with new, more democratic structures.^[66]
Georgians – whether noble supporters of the regime or socialists – tended to see little benefit for themselves in leaving Russia. Armenians too saw their presence in Russia as an acceptable state of affairs, holding out the possibility of using Russian power to bring “Western Armenia” out of Turkish control and into the Russian sphere as a means of uniting the Armenian communities. In Central Asia, as Adeeb Khalid has shown, Jadid reformers saw little need to leave Russia – again demanding greater autonomy – and were pleased with the opportunities for education, printing, and trans-Islamic conversations that their presence in Russia offered them. Kazakh intellectuals too were most intent on cultural autonomy, rather than separation. In the Soviet era, especially in the post-Stalinist period, most of the national elites welcomed indigenization and the possibilities for education, positions of authority, economic development, and the like, that these policies allowed.^[67]