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]
IV. GOVERNING THE IMPERIUM

A substantial portion of the explosion of interest in questions of Russia/Soviet Union as multiethnic, multiconfessional imperium has not unexpectedly focused on the arena of politics and state policy. Faced with the complexities of a massive and diverse polity, state officials – whether tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet – tended to respond with a series of not dissimilar patterns of governance based on the options before them (albeit, with certain important moments of change and innovation, such as the 1920s and 1930s). Recent scholarship has tended to cast the imperium’s officials into three roles: bureaucrat-policeman, landscaper, and referee. Whatever the role, however, the recent wave of histories has underscored the significant structural, geographic, and human limitations, or complicating factors, that impeded state efforts to govern. Indeed, it is more often than not the emphasis on the problems and hurdles of governance that have been the most original part of this scholarship.

A) BUREAUCRAT-POLICEMEN

The bureaucratic-policeman state was most concerned to ensure the loyalty of its subjects, to prevent or put down signs of unrest and opposition (and the disruption of order and stability in general), maintaining the security of its borders, and to ensure the regular payment of taxes and fulfillment of other important state obligations such as military service. Both tsarist and Soviet officials spent significant amounts of time and resources to determine and then weed out the disloyal from the loyal. The question of who was loyal (what categories of people in addition to which individuals), and just how loyalty was defined changed numerous times over the period under investigation here (shifting among such criteria as religious affiliation, ethnicity, political reliability, class origins or social status, or some combination thereof).^[68] For instance, Baltic Germans were at one time the bedrock of tsarist policy, then became suspect after the unification of Germany in 1871, and then became loyal subjects again after 1905 when the revolutionary activities of the Latvian and Estonian peasants scared the Russian state into reclassifying the Baltic Germans. A not dissimilar story can be told about the frequently shifting, relative degrees of “loyalty” assigned to Azeris and Armenians in South Caucasia. Moreover, loyalty was also frequently defined differently depending on what region of the empire one examines – what loyalty meant in the Polish lands in the nineteenth century was quite different from the definition applied among Chukchi, for instance. Religious non-conformists such as the Old Believers, Molokans, and Dukhobors might be considered heretical pariahs and disloyal threats when living in the central Russian provinces, but when they resettled further from the core territories (to South Caucasia, the Urals, or the Far East, say), the degree of loyalty assigned to them by state officials changed drastically, at times to see them as productive, model peasants devoted to the fatherland. Much like the Muscovite state that Valerie Kivelson describes, the later tsarist and Soviet states also thought and governed “spatially.”^[69]
The bureaucratic-policeman state was also deeply concerned to ensure the proper and regular payment of taxes and obligations to the treasury. Indeed, often economic benefit far outweighed any considerations of an imperial civilizing mission or other cultural policies. Muscovite rulers after the conquest of Kazan were less concerned to transfer land to Russian or Orthodox pomeshchiki than they were to ensure that as much land as possible remained in productive, taxable use. Among the Buriats in the 19th century, as among many others in Siberia, missionary efforts at conversion were highly curtailed. Authorities feared that conversion would reduce their tax receipts since newly converted Buriats were freed from iasak, which would have reduced the very lucrative fur receipts. Similarly, Terry Martin notes that the whole set of Affirmative Action policies that he details were what he calls soft line policies and always secondary to the hard line policies of industrialization and economic growth. Ronald Suny adds how during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, local republican leaders were offered much greater local control of affairs “as long as economic growth continued.”^[70]
In their efforts to maintain order and peaceful administration, historians have long known, the tsarist and Soviet rulers used a series of tactics that oscillated between a greater emphasis on assimilation and integration, on one hand, and localism and the accommodation or often promotion of difference, on the other hand.^[71] In either case, however, we see significant levels of flexibility and regional variation in terms of polices and governing structures. In the Soviet period, Terry Martin underscores the differences between “east” and “west” nationalities in the formation of Soviet nationality policy.^[72] In the tsarist period, different regions tended to be governed by different institutions or different ministries, with variations also based on west, east, and south. The Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of War, Synod, and Ministry of State Domains, among many others, all had say in governing different regions, and these combined with differing local power groups and local administration. Thus, while Poland (briefly) and Finland might be ruled by their own constitutions, and emancipation for serfs applied in the Baltic states decades before it was permitted in the Russian lands themselves, the Caucasian lands were for much of the Imperial period under the control of a Viceroy who answered directly to the Tsar, Central Asia was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War, and regions of the Altai were administered as part of the Tsar’s Kabinet property.
We also see the regular incorporation of “native” elites into the governing structure: as an effort of cooptation, of Soviet-era korenizatsiia policies, and out of governing necessity. Given an absence of sufficient resources and sufficient trained cadres, the Russian rulers could not govern the imperium by themselves. Throughout, then, the projects of the tsarist and Soviet imperia were shared ones, completed only through the assistance and energy of the non-Russian peoples, especially of non-Russian elites.^[73] Even if, at times, non-Russians were barred from the heights of political power, their roles in local administration and the police apparatus were very prominent, governing both other non-Russians and Russians. In tsarist South Caucasia, an extremely diverse group of people was cast in the role of local official (and arbiter of inter-communal relations): Russians, Poles, Baltic Germans, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Imeretians, and Ossetians, to name but a few of the different communities who filled out the positions of authority from the local policemen, clerks, and district administrators to the provincial governors and higher ranking military officials. For their part, Nivkhi hunters on Sakhalin worked as bounty hunters for the prison system tracking down escaped prisoners, a contribution to imperial order that was evocatively known as hunting the “white sable.”^[74]
Yet, for all these basic characteristics of the bureaucratic-police state, much recent scholarship on the imperium ultimately notes the weakness or absence of administration in the far corners of the empire. Rather than the powerful central Russian state imposing its will on its imperial captives, the state as bureaucrat-policeman appears at times absent, corrupt, too often incompetent, and even powerless. Subjects of the imperium were left to themselves to sort out their interrelations. By way of examples, Kate Brown notes the ephemeral Soviet presence in the kresy in the early Soviet period while on the other end of the country, and a few years earlier, Bruce Grant underscores the almost absent nature of tsarist administration on Sakhalin. Russian settlers and the peoples of the South Caucasus in the nineteenth century, much like the Virgin Landers and the special settlers and Kazakhs in Akmola region in the twentieth, were in many respects left along by state officials to negotiate their conflicts through violence. As Caucasian Viceroy M. S. Vorontsov replied to complaints from Molokan settlers in what is today Azerbaijan: “Is it really possible that you cannot cope with the Tatars yourself?”^[75]
The relatively absent and ineffectual imperial state has been explained by reference to a number of different factors. Certainly, sheer geographic distance made governance staggeringly difficult. At the same time, the diversity of approaches to governing different regions and the general bureaucratic dispersal of power in the hands of a multitude of ministries, kommisariats, and local institutions of power made the imposition of one political agenda problematic. Indeed, state efforts at order and stability were hampered by changing policies with each ruler, run by multiple agencies, and with complicated relations among central, regional, and local officials. Here, what has been described as Russia’s pragmatic flexibility in governance could also mean disorder. These bureaucracies often worked in an absence of knowledge one of the other, and also at cross purposes. “True policy,” Terry Martin writes, “emerged from dialogue between them.” Likewise, Peter Blitstein notes that governing principles were neither coherent nor linear but rather a “hybrid of contradictory policies.”^[76]
Moreover, local interest groups and non-Russian leaders often had their own visions of the appropriate direction for the imperium, and they adapted or ignored central directives with significant regularity. Terry Martin writes about the necessity of “recruiting all moderately revolutionary titular nationals into important leaderships positions in the non-Russian republics. They in turn naturally brought their own concerns about national culture and identity into the Communist Party.” They often initiated their own policies that were quite distinct from the goals of St. Petersburg or Moscow, and it was not entirely uncommon for these more regional initiatives to affect the direction of broader, central policy. This was certainly the case with the widely divergent legal cultures found within the imperium, where local norms of right and wrong, and justice and punishment, could vary dramatically.^[77]
The bureaucratic-policeman state was also actively involved in categorizing and classifying the diverse population within their borders – although in different ways in the tsarist or Soviet state. They did so in an effort both to administer the people (by bringing what the elites saw as order to the ethno-socio-confessional world that was their charge) and, as I will discuss below, to transform that world into desired forms and models. The categories that state power used to order and define the population shifted over time, ranging along a variety of axes: social/estate, linguistic, religious, ethnic, economic practice, gender, perceived political loyalty, and geographic location, to name a few.
The nature of classification had important ramifications for the population. On one level, classification did more than just document the human reality, it also helped to transform it simply through the production and mapping of knowledge. Moreover, given the imperium’s generally differentiated approach to governance in both the tsarist and Soviet systems, just where an individual or community was placed in the grand classification schemes affected both their rights and responsibilities in the society in often dramatic ways – linking one’s ethnic, confessional, or class categorization with access to rights, land, education, and social and political mobility to name but a few. Thus, as Pete Rottier points out, designation in 1907 as one of the less developed peoples of the empire meant disenfranchisement from the Duma and zemstvos, as was the case with the Kazakhs. Russian Sabbatarians (Subbotniki), after finding themselves classified as “Russian sectarians,” petitioned state authorities to be re-categorized as “Jews” because the latter had the legal right to a Synagogue that those deemed sectarians were denied. It was a curious sight for Russian and Jewish elites to see people of “Russian” ethnicity working to be classified as “Jews” because it would better their legal and religious status. So important were these labels, that many strove to find ways to manipulate them to their advantage – and indeed, once created and deployed, state categories took on lives of their own. The so-called “rock people” – generally Old Believer Russians of the Altai – asked and received permission to be classified as inorodtsy after the 1822 Speranskii reforms in Siberia because it granted them a much better tax status despite the fact that they would in the process be classified outside of the “Russian” fold.^[78]
Entering the 20th century, as Eric Lohr writes, the “state’s power to arbitrarily define and redefine its internal enemies” became even stronger, especially during and because of World War I when classification as an “enemy alien” (and later more broadly as German, Jewish, or a number of others) led to expropriation of property, forcible relocation, at times arrest, and the extra-legal summary justice and attacks of those who were angered by the enemies. Lohr continues: “Like the tsarist regime, the Bolsheviks were able to construct their own categories of internal enemies and change them quite radically and suddenly from above.” Indeed, as Francine Hirsch points out, being classified as a “diaspora nationality” in the Soviet period was life transforming: “Diaspora nationalities remained Soviet citizens in the formal sense, but were stripped of their native-language institutions, land, and possessions, and were deported from regime zones.”^[79]
Proper administration, good order, and classification paradigms required knowledge and information about the peoples, landscapes, and ecologies under the control of the imperium.^[80] Yet, this knowledge was often illusory and hard to obtain. In tsarist times, the vast distances and the absence of necessary lines of communication made the acquisition or dissemination of knowledge extremely difficult. Months and months might go by between a central request for information and the arrival of that information. Sometimes, the information never came. Relatedly, tsarist/Soviet officials also struggled – often futilely – to control the spread of rumors and false information that disturbed the well functioning and order of society (such as rumors of impending forced conversions or involuntary resettlement, or rumors that misinterpreted newly passed laws).
Tsarist elites became highly dependent on a small number of people to gather information about their empire: either sending out an investigator (whose report usually became the foundation of policy) or contacting local elites for their views and thereby granting local knowledge a great deal of influence. In either case, there was plenty of opportunity for these privileged knowledge-making individuals to sculpt their reports in ways that suited their own views or served some sort of local political function. More generally, local knowledge played an extremely important role in the process of constructing and managing the imperium, acting as an authoritative voice in such questions as the boundaries and ownership of land, where water might be found, how best to utilize the landscape for economic gain, what the pre-history of local inter- and intra-communal relations was, or the dynamics of local legal cultures, for example. Here too, the declarations of a region’s inhabitants – both the elites but also, and perhaps especially, of those of lower social status as well – were crucial to the well-functioning of the state and its people, offering them certain powers and possibilities through their information.^[81]
Language also remained a major hurdle for much of the modern era. Michael Khodarkovsky rightly highlights how Russian relations with the peoples of the steppe were determined to a great degree by the translators, who at times took great liberties in their work in an effort not to insult anyone (especially because they might be the ones skewered for such an insult). Hundreds of years later, KGB operatives found it difficult to obtain information on nationalists returning to Ukraine from the Gulags because they did not have the necessary language skills. The result of all of this was a general absence of knowledge about the periphery upon which to make decisions. Indeed, despite the advent of telephone, television, air travel, and so much other technology that made the world a smaller place and allowed for the much more rapid dissemination of information – and despite the work by ethnographers, geologists, statisticians, and many other professionals to increase understanding of the human and natural resources reality of the state – even in the post-World War II period, central authorities continued to have a hard time gathering sufficient information and understanding about the different regions.^[82]

B) STATE AS LANDSCAPER

A second characteristic role of tsarist/Soviet state power was as “landscaper,” gardening both the people and the lands of the imperium in order to redefine and recreate the population on new lines. In his interview included in this issue of Ab Imperio, Zygmunt Bauman offers a discussion of two ideal types of states: the pre-modern “gamekeeper” and the modern “gardener.”^[83] These analytical distinctions are in many ways helpful for making sense of the Russian/Soviet imperium. While the shift from the gamekeeping state to the gardening one was by no means abrupt, evolving over generations, it does seem apparent that the gardening approach had become fully integrated into Russian governance by the reign of Catherine the Great and her embrace of Enlightenment rationality. Although the forms, intensity, and tempo of gardening – and the degree of “success” – would transform over the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth (the early period of which was in many respects qualitatively different), there is a “modern” continuity across the period under discussion here. Moreover, as the discussion that follows indicates, Bauman’s assertion that the “fully controlled garden is never attained, and the struggle for control never ends” is fully born out. Indeed, much of the recent scholarship on the tsarist/Soviet imperium highlights the myriad restrictions and obstacles that the gardening state confronted and the generally unfulfilled goals of a perfect garden.
That said, Bauman’s distinctions between the modern and pre-modern are perhaps too stark. The “desire to impose a design on formlessness, order and structure on chaos and randomness” was witnessed in pre-Petrine Russia too, as Valerie Kivelson’s study of Muscovite cartography makes clear. Even if not fully the conscious intent of the cartographer – and the question of intent and mentality is more difficult to discern in the earlier sources – the outcome of Remezov’s mapping of Siberia was clearly a bringing of order to the newly acquired Siberian lands and the creation of “peoples” through the labeling and placing of them in territorial blocks on the map.^[84] Additionally, although “pre-modern,” the arrests and banishment of Old Believers, those deemed witches, and later Jews (in 1742), and the forcible repression of the Judaizers in the 1480s, also reflect Bauman’s vision of the gardener weeding out undesirable “plants.” In his interview here, Bauman also characterizes the gardening state as concerned over excision – “the control over inclusion and exclusion.” However, as much of the recent scholarship on Russia/the Soviet Union indicates, gardening was just as much about the transformation of the desirable “plants” themselves, both in their external appearance, physical (even genetic) makeup, lifeways, and their mentality and spirituality.
Landscaping took many forms in the tsarist/Soviet imperium. First we can point to the creation and manipulation of categories and labels. During the twentieth century, knowledge became increasingly a controlling tool of the imperium, not just a means to administer the population. Ethnic communities were at times created and then destroyed through the process of classification and list-making. A significant component of classification came in the form of ethno-confessional territorialization: the delimiting and demarcating of territorial homelands for specific communities, which began in the seventeenth century with Muscovite map makers and continued through the Soviet era.^[85]
Second, both tsarist and Soviet states actively prescribed certain ways of living and acceptable culture and discourse, while proscribing others: sedentarization for nomadic communities; administrative, linguistic, and/or cultural Russification; forced or enticed conversion to Orthodoxy; unveiling of Muslim women; new definitions of byt and the struggle to forge new Soviet men and women; efforts (beginning in the early nineteenth century) to change popular attitudes towards health and medical practices and to spread scientific ways of thinking; and the re-writing of alphabets, languages, and educational patterns, to name but a very few. As a specific example, late in the Imperial period, Stolypin and Krivoshein developed a vision to use Siberia, and its freer economic and social relations, as a model to remake all of Russia.^[86]
Third, human landscaping was carried out through mass resettlement: both state-sponsored, voluntary migration and violent, forced movement of peoples based on ethnicity, religion, social status, and/or perceived loyalty. The examples are myriad: Religious communities like Old Believers and sectarians to the periphery of the realm; Tatars and Circassians abroad after the Crimean and Russo-Turkish wars; Germans and Jews, among others, during World War I; Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush during World War II. These were combined with the mass migration of Russians and other Slavic peoples to formerly non-Russian parts of the imperium.^[87] It also bears noting that “landscaping” was by no means the unique domain of the central tsarist or Soviet states. In his Imamate, for instance, Shamil resettled by force those who would not join his anti-Russian movement. Georgian leaders in the Soviet era transformed the demographics of Abkhazia with an active and extensive policy of Georgian in-migration during the Soviet years.^[88]
Fourth, human landscaping was carried out through violence, arrests, and murder: such as, to name a mere few from a dispiritingly long list, the excision of Ukrainian nationalist fighters and Baltic opponents after World War II, or the violent treatment of resistance movements in the North Caucasus. Similarly, in the 1930s we see massive anti-religious campaigns among Muslims and Buddhists, with religious leaders imprisoned or executed, and religious buildings either razed or appropriated for “socialist” uses.^[89]
Fifth, landscaping took place through economic development. Siberian societies, for example, were completely reformulated and transformed by Soviet-era economic development efforts. Officials attempted to place the often square peg of traditional economic activities (reindeer herding, hunting, etc.) into the round hole of socialist economic frameworks of collectivization, concepts of non-seasonal, clock-based work-time, quotas, and rapid industrial development. The process of collectivization frequently was accompanied by violent sedentarization campaigns.^[90]
Finally, landscaping also took the form of actually transforming the natural world to suit the political needs and social goals of nationality policy: from carving new rivers and irrigation systems in Central Asia; to hydroelectric dams through Siberia; to the Siberia river diversion plans; the plowing under of the steppe into chernozem fields; the devastation of sable and other animal communities by fur trappers; the development of mineral, metallurgical, and oil industries in South Caucasia and the Urals and Siberia; or the denuding of forests to feed various industrial enterprises in Karelia and the north, to name but a few examples.^[91]
Yet, for all of the dramatic, violent, brutal, and naked power harnessed to landscape its population – and I do not want to dismiss or downplay the cruelty of it all – there were here too very real limitations on the state and its people, resulting in compromise and unfulfilled goals. On one hand, the state was never able – even in the 20th century and for all its ideological aspirations and “gardening” tools at its disposal – to impose its will uniformly and easily on the multitudinous peoples of the empire. The limitations existed for many of the reasons discussed above that were pervasive to the governing system as a whole, including the simple lack of sufficient resources. On the other hand, there was (not unexpectedly) substantial resistance (or disinterest) on part of non-Russian peoples to be “landscaped” pushing back state agendas. There was overt resistance in the form of violence, ranging from Pugachev’s Cossack-inspired revolt against the encroaching Catherinian state, to the Chukchi resistance to tsarist efforts at control and conversion, to the Polish revolts, the “Kirghiz” revolt of 1916, Chechen resistance movements from the mid-nineteenth century through to the end of the twentieth, and the partisan movements in Ukraine and the Baltic states after World War II, to mention just a few. Moreover, the state could not foresee nor control all of the outcomes from any given policy. State efforts at landscaping often provoked unwanted responses, particularly interethnic violence – we can see this in the korenizatsiia policies, and the process of districting and border making, which produced significant tensions in the regions.
There was also a package of other much less direct forms of resistance (passive resistance, everyday resistance, simple ignoring) that helped to restrict the scope and success of landscaping efforts. These included the efforts on the part of local elites, who managed the implementation of a number of these landscaping efforts to blunt their force or sabotage their outcomes. More generally, older social, political, and cultural patterns continued and these legacies were reinforced through confrontation from the imperium’s outside forces. “Clan” politics, or the triumph of tradition, continued through much of the twentieth century. The response to the hujum on the part of many people in Central Asia was to retain the veil and maintain female seclusion. Ultimately, as Douglas Northrop argues, the Bolshevik state was unable to transform Central Asian social and gender systems to fit its designs – although it did produce a variety of unexpected (and undesired) outcomes in the process of trying, thereby changing Central Asian society in other ways. Finally, there was also a certain degree of unintended resistance, where even those loyal to the regime acted in ways, or championed causes, that were not part of the accepted lexicon of political and social activity. Such was the case with the authors and cultural elites in western Ukraine that William Risch describes, who were generally unopposed to the Soviet regime and yet went off in cultural directions that the central authorities did not approve.^[92]
The peripheral regions held various powers, even within the Soviet Union. There was an ongoing fear on the part of St. Petersburg-then-Moscow of nationalism and the potential for waves of nationalism to tear apart the state. Bolshevik concessions to the threat of nationalism came in the form of broad policies of korenizatsiia, including cultural and linguistic opportunities, the promotion of non-Russians into positions of authority on the local levels, and the granting of special economic benefits to certain regions in order to advance industrial development or to mitigate the economic difficulties in the area. Especially after Stalin, the central Soviet leadership allowed for a great deal of local power and autonomy to certain local elites in return for loyalty, stability, and appropriate economic returns. Thus, from the mid-1950s on (and sometimes beginning before), Secretaries of Republican Communist Parties tended to hold office for long periods of time, such as Vasilii Mzhavanadze, nineteen years in Georgia, 1953-1972; Jabar Rasulov, twenty-one years in Tajikistan, 1961-1982; eighteen years for August Voss in Latvia, and the list goes on.^[93]

C) REFEREE

As much as a landscaper, the Russian and Soviet states in the modern era were also equally characterized by their function as referees among the many ethno-confessional constituencies in the imperium. The result was a system of governance that was often relational: directed at the intersection of, or relations between, groups as much as towards any single group alone. The system was also frequently reactive – responding to the demands of subjects for mediation and mitigation. Local initiative, dynamics, and disputes in the borderland regions often dictated the terms of policy, with state officials responding to faits accomplis. A pattern emerges here that crosses centuries, in which petitions of various sorts from somewhere in the empire arrive in the corridors of power, after which officials act, usually forming some kind of commission (or entrusted to a specific person) with the job to go investigate what is happening in the region and then formulate a plan to resolve the tension. Through aggregation and precedent, the results of these efforts to resolve specific cases or incidents often led to, or they became, a more general policy. Notably, once state power inserted itself into certain communities and became engaged in certain disputes it tended not to withdraw. Not only did state officials (both local and central) wish to maintain order and ensure resolution to tensions that might prove destabilizing, but they also realized that they could use their role as referee in order to ensure their desired outcomes and to forward their policy goals. At the same time, the many ethno-confessional groupings in the empire also quickly came to realize that they too could manipulate the referee to their advantage.^[94]
Thus, for example, in the late 18th century in the recently annexed Polish lands, Lithuanians, Jews, Poles, and Belorussians sent in wave after wave of petitions to their new Russian masters in St. Petersburg concerning specific grievances and, more broadly, their intra-confessional relations, that St. Petersburg was obliged to resolve them in some form or other. In response to one set of complaints by Jews about a Shklov landowner, the Senate sent G. R. Derzhavin to investigate. Ultimately his views and report proved to be foundational for the development of tsarist policy towards its newly incorporated Jewish population and helped to construct the “Jewish question” in Russia. As John Klier has argued, “the Russian authorities unthinkingly blundered across this Jewish Question in the course of governing a region of which they had little practical knowledge” and in response to numerous “appeals to the central government from aggrieved elements of the Belorussian population.”^[95]
Similarly, in 1816, the Preobrazhenskoe Old Believer community in Moscow split on the question of electing their patrons and called on the Moscow administration to mediate. However, upon looking into the affair, officials – who had previously left the Theodosians alone – were abruptly taken aback by what they found (from allegedly helping runaway serfs to aiding Napoleon in the recent war). Full scale investigations were followed by arrests, new legislation, and the formation of a new governing structure for Old Believers and sectarians in form of the Secret Committee on the Dissenters’ Affairs – an institutional change that transformed the state’s approach to religious dissent.^[96]
Robert Crews underscores how the state, through the Orenburg Assembly and other newly formed Muslim institutions, acted as referee between lay and clerical Muslims and between different variants of Islam. “Recourse to the state became a critical tool for ‘ulama and laypeople alike. Frequently unable to compel dissidents by other means, clerics solicited the intervention of courts and police to correct behavior they judged to be contrary to shari’a. And learned and unlettered alike used bureaucratic procedures and rhetorical strategies beyond the mosque community to denounce erring prayer leaders and other licensed clerics.”^[97]
We see similar patterns in the process of border delimitation in the 1920s and 1930s. Here, state officials were required to mediate between competing claims to land – claims that were raised by the local populations themselves. Here too petitions on the part of peoples and political units on the periphery set in motion a process of review and examination, in which a small number of “experts” would work to find a resolution.^[98] At the end of the Soviet period, we see the Soviet state doing similar things over Nagorno-Karabakh. There, the competing claims of Armenians and Azerbaijanis spilled over into conflict, and the Soviet central state was required to step in (indeed, to declare direct rule) in an effort to try to cool the situation and restore order. Here, in particular, we see not only the tensions and conflicts between two different ethnic communities in the Soviet Union, but the open tensions between two Union republics.^[99]

V. IMPERIUM AS LIVED EXPERIENCE

Less prominent in the current wave of historiography – although no less fruitful – are studies that attempt to go beyond the purely political or cultural aspects of empire, multiethnicity, and multiconfessionality to explore the actual lived experience of individuals and communities within specific political and ideological contexts. Despite a field-wide tendency to privilege state level politics and ideology, there is a need to supplement that statist vision with a more socio-cultural one that encompasses the meanings of multiethnicity, multiconfessionality woven in the fabric of daily life in all its nitty-gritty details. Perhaps more importantly, scholars need to explicate the interaction of the macro and the micro: of policy, law and elite ideologies, on one hand, and the lived, daily human experience on the other hand.^[100]
Thomas Barrett, in his work on the history of the Terek Cossacks, offers a mission statement for this sort of historical approach. “Such a history,” he writes, “of society, economy, and transcultural contact in one borderland region of Russia helps to ‘ground’ our understanding of the empire, an understanding that is all too often portrayed from the perspective of the center, and only in terms of policies, institutions, and cultural representations. What has been missing, and what is essential to an understanding of how the borderlands fit into the Russian Empire, is a history of those who moved there and lived at the edge of empire, how diverse people interacted there, their cultural exchanges, and the new landscapes, economies, and societies they created.”^[101] Similarly, Rogers Brubaker and his co-authors have recently endorsed the importance of examining the history of “the everyday experience of ethnicity,” arguing that “ethnicity and nationalism could best be understood if studied from below as well as from above, in microanalytic as well as macroanalytic perspective.” In their study of the Transylvanian town of Cluj, they endeavor to examine “the daily reproduction and enactment of ethnicity” – “the everyday contexts in which ethnic and national categories take on meaning and the processes through which ethnicity actually ‘works’ in everyday life.”^[102]
The focus on local-level events and the histories of individuals and communities is important on a number of levels. First, just how individuals and communities understood and experienced their multiethnic and multiconfessional context is of course an important historical topic in and of itself – especially if we are fully to understand the nature and meanings of the polyethnic, polyconfessional world that was and is Eurasia. In many respects, “empire” has little meaning outside of the ways that the individuals and communities within it experienced it.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, these sorts of studies offer fundamentally different visions of the internal mechanics of the imperium than studies that focus primarily on elite policy or ideology. If states and their officials are in the business of demarcating boundaries – geographic, legal, social, ethnic – as part of their systems of governance, recent studies of the lived experience of empire highlight the breaking down of barriers and the transgression of boundaries. Structures of power look different at the local level, with power, not unexpectedly, much more diffuse in the context of intrapersonal relations. From this vantage point, the tsarist and Soviet states are at times relatively absent from local level affairs and daily human interactions. Hierarchies and approaches that seem so neat and clean in policy, law, and elite ideologies start to waver, blur, and collapse. Rather than solely the domination of one group by another, the “street-level” imperium involved multiple directions and forms of accommodation and acculturation. Cultural, social, religious, and biological blending defined the landscape; as did the reverse side of this coin: redefinitions of self, community, and tradition in the new, merging, and diverse ethnoconfessional context.
We see almost everywhere a cohabitation of tension, animosity, and violence with mutual aid, support, and even friendship, marriage, and other forms of inter-human bonding. Violence and conflict remain prominent characteristics, to be sure, but, in recent studies, scholars do not assign solely negative value to conflict, seeing it instead as part of a larger pattern of social and economic interaction. What often proves so fascinating in these stories are the shifts to and from hostility; how functioning multiethnic, multiconfessional groupings break down in certain contexts producing aggression, and then how seemingly quickly the shattered pieces of the social collective are then fitted back together in order to return to certain, often new, types of peaceful, mutually beneficial interaction.
This “lived experience” approach to the study of empire and multiethnicity has been particularly apparent in the anthropological and sociological studies of Russia/ Soviet Union. In his research on the Nivkhi of Sakhalin, Bruce Grant highlights the importance of going beyond ideology and policy to explore the lived reality. “Throughout the Soviet period,” he writes, “at the level of public discourse, there was a strong and conscious reification of the opposition between the traditional and the modern, the local and the federal, Nivkh and Soviet… However, one gets a different impression at the level of the lived experience of these discourses, where such kinds of oppositions are harder to distinguish because of the ways in which they were so mutually manifested. Most Nivkhi I knew thought of themselves as Soviets first and Nivkhi second; a good number of others, especially younger people, thought of themselves as Soviet only. It was at this level that one had to sort through the seeming contradictions of dwelling on the loss of family members during Stalin’s purges and then praising Stalin for his firm hand, of Nivkhi who had lost their homes or pensions during the resettlements and yet so vigorously opposed the loosening of state control under perestroika.”^[103]
Georgi Derlugian’s “world systems biography” follows in a similar vein of marrying the local texture of everyday life (and of one person in particular) with broad macro-level, global processes. Here, by focusing on the life of Musa Shanib, he explores the origins of the violence and opposition in the North Caucasus in the 1990s. He adds new layers of understanding as to why or why not violence and tension broke out in certain places in the region and not in others – and explaining them without reliance on such tropes as the clash of civilizations or Islamic militancy. Derlugian lays out his approach as follows: “Micro-processes and ground-level situations are but fine grains caught up in the larger flows of historical trends and social configurations. But close empirical analysis of such micro-processes can help us to cut the building blocks useful for constructing explanations on a larger scale.”^[104]
Thus, Derlugian integrates the biography of an individual (not only prominent in the affairs of post-Soviet Caucasia but also symptomatic of his generation) into the larger socio-political changes of the Soviet Union from the 1960s through the 1990s. Here he embeds daily life experiences in the larger patterns human history; and vice versa. On one level, he emphasizes the importance of shifts in the social system in the late Soviet era (especially the aspirations of the shestidesiatniki that were unfulfilled under Brezhnev’s stagnation and its glass ceilings). On another level, his explanation relies on the importance of certain generational patterns and both inter- and intra- generational conflict. Shanib and others like him were “characteristic examples of the upwardly mobile cadres, specialists, and national intellectuals produced during the tremendous expansion of Soviet higher education in the 1950s.” He had “dazzling career prospects” until “towards the mid 1960s there emerged all over the Soviet provinces closed networks of bureaucratic patronage and privileges that would hold their grip on power for years to come.” Notably, the local opposition of which Shanib was a part in the 1990s was made up primarily of “1960s intellectuals” who had been barred from entrance into the privileges of the bureaucratic networks. Derlugian goes on to explain how nationalism came to play such an important role in North Caucasian politics. All seemed possible in the heady early days of Gorbachev. But ongoing obstacles to power in the social and political realm for people like Shanib lead to frustration. Ultimately, when the Gorbachev reforms foundered and the electoral process of 1989 and 1990 did not bring Shanib and other like him their long-sought power (in part because of electoral corruption), they turned to street protests and “street politics.” Derlugian laments, “Shanibov and his companions decided to ride the tiger of popular wrath.”
The importance of local history to understanding the dynamics of the multiethnic and multiconfessional Russian imperium is also seen in a series of works that examine population movements and colonization. This approach is seen in the work of Jeff Sahadeo, for example, and his examination of “Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent.” Here, he emphasizes the importance of widening the focus from policy-making and ideology alone to encompass the perspectives and realities of the local, daily life; to explore the “complicated dynamic between policy and practice.” “Intricate local relationships altered visions and practices of imperial rule, offering unexpected opportunities and dangers for local actors and reverberating from Tashkent to the heart of the empire.” For Sahadeo, these ongoing encounters, with their “complicated dynamics between accommodation and violence, between common interests and otherness” fundamentally redefined the meanings of “race, class, and nation as well as empire.” At the same time, these aspects of the history change our grasp of the Russian imperial past, moving away from “simple dichotomies of power and resistance” that he sees characterizing many studies on the region. Structures of power and notions of hierarchy look quite different when viewed from the local vantage point. Ideologies of empire might point to “Asian backwardness,” yet the lived experience of multiethnicity underscored the ways in which local approaches to healing, engineering, and trade far surpassed the “European” offerings that Russians brought with them. To be sure, military power was ever present in the barracks of soldiers outside the city and often used nakedly. Yet, alongside these more overt forms of power and domination, came a more flexible and mutable series of power relations that grew out of daily life contacts.^[105]
Sahadeo pays particular attention to what he calls “poor whites,” that is Russian and Slavic settlers of lower social status who “played key roles in transforming relations between colonizer and colonized.” In particular, the perceived lack of civilization, rudeness, and dirt of Russian peasants and workers destabilized elite Russian efforts to erect a hierarchy based on race and ethnicity with Russians (as Europeans) at the top; so too did the spread of Russian prostitutes for Central Asian clients. Notions (and pecking orders) of race, social status, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality were frequently at loggerheads, offering both opportunities and obstacles to all those living in the region.^[106]
In his study of the Terek Cossacks, Thomas Barrett highlights the very important role that the Cossacks played in tsarist empire-building (as colonists, as agents of security, as economy builders, and as carriers of Russian civilization), underscoring that the parameters and structures of the tsarist empire were created not by state policy alone but by the interaction of diverse peoples in the borderland regions. In particular, the story of the Terek Cossacks demonstrates the ways in which power hierarchies and central state agendas were so often thrown on their heads by the actual experience of human interaction in the peripheral regions. Just who was colonizing whom was an open question. “In practice, Cossacks were often affected the most by the facts of settlement. The weakness of the Russian state in the North Caucasus allowed Cossacks to maintain a large degree of independence; the weakness of the Russian economy made them dependent on native economies and labor power; the particularity of the local environment encouraged them to adopt native material culture. While Russian power expanded, Russian civilization contracted; the North Caucasus was pulled into the empire, but at the same time the Terek Cossacks were pulled into the North Caucasus.”^[107]
I have tried to take this approach in my recent work on Russian sectarian colonization of the South Caucasus. There, whatever may have been the policies of the Russian state toward the region, much of how the Georgian, Armenian, Azeri peoples (among others) experienced Russian rule came through their interactions with the settlers who quite suddenly appeared as their new neighbors. In tandem with the colonizing and transforming imperial state that has tended to be at the heart of studies of South Caucasia in the 19th century – with clear lines of hierarchy and power and the collision between the interests of local society and the imperial power – the interactions of the settlers with the local peoples produced five forms of interaction that evolved in contradictory and often unpredictable directions: land disputes, partial enserfment, violent clashes, economic bonds and mutual aid, and, to a lesser degree, socio-economic and cultural exchange. In their daily negotiations, the powers of the tsarist state looked a great deal more diffuse and uneven. Rather than the unequal subjugation of one party by another, no single group consistently played a predominant role, and the Russian colonists were not necessarily privileged in the encounter. The forces of acculturation and accommodation altered both settlers and locals, proving especially transformative for the Russians. Violence coexisted throughout with economic interactions and mutual support.^[108]
In her study of the Virgin Lands project, which made enviable use of oral histories, Michaela Pohl unveils the complex daily life interactions and mutual relations of the numerous different ethno-confessional settler and native communities in the Akmola region (Chechens, Ingush, Germans, Koreans, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Kazakhs, to name a few by ethnic group; or, divided by state category, special settlers, Virgin Landers, and locals). Here she explores the role of the multiethnic periphery in Soviet historical experience, and most importantly, tries to delve into the character of the Soviet Union on a human, daily life level. In the process, Pohl uncovers a very different understanding of the Virgin Lands project. Rather than the economic and environmental failure that has been the standard interpretation, she finds that “despite the initial difficulties and the disregard for individual and communal fates the Virgin Lands project offered economic progress and the promise of a new identity.”^[109] Here, amidst startling inter-ethnic violence, multiple ethno-confessional communities produced different responses to the Virgin Lands program. In the process, they defined themselves and the region in new and different ways. For many Virgin Land settlers the program was a great success, offering – ultimately, after initial travails – the opportunity for high wages, honors and decorations, and the possibility to reconstruct their lives. As Pohl argues:

“Viewed from the Virgin Lands – at the peripheries of both Russia and Kazakhstan – and despite economic and ecological setbacks, the Virgin Lands project, or rather what it was transformed into, turned out to be one of Khrushchev’s most successful and lasting social reforms. It was a process that initiated the destalinization and rehabilitation of a region that had served as a dumping ground for punished nations and for labor camps. It took place rather differently from how we – or Khrushchev – had imagined. It was far more turbulent and even violent, and it involved many different groups of people besides Russians and Kazakhs. The processes of migration and construction evoked contradictory responses ranging from fervent support to bitter resistance. Ultimately, however, the Virgin Lands opening gave hundreds of thousands of the most varied people opportunities to build new lives and to reinvent themselves. Notions of moving to an “empty” space led to conflicts, but they also served to rehabilitate the region and to make way for a new identity for both settlers and local people.”^[110]

In addition to sites of migration, urban settings have also proven an extremely rich locus for understanding, and rethinking, the everyday experience of the imperium. From Warsaw, Riga, Odessa, and Kiev to Tbilisi (as Bryce noted at the beginning of this essay), Baku, and Tashkent, and from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kazan to Irkutsk and Harbin, tsarist/Soviet cities were perhaps most characterized by their ethnic and religious heterogeneity.^[111] Here, frequently in architecturally segregated living zones, peoples from around the empire nonetheless interacted on a daily basis. In recent studies, in addition to conflict and violence, these urban zones have increasingly come to be seen as places of “getting along” where often quite different ethnic, confessional, and social-status communities forged mutually influential, linked lives. Official hierarchies of power and influence often fell at the wayside of street-level, mundane, human interactions.
This grounding of empire in urban realities, and the attendant changes in interpretation of tsarist/Soviet history, has been seen especially clearly in a number of works on urban Jewish life. In a recent Slavic Review article Natan Meier explores “the dynamics of interethnic and interconfessional relations… between Jews and non-Jews, in the late Russian empire… [through] the associational life within the empire’s largest cities,” particularly in Kiev. Given the pogroms of 1881 and 1905, it is not unexpected that violence and animosity formed part of the relationship. What Meier also highlights, however, is what he calls “the small but significant islands of neighborly interactions, cooperation, and even conviviality…” in voluntary societies, in which were formed “working partnerships, acquaintanceships, and even friendships.” Thus, rather than the “long-suffering, rightless passive minority” in which the Russian Jews remained isolated from “mainstream” Russian society – views that have tended to dominate the historiography – Meier sees a much more integrated social reality in which tensions, conflicts, hatreds, combined with meaningful human interactions and structures of friendship and mutual support. In doing so, Meier’s work (and those of a generation of scholars of Jewish history) have started to see the Jewish experience in Russia as less exceptional than has long been thought.^[112]
In her recent study of late-Imperial Odessa, Roshanna Sylvester demonstrates how the multiethnic nature of Odessa, and the intersections among its different peoples, produced a particular trajectory for the city’s population. At a time in which Russian nationalism and “Russification” were ascendant – and at a time in which Jews were regularly targeted as untrustworthy and disloyal (indeed, dangerous people who seemed to control too many business enterprises and were likely to corrupt the poor, benighted Russian and Ukrainian peasantry who were easily duped) – the Jews of Odessa were in fact the people and the culture who came in many ways to be the defining force of what it meant to be Odessan. Indeed, the process of social and cultural assimilation in Odessa was not to some Russian or even Ukrainian norm, but rather to a separate and distinct Odessan identity that was heavily defined by Jews. “Whether their pursuits were criminal or otherwise,” Sylvester writes, “newcomers to Odessa acculturated into an urban environment that was secular, modern, and, most importantly, largely of the Jews own making. True, Odessa Jews still had to deal with the discriminatory policies of the Russian state. Likewise, they had to fend off the periodic attacks of violent anti-Semites, including some in the ranks of local officialdom and the police. Despite these impediments, however, Odessa Jews were fully integrated into the life of the city – Jewish experience absolutely central to what it meant to be modern Odessan.” Here then, Sylvester uncovers a world in which “the Jews themselves had the power to shape the society they came to occupy, non-Jews in the city acculturated to them.”^[113]
Similarly, in his pioneering work on the Jews of late-Imperial St. Petersburg, Benjamin Nathans unveils a different pattern of interactions between Jews, Russians, and other ethno-confessional groups in the city. Nathans highlights the high degree of integration of certain, selected, “useful” Jews. He also notes the way in which such integration began to be challenged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries not only by an intolerant state intent on controlling and disempowering the Jews but from Petersburg Russians themselves who perceived themselves to be at a disadvantage vis-а-vis the minority Jews. Here, then, the personal and professional relations (and aspirations) of Russian and Jewish Petersburgers proved the most important motor force in determining the fate of the city’s Jewish inhabitants. Notably, gentile lawyers proactively pushed for a reduced number of Jewish lawyers, and did so in part to stave off what they thought would be a state intervention in their professional societies should the number of Jews become too large. Such reductions would have the additional bonus of reducing the number of would-be competitors for their legal skills. “The debate over admission to the bar was complex and often arcane,” Nathans writes, “in theory, it concerned matters that had nothing to do with Jews of the ‘Jewish Question.’ And yet, in a remarkable chain of events, Jews and control over admission became inextricably and fatefully bound up with each other.” By bringing the story down from state policy towards Jews (and Jewish-state relations) to focus more on the Jews of St. Petersburg themselves and their interactions with their neighbors, Nathans offers a reconceptualization of Russian Jewish history.^[114]

IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION

The discussion here has only touched on a few of the many rich veins of recent historical research in the question of Russia/Soviet Union/Eurasia as multiethnic and multiconfessional space. There remains, of course, much more to this recent scholarship: questions of the role of nationalism in the imperium, the imperial ideologies of officialdom, the character of Russian orientalism, the meanings and measures of “race”, debates over questions of assimilation, Russian-ness, and Russian identity, the responses and perspectives of the non-Russian peoples, the place of the Russian imperium in a comparative, global perspective (especially since the Russians themselves were active and self-conscious in measuring themselves against external trends and yardsticks), to name but a few. Also missing here is a discussion of the robust and indissoluble links between foreign policy and domestic nationality policies.^[115] State security was, it perhaps goes without saying, a central goal of the imperium, and officials saw the imperium’s heterogeneity and its security as inextricably linked. Internal policies towards ethno-confessional minorities were regularly carried out with an eye to the international impact of those policies, both as a defensive measure against possible external incursion and also as a means to extend influence abroad. In other areas, such as the gendered and ecological aspects of the imperium, knowledge remains underdeveloped and there remains more research to be done. Yet, the “imperial turn” has already transformed the writing of tsarist/Soviet/Eurasian history in enduring ways.