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).^[1] 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.”^[2]
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.”^[3]
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.^[4] 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.^[5] 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.^[6] 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.”^[7]
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?”^[8]
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.”^[9]
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.^[10]
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.^[11]
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.”^[12]
Proper administration, good order, and classification paradigms required knowledge and information about the peoples, landscapes, and ecologies under the control of the imperium.^[13] 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.^[14]
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.^[15]

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.”^[16] 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.^[17] 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.^[18]
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.^[19]
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.^[20] 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.^[21]
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.^[22]
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.^[23]
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.^[24]
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.^[25]
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.^[26]

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.^[27]
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.”^[28]
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.^[29]
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.”^[30]
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.^[31] 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.^[32]

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.^[33]
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.”^[34] 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.”^[35]
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.”^[36]
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.”^[37]
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.^[38]
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.^[39]
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.”^[40]
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.^[41]
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.”^[42] 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.”^[43]

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.^[44] 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.^[45]
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.”^[46]
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.^[47]

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.^[48] 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.