If one was not born Russian, russkii or rossiiskii, could one be made so in the Northwest Provinces of the empire after 1863? This question, raised by the Polish historian Witold Rodkiewicz in his Russian Nationality Policy in the Western Provinces of the Empire (1998),^[1] is the main concern of Darius Staliūnas’ Making Russians. This book is a double boon, a monograph combining original research with focused coverage of recent research and developing historiography in a Euroatlantic framework. Penned over a quarter of a century after Edward Thaden’s pathbreaking Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland (1981) and following Theodore R. Weeks’ influential Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia (1996),^[2] Staliūnas concurs that Russia’s nationality policy was hardly as monolithic as it had once seemed. He shows how the demise of the Soviet Marxist canon in the 1980s and discrediting of much ethnocentric teleology in the roaring 1990s gave way to a «stress that the most important aim of the Russian authorities in the empire’s polyethnic borderlands was to ensure the political loyalty and social stability of members of other national groups» (P. 9). This trend is evidenced by young Lithuanian historians, more acutely aware of the limits of twenty-first century national memory and the potential of history-writing in their country’s new civic space. Considering Russification, the author’s constructive hopes are clearly aligned with the «consensus» in the scholarship of this postcommunist generation, «what we might call a civil view, whereby the object of Lithuanian history is not just a single national group but society as a whole» (Ibid.).
This rehabilitated late imperial Lithuanian-Belarusian purview of «society» as modern and polyethnic, a notable contrast to Timothy Snyder’s emphasis on the proto-federalist persistence of early modern linguistic and confessional diversity in the Polonized Grand Duchy and Habsburg Galicia, is an important corrective to primordial nationalist claims, Russian/Soviet xenophobic misgivings, and excessively patriotic Polish commemorations of «Poles against the empire and the empire against the Poles,» as Andrzej Nowak succinctly put it. Staliūnas is much in tune with the critical Euro-national conciliatory Lithuanian trend when he applauds the superb (and much-neglected) series, Lietuvių Atgimimo istorijos studijos («Studies in the Lithuanian National Revival»), and notably the 1996 book by Egidijus Aleksandravičius and Antanas Kulakauskas, Carų valžioje: Lietuva XIX amžiuje («Lithuania under Tsarist Rule in the Nineteenth Century»).^[3] In Making Russians, the author focuses on how bureaucrats configured the regional logic of nationality policy before differentialist and later segregationist policies were implemented by the state. Treating the inconsistent Russification policies in the 1860s and 1870s as confessional and linguistic experiments and bracketing their relative success («the fight for the soul of the people» – P. 289), Staliūnas allows the Russian bureaucracy to return as a principal actor, on the same stage as much-trumpeted nation-building intelligentsias. As with Serhy Yekelchyk’s important Ukraine: Birth of Modern Nation (2007),^[4] due credit must go to these civil-servant mappers of identity and territoriality writ large – some less moderate than desired, but not altogether appalling to everyone equally in their misconduct – for shaping the identities of Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Russians, Belarusians, Protestants, Catholics and others, the «ethno-cultural orientation of non-dominant national groups» (P. 160).
Staliūnas details the wholesale politicization of identity in the Northwest Provinces (NWP) and Vil’na Educational District (VED): how the empire’s civil servants deployed categories of language, confession, class and region to define the population by late imperial Russian assimilation, acculturation, and integration. This triune model of tools to ensure a territorial status quo, in a phrase borrowed from Benjamin Nathans’ Beyond the Pale (2002),^[5] was a key to the enterprise. Nationality policy was a form of «social engineering» (P. 48) through educational and (Orthodox) church initiatives, and the state’s application of politicized nationality statistics. Multiple plans were on bureaucrats’ desks and considered by Alexander II after 1863; some (the opening and closing of schools and churches; introduction of a numerus clausus for Poles studying in Russian universities) were considered seriously and implemented, others (Stanisław Mikucki’s Russian Slavophile relegation of Polish to the rhetorical status of «Mazovian dialect») never quite made it off the drawing board (P. 197). Noting «the existence of various nationality policy strategies» (P. 299), Staliūnas reprises the classical cases of Russian ministers (Valuev, Murav’ev, Miliutin) and well-known Slavophiles (Hil’ferding, Katkov, Aksakov) in official discourse. Between St. Petersburg, Vilnius and Minsk, the Russifiers’ «politically correct» consensus was that the Polish insurrection of 1863 showed the need for «Russians» to protect «the masses» in Lithuania and Belarus, particularly through education, against a perceived Polish high-cultural (linguistic) and confessional (Roman Catholic) threat. Russification was thus Janus-faced: the depolonizing Russifiers were charged with the interminable task of mapping the old Grand Duchy’s diversity as Russian in the borderlands.
Staliūnas’ idée fixe is a kind of anti-xenophobic penchant for emphasizing the multicultural borderland heritage of Lithuania-Belarus in Russia’s Europeanizing framework, when pluralism was a rather static state-policy option. In his role as historian, Staliūnas primarily takes on «today’s language, both everyday and academic . . . [in which] Russification is taken to mean assimilation,» and the «dominant opinion [among Lithuanian scholars] that what the imperial authorities or publicists supporting them said or wrote does not matter; what matters is what they did» (P. 57). He therefore focuses geographically on the Severo-zapadnyi krai, a Russian imperial designation. From a Lithuanian-Belarusian mental map where the Jewish Question is central in the Pale, he thus resists as «antiquated» the Polish term kresy, adding, «The use of this term when analyzing imperial nationality policy or similar problems . . . presupposes the view that these territories form part of the Polish borderlands» (P. 310). Staliūnas is certainly justified to revive a more balanced Lithuanian-Belarusian krajowcy («borderlander») view and seek a break from the joining of Russophobic ethnonationalism to binary Cold War geopolitical tropes. Still, the Russian toponym – one which would, undoubtedly, treat as less-than-oppressive the legitimacy of the last partition in 1795 and create a more favorable scenario for modern educated Lithuanians after 1863 – is taken on without elaborate explanation. In the case of Polonized gentry who had their estates confiscated by the tsars and their loyalist officials after 1831 in the kresy, perhaps «Russification» was not so pacific in the final analysis.
Looking at the «making Russians» recipe, Staliūnas provokes the reader with basic questions about the premises and prejudices behind Russification policy and, on a deeper level, the historians who study the process. Could a Polish Catholic be a Russian in the late 1860s? Not likely, given the (real or imagined) fear of proselytism, entrenchment of Russian confessionalization and nationality schemes in mental maps of the «European» empire, and bureaucratic lack of confidence that a Polish-to-Russian transformation could occur. Could educated Lithuanians have drawn from other policy experiments in the Russian Empire? Quite possible: the Il’minskii System, proposed by a missionary and orientalist «to counterbalance Islamisation and Pan-Turkism,» was but one example (P. 244). Staliūnas is less concerned with definitive answers than with moderating historians’ minor points of contention and testing documentary finds and conclusions against each other. «Historical studies of the introduction of the writing of Lithuanian in Cyrillic characters,» he writes, «are probably the best example of how one event can be viewed in many different ways» (P. 233). The author is always quick to deconstruct, or at least to point out the «lack of unanimity» (P. 289) among both policymakers and scholars.
While his tour of the current historiographical landscape is formidable, the organization of the book lacks a master narrative, and this can be detrimental. At times, the six chapters appear to be more of a compilation of articles and historiographical meditations for the specialist, loosely gathered around the same topic. Nevertheless, the author assembles an impressive overview of articles and books (mainly since the late 1980s) on the history of Russification. Works by Th. Weeks, M. Dolbilov, V. Merkys, A. Miller, L. Gorizontov, A. Kappeler, D. Fajnhauz, J. Remy, P. Werth and B. Nathans all figure prominently, and minor disagreements are dutifully explored. Given the scarce number of non-Lithuanian scholars in the West who can rummage through Lithuanian, this makes Making Russians a must-read. Staliūnas, to his great credit, welcomes contributions by his Lithuanian colleagues (Z. Medišauskienė, V. Žaltauskaitė, T. Bairašauskaitė) as well as up-and-coming Polish, Russian, and American historians of empire and minority policy (H. Głebocki, A. Komzolova, P. Werth).
Making Russians thus offers no single recipe for the cocktail; the book invites further research and dialogue on Russification among specialists. In attending to state documents, the formation of national identity, and what we might call the oxymoron of Russian «bureaucratic creativity,» one might wish for a methodological complement to reconsider Staliūnas’ political take on this wide-ranging historiography, one that brings in postcolonial theory and feminist critiques of classical archival work and examination of state documents. (See, for example, the 3/2007 issue of Ab Imperio, «The Empire of Archives.») But to complicate interpretations is, after all, what engaged political historians are supposed to do. Russification in the Severo-zapadnyi krai provides an ideal geographical space for such a conversational problematic, and Lithuania, perhaps more so than today’s Poland, Ukraine or Belarus, has a special role to play in a new dialogue. In Making Russians, Darius Staliūnas’ will-to-pluralize is a judicious historiographical review of the blueprints for Russification, essential for all who study the borderlands of empire.