The chronological framework of this study is before and after 1863 up to the end of the decade. This was a crucial decade not only in the Russian Empire: to the west, there was a simultaneous contest between Prussia and Austria for dominance in Germany, and within the Austrian Empire between centralism and some form of Hungarian separatism. The contest within Austria as well as Russia involved a primary ethnic confrontation (Germans and Hungarians there, Russians and Poles here) that complicated their relations with numerous non-dominant ethnic groups and prompted proposals for ecclesiastical reorganization. The events within the Habsburg realm and especially Transylvania during the 1860s are the area of my special expertise^[1] so I will focus my comments on these themes and the comparison of the Habsburg and Russian contexts in the material presented by Darius Staliūnas. The author employs a comparative method in examining the application of policy to different ethnic groups that invites comparison to regions completely outside his study.
In his now classic survey of European history in this period,^[2] Robert Binkley defined the era as the clash of nationalism and «federative polity,» or the confederation of loosely defined political units within or beyond the bounds of existing states. He viewed it as unfortunate that political «realism,» allied with the power of the national state, gained the upper hand due to its victories in Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Turning points in foreign policy were decisive: the Crimean War (1854-1855), Northern Italy (1859), Poland (1863-1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870-1871). The intervening years were replete with political debate and experiments such as those documented by Staliūnas. Our author notes the importance of the first and third of these events for his study, but chooses not to decenter it (as I will) by comparison with other regions and particularly the two decisive internal events in the Habsburg realm, the October Diploma of 1860 that partially restored the Hungarian constitution and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Staliūnas writes that defeat in the Crimean War «forced Russia into rapprochement with France, which encouraged the Romanov Empire to make concessions to the Poles. On the other hand, the defeat convinced the imperial elite that reforms were essential and that this required stability» (P. 43). Austrian leaders reached the same conclusion after their defeat at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Both emperors were mindful of the danger of concessions to Polish and Hungarian claims, hence simultaneously sought allies (or instruments) in countervailing forces.
This period of political experimentation manifested itself in strikingly similar ways in Transylvania and the Northwest Provinces of the Russian Empire. The locally dominant nobility, Hungarian in the one region and Polish in the other, was the chief obstacle to the government’s goals. There was traditional sympathy between the Hungarian and Polish ruling classes due to the similarity of their social systems and political traditions. The dominant nobility led an ethnic minority in these regions, but its history of regional dominance and national revival lent confidence to its aspiration for renewed leadership. The implementation of the emancipation of serfs in the Northwest Provinces (NWP) would target rebel landowners after 1864. Similarly, Austrian authorities in charge of clarifying the status of peasants in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848-1849 were harshest in their treatment of landowners who had been partial to the Hungarian independence movement. At the same time, as Staliūnas shows in the case of the NWP, imperial officials could not completely abandon landowning elites as a source of local administrative personnel, nor were they ever advocates of social revolution.
Hungarian historiography has spoken of Germanization in the period before 1867, meaning less the inculcation of German culture than the replacement of Hungarian elites with German-speaking (but often Slavic or Romanian) officials. Historians also speak of Magyarization in Hungary in the period after 1867. As in the case of the Russification studied by Staliūnas, these loaded terms masked complicated realities. One also sees in both empires the tendency of imperial officials to view religion as a marker of national identity and an instrument with which to influence peasant peoples’ loyalty. The Catholic and Orthodox churches enjoyed privileged positions in large part because of their identification with the religion of the ruling dynasty.
Staliūnas refers in his historiographical introduction to the thesis that Russia practiced divide and rule, seeking to strengthen Lithuanians and Belarusians at the expense of the Poles. Opportunities for the strategy were numerous in the Habsburg environment. It may have been the Austrian authorities that armed the peasants of the Kraków territory who revolted against Polish aristocratic opponents of the Austrian government in 1846. During the Revolution of 1848 the imperial court moved to the relative safety of the dynastically loyal Tyrol, and when Galician Ukrainians expressed dynastic sentiments Galician Poles referred to them as «Tyrolians of the East.» In the aftermath of 1848, the non-Hungarian elements of defeated Hungary gained cultural (but rarely political) rewards for their dynastic loyalty. This maneuver became much more open in the era after 1859 when press censorship eased throughout the monarchy. German centralists badly needed to counterbalance advocates of Hungarian rights in the diets of the Hungarian lands and in the Viennese parliament. Austrian authorities extended suffrage to the Transylvanian Romanians in the provincial elections of 1863, spurring their national movement but scandalizing the Hungarians whose nobility had long dominated local politics. In retrospect this episode helped bring Hungarians to the negotiating table and seal the Compromise.
Staliūnas enumerates three reasons why Russia’s rulers rejected divide and rule: an unwillingness to contemplate separate identities for the non-dominant ethnic groups, a reluctance, by reason of social conservatism, to support the advancement of peasant peoples, and a determination to retain government initiative (P. 56). The Russian discourse documented in this book does not dwell on the parallels in Austria’s recent history that I have described, but contemporaries must have been aware of them. To be sure, there were important differences in the way official policies toward the national groups played out in Transylvania and the NWP. The Russian rulers, despite their debacle in the Crimea, were in a much stronger position to enforce their will after the defeat of the Polish Uprising than were the Habsburgs at this time, for whom rejection of the Hungarian advocates of the Compromise might have placed an instrument in the hands of Austria’s Prussian rivals for dominance in Germany during the most delicate stage in that contest. International sympathy for the Poles, in contrast, stopped far short of posing a hindrance to Russian actions. Even if it had, it is difficult to envision the Polish and Russian sides concluding a compromise à la hongrois. As part of the compromise Vienna conceded the Hungarian demand that Transylvania be united with Hungary proper, but Staliūnas notes in passing (I would like to learn more about this) that St. Petersburg rejected a similar demand with regard to the NWP, that it be united with Poland.
The policy of both the Habsburg rulers and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to support Catholic church unions in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries was an important precedent for the penchant of Russian policymakers to consider religious adherence a marker of cultural identity and political loyalty. Russia would suppress these church unions in the Polish-Lithuanian lands after annexing them, but in the Habsburg lands they survived so that the Ukrainians and Romanians there entered the modern era as bi-confessional, Orthodox and Greek Catholic (Uniate) peoples. The churches’ rival claims to leadership introduced an element of pluralism into political development. Alleged Latinization among the Uniates inspired Orthodox Romanian and Ukrainian assertions that Uniates were renegades, while they in turn formulated alternative models of social advancement and cultural orientation.^[3]
Staliūnas shows that for many Russian contemporaries Catholic signified Polish, and Orthodox signified Russian; thus efforts to weaken Lithuanian and Belarusian ties to the Catholic church were presumed to weaken Polish influence. This motivated the forced conversion of some 70,000 Roman Catholics to Orthodoxy and the partial introduction of the Russian language (the Mass itself continued in Latin) in Roman Catholic churches. In both cases the authorities focused on Belarusian districts and avoided the Lithuanian ones. They did this, the author states, because they viewed the Lithuanians as a more difficult case and that they were considered to be «fanatical.» He ought also to note that the Belarusian districts were precisely those where the forced reunification of the Belarusian Uniate church had taken place in 1839 and the Latin rite parishes had accommodated Belarusian fugitives. Another gap in the account is whether the language of sacramental confession entered into the discussion, namely the area of parish life where communication had to be bidirectional. The book examines the complex motives behind an unsuccessful 1865 proposal for church union, How to End the Abnormal Situation in the Western Gubernias, that would create a «Russian Catholic Church» under the authority of a state office rather than the Holy See. The proposed interposition of this state authority would be a departure from the earlier church unions, but followed the precedent of the Roman Catholic Collegium, founded by Alexander I in 1801. Russian authorities, and especially Minister of Interior Petr Valuev, were unwilling to take this radical step.
The contemporary designs in Transylvania for «confessional engineering» (which is the author’s interesting phrase) were less radical but more widespread. There was no Austrian proposal for a new church union and creation of a new hybrid confession, and there were no forced conversions in this period. The movement of conversion here was almost exclusively among the eastern rite Romanians, concerned confession only, and arose from intraethnic political competition rather than coercion by the state. The authorities did force a Roman Catholic bishop (Lajos Haynald of the Hungarians) to resign and influenced the politics of the Romanian churches by extending subsidies to their parishes. Confessional engineering in Transylvania meant most of all the demand to create ethnically exclusive church provinces, which were granted to the two Romanian churches but denied to the Hungarian Catholics and Calvinists and the Armenian Catholics. At stake was the creation of ecclesiastical polities that would rival the laity for ethnic leadership and would direct autonomous educational systems.
The author’s discussion of alphabet as a signifier of confession and national identity also presents interesting parallels to Transylvania. There too, the Latin alphabet was associated with the Roman religion, and Gothic print (Fraktur in German, also known in English as «blackface») with the Lutheran. The status of the Cyrillic alphabet in Transylvania was more complicated. Romanians had historically used this alphabet, but the church union increased use of the Latin alphabet to a much greater extent than had ever happened with the Ukrainian and Belarusian Uniates. This was because Romanian Uniates were in the forefront of their national movement that placed great emphasis on the Latin origins of the Romanian language. The tipping point for the public use of the Latin alphabet for Romanian (even in the overwhelmingly Orthodox Danubian Principalities) came precisely in the 1860s, although the use of Cyrillic script in the internal correspondence of the Romanian Orthodox church survived into the early twentieth century. The preservation of Cyrillic on confessional grounds has an analogy in the opposition of Lithuanian churchmen, especially Bishop Motiejus Valančius, to the usage of Cyrillic in the Lithuanian language. As with Romanian, ethnopolitical and linguistic arguments for the adoption of a modified Latin alphabet would prevail.
The author’s nuanced analysis of Russian official discourse in this study reveals many parallels between the controversy over Russification in the Northwest Provinces and events in the borderland province of Transylvania to the south. The broader struggle between Poles and Russians to the north, and Hungarians and Germans in the Habsburg realm, exposed the smaller peoples caught between them to special pressures. Staliūnas demonstrates that Russian authorities resorted to various instruments (land and taxation, statistical manipulation, schools, churches, and language) in pressuring Lithuanians and Belarusians to become less Polish, hence no longer a reliable instrument of Russia’s most refractory nationality. The policy that the subject peoples perceived as Russification or Magyarization was, in the eye of the authorities, a justified measure in defense of their nation as staatstragendes Volk. Habsburg and Hungarian authorities would also resort to all of these instruments.
The historiography on the 1860s in Transylvania focuses to a lesser degree than does Staliūnas on official and internal discourse. This is a lacuna of the research on Transylvania, because the intention of policy is crucial when discussing a policy that is largely presumed to be assimilatory. The emphasis in work on Transylvania is much more on ethnic and religious groups as autonomous actors. This is true of the classic works of Keith Hitchins on the Transylvanian Romanians and, further north, of John-Paul Himka on Galician Ukrainians and their churches.^[4] Hitchins’ work on Orthodox Bishop Andreiu Şaguna invites comparison to that of Vytautas Merkys on Bishop Valančius.^[5] Both were scholars, religious leaders, and ethnopoliticians. Şaguna was more successful, but also faced a less dominant state and enjoyed more political options.
The decisive distinction between the Northwest Provinces and Transylvania was surely in the relative weakness, or tolerance, of the Habsburg state. Hungarian works in English, while critical of Austrian policies, give primary agency to social forces for the 1860s and later. The Hungarian «History of Transylvania» (first published in 1986, and translated more recently into English) provides analysis in each chronological section on Hungarian, Romanian, and German culture and politics. Magyarization entered contemporary discourse only from the 1880s onward when the government sought to strengthen the Hungarian element through school finance and regulations on place names. Historians are writing about this later period when they dispute the reality of Magyarization. These policies were an own-goal in terms of the reaction they provoked among the minorities. Official statistics did show a new majority for Hungarians after 1900, but this may have been primarily the result (as Hungarians argue) of changing Jewish loyalties and the effects of natural assimilation and life choices.^[6] A recent German study also argues that Hungarian school policy aimed primarily at modernization rather than forceful assimilation. I argued in a recent study that Hungarian authorities exploited existing assimilatory trends to create a new Hungarian Greek Catholic diocese in 1912.^[7] Romanian work on the same issues asserts unambiguously repressive motives.
National and confessional policies had to wrestle with issues of religious and political loyalty in the large region between Germany and inner Russia, especially during the crucial decade of the 1860s. Authorities pulled a variety of levers in their effort to influence the evolution of the ethnopolitical landscape. What were they trying to do, and was it really the Russification or Magyarization of contemporary polemics and later historiography? Staliūnas provides answers for the Northwest Provinces of the Russian Empire: to weaken the Polish element, reclaim the Belarusians, and reorient the Lithuanians. These insights stimulated my reflections on German and Hungarian efforts further south. In neither case were these efforts particularly successful, but they had lasting effects nonetheless. The crucial decade was even more crucial in the Russian than the Habsburg realm because it determined not only the configuration of political power but the ethnic policies to be followed in succeeding decades.