It is by now a truism that the Russian Empire – and no less the Soviet Union – was a multi-national state that should not be studied or researched as if it was simply “Russia.” And yet most Russian/Soviet history courses continue to be taught with scant reference to non-Russians, emphasizing tsars and party secretaries, Moscow and Petersburg, and relegating the “national question” – if mentioned at all – to a special lecture or two. Textbooks reflect this Russo-centrism and even those of us who consider ourselves specialists in nationality policy can easily fall into this trap. Part of the problem involves the conceptualization of the Russian Empire and the pedagogical complications involved in presenting a multi-national historical narrative. After all, even if roughly half the population (depending on definition and the exact time) was not Russian, the tsar, the bureaucracy, and the capital cities cannot be understood outside the context of Russian culture and the Orthodox religion. The volume under review, part of the series Okrainy Rossii, attempts to present a historical narrative of one region of the Russian Empire: the so-called western provinces and the Kingdom of Poland or, to put it another way, the territory acquired by Russia in the Polish Partitions and the Congress of Vienna. By bringing together a number of the best Russian specialists, this volume represents in a sense a snapshot of the present state of the historiography. As such it will be invaluable for specialists, graduate students, and anyone wishing a detailed and sophisticated account of the political history of this region.
One reason why writing and teaching national history is so prevalent is that the state is easily defined and delineated. Not so with a “region,” as here. As the authors point out, when they speak of “Zapadnye okrainy” they exclude Finland and the Baltic provinces which from a geographical point of view could easily have been included here. But from a political and historical point of view, “Zapadnyi krai” referred to the nine (by the late nineteenth century) provinces from Kovno (Kaunas) to Kiev, Volhynia to Vitebsk. But this book (quite justifiably) does not limit itself to this region alone: it also includes the Kingdom of Poland (or, to use the post-1863 official term, “Privislinskii krai”). The justification for discussing these two administratively separate regions together is both historical (both were part of the pre-partition Rzeczpospolita) and sociological (throughout this region, to varying degrees, the most problematic national group from the Russian point of view was, of course, the Poles).
But trying to forge a narrative covering these two distinct regions is also problematic as they were subject to quite different laws and administrative practices. Even after 1863, when great effort was expended to bring the Kingdom of Poland more in line with general administrative practices in the empire, it retained its own legal system (based on the Code Napoleon), mortgage laws, and censorship regulations. In this book, the western provinces vs. Kingdom of Poland complication means that the latter gets more detailed treatment in the first half of the century (probably inevitable given the presence of a Sejm up until 1831, a separate monetary system, administration, etc.), is given its own specific chapter for the period 1863-69. Thereafter the emphasis shifts to the “zapadnyi krai” with the Polish provinces receiving much less attention. These remarks are not meant as a criticism so much as an indication of the complications involved in considering these two regions together in a single narrative. But, arguably, the similarities in the general line of policy (though often not in specific laws) probably outweighs the complications of shifting between the two regions covered.
There is also the issue of approach and interpretation. In the past decade or two, research on the “nationality question” in the Russian Empire has broken with older historiography which tended to see the Russian Empire (and USSR) as a grinding russifying monolith. Rejecting the fundamental assumption of this older approach – that the Russian Empire/USSR “by its nature” aimed for national and cultural uniformity – has forced historians to seek out the motivations as well as techniques of imperial “nationality policy.” In this volume, it must be said, the implicit motivations are fairly straightforward: on the one hand, the simple and longstanding need to maintain order and control over an imperial periphery, on the other, a more modern urge to homogenize, convert, nationalize, in short “russify.” On the whole, the authors here agree that the former, old-fashioned motivation prevailed but at times a more modern and aggressive conception of nationality cropped up, in particular in the immediate aftermath of the 1863 Polish uprising. The authors do not make explicit comparisons with policy on other imperial peripheries (e.g., Caucasus, Central Asia, Baltic) which might have been illuminating – for example, did General K. Kaufman’s fundamental understanding of the russkoe delo differ when he was transferred from Vil’na to Tashkent? Generally, as befits a textbook, this volume aims more at presenting an informative narrative than at problematizing the categories by which we understand empire and nationality.
The book concentrates overwhelmingly on the nineteenth century. To be sure, the first two chapters do discuss the Pax Mongolica, Rzeczpospolita, and Hetmanshchina, but these chapters cover barely fifty pages. The main authors here, Alexey Miller, Mikhail Dolbilov, Ekaterina Pravilova, and Oleg Budnitskii, are all specialists in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and this shows in the book’s coverage. Thus the five years before 1863 receive approximately the same space as the entire pre-1772 history of the region. Perhaps this is inevitable as the authors here are interested in nationality and “nationality policy” (though they avoid the term), and the importance of nationality in tsarist policy grows enormously in the second half of the nineteenth century. But this does tell us something about the book: while economic and social issues are not entirely neglected, they are viewed mainly through the prism of their impact on nationality policy (or, conversely, how nationality affected them). Thus when considering preparations for peasant emancipation, next to no attention is paid to actual economic conditions while the entire emphasis is placed on the Russian administration’s fears of separatism among Polish landlords. This is not necessarily a criticism but it does indicate the book’s limitations: this is primarily a work concerned with tensions between Russian administrative policy and local nationalities (in great part, Poles).
The authors are primarily interested, to my mind, in providing a fairly “thick” coverage of political events in the Western provinces. In this sense, one could argue, this is a fairly old-fashioned enterprise of narrative history. On the other hand, their understanding of imperial policy is influenced by new models of interpretation and they present a sophisticated and detailed picture of divergent forces within the imperial bureaucracy trying to deal with real and perceived threats to the Russian Empire and even the Russian nation. Here confession plays a major role, mainly in the form of the familiar Catholic vs. Orthodox struggle. After 1863, the authors show that religion was increasingly intertwined with nationality (as Paul Werth has argued) and even subsumed into it. And yet, despite efforts by some activist chinovniki to encourage conversion in an effort to strengthen the Russian (either imperial or national) position here (again, mainly right after the shock of the 1863 uprising), in the end this activism was of short duration and had fairly limited consequences. One can see, however, sparks of a modern, more aggressive Russian nationalism within the bureaucracy itself. In the end, however, both bureaucratic inertia and the fundamentally pre- (even anti-) modern nature of the Russian Empire worked against any general acceptance of modern national mobilization in the region.
While considering the Ukrainian question, emphasis is placed on government policy – predictably, the Valuev circular and subsequent application of restrictions. Mikhail Dolbilov considers the issue of “Russian identity” by discussing little-known bureaucratic initiatives toward mass conversation and use of Russian in Belarusian Catholic churches but admits that in the end these efforts were not sustained. Economic factors are not entirely ignored: the growth of cities, emigration to Siberia, and economic growth in the Southwest are mentioned in the context of efforts to assimilate Ukrainians to Russian culture. But here, too, much more space is devoted to formulation and implementation of policy than to social, economic, or cultural factors. Ukrainians (and other nationalities) are considered mainly as objects of Russian policy, not as active historical subjects. Once again the great chronological watershed comes with the era of the Great Reforms and the 1863 uprising when the government feels the need to attack the issue of Ukrainian separatism specifically: there would, after all, be no need for Valuev to write that “no separate Little Russian language ever existed, exists, or will exist” unless the minister (and others) suspected that maybe it did and does.
And what to do about the Jews? In the period covered by this book the largest Jewish community in the world lived precisely in this region (only on the eve of World War I did the American Jewish community begin to rival it, but the great majority of American Jews were either themselves immigrants from the Pale or the sons and daughters of these immigrants). The Jews were unique in their cohesiveness as a community, despite differences between “Litwaks,” Polish Jews, and Galizianer. Policy was, of course, divided between the Pale, the Kingdom of Poland (where Jews enjoyed quasi equal rights from 1861), and the rest of the Empire (which included, for instance, the city of Kiev). In a synthetic work like this one, the problem is just where to fit the Jews in. One can either try to integrate policy toward Jews with other forms of russification or simply look at the “Jewish question” as its own separate issue. The authors here have chosen the second approach, which is probably the best one for a work like this. Policy toward the Jews is mentioned briefly in the context, say, of Wielopolski’s reforms in the Kingdom of Poland, but a separate chapter considers the Jews over the entire period (1772-1917) of imperial rule. This chapter presents a very respectable general overview of developments both within Jewish life (hasidism, haskalah, the Bund, Zionism) and in policy toward Jews (abolition of the kagal’, easing of restrictions in the era of the Great Reforms, the “temporary laws” of 3 May 1882). To be sure, this is again a mainly Russian narrative based on Russian sources more than “Jewish history,” but as Yuri Slezkine has demonstrated, Russian-speaking Jews also belong to Jewish history. Here Oleg Budnitskii provides an excellent introduction to the early formation of the russkii evrei, integrating the Jewish historical narrative into Russian history, which works very well.
The barely ten years of the “Duma period” are of considerable importance for Russian imperial history and have in the past mainly been analyzed with November 1917 (i.e., “what went wrong?”) in mind. Here the period is given detailed and sophisticated coverage, showing both the growth of non-Russian nationalist groupings (from the PPS and National Democrats among the Poles, to UDRP and other Ukrainians parties, to Lithuanian and Jewish parties) and the increasing level of Russian national sentiment (not to say chauvinism) reflected both in Duma parties and in government policy. One weakness of the coverage is the presentation of these movements, so to speak, in an abstract way. By focusing on the Duma and the way each “national” party related to the Russian center, the larger context of, for example, conflicts between non-Russians (e.g., Polish-Lithuanian, Polish-Jewish, etc.) fade from sight. And even from the point of view of the Russian center – take for example the failure of Witte to push through a municipal reform in the “Vistula provinces” – these frictions certainly had an impact on government policy. Even less can we appreciate how rising modern antisemitism – probably most clearly articulated by the Polish National Democrats – complicated St. Petersburg’s efforts to keep the peace and hold the empire together.
The coverage of the Duma years as regards nationality (focusing, of course, on laws having an impact on the western and Polish provinces) is an excellent overview of the issues and personalities in the Russian parliament and how these affected nationality policy in the west. But again, by focusing on the Duma rather than the situation on the ground in, say, Kiev, Warsaw, or Vilna, the narrative presented is a very Russian one – even when the dramatis personae include Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews (trying to affect Duma decisions). Furthermore, the key question – was there a shift in the basic premises of nationality policy (i.e., did Stolypin push for a more national Russian Empire?) – is not really addressed. Possibly the authors preferred to present discussions and laws and let the reader decide. But even in a textbook a certain amount of speculation as to the direction of policy is appropriate, and it would have been interesting to go beyond actual Duma politics and specific issues (Kholm province, zemstva in Western provinces) and consider whether in the post-1905 period the Russian Empire really was tipping toward a more activist kind of nationality policy (as most non-Russians at the time appear to have believed).
The sophisticated and detailed sections on fiscal and economic developments that are included in a number of the chapters are an unusual and very useful aspect of this book. For example, the economic impact of the partitions (mainly negative) are discussed in a short (3 pages) but sophisticated passage. Tax collection, monetary policy, the erection and abolition of customs barriers between the Kingdom of Poland and the empire also receive treatment in subsequent chapters. Including these passages on the economic and fiscal history of the region (focused primarily on the Kingdom of Poland) adds much to this book, particularly as few specialists on borderlands history have any degree of specialist knowledge in economic matters. There is, however, a great difference in style and content between these passages and the rest of the book where economic matters are barely touched upon, and this lack of integration between the passages can make for a jarring transition from one section to the next.
An unusual and very welcome aspect of this book is the inclusion, after the main text, of four bibliographical essays by distinguished specialists from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. The differences in approach and “coverage” in these essays reflects different conceptions of just what “national history” means. For example, Andrzej Nowak chose to concentrate on relatively few recent works, nearly all by Poles (i.e., foreign historians are mentioned but not discussed in depth), and wrote a detailed, at times quite critical, review of their works and findings. Vladimir Kravchenko, on the other hand, paints a much broader canvas, including many foreign (including Ukrainian émigrés) historians, but not reviewing works in great depth. Sergei Tokc, possibly because of the relative dearth of historical monographs on this topic, spends most of his article discussing how the imperial period has been conceptualized in recent Belarusian historical textbooks and collective works. Finally, Darius Staliūnas takes a different tack altogether, providing a very informative overview of Lithuanian historiography on the Russian period (and Russian nationality policy) from 1918 to the present day, including as appropriate émigré historians. The strikingly different approaches chosen by these four authors shows the richness of the material (both the historical and historiographical!) considered here; all provide little-known historiographical information that will be of particular interest for specialists and those wishing to delve further into these issues. It is regrettable, however, that the editors did not provide a short biographical and bibliographical introduction for each of these authors.
In conclusion, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii is an important and rich work of scholarship. It straddles the line between a textbook, aiming to give a unified historical narrative of a given territory, and a historical monograph based on original sources that cares less about “consistent coverage” than about examining specific incidents, recent trends in historiography and theoretical approaches. While this “double nature” of the present volume is sometimes jarring for the reader, in the end this book has much to teach both specialists (though they may already be acquainted with many of the monographic details) and generalists (though at certain points they may find the level of detail and sophistication daunting). In any case, this is a pioneering work which, one hopes, will help influence Russian historians (and readers of history!) to consider in more depth and detail the importance of non-Russian nationalities and territories for the history of the Russian Empire.