Published in Russian, see Russian pages of this website.

SUMMARY:

Alexander Smolenchuk’s review is devoted to the volume Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire and Alexei Miller’s The Romanov Empire and Nationalism. He engages the representation of the Byelorussian dimension of history in these works. Smolenchuk interprets the appearance of these works both as part of the Russian search for a new identity in a new historical era and as the revision of historiographic conventions of Russian historical writing, which was heretofore predominantly centered on political history. While praising the volumes for their departure from the conventional narrative of Polish-Russian struggle in the western borderlands, Smolenchuk criticizes this new approach for altogether abandoning the notion of national narrative in historical analysis. He disagrees with Alexei Miller’s perspective on national narratives as inherently incapable of capturing the diversity of historical actors and space of historical experience. Focusing on the volume on western borderlands of the Russian Empire, Smolenchuk notes that the history of Byelorussian national movement and process of nation-formation was not appropriately treated in the volume for its alleged underdevelopment. He states that the fact of underdevelopment does not eliminate the necessity to introduce the Byelorussian dimension as part of reconstructing the phenomenon of imperial diversity. Furthermore, Smolenchuk criticizes the volume on several points: for the chronologically broad and uncritical application of the self-descriptive category of Ruthenians with respect to the local population of the borderlands; overestimating the degree of modernity of Polish national identity in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries; overlooking the assimilatory practices toward the Byelorussian peasants during the reign of Catherine II; and under-appreciating the persistence of non-ethnic regional identities in the borderlands. In conclusion Smolenchuk contends that the volume failed to incorporate the Byelorussian perspective on the manifold historical experience of western borderlands, for which Byelorussian historians are also to blame, for they are not sufficiently present in international scholarly exchanges and their scholarship is not as advanced and free as the scholarship of their Ukrainian and Lithuanian neighbors.