SUMMARY:

In her article, Aleksandra Petukhova suggests looking at the escalation of the “Finnish Question” during the last decades of imperial Russia as a particular intertextual media discourse generated by the metropolitan imperial elites in a certain historical context. The author turns her attention to the group of conservative intellectuals, such as K. F. Odrin, M. M. Borodkin, N. N. Korevo, and K. N. Iakubov, who assumed the role of ideologues in cultivating a “national way of thinking” at a time when the ruling elites faced the challenges of uneven modernization in the imperial center and arguably in more developed national peripheries.
Petukhova analyzes the language of anti-Finnish rhetoric of these publicists in polar categories of “unity” and “national threat,” and makes parallels to earlier rhetoric of anti-Polish discourse that emerged after the uprising of 1863. The former category accentuated the universalistic nature of the Russian people, whereas the latter singled out alien elements, “inner enemies” that did not differ from immoral revolutionaries. The metaphoric devices and vivid pejorative idioms employed in anti-Finnish propaganda facilitated the construction of virtual borders between “us” and “them,” Russians and Finns, and had the unintended consequence of invigorating separatist tendencies in Finland.
It is still unclear whether the imperial authorities actively encouraged the anti-Finnish media campaign, yet what is definitely clear, as Petukhova demonstrates, is that it missed not only its goal, but even the domestic audience. The rhetoric of “friends vs. enemy” was consumed mostly by conservatives and the autocracy and was less popular with the general imperial public.