Alexei Miller is representative of a new type of Russian international scholar who is rewriting the history of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Trained as a specialist in the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Balkan and Slavic Studies. This institution, though moderately reformed, has survived the transition to post-Soviet conditions with some new research agendas and intellectual and political allies, which was among the reasons why in 1999 Miller changed his affiliation for the Institute of Scientific Information in Humanities of Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Miller has taught extensively in the Central European University in Budapest, where he has helped shape future generations of Russian, Ukrainian, and other Eurasian historians. He was a participant in the first post-Soviet meetings of Ukrainian and Russian historians with their European and North American counterparts to explore some of the long suppressed and contentious issues in Russian-Ukrainian historical relations; he then undertook the first Russian conference (under Russian Academy of Sciences sponsorship) on these topics in Moscow and has maintained his Ukrainian contacts and research interests in the broader contexts of Austro-Hungarian history and Euro-American historiography more generally. (As a further sign of the internationalization of historical scholarship on the Russian Empire, this work was supported by the German Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation.)
And now this pioneering work on the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the imperial intelligentsia, especially those of its leading activists in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and provincial Ukrainian/Little Russian cities. This book is intellectually and politically courageous because of the new possibilities and fears that overshadow the working out of a new post-Soviet Russian-Ukrainian set of relationships. It is proving difficult for Russian elites to get used to an independent Ukrainian state; and it is proving at least as difficult for contemporary Ukrainian elites to forge a modern set of national identities that both acknowledges the deep and long ties with Russians and their culture, but also positions Ukrainians in a broader European community. Miller’s book is the first by a mature Russian historian to take up seriously the place of Ukraine in the imperial political and intellectual worlds. It is not the first book on the topic: Soviet/émigré scholar Fedor Savchenko’s classic study of the bans on key aspects of Ukrainian intellectual life appeared in 1930, but his work was off limits in Soviet Ukraine and reprinted in Munich in 1970; Savchenko himself was arrested and shot during the Stalin terror. Miller also pays particular debt to Petr Zaionchkovskii’s study of the Cyril and Methodius Society and to Euro-American historians (David Saunders and Daniel Beauvois particularly) who have examined the issues from the published and some archival sources. But the censorship restraints on Soviet historians, which extended of course to their non-Soviet colleagues, precluded the kind of study of bureaucratic politics and intellectual biography that is at the core of Miller’s revisionist work.
Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally (and reluctantly) nationalizing imperial states (here Andreas Kappeler’s multiperspectival history paved the way for a new appreciation of the Russian Empire’s “imperial,” that is multiethnic, dimensions), but he has also been an important translator for Russian-language scholars of the ideas and literatures of nationalism that social scientists have written in the postwar twentieth century, especially Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” Those literatures are tested against newly available library collections and archival materials in Moscow and St. Petersburg: the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (AVPRI), the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), and the manuscript divisions of the Russian State Library and Russian National Library.
The period that Miller treats, primarily the reigns of Nicholas I, Alexander II and Alexander III, was formative for modern Russian-Ukrainian relations: from a period of relatively positive relations among the Slavophiles and early Ukrainophiles, the relationship turned to one of hostility and repression in a series of authoritative decrees and instructions to come from the imperial capital. Miller organizes his study around the origins of and reactions to the Valuev circular of 1863 and the Ems ukaz of 1876 (both of which are reproduced in their entirety as appendices to the volume). Interior Minister P. A. Valuev ordered the censorship committees to forbid the publication of books in the “Little Russian” dialect except in belles-lettres (that is all popular, educational and religious literature); the Ems decree expanded the prohibitions to include the import of literature in that “dialect” from abroad and to ban everything but the publication of historical documents; the ukaz also provided for subsidies to an anti-Ukrainophile newspaper in Habsburg Galicia and the exile of two prominent Ukrainian activists. For Miller the story is one of confrontation between three evolving nation-building projects, the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian, that targeted the same population and proved to be incompatible in the ways they were configured by contemporaries (and for many subsequent decades).
For historians of modern Russia, this period marks the rise of rival Russian national and imperial myths, especially the idea of an East Slavic “Great Russian” nation with its tripartite subdivision (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian sub-nations). Miller situates this myth in an emerging consensus among reformist bureaucrats and public intellectuals in favor of an increasingly assimilationist politics; assimilation was part of their vision of remaking the Russian Empire that we have come to know as the era of the Great Reforms and that reserved a preeminent role for Russian language and culture in that remade Empire. Among historians of Ukraine wherever they have written, the imperial period has suffered from relative lack of study when compared to the more “heroic” periods of the Hetmanate, the more “foundational” period of Kyivan Rus’ and Halychyna, and even the revolutionary and Soviet periods (especially 1917, the Civil War, the Famine and World War II). Despite this relative neglect, this period marks the rise of a Ukrainian national consciousness out of romanticism and in response to Polish and Russian agriculturalist utopias. Miller’s study presents the best picture yet of the interactions among imperial elites in the capital and in Little Russia. But because Miller is writing in the post-Soviet, post-colonial, and to some degree post-national era (despite important countervailing trends precisely in the newly sovereign states of the former Soviet bloc), his historicization of the Russian reaction to Ukrainian claims on identity and cultural and political autonomy also explores alternative explanations and alternative solutions that were imaginable at various stages in this brief but important period in Russian-Ukrainian relations.
Following on Anderson, Miroslav Hroch, Antony Smith, and others, Miller emphasizes the secondary, imitative character of the nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe, but also stresses the important differences between the nationalism of ruling nations (primarily in western Europe and the Americas) and the official nationalism of ruling dynasties. Anderson himself borrowed the concept of “official nationalism” from the Russian Empire and Enlightenment Minister Sergei Uvarov’s program of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. But whereas Anderson focused on the classical colonial (and overseas) empires and their colonies, Miller insists that the Russian-Ukrainian relationship is more appropriately compared with the Anglo-Scottish or French-Provencal than with the Anglo-African or Franco-Asian dynamics. Whereas other non-Russian national movements challenged the integrity of the Empire, Russian elites came to view the assertion of a separate Ukrainian identity (and, to a lesser degree, Belorussian identity) as a challenge to their own notions of the unity of the “Russian nation.” Miller also insists on distinguishing between the official nationalism of the autocracy and the nationalism of articulate elites outside the state; though these two phenomena were closely related they followed somewhat autonomous paths of development.
Miller traces the origins of Ukrainophilism to the French Revolution and Polish romanticism, on the one hand, and to the imperial universities in Kiev and Khar’kov, on the other. The first program of modern Ukrainian nationalism was articulated by the Cyril and Methodius Society and provoked a range of responses among Russian and Little Russian writers. A part of Russian opinion insisted that the Ukrainian language was a dialect and that the western region ought to be thoroughly russified to bring about the “natural” unity of the large Russian nation; a second influential position (among Russians and some who considered themselves Little Russians) shared the goals of political unity of the Empire, but allowed for some measure of cultural autonomy for Ukrainians (Iurii Samarin is taken to be representative of this second more multiculturalist approach). The press polemics of Ukrainian language and identity resulted in a harsh crackdown on the Society, whose members were arrested and sent into exile. Nicholas I and his advisors early on identified the Society as the result of Polish influence, especially from Polish émigré circles in Paris; the theme of Polish intrigue thereafter became part of the arsenal of the critics of the Ukrainian national movement. Still, Miller argues that tsarist officials exercised relative restraint with the Ukrainian intellectuals, largely motivated by a faith that the Ukrainian cause might be coopted and out of fear of pushing the Ukrainians into closer embrace by the Poles.
After Nicholas’ death and the accession of Alexander II to the throne, the exiles were allowed to return home and to the imperial capital, which became the site of renewed Ukrainian national activism. Miller credits A. Troinitskii, a censorship official responding to a Ukrainian-language publication, with the first formulation by a bureaucrat of an explicitly assimilationist policy in 1861, a formulation which, incidentally, made reference to the examples of England’s and France’s nation-building projects. In the press of the second half of the 1850s, Ukrainophiles defended their positions against Russians and Little Russians, who saw unity with Russia as a virtue while not abandoning their local patriotisms, dialects, and folklores (Mikhailo Maksymovich squared off against Mikhail Pogodin; one of the most important voices advocating the Russian project was that of journalist Mikhail Katkov). With official approval of a new journal, “Osnova,” the Ukrainian national movement spread to hromadas across the southwest provinces and in the capitals. The polemics began to touch on increasingly sensitive issues of the boundaries and organizational principles of the Russian nation and were made more acrimonious in the context of rising hostility and suspicions among Russians toward the Polish national movement.
It was in this context that the Valuev circular had its immediate origins. War Minister Dmitrii Miliutin set the bureaucratic machine in motion with instructions to the Kiev General-Governor to do something about the hromada there, which had been denounced most probably by Polish landowners and Little Russian clergy. Though Katkov’s writings were also influential, Miller argues that the correspondence among officials in St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Khar’kov were the crucial factors, as was the 1863 Polish uprising. Instead, when Valuev issued his circular-ban on Ukrainian-language materials, it was more a recognition of the weakness of any more positive program of Russian nation-building than out of any position of strength; moreover, Miller makes a persuasive case that Valuev and his subordinates viewed the repressive measures as temporary for the duration of the Polish insurrection. And Miller identifies strong currents of opposition to the circular within the bureaucracy, most notably from the Minister of Enlightenment, A. V. Golovnin, who tried to repeal the ban and even coordinated his actions to some degree with those of the Ukrainophiles themselves. Both the splits within the bureaucracy and the fears of driving the Ukrainophiles into the arms of the Poles led to milder sanctions against the activists (closing down “Osnova” and the Kiev hromada, arrest and exile of a couple dozen persons) than were applied against other contemporary trouble-makers like the Omsk separatists (who were tried in 1865 and sentenced to prison and hard labor). One surprising experiment that was adopted was the recruitment of several of the leading Ukrainian activists for administrative positions in the Polish Kingdom, most notably P. A. Kulish. Despite the increasing recognition by imperial officials of the need to inculcate a more profound sense of Russianness among the Empire’s population and an increasingly vociferous campaign in the press, government policy remained inconsistent, contradictory, poorly planned and, in the end, ineffective. Miller reminds us that the first real efforts to expand rural education (and literacy) came a full three decades after the emancipation of the serfs.
The beginning of the 1870s saw another revival in the press and organizational activities (Kiev branch of the Imperial Geographic Society and a Kiev History Society) of the Ukrainophiles, this time in Kiev and with the support of the new Kiev Governor-General A. M. Dondukov-Korsakov and many representatives of the Little Russian gentry (Miller emphasizes that these figures did not support any program of linguistic or political separatism, but hoped to influence some of the most “reasonable” Ukrainophiles by giving them official fora for their ideas; Miller sees Dondukov-Korsakov as the leading advocate for an Anglo-Scottish model of negotiating integration and autonomy). Myhailo Drahomanov formulated a new argument against assimilation of the Ukrainians into the Russian nation--that Russia’s enemies, the Poles and Germany, would benefit most from the alienation of Ukrainians by further repressive measures against their culture. This conflict eventually blew up in 1875 with Drahomanov’s dismissal from university service, but Kiev authorities tried--in vain--to shield the Geographic and History Societies from broader campaigns of personal repressions and closing, despite shrill accusations of separatism coming from influential corners. The Ems ukaz summarized the measures to be taken to combat this particular episode of Ukrainian opposition politics. But once again, almost as soon as the ukaz was accepted by Alexander II, it was contested by both the Minister of the Interior, A. E. Timashev, and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, as well as resisted on the ground in Kiev by the governor-general and the curator of the Kiev school district. And, once again, the repressions were relatively few and mild when compared to analogous sentences for other types of opposition. Still Miller acknowledges that the 1870s were the most hostile period to date of censorship of Ukrainian publications and forced the Ukrainian national movement to relocate to Austria-Hungary, where the Habsburg dynasty had been persuaded to allow much greater public participation in national politics than did their Romanov counterparts across the border.
As to another potentially important provision of the Ems ukaz, subsidies to the Galician organ of the pro-Russian (Russophile) party “Slovo,” they too proved ineffective in countering the Ukrainophile activities (Loris-Melikov ordered the subsidies halted during his brief “dictatorship of the heart”), even after the sums were increased during the 1880s when Russian military circles began to view Austria-Hungary (and Germany) as their most threatening future rivals. Miller concludes that tsarist authorities still looked on Galicia more as a recruiting ground for officials and Orthodox clergy for the Russian Empire than a place that might serve to reinforce Russian influence. After the crisis of authority that followed in the wake of the 1880 assassination attempt by Russian revolutionary terrorists, Senator A. A. Polovtsov was sent to Kiev and gathered information about the Ukrainian national movement, which continued to attract far less attention than its Polish counterpart. Several officials, including now former governor-general Dondukov-Korsakov, recommended softening the repressive aspects of the Ems ukaz, but the working group that was appointed by the Emperor to address the Ukrainian issues met only after Alexander II’s assassination in a very new climate under his son. Alexander III and his closest advisors on these matters, especially Konstantin Pobedonostsev and N. P. Ignat’ev, saw evidence everywhere of Polish-Jewish conspiracies and launched new russification efforts that were far more aggressive than those contemplated by earlier officials and, in Miller’s opinion, were ultimately counter-productive and ineffective. The provisions of the Ems ukaz remained in effect until the Revolution of 1905.
One of Miller’s most important contributions in this meticulously researched study is his identifying a series of historical alternative paths that materialized ever so many years within Russian official and public circles for a more tolerant approach to Ukrainian activists’ demands for recognition of their language and distinct history. Unfortunately for Russian-Ukrainian relations, those voices were regularly quashed by the “traditionalists” (Valuev’s reliance on aristocratic values supplemented later by Pobedonostsev’s faith in the clergy as nationalizing elements) and their impact constrained by the autocratic state and its police-bureaucratic mechanisms. Miller argues that the myth of the tripartite Russian nation with its Little Russian sub-variant, a myth that lives on today in numerous influential circles, was a response to both assertions of a more autonomous Ukrainian nation and to rival Polish claims that saw Ukrainians as integral parts of the kresy. Though Russia and Ukraine today exist as independent states and their relations are significantly transformed from previous centuries, Miller’s study reminds us that no national projects are inevitably doomed to success (or failure, for that matter) but must be explained as a complex confluence of historical institutional, social, and intellectual developments and are best approached in a comparative and international context. “Ukrainskii vopros” is an original, solid contribution to the history of the national question in eastern Europe and elsewhere.