Valentin Semenovich Diakin (1930-1994) is an historian well known in the West, the Soviet Union, and today's Russia for his many scholarly monographs, published over three decades, on the relationships between the autocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the nobility, particularly in the period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The volume under review is an unusual one, lying somewhere between an author's notes and a book – the book that Diakin was unable to complete before his untimely death.
I. V. Lukoianov, one of the volume's editors, describes it as an “analytic abstract of archival materials, primarily from the fondy of the Russian State Historical Archive... mainly intra- and interdepartmental correspondence, journals of meetings, memoranda, certificates, draft laws... most of all, documents representing the views of central, and partly local, authorities on various aspects of nationality policy... practically nothing on the history of relations among nationalities, and little on the history of national movements.” (p. 11) The extracts from such documents that constitute the volume are characterized by Lukoianov as an “intermediate link between a mere abstract and an author's first draft. Often found in them are the author's evaluations, remarks, establishment of linkages among separate facts, and exposure of hidden tendencies in policy.” (Ibid.)
All abstracts contain full citations (fond, opis', delo, and list); unless labeled as from GARF, the documents abstracted are from RGIA. Excerpts from the originals are in quotation marks. The volume will consequently serve as a very useful guide to the archives for future researchers.
The number of pages devoted to various geographic regions varies as follows: Caucasus 39% (mostly on general matters and Georgia, little on Armenia or Azerbaidzhan specifically), Western gubernii including Ukraine 16%, Central Asia 13% (much more on Turkestan than the Steppe oblasti), Poland 11%, Volga region 4%, Siberia 2%. General questions on nationality policy occupy 15% (more than half of this concerns Muslims and Jews). Chronologically, the documents range from the 1860s to 1916, but only a minority are from the period before the latter 1890s.
Diakin's fifty-page overview of his topic, “The Nationalities Question in Tsarism's Domestic Policy in the 19th and Beginning of the 20th Centuries (Formulating the Problem),” written in December 1993 for discussion in the Section on Modern Russian History, Institute of Russian History, St. Petersburg, is an appropriate and welcome introduction to the volume. The text of this essay, according to the editors, is closer to the author's original than that published in Voprosy Istorii, 1995, No. 9 and 1996, Nos. 11-12.
Diakin's essay offers a rather pessimistic, as well as deterministic, view of Russia's nationalities problem. In his view, Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan was a “tragedy not only for the Tatar but also for the Russian people.” Without the incorporation of Kazan, Muscovy “would have remained more or less mononational and free from ethnic contradictions, and the energy of the Russian people would have been employed not for extensive colonization of huge expanses... but for the intensive mastery of their own lands. In that case the Russian state's economic, and consequently its social and political, development would have proceeded more rapidly, with a greater probability of escaping a revolution on the scale of 1917.” (p. 14)
Surely this is too heavy a burden to be placed on one example of empire-building. Would not Russia's expansion to the west and south have taken place even had Kazan continued to block the way to the east? Or is Diakin implying that Russia's first imperial conquest contained the seeds of the many subsequent cases?
In the sense that states tend to extend their authority or influence up to the lines where a balance of power with their neighbors is achieved, this is true. Perhaps this is what Diakin means by stating that history develops according to its own laws: “At a certain stage the creation of the Russian Empire was inevitable, just as at another phase its collapse became inevitable.” (Ibid.) Hopefully, he would have elaborated on this point had he been able to complete his monograph. But it was the collapse, rather than the creation, of the empire that was his focus – his goal to trace the place of the nationalities question in the “policy of Russia's ruling circles...particularly in the last decades of its existence.” (Ibid.)
Diakin condemns the regime's handling of this question. Its “crude means of suppressing national movements only backfired, helping to radicalize such movements....This in turn served as a new spur to strengthen the authorities' repressive actions,” turning the nationalities question into “one of the most important destabilizing factors in the Russian Empire” by the turn of the century. (p. 61) Nothing surprising in this view.
But Diakin also asserts that “tsarism's anxiety over the very first manifestations of the national self-consciousness of Russia's peoples, peaceful and limited in their goals, was well-founded, for these manifestations were a potential threat to the empire's preservation.” (Ibid.) Furthermore, argues the author, “hopes for the appeasement of national movements by means of partial concessions” were futile. Europe's history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates “that any considerably large ethnos aspires to have its own territorial state formation... [B]eginning with a movement to defend and develop its particular culture, the process of national self-consciousness arrives... at the slogan of territorial autonomy and, under circumstances favorable to the radicalization of [its] demands, of full independence. The principle of national cultural autonomy, preserving the unity of a multinational state, proves in practice to be realizable [only] where various ethnic groups do not live in compact districts and even cannot claim to have lived in such in the past.” (pp. 60-61)
Russia, of course, is not one of these exceptions and therefore is subject to the following historical law: “Given a certain degree of maturity of the ethnic groups contained within multinational empires, their retention in one state becomes possible only through force. Therefore, as soon as an empire demonstrates the lack of such force, it falls to pieces. ...Evidently there exists no policy that can prevent the collapse of empire... only a policy which absorbs the shock of such a collapse and makes it less painful.” (Ibid.) Diakin is correct in insisting on the incompatibility of empire with the political ideal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the nation-state. If they are to continue, multinational states, a category which includes empires, must somehow come to terms with this ideal.
Defeat in World War I destroyed the Russian Empire. Had its collapse been accepted by Russia's new rulers, Diakin argues, it could have been gradually reconstructed on the basis of political equality for its peoples, who were already linked economically and culturally. Diakin implies here a true federation of ethnically defined units, similar to the one the Soviet Union purported to be, but in fact was not: “Having used, from the start, the slogan of the old empire, and having then created by force its own [empire] on the wreckage of the old, the Bolshevik party planted under the country's further development the mine that has exploded in our days.” (pp. 61-62)
State reconstruction on the basis of political equality among the nationalities is a much more difficult task after the collapse of the Soviet Union than it would have been in 1917, according to Diakin. The intervening seventy-five years have created an “absurd level” of “regional economic specialization within the framework of a single national economy.” Furthermore, the settlement of significant numbers of Russians outside the Russian Federation “creates tension in Russia's relations with the republics that have attained independence and engenders chauvinist tendencies both in Russia and in the other states of the CIS.” (Ibid.)
It is much to be regretted that Diakin did not live to weave his abstracts and notes into a connected narrative and to refine his analysis of the government's policy toward the country's minority nationalities. But the working materials he left, so well presented in this volume, are of great value to students of this theme – a theme so central to Russia's past, present, and future.