SUMMARY:

Chapter 8 of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia is titled “The Dilemma of Stability and Progress: Empire and Reforms in the Nineteenth Century.” By the end of the eighteenth century the Russian Empire had incorporated almost the entire loosely defined region of Northern Eurasia with its overlapping and contesting local cultures, social hierarchies, and regimes of difference. From then on, the stability of the imperial regime became conditioned by its ability to accommodate and rationalize spontaneous self-organization processes of the societies and cultures that it had incorporated. This predetermined the systematically reformist and modernizing character of the Russian Empire, regardless of the reactionary political views of some of its rulers: only constant customization of the social and political order sustained the legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of various social elites.
Part 2 of the chapter, “Designing National Empire,” covers the second half of the nineteenth century, stressing the fundamental continuity between the regimes of Alexander II and Alexander III, while also highlighting the vital difference between them. The phenomenon of the “Great Reforms” is interpreted as a coordinated (albeit not fully self-conscious) attempt to rebuild the Russian Empire on the national principle – the most progressive at the time, that in Western Europe had proved its unrivaled efficiency in mobilizing the society in support of national political regimes. In the absence of any single normative understanding of what “nation” is, the reforms opened several possible historical paths for the Russian Empire. Implicitly, they laid the foundation for an “imperial nation” – a still nonexistent concept at the time (and one that is still strikingly underdeveloped), while institutionally contributing to the emergence of a civic nation, and rhetorically appealing mostly to the simpler and more familiar ethnoconfessional national principle.
The regime of Alexander III continued this work and made a decisive step toward actually implementing in practice the project of national empire – only understood unequivocally as the Russian ethnonational empire. Accordingly, the regime censored or overrode all alternative readings of nation implicitly present in the program of the Great Reforms – something that has been branded “counterreforms” (a misleading term, given that the only element rejected in the policies of Alexander II was the multiethnic and civic thrust of some of the reforms but not the reforms themselves). In doing so, the regime of Alexander III relied on the culturally constructed understanding of Russian history and the meaning of Russianness. Using this historical image as the blueprint for politics, the regime sealed all the alternative versions of Russia’s future and effectively put the Russian Empire on the brink of collapse: it had been empirically proven that ethnonationalism was inconsistent with a polity embodying a delicate balance of the imperial situation. The proliferation of a social vision permeated with ethnonationalism symbolically decomposed and disintegrated the hitherto entangled imperial space, prompting all sorts of separatist movements, and it alienated the neighboring nations (including longtime strategic allies, Germany and Austria) by aggressively enforcing the national borders of Russia imagined as a homogeneous political and cultural entity. By the time of his death, all the undersirable ramifications of Alexander III’s policies had become evident: the ideal of autarky had led to Russia’s dependence on foreign capital and imports of machinery; the cult of international sovereignty resulted in the autocracy’s dependence on the alliance with republican France. It was up to the regime of his successor, Nicholas II, to explore new, untrodden paths to the future, or to continue implementing policies rooted in historical myths that had already proved to lead nowhere.