SUMMARY:

The essay highlights a paradox – when the 1917 February Revolution opened up possibilities for the development of various national projects in the former Russian Empire, most of them did not take a clear separatist path. It was only after the Bolshevik October coup, which put the country on the brink of open civil war and economic catastrophe, that national regions and movements hastened to distance themselves from the crumbling imperial statehood by proclaiming independence. Their explicit anti-imperial rhetoric notwithstanding, most national movements revealed a perception of the former imperial space as a natural context for self-realization. This paradox can be logically explained only within the model of the imperial revolution advanced by the historian of Iberian empires, Jeremy Adelman. It suggests that the political revolution became a response to the radically upset status quo in the old imperial system, when a powerful minority (Russian nationalists and the upper classes) threatened to usurp the entire Russian Empire. Following this logic, the 1917 Revolution can be seen as an attempt to restore the initial promise of the empire to provide a common social sphere. But instead of the principle of “equal otherness,” the revolutionary democratic ideal insisted on the principle of equal belonging to the commonwealth. The prospects of this imperial revolution were complicated by the fact that it happened in the structural imperial situation, but was conceptualized in the language of social imagery that completely ignored the problem of empire. With a few significant exceptions, most intellectuals and politicians in Late Imperial Russia framed their perception of society in nation-centered categories, taking the French Third Republic as an ideal. Russian Empire was not mentioned even formally in most important official documents throughout the revolutionary 1917 and was largely absent in the public discourse. The imperial revolution was staged by people seeking new, just forms of accommodation of differences on the pan-imperial scale, who were perceiving reality in categories of homogeneous groups of horizontal solidarity (nations).