The confluence of imperialism and nationalism is one of the most confusing and startlingly understudied historical topics. In the popular imagination fed by journalists and policy experts as much as by fantasy books and films, empire is naturally expected to pursue constant expansion in the name of the superior race or people. Moreover, an empire is inconceivable without servicing the Herrenvolk (ruling people) and performing the role of “prison of nations.” Not necessarily inaccurate, these assumptions are very modern.
The origins of these terms, originally bearing meanings very different from their later usage, marked the rise and demise of Romanticism – just a few artistic styles and epistemological stances ago. Thinking in categories of individual spiritual and collective civilizational development, Johann Gottfried Herder suggested that “only a politically mature people can be a ‘ruling people’ [Herrenvolk],” meaning the popular sovereignty rather than hegemony over other peoples (so that the people can be Herrenvolk “only if it holds the administrative reins in its own hands and participates decisively through elected representatives in the selection of its political leaders can a people be called mature”).^[1] In 1792, he added pronouncedly: “Let one have no pet tribe, no favorite people [Favoritvolk] on the earth.”^[2] A Romantic litterateur, Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine, visited Russia in 1839 to confirm his politically and religiously conservative ideals. The contrast between their actual realization under Nicholas I (unattainable under the constitutional regime of Louis Philippe in France) and Custine’s expectations caused him to bitterly blame the Russian mirror for their ugly face in La Russie en 1839 (1843). He announced that “this Empire, immense as it is, is no more than a prison of which the emperor keeps the key.”^[3] There was nothing about nations and nationalism in Herder’s and Custine’s Romantic reasoning, or about controlling other nationalities by the empire or its “favorite people.” It took decades of the notion of volk’s biologization to transform the idea of spiritual kinship into a synonym of race.^[4] Parallel to this, the rise of transborder nationalisms (“pan-movements”) produced empire-like entities of the German Reich and the Kingdom of Italy, and caused the regimes of the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire to reinvent themselves as national states of pan-Slavic and pan-Turkic entities.^[5]
The modern notions of an empire as “prison of nations” and its Herrenvolk suppressing minority nationalities crystallized only by the outbreak of World War I (which itself largely resulted from the radical transformation of the social imaginary). In April 1914 Vladimir Lenin coined the formula “Russia is a ‘prison of nations.’”^[6] In October 1916, opening the first issue of the anti-imperial magazine The New Europe with a programmatic article, Thomas Masaryk announced that “Darwinism … was utilised to argue the rights of big and powerful nations; while Nietzsche’s Darwinistic ‘Uebermensch’ (superman) and ‘Herrenvolk’ (ruling race) were especially accepted in a Pangerman sense. … Pangermanism is a programme for the final solution of the Eastern question.”^[7]
So, even in the early 1840s, despite his romantic involvement with the Polish émigré Ignatius Gurowski and thus exposure to “Polish propaganda,”^[8] Custine believed that the Russian Empire was a prison not of “nations” but of individual subjects. By 1917, it was already common knowledge that the Russian Empire was oppressing its numerous nationalities, and that Germans perceived themselves as the ruling race dominating the Untermenschen from the East (Slavs, later joined by Jews and Roma). But how exactly did this transformation happen in the popular imagination and in practice? What did it take for the liberating concept of nation and the anational (or antinationalist) political-epistemological formation of empire to merge into the most toxic and deadly combination of nationalized and nationalizing empire? These questions are largely ignored in historiography, because the state of empires during the last decades before their collapse is perceived (paradoxically) as their most typical stage. A rare exception is the comprehensive edited volume Nationalizing Empires, which, although it presents interesting studies of individual national movements, it does not clarify the problem.^[9] The editors and most of the contributors regard empires (the Russian, the Habsburg, or the Ottoman) merely as political containers for breeding regular nations and nationalisms. Once they are mature enough, nations find imperial constraints restrictive and seek to secede, with one of them, at the control of the imperial state, attempting to preserve its hold over the others (as the Herrenvolk, politely not called by that name in the book). This perspective is typical of nationalities studies that perceive empire largely as a redundant category: a form of underdeveloped nation or a nation abusing the “natural” mandate of nation-state.
The present issue of Ab Imperio fills in this conceptual lacuna without reducing the complex phenomenon of nationalizing empire to one of its components (empire or nation) but treating it as a hybrid whole. This approach broadens the usual view of hybridity as typical of marginal social groups, out of their subalternity mimicking those in power (as per Homi Bhabha). The hypothesis of the imperial regime’s hybridity problematizes the normative postcolonial theory of empire and deconstructs the teleological concept of nation as a natural group (whether organically self-conscious or shaped along objectively visible lines by activists). This is the underlying theme of issue 3/2020, “‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’: Hybridity, the Nationalizing Empire, and Imperialist Nationalism.”
The “Methodology” section features the thematic forum “Russian Empire: Nationalized and Nationalizing,” centered on Darius Staliūnas’s study of the Russian imperial regime’s attempts after the 1905 Revolution to reclassify the population in the Western Region into national groups. Staliūnas identifies several areas in which the administration could impose the new principles of groupness, completely superseding the old categories of legal estate and confession by nationality or just introducing nationality as an additional criterion. Naturally, the first imperial census of 1897 was one such area, laying the foundation for subsequent statistical surveys. Other spheres of the government-imposed classification had more immediate practical repercussions, whether the regime of land ownership, school system, elections to the State Duma and local zemstvos, or admission to the civil service. In all these spheres, the task was to identify the “Poles” (as different from Lithuanians and Belarusians) and “Russians,” specifying other national groups along the way. Surprisingly, the criteria for determining nationality altered from one sphere to another: spoken language, current residence and territorial origin, confession, legal estate, and self-identification, separately or in various combinations, were applied differently in different contexts and periods of time. Staliūnas argues that this variability reflected “not just the changing idioms of nationhood but also [the] pragmatic nationality policy” of the imperial regime in the Western Region, which was perceived as nationally Russian “in a historic, ethnic, and confessional sense” (P. 35).
Staliūnas meticulously registers inconsistences in the application of the alleged imperial nationality policy simultaneously on several levels, which makes the rationale of such a complicated policy and the decision-making process behind it particularly puzzling. So, on one level, there is great variability in defining Polishness across different sociopolitical contexts (in the regulations of land sales, Duma elections, or schooling). On another, Staliūnas notes temporal inconsistency: the nationalizing trend was not sustainable throughout the late imperial period and rather decreased in the 1910s instead of culminating, as one would expect. Furthermore, the policy was not consistent throughout the imperial administrative hierarchy: in violation of the government instructions that demanded a more lenient attitude toward Poles in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, the local authorities introduced even stricter principles of admission to the civil service based on the nationality principle. Paraphrasing the catchy formula of George Yaney,^[10] one can find in the story told by Staliūnas a tremendous “urge to nationalize,” but what drove such disparate measures of various branches and levels of the government remains unclear.
To broaden the historical context and see how unique the somewhat idiosyncratic nationalizing policy was in the Western Region, the editors invited Klimenti Fedevitch and Ian Campbell to share their expertise on the effects of Russification after 1905 in other regions of the empire. Building on his recent study of the history of the nationalist Union of the Russian People (URP) in Southwestern Ukraine, Fedevitch discusses the paradoxical case of Ukrainian “Russian nationalism.” The Pochaev chapter of the URP in Volhynia province was the largest in the empire, accounting for the incredible one-quarter of the total 400,000 registered unionists empire-wide. The absolute majority of these Volhynian Russian nationalists were Ukrainian peasants in the region that, just three decades later, would become the hotbed of Ukrainian militant anti-Russian nationalism as embodied by the OUN (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). This double paradox of Ukrainians constituting the largest group of Russian nationalists before turning into vehement Ukrainian nationalists alone raises the issue of the nature of the Russian nationalism promoted or at least supported by the imperial regime. By offering a prosopography of the URP Pochaev chapter’s main leaders, Fedevitch further problematizes the perspective offered by Staliūnas while also underscoring the tensions between the central government and local actors and among various understandings of national.
The most successful modern Russian nationalist organization in the empire, the URP Pochaev chapter was organized and run by high-ranking Russian Orthodox clergymen. They broadly relied on the Ukrainian language in their propaganda and cultivated Ukrainian culture, thus laying the ground for the rise of modern Ukrainian nationalism in the future. Therefore, this was essentially a form of Russian imperial nationalism – relatively inclusive culturally (with the exception of Catholics) – and prioritizing loyalism and monarchism. It might be tempting to interpret it as an archaic relic of the confessional state substituting for the modern ideologies and institutions that were lacking.^[11] However, Fedevitch draws a much more complex picture. Almost all leaders of the URP Pochaev chapter were newcomers to Ukraine, so their reliance on Ukrainian language and culture was a conscious choice rather than the continuation of a tradition. Moreover, they had had prior experience of special missionary training and work in the Middle Volga, enforcing the program of Christianization through nationalization developed by Nikolai Ilminskii.^[12] The practices developed for Turkic- and Finnish-speaking minority groups were deliberately applied to Ukrainians, who were officially recognized as part of the big Russian nation and accepted by local Russian nationalist leaders as a separate people. Finally, Fedevitch points to the Russian Orthodox hierarchs’ suspicious attitude toward if not contempt for the imperial government and dynasty in the wake of the 1905 Revolution. Rather than merely performing the functions of the state, they consciously developed Russian nationalism as an ideology and political force independent of the imperial regime, increasingly deemed hostile to Russian national interests.
Campbell reconstructs the complicated dynamics of the imperial and the national in the very different geographic and social setting of the Kazakh Steppe, specifically of Turgai region (oblast). Touted primarily as an economic measure ameliorating the proverbial overpopulation and land scarcity in the “Russian village,” the large-scale resettlement of peasants from European provinces to the steppe as part of the Stolypin reforms was clearly a policy of settler colonialism and national Russification of the region. Indeed, the arrival of some 200,000 colonists radically shifted the local demographics, and their settlements and fields disrupted the Kazakhs’ traditional migratory routes, thus contributing to the economic and social crisis of the nomad society. This modern form of nationalist expansion was complicated by the fact that the majority of the “Russian” colonists came from the Ukrainian provinces of Ekaterinoslav, Poltava, Kherson, and Taurida (mirroring the demographics of Russian nationalism in Volhynia). Their familiar agricultural techniques were inefficient in the new natural environment, so colonists eagerly borrowed Kazakh methods of cattle breeding and practiced economic cooperation with the indigenous population. Parallel with “Russian” Orthodox Christian colonists, the region also witnessed an influx of Muslims – mostly Volga Tatars, who constituted a significant part of the local urban population.
So, the modern forces of nationalization promoted a typical imperial situation of human intermixture and ambivalent categorization. Traditional imperial practices of particularism were now supporting the apartheid-like exclusion of Kazakhs as inorodtsy from the imperial sociopolitical sphere, most notably from the military service. Modern nationalizing and universalizing policies, to the contrary, encouraged social integration in the region. Campbell argues that this hybrid and dynamic arrangement was radically disrupted by genocidal violence unleashed by the imperial authorities against the Kazakhs, in response to the 1916 uprising in the steppe. The Turgai revolt staged by merely several percent of the total Kazakh population was triggered by the attempt to mobilize Kazakhs as a labor force in the rear. The imperial authorities’ mobilization plan and the Kazakhs’ response to it reflected the ambivalent situation on the ground hitherto sustained largely through self-organization: a combination of significant social integration and a staggering dearth of institutionalization and administrative control. In this crisis situation, instead of productive “creative misunderstandings,” this middle ground produced a series of mutual misunderstandings that led to a deadly confrontation (to use Richard White’s model and language).^[13] It was still not destined to turn genocidal, Campbell argues, pointing to the precedent of other revolts in the region. However, the combination of the failed state (the numerically insignificant poorly trained but well-armed imperial troops) with a readily available nationalizing worldview structured the indiscriminative application of force as intentionally genocidal, to the effect of differentiating the entangled Turgai society into clearly bound national compounds. Not the nationalizing imperial government but the local authorities, who could be expected to know better, played a decisive role in the radicalization of the events.
Just as Fedevitch, Campbell reconstructs a complex picture of traditional imperial and modern national practices and concepts intertwined so that their original characteristics changed, producing truly ugly combinations. In this regard they correct Staliūnas’s expectations of some coherent Russian nationalism being projected to the regions in an organized manner by some unified “bureaucracy,” and they confirm his findings of the situational understanding of nation and its easy “mutations” depending on who was operating with the concept, and why. Apparently, the phenomenon of a nationalizing empire is produced when a nation-centered social imagination is embraced by most categories of social actors still operating within the old imperial political structure and with customary imperial practices, now purged of their original rationale. This universal “urge to nationalize” comes from everywhere, not only from the capital, and supports very different interpretations of “nation” as being developed in a structural imperial situation of contextually determined meaning. A nationalizing empire embraces this deadly combination amplifying the most repressive aspects of the two forms of groupness – nation, with its totalizing perception of society and the cult of pure forms, and empire, with its fondness for constructing hierarchies and expanding to territories yet unclaimed by a peer great power. By the same token, a nationalizing empire does not know the secrets of social stability that were used by old imperial and new national regimes: a reliance on diversity as the social norm by the former or on egalitarianism and democratic government by the latter. It is unclear whether the evolution of imperial formations necessarily led to the stage of nationalizing empire, but once achieved, the tremendous conflict potential of nationalizing empire made the subsequent outbreak of violence and societal collapse.
But what about the imperial metropole, discussed only cursorily by the forum’s contributors – when and how did nationalism take hold over the imperial elite? A sad occasion allowed us to cover this topic here. Seymour Becker, a member of the Ab Imperio editorial board from the journal’s inception, our teacher and friend for the past twenty-five years, passed away on October 5, 2020. The best professional tribute to a colleague is publishing his work. Over the past two decades, Seymour Becker has been working on the book “The Borderlands in the Mind of Russia: Russian National Consciousness and the Empire’s Non-Russians in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Still unfinished, the manuscript contains several chapters that are quite ready for publication. This issue presents two of them, preceded by Sergey Glebov and Marina Mogilner’s introduction: chapter 4, “Projects for Political Reform in the First Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” and (somewhat abridged) chapter 5, “Nationalism and the Borderlands in the Reign of Nicholas I.” These chapters reconstruct the first stages in the making of the discursive space of the Russian nationalizing empire during the first half of the nineteenth century: in the constitutional projects of Alexander I’s associates M. M. Speranskii and N. N. Novosil’tsev and the Decembrist leaders N. M. Murav’ev and P. I. Pestel, in the ideological systems of intellectuals of Nicholas I’s era, S. S. Uvarov, Iu. F. Samarin, and A. I. Herzen, as well as in the popular history courses of N. M. Karamzin and N. G. Ustrialov. Becker demonstrates that, from the very beginning, this was a hybrid project of creative appropriation by profoundly “imperial” figures of the national idiom and episteme born in revolutionary France (rather than the evolution of some primordial Russian protonationalism). The result of this process is best symbolized by the firm association in scholarship and public opinion of the initially national – republican and Jacobin – principle of “one and indivisible” country with the Russian imperial autocratic regime. Becker traces the process of intellectual transfer and ideological appropriation of French revolutionary republicanism by the Russian imperial elite, who had reworked it into a variety of autochthonous nationalisms (with varying degrees of allowing for popular sovereignty). Further complicating the story of this borrowing, Becker argues that the development of modern Russian nationalism under the auspices of the imperial regime was synchronous with similar processes in Western Europe, or even preceded them in some important respects. By shifting attention from a structural understanding of empire to the ways in which the imperial situation was conducive to the emergence of a national idiom, Becker’s study lays to rest the notion that Russian nationalism was somehow “underdeveloped” because of the primacy of empire. The approach outlined in Becker’s last manuscript has been verified and further elaborated in our history course New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia.^[14]
In the “History” section, two articles study the aftermath of the hybrid nationalizing empire during the Soviet period in Siberia. Vera Galindabaeva and Nikolay Karbainov write a longue durée history of two Buryat villages jointly populated by two hybrid groups: the Karyms and the Semeiskie. The former are descendants of baptized Buryats and Russians, the latter are Russian Old Believers also heavily intermixed with Buryats. The prerevolutionary nationalizing empire, the Soviet regime of ethnicity-based nations, and the post-Soviet increasingly racialized and religion-centered social imaginary provided different settings and languages for expressing the hybrid identities of the Karyms and the Semeiskie. In the imperial situation of context-defined meaning, the confessional factor played the role of an important maker of national groupness already in the early nineteenth century. Semeiskie Old Believers were identified as peasants by legal estate, whereas the Karyms, as recently converted Orthodox Christians, were still classified as aliens (inorodtsy), so that residents of the same village reported to two different administrative structures. The Semeiskie could claim their regular Russianness as peasants, while the Karyms were more Russian as Orthodox Christians, although the self-identifications of the two groups did not fully coincide with categorizations by local authorities and the government and experts in the metropole. The early Soviet period institutionalized the two groups by allowing each to have its own school and preferred occupation, although both were nominally recognized as nationally Russian. With the onslaught on religion under Khrushchev eliminating the main “national” difference between them, the Karyms and Semeiskie almost converged, but the end of the USSR revived the old dualism. In the new sociopolitical context, the hybrid identities have once again been rearranged, thus ascribing new meaning to religious, ethnic, and social factors.
Igor Stas focuses on a particular historical moment: the official festivities commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District (okrug) in 1950. The article’s central category is Stalinist national citizenship, which is understood as recognizing the status of a regular Soviet citizen in certain authorized formats. After the revolution, indigenous peoples of the North were exempt from this status just as the aliens (inorodtsy) were under the imperial regime, albeit for a slightly different reason. The scheme of historical materialism did not expect the peoples still at the stage of primitive communism to fully participate in the postcapitalist, socialist society. By accepting the status of a socialist nation offered by the late Stalinist regime, a group could bypass these ideological complications and gain full access to Soviet status. This did not entail assimilation and Russification but implied acceptance of the essentially hybrid, although rigidly policed, officially authorized and standardized “national” culture. As in the case of the nationalizing empire, this was a hybrid project, which encouraged nation-building while simultaneously setting limits on self-expression, and imposed the imperial hierarchy, whose task was promoting Soviet national cultures.
In contrast to the Soviet “affirmative action” nationalizing empire, there was nothing hybrid and not much ambivalent about the Nazi Reich – which probably explained its short life. It was designed on the model of the interiorized polemical depiction of empire by nationalists like Masaryk (envisioning the German Herrenvolk “dominating less educated nations – in short, … ruling the whole world”^[15]), rather than on any preexisting imperial formation. Ella Rossman in the “Historiography” section writes about the development of women’s history of the Holocaust, intertwined with the parallel evolution of the feminist movement.
Finally, issue 3/2020 offers a study of the emerging postimperial and postnational moment in the forum “The Belarusian Postcolonial Revolution.” Five scholars document and analyze different aspects of the Belarusian civil protest movement that arose in the wake of the rigged presidential election in August 2020. Essentially preliminary field reports, their contributions are valuable for analytical insights and professionally amassed and verified empirical evidence. For many years, Belarus was used by scholars as an example of impotent post-Soviet transition, unable to acquire a new social vision and subjectivity. In his introduction to the forum, Ilya Gerasimov argues that the concept of postcolonial revolution, once formulated on the example of the Ukrainian Euromaidan, is best applicable to the ongoing profound transformation of Belarusian society. This makes the forum materials invaluable as records of participant observations of a postcolonial revolution unfolding in real time.
As history being created before our very eyes, it is important to have a sense of its fundamental congruity across centuries, and a conceptual language capable of communicating this congruity despite dramatic ruptures and structural transformations. This issue of Ab Imperio aspires to contribute to this grand task.