SUMMARY:

Darius Staliūnas studies the Russian imperial regime’s attempts after the 1905 Revolution to reclassify the population in the Western Region into national groups in several spheres, including population surveys, the regime of landownership, the school system, elections to the State Duma and local zemstvos, and admission to the civil service. 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.