SUMMARY:

This is chapter 4 of Seymour Becker’s unfinished book “The Borderlands in the Mind of Russia: Russian National Consciousness and the Empire’s Non-Russians in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” On the example of 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, this chapter 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). 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.