SUMMARY:

This is chapter 5 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 ideological systems of intellectuals of Nicholas I’s era, S. S. Uvarov, Iu. F. Samarin, and A. I. Herzen, as well as the popular history courses of N. M. Karamzin and N. G. Ustrialov, this chapter traces the process 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 Russian imperial elite had reworked French revolutionary republicanism into a variety of autochthonous nationalisms (with varying degrees of allowing for popular sovereignty). 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.