SUMMARY:

This is chapter 6 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.” In chapters 4 and 6, published in Ab Imperio 3/2020, Becker traced the development of modern Russian nationalism under the auspices of the imperial regime during the first half of the nineteenth century. He argued that this process was synchronous with similar processes in Western Europe, or even preceded them in some important respects.
Chapter 6 covers the period of the Great Reforms (1860s–1870s) as the moment of radical reconceptualization of the Russian Empire in categories of the modern state, now understood as a political organization of nation, in various interpretations. Becker transcends the traditional history-of-ideas delimitation of the period’s Russian intellectual landscape into Slavophiles and Westernizers, progressives and conservators, liberals and socialists by demonstrating their fundamental agreement on the primacy of nation in reforming Russia. Such diverse intellectuals as Prince Peter V. Dolgorukov, Boris N. Chicherin, Alexander V. Lokhvitskii, Alexander D. Gradovskii, Mikhail P. Pogodin, Ivan S. Aksakov, Iurii F. Samarin, Alexander F. Hilferding, Mikhail N. Katkov, Mikhail P. Dragomanov, Alexander I. Herzen, and a number of less prominent figures believed in a direct linkage between nation and state. What divided them was the practical interpretation of this connection.
Becker identifies several key issues that provoked the intellectual schism among the chapter’s protagonists. One was the dilemma of centralization vs. decentralization of the future Russian state and, accordingly, its national arrangement. The choice of federalism implied the coexistence of several distinct nations in one state; opting for the centralized state meant building a single political or ethnocultural nation. Either way, the old imperial anational constitution of Russia was forsaken and consciously rejected, as demonstrated across the political spectrum by the unanimous criticism of the Habsburg Empire as a profoundly “artificial” polity. As before, the politics of comparison played a central role in the debates discussed in the chapter, with references to some countries as examples of ideal federalist arrangement and others as ideal centralized nation-states (and the third category as archaic negative examples). Becker shows that the conscious rejection of the old imperial arrangement was fraught with an embrace of the new colonial imperialism. Thus, Russian liberals were enthusiastic about J. S. Mill’s strong support for the principle of popular sovereignty and the right of each nationality to a separate political body. By the same token, they unproblematically accepted Mill’s thesis that a “weaker” nationality might be absorbed by a “stronger” one, and that “civilized” nations have the right to rule “barbarous” peoples as yet unprepared for political sovereignty.
Thus, the stage was set for bringing the nationality principle from the domain of political theory into political practice and transforming the Russian Empire into a nationalizing empire.