SUMMARY:

This is chapter 7 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.” Chapters 4, 5, and 6 were published in 3/2020 and 4/2020 of Ab Imperio. Chapter 7 concludes Becker’s comprehensive survey of modern Russian nationalism as it developed from the turn of the nineteenth century to the time of Alexander III’s nationalizing empire regime. The Great Reforms of Alexander II were a decisive turning point from the original project of empire as an anational polity to a nation-centered political imagination. Still, the reforms were ambivalent enough to preserve the possibility of an alternative development: expanding the elite inclusiveness of the original imperial project through popular representation, rather than promoting authoritarianism and exclusive Russian nationalism. Becker’s chapter considers émigré dissidents (Prince Peter Dolgorukov), Alexander II’s reformers (Peter A. Valuev), and legal theorists (Alexander Lokhvitskii, Boris Chicherin), all of whom contemplated constitutional rearrangements of the empire, even discussing federative scenarios. Contrary to the conventional view of nineteenth-century nationalists as the ultimate champions of democratization, the renowned Russian nationalist Mikhail Katkov opposed the very idea of constitutional reform, not to mention the possibility of Russia’s federalization. He was an early champion of nationalizing empire as the nation-state of ethnoconfessional Russians, who would appropriate the autocratic regime to dominate the “non-Russians.”
The January Uprising of 1863 in the former lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was both a result of these intellectual and political developments and a major reason that the Great Reforms took a course toward Russian authoritarian nationalism (making Katkov the most prominent ideologist of the nationalizing empire). For Becker, “the Polish Question” is a litmus test highlighting the main contradictions of the modernizing and nationalizing Russian Empire, caught between considerations of international prestige and domestic security, and choosing among various versions of national mobilization (along popular representation, Slavic solidarity, or exclusive ethnoconfessional Russianness). The case of Finland, also discussed in the chapter, presented a purer constitutional problem, not complicated by past imperial rivalries over contested territories or Slavophilism. The Grand Duchy of Finland’s cultural and political distinctiveness could have justified the need for constitutional reform in the empire and even for its federalization. However, and quite counterintuitively, the triumphant ideology of the Russian nationalizing empire proclaimed as its goal the Finns’ cultural assimilation. Of the possible scenarios for managing human diversity, the Russian nationalizing empire picked the least productive one for a multicultural heterogeneous society.