SUMMARY:

This is part 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.” It follows the publication of chapters 4, 5, and 6 in previous issues (3/2020 and 4/2020) and chapter 7 in this issue of Ab Imperio. In this text, Becker discusses how the gradual adoption of Russian ethnoconfessional nationalism by the educated public and Russian imperial regime in the second half of the nineteenth century was reflected in discussions concerning the national flag. The hybrid regime of nationalizing empire struggled with the need to choose between the old dynastic and new national symbols.