This thematic issue of Ab Imperio within the annual program “Historicizing Diversity” explores the situations in which diversity becomes visible, describable, and conceived of as a scandal and violation of political and social norms. Rather than looking into cases of open confrontation or treating the problem as primarily the concern of the ruling regime, the materials published in this issue tackle diversity as an omnipresent nuisance. In any case this diversity equally bothered the rulers and their subordinates.
Consider Igor Kuziner’s article in the “History” section, which tackles the surprising evolution of one of the most radical groups of Russian Old Believers: the so-called Wanderers (beguny). Formed in the late eighteenth century, the Wanderers completely rejected any interaction with legal social institutions, whether that meant the political authorities or regular economic activities. Constantly on the run from the world, to survive they had to rely on financial and logistical support from sympathizers who pursued conventional socioeconomic strategies and only at the end of life “disappeared” from the world by joining the Wanderers and beginning their own “getaway.” Paradoxically, around 1909, a group of Wanderers in Yaroslavl province under the leadership of Alexander Riabinin started several legal commercial enterprises. After a few initial failures, they launched a successful steam mill. The double transgression from the vantage point of some Wanderers – an activity that was both legal and for-profit – caused a split within their community. However, Riabinin and his followers claimed that they remained true to the ideals of their creed and were acting in accordance with its spirit. The article explores this conflict and the arguments of the two sides.
Departing from the mainstream historiographic interpretation, Kuziner does not perceive the Wanderers’ millenarianism as a fanatic determination to exist in isolation from the larger society. Except for rare cases of Old Believers living in seclusion in the Siberian wilderness, most of them lived the same lives as millions of Russia’s “professional believers” – pilgrims who wandered from one sacral site to another for several months a year or even for their entire lives. They occupied the same socioeconomic niche as vagabonds and beggars, which was quite normal in the society’s eyes, even if deemed marginal and undesirable by the authorities. Of humble, mostly peasant social background, the Wanderers were doing what many Orthodox believers of lower social status did, and in this sense they did not occupy some isolated underground. As demonstrated in the article, the true identity of the Wanderers and their whereabouts were well-known to peasants and local authorities alike. Thus, their perceived difference or rather fundamental otherness was more a matter of the Wanderers’ self-positioning and the official rhetoric, which had few practical ramifications. The imperial government officials preferred to close their eyes to the existence of the Wanderers, with the important exception of cases in which the disappearance of a person joining the congregation was interpreted as a murder. The Orthodox peasants regarded the Wanderers as people of pure faith and considered joining them a monk-like dedication of one’s life to God.^[1] The apparent transgression, from imperial officialdom’s point of view, the Wanderers phenomenon had surprisingly low potential for producing conflict situations because the existing social structures and norms were capable of accommodating this type of diversity (at least on the basis of the principle “don’t ask, don’t tell”). The Russian Empire was constituted as a universalizing political framework that incorporated a variety of particularistic socioeconomic and cultural niches. So as long as the Wanderers occupied the niches that were deemed within the range of traditionally acceptable, they faced little risk of conflicting with the authorities.
Everything began to change after the Revolution of 1905, which came to symbolize the watershed between the idealization of the mostly invented tradition of the old order and the open-ended striving for an ideal future. Despite their isolationism, the Wanderers were directly affected by this epistemological shift. The partial liberalization of the imperial regime and legalization of the Old Believers by the 1905 imperial decree of religious toleration prompted a fierce competition for the flock among different congregations. The Wanderers faced the dilemma of dying out as a congregation by losing the younger generation to other, more visible and energetic religious groups, or accepting the challenge. To Riabinin, the steam mill probably symbolized his community’s presence in the society, serving as a beacon to attract followers to be educated in the religious school opened at the mill and financed by its revenues. Paradoxically, to remain true to their millenarian religious ideas, the Wanderers had to adapt to the changing world. For Riabinin, this was not a betrayal of their ideals, because the old life of vagabond pilgrims was as typical of the low-class Russians in the nineteenth century as were entrepreneurial activities during the post-1905 period. To his opponents, this was a terrible transgression bordering on apostasy. The commonality of beliefs per se was producing difference and escalating a conflict among the Wanderers who disagreed about the best way to preserve their community in the rapidly changing social environment.
Simultaneously, at the opposite end of the power hierarchy, the imperial government was tackling the problem of converting what was perceived as the archaic particularism of privileges and obligations into a modern political regime of standardized, if highly selective, national citizenship. The 1905 constitutional reform was viewed as the culmination of the empire’s nationalization that had long been underway.^[2] Therefore, this reform produced the State Duma as the body representing the loyal political nation rather than the existing imperial diversity. Yet nonexistent, the Russian political nation was to be handpicked through the election process, discarding any diversity and consolidating cultural and political sameness. The architect of the reform, Sergey Kryzhanovskii of the Ministry of the Interior, argued that the social profile of the electoral returns was more politically relevant than the constitutional rights of the legislature. Accordingly, he advocated sophisticated social engineering, which, based on expert knowledge, was expected to preprogram the political profile of the Duma. This was a reaction to the “scandal of empire” (Nicholas Dirks), with the modernists perceiving the empire as a liability simply by virtue of its indiscriminate use of diversity. However, there was no simple way to disentangle from imperial diversity. The documents published in the “Archive” section of this issue reveal the mechanism for reproducing the fundamental imperial situation of irregular diversity through attempts to rationalize and consolidate it.
Desiring to fine-tune the future imperial parliament by consulting with experts on various local conditions, the Ministry of the Interior circulated a draft electoral law among the provincial governors. The responses of ten of them are published in this issue of AI. Accepting in general the proposed political model, each of the governors found it necessary to request accommodations for special local interests and circumstances. As Mariia Gulakova and Alexander Semyonov argue in their introduction to the archival selections, the governors’ responses display unanimous concern about maintaining the fragile control over the culturally diverse local population at a time of revolution. Instead of the region’s representation in the parliament by a certain quota of deputies, the governors insisted on a more targeted representation of the main local groups of interests. In doing so, they effectively restored and institutionalized the regime of imperial citizenship as based on representing diversity rather than sameness. In this case, the governors viewed the lack of concern for imperial diversity as a transgression fraught with manifold conflicts and political disorder, whereas Kryzhanovskii found the preservation of the status quo as compromising the country’s future. In his memoirs Kryzhanovskii scorned the “senile” senior imperial bureaucrats, as incapable of understanding modern politics.^[3] As in the Wanderers’ case, the disagreement over the significance of the existing imperial disparities and the need for a more integrationist stance split the ruling elite and produced new differences in place of unity.
The dissolution of the Russian Empire made it a practical priority to differentiate common imperial subjecthood into new national citizenships and bring would-be citizens scattered across the old imperial space to their national states. To this end, a series of international treaties concluded in 1920–1921 between Soviet Russia and its neighbors, from Finland to the Ottoman Empire, stipulated the rules for choosing a new national citizenship. In the “History” section, the article by Mariya Oinas focuses on the results of the 1920 Treaty of Tartu between the Estonian Republic and the RSFSR, and more specifically, on one particular group seeking to acquire Estonian citizenship. At the turn of the twentieth century, and especially with the start of the Stolypin reforms, thousands of landless Estonian peasants relocated to Russia’s Asiatic territories that were open for agricultural colonization, including the Kazakh Steppe. Estonian farmers prospered in the new socioeconomic environment, but after the Treaty of Tartu they began applying en masse for Estonian citizenship.
Using the archival holding of the Estonian Repatriation Commission in Siberia and putting together a database that includes some 1,600 Estonian farmers who resided in the territory of would-be Kazakhstan, Oinas reconstructs the complicated logistics for acquiring Estonian citizenship and the purpose of doing so. Unlike Poland and, to a degree, Lithuania, the Estonian Republic qualified as a potential citizen anyone born on the territory that would have become Estonian by 1920 or even anyone just registered with a territorial commune or a legal estate on that territory in the past. An additional veto process helped filter applicants for citizenship who were deemed undesirable, particularly for political reasons. The Estonian government also tried to discourage legitimate applicants, including ethnic Estonians, who might become economic burdens on the country and contribute to social tensions. Well aware of the lack of any available land resources in Estonia, Estonian farmers from the Akmola and Semipalatinsk regions in the Kazakh Steppe still applied for Estonian citizenship. Oinas explains their unanimous enthusiasm about acquiring this citizenship by the hope to avoid the draconian Soviet food procurement campaigns as foreign nationals. This hope proved illusory, as the local Soviet authorities showed even less concern about legal matters than the Moscow government. Nevertheless, even after obtaining Estonian citizenship, few farmers actually moved to Estonia. The inauguration of the New Economic Policy in 1921 somewhat eased the pressure on Estonian colonists, while the difficulty of relocation and the need to leave behind most of their property was a strong deterrent to emigration. The majority of Estonian farmers eventually took Soviet citizenship, which suggests that their primary motive in opting for a national citizenship was pragmatic rather than ideological and that citizenship was considered a set of extraterritorial rights coexisting with different territorial jurisdictions. Essentially, they attempted to play the imperial citizenship card in the new legal realities by claiming special status for themselves without intending to use it as expected, that is, by emigrating to Estonia.
The Soviet regime did not live up to these expectations not only because of its profound disrespect for the law but also due to the fundamental nation-centrism of the Bolshevik worldview. Any forms of diversity not included in the normative taxonomy of the Soviet social order were deemed worse than transgression: a deviation deserving of genocidal elimination. At the same time, the persistent tension between Soviet universalism and nation-centrism was responsible for creating new forms of hybrid groupness and hence the perpetual reproduction of diversity. Fast-forward to the 1940s, this is what discovered members of the Carpatho-Rusyn intelligentsia, who considered themselves Russians (also known as Russophiles), after their region was occupied by the Red Army in 1944. Concluding the “History” section, Iaroslav Kovalchuk’s article tracks the careers and works of two Carpatho-Rusyn Russophiles, Petr Lintur and Petr Sova, who were compelled to transform from being the main opponents of Ukrainian nationalists to becoming champions of the region’s Ukrainization. This was the condition of their acceptance into the ranks of the Soviet intelligentsia, which also meant the formation of a group of Ukrainians who in many ways differed from other Ukrainians.
By the 1930s, the former East-Slavic-speaking population of the historical region claimed by several nationalist movements had differentiated into Ukrainophiles, Russophiles, and Rusynophiles, of which the latter orientation was the least developed. The rise of Russophilism in the mid-nineteenth century under the Habsburg Empire was the Rusyn’s response to Hungarian national mobilization in the wake of the 1848 Revolution. By identifying with Russian high culture, Russophile Rusyns drew symbolic boundaries that prevented their assimilation into any of the neighboring national projects, be it Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, or Ukrainian. In 1944, they hoped that the region’s annexation by the USSR would secure its national Russian character and they offered their services to the new ruling regime. But despite fostering the increasingly aggressive propaganda of Russian nationalism throughout the 1940s, the Soviet leadership had other plans for the Rusyns. The normative concept of territorial nations embraced by the Soviet regime mandated incorporating Transcarpathia as part of the adjacent Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Theoretically, the Russophile Rusyns could have claimed the status of a national autonomous republic or region within the UkrSSR. But Russians were expected to be the titular nationality in the RSFSR, so giving them an additional national territory was out of the question. Besides, borderland national autonomies were believed to compromise security, particularly when separated from the mainland by a mountain ridge. So the services of politically loyal Russophiles were accepted, but only as agents of Soviet universalism as embodied in the all-union Communist Party and the Russian-language official discourse of Soviet transformation. In other words, the Russophile Rusyns were allowed to preserve their Russian identity but only in their capacity as ruling cadres implementing Party policy in their region. The policy happened to be the Ukrainization of their homeland that became the farthest western Ukrainian territory, Transcarpathia.
As a result, instead of producing a lineup of “pure nationalities,” the combination of Soviet universalism and nationalism fabricated “different Ukrainians” and “different Russians,” thus hybridizing the officially recognized categories of difference. This effect reflected the persisting imperial situation of multidimensional diversity that was not reducible to any single taxonomy. Viewing the existence of Russophile Rusyns outside the RSFSR as a transgression, the Soviet regime did not completely obliterate their otherness but turned it into a problem for the Ukrainian national project and for universal Sovietness. The protagonists of Kovalchuk’s article were involved in constant quarrels with Ukrainophiles of various status and the Soviet authorities; the idea of Rusyn distinctiveness did not disappear after almost seventy years of systematic Ukrainization; and the history of the twentieth century proved the tremendous potential of neatly demarcated nationalities to stage violent confrontations.
As the articles in this issue suggest, what seems to be the real source of conflicts is not diversity itself but attempts to rationalize it that ignore the complex, never monological and unilinear, reality on the ground.