SUMMARY:

In the era following the Great Reforms of the 1860s, the Russians collectively lost formal privileges in the reactionary revanche, but gained quasi-compensatory informal privileges through Russification; by contrast, the nationalities were deprived of many long-standing formal and informal privileges, but acquired no new ones. Over the last fifty years of tsarism, the nationalities saw their situation within the empire deteriorate: nut only were rights denied, but even the earlier, now unacceptable privileges were effectively phased out for all but Russians. No national minority either lost or gained rights: over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russification transformed the hierarchy of privilege in favor of the Russians; but the tsarist insistence on granting privileges rather than recognizing rights was maintained, without fundamental concession or reservation, to the very end.