1. Кто, где и когда был “русским” в Московии, Российской империи и СССР? Что делает человека “русским” в России?
Who, where and when was a “Russian” in Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the USSR? What makes one into a “Russian” (russkii) in Russia?

Андреас КАППЕЛЕР. Если бы нам это было известно! Во-первых, российская “Begriffsgeschichte” находится все еще в зачаточной стадии, поэтому следует всячески приветствовать усилия журнала “Ab Imperio”, развивающего эту область исторических исследований. Во-вторых, термин “русский”, который в отличие от большинства этнонимов является прилагательным, происходящим от слова “Русь”, указывал и указывает на такое множество значений во времени, пространстве и социальном контексте, что практически невозможно коротко ответить на поставленный вопрос. В-третьих, с середины XVI столетия в русском языке появляется термин “российский/россиянин”, который относится к российской государственности – Российской империи, Российской Социалистической Федеративной республике, Российской федерации и их гражданам. Однако термины “русский” и “российский” не всегда можно четко отличить друг от друга. Во многих языках они переводятся одним словом (russian, russe, Russe); пока еще трудно судить, утвердится ли, например, в немецком языке введенное германскими историками разделение “русский” (russisch) vs. “российский” (russlдndisch). “Русский” относился и относится по сей день к различным воображаемым и конструируемым сообществам. Это наблюдение справедливо как в случае языкового сообщества: под русскими могли подразумеваться только великорусы или все восточные славяне (включая украинцев и белорусов), так и в случае этнической группы, национальности или нации, которая покоится на языковой общности, но не всегда совпадает с ней: русская национальность в Советском союзе не совпадала с языковым сообществом, поскольку из нее были исключены русскоговорящие евреи. Кроме того, можно сослаться на историческое или культурное родовое сообщество, которое (в зависимости от точки зрения) идентифицируется со всей средневековой Русью или только с ее северной частью, или же с поздними историческими образованиями. Сюда же следует отнести и конфессиональное сообщество, которое объединяло в киевской митрополии, а позднее – в московской метрополии и патриархии православных русских (к которым принадлежали также крещеные карелы и мордва). Под русскими могут пониматься подданные или граждане государства – от средневековой Руси, Московии и Российской империи до Российской федерации (также и татары, якуты и т.д.). Наконец, “русский” мог означать социальную группу, как правило, крестьян, олицетворявших русский народ в противоположность полиэтническим, поликонфессиональным и многоязычным элитам царской империи или же мультинациональной интернационалистской элите Советского Союза. На практике зачастую происходит смешение нескольких вариантов значения термина “русский”, так что его современное прочтение имплицирует в той или иной степени все значения.

Andreas UMLAND. The problem of establishing who is a “Russian” and who is not is illustrated by the fact that the English “Russian” or the German “Russe” are uniform translations of three different words in Russian language: “russkii,” “rossiianin,” and “velikoros.” Whereas “velikoros” (literally: Great Russian) can only mean an ethnic Russian narrowly defined, “russkii” might, in some interpretations, also include Byelorussians (“White Russians”), Ukrainians (“Little Russians”) or even Tatars. A “rossiianin” would usually imply a citizen of the Russian Federation, i.e. a distinctly non-ethnic understanding. To complicate the problem even more, recently the confusing construct of “etnicheskie rossiiane” appeared, referring to Russians and/or Russian-speakers outside the Russian Federation.

Михаил ДОЛБИЛОВ. В Российской империи, пожалуй, одним из важнейших факторов, побуждавших человека с русской идентичностью (ухожу здесь от вопроса о ее “объективных” параметрах) обостренно осознавать свою русскость, была служба или вообще проживание на окраине, особенно в противоборстве с культурно чуждым населением. Например, это случай чиновников из внутренней России, которые, приехав в Западный край после польского восстания 1863 г., думали и говорили о себе как о русских тем запальчивее, чем сильнее чувствовали себя меньшинством среди местной польскоязычной элиты. Если бы можно было составить карту интенсивности самосознания “русскости” в империи, то мы, наверное, увидели бы сгущение цвета именно там, где на этнографической карте “русские” цвета разжижаются.
В этой связи на ум приходит одно очень распространенное в позднюю имперскую эпоху выражение, почти технический термин – “русский элемент”. Так называли русских тогда, когда перед ними ставились задачи русификации, колонизации, цивилизования кого-то или чего-то и т.д. В каком-то смысле, человек был русским тем больше, чем больше он выступал в этом качестве “элемента”. Насколько мне известно, о семантике этого чрезвычайно важного понятия нет систематических исследований. Кимитака Мацузато в статье, опубликованной в самом первом номере Ab Imperio (2000, № 1), анализируя правительственные меры по борьбе с польским присутствием в губерниях Правобережной Украины и укреплению там русского землевладения, вскользь заметил: употребляя слово “(русский) элемент”, власть невольно выдавала свой скепсис, сомнение в энергии и стойкости проводников русского влияния. Т.е. коннотация была такой: всего лишь “элемент” в чуждой, со всех сторон давящей стихии.
Я благодарен автору статьи за то, что он поднял этот вопрос, но далеко не полностью согласен с такой трактовкой. Очень часто термин “русский элемент” встречается в контексте, где он призван подчеркнуть нечто совсем другое – корпоративность, сплоченность, организованность, в конечном счете – связь тех, кто его составляет, с правительственной стратегией. Характерен сам подбор глаголов – “внедрить русский элемент” и др. Вероятно, термин был амбивалентен – он отсылал и к образу меньшинства, стойко противостоящего сильному противнику, и напоминал о поддержке этого меньшинства из далекого, но все-таки центра, интегральной частью которого этот элемент и был. Было бы, конечно, интересно проследить, как использовался (если использовался) этот термин в колонизаторской риторике других империй.
От “русского элемента” можно перебросить мостик к другим устойчивым функциональным клише с этнонимом (всегда ли этнонимом?) “русский”, который обретал важные смысловые оттенки в этих словосочетаниях. Замечательный, на мой взгляд, пример – выражение “русский в душе”, очень употребительное в XIX в. Одно дело – просто “русский”, а другое – “русский в душе”. Пушкин называл своего кишиневского покровителя И. Н. Инзова “русским в душе”, противопоставляя ему своего следующего начальника М. С. Воронцова, который, как вытекает из логики текста, “предпочитает первого английского шалопая своим соотечественникам”. Перечисляя добрые качества “русского в душе”, Пушкин явно напирает на патриархальность, неформальность обхождения.
Для современного слуха “в душе” звучит, скорее, как “в глубине души”, “непроявленно”, может быть даже in potentia. Люди же XIX века, как правило, употребляли этот оборот в тех случаях, где мы бы произнесли – “до глубины души”, “до мозга костей” или, как любил вполне серьезно выражаться, давая богатую пищу острословам, известный администратор имперских окраин генерал Кауфман, “русский с головы до пяток”. Рискну, однако, предположить, что и “русский в душе” было не вполне прямолинейной характеристикой. Мне приходилось встречать это выражение в контексте, где упоминание души намекает на оппозицию казенного национализма и “живого” национального чувства. Иначе говоря, “русский в душе” – это еще и тот истинный, до глубины души русский, кому не дают развернуться и проявить себя те или иные институты, формальности, процедуры и т.п., кто, может быть, даже принужден прятать свою русскость в глубине души. Думаю, устойчивость этого оборота подчеркивает сильную инерцию романтизма в русском национализме. Кстати сказать, в большом ходу было аналогичное, но оценочно противоположное клише – “поляк в душе”. Вот оно определенно употреблялось в двуедином значении – в глубине души (коварный, скрытный, затаенный) и до глубины души, насквозь (фанатичный, заядлый, неистовый).

David ROWLEY. Defining a nationality is a political act. There are many characteristics that could be chosen as the typifying features of a nation, including language, religion, social values, myths, idea of homeland, and sense of history. The choice of some features as essential to national identity serves to mobilize or empower those people who share them and to silence and marginalize those who do not. Consequently, the two most productive methods of investigating nationalism are to ask: Are there materials available from which a national identity could be constructed? And, is there evidence that political elites attempted to make appeals to national identity to manipulate the population (either to mobilize it or cause it to be quiescent).
An elite thought of a Rus’ nation long before such a nation became conscious of itself. The territory governed by Vladimir was known by the Eastern Church as “the Metropolitanate of Rus’” and was treated by the Church hierarchy as a territory occupied by a single nation. Yet at that time, the people living there did not all speak the same language and were not all believers in the same religion.
At some point thereafter, but not later than the fourteenth century, the population of the forested lands between the Dnieper and the Volga had acquired enough cultural homogeneity to provide the elements from which nationality could be constructed. A people with a name (the Rus’), occupied a homeland, spoke a common language, celebrated the same religion, shared the same myths and stories, and followed the same social practices. There were also two “others” against whom they could be defined, an ethnic “other,” the Tatars, and a religious “other” the Roman Church.
The chronicles and poetry of that time project a very elementary definition of a Russian: an Orthodox Christian who was dismayed at disunity among the Rus’ princes and who wanted the land of the Rus’ to be free of foreign occupation. This is a reflection of the political agenda of the Church and of the Grand Princes of Moscow. The Orthodox Church continued to think of itself as the community of all the Rus’ – despite the new political divisions that were appearing in the west; the Grand Princes of Moscow claimed that their goal was to “gather the lands of Rus’,” i.e. to rule the same territory (and people) claimed as a community by the Church. Two centuries later, a similar definition of a Russian – a Orthodox believer who wanted to be ruled by a Russian tsar – was used by the leaders from the northeast to mobilize national armies in order to end the Time of Troubles. The calling of a Zemskii Sobor representing all classes also recognized the existence of a Russian nation and attempted to use it to give legitimacy to the new dynasty.
The definitions of Russkii in nineteenth-century Russia were thoroughly political. Gogol’, a monarchist, thought the Russian people were the closest of all peoples to God, Belinskii, who opposed the monarchy, thought they were atheists. Tsars defined Russians as those people who loved and respected the tsar; narodniks defined Russians as essentially socialists. In the Soviet Era the elements available to those who wanted to foster a Russian national identity hadn’t changed, it was simply a question of how and when they could be used. When it was thought desirable by Soviet leaders to limit the political power of Russians, they could be defined as the people who read and loved Pushkin and Nekrasov. When the Union had to be defended, the images of Aleksandr Nevskii, Minin and Pozharskii, and Suvorov could be used to define the Russians as patriotic fighters who sacrifice themselves for the motherland.

2. Русский империализм – русский национализм: семейная ссора? Какова специфика положения “титульной народности” в Российской империи/СССР и доминирующие принципы групповой солидарности? Русский национализм и империя: взаимопитающие источники или взаимоисключающие категории?
Russian imperialism and Russian nationalism: a family quarrel? What are the specifics of the situation of the “titular nationality” in the Russian Empire/USSR and what are the dominant principles of the group solidarity? Russian nationalism and empire: mutually supporting elements or mutually exclusive categories?

David ROWLEY. When the Russian monarchy was at its strongest, however, (from Ivan III to Ivan IV and from Aleksei to Aleksandr I) the rulers paid little attention to national themes. They represented themselves as emperors – the opposite of national monarchs. An emperor, who rules a state that contains more than one nation, must base his or her legitimacy on a universal and not a national idea. The universal idea can be a religion (such as Christianity, which recognizes no national distinctions) or a worldview (such as the Enlightenment, which imagines the possibility of a universal natural law governing all human beings). At the very least, an emperor would expect that his or her subjects be united by a feeling of pride at living in a state ruled by an ancient and glorious dynasty. In any event, emperors do not attempt to assimilate their subjects into a single nationality.
In fact, however, Russian tsars did not want to mobilize their people to do anything. To employ nationalist or national imperialist appeals to the people would be to suggest that the purpose of the empire was to serve a goal superior to the sovereign will of the emperor. This is just what Russian tsars would not permit. Nikolai I began to use “narodnost’” in legitimizing his rule, but he and his successors were more interested in maintaining a passive population than in mobilizing it for any purpose. When Aleksandr III and Nikolai II tried to “Russify” Poland and Ukraine, it was a negative and not a positive policy. It was not that they believed that Poles and Ukrainians would be happier if they were turned into Russians; they only wanted to assimilate them in order to eliminate the demand for national independence. In almost all other cases, Russian emperors were not anxious to transform the peoples they ruled into Orthodox believers and ethnic Russians. Where the Russian language was fostered, it was as an imperial lingua franca not a means of national assimilation. In Central Asia Islam was generally encouraged as a civilizing and stabilizing religion.
Furthermore, even if the tsars had wished to, it is conceptually difficult to mobilize a nation in the support of an empire. Nations are, by definition, distinctive and exclusive, and nationalist leaders typically call for national independence on the grounds that the only legitimate government is one “of, by, and for” the nation. To ask a nation to become an empire builder is to ask (1) that the nation sacrifice itself for the well-being of others (which contradicts the usual justification for nationalism) and (2) to suggest that the nation is the bearer of principles that will benefit the subject peoples of the empire (which contradicts the idea that each nation has its own unique values).
Dostoevskii’s idea that the Russians are bearers of universal human values could have served as an imperial ideology. Popular literature in the late nineteenth century also attempted to engage the imperialist enthusiasm of Russians by representing them as a progressive and civilizing force. Similar propaganda was disseminated in the other imperialist powers of Europe at the time. However, hat this propaganda didn’t work. That national liberation and separatism is more powerful a force than national imperialism is demonstrated by the dissolution of the Russian Empire after the First World War and the break-up of the western European colonial empires after the second. The subject peoples could not be convinced that they were being selflessly led toward a higher civilization, and the imperialist people could no longer be convinced that “spreading civilization” was in their own national self-interest.
This explains the success of the Soviet Communist Party in reassembling the old Russian empire and maintaining it for most of the twentieth century. Communism was an ideal ideological substitute for Russian nationalism. Russians could be mobilized as communists not as ethnic Russians, as bearers of a universal and not a national truth. The peoples of the union could adopt the universal ideology without giving up their national identity or (in theory, at least) feel that they were being colonized by another nation. The Soviet Union fell apart when national identity superceded soviet identity.

Андреас КАППЕЛЕР. Понятие империализма в германской и российской традициях, в отличие от английской, связывается как правило исключительно с идеологией и политикой специфической эпохи империализма конца XIX – XX столетий, в то время как идеологии, курсировавшие в границах Российской империи, обозначаются как имперские или как имперский патриотизм. В принципе, всегда существовало и существует противоречие между супранациональным, поликонфессиональным имперским национализмом, между демократическим гражданским национализмом и этническим русским национализмом. Мне представляется важным подчеркнуть эвристический принцип этого разделения. На практике все эти национализмы смешивались и смешиваются друг с другом. Русская “титульная нация”, как и все прочие нации, была и остается постоянно изменяющимся воображаемым сообществом. По аналогии с процессом превращения французских крестьян во французов на протяжении XIX столетия (Eugene Weber), можно задаться вопросом о принадлежности русских крестьян накануне XX в. к русской нации.

Andreas UMLAND. Vera Tolz has recently very cogently reflected upon this issue in her comprehensive history of Russian nationalism (see her excellent book “Russia” (Arnold, 2001)). Tolz identified the merger of Russian nationalism with Russian imperialism from the 19th century onwards as one of the major unfortunate developments in modern Russian political thought. Many Russian nationalists copied schematically Western concept of the nation-state, and thus mistakenly identified most (or even the whole) of the Russian and/or Soviet land empires with the Russian nation-state. As a result, until today, the borders of “Russia” remained disputed, and the distinction between “nation-builders” and “empire-savers” (Roman Szporluk) are still blurred. Anti-nationalists might be in favor of a common market, joint institutions and closer cooperation within the framework of the C.I.S, although this would obviously mean increased Russian influence on other Commonwealth members. Nation-builders, on the other hand, might have revisionist, irredentist aims with regard to parts of the territory of some Newly Independent States, such as Kazakhstan or Ukraine, as they regard them as Russian territory.

3. Православные или русские: религиозная и этническая концептуализация русской нации.
Russians and the Orthodox: religious and ethnic conceptions of the Russian nation.

Михаил ДОЛБИЛОВ. Безусловно, это две существенно различные концептуализации. И, может быть, ярче всего эта альтернатива иллюстрируется именами И. С. Аксакова и М. Н. Каткова, каждый из которых отстаивал в период Великих реформ свое видение русской нации (хотя, конечно, в случае Каткова нет оснований говорить о чистом этноцентризме). Я бы высказал здесь лишь одно caveat. Не стоит подходить к этой проблеме с готовой меркой: “pre-modern” – “modern”. Я имею в виду тенденцию приписывать формулу “русские=православные” архаичному типу национального самосознания, заведомо враждебному секулярным факторам нациостроительства. У многих сторонников этой концепции во второй половине XIX в. находим весьма сложное сочетание религиозных и светских представлений о национальном единстве; православное исповедание виделось им не столько сущностью нации, сколько скрепляющим инструментом.
С другой стороны, сторонники расподобления русскости и православия выказывали порой приверженность к традиционалистским схемам мышления. Тот же Катков в 1860-х гг. ратовал за замену польского языка русским в католическом богослужении. Идея “русского католицизма”, вроде бы вполне “модерная” (католик тоже может быть русским!), очень его увлекла, но для ее обоснования он прибегал к доводам куда менее новаторским, например: “сущность [национального] вопроса заключается не в том, кто на каком языке обыкновенно разговаривает, а в том, какой язык служит необходимым органом в деле религии”. Получалось, что только и исключительно проповедь на русском языке могла убедить крестьян-католиков в том, что они неполяки. Таким ли уж чистым “модернистом” был Катков?

Андреас КАППЕЛЕР. Религиозный и этнический концепты не находятся в противоречии друг с другом. Этнические группы и нации очень часто отграничивают себя от других подобных им сообществ, исходя из религиозных критериев – например, говорящие на одном языке сербы и хорваты, карелы и финны, голландцы и фламандцы. Эта коннотация была характерной и для русского национализма, к отличительным чертам которого часто относили православие. Однако конфессия являлась, как правило, лишь одним из факторов, поскольку дискурсивно утверждаемое равенство между православными и русскими, например, в идеологии панславизма (а в действительности – панортодоксизма), не было столь убедительным.

Andreas UMLAND. As in the relationship between nationalism and religion in other countries, there are several issues involved when analyzing the implications of different definitions of common identity for Russian politics. At least theoretically, some of the most ardent and politically active representatives of Orthodoxy might not be Russian nationalists in as far as their motivation could be exclusively religious. Pure fundamentalists would certainly qualify as “extremists,” yet not as ultranationalists or fascists.
What seems to be happening more often is, however, that religious fanaticism goes together with extreme nationalism, such as in the case of the late Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga Ioann (Snychev). In this case nationalism can, arguably, become more easily integralist in as far as a higher status and specific pretensions of the nation in question are derived not only from pseudo-historical or -scientific arguments, but also from exegeses of religious texts.
In the third case, a definition of the nation as a community of church-goers might create a cross-cutting cleavage that would moderate nationalism by blurring the definition of who is a member of the nation, and who is not.

Daniel RANCOUR-LAFERRIERE

RELIGIOUS ICONS: A LITTLE EXPLORED CORNER OF THE RUSSIAN NATIONALIST MIND
Russians and the Orthodox – has always been an issue of intense interest to ethnic Russians (русские), the overwhelming majority of whom cannot “imagine” a Russia without Russian Orthodoxy as the predominant religion. However, this connection is usually explored by scholars from a political perspective. For example, the balance of political power between the Orthodox Church and the tsars underwent a radical change under Peter the Great. Or, Stalin gave more leeway to the Church during the war with Nazi Germany, while Khrushchev clamped down on the Church in the 1960s. Nowadays there is much speculation about what influence the Church has on the Putin administration. And so on.
A different way to examine the interaction of Russian nationality with Russian Orthodoxy is to consider how specific religious beliefs and practices relate to the Russian nationalist imagination. As is well known, Orthodox believers generally pray in the presence of icons. Every Orthodox church (храм) has an iconostasis, and icons may be found in other parts of the church as well. The traditional Russian peasant hut had (and in many areas still has) its icon corner (красный угол, божница). Many automobiles on Russian highways are furnished with an icon or icons – a Russian equivalent of the American “dashboard Jesus.” On a recent cab ride in Moscow I noticed that the front passenger dashboard was decorated with the following sequence: a Mother of God with Christ Child (Богоматерь с младенцем), Christ alone (Спас), and St. Nikolai (Николай угодник). This was followed by the brand name Жигули. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was in Russia.
There is a special connection between Russian ethnic identity – especially the Russian nationalist’s identity – and Russian religious icons. Of course Orthodox believers in Russia venerate icons for primarily religious purposes having to do with the salvation of their souls. The original intent of icons, after all, was to put believers in spiritual contact with the prototypes represented on the icons – Christ, the Mother of Christ, saints, and angels. An icon facilitated spiritual development of the individual Christian. But, over the centuries, icons have also taken on other functions having to do with imagined communities of Christians, as Anderson would say. One such imagined community is the Russian nation.
Russian icons bring glory to Russia herself. Foreign visitors to and admirers of Russia tend to think of icons as the quintessentially “Russian” art form. This impression is conveyed, for example, by Robin Milner-Gulland’s interesting chapter on “Iconic Russia” in a book titled “The Russians”.
Russians, too, often convey the impression. According to Viktor Lazarev, the art of icon painting, as revealed in the historically-significant 1913 exhibition of fifteenth and sixteenth-century icons in Moscow, is “one of the most perfect manifestations of the Russian national genius.” Lazarev, who was working within a Soviet context, was not in a position to explore very explicitly what constituted “Russian national genius.” Pre-Soviet and post-Soviet critics, however, have not hesitated to investigate and to praise what they consider to be “Russian” about Russian icons.
For example, nineteenth-century scholar Fedor Buslaev, after admitting to the artistic backwardness of old Russian icons by comparison with Western religious art contemporary with them, and after asserting that Russian icon-painting “does not know and does not want to know beauty for its own sake,” asserts that it is instead “permeated with reverence for the holiness and divinity of the personages depicted,” and, as a result, it “imparts to them a certain greatness which corresponds in the icon to the one who is praying.” Whereas Western art on religious themes often descends to frankly sexual material (a Van Eyck Madonna) or serves as an occasion for depicting the vulgar luxuries of the rich (Veronese’s renditions of the Marriage in Cana of Galilee), Russian religious art has always retained a certain primeval, spiritual purity. According to Buslaev, it is never concerned to represent what is worldly, for it is preoccupied with high ideals. These ideals, moreover, are those of the Russian nation itself:

“Church art in the West was only a temporary, transitional phenomenon which had to give way to secular art, historical painting, genre painting, landscapes. In contrast to this Russian art, restrained within the limits of religious style by its very deficiencies, surviving until only recently in all its purity without any historical influence, has remained an art of the church. In all the tangibility of its external form was reflected the firm independence and uniqueness of the Russian nationality [русской народности]...”

The images rendered by Russian icons may repeat themselves with monotonous regularity over the centuries, but for Buslaev their spirituality remains undefiled. The icon-handbooks (“подлинники”) which many icon-painters utilized to guarantee this sameness of icons over time constitute, in Buslaev’s opinion, “a great monument of the Russian nationality.”
Evgenii Trubetskoi, another pre-Soviet thinker, also did not hesitate to delineate what he thought was praiseworthy in Russian icons. Alain Besanзon quite rightly refers to Trubetskoi’s “artistic nationalism.” Trubetskoi asserted that, with time, the icon-painters of Rus’ stopped following their Greek masters, and painted in their own – “Russian” – fashion: “Why is it surprising that, once Russia started to believe in herself, she saw her own image in the heavens; and the icon-painter, once he forgot the lessons of his Greek teachers, started fitting the image of Christ with Russian features? This was not self-elevation, but a manifestation of Holy Rus’ in icon painting.” It was this sense of a holy nation which eventually enabled the inhabitants of Rus’ to throw off the “Tatar-Mongol yoke.” According to Trubetskoi, “the icon is a manifestation of that same beneficent force which once saved Russia.” These words, written in the catastrophic days of 1918, were meant to encourage Russians again to turn to their traditional religious practices – including the painting and veneration of icons – as a way of resisting demonic, anti-Russian forces – in other words, the Bolsheviks. But Russia was not saved in 1918. She was instead transformed into an officially atheist state (and Trubetskoi himself died of typhus in 1920).
The distinguished art historian Nikodim Kondakov also tied Russian icons to Russia herself. Russian icon-painters may have borrowed much from foreign sources, asserted Kondakov, yet their art remained “Russian.” Thus, “…although the Russian image of Christ represents an alien type, in it is nonetheless contained the ‘Russian soul’.” By this Kondakov seems to mean that, although Russian icons of the Savior derive from a “Graeco-Italian type,” they nonetheless display an admixture of “features of the ‘Russian’ folk type,” for example the Rublev variant is “significantly russified in its features.”
Certain attitudes concerning the production of icons also reflect national awareness. If an icon was painted in what was perceived as too realistic and too Western a manner, it was derogatorily termed “friaz’” or “friazhskoe pis’mo” (from the old term “friag,” meaning an Italian, or a foreigner generally; sometimes translated as “Frankish”). Foreign models were to be avoided. In 1691 Patriarch Ioakim declared: “I ordain in the name of the Lord that icons of God-Man and of the most Holy Mother of God and of all the saints should be painted according to old versions…; and above all that they should not be painted from Latin and German images, which are unseemly, invented in accordance with personal whims, and which corrupt the Tradition of our Church. Such irregular images as exist in churches must be removed.” Foreigners were also not supposed to participate in the sale and distribution of icons. These xenophobic notions, originating primarily in the seventeenth century, were taken seriously by some as late as the twentieth. They are difficult to disentangle from the even more important religious rule that only an Orthodox believer, never a “heretic” (“еретика”) or “non-believer” (“неверный”) – be permitted to paint icons. The idea that a Muslim or a Jew or any other non-Orthodox citizen of Russia could paint a “Russian” icon was even more unthinkable than the idea that a German could paint such an icon. However, this connecting of the Russian ethnos or nation to Orthodox Christianity should come as no surprise. Those who express nationalist sentiments with regard to Russian icons think as Russian nationalists do generally.
Icons in Russia are also often related to important events in the history of the Russian nation. Indeed, the miracles attributed to certain icons are “historical events” in their own right. As Kira Tsekhanskaia states in her valuable – if somewhat nationalistic – recent treatise on icons in the life of the Russian people, “the signs and miracles constitute a part of the Orthodox spiritual heritage, and have just as important a significance as all other historical events.” One need not believe in miracles to accept this truth. The miracles may have been constructed after the fact in order to suit some political, dynastic, or national faction, but they have been real ever since they were constructed. The miracles may not be as literally real as “other historical events,” but they have psychological reality in the minds of the Russian Orthodox faithful. Indeed, many of the “other historical events” probably also reflect more of the psyches of their after-the-fact narrators than of what happened empirically. But that is another, broader issue.
Icons of the Mother of God are particularly important for the nationalists. They play the major role among all icons in native histories of Russia (and Rus’), in the chronicles, and in devotional accounts. The latter are especially abundant, existing as they have for centuries both in oral folklore and in written lore. In the written form they are usually termed сказания. These narrations are often published in large collections featuring hundreds of icons (or icon-types). A recent example is Dmitrii Orekhov’s 2000 compendium “The Holy Icons of Russia”, which is devoted almost exclusively to icons of the Mother of God. An earlier example is the popular nineteenth-century compilation titled “Skazaniia about the Earthly Life of the Most Holy Mother of God”.
The obviously devout – and anonymous – author of this latter work writes about “the Mother of God’s beneficent protection over Russia.” Her protection or cover – “Покров,” also the name of one of Mary’s major feast days in Russia (1 October) – has been manifested primarily through the action of her miracle-working icons, according to the compilation. These icons have often been brought right out onto the field of battle, or soldiers have venerated these icons before going out to fight. Thus the city of Novgorod was supposedly protected by an icon of the Mother of God from an attack by the Suzdalians and their allies in 1140. An icon of the Assumption of the Mother of God helped defeat the Tatars on the field of Kulikovo in 1380. Tsar Fedor Ivanovich was assisted by an icon of the Don Mother of God in fending off Crimean Tatars from Moscow in 1591. The Poles were driven out of Moscow during the “Time of Troubles” early in the seventeenth century, and in memory of this victory the Kazan Mother of God is honored every year on 22 October. Later, in the seventeenth century, the Turks were driven back from lands south of Kiev with the help of a local icon of the Mother of God. The Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 was a failure, in part, through the assistance of the Smolensk Hodegetria.
Other examples could be adduced. Tsekhanskaia lists nineteen different holidays of the Orthodox church calendar which celebrate icons which have supposedly defended the Russian (русское) military from an enemy. Only three of these nineteen do not involve the Mother of God.
Russian icons are important objects of Russian military culture. The catalogue of a recent St. Petersburg exhibition on “Orthodoxy, the Army, and the Navy of Russia” includes numerous icons – along with military decorations, swords, spears, military uniforms, helmets, halberds, pistols, cannons, banners, etc. A good half of the icons are of the Mother of God, or include the Mother of God as a component. There are also icons of Christ (“Not Made by Human Hands”), St. Nikolai of Mozhaisk, St. Andrew, St. George and the Dragon, Sergei of Radonezh (who blessed soldiers on their way to the Battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380), and some others. The juxtaposition of these icons with weapons of war might seem odd from the viewpoint of a true Christian. But, for Russian nationalists, certain Russian icons are weapons of war.
One might even construct a military folk history of Rus’ and Russia based on the history of devotion to certain icons. For example: “the Pochaev Mother of God represents the victories of the Russians over the Turks,” declares Orekhov. Such a history would have to include Ukraine, for Russian nationalists have always tended to view people living in the vicinity of Kiev as “southern Russian” – as when one account refers to the “faith of the southern Russian [южно-русского]people in the strong and unceasing intercession of the Mother of God.” Such a history would also extend right into the Soviet period. Father Filadelf points out that the Kazan Mother of God was carried in procession around the city of Leningrad shortly before the German blockade of that city was broken. Soviet marshal Georgii Zhukov kept a Kazan Mother of God with him at all times throughout the war. Rumor has it that a Soviet fighter plane flew a Kazan Mother of God around the perimeter of Moscow in 1941 in order to protect that city from the Hitlerite invaders. Apparently the Kazan Mother of God was very busy during the war, traveling around the various fronts (“путешествовала по фронтам”).
One could also construct a folk geography of Russia based on the supposed activities of icons. According to Tsekhanskaia, in the Russian Orthodox imagination, specific icons strengthen specific borders of Russia/Rus’ from foreign invaders:

“In the depths of the Russian soul, and in Russian self-awareness, there has been preserved a faith which for a thousand years [sic] has helped to build and to guard the boundaries of the Fatherland. Orthodox people have always profoundly and anxiously believed in the heavenly protection of the Mother of God, and in the notion that God’s Mother defends and blesses our land by means of Her miraculous icons: the Tikhvin – the northern reaches of Rus’; the Iverian – the southern limits; the Pochaev and Smolensk – the western boundaries; and the icon of the Kazan Mother of God, especially beloved and revered among the simple folk, preserves and guards the eastern boundaries.”

One may disagree with the details of such a forthright and grandiose scheme for the various icons. In particular, the Kazan Mother of God seems to have been involved with more military actions in the west than in the east, so it is difficult to see her as a preserver of eastern boundaries (except that she was discovered in Kazan in 1579 when Bishop Germogen was proselytizing Tatars there). In any case, the nationalistic essence of this scheme is clear. Tsekhanskaia honestly believes that icons have defended Russia and the Russian people from enemies on all four sides over many centuries, “a thousand years” even. And every one of the icons in her scheme is an icon of the Mother of God.
There is much more that could be said – and will be said^[1] – about the nationalistic significance of Russian Orthodox icons. For now, I hope I have piqued the curiosity of historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others who are participating in this roundtable on facets of Russian nationalism.

4. Какова роль имперских окраин (или, точнее – выходцев с окраин) в развитии русского национализма; что (или кто) являлось наиболее активным ферментом его формирования?
What is the role of the borderlands (or, more precisely, of individuals from the borderlands) in the development of Russian nationalism? Who or what was the most active ferment in the formation of Russian nationalism?

Михаил ДОЛБИЛОВ. Для самой империи важную роль играли те “выходцы” с окраин, которые до того сами были там “пришельцами”. Я имею в виду, прежде всего, тех людей элиты, чиновников, которые приезжали на окраину, обзаводились кругом знакомств, а нередко и родней, усваивали, так сказать, краевой колорит – не теряя при этом прежней идентичности. Выше я говорил о том, что в противостоянии с окраинным сепаратизмом люди из центра особенно живо вспоминали о своей русскости, но периоды открытой конфронтации были не столь часты. Землевладельцы или администраторы, мирно прожившие на окраине столько-то лет и вернувшиеся в центр, во внутреннюю Россию, сохраняли интерес к местным проблемам, становясь нередко центрами тяготения для новых выходцев с окраины. Хрестоматийный пример такого “человека с окраины” – императрица Анна Ивановна, курляндский опыт которой отразился в приемах кооптирования окраинной знати в имперскую элиту.
Пожалуй, даже те люди, кто посетил окраину в ее “минуты роковые”, воевал там, подавлял мятеж, наказывал и усмирял, накладывали на свою русскость специфический отпечаток – “кавказские русские”, “виленские русские”…

Андреас КАППЕЛЕР. Национализм всегда предполагает дифференциацию между своим и другим – чужой и чужое являются его неотъемлемой частью. Русский национализм нередко артикулируется и формулируется в оппозиции и через оппозицию к “Европе”, “Западу”, реже к “Азии” и “Востоку” (что бы под этим ни понималось). В контексте Российской империи таким контрагентом был, прежде всего, польский национализм, в конфронтации с которым набирал силу русский национализм с 1830 г. и особенно интенсивно – с 1863 г.

Andreas UMLAND. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet imperial borderlands provided some of the most radical neo-imperialists for Moscow politics, among them Vladimir Zhirinovskii and Nikolai Petrushenko (Kazakhstan), Viktor Alksnis (Latvia), Iurii Blokhin (Moldova), Sazhi Umalatova (Chechnia), Georgii Komarov (Kyrgyzstan), Evgenii Kogan (Estonia) or Anatolii Chekhoev (Southern Ossetia). The so-called “inter-movements,” i.e. Russian imperialist organizations, played an important role in aggravating ethnic conflicts in the Baltic countries.

5. Что включает в себя проблематика изучения “русского национализма”; как определяет ее специфику имперский контекст ее существования?
What does the problematic of studying Russian nationalism include? How is it defined by the imperial context of its existence?

Андреас КАППЕЛЕР. С давних пор в исследованиях национализма так называемые примордиалисты и функционалисты (модернисты) ведут спор о том, с какого момента можно говорить о нациях. В российском случае первые признаки модерного национализма появляются, самое раннее, в конце XVIII столетия. В различных вариантах они распространяются постепенно в течение XIX в. и охватывают уже в XX в. широкие слои населения. Однако Российская империя и имперское сознание возникли гораздо раньше, чем русская нация, а государство и империя оставались и остаются по сей день решающими факторами русского национализма. И хотя мы сталкиваемся время от времени с попытками конструирования этнического, религиозного или революционного национализма в отрыве от империи или государства, они никогда не имеют продолжительного успеха. Таким образом, исследования русского национализма должны учитывать имперский контекст. Примерами могут служить новые работы по русскому национализму Джоффри Хоскинга и Андреаса Реннера.
Andreas UMLAND. The subject of Russian nationalism as a political ideology may include very different phenomena depending on how far one is prepared to stretch the concept of nationalism. One could include moderate forms of particularism mixed with universalist ideas, and sometimes labeled “patriotism” (a term that is also often used by de-facto ultranationalists). In this case, many, if not all, major political forces of today Russia, including factions within Yabloko or the Union of Right Forces, could become objects of research into Russian nationalism.
One would also have to decide which variations of generic radical particularism the concept of nationalism would still embrace. Would, for instance, pan-Slavism, Eurasianism, or the idea of an anti-American alliance of traditionalist continental countries (e.g., Alexander Dugin‘s “Neoeurasianism”) fall within the realm of “nationalism”? If the primary point of reference of these more or less clearly anti-universalist ideas are not ethnic Russians proper, not even the Eastern Slavs, but some larger community such as all the people of the former Russian empire, or even all peoples of the Eurasian continent, would that still count as “nationalism”?

Vera TOLZ

RUSSIAN EMPIRE- AND NATION-BUILDING

A number of scholars, most notably Hans Rogger, Roman Szporluk and Geoffrey Hosking, have argued that in the Russian case empire-building impeded nation-building. Their arguments are as follows:
The timing of the creation of the Russian empire. Moscow’s conquest of non-Slavic and non-Christian territories in the mid-sixteenth century occurred at the time when national distinctions were not recognized and it also immediately followed the take-over of other east Slavic principalities, described in the medieval chronicles as ‘the gathering of the indigenous Russian lands.’ Thus, from the beginning the line was blurred between the absorption into Muscovia of what are now undisputed parts of “Russia proper” and the territories of people culturally and religiously different from the Russians.
Imperial government suppressed nation-building. The land-based empire perpetuated the existence of the repressive autocratic government, which submerged society and which, in maintaining the privileges of the elite for the purpose of imperial stability, delayed liberal reforms, which could have facilitated nation-building in the nineteenth century.
Russians failed to grasp the arguments of nationalism. Because of the timing and the way in which the empire had been created, Russians continued to think in pre-national categories in the era of nationalism.
It seems to me that these arguments are in need of some modification. The significance of timing in the creation of empires as opposed to consolidation of national identities should not be overestimated. In Western Europe the consolidation of nation-states occurred not before, as Szporluk and other scholars argue, but parallel to the creation of overseas empires. (See, for instance, Linda Colley’s analysis of the relationship between empire- and nation-building in the case of Britain.) I would argue that the first problem with Russia’s nation-building was not the undeniable fact that in some way it was impeded by empire-building, but that Russia has never developed into a modern state, which could command broad public loyalties. The roots of such development lie in the pre-imperial period.
Benedict Anderson, John Breuilly, Ernest Gellner and other theorists of nationalism have shown that a certain type of state was in existence in Western Europe prior to the advent of nationalism and modern West European nations emerged within the framework of those states. Particular developments, which took place as far back as in the Middle Ages, lay the foundation in West European societies for subsequent modernization and nation-building.
The development of the Russian polity was different. Before the Moscow principality began to turn into an empire in the second half of the sixteenth century, a century earlier the foundation had been laid for a polity whose political culture was not conducive to modernization and subsequent nation-building. In the fifteenth century, when the Muscovite “state” began to take shape, the Moscow principality was profoundly different from European societies – it had no major urban centers, few settlements and a poor level of communication between them. Great Princes’ sovereignty in Muscovite Rus included “the attributes of patrimonial or domainial power, i.e. full ownership of the land and its inhabitants.” In France, for instance, the differentiation of domainial institutions and public ones was completed by the fourteenth century. In Russia it only started in the eighteenth. Even afterwards the distinction between the domainial and public spheres remained vague. While noting the patrimonial origins of the Russian state in the pre-imperial period, historians do not directly relate this feature to the analysis of Russian nation-building.
Whereas Richard Pipes, following Vasilii Kliuchevsky’s analysis, developed the argument about the patrimonial nature of the Russian state, Hosking stressed that resulting overcentralization was more an aspiration than a reality in Muscovia and in the Russian empire. Hosking pointedly described the Russian state throughout the entire period since the fifteenth century as a collection of “networks of personal dependence.”
Thus the Russians have never had a state which could be a focus of loyalty not just for a narrow group of the ruling elite but for broader segments of society and therefore throughout the nineteenth century the majority of the population continued to be bound by a pre-national type of loyalty – that to the tsar personally, while continuing to see the state as an enemy. Only a state capable of throwing bridges across various social, religious and ethnic divides and reconcile members of society and the ruling elite could offer a framework for an enduring nation-building. Such a state might have been able to create a higher loyalty and integrate different social and even ethnic groups. It should be kept in mind that the emergence of the Russian polity as “networks of personal dependence” had preceded the advent of the empire and its features continue to endure today, when the empire is gone.
The second problem was that Russian nation-builders downplayed the essential differences between the Russian empire and the states with which they compared it. By the turn of the nineteenth century such founding fathers of Russian nationalism as the historians Ivan Boltin and Nikolai Karamzin constructed the argument that Russia possessed everything that the West had and, if it differed, the difference signified Russia’s advantage over the “other,” as it indicated the realization of ideals to which the West was only aspiring. Rather than continuing to be affected by pre-national perceptions, these Russian intellectuals understood the arguments of nationalism and were affected by them. The problem was that the concept of nation did not offer a suitable framework to understand Russian realities, and its application only blurred the ability of intellectuals to analyze the processes in their country.
The comparison with Russia’s constituent “other” (“the West”) made Russian intellectuals draw several conclusions. The most significant of them was that the Russians had a state, within whose borders nation-building could proceed, as was the case in Britain and France.
THE IMPLICATIONS The results of the application of the West European concept of a nation to Russia became particularly significant from the 1860s onwards, when the tsarist government, for the first time, began relatively consistent attempts to homogenize society along both civic and ethnic lines. But unfortunately for Russian nation-builders, by that time leaders of some minority groups began rejecting state-framed nationalism of the Russians.
We should remember that the Russian government justified its policies of both civic homogenization (emancipation of the serfs, the creation of zemstva, the introduction of some form of state-sponsored primary education and of nearly universal military service) and ethnic homogenization (linguistic Russification and conversion to Orthodoxy) by stressing the need to replicate nation-building processes in Western Europe. (The relationship between, military success, economic modernization and cultural homogenization of society began to be understood.) In contrast to a popular misperception, nation-building in Western Europe did not finish at the time of the French revolution but largely began then. During the nineteenth century, the ruling elites in France, Britain, unified Germany and Italy used coercion to enforce high cultures of the elites on societies, wiping out local customs and dialects in the process. This is what the Russian ruling elites under the three last Russian tsars were trying to copy and they explicitly said so, rejecting the comparison between Russia and Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. For instance, the reference to nation-building in France and Germany was the official justification for the introduction of the draconian measures to prohibit the publication of most books in Ukrainian and the import of Ukrainian-language books from abroad in 1863 and 1876. A coercive nature and relative consistency of Russification policies under the three last Russian tsars were therefore not a manifestation of the strength of Russian imperialism, but a desperate attempt of a pre-modern multi-ethnic state to respond to nation-building processes elsewhere in Europe.
The majority (but not all) Russian intellectuals agreed with this state-framed definition of Russian nationhood. Even if they did not regard all the areas of the Russian empire (such as, for instance, Central Asia) as part of “Russian national territory”, the majority believed in the eventual success of integration of all of these parts into a fatherland united by civic loyalties and capable of surviving in the period when nationalism began to undermine Europe’s land-based empires. The disintegration of the Russian state in the wake of World War I took most Russians by surprise. To my mind, this is not because they did not understand the arguments of nationalism. Instead, they were appalled that what worked in Western Europe (i.e. the integration of regional cultures and traditions into homogenous national cultures) failed to work in Russia.
It seems to me that it is the application to Russia of a West European concept of a nation united primarily by civic loyalties that prevented Russian nation-builders from understanding the processes taking place among the minority groups, whose elites began to be affected by the ideas of nationalism in their own way since the second half of the 19th century. These elites came up with counter-state concepts of national communities. Russians failed to appreciate the significance of their arguments not from the standpoint of imperialism, but from their own state-framed nationalist perspective.
WHY DID THE RUSSIAN VISION FAIL? In analyzing the emergence of counter-state nationalisms in Russia and of the failure of the Russian state-framed vision of naitonhood, one should remember that minority nationalisms were not the expression of century-old nationalist aspirations of these ethnic group, but, in most cases, the product of the nineteenth century. This includes the nationalism most threatening to the state-framed vision of the Russians – Ukrainian nationalism. Cultural and linguistic differences between the French of Ile de France, on the one hand, and Bretons or Provencals, whose dialects and customs French nationalism was aimed at obliterating in the nineteenth century, were no less significant than the differences between Great and Little Russians in the 1860s and the 1870s, when Russian government officials argued that at the time of the creation of a German nation-state they could not allow the separation of “one of the branches of the Russian nationality.”
From the standpoint of today, it is tempting to perceive the emergence of a multitude of different nations on the territory of the former tsarist empire and the Soviet Union as the only possible outcome of the development of the region and these nations as primordial communities continuously trying to liberate themselves from the Russian rule. But this is a typical position of nationalist activists, which has little historical basis. Mark Beissinger rightly pointed out that “the most important dimension of any imperial situation is perception” and it is often post factum, depending on whether a state-building project succeeded or failed that the final judgment is reached over the imperial or nation-state nature of a polity.
There are several reasons why the Russian state-framed vision of nationhood failed. Here I will comment on the two of them, which seem to me most significant. The first is what I have stressed at the beginning – the lack of a state as a system of formal institutions rather than a collection of “networks of personal dependence.” The latter did not have the capacity to foster a necessary sense of loyalty based on the concept of citizenship among the country’s diverse subjects.
The second crucial point is the timing of nationalizing policies. Government policies initiated in the 1860s and aimed at bringing non-Russians closer to the state and integrating Russian peasants had no time to have a sufficient impact before the cohesion of Russia was tested by World War I. By the second half of the nineteenth century some of the non-Russian elites were already affected by the ideas of nationalism and began to formulate their own counter-state concepts of nations.
Since in the modern world nationalism gives an answer to the question about people’s dignity and self-worth, it is much more difficult to assimilate people with some sense of national identity than to carry out “nationalizing projects” (i.e. destruction of cultures, customs and languages of local communities) in peasant societies where people’s self-worth was defined by their position in a hierarchical society, not by their belonging to a national community. The latter was largely the task of the elites in France, Britain, Germany and Italy, where in the course of the nineteenth century policies aimed at turning peasants into citizens were pursued. When the Russian government finally began to introduce nation-building policies with some consistency, it increasingly had to deal with the emergence of leaders offering alternative nation-building projects for local communities.
The Soviet government tried to take charge over the development and, in the process, unwittingly strengthened national identities among some non-Russian ethnic groups and created, almost from scratch, such identities among others. But this is already another story.

6. Каковы перспективы русского национализма в современной Российской Федерации.
What are the perspectives of Russian nationalism in today’s Russian Federation?

David ROWLEY. From my very distant vantage point, it appears that the most powerful force holding the Russian Federation together and driving its relations with the near abroad is Russian nationalism and not national imperialism. Russia faces unique post-imperial problems and dilemmas, since its empire was different in degree from the colonial empires of Western Europe. It lasted longer, it was more closely integrated, and the titular nation made up a much larger proportion of the population of the empire as a whole, as well as a larger proportion of the population of the provinces/colonies. The characteristics suitable for the construction of a Russian national identity are certainly still present in the population of the Russian Federation. Should the government wish to mobilize Russian nationalism to promote the well-being of Russian populations beyond its borders it will have a fertile field in which to work. Empire-building, however, would be much more problematic.

Андреас КАППЕЛЕР. Десять лет назад западные наблюдатели говорили о “Веймарской республике в России” и прогнозировали быстрый рост экстремального этнического антисемитского национализма и/или агрессивного имперского национализма. Хотя обе тенденции все еще актуальны и пропагандируются в экстремистской печати, пророчества западных экспертов, к счастью, не оправдались. Доминантными оказались умеренные, ориентированные на государство и/или этничность варианты русского национализма. Для федеративной структуры России подошел бы принцип супраэтнического, гражданского национализма американского или швейцарского образца, который бы включал татар, бурят, дагестанцев и прочие народы. Однако это произойдет нескоро, поскольку введенная Лениным в СССР и распространенная в других частях Европы концепция этно-территориальной нации все еще доминирует в политике и сознании людей.

Andreas UMLAND. The prospects of Russian nationalism, even of some of its more radical versions, seem to be better today than in the early 1990s. In the first post-Soviet decade a major dividing line in political conflicts was that separating the more or less radical nationalists within the Supreme Soviet and State Duma from the comparatively liberal factions in the parliament and government (though there were also nationalist tendencies within the governmental structures under Yeltsin). Today, by contrast, the line dividing the KPRF and United Russia is not one between pro- and anti-nationalism. I am not even sure that the main issue dividing both political camps is primarily ideological one. Rather, political discourse in general has become more inward looking and penetrated by often specifically anti-American ideas. The new coordinates of the Russian political spectrum have pushed universalist ideas represented by the democratic movement of the early 1990s outside the political mainstream. Political conflict today is more focused on which historical reference points, means, tactics, and symbols to choose in the implementation of generally accepted nationalist aims in foreign and domestic policies, rather than on whether pursuing such aims might be useful for Russia at all. Thus nationalism will, , for better or for worse, remain a relevant research topic in contemporary Russian studies.