SUMMARY:

Chapter 9 of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia is titled “Empire and Revolution: Revolutionary Movement in the Imperial Society before the Age of Mass Politics.” The chapter covers the genesis of the revolutionary tradition in the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century and traces its evolution until the early twentieth century. It appears that revolutionarism emerges out of the fundamental conflict of the imperial situation of manifold differences and conflicting interests, as a pure analytical pursuit of projects of ideal accommodation of that conflict. As such, it can overlap with riots or elite coups d’états, but the main meaningful characteristic of a revolutionary movement that separates from other causes of violence and collapsed statehood is its reliance on a clear blueprint for a better future society. In this regard, conservative Slavophiles were no less revolutionary than Decembrists. The elusiveness of nation as the main historical actor drove some revolutionaries to extreme terrorist tactics, while at the same time reproducing the fundamental imperial situation within the imperial revolutionary movement due to the multitude of meanings of “nation” to different political and cultural groups, in different parts of the empire.