Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia

Bibliographic Data

ID5772023
AuthorsVera Tolz (0000-0002-7118-9918, Indiana University Bloomington, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume10
Issue2
Pages261-290
Publication date2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueKritika (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1531-023X • E-ISSN: 1538-5000
PublisherSlavica Publishers (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/kri.0.0086
OpenAlexW1996675274
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited30

Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia Vera Tolz (bio) The late imperial period in Russia was marked by intense debates about how to achieve social, political, and, in some instances, cultural cohesion within the context of the empire's multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism. To use our contemporary terminology, we can define the challenge that faced Russian politicians and intellectuals as a resolution of tension between the country's imperial structures and the forces of modern nationalism.1 Among the various actors whose role in developing the new thinking about the management of the empire has recently been attracting increasing attention are imperial scholars. Particularly since the 1880s, some of them began advancing, through their research, various integrationist projects as liberal Moscow anthropologists searched for a definable "imperial race" on the territory of the Russian state, whereas linguists explicitly related their own work on Russian [End Page 261] and Ukrainian languages to their visions of the future Russia.2 The tsarist government, however, often disregarded the opinions of academics, particularly those who were known to be critical of autocracy and of the cultural and administrative Russification of minorities. Thus the main contribution of scholars in facilitating the management of the empire's borderlands in the late imperial period is seen as being limited mostly to the development of the new nationality-based categories of classification of imperial subjects which bureaucrats utilized to control the borderlands more efficiently.3 It is widely assumed that it was in the early Soviet period that the (former) imperial experts on Russia's ethnic minorities began to play a truly significant role in nation-building (natsional′noe stroitel′stvo in Soviet terminology) among the population of the borderlands.4 More broadly, it is also widely accepted that, even though the late imperial government began to utilize ethnic markers to organize politics,5 the process of the formation of nations among eastern and southern minorities (with the exception of Armenians and Georgians) falls within the Soviet period.6 This article contributes to a still limited body of research that focuses on the ways in which prerevolutionary discourses of nationhood and modernity actually exercised a major impact on the early Soviet nationalities policies. Adeeb Khalid has articulated in a particularly forceful manner the argument that these policies cannot be understood without knowledge of the developments in the last decades of the old regime. His work has challenged the established view that local peoples in Turkestan had not thought in national terms before the Bolshevik government initiated the national delimitation of Central Asia in the 1920s.7 [End Page 262] Another case of a link between the formation of new identities among non-Russian minorities in the late imperial and the early Soviet periods was noted in 1977 by Isabella Kreindler and further studied recently by Austin Jersild. Both scholars have argued that there was a degree of similarity between Lenin's policies on nationalities and the approach to the Christianization of small minority groups in the Volga region, formulated in the 1860s by the Orthodox missionary Nikolai Il′minskii. Under the influence of Romantic nationalism Il′minskii became convinced that the Christianization and eventual Russification of minorities was possible only if those minorities respected their local customs.8 The Bolshevik leaders, however, never directly referred to Il′minskii's experiment; and in its essence, the missionary's plans for the minorities differed significantly from the early Soviet visions. The promotion of ethno-cultural distinctions among these minorities by Il′minskii had very narrow limits, particularly in comparison with the Soviet project of sub-state nation-building. Il′minskii intensely feared the appearance among the minorities of people possessing what at the time was called "national consciousness" (natsional′noe samosoznanie).9 The schools set up by Il′minskii actually facilitated this development, but it certainly was not his plan.10 Thus Il′minskii's activities fit well with a common perception among contemporary scholars that, when certain modernizing projects of the imperial elites encouraged the emergence of nationally minded activists and national movements in the colonial domains, this happened unwittingly, rather than being the imperial elites' intention.11 This article looks at a

Autocracy · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Soviet and Russian History

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