Interpreting Russia’s Imperial Dimension

During the last decade, scholars' increasingly sophisticated understanding of nation building has caused interesting divergence between their analyses of the nationalities problem in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold authorities like Walter Kolarz and Richard Pipes branded both tsarist and Soviet states as expansionist, Russian-dominated empires, which suppressed the natural nationalism of non-Russian nationalities. Such interpretation rested unproblematic view of nationalities as organic communities and empires as obsessed with the suppression of national sentiments. By the 1980s, however, the profession began adopting the constructivist models of Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner, Miroslav Hroch, Benedict Anderson and others, who saw modern nations as invented, or as products of modern social and cultural processes. Just as historians of Russia and the Soviet Union were coming to terms with the idea that nationalism created nations, rather than the other way around, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederick Cooper, Ann Laura Staler, and others began to argue that, far from suppressing ethnic difference, modern empires elaborate and employ it as a governing tool. With the notions of nationality and both problematized, the field of Russian Studies was posed for paradigm change.Curiously, though, as the books under review illustrate only too well, specialists imperial Russia and the USSR have taken different views the applicability to their respective fields of study of contemporary theories empires. Among scholars working tsarist Russia, one senses considerable enthusiasm for comparing Russia's colonial projects to those of other European empires. Thus, Ronald Grigor Suny's insightful chapter in A State of Nations embraces the present-day understanding of imperialism as a discursive, as well as military and administrative, power. Suny provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the Russian Empire's failure to create a multinational Russian nation by elaborating an identity distinct from a religious (Orthodox), imperial, state, or narrowly ethnic identity.5 But he goes beyond this argument, which has been made before, notably by Geoffrey Hosking and Roman Szporluk, who suggested that empire building obstructed Russian nation building. Suny shows that, especially with Russia's expansion into the Caucasus and Central Asia, the empire joined a modern colonial project of describing and categorizing its subjects. Scholars and writers developed Russian Orientalism, which by way of comparison to the Asian other, allowed them to address the empire's ambiguous position between Europe and Asia (p. 46).Russian Orientalism has been the topic of several recent works, even generating some controversy in professional journals. However, Austin Jersild's Orientalism and Empire provides the first comprehensive treatment of this subject, which blends historical descriptions and cultural analysis. Concentrating the history of the conquest and incorporation of the North Caucasus mountaineers, Jersild highlights the efforts of empire builders and the emergence of imperial imagination. He argues that political, ethnographic, and literary writing about famously exotic mountaineers contributed to the growing consciousness of Russia as empire that emerged and developed from the 184Os on (p. 4). Although visions of empire were elaborated, ultimately, in order to justify the conquest and promote the idea of Russia's civilizing mission, developing a new imperial purpose was a multinational enterprise. Georgian intellectuals, as well as Ossetian, Abkhaz, and Dagestani teachers, missionaries, and officials, worked with Russian bureaucrats in creating the rhetoric of empire.Jersild begins his narrative by documenting the unfinished Caucasus War, Russia's imperial advance into the Caucasus that lasted, in its active phase, from the 1790s to the 1860s, but was followed by numerous rebellions of the allegedly pacified Chechens, Dagestanis, and other nationalities

Ancient history · Combinatorics · Dimension (graph theory · History · Mathematics · Soviet and Russian History

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