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Geographies of imperial identity
with a distinctly imperial quality that enabled it to be at once multiethnic and
supra-ethnic. It was founded upon affinities that effectively both absorbed and
superseded mere racial and ethnographic criteria. This line of thinking in late
imperial Russia provided a direct link with nationality debates and policies
throughout the Soviet Union and indeed down to the present day.
The national assimilation of its non-Russian populations, however, was only
one means by which the empire was to be ‘Russianised’. Along with it went a
heightened awareness of the pervasiveness of ethnic Russian settlement itself
across the remote imperial expanses, an awareness that was apparent above
all in a new historiographical emphasis on the factors of resettlement and
colonisation in Russian history. The groundwork for such a perspective had
been laid in the early 1840s, in the theories of the Moscow historian Sergei
Solov’ev about the genesis of the Russian nation. Anticipating a theme that
later in the century would figure prominently in nationalist historiography in
many countries, Solov’ev argued that the Russian nation had been formed by
a primordial process of movement across and settlement of vast geographical
spaces. His attention was fixed upon Russia’s earliest history, and the geo-
graphical realm he had in mind was correspondingly limited, but after the
middle of the century his ideas were generalised into the prospect of a single
colonising moment which ran throughout all of Russia’s historical experience
from its origins down to the present, and which included the full geograph-
ical scope of all Russia’s vast imperial domains.
24
This was a view of Russia
as a nation ‘colonising itself’, as Solov’ev’s successor at Moscow University,
Vasilii Kliuchevskii, famously put it, in which resettlement and colonisation
were ‘the basic facts of [its] history’.
25
With varying emphases, this perspective
was developed in subsequent decades by numerous historians, including A. P.
Shchapov, M. K. Liubavskii, G. I. Vernadskii and many others.
Indeed, its appeal extended far beyond the university lecture hall, and it
gave rise to a teleological vision of inexorable movement eastwards ‘against
the sun’ that ran throughout the entire historical life of the Russian nation –
effectively a sort of Russian Manifest Destiny.
26
Like the American prototype,
this prospect bequeathed new meaning and rationale both to the Russian
historical chronicle as well as to Russia’s imperial spaces themselves, and it
24 S. K. Frank, Imperiale Aneignung. Diskursive Strategien der Kolonisation Sibiriens durch die
russische Kultur (Habilitationschrift, University of Konstanz, 2003)pp.108–23.
25 V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, 9 vols. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1987), vol. I, pp.
50–1.
26 G. I. Vernadskii, ‘Protiv solntsa. Rasprostranenie russkogo gosudarstva k Vostoku’,
Russkaia mysl’ 1 (1914): 56–79; Georgii Vernadskii, ‘O dvizhenii russkikh na vostok’,
Nauchnyi istoricheskii zhurnal 1, 2 (1913): 52–61.
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