Encyclopedia of Russian History

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

used a “stick and carrot” policy toward these coun-

tries. The active nationalists from these countries

were imprisoned and sent to exile. At the same time

the Soviet government made larger investments in

the economic development of the Baltic countries

compared with those of the other national re-

publics. The authorities attempted to maintain

higher standards of living in these countries and

thus decrease the dissatisfaction of the population.

However, the people of Latvia, Lithuania, and Es-

tonia looked at Russians as occupiers and were usu-

ally hostile toward the Soviet regime. The Baltic

countries were the first to declare their indepen-

dence during the time of perestroika (1985–1991).

The nationalist-oriented part of the Jewish

population participated in the Zionist movement

and fought for the right of emigration to Israel. A

small percentage of the Jewish population of the

Soviet Union emigrated to Israel, the United States,

and other countries during the 1970s and early

1980s. However, this emigration was severely re-

stricted by Soviet authorities, who treated the em-

igrants as traitors to the Motherland.

In the last years of the Soviet Union national

conflicts increased in the Caucasus republics.

Bloody anti-Armenian pogroms occurred in the

Nagorno Karabakh region and in Baku, the capital

of Azerbaijan. In Georgia violent conflict occurred

between the Georgian and Abkhazian population.

The Soviet nations never harmoniously coex-

isted. Brezhnev’s slogan of Friendship of Nations

was an empty propaganda claim. The Union of the

Soviet Socialist Republics was cemented by the mil-

itary power of the communist government, and by

fear of repression and persecution of the most ac-

tive national elements in the Soviet regime. As soon

as liberalization appeared with Gorbachev’s pere-

stroika policy, the Soviet republics one by one de-

clared their independence. Still the central Soviet

government strongly resisted decentralization of

the country during the late 1980s. By the order of

Soviet leaders, troops were used against civilians in

Latvia and Lithuania. But the end of the Soviet em-

pire was fast approaching. The Soviet Union col-

lapsed in December 1991 and many nations of the

former union began a new chapter in their history

as independent countries.

See also: EMPIRE, USSR AS; LANGUAGE LAWS; NATIONAL-

ITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATION AND NATIONALITIES;

RUSSIFICATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hosking, Geoffrey, and Service, Robert, eds. (1998). Rus-

sian Nationalism, Past and Present. New York: St.

Martin’s Press.

Kostyrchenko, Gennadi. (1995). Out of the Red Shadows:

Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia, tr. from Russian.

Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Na-

tions and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Pipes, Richard. (1980). The Formation of the Soviet Union;

Communism and Nationalism 1917–1923, 3rd ed.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel. (2000). Russian Nationalism

From an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Imagining Rus-

sia. Slavic Studies. Vol. 5. Lewiston, NY: Edwin

Mellen Press.

Rubenstein, Joshua, and Naumov, Vladimir P., eds.

(2001). Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition

of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, tr. Laura Ester

Wolfson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Service, Robert. (1998). A History of Twentieth-Century

Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Simon, Gerhard. (1991). Nationalism and Policy toward

the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitar-

ian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society, tr. Keren

Forster and Oswald Forster. Boulder, CO: Westview

Press.

Subtelny, Orest. (2000). Ukraine: A History, 3rd ed.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Suny, Ronald G. (1998). The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the

USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford

University Press.

ICTORIA

HITERER

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

The Russian Empire penetrated Europe as Europe’s

age of nationalism began. The retreat of Napoleon

Bonaparte after his failed invasion brought Russia

into the heart of Europe. The Congress of Vienna

(1815), which reestablished a European order after

Napoleon’s defeat, brought Russia’s border’s far-

ther west than ever before. The ancient Polish cap-

ital, Warsaw, was added to the Polish lands taken

by Russia in the partitions of the late eighteenth

century. The diplomatic settlement established Rus-

sia as a great European power, if not as a great Eu-

ropean nation. Although Tsar Alexander I was then

something of a liberal autocrat, national legitima-

tion would never have entered his mind. The mod-

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

1003

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ern idea of the nation as a people inhabiting a ter-

ritory and deserving of a state ruling in their name

was alien at the time, and would long remain so.

Between 1815 and 1917, national ideas reached

Russia from its western and southern frontiers,

providing some with the hope of change, and oth-

ers with a tool of reaction.

TENTATIVE CONSTITUTIONALISM, 1815–1830

Nationalism can be a method of rule by those who

already hold power. Yet during the early nineteenth

century, even the suggestion of popular sover-

eignty was inimical to the tsars’ prerogative of ab-

solute personal power. Any emphasis on the

Russian peasantry as a political class would have

challenged the right to rule of the Romanov dy-

nasty, as well as the prerogatives of the largely for-

eign elite that administered the growing imperial

state. In any event, as seen from St. Petersburg, na-

tionalism was a force associated with revolution, a

challenge to traditional rule rather than a way to

bolster it. This was the lesson of the French Revo-

lution and the Napoleonic wars.

As an ideology of change, nationalism was a

challenge to the monarchies and empires of ancien

régime Europe, yet it found few adherents in Rus-

sia during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The uneducated peasantry was tied to the com-

munal system of land ownership, an isolated world

of limited horizons. Few were able to see the peas-

ants as people, let alone as a political nation, be-

fore the emancipation decree of 1861. The church,

an agent of national revival elsewhere in imperial

Europe, was subordinate to the Russian state and

aligned with the principles of dynastic and auto-

cratic rule. The nobility, elsewhere in eastern Eu-

rope the bearer of historical national consciousness,

was in Russia associated with the state, for the

Russian state created by Peter I and Catherine I had

transformed it into a new cosmopolitan service

class.

After 1815, the Russian Empire held the ab-

solute majority of the world’s Poles, and about 10

percent of the Polish population was noble.

Napoleon, exploiting Polish hopes for statehood,

had established a duchy of Warsaw. This quasi–

state was revived and enlarged at the Congress of

Vienna as the Kingdom of Poland. Although

Poland’s former eastern lands were absorbed by the

Russian Empire, Polish nobles even there held social

and economic power. Institutions of the old Polish-

Lithuanian Commonwealth, such as the university

at Wilno, the Lithuanian Statutes, and the Uniate

Church, functioned with little interruption. Alexan-

der ruled these eastern lands as tsar, but the King-

dom of Poland as constitutional monarch.

The Polish gentry, the leading class in the

departed Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, consid-

ered itself a historical nation. Before the common-

wealth was dismembered by the partitions, much of

the middle gentry had been resolutely conservative,

perceiving central power as the greatest threat to their

traditional rights. In Russia, the same inclination

turned the middle gentry into radicals, attentive to

the constitution as the source of the tsar’s right to

rule Poland as king. The 1830 uprising was premised

on social–contract thinking: Since the tsar (Nicholas

I) was not fulfilling his obligations as king of Poland,

his subjects had the right and duty to rebel. The up-

rising was national in some sense, since the gentry

saw itself as the nation; it was certainly democratic,

in that the Polish Diet saw itself as representing a

European republic struggling against despotism; but

it was not modern nationalism, for its participants

neither legitimated their claims on a popular basis

nor aroused passions against an enemy nation.

ROMANTIC AND OFFICIAL

NATIONS, 1831–1855

The defeat of the 1830 uprising created the condi-

tions for a sophisticated discussion of the nation by

Russian subjects. Poland’s ten thousand political

emigrés were highly literate, politically engaged,

and determined to explain their military and polit-

ical defeat. Many of the emigrés, and most of the

leading figures, were of historical Lithuanian ori-

gin. Back in Russia, the 1830s and 1840s saw the

end of traditional Lithuanian institutions, such as

the university and the Statutes. The Uniate Church

was merged with the Russian Orthodox Church in

1839. For the Polish emigration as a whole, the old

commonwealth remained the touchstone of politi-

cal thought. But in time a new generation arose

that had no actual memory of the old order and

reimagined it in ways that reflected various ideas

of nationality.

The nationalist politics of Poles in the Parisian

emigration can be divided into two main currents:

republican and monarchist. Joachim Lelewel, once

a professor at Wilno, propounded a democratic re-

publicanism that drew its optimism from a belief

in the pacifism of Slavic peoples. Unlike Russians

with similar ideas, Lelewel believed that this paci-

fism could be destroyed by autocratic rule. The Pol-

ish Democratic Society, founded in 1832 on French

models, soon fell under Lelewel’s influence. The

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

1004

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

leader of the monarchists was Adam Czartoryski,

a great Lithuanian magnate and onetime minister

to Alexander I. Czartoryski was a liberal constitu-

tionalist who advocated monarchy on pragmatic

grounds. One of his disciples, Józef Bem, led the

Hungarian insurrection in Transylvania in 1848.

Other Poles justified monarchy in terms of national

development. Karel Hoffman argued that a

monarch was needed to create cities and middle

classes. Janusz Woronicz theorized that a true

monarchy mediated between a self–aware nation

and the exercise of power. In his view, the parti-

tioning powers were not true monarchies, because

they did not represent nations. By the end of the

1830s, the monarchical Party of May 3 had fifteen-

hundred members.

The 1830s and 1840s also witnessed intense

philosophical discussion of the nation by Russian

subjects. The Polish nationalist philosophers of the

day generally came from the Polish Kingdom and

wrote dissertations at German universities. German

philosophy was fashionable in Russia, but the Poles

actually completed philosophy doctorates in Ger-

many. Their work was more systematic than that

of their Russian contemporaries, and influenced

philosophical discussion (especially within Left

Hegelianism) rather than simply refracting it

through local conditions. Polish philosophy was

more open to French ideas than German philoso-

phy, and more open to German ideas than French

philosophy. Polish philosophers tended to replace

the state with the nation in Hegelian dialectic and

supported philosophies in which action was con-

stitutive of the nation. Most of them combined

academic philosophy with practical work. The best-

known were August Cieszkowski and Karol Libelt.

Polish Romantic poets of the epoch were also

concerned with the nation. It should be stressed,

however, that many of their preoccupations were

unintelligible to later generations of modern na-

tionalists. Adam Mickiewicz’s interest in mysticism

or Juliusz Sl

owacki’s fascination with spirit are dif-

ficult to reconcile with secular ideologies of any

kind, even if a simplified form of Mickiewicz’s mes-

sianism did become a common trope. Pan Tadeusz,

the most beautiful and most prosaic of Mick-

iewicz’s major works, became a national poem two

generations or so after its completion in 1834.

Mickiewicz and Sl

owacki were regarded as national

figures of the first rank during their lives, but their

career as national bards was mainly posthumous.

As nationalism came to be associated with the lan-

guage of the folk, poetry came to matter less for

its content than for its form. At the time, the po-

ets (like the philosophers and the politicians) saw

the national mission as part of a European or uni-

versal regeneration. Polish emigrés were the only

group in Europe to remember the Russian Decem-

brists and recall the predicament of other peoples

under imperial rule.

The Decembrists, of course, had opposed the

ascendance of Nicholas I in 1825. Nicholas was a

man of imposing prejudices against Poles and Jews,

and was capable of great hatred against whole na-

tions from time to time, but he was no modern na-

tionalist. His reign (1825–1855) is generally seen

in the early twenty-first century as reactionary, as

it was by Polish rebels in 1830. Insofar as there

was a philosophy of rule during Nicholas’s reign,

it might be sought in the Official Nationality of his

education minister, Sergei Uvarov. Nationality was

the third term in Uvarov’s famous trio: Autocracy,

Orthodoxy, Nationality. Uvarov meant nationality

to be subordinate to the first two principles of rule.

The Russian nation was the group meant to sub-

mit to the tsar according to the teachings of the

church. Uvarov’s educational program was thus a

kind of reverse Enlightenment. Education was not

meant to create individuals capable of independent

judgment, but rather a collective understanding

that the ruled are to be judged by the ruler.

The printing press allowed an emerging group

of literate Russians to interpret national ideas ac-

cording to their own lights. The generation of the

1830s and 1840s, like those that followed, read

Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State

(published 1816–1826). Two renegade Poles led the

way in these years in spreading simple national

ideas through the press: Faddei Bulgarin, editor of

the Northern Bee, and Osip Senkovsky, editor of the

Reader’s Library. The mere existence of such peri-

odicals guaranteed that discussions of the nation,

even if not at all revolutionary, were unacceptable

in Uvarov’s limited vision. The press mediated be-

tween the dynastic interpretation of official na-

tionality prevalent in St. Petersburg and the rival

Romantic conceptions emerging around Moscow

University. Slavophiles interpreted Uvarov’s trio in

their own way: Autocracy left room for the au-

tonomous commune, Orthodoxy was a shield

against Catholicism and Protestantism, and Na-

tionality mandated attention to the peasant. This

Romantic patriotism, although not meant to un-

dermine Official Nationality, differed on one essen-

tial point. Whereas Official Nationality gave

priority to the state and sought to consolidate

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

1005

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Peter’s achievement, the Slavophiles began to em-

phasize the people and to critique Peter’s cos-

mopolitan project. Nonetheless, they had little in

common with the Polish Romantics of the same

generation. Both made reference to the past in the

hope of overcoming a crisis of the present. But

where the Slavophiles spoke of the unspoiled com-

mune, the Poles imagined a restored common-

wealth. The Polish dilemma was statelessness; the

Russian dilemma was backwardness.

STATE AND NATION, 1855–1881

This fact was brought home by the humiliation of

the Crimean War. The new tsar, Alexander II, ac-

cepted that military defeat justified state reform,

and that state reform required the emancipation of

the serfs. The twenty years after the emancipation

proclamation of 1861 saw the emergence of a new

group of prosperous peasants in many parts of the

empire, and this group recast the national ques-

tion, especially on the borderlands. Yet the imme-

diate reaction to reform was rebellion. Reforms

initiated in Warsaw led to a revolution of rising ex-

pectations, the failure of which accelerated the de-

velopment of modern ideas of nationality in Poland,

Russia, and the lands between. Although there were

a few lonely exceptions, such as Alexander Herzen

and Mikhail Bakunin, literate Russian society as a

whole reacted to the Polish Uprising of 1863 with

disgust and antipathy. In this atmosphere, Mikhail

Katkov became quite influential. His new journal,

Moscow News, publicized the idea that the rebellion

was a war of nations and compromise would be

deadly for Russia. Katkov endorsed the policies of

Mikhail N. Muraviev in Lithuania, because Mu-

raviev also cast the struggle in nationalist terms:

Russians against Poles and their Jewish allies.

Katkov’s exposition of the 1863 uprising marked a

transition from the Romanticism of his youth to

the pessimism of his later years. His writings ex-

pressed to his twelve thousand readers the painful

disappointment of the Slavophile on learning that

others might reject Russia, and the emerging con-

viction that state power might yet put matters

right.

Similar views found a scholarly articulation in

the pan-Slavism of Nikolai Danilevsky. He resolved

certain apparent tensions in the earlier Slavophile

scheme by arguing that the state embodied the

ideals of Christianity and the peasant tradition, and

peace-loving Slavs needed to use force to unite

them. A new civilization founded on these princi-

ples would emerge, Danilevsky contended in Rus-

sia and Europe (1869), when Constantinople fell to

Russia. Danilevsky also applied his argument about

force to the problem of Slavs who rejected Russian

rule. Poland, which he compared to a hideous

tarantula, could perhaps be coerced into seeing rea-

son. Pan-Slavism was put to the test by interna-

tional politics during the second half of the 1870s,

when Russia made war against the Ottoman Em-

pire in the name of the Serbs and Bulgarians. The

disappointing terms of the Treaty of Berlin brought

home the objective limits of Pan-Slavism as an in-

ternational mission.

Populism was another initiative that failed to

pass the test of political reality. Fired by a faith in

the essential goodness of the peasant, the narodniki

went “to the people” in the early 1870s. Had their

message been heeded, Russian populism might have

followed the path of similar movements toward the

ethnic nationalism that many enlighteners em-

braced farther west. In the event, most of the young

people who remained in politics after this failure

moved to the hard left, imagining (as in Vera Za-

sulich’s famous correspondence with Karl Marx)

that the peasant commune was itself proto-

communist. Populist ideas took a different turn

where the commune was less established, as in

Ukraine, for example. Ukraine had played a crucial

role in Russian national history, providing Mus-

covy’s ideologues in the seventeenth century and

many of its civil servants in the eighteenth. As

Karamzin initiated the new trend toward a

Moscow-centric history of the empire during the

1810s and the 1820s, as Romantic ideas reached St.

Petersburg during the 1830s and the 1840s, and as

the Crimean War brought a sharper Russian na-

tionalism during the 1850s, Ukrainian intellectu-

als in Kharkiv and Kyiv began to see the Ukrainians

and the Russians as separate peoples. The poetry of

Taras Shevchenko confirmed not only the distinc-

tive Ukrainian language but the definable place of

Ukraine between Russia and Poland. The partitions

of Poland had brought right-bank Ukraine into the

Russian Empire, and during the 1860s and the

1870s not a few members of the Polish gentry (e.g.,

the historian Volodymyr Antonovych) chose

Ukrainian populism and indeed Ukrainian identity.

This Polish influence was cited in the Valuev De-

cree of 1863, which restricted the use of the

Ukrainian language. The 1876 Ems Decree, which

prohibited the publication of Ukrainian books, in-

duced many Ukrainian intellectuals to emigrate to

Austrian Galicia. The most important example was

perhaps Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Antonovych’s

student, and the greatest historian of Ukraine.

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

1006

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Politicized Ukrainians in Kyiv generally stayed on

the left, and anticipated that national questions

would be resolved within a reformed Russian state.

Similar patterns soon emerged in other Chris-

tian national revivals, such as the Georgian and the

Armenian. Georgia boasted an ancient civilization,

a solid state tradition, and a mature national liter-

ature. Its position as a weak Christian country in

the Caucasus had moved its nobles to accept Russ-

ian overlordship in 1783. Although some of them

had conspired against Russia in 1832, a generation

later the Georgian nobility was a model service

class. Its traditional position was eroding because

there were now many wealthy peasant farmers,

Armenian merchants were extending their hold on

the better districts of cities, and Russian bureau-

crats were arriving in large numbers. A new Geor-

gian intelligentsia, educated in St. Petersburg, tried

to protect the endangered Georgian language dur-

ing the 1870s. Insofar as this tendency was polit-

ical, it involved no more than vaguely socialist

leanings mixed with the hope for national auton-

omy in the empire. The Armenians were also Chris-

tian but had their own church; they too had a

historically prominent class, but it was the mer-

chants; and they were even more dispersed among

Muslims than the Georgians. The Armenians had

good reasons for being loyal to the empire, because

they stood to lose much in any conflict with the

Georgians or the Muslims. For the Armenians, as

for many other established national groups in the

borderlands, the use of national questions by the

center after 1881 was an unwelcome sign of fu-

ture trouble.

NATIONAL OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, 1881–1905

Alexander III, who ascended to the throne after his

father’s assassination in 1881, was more amenable

to Russian nationalist ideas than his predecessors.

During his reign, national ideas were no longer as-

sociated with revolution (as during the early nine-

teenth century) or with reform (as during the

middle of the nineteenth century), but rather with

reaction. The 1878 trial of Vera Zasulich for at-

tempting to kill the police chief of St. Petersburg

had discredited reform even before another social-

ist murdered the tsar three years later. During the

1880s, Russian nationalism was an updated and

secularized version of the old claim that the Rus-

sian nation existed by virtue of its Orthodoxy and

its submission to the tsar. Under Alexander III and

his successor, Nicholas II, a secular conception of

the superiority of the Russians supplemented the

traditional divine right to rule. Rule was by now

an end in itself, since both external crusades and

internal reforms were no longer seriously consid-

ered. Cultural Russification was advanced as policy

on the grounds that Russians would be better sub-

jects than others, but the tsars ruled in the mean-

time by turning one group against another. There

was a shadow of liberalism here, because the ben-

eficiaries were often peasant nations oppressed for

centuries by a traditional gentry elite. In this situ-

ation, the peasant nations had, at least for a time,

some grounds for optimism: the non-Russian gen-

try and the Russians themselves had very little.

The most important exponent of this improvi-

sational pessimism was Konstantin Pobedonostsev.

As over-procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880

to 1905, Pobedonostsev discriminated against Old

Believers, religious minorities, and Jews. He was

most influential, however, as tutor to the last two

tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II. He came clos-

est to direct power in the aftermath of Alexander

II’s assassination, when he drafted the manifesto

that delayed reform in the name of the people. For

Pobedonostsev, this was no contradiction, since ab-

solutism was Russian and therefore represented the

Russian people. Pobedonostsev claimed that Russia

was the greatest of nations, and the others were

the froth of foreign intrigues. In practice, however,

he knew that non-Russians did not share this view

and would not wish to become Russian. His poli-

cies were grounded in historical temporizing, in the

hope that suppressing rival nations now would al-

low a Russian victory later. Pessimism of this kind

was common by the 1880s. One could still find ex-

ceptional figures, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

who still believed in universal missions. Yet offi-

cers and bureaucrats were steeped in a nationalism

more like Pobedonostsev’s, facing as they did in

practice the problems he perceived from on high.

Especially in the borderlands, Russian officials had

to reconcile their positive view of Russian culture

with the essentially negative task of Russification.

At the periphery, Russification involved a tri-

angle consisting of Russia, the traditional local

power, and a rising peasant nation. In one pattern,

visible in the Baltic region, Russia supported (to a

very limited extent) the peasants against the gen-

try. In Finland, for example, the local hegemony of

Swedes was challenged by the introduction of

Finnish schools in 1873 and the equal status

granted to the Finnish language in 1886. Within a

generation, however, the Finnish movement had

oriented itself against the Russian state, Finns prov-

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

1007

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ing to be as zealous as Swedes in resisting the full

incorporation of their kingdom into the Russian

Empire. In the lands now known as Estonia and

Latvia, Baltic Germans lost much of their tradi-

tional authority, some of it to new national move-

ments. During the 1870s, the 1880s, and the

1890s, Estonian and Latvian patriots tended to ex-

pect Russian support against local Germans. In both

cases, the quick emergence of a propertied farmer

class and the rapid creation of a cultural canon sig-

nified a new historical self-consciousness. An Es-

tonian daily newspaper began publishing in 1891,

and a Latvian in 1877. In Lithuania the gentry had

been Polish, and the Lithuanian movement emerged

after the defeat of the 1863 uprising. Lithuanians

were seen as a passive and loyal element, but some

of the children of prosperous peasants (and some

Polish nobles) took Russification and university ed-

ucation in St. Petersburg as a prompting to return

to the Lithuanian folk. The first modern Lithuan-

ian periodical appeared in 1883.

The failure of the 1863 uprising in Poland in-

clined many patriots to reject traditional paths such

as emigration, speculative philosophy, and Ro-

mantic poetry in favor of a sober appreciation of

the national predicament. The hope for rescue from

abroad, touchingly portrayed by the novelist

Boleslaw Prus in The Doll (1887–1889), had now

faded as well. In the former Kingdom of Poland,

now officially the Vistula Land and nothing more,

positivists such as Prus and Alexander S

wieto-

chowski urged greater attention to the physical sci-

ences, economics, and pedagogy. They wrote of the

possibility of social renewal (a code, under censor-

ship, for national rebirth) through work at soci-

ety’s foundations. Theirs was a national idea

designed to create a national society in the absence

of a state. Both its limitations in practice and its

emphasis on science made it an effective spring-

board to the Marxism of the next generation. Some

of these Marxists, such as Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz,

joined the Polish Socialist Party of Józef Pilsudski,

founded in 1892. This party treated national inde-

pendence as a prerequisite of social revolution, and

Kelles-Krauz supported its program with the first

serious sociological study of nationalism. The pos-

itivists’ attention to the non-gentry classes of so-

ciety was a model for the National Democrats,

whose movement (founded in 1893) added con-

spiracy and explicit national content to the earlier

program of informal mass education. By 1899 the

National Democrats had organized some three

thousand educational circles. In 1903 their leader,

Roman Dmowski, published a polemical tract en-

titled Thoughts of a Modern Pole, which criticized the

traditional leaders of Polish society, the gentry and

the post-gentry intelligentsia, and proclaimed a

fierce competition between ethnic nations as the

wave of the future. Dmowski excluded Jews from

the future national community; with time (and later

electoral disappointments) anti-Semitism became a

central message of National Democracy. Dmowski

said little about independence, since he thought the

Russian Empire a useful shelter from the powerful

German culture; despite this tack he must be con-

sidered one of the early modern nationalists of the

Russian Empire. Like all Polish activists, Dmowski

had to account for the division of Poland lands and

people among the three partitioning powers, Ger-

many and Austria as well as Russia.

The problem of division was far deeper in the

case of other groups, such as Muslims. There were

probably more Muslims in the Russian Empire than

in the Ottoman, but the latter was a more logical

starting point for any national politics. Beginning

in the early 1880s, Muslims in Russia had to re-

spond to the more active program of cultural Rus-

sification. An interesting reaction was that of Ismail

Bey Gaspirali, who believed that Muslims had to

learn Russian to resist Russification and secure their

proper place in the empire. In his 1881 work, Mus-

lims of Russia, he promoted a national press and

a national intelligentsia. Like his Georgian and

Armenian contemporaries, Gaspirali was a cos-

mopolitan who concluded from travel and educa-

tion that merely cultures were endangered. Himself

a Crimean Tatar, he wished to reach Muslims

throughout the empire, and his books and news-

papers were indeed widely read in Baku and Kazan.

The Volga Tatars began a movement of religious

and social reform with some limited national con-

tent. Shihabeddin Merjani wrote the first history in

the Volga Tatar dialect, and, in fact, was the first

to call the Muslims of the region Tatars. Like the

Muslims, the Armenians found themselves on both

sides of the Russian-Ottoman border. Armenian na-

tional politics in Russia were initially directed to

support for Armenians repressed on the Ottoman

side. Penetration by Armenian revolutionaries

served as a pretext for massacres of Armenians in

the Ottoman Empire in 1894–1896. All of this left

Armenians loyal to St. Petersburg. Their immedi-

ate Caucasian neighbors, the Georgians, faced in-

ternal challenges, and responded with nationally

aware socialism.

The Jews were so dispersed that any sort of

territorial politics seemed utopian. Since the Con-

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

1008

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

gress of Vienna, about half of the world’s Jews

had been Russian subjects. During the 1880s, at a

time when Russian nationalism still left consider-

able room for certain groups to hope for reform,

Jews were immediately touched by its pessimism.

Earlier discussions among journalists and liberals

about equal status for Jews and Russians were

halted by the 1863 uprising, in which Jews were

seen (by Ivan Aksakov, for example) as allies of the

Poles. The pogroms that followed Alexander II’s as-

sassination in 1881 (in Yelizavetgrad, Kiev, Odessa,

Warsaw, and elsewhere) convinced many Jews that

emigration from Russia was their best hope. The

official association of Jews with revolution (by

Pobedonostsev, for example) and the expulsion of

Jews from Kiev (1886) and Moscow (1891) con-

vinced others. The leaders of the emigrationist

movement organized themselves at Katowice in

1884. Yet flight to Palestine was initially an apo-

litical aspiration, since the emphasis was placed on

the practical task of leaving Russia. The emergence

of Theodor Herzl’s brand of Zionism transformed

the personal and the practical into the idealistic and

the political, and is usually marked as the begin-

ning of modern Jewish nationalism. Its First Basel

Congress (August 1897) called for “a home for the

Jewish people in Palestine,” a Jewish state. This

ideal was influential, but was an imperfect fit with

the immediate needs of the world’s largest Jewish

community. The failure of Herzl’s high diplomacy,

and then his death in 1904, left room for alterna-

tive Zionist ideas: socialist Zionism (Ber Borochov

and Po’alei Zion), the revival of Hebrew in Russia

(associated with Ahad Ha-’Am), and Zionism aware

of neighboring national revivals (exemplified by

Yitzhak Gruenbaum and Vladimir Jabotinsky,

among many others). That said, the international-

ist socialism of the Bund (founded in 1897) was far

more attractive to young Jews with Haskalah, or

secular, education, and played a more important

role in Russian politics. From 1901 the Bund ad-

vocated national cultural autonomy within a

postrevolutionary Russian state. During the Revo-

lution of 1905, it was one of several socialist and

leftist parties working in this direction.

MASS MOVEMENTS AND RUSSIAN

RETRENCHMENT, 1905–1917

The Revolution of 1905 was the baptism of a new

Russian nationalism, not entirely dependent upon

the state, and modern enough to pay attention to

the Russian people. Before 1905 there was nothing

like a Russian national movement, and the people

were excluded from political discussions on the

right. The revolution prompted monarchists to ap-

peal to the people to support the tsar, and modern

nationalists who spoke of a “Russia for the Rus-

sians,” to cite Alexei Kuropatkin’s pamphlet about

tasks for the Russian army. Russian liberals believed

that reform would create a nation that would

strengthen the state within its present borders; na-

tional liberals such as Peter Struve spoke of a Rus-

sian nation in the making. As a social force Russian

nationalism was most important in the west,

especially in Ukraine, where Jews, Poles, and

Ukrainians were blamed for the instability. Polish

socialists did indeed work with the Bund to exploit

the revolution: but it had begun, awkwardly, in St.

Petersburg, as a result of the war against Japan.

Non-socialist Polish parties appealed for the Polo-

nization of schools and for a national assembly. A

few Ukrainian parties also requested an assembly,

and the Ukrainian Bohdan Kistiakovs’kyi was an

interesting proponent of federalism.

National autonomy within existing borders

was the typical national demand of minorities in

1905. Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians all held

national congresses and pressed for reform on these

lines. Muslims petitioned for legal nondiscrimina-

tion at a congress of 1905. Many Turkish nation-

alists, such as Yusuf Akchura, soon emigrated to

the Ottoman Empire to support the Young Turks

project in Istanbul. Muslims in Russia sought a rec-

onciliation of the religious and the secular, but did

not yet see the secular as necessarily national. Ed-

ucation in the Arab world or in St. Petersburg still

appeared to be a complementary and necessary part

of this project. Musa Jarulla Bigi, who was secre-

tary of the Muslim congresses between 1905 and

1917, studied in both places. Armenians had seen

their church’s lands confiscated by the state in

1903, but internecine violence with Azerbaijani

Turks in 1905 left most of them loyal subjects of

Russia. The Dashnak movement, founded to sup-

port the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, won

temporary popularity in Russia by defending the

Armenians in Baku and elsewhere in 1905. Geor-

gian socialists initiated some strike actions in 1905

and mediated between the Armenians and the Azer-

baijani Turks, but nothing like a Georgian sepa-

ratist nationalism emerged at this time. Armenian

and Georgian socialists alike generally supported

some form of cultural autonomy.

The new parliament (or State Duma), estab-

lished by Nicholas II in 1905, was the only insti-

tution that might have channeled these various

national sentiments into a reform of the state. Pol-

NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE

1009

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ish nationalists led by Roman Dmowski made the

most concerted effort to profit from this institu-

tion; the Polish Circle they organized was national

in composition and goals. Yet their only legislative

victory was the return of the Polish language to

Polish schools, and this was quickly reversed. Only

the First and Second Dumas were vaguely repre-

sentative; from 1907 the goal of the electoral laws

was to ensure the election of a Duma “Russian in

spirit.” Prime Minister Peter Stolypin embodied the

great irony of Russian nationalism: on the one

hand, he changed the electoral law because he be-

lieved that Poles would win wherever they ran; on

the other, he claimed that Russian nationality was

itself a powerful attractive force. Stolypin famously

urged Dmowski to admit that being a Russian sub-

ject was the greatest of blessings. The only na-

tionalism represented in the Third and Fourth

Dumas was Russian. In 1912 the Duma created a

new Chelm district, intending to encourage Uniate

converts to Roman Catholicism in the region to

convert to Orthodoxy. Here was the use of autoc-

racy to identify nationality with Orthodoxy, or at

least the deployment of state power to remove at-

tractive national alternatives. Dmitry Sipiagin had

earlier considered Polish-Russian population ex-

changes as a possible solution to the Chelm prob-

lem. Forced population movements became policy

during World War I, as Russia removed Germans

and Jews from its western territories.

Even in 1914, one would have been hard

pressed to find much organized national opposition

to the Russian Empire. Opposition to the war was

not usually articulated in national terms. Nation-

states were created in the aftermath of the Bolshe-

vik Revolution, once imperial power had been

discredited and broken. Russian nationalism was

the ideology of Anton Denikin and other White of-

ficers, but they were defeated by the Bolsheviks.

Living in Cracow (in Austria) in 1912, Vladimir

Lenin had come to appreciate European national

movements and contemplated their exploitation by

a socialist revolution. In 1913 he defined “self-

determination” to mean either national indepen-

dence or nothing at all, forcing a choice on na-

tionally aware socialists while making a show of

flexibility. Once in power, Lenin collapsed the two

alternatives, promoting Soviet republics with na-

tional names. In 1913, Lenin had asked Josef Stalin

to critique the proposed nationality policy of the

Austrian socialists. Stalin’s response was important

in political if not intellectual terms: He defined na-

tions as stable communities and spoke of national

psychologies. These views seemed to gain impor-

tance in his mind as he gained personal power, and

can be linked to his national policy during the

1930s. Lenin and Stalin were unusual Russian sub-

jects, but their assimilation of nationalism was de-

terminative of the fate of many of the peoples of

the former Russian Empire.

See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; GEORGIA

AND GEORGIANS; JEWS; KARAMZEN, NIKOLAI

MIKHAILOVICH; LANGUAGE LAWS; NATIONALITIES

POLICY, TSARIST; NATION AND NATIONALITY; OFFICIAL

NATIONALITY; PANSLAVISM; POLES; POPULISM; RUSSI-

FICATION; SLAVOPHILES; UKRAINE AND THE UKRAINI-

ANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chmielewski, Edward. (1970). The Polish Question in the

Russian State Duma. Knoxville: University of Ten-

nessee Press.

Frankel, Jonathan. (1981). Prophecy and Politics: Social-

ism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pipes, Richard. (1954). The Formation of the Soviet Union.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1959). Nicholas I and Official Na-

tionality in Russia, 1825–1855. Berkeley: University

of California Press.

Rorlich, Azade–Ayse. (1986). The Volga Tatars. Stanford:

Hoover Institution Press.

Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1988). The Making of the Georgian

Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Thaden, Edward. (1964). Conservative Nationalism in

Nineteenth–Century Russia. Seattle: University of

Washington Press.

Walicki, Andrzej. (1979). A History of Russian Thought:

From the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press.

Walicki, Andrzej (1982). Philosophy and Romantic Na-

tionalism: The Case of Poland. Notre Dame, IN: Uni-

versity of Notre Dame Press.

Weeks, Theodore. (1996). Nation and State in Late Impe-

rial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the West-

ern Frontier, 1863–1914. Dekalb: Northern Illinois

University Press.

IMOTHY

NYDER

NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET

The centerpiece of Bolshevik nationality policy be-

fore they came to power in 1917 was the right of

NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET

1010

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

nations to self-determination. As outlined by

Vladimir I. Lenin in his 1916 work The Socialist

Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determi-

nation, this constituted the “right to free political

secession” for all nationalities without qualifica-

tion. In the same work, Lenin distinguished be-

tween different types of national movement,

characterizing the Russian Empire as one of the ar-

eas where “the twentieth century has especially de-

veloped bourgeois-democratic national movements

and sharpened the national struggle”(Lenin, 1964,

p.151). Therefore national movements could play

an important role in the democratic movement to

overthrow tsarism, but at the same time Lenin ex-

plicitly argued that the right to secede ought in it-

self to be sufficient to persuade national minorities

of the security of their national rights in a demo-

cratic state. While supporting the right of nations

to self-determination, the Bolsheviks would not

necessarily argue in favor of the right of secession

being exercised. In any case in a socialist state, the

clear economic and political advantages of remain-

ing part of a larger state combined with the guar-

antees provided by the right to secede and the

natural international class unity of the proletariat

would ensure that, in most cases, national mi-

norities would choose to remain within the larger

state. This argument has led many historians to

conclude that the right of nations to self-determi-

nation was purely a slogan designed to attract the

maximum support from national minorities for

Lenin’s aim of socialist revolution, and was mean-

ingless when it came to the practicalities of a multi-

national Soviet state.

SELF-DETERMINATION TO FEDERALISM,

1917–1923

The principle of self-determination was invoked by

the Soviet government in recognizing the indepen-

dence of Finland at the end of 1917, but was not

applied in its literal form thereafter. Nevertheless,

it continued to dominate debates on the national

question at Bolshevik Party conferences and con-

gresses up until 1921. These arguments were a

continuation of long-standing objections to Lenin’s

policy on the part of a significant group in the

party leadership led by Yuri Pyatakov, Nikolai

Bukharin, and Karl Radek. They argued that the in-

ternationalism of the working class meant that the

continued existence of nations in a socialist society

was inconceivable, that in the short term they were

purely a distraction from the class struggle, and

that recognition of national rights simply gave suc-

cor to divisive bourgeois nationalists. A particularly

heated debate between this group and Lenin at the

Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 led to a com-

promise resolution that introduced a new qualifi-

cation to the right to self-determination: The

question of who should represent the will of the

nation on this matter would depend on the level of

historical development of that nation. The implica-

tion was that for more developed nations, especially

those already within the Soviet system, the national

will would be expressed by the proletariat through

their representative bodies, the Soviets themselves.

Even in this qualified form, no nation was given

the opportunity to exercise self-determination, and

by 1920 the commissar (equivalent to minister) for

nationality affairs, Josef Stalin, had declared self-

determination a counterrevolutionary slogan.

Nevertheless, these debates were highly signif-

icant. The internationalist arguments of Bukharin

and Pyatakov were deployed by substantial num-

bers of Russian communists working in non-Russ-

ian areas and enjoyed widespread support among

both leading and rank-and-file Bolsheviks. In fact,

it is doubtful whether Lenin ever enjoyed majority

support for his policy within his own party. In the

non-Russian regions, disputes between Russian and

local national administrators and Party officials

were frequent. Although these disputes more often

than not centered on practical matters such as land

distribution or the status of languages, the latter

group frequently invoked the spirit of self-deter-

mination in support of their demands, while the

former were often ready to dismiss their opponents

as bourgeois nationalists. Underlying all the argu-

ments about self-determination, then, was dis-

agreement over whether separate national rights

should be recognized in any form. Lenin’s aversion

to Great Russian Chauvinism meant that when the

center was called on to intervene in such disputes,

as often happened, it was more often than not the

local nationals who received the more favorable de-

cision. The predominance of Russians in the re-

gional Bolshevik Party structures, however,

ensured that even these interventions could be ig-

nored.

Lack of clarity as to the status of national mi-

norities helped to perpetuate these divisions. Ini-

tially the Bolsheviks had no clear blueprint for the

organization of their multinational Soviet state.

The principles behind Lenin’s policy provided some

sort of framework: national minorities who had

been oppressed under the tsars must be assured that

they would not continue to be treated in the same

NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET

1011

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

way; they should as far as possible run their own

local institutions and be responsible for cultural

matters, and they should enjoy the same linguis-

tic and educational rights as Russians, assisted by

the center where needed. Lenin also agreed with the

need for some kind of national autonomy, various

forms of which had been proposed by European

Marxists since the beginning of the twentieth cen-

tury. Within these broad parameters, policy was

largely improvised in the key period between the

end of the civil war in 1920 and the formation of

the Soviet Union in 1924.

Shortly after the October 1917 revolution, a

Commissariat for Nationality Affairs (or Narkom-

nats) was formed under Stalin’s leadership.

Narkomnats was responsible only for the smaller

nationalities located within the Russian Soviet Fed-

erative Socialist Republic (RSFSR); until 1924, the

larger nationalities of Ukraine, Belorussia and

Transcaucasia had formally separate Soviet re-

publics, linked to the RSFSR by treaties but in prac-

tice all dominated by the centralized Bolshevik

Party. In a 1913 article, “Marxism and the National

Question,” Stalin had argued for territorial national

autonomy, opposing the nonterritorial cultural au-

tonomy espoused by the Austrian Marxists Otto

Bauer and Karl Renner. The first autonomous re-

public, the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Republic,

was created in February 1919 and eventually pro-

vided the model for a series of autonomous re-

publics and autonomous regions that proliferated

across the RSFSR between 1920 and 1922. Their

status was formally defined in separate treaties, but

in general the republics and regions were respon-

sible for matters of local government, education,

culture, and agriculture, while the center retained

authority over industry, the military, and foreign

affairs.

In 1922, the unsatisfactory constitutional sta-

tus of the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcau-

casian Soviet Republics was addressed. As Stalin

argued, the formal separate status of these re-

publics meant that they could pass their own laws,

but if the leadership in Moscow objected, they could

have these laws repealed by recourse to the disci-

plinary procedures of the Bolshevik Party, whose

members controlled all the republics. The solution

proposed by Stalin was to incorporate these re-

publics into the system of autonomous republics

of the RSFSR, which he himself had been instru-

mental in creating. In September 1922, Lenin ob-

jected that it was unacceptable to incorporate such

important nationalities on the same basis as the

smaller ones of the RSFSR and to subject them to

the authority of a state whose title implied they

would become a part of Russia. Instead, he pro-

posed that they should join a new formation on

the same footing as the USSR, in a federative union

of equals. The title of the new federation was even-

tually decided on as the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union. Lenin was by

this time almost entirely incapacitated by illness,

but had time to win this argument and then had

to rely on others to carry his policy through. Un-

til recently, most historians have taken this episode

as evidence that Lenin stood for a more liberal po-

sition in regard to the non-Russians, while Stalin

was a ruthless centralizer. More recently it has been

argued either that in reality there were no signifi-

cant differences between the two, or at least that

they were not so far apart on this particular point.

The USSR officially came into being on Janu-

ary 1, 1924, consisting of the RSFSR, the Ukrain-

ian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Belorussian SSR,

and the Transcaucasian Federation, itself made up

of the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani SSRs

(which were later given entirely separate status).

In 1925 Central Asia, previously part of the RSFSR

as the Turkestan and Kirghiz Autonomous Re-

publics, was divided into separate republics, with

further later reorganizations resulting in the five

Central Asian SSRs, the Kazakh, Uzbek, Tadzhik,

Turkmen, and Kirghiz. Following World War II,

newly acquired Soviet territory formed the Eston-

ian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Moldovan SSRs, mak-

ing a total of fifteen union republics and dozens of

autonomous republics and regions for the remain-

der of the Soviet period. Federalism between a num-

ber of national territories, which had been rejected

outright by Lenin and others before 1917, thus be-

came the central organizing principle of the Soviet

state by 1924.

Within this constitutional framework, for most

of the 1920s the Soviets pursued a range of poli-

cies aimed at promoting the national, economic,

and cultural advancement of the non-Russians: pri-

ority to the local language, a massive increase in

native language schools, development of national

cultures, and staffing the Soviet administration as

far as possible with local nationals. Collectively,

these policies were known as korenizatsiya, or

“rooting.” Although widely opposed by local Russ-

ian (and some non-Russian) communists, these

policies were generally successful in establishing lo-

cal national leaderships and strengthening national

identities associated with particular territories that

NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET

1012

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY