Католики, мусульмане и иудеи Российской империи в последней четверти XVIII – XX вв по А. К. Тихонов (review)

Abstract

502 Рецензии/Reviews Darius STALIŪNAS А. К. Тихонов. Католики, мусульмане и иудеи Россий- ской империи в последней чет- верти XVIII – XX вв. Санкт- Петeрбург: Издательство Санкт- Петербургского университета, 2007. 356 pp. ISBN: 978-5-28804293 -5.1 The Soviet period was not a favorable time for the research of the confessional policies of the Russian Empire, not only because atheism was propagated and religiousness was considered to be a sort of a throwback, but also because of the ideology of “a friendship of nations ” that was propagated in the country. Confessional and language policies were not a priority for the Soviet government, because in researching these problems it could have been revealed that a certain “ethnic hierarchy”2 had existed in the Romanov empire, which would have clearly went against the claim about the “eternal” friendship of Russians and other nationalities of other Soviet republics. The national policy of the nineteenth century Imperial Russia was not a priority theme in Western historiography during the Cold War, just as it was not one in the Soviet Union. In order for bigger changes to occur in historiography, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the entire Soviet block was needed, though changes in Western historiography occurred a bit earlier, around the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, when the Russo-centric approach towards Imperial Russia was rejected . During the last 20 years, the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character of the Romanov Empire enjoyed such an amount of attention from researchers that sometimes it may appear that during such a short period more books and articles were devoted to this topic than during all the previous years. One of them is the book by Andrei Tikhonov, which discusses the confessional policy of the imperial government from the view of the three largest non-Orthodox confessions – Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam. One may note at once that the book’s author does not even try to 1 Original version was published in: Pinkas. Annual of Culture and History of East European Jewry. Vilnius: Žara, 2008. Vol. II. Pp. 172-180. “Pinkas” is published by the Centre for Studies of the Culture and History of East European Jews (Vilnius, http:// www.jewishstudies.lt). 2 The “ethnic hierarchy” of Imperial Russia has been shrewdly described by Andreas Kappeler: А. Kappeler. Mazepintsy, malorossy, khokhly: ukraintsy v etnicheskoi ierarkhii Rossiiskoi imperii //A. I. Miller, V. F. Reprintsev, B. N. Floria (Eds.). Rossiia – Ukraina: istoriia vzaimootnoshenii. Moscow, 1997. Pp. 125-144. 503 Ab Imperio, 3/2008 Most of the work is based on references to various laws and archival sources, chosen randomly and recounted without any analysis for a length of several pages (as are, incidentally, the quotations from personal letters or diaries or the publications of other researchers, e.g., pp. 7-9). We will focus most of our attention in this review on how Tikhonov interprets the “Jewish Question”, but first we will discuss briefly the description of imperial policy regarding the Catholic Church in this book. This discussion is not consistent, and the subjects chosen are often not the most important, though it could not be otherwise, as the author uses random documents found in the Russian state history archives and makes hardly any use of the available scientific literature . For this reason, we find here strange interpretations, for example the claim that “the most important question of the 1830-1831 Uprising was the defense of Catholicism” (P. 92). The memoirs of Imperial Russia’s Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin are the basis for the description of the 1863-1864 Uprising and its goals (Pp. 161-162). The author’s main thesis about Russian policy towards Catholicism is not very surprising either: the imperial government did not meddle in the “internal” life of Catholics and other non-Orthodox believers, it just include this book into the existing discourse on multi-confessionalism in Imperial Russia: it is just in the footnotes of the introduction that some works on this topic are mentioned , however their selection is rather haphazard. Just as importantly , the author does not even attempt to argue with the research of other historians and usually simply disregards it (even that mentioned in the footnotes at the beginning of the book). This, by the way, goes not only for Western, but for Russian historiography, as well as...