“Украинский вопрос” в политике властей и русском общественном мнении (вторая половина XIX в.) по А. И. Миллер (review)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Ab Imperio, 4/2001 436 Mark von HAGEN А. И. Миллер. “Украинский вопрос” в политике властей и русском общественном мнении (вторая половина XIX в.). СПб.: Алетейя, 2000. Alexei Miller is representative of a new type of Russian international scholar who is rewriting the history of Eastern Europe and Eurasia . Trained as a specialist in the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Balkan and Slavic Studies. This institution, though moderately reformed, has survived the transition to postSoviet conditions with some new research agendas and intellectual and political allies, which was among the reasons why in 1999 Miller changed his affiliation for the Institute of Scientific Information in Humanities of Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Miller has taught extensively in the Central European University in Budapest , where he has helped shape future generations of Russian, Ukrainian, and other Eurasian historians . He was a participant in the first post-Soviet meetings of Ukrainian and Russian historians with their European and North American counterparts to explore some of the long suppressed and contentious issues in RussianUkrainian historical relations; he then undertook the first Russian conference (under Russian Academy of Sciences sponsorship) on these topics in Moscow and has maintained his Ukrainian contacts and research interests in the broader contexts of Austro-Hungarian history and Euro-American historiography more generally. (As a further sign of the internationalization of historical scholarship on the Russian Empire, this work was supported by the German Alexander -von-Humboldt Foundation.) Ab Imperio, 4/2001 437 And now this pioneering work on the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the imperial intelligentsia , especially those of its leading activists in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and provincial Ukrainian/Little Russian cities. This book is intellectually and politically courageous because of the new possibilities and fears that overshadow the working out of a new post-Soviet Russian-Ukrainian set of relationships. It is proving difficult for Russian elites to get used to an independent Ukrainian state; and it is proving at least as difficult for contemporary Ukrainian elites to forge a modern set of national identities that both acknowledges the deep and long ties with Russians and their culture, but also positions Ukrainians in a broader European community. Miller ’s book is the first by a mature Russian historian to take up seriously the place of Ukraine in the imperial political and intellectual worlds. It is not the first book on the topic: Soviet/émigré scholar Fedor Savchenko’s classic study of the bans on key aspects of Ukrainian intellectual life appeared in 1930, but his work was off limits in Soviet Ukraine and reprinted in Munich in 1970; Savchenko himself was arrested and shot during the Stalin terror. Miller also pays particular debt to Petr Zaionchkovskii ’s study of the Cyril and Methodius Society and to EuroAmerican historians (David Saunders and Daniel Beauvois particularly ) who have examined the issues from the published and some archival sources. But the censorship restraints on Soviet historians, which extended of course to their non-Soviet colleagues, precluded the kind of study of bureaucratic politics and intellectual biography that is at the core of Miller’s revisionist work. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally (and reluctantly) nationalizing imperial states (here Andreas Kappeler’s multiperspectival history paved the way for a new appreciation of the Russian Empire’s “imperial,” that is multiethnic , dimensions), but he has also been an important translator for Russian-language scholars of the ideas and literatures of nationalism that social scientists have written in the postwar twentieth century, especially Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” Those literatures are tested against newly available library collections and archival materials in Moscow and St. Petersburg: the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (AVPRI), the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), and the manuscript divisions of the Russian State Library and Russian National Library. Рецензии 438 The period that Miller treats, primarily the reigns of Nicholas I, Alexander II and Alexander III, was formative for modern RussianUkrainian relations: from a period of relatively positive relations among the Slavophiles and early Ukrainophiles, the relationship turned to one of hostility and repression in a series of authoritative decrees and instructions to come from...