Defining Russia at the Margins

Abstract

Both in its tsarist and Soviet incarnations, modern Russia has been a country of awesome imperial proportions and overwhelming ethnic, religious and cultural complexities, the state that has been and remains territorially the largest, and ethnically the most diverse, with most of these ethnic groups located on Russia's peripheries. Perhaps because the task is so daunting, few Western researchers have ventured to include Russia's minorities in their narratives. Indeed, such comprehensive coverage of Russia's non-Russians might have required more than the expertise of any single scholar. The tendency thus far has been to err in the other direction: to approach Russian (or Soviet) history as if this enormous multinational state comprised a single-Russian-nation. With the fragility of both the Soviet Union and Russia exposed by recent and ongoing political seismic tremors, and with relevant archival collections open, at least for now, Russia's others are capturing their share of scholarly attention. This can only enrich our historical understanding of Russia's imperial and Soviet past as a whole, completing the picture not just at the margins but also at the center, itself shaped by the exercise of holding the empire together. We learn from Wayne Dowler that in the nineteenth century something like 40 percent of the Russian Empire's population was not Russian according to contemporaries' definitions. Of course, that official figure understated the proportion of minorities by some sixteen percentage points in favor of the Russians. The empire flung the net of Russian definition broadly, capturing in the imperial nation the East Slavic Ukrainians and Belorussians. The more commonly cited number of 56 percent non-Russians may be a projection of our own tumultuous present into the tsarist past.' Yet, it is the latter figure that became more and more pertinent to the evolving situation of the imperial polity as it succumbed to the pressures of burgeoning and conflicting nationalisms around the turn of the century. The empire included so many ethnic and religious groups within its borders that no consistent nationality policy was ever in place, and, undoubtedly, none would have been fully adequate. Nor, of course, was public and intellectual opinion on the different national questions monolithic. Thus the Russian Empire's nationality problems and nationalisms are best studied, at this stage of historiography, individually-