The Enlightenment in Russia and Points West

Abstract

The Enlightenment in Russia and Points West Steven Seegel Andreas Kappeler, Ungleiche Brüder: Russen und Ukrainer vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Unequal Brothers: Russians and Ukrainians from the Middle Ages to the Present). 267 pp., illus., maps. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017. ISBN-13 978-3406714108. €16.95. Curtis G. Murphy, From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. 312 pp. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. ISBN-13 978-0822964629. $28.95. An early modern focus dominates the books by Andreas Kappeler and Curtis Murphy, who each prioritize shifts out of imperial contexts for Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Western Europe's benchmark year of 1789 thus fades into the background. For Murphy, the lost towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth represented an unusually persistent old order of decentralized citizenship (obywatelstwo) in the private towns of "LitBel" and Ukrainian early modern Europe. For Kappeler, borderland spaces of modern Ukraine emerge from Habsburg-Romanov interfaces, a long devolution into homogeneous forms of frontier ethnic nationalism, up to the current conflict between Moscow and Kyiv. Both books are, in a sense, a defense of Europe, but not in a nostalgic way. Where Kappeler looks into submerged, multiethnic pluralisms and a post-1989 order guided by shared European values, Murphy is skeptical of bureaucratic statism, unitary or otherwise. He innovatively examines how discourses of governmentality and improved efficiency served to mask the centralizing prepossessions of an Enlightenment project—that is, applications of rationality and progress against republican liberties. [End Page 627] As a first monograph, From Citizens to Subjects is meticulously researched. Murphy comments on the unusual, decentralized, and persistent culture and society of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He covers the late reforms of the 1760s, through the three partitions, until the 1860s and 1870s when reformist imperial Russia abolished serfdom (1861), confiscated Polish estates (1863–64), and reorganized its cities (in 1870, with Ukraine and Belarusian regions as late as 1875). The book's abiding tension is republicanism versus centralism: how citizens living in private/public towns were caught in the long push toward bureaucracy and uniformity. Townspeople lost their particularistic practices. In the new imperial Russia, cities became villages. Although Murphy mostly bypasses the Prussian-annexed areas, which held many small, private towns under the Magdeburg Laws, his urban sociopolitical analysis of the habitus of newly annexed Austrian and Russian territories is rightly impressive. He samples some 22 private and royal towns (appendix 1) in the Kijów, Lublin, and Nowogródek palatinates (województwa), the Chełm area (both the town and the land), and the lands of incorporated Galicia and Volhynia. Murphy is, unapologetically, a social historian and disciple of the "[Andrzej] Kamiński school" (xv), the Georgetown early modern historian of Poland-Lithuania whose major historiographical contributions have zeroed in on (mis)perceptions of Warsaw and Moscow, the 18th-century European power balance, and tensions between republic and autocracy from the vantage of peripheries. Murphy writes against the current of "the self-congratulatory narrative created by the partitioning powers and the self-critical story told by generations of Poles" (24). Drawing from Kamiński, Pieter Judson, and political theorists from Quentin Skinner to Isaiah Berlin, Murphy's monograph urges us to disavow "enlightened centralism" and see things more like a small (around 5,000) or medium-sized (about 10,000) town of the 18th century.1 From Citizens to Subjects ventures outside the larger Warsaw, Kraków, Lublin, and Poznań. Murphy utilizes sources from [End Page 628] four main archives—the Archive of Ancient Acts in Warsaw (AGAD), the State Archive in Lublin, the Czartoryski Princes Library in Kraków, and the Central State Historical Archive in Kyiv. He offers a skillful critique of the buried tenets of statist centralism, which, it would seem, functions as a kind of cover-all not only for inefficient federalism but also for cameralist, physiocratic, Napoleonic, and positivist models of imperial governance. Against bureaucrato-federalist uniformity, the historian describes the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as "a uniquely devolved system" (128).2 Within its borders before 1795, Warsaw was the largest Polish "crown" city, with an aggregate population of 64,000 (in 1777). Neither it nor...