The Russian Empire and the National Periphery: Between the Theory of Autocracy and Management Practices

Abstract

This article considers the relations between the Russian Empire and its national peripheries. The authors focus on the deformation of imperial principles of the organisation of power under the influence of the periphery instead of the traditional analysis of imperial methods of incorporating it. The work is based on documents from federal archives and published historical evidence and is structured around three main problems of the Romanov Empire, i. e. first, geography as a hard struggle with distances; second, politics as administrative practice; and third, economy as the price of the peripheries. The article defines the fundamental principle of Russian autocracy regarding the periphery as its desire for political and cultural integration of the periphery into the state. At the same time, the implementation of this principle forced the imperial authorities to seek other mechanisms to integrate outlying territories. The authors conclude that the experience of the Russian Empire demonstrates an inconsistency between state theory and practice. The periphery was not only an object of imperial policy, but also an agent in the development of the empire itself.