Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 by Charles Steinwedel (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 762 Griffiths and Esteban Buch to explore the context of the work’s original conception and execution, and elsewhere in the volume both Nizhinskii and Roerich are discussed (by Claudia Jeschke and John E. Bowlt) as equal partners in the first performances. Alongside these contextual studies, there are more conventionally musicological accounts of the score’s ‘revolutionary potential’ by Tobias Bleek and Andreas Meyer, as well as surveys of the ballet’s reception by David Schiff, Jonathan Cross, Stephanie Jordan, Svetlana Savenko (reprising material also covered in Stravinsky and His World), Jonathan W. Bernard and Robert Piencikowski. Other authors (Stephen Walsh and Arne Stollberg) challenge Stravinskii’s own infamous statements about the score and its performance tradition, and the volume finishes with an final group of articles exploring the wider cultural and artistic context (Jan Assman, Herfried Münkler, Richard Taruskin). Beautifully produced with a lavish spread of colour illustrations, Avatar of Modernity brings together a diverse range of leading international specialists in the history of Russian and European music, visual arts, ballet and cultural history who both uphold traditional views of The Rite of Spring’s unique and seminal importance, whilst also subjecting the work to intelligent, refreshing and often sceptical analysis. Moreover, it encourages us to rethink the nature of modernism itself, challenging us to shed long cherished myths of isolated artistic inspiration (as summed up by Stravinskii’s pronouncement that he was ‘the vessel through which Le Sacre passed’), and to see modernism instead as a complex and fluid network of influences, collaborations, disputes, compromises, narratives, myths, claims and obfuscations. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Steinwedel, Charles. Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2016. xiv + 381 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00: £32.00. This carefully-researched study of a single region of the Russian Empire over a 350-year period is a reminder of the importance of local histories to any understandingoftheimperialwhole.Bashkirialayonthefringesofwhatwould become European Russia, a liminal region with a large nomadic and Muslim population that would nevertheless be fully assimilated to metropolitan administrative structures, seen most clearly with the introduction of zemstva to Ufa province after 1875, and the continued jurisdiction of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, which despite its name was based in Ufa. REVIEWS 763 Bashkiria’s experience of Russian Imperial rule differed in important ways from that of neighbouring Muslim-populated regions. As Steinwedel puts it: ‘Bashkiria marked the easternmost movement of landowning nobles and the easternmost non-Russian, non-Orthodox population that, by the 1870s, imperial officials considered sufficiently loyal and capable to fight for the Tsar’ (p. 247). The Bashkir nobility preserved greater privileges and control over land than their Tatar counterparts, whilst at the same time the region was seen as more backward and distant from European Russia than Kazan´ province. The neighbouringregionsoftheKazakhsteppe,whoseinhabitantssharedreligious, linguistic and cultural ties with the Bashkirs, remained permanently excluded from the civic structures of the empire. Bashkiria thus offers a particularly fascinating case-study of how a culturally alien frontier region was gradually assimilated to the empire’s core, reflected in its continued status as part of the Russian Federation today. This was partly an administrative process, but also involved the migration of Russian peasants from elsewhere in the empire, railway construction and associated economic change. It began, as in many other regions of the empire, with the forging of an alliance between the Bashkir nobility and the Russian state. Russian expansion into Bashkiria (the subject of an earlier study by Alton S. Donnelly) was not the ‘voluntary uniting’ of Soviet mythology, but it was less violent and abrupt than the conquest of Kazan´ which preceded it, or that of Central Asia which followed. The formal submission of Bashkir elites to Muscovy was accompanied by the preservation of their status and privileges, and their incorporation into the Muscovite nobility, and for almost a hundred years this allowed relative peace (pp. 19–26). From the mid seventeenth century this relationship began to deteriorate, as Moscow tried to impose more direct control and extract...