non-Russian Peoples Research Articles

П.А. Столыпин и «мусульманский вопрос» в Российской империи

At the beginning of the 20th century the imperial model of the Russian state faced challenges caused by the rise of national self-consciousness of non-Russian peoples. The power structures of the Russian Empire experienced considerable difficulties in the development of the State course in relation to the "Muslim movement", ideologically and organizationally formed in the period of the Revolution of 1905-1907. The article analyzes the views and political course of P.A. Stolypin in the solution of the "Muslim question" in the Russian Empire. There are signs of pragmatism and alertness in Stolypin's attitude the Muslim problem. He focused on the dangers of Islamism and Turkism ideas for the integrity of the state. The measures taken by the authorities were selective, reactive and not supported by sufficient financial and human resources. Despite all attempts, the public authorities failed to control the internal life of Muslim communities and the Muslim education system. The distrust and alertness of the Imperial Center to its Muslim subjects did not allow the Russian authorities to reach an understanding with Muslim elites, including pro-Russian ones.

Russification as a factor in religious conversion. Making Lenin roll over in his grave

The Soviet project was as thoroughly atheist as any geopolitical system seen on the world stage. Yet in a way that V.I. Lenin could have never imagined, one of the main objectives of Soviet authorities has now become a significant factor in Central Asian Muslims converting to Christianity. Russification is the term normally used to describe the social process, whereby non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union became acculturated into Russian patterns of life, thought and worldview during the Soviet era. The result was that many Muslims inhabited both Soviet/Russian and Muslim cultural space, thus creating a new cultural identity that facilitated religious conversion away from Islam. This field research report uses the lens of personal conversion stories to examine some aspects of this phenomenon. Also, the range of personal experiences points towards the need to understand Russification as a spectrum of acculturation.

Golubev, Alexey and Takala, Irina The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 774 Golubev, Alexey and Takala, Irina. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI, 2014. xvii + 236 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Over the last decade, scholarship on the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union has investigated many areas inhabited by non-Russian peoples. Baron, Breyfogle, Hirsch, Kerttula, Khalid, Martin, Sahadeo, Sunderland, Suny and many others have explored a variety of themes and regions and significantly increased our understanding of Russia and the USSR as multiethnic , multi-lingual and multi-confessional states. Yet much remains to be explored and written about this fascinating region and the people who have inhabited it. In this carefully written volume, Golubev and Takala explore the little-known history of approximately 6,500 Finnish-speaking people who travelled to Karelia, the region of north-western European Russia bordering on modern-day Finland, in search of a socialist paradise. In the space of nine chapters, these two Petrozavodsk State University historians investigate what led Finnish speakers who had previously emigrated from Finland to Canada and the United States to relocate once again, this time to build socialism. In the Karelian Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic (from 1923) they joined so-called ‘Red Finns’, or left-leaning Finns who fought with or supported those trying to establish a Communist government in Finland in 1918–19. When the so-called ‘White’ government took control in Finland, many ‘Red Finns’ fled across the border into socialist-controlled Russia. As Golubev and Takala relate, these Red Finns had a significant influence on the political and economic development of Soviet Karelia throughout the 1920s and first half of the 1930s. Between 1926 and 1935, the number of Finnish speakers in Soviet Karelia jumped from 2,500 to around 15,000. In part this flow of workers to Karelian factories, farms, and forests stemmed from government policies intended to attract foreign workers and foreign capital to expand the Soviet economic base. Soviet Karelia’s Red Finn leader at the time, Edvard Gylling, advocated for attracting foreign workers in the early 1930s, prior to his removal in 1935. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado describes competing visions (from the perspectives of Moscow and Petrozavodsk) of immigration policies, and the social, financial and logistical aspects of immigration to Soviet Karelia. Golubev and Takala argue that despite the initial successes in the early 1930s, the immigration programme ultimately failed due to Soviet policies, including the Great Terror. But that failure was not initially clear. In fact, thousands of American and Canadian Finns gave up their homes, businesses and livelihoods to travel thousands of miles to take part in building socialism. As REVIEWS 775 the book’s title suggests, many were motivated by the opportunity to help build a socialist utopia and workers’ paradise. Their idealism and hope drew them to invest themselves and often everything they owned to travel to the unknown. Unfortunately for them, as Golubev and Takala document, this new land was not as welcoming as had been promised. In general, these Finnish speakers found that weak infrastructure, poor living and working conditions, and limited food (in both quantity and quality) challenged their commitment to a socialist utopia. Most North American Finns did have access to special stores and better food than the local Karelian and Russian people, but nevertheless suffered substantially for the first few years. Despite these challenges, North American Finns made notable contributions to education, literature, theatre, music, dance and even sports in their region. Golubev and Takala describe in great detail the debates about language policy, with Finnish being given higher status than Karelian for several years. They also devote a chapter to the challenges of cross-cultural communication before describing the tragic end of many American and Canadian Finns in the Great Terror and World War Two. At least 739 North American Finns perished between 1937 and 1938, according to these authors, who provide significant detail on several victims and a timeline of arrests and deaths. They also assess World War Two and its impact...

Interpretation of the Religious Policy of Autocracy in the XIX – Early XX Senturies under Paradigm Change

The article is written on the basis of scientific researches of the Soviet and modern historians both from the CIS-countries and abroad. The problem attracts attention and is of scientific interest due to the fact that modern approaches of scientists of the post-Soviet countries in the study of the religious policy of the Russian empire in the national regions differ from those of the preceding period. The current researchers, while writing their works, use and introduce into scientific circulation documentary materials from archives and rare libraries’ collections, which in the Soviet times were “unnoticed”. Pressing of the Soviet ideological machine did not allow scientists to give an objective assessment of individual historical events. Works of scientists of the capitalist camp were not available as “the bourgeois methodology” could cause great harm to the scientific researches of the Soviet historians whose “methodological basis was the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the documents of the Party and government”. The object is the research on the colonial policy of autocracy in the religious life of the non-Russian peoples. The purpose of the article is to highlight the impact of changes at the turn of the XX –XXI centuries associated with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the formation of independent states on the process and the results of historical researches in the post-Soviet republics. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s1p516

Mashanov М.А. and His Contribution to the Studies of the History and Ethnography of Turkic and Finno-Ugric Peoples of the Middle Volga Region and Cisural Area (1852–1924)

The issues of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional relations have always attracted the attention of researchers. The given paper is aimed at studying the life and activity of a missionary, a scientist and a lecturer of the missionary anti-Muslim department of the Kazan Theological Academy Mikhail Aleksandrovich Mashanov; his contribution to the investigation of the history, ethnography, language and culture of the Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples of the Middle Volga region and Cisural area in the second half of the 19 th and at the beginning of the 20 th centuries; the examination and development of the problems of Islam and Christianity in Russia and Middle East. The authors explored the missionary and social activity of Mashanov who played an important role in the process of Christianization and Russification of the non-Russian peoples in the Volga region and Cisural area. The research reviews the scientist's contribution to the education of the Tatars, Chuvash, Maris, Udmurts and Mordvins as members of the orthodox organization, the Brotherhood of St. Gurias; analyzes the scientific works and Mashanov's contribution to historico-confessional and ethno-political study of the Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia and the Republic of Tatarstan in the second part of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th centuries, the preservation and development of the languages, the formation of national education. The authors managed to find out and collect a huge number of various (historical, linguistic, ethnographic) materials about the Tatars, Maris, Chuvash, Udmurts, Mordvins, which are of great importance while investigating the roots of modern international and inter-confessional relations in the Republic of Tatarstan and the Russian Federation. The paper findings may be useful for researches who deal with the missionary policy and modern ethno-political processes in the Russian Federation.

Islam and Christianity in the Middle Volga Region in the Second Half of the XVI-XVIII Century

The relevance of the problem under investigation related to the religious policy is caused by the need of studying the historical experience of relations between the Orthodox state and the other faiths, crowned with tolerance and legitimization of Islam and the need to develop both an optimal model of church-state relations and ethnic and religious policy, not only in the medieval period, but in the context of the challenges of modernity and politicization of religion. Article examines the religious policy of the Russian state in relation to the non-Orthodox religions, especially Islam, in the process of entering a multi-confessional and multi-ethnic territory of the former Kazan khanate in the orbit of the functioning of the Russian state in the second half of the XVI-XVIII centuries. Its aim is to highlight the evolution of the political line of aversion to religious tolerance caused by the resistance of the non-Russian peoples of the baptism. The paper concluded that the possibility of allocating the six milestones Christianization of the non-Russian peoples of the Middle Volga region as part of the emerging empire in the XVI-XVIII centuries. It is noted that in general, despite the limitation of the non-Russian population owners’ rights, infringement of socio-economic rights of the Yasak majority and a pressure on Muslim clerics, this policy proved to be ineffective against Muslims. It is noted that the relaxation of Christianization was due to social movements, among which a rebellion. It is emphasized that awareness of the need to review the relationship of Islam and a peaceful coexistence between the two faiths, to some extent led to their subsequent convergence. The materials of the article have value for understanding the formation of cultural, historical and national identity, adding principles of interaction with other cultures, able to lead to a mutually beneficial dialogue, for research on the history of both Russia and the peoples of the Volga-Ural region. Also the materials of the article may be used in general and special courses of Russian history and the history of religion.

The Historical Memory of the Tatar People in the Works of Musical Culture

Studying of the structure and content of the social consciousness of non-Russian peoples in Russia, the historical aspect is very new and promising scientific task. Of particular interest is the study of structures of Tatar- Muslim's historical memory in the region of the Volga and the Urals. The aim of our study: to trace the formation of the cultural symbols of the Tatar people, contributing to the folding of national identity. Based on the study of Tatars’ historical memory structures we found the qualitative content of social consciousness mostly of Tatar youth in the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries, named social protest songs of Shakirds in madrasas. Studying of Volga Tatars’ amateur musical creativity is the new look, considering Shakirds’ songs in madrasas as a historical source, which also reflects the historical memory and national identity of the Tatars.

Survival and Subversion during the Great Patriotic War

Survival and Subversion during the Great Patriotic War Alexis Peri Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, trans. Marian Schwartz. 552 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0300110296. $75.00. Laurie R. Cohen, Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia. 378 pp. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-1560464697. $99.00. After spending several decades in the shadows of the Cold War, the Great Patriotic War and its impact on the bodies and minds of Soviet citizens has become a booming field of scholarly investigation.1 Because of this research, the war has come to rival the October Revolution as an event that redefined Soviet ideological narratives and reshaped life in the USSR for decades. The Soviet Union’s 1945 victory was a paradoxical turning point that seemed to shore up Soviet legitimacy internationally while cultivating doubts and demands at home. Amir Weiner, Elena Zubkova, and Mark Edele, among others, have argued that the war fostered in Soviet citizens a certain self-assertiveness and sense of entitlement for material benefits, political reforms, and transparency from the regime.2 Recently, scholars have tackled this [End Page 437] monumental conflict and its repercussions city by city, highlighting how local communities endured the war and then rebuilt their lives and environs, often in conflict with official reconstruction efforts.3 Laurie R. Cohen’s Smolensk under the Nazis and Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin’s The Leningrad Blockade contribute substantially to this investigation of World War II’s transformative effects on Soviet society. Much of the existing research on this theme focuses on discontent that sprouted after the war, when the regime failed to reward its citizens’ sacrifices with a better quality of life.4 By contrast, Cohen and Bidlack and Lomagin highlight civilian experiences during the early and most devastating years of the war, 1941–42. Both of their studies are heavily archival, rigorously documented, and comprehensive. Smolensk under the Nazis is a traditional monograph, while The Leningrad Blockade is half monograph, half document collection. In addition to providing a detailed history of the siege, it includes 66 archival documents, a chronology, and numerous diagrams, which promise to be useful both for scholars and teachers of the blockade. Both works are driven by two questions: How did Soviet citizens survive the war? And did their political attitudes and allegiances shift as a result of that ordeal? In both studies, the power dynamics between the local population and state, party, or military leaders (be they Soviet or German) take center stage, and they raise critical questions about the war’s impact on popular attitudes. Wartime Smolensk and Leningrad, as well as the authors’ approaches to them, differ in significant and illuminating ways. Unlike besieged Leningrad, which has been the subject of some 400 books by Bidlack’s count (3), [End Page 438] Smolensk has received little scholarly attention. Cohen’s work brings a wealth of information to light about its 26 months under German occupation. Smolensk is an important case study, Cohen argues, because of its historical role as Russia’s bulwark against invaders en route to Moscow (4, 11). The city “epitomized the historically besieged, occupied, and recaptured Russian town” (8). Moreover, Smolensk illuminates how the experience of German occupation differed for a predominantly Russian population as opposed to that of non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union and in East Central Europe, for whom arguments about Russian barbarism and ethnic inferiority had greater purchase. Cohen’s detailed yet expansive history begins with an overview of imperial and prewar Soviet Smolensk before it delves into the invasion of the city, the new civic order established under German occupation, and the re-Sovietization of the city after it was liberated in 1943. The work is structured chronologically and thematically; it offers a “before” and “after” picture of Smolensk as well as thematic sections on specific aspects of the occupation including food policy, war crimes and violence, reeducation efforts, partisan activity, and the dissemination and reception of propaganda. Cohen’s central claim is that the Smolensk community, although caught between the totalizing ideologies of Stalinist...

Організація видавничої справи національних меншин у підрадянській Україні (20-ті–початок 30-х рр. ХХ ст.)

Organization of publishing industry of the major ethnic minorities (Germans, Poles, Jews, Bulgarians, Moldavians, etc.) in Soviet Ukraine during the interwar period is considered in the article. The so-called indigenization policy was an important part of the national cultural development at that time. In fact, it was an attempt to head the spontaneous processes of the national life development of various non-Russian peoples of the former Russian Empire.Publishing industry became a key element of indigenization policy in Soviet Ukraine, because the book and the press were an important weapon in the process of ideological education of loyal Soviet people. Books and press publishing of national minorities in Soviet Ukraine most actively developed in 1923–1933 — decades from the beginning of indigenization policy to its clotting in the early 30’s of XX century when minority leaders began to receive the label «bourgeois nationalists».The author concludes that the indigenization policy positively affected the development of national and cultural life of ethnic minorities in general and their publishing industry in particular. The number of non-periodicals and periodicals had steadily increased since the proclamation of indigenization policy to the peak of its development. This was particularly true for editions of Jewish minorities.

Pусская этнография 1850-х годов и этос цивилизаторской миссии: случай “литературной экспедиции” Морского министерства

The article revisits one of the grand initiatives of the admiral and reformer, Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich – the “literary expedition” sponsored by the Navy Ministry in 1855−1861. The author specifically problematizes the views of Russia’s civilizing mission as expressed by participating writers, who were commissioned to explore the empire’s diverse littoral populations – the potential resource of sailors. Focusing on the ethnographic essays penned by expedition participants such as Aleksei Pisemskii, Apollon Maikov, Mikhail Mikhailov, Sergei Maksimov, and Ivan Goncharov, the author demonstrates that the problem was not those writers’ belief in Russia’s civilizing mission itself, but their understanding of the ultimate goal of “civilizing.” The majority (with the exception of Pisemskii) were inclined to advocate complete assimilation of ethnically non-Russian peoples. And all the participating writers tended to classify peoples of the empire along rigid cultural and even biological hierarchies, which suggests that the discourse of racialization had already revealed itself in Russia by the 1850s. The author substantiates this claim by placing the views of writers− expedition participants within the broad historical context of ethnography and Oriental Studies of the mid-nineteenth century.

Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: An Essential Resource

Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia. A Comprehensive Bibliography. Volume I. Southeastern and East Central Europe. Edited by Irina Livezeanu with June Pachuta Farris for the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS), Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, xvi + 892 pp., (hb) ISBN 978-0-76560-737-9. Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia. A Comprehensive Bibliography. Volume II. Russia, the Non-Russian Peoples of the Russian Federation, and the Successor States of the Soviet Union. Edited by Mary Zirin and Christine D. Worobec for the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, xix + 1200 pp., $388.95 (for both volumes together), hb; ISBN 978-0-76560-737-9.

The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Colonial Comparisons

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. xiv + 511 pp., maps, illus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0691127088. $55.00. Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov, eds., Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire. vi + 280 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2009. ISBN-13 978-9004175716. $171.00. Svetlana Gorshenina and Sergei Abashin, eds., Le Turkestan Russe: Une colonie comme les autres? (Russian Turkestan: A Colony Like the Others?). Cahiers d'Asie Centrale, no. 17/18. 548 pp., maps, illus. Paris: Editions Complexe, 2009. ISBN-13 978-2804801748. 30.00 [euro]. Ever since the Imperial Turn in Russian history began in the early 1990s, there has been a sense that historians of the Russian Empire were running to catch up with the more developed historiographies of the other great modern and early modern empires--British, French, Habsburg, Qing, Mughal, or Ottoman. Restrictions on archival research, together with the dead hand of Sovietology and the strategic and ideological priorities of the Cold War, meant that much of the existing historiography lacked both empirical rigor and theoretical sophistication and tended either to focus on patterns of Russian aggression and national resistance or to reproduce cherished myths of Russian and Soviet exceptionalism. Comparison beyond the borders of the USSR was rare, while the new postcolonial sensibility that informed much research on empires from the 1980s onward had little or no impact. (1) These deficiencies have been pointed out repeatedly as scholars scrambled to close this gap, and a flood of new works on Russian imperialism and the history of the non-Russian peoples of the empire has transformed the historical landscape. (2) Nevertheless, the sense has remained that Russian imperial historiography needs to be brought into conformity with that of Africa or South Asia, the main regions of European colonialism, or with that on the Ottoman Empire and its management of different peoples--to apply the insights developed in the study of other empires to the Russian case. It is the approach I have taken in most of my own work to date. (3) It is also that used by many of the contributors to Le Turkestan russe, where the title of Svetlana Gorshenina's introductory historiographical essay (17-76) asks whether or not Russian Turkestan will ever enter into the mainstream of postcolonial studies. (4) Of all the panaceas offered as a means of rescuing Russia from the margins and bringing it to the center of modern scholarship on empire, the most attractive has been that of postcolonialism. As with much academic jargon, this is something more often invoked than explained. Broadly speaking, postcolonialism seeks to expose the unequal relationships of power inherent in empire and to explore and explain how these have subsequently shaped the world and the ways in which its peoples and cultures are represented. It generally includes a strong moral and political critique of colonialism and its legacies. This critique is usually confined to a particular variety of supposedly normative European maritime colonialism of the 19th century, and until recently land-based or dynastic empires were rarely included. The structures of dominance and hegemony examined by postcolonial scholars did not end with the formal independence of colonized regions but were perpetuated by economic and, above all, cultural means. The discourses that had helped form and sustain empire--notably those emphasizing the racial, religious, and cultural inferiority of colonized peoples, their passivity, laziness, lewdness, and general inability to govern themselves--persisted long after its apparent dissolution. While the best-known theoreticians of postcolonialism--Bernard Cohn, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and others--were mostly either anthropologists or literary critics, these arguments had profound implications for historians. …

1920年代から30年代初頭のソ連におけるマルクス主義歴史家の論争

The paper discusses the controversies on the history of non-Russian peoples in the USSR among the Soviet Marxist historians in the 1920s to early 1930s. The development of early Marxist historical science in the USSR was closely related with the policies of the party. The party leaders distinguished the nationalism of the oppressing nations from that of the oppressed nations, and considered “great power chauvinism,” or Russian nationalism, the main danger. Accordingly, the study of all the peoples in the USSR and the improvement of their cultural level became an important task for scholars, including historians. At the first convention of the All-Union Society of Marxist Historians in December 1928 to January 1929, the study of the history of the peoples in the USSR was declared as the main task of Soviet historians. For the first time, the historians faced the problem of how to interpret the history of non-Russian peoples from the Marxist perspective. One main arguing theme was the evaluation of the Russian rule over the non-Russian peoples. Another main problem was the tendency of “the great power chauvinism” of the Russian Marxist historians; this issue was raised by Ukrainian Marxist historians, including M. Iavorskii. They criticized some Russian Marxist historians for underestimating the Ukrainian elements in the history of the revolutionary movement in Ukraine and for not acknowledging the independent features of the cultural, social, and economic history of Ukraine. However, M. Pokrovskii, the most authoritative Russian Marxist historian, did not accept the criticism, and thus, the historians never reached a consensus. In contrast, the problems that became serious themes in the Stalin period, such as the evaluation of the Khan who led the rebellion of non-Russian peoples against Russia, or the evaluation of the “Holy war” by the Muslim population against Russian rule, were given less attention by the historians. At the end of 1929, when “the cultural revolution” began, not only did the non-Marxist intellectuals receive criticism, but the debate among the Marxist historians became strained. In Ukraine, the criticism against Ukrainian nationalism caused mass political oppression, and the most famous non-Marxist historian, M. Khlshevskii, and Marxist historian, M. Iavorskii, were both arrested. The class factor was put forward in the historical interpretation and this change was reflected also in the study of non-Russian history. The leaders of rebellions against Russia in nineteenth-century Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus and of the rebellion against Poland in seventeenth-century Ukraine came to be evaluated as repressors of the masses, and their dissatisfaction against the ruling classes was considered to be a driving force of these rebellions. In the Stalin period, historians tried to reevaluate the tradition and the leaders of each people and again faced the problem of the harmonization of the class elements and the national character of each people. This problem remained unsolved from the 1920s. Thus, in the discussion of the early Soviet period, we can see the roots of the fierce discussion among the historians and politicians of the Stalin period.

Islam and the Russian Empire. Reform and Revolution in Central Asia By HELENE CARRERE D'ENCAUSSE

In any field of history, a book needs to be something quite special to justify an unaltered reprinting forty years after its original publication. For the history of the Russian Empire this is even more true, thanks to the archival revolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which finally allowed Western scholars to use long-inaccessible collections of documents. A book which, as in this case, concentrates on the Islamic, non-Russian peoples of the Empire, whose history more than any other has been revolutionized since the early 1990s, would need to be a masterpiece. Unfortunately Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s Reforme et Révolution chez les Musulmans de l’Empire Russe was a flawed book even on its original publication in 1966, and was already beginning to look rather tired and dusty when this English translation was first published in 1988 without any updating (the timing was unfortunate). I.B. Tauris’s decision to re-publish it without so much as a new critical introduction is baffling, an insult to the intelligence of those who are familiar with the field, and a shameless attempt to cash in on the ignorance of those who are not.

TERMINOLOGY PERTAINING TO ETHNIC RELATIONS AS USED IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

The article discusses the denotation and changes in the meaning of terms describing ethnic relations in various formal and informal texts originating from late Imperial Russia, examining the terminology regarding the Empire’s ethno-political geography and regional dimension, as well as the correlation between the hierarchical concepts of Russian Empire – Russia – borderlands. The article also outlines the identifying characteristics of the basic ethnic categories in the Empire, i.e. Russians and non-Russians (инородцы), and addresses the issue of non-Russians “becoming Russian”. Consideration is given to phrases and expressions illustrating the central government’s ethnic integration policy in non-Russian territories. Among those most frequently encountered are “rapprochement” (сближение), “merging” (слияние), “Russification” (обрусение, русификация): terms that lack proper, unambiguous definition, and have produced no consensus among either contemporaries or modern researchers. The government pursued the homogeneity of the Empire not by respecting multi-culturality and diversity or guaranteeing free development of ethnoses, but rather by aggressively enacting rapprochement with the Russian nation, forcing the Russian language upon residents of the Empire (also as the language of tuition in primary schools), and disseminating the Orthodox faith, thus crippling the peoples’ natural strive for self-realisation and self-determination. The attempts to eradicate native-language primary education give enough reason to speak about Russification in the sense of assimilation (Russianisation), regardless of whether or not this was a conscious effort and goal set by the masterminds behind the reforms. Estonian national movement activists and intellectuals interpreted the government’s ethnic policy as forcible denationalisation and re-ethnification set to annihilate the Estonian nation through the dominance of the Russian language in education and public administration. Whether the government was indeed harbouring such plans, or to what extent, remains unclear. The Empire remained based on dynastic statehood until its demise; nationalism did not become a ruling ideology despite the Russian and non-Russian ethnocentricity thriving and Russian nationalists striving to reshape the dynastic state into a nation state. The central government launched multiple Russification programmes in the border regions, yet these were eventually thwarted by resistance put up by non-Russian peoples.

Imperial Entanglements : Two New Histories of Russia's Western and Southern Borderlands

Imperial Entanglements: Two New Histories of Russia's Western and Southern Borderlands G. M. Hamburg (bio) Robert D. Crews , For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. viii + 463 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0674021649. $29.95. Mikhail Dmitrievich Dolbilov and Aleksei Il´ich Miller, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii [The Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire]. 608 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006. ISBN 586793425X. These days, one of the most active research fields in modern Russian history is borderlands history: that is, the history of non-Russian peoples living on the empire's peripheries, understood either in isolation from the Great Russian heartland or in dynamic relationship to it.1 Because this subject encompasses a central dimension of Eurasian history—Russia's status as a multinational, multi-confessional polity—the intellectual attractiveness of studying it is self-evident. Since as little as 20 years ago one could not confidently have predicted that scholarship would move so vigorously in this direction, we should ask why so many scholars both in post-Soviet Russia and the West have now opted to write on the borderlands. In the Soviet Union, of course, writing the history of non-Russian peoples was a serious enterprise from the very beginning of Soviet power, but much of the scholarship that appeared in the early Soviet period was attuned to party doctrine and thus not inclined to investigate important questions such [End Page 407] as the place of religious affiliation in nationality politics.2 Moreover, certain issues like Russian–Jewish relations were so sensitive that, at times, they were virtually off-limits to scholars.3 In addition, borderlands scholarship occasionally became the virtual preserve of academics who either belonged to one of the non-Russian nationalities or lived in one of the non-Russian republics; meanwhile, the "commanding heights" of the historical profession were occupied by historians who wrote the history of the heartland.4 This professional constellation began to disintegrate in the Gorbachev and post-Soviet periods, but its breakdown did not immediately lead to a concentration on borderlands history. Indeed, if we imagine scholarship proceeding in waves, the [End Page 408] first wave, lasting from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, issued from a fascination with liberalism and reform in imperial Russia; the second wave, beginning in the early 1990s and still continuing at present, arose from a revival in Russian conservatism and a concomitant interest in the relative durability of the Russian empire compared with the Soviet Union. Borderlands history is the third wave of scholarship since the late 1980s. Its numerous sources include: the shattering of old taboos that hindered research on the subject; the realization that the Russian empire managed its national minorities for 300 years without experiencing the kind of "meltdown" that occurred in the last years of Soviet power; the knowledge that post-Soviet Russia, being a "post-imperial empire," must also attend to nationality problems of various kinds, many of them inherited from the Soviet system or from the Russian empire; the opening of archives in former borderlands regions that were once difficult to access, even for Russians; Western scholarly research in borderlands history that reinforces Russian interest in the subject; and the revival of certain classical problems in international relations—namely, tensions between Poland and Russia over the Western border zone, and tensions between Russia and Islamic states over the Caucasus and Central Asia. Western scholarly interest in the imperial borderlands developed in a slightly different fashion. In Britain, for example, historians have long paid attention to the non-Russians along the southern rim of the Russian empire, probably because these peoples have been near neighbors of Britain's own empire.5 Moreover, the desire to compare the operation of competing empires has animated many British scholars, from imperial taxonomists like Arnold Toynbee and Niall Ferguson to Russian specialists like Dominic Lieven.6 In France, which has had its own empire located partly in Muslim societies, there has been a long-standing fascination with Russia's Islamic subjects in the Caucasus, in Tatar regions, and in Central Asia.7 Moreover, French [End Page 409] scholarship on the multinational composition of...

Women & gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: a comprehensive bibliography: v.1: Southeastern and East Central Europe; v.2: Russia, the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation, and the successor states of the Soviet Union

Women & gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: a comprehensive bibliography: v.1: Southeastern and East Central Europe; v.2: Russia, the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation, and the successor states of the Soviet Union

Украинская Историческая Память и Советский Канон: Как Определялось Национальное Наследие Украины в Сталинскую Эпоху

SUMMARY: Serhy Yekelchyk’s article proceeds from the assumption that an imperial state creates room for the articulation of ethnic difference rather than pursues some kind of an assimilationist project. Moreover, the imperial rule necessitates the development of homogenizing and essentializing devices such as “India” or “Ukraine” that are useful both for the imperial definitions of what or who is being ruled and for the indigenous elites. The author argues that understanding Stalinist historical memory as a subspecies of an imperial discourse allows us to make sense of the hierarchy of many national pasts within it. Moreover, such an approach also throws some new light on the question of agency in the Stalinist cultural production. In the article, bureaucrats and intellectuals in the republics who interpreted the vague yet powerful signals from the Kremlin emerge as major players in the shaping of the Stalinist historical imagination. In his assessment of the role of this social group, Yekelchyk relies on the insights from post-colonial theory, which, in his view, is particularly helpful for making sense of the limits and possibilities in the promotion of non-Russian historical memory under Stalinism. Yekelchyk shows that the Stalinist project of memory was disadvantaged from the beginning by the state’s inability to control individual interpretations of historical narratives. But this was not its only problem. When in the 1930s the Stalinist USSR became the self-conscious successor of the Russian Empire, it had to incorporate into its narrative the story of tsarist conquests and territorial acquisitions. However, it never quite reconciled this narrative with the previous notion of “class history” or with the separate historical mythologies of the non-Russian peoples. In addition, residual counter-memories of the pre-Bolshevik nationalist historical narratives survived in Ukraine well after World War II. The German occupation further undermined the Soviet authorities’ control over public memory. The Kremlin sought to prescribe and homogenize social memory, but internal tensions within the Stalinist historical narrative and their inability to prescribe only one possible reading of cultural products undermined their efforts. The authorities could not fix the meaning of the past, from which the Soviet nations supposedly got their sense of orientation for the future. In the end, the Stalinist empire of memory was kept together by state intimidation – and began disintegrating as soon as the threat of political violence was removed. Yekelchyk develops these arguments in the sections of the article dedicated to the post-war pantheon of “Ukrainian classics”, Sovietization of Ukranian museums and the mnemo-projects of monuments and memorials.

Science, Culture, and Empire: Eurasianism as a Modernist Movement

SUMMARY The article explores the ideas of the Eurasianist movement on the unity and diversity of Eurasia, gives an overview of the role of non-Russian peoples in Russian history and culture as seen by the Eurasianists and describes the main characteristics of Eurasianist doctrine. It also discusses the semantic knot of the Eurasianist discourse, namely, the 1917 Revolution, which was accepted as the opening of a new era for Russia. In conclusion, Eurasianist views on art are introduced.

Staat und Nationalitäten in Russland. Der Integrationsprozess der Burjaten und Kalmüken, 1822-1925 by Dittmar s> Schorkowitz (review)

148 SEER, 8i I, I 2003 Schorkowitz,Dittmar. Staatund fationalitdten inRussland. DerIntegrationsprozess der Burjatenund Kalmilken,I822-I925. Quellen und Studien zur Geschichten des ostlichen Europa, 6I. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 2001. 6I6 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography . Index. ?96.12. IT has been over a decade since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its fragmentation along national lines. A sudden realization of the importance and continuous relevance of national, ethnic, and religious issues generated much discussion and anticipation of new imperial histories with greater focus on the non-Russian peoples, away from the Russian capital and central Russian region. But for all the talk, such topical and geographical shifts have been slow to take place. The book under review, together with several recent works by American historians (in particular by Robert Geraci and Paul Werth, whose nuanced and sophisticated studies dealt with the Volga Muslims and Volga pagans respectively), makes an important contribution to our understanding of the workings of the Russian empire in its periphery. The volume is an imposing work of over 6oo pages, twenty illustrations, and thirty tables. Its empirical base is enormous. In addition to a large standard bibliography, Dittmar Schorkowitz introduces a large volume of archival materials from both central and local archives. As the subtitle indicates, the book focuses on the integration process of the Buriats and Kalmyks into the Russian empire and the early Soviet Union, I822-1925. The Kalmyks and Buriats belonged to Russia's numerous non-Russian and non-Christian subjects, whose total number by the late nineteenth century exceeded the number of Russians proper. Yet they differed from other nonChristian subjects in two important respects: their religion was Tibetan Buddhism or Lamaism, and they were nomads. These two features defined both the character and the status of these peoples within the empire and government policies toward them. XVhile the large pagan population had been converted to Christianity en masse and expediently, even though often nominally, Buddhism and Islam remained the two most important and deeply entrenched non-Christian religions. It was the religion which defined both the character of Russia's Muslim and Buddhist subjects. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the i 830s, the Russian authorities largely supported and encouraged lamaist clergy to convert the shamanist Buriats to Buddhism. This attitude was consistent with Russian policy which envisioned that the spread of Buddhism among the Buriats, just like that of Islam among the Kazakhs, would turn these people into more civilized and loyal imperial subjects. During the I830s, however, this. policy was reversed, and the government engaged in limiting and undercutting the authority of the lamaist clergy among the Kalmyks and Buriats until the Edict of Toleration of 1905. Throughout the nineteenth century, Russian policy vacillated between leaving the lamaist clergy alone in the hope that this would encourage their greater co-operation with the Russian authorities, and taking a hard line by accusing the lamas of corruption. Russian policy emerges here as a process shaped by different individuals, agencies and government visions. For instance, REVIEWS 149 the zealousand hostileapproachtakenby the Synod towardthe lamaistclergy was supportedby the Ministryof the Interior,but was invariablytemperedby the more pragmaticattitudeof the Ministryof StateDomains. At the core of Russian policy was the issue of the Kalmyks' and Buriats' religious conversion to the Orthodox Christianity. Conversion was always desirable, even though not easily achieved, and was seen as the ultimate and necessary step for the natives to become both civilized and Russian. Schorkowitz remarks that 'civilization was no longer pursued through the means of the Enlightenmentbut indoctrinatedthroughOrthodoxy' (p. 350). Inseparablefromreligiousconversionwas the idea of the forcedsettlement of the Kalmyks and Buriats. In the government's eyes, its Buddhist subjects were nomads and cattle rustlers, wild and primitive people whose mores would be tempered only by settling down, becoming peasants, learning Russian and, of course, joining the Orthodox Church -the attitude that Schorkowitzcalls xenophobic and 'chauvinisticRussocentrism'(p. 3I5). But settlingthem presented severaldilemmas. How was one to classifythe settled Kalmyks and Buriats? Should they be ascribed to the Cossack estate or become state peasants? (p. 356). Later on, the problem of dividing the land and drawing boundaries (pp. I6I-7I) became one of...