Writing the History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective of Federalism
Studies of empires are back in academic fashion.1 Why this should be so at the end of the
twentieth century is a subject for interesting speculation. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its
central and east European bloc has given rise to conferences and volumes treating the Soviet
"socialist commonwealth" as "the last major world empire" and comparing its collapse, at least, to
those of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.2 But even before the Gorbachev-era reforms
in foreign and security policies that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, revival of interest in
empires, particularly the British, French, and Habsburg cases, was motivated by very diverse
political and academic agendas. Some of the interest was from parties unashamedly critical of
European empires and of European hegemony generally; these scholars, especially prominent
among students of third-world or post-colonial histories and cultures and notably not among
traditional historians of Britain or France, revived the anti-imperialist politics that had its origins in
the late nineteenth century, but they tied their academic studies to critiques of contemporary
American "imperialism."3
These studies often combined critical stances on European rule with
Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Cornell, 1986); Paul M. Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987) ; Michael
Mann also devotes considerable attention to empires in his worldhistorical study, Sources of Social Power (Cambridge, 1986).
1
See the recent SSRC-sponsored workshop at Columbia
University, "Imperial Collapse: Causes and Consequences," November
19-20, 1994 (where the author of these lines was a participant)
and the conference volume from the U of Minnesota on Habsburg and
Soviet collapse, Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good, editors,
Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Soviet Union
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).
There was even a brief
academic and policy intellectual interest in the "Ottomanization"
of the Soviet Union, by which authors seemed most often to mean
the intervention of the "Great Powers" in the dismemberment of the
new "sick man" of the international system, the USSR.
2
The most important studies have been inspired in the first
instance by the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and
then by the school of sub-altern studies that focussed initially
on British India and post-colonial South Asia; see the essays in
3
1
new historical disciplines such as "the new cultural history" or history of science and medicine.
This trend might be partly explained by the coming to academic power of the generation that was
influenced if not shaped by the radical politics of the 1960s and transformed in more recent times
by the popularity of identity politics and the battles over multiculturalism in the United States.
But another important recent source of renewed interest in empires comes from the
reevaluation of the nation-state and nationalism, a reevaluation that seeks to explain the often tragic
history of nationalism, especially during the twentieth century and at its end, and perhaps from an
unarticulated disappointment in the failure of the United Nations' self-proclaimed ideal of having
triumphed over the nationalisms that were seen as the root of World War II.
The post-Soviet
nationalisms of eastern and central Europe and Eurasia generally have "emerged" so suddenly and
with such negative consequences that parallels are frequently drawn to interwar or wartime
nationalist movements.4
The commemorative versions of the past that many of the new national
movements or political leaders are promoting are so blatantly "constructed" and lie so firmly in the
tradition of the lachrymose and competitive national martyrdoms5 that it has provoked historians,
Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern
Studies. See the Forum in American Historical Review devoted to a
discussion of Subaltern Studies (Vol. 99, December 1994): 14751545, with contributions by Gyan Prakash, Florencia E. Mallon, and
Frederick Cooper.
The post-Soviet "nationalization" of the past recalls
Benedict Anderson's discussion of the ironic appropriation of the
European empires' legacies in cultural politics for the new
nations having to demonstrate their antiquity. See his insightful
chapter, "Forgetting/Remembering" in Imagined Communities (London:
Verso, 1991).
4
The characterization of these histories as lachrymose is
attributed to a Romanian writer by Katherine Verdery, in her
"Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania,"
Slavic Review 52:2 (Summer 1993): 185-96; on the role of military
defeats in nationalist consciousness, see Tony Judt, "The Furies
of Nationalism," New York Review of Books (26 May 1994); on the
primacy of suffering in Jewish history, see Michael Stanislawski,
Tsar Nicholas and the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
5
2
historical sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists to revisit national and ethnic
identities with a reinforced skepticism.
Because many modern nationalisms emerged from within the political and intellectual
cultures of the powerful empires and proclaimed their self-evidently more just and efficient nationstates as the rightful heirs to the decrepit and outmoded empires, the nationalism that pervades
modern historical studies biased practitioners against choosing empires as their object of study; but
the return of ethnic and national conflict to Europe in particular, but Eurasia generally, has evoked
an almost nostalgic view of at least some multinational dynastic empires that, in retrospect, look to
have regulated inter-ethnic relations for far longer and with less apocalyptic consequences than the
modern nation-states that were forged in the aftermath of the great empires that went down to defeat
during and after World War I.6 In particular, the Habsburg Empire, to a lesser degree the Ottoman,
have enjoyed a historiographic rehabilitation, whether it be for the Austro-Marxist proposals of
Otto Bauer and Karl Renner for a federalism based on extraterritorial cultural autonomy or a
modernized version of the millet system of the Ottomans.7 But whereas nations and nationalism
Society of America, 1983), introduction.
This semi-nostalgic rehabilitation colors the works of
leftist scholars who have written important and critical studies
of nationalism, such as Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
Since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990)
and Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities.
A related but distinct development has been the
disillusionment of third world intellectuals with postcolonial
nation-states and the national movements that brought those
entities into existence.
This is a theme that runs through the
discussions by Prakash for South Asian and Cooper for African
history in the AHR Forum cited above. These scholars do not share
the semi-nostalgia for empire, but nonetheless have complicated
our understandings of collaboration, resistance, domination, and,
of course, subalternity in colonial situations.
6
These historiographical rehabilitations are occurring
parallel to the efforts of some Austrian and Turkish elites to
extend their states' influence in the post-Cold War landscape.
Austrian officials and intellectuals, for example, have sponsored
conferences on the "past, present, and future" of Mitteleuropa,
7
3
have enjoyed considerable attention from historical sociologists and social theorists, empires and
multinational states generally have remained relatively undertheorized.8
The re-thinking of the nation-state has also been stimulated and reinforced by European
historians, many of whom find the traditional nationalist narratives of Germany, France, and
Britain, once held up as the paragons of nation-state-ness, to be inadequate in an era of European
integration and the prominence of regional and trans-regional politics.9 Just as integrationists and
regionalists perceive the organizational unit of the nation-state to be either less meaningful or
artificially constraining, so too many historians are finding the venerable practice of organizing
their departments around national narratives to be anachronistic and distorting.10 In this context as
well, the history of empires offers new avenues for challenging the long-reigning units of study.
while their Turkish counterparts occasionally float proposals for
a greater Turkic condominium in Central Asia and the Black Sea
Region.
Doyle's book (cf. footnote 1) focuses on explanations for
imperialism and derives a tautological definition of imperialism
as what empires do; Kennedy's book is really about the rise and
fall of great military-economic powers.
Other classic studies,
including Shmuel Eisenstadt's The Political Systems of Empires
(New York: Free Press, 1969), share the usual bias that empires
are outmoded and anachronistic formations that carried within
themselves the seeds of their own decline because they were
organizationally "infeasible."
8
Here, see, Michael Geyer, "Historical Fictions of Autonomy
and the Europeanization of National History," Central European
History 22 (1989): 316-43;
James Sheehan, "What is German
History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History
and Historiography," Journal of Modern History 53 (March 1981): 123; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and perhaps the earliest
recent skeptic of the nationalist narrative, Eugen Weber, Peasants
into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
9
Michael Mann argues that the nation-state of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries continues to exercise its covert
influence in its dominance of sociology and history alike.
Sources, p. 2.
10
4
Finally, the re-investigation of empires is one of many sites for exploring the contemporary
dilemmas of especially liberal political thought as it grapples with the consequences of the new
political economies emerging with the large trading blocs (EEC, NAFTA, and the Pacific bloc
above all) for state sovereignty, human rights, citizenship, and collective and individual identities.
High on the international agenda is a widely perceived need to rethink the relationships between the
individual's rights and the rights of various collective bodies, be they nations, sub-nations, or
otherwise defined minority communities.11 To point only to the previously mentioned examples of
the Ottoman millet system and the proposals for restructuring the Habsburg Empire associated with
Austro-Marxism, at least late imperial elites struggled with many of the issues that have found new
resonance in the transnational era. Of course, there are limits to how much can be learned in the
late twentieth century from empires that were putatively governed along dynastic, estate, and
confessional principles, and certainly many of the most inhuman and intolerant nationalists of the
twentieth century came out of those empires, but they--the empires--also experienced a vigorously
diverse flowering of intellectual and political thought about alternatives to the current
arrangements, most of which were suppressed by later nationalist rewritings of the past precisely
because they were transnational or even anti-national.12
There are likely to be many more sources of the revived interest in empires, but the trend
has certainly arrived in studies of Russian and Soviet history as well, though not without hesitations
and ambivalences.13 Considering that several important intellectual armies have been conducting
I thank Sarah Stein, Amanda Binder, and Stuart Finkel for
suggestions along these lines during a discussion of an early
draft of this essay at Stanford University.
11
As a caution against drawing too many lessons from the
Ottoman experience (and the experience of the traditional empires
more generally), see the provocative remarks by Aron Rodrigue,
"Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire," Stanford
Humanities Review 5.1 (1995): 81-90.
12
13
The
most
scholarly
treatments
5
of
the
complex
issues
their skirmishes for decades on the fringes of the academic landscape, it is remarkable that
mainstream Russian and Soviet historians have been so stubbornly centered on a view of the past
shaped by the two capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg and by the politics, society and culture of
ethnic Russians for the large part. As to the peripheral skirmishers, one of the formulators of the
major Marxist critque of imperialism was after all Vladimir Lenin, who borrowed from and adapted
his contemporary Hobson's now classic text, Imperialism: A Study (1902).14 Lenin's approach was
fully in line with the critics of empires who saw them as inevitably doomed; by identifying
imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin's writings reinforced the sense of imminent
collapse, even if he did not see the triumph of the nation-state as the ultimate outcome (but rather an
international socialist federation of liberated peoples). Curiously, Lenin left his own "native"
Russian Empire relatively unexamined in his investigations except to introduce into Bolshevik
political rhetoric the concept "prisonhouse of nations" and the slogan of national selfdetermination,15 but early Soviet "post-colonialist" scholars nonetheless drew from the anti-Russian
tradition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to produce sophisticated studies of Imperial political
involved in writing the history of the Russian empire have come,
not surprisingly, from German historians.
See the pathbreaking
synthesis by Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvoelkerreich
(Beck: Munich, 1992), and the earlier Russian Imperialism by
Dietrich Geyer (New Haven, 1987; German original, 1977). For the
Soviet period, one of the best available treatments of the USSR as
a multinational state is Gerhard Simon's Nationalism and Policies
toward the Nationalities (Boulder: Westview, 1991; German
original, 1986). Among the English-language surveys of Imperial
history, the only one to devote much attention to both Imperial
foreign policy and the non-Russians is Hugh Seton-Watson, The
Russian Empire, 1801-1917 (Oxford, 1967).
Lenin's Imperialism,
appeared in 1916.
14
the
Highest
Stage
of
Capitalism
Lenin's theory of self-determination is developed in "The
Right of Nations to Self-Determination," (Feb-May 1914) in V. I.
Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 20 (Moscow, 1964), pp. 394-454.
15
6
institutions and social and cultural policies, including a Soviet precursor of Edward Said's critique
of Orientalism as early as the 1920s.16 Of course, their agenda was to expose the iniquities of the
pre-revolutionary past so as to overcome national and other discrimination and exploitation in the
new Soviet order.
Once the experiments with korenizatsiia and what was called Soviet federalism were
determined to have gone too far for the Stalinist leadership, this early critical scholarship on the
Russian empire was suppressed in favor of a more benign view of Russia's past more in line with
the "organic" view of Russian expansion and state-led evolutionary progress favored by the liberal
and Slavophile consensus that emerged among late Imperial Russian historians.17
The "national
question" was declared to have been resolved sometime in the 1930s with the liquidation of
discrimination based on nationality and the creation of Soviet national cultures. Surprisingly, many
Marx's critique of Russian imperialism was only published
in the Soviet Union in 1989, see Karl Marks, "Razoblacheniia
diplomaticheskoi istorii XVIII veka," Voprosy istorii 1 (1989): 323; 2: 3-16; 3: 3-17; 4: 3-19.
Among the examples from
scholarship inspired by this critical attitude toward tsarism
written during the 1920s and early 1930s are G. Safarov,
Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia: opyt Turkestana (Moscow, 1921); P. G.
Galuzo, Turkestan--koloniia (Ocherki po istorii Turkestana ot
zavoevaniia russkimi do revoliutsii 1917 goda) (Moscow, 1929); on
an interpretation of Ukraine as a tsarist colony, see Mykhailo
Volobuev's writings, especially his "Do problemy ukrains'koi
ekonomiky," in Bil'shovyk Ukrainy (January 30 and Febrary 15,
1928).
For a Soviet precursor of Edward Said's critical
insights into Orientalism, see N. Svirin, "Russkaia kolonial'naia
literatura," Literaturnyi kritik 9 (1934): 51-79.
16
The historians who shaped that consensus include Nikolai
Karamzin, Sergei Soloviev, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, and Pavel
Miliukov.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Aleksandr
Presniakov had begun to raise the question of the impact of
expansion and incorporation of various ethnic groups on the
transformation of the Russian Empire.
See his The Formation of
the Great Russian State, trans. A. E. Moorhouse (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1970; original Russian, 1918) especially
Presniakov's and the editor's (Alfred Rieber) introduction.
I
thank Charles Steinwedel for this reference.
17
7
western scholars, perhaps heavily influenced by a version of modernization theory, failed to
question seriously these Soviet claims and assumed that, like most other modernizing,
industrializing societies, so too in the Soviet Union, national and religious distinctions would
disappear.18 That faith may have prepared western scholars to adhere to the late Imperial consensus
among Russian historians that viewed the Russian Empire as a nation-state in embryo. This
consensus focused on the great Russian state forging a nation, a project transferred from Nicolaevan
bureaucrats to early twentieth-century liberal and conservative politicians.19
That view,
disseminated by influential emigre historians such as Michael Karpovich at Harvard, shaped the
postwar generation of Russian historians in the North America and Europe.
The other peripheral skirmishers, many of whose works are now being rehabilitated,
revisited or republished, belong more or less loosely to the Cold War-era tradition of "captive
nation" historians. Of course, Republican and Democratic administrations and congresses alike
made constant rhetorical reference to the Soviet empire and, under Reagan, to the "evil empire,"
and thereby perpetuated a view of Russian history as the source of Soviet expansionism. An
examplar of this genre is the volume edited by Taras Hunczak in 1974, Russian Imperialism from
Ivan the Great to the Revolution, which charateristically opened with an essay, "The Origins of
Russian Imperialism."20 These scholars, although ostensibly skirmishing at opposite ends of the
See Walker Connor, "Ethnonationalism," in M. Weiner and S.
P. Huntington, eds., Understanding Political Development (Boston,
1987).
18
The aims of Official Nationality doctrine, most likely a
minority position during its putative dominance during the reign
of Nicholas I, were transformed in the era of the Great Reforms
into a modernizing state project, which, in turn was adopted by
Kadet and Octobrist spokesmen.
See, for example, P. B. Struve,
"Chto zhe takoe Rossiia?" Russkaia mysl' (Jan 1912); and the later
Miliukov.
19
That essay by Henry Huttenbach, a stalwart of "captive
nation"
or,
in
their
more
innocuous
rendering,
"Soviet
nationality" studies.
20
8
political spectrum from their early Soviet predecessors, nonetheless shared an agenda of national
liberation and anti-imperialism, as long as the empire under discussion was the Russian or, in their
case, the Soviet one. Most of the emigre, or diaspora, histories of the "captive nations" were
inspired by such a view of Russian and Soviet history, from the Ukrainian, Polish, and Baltic
historians on the western borderlands to the influential school of historians of the Turkic and
Muslim peoples of the empire formed around Alexandre Benningsen. Moscow, St. Petersburg, and
Russians generally figured in these narratives primarily as foreign invaders, conquerors, and
exploiters, and, once again, the Russian Empire and its Soviet successor were castigated as
"prisonhouses of nations."21
Long ago Lord Hailey reminded us that "Imperialism is not a word for scholars," but his
warning was not heeded. For more leftist scholars, the British (and to a lesser degree the French)
empire was the paragon or bogeyman of "imperialism;" for those more closely aligned with the
political right, the Russian and Soviet empires provided the obvious target.22 For many of the more
militant scholars and their counterparts in the Cold War-era political establishment, "imperialism"
was tossed about immoderately, but usually carried connotations of expansionism and exploitation.
Taras Hunczak, see above mention; Alexandre Bennigsen, Les
musulmans oublies. L'Islam en Union sovietique (Paris, 1981);
following in Bennigsen's tradition, the most notable "captive
nation" historian for the Turkic peoples has been Helene Carrere
d'Encausse; see her Islam and the Russian Empire. Reform and
Revolution in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988).
21
That imperialism is indeed a highly charged understanding
is clear from the empires to which it is not applied so readily,
the Habsburg and Ottoman.
These empires, perhaps because they
failed earlier in the game or perhaps because they largely had
stopped expanding before the rise of a powerful anti-imperialist
movement and intellectual trend, have been treated as relatively
more benign by most scholars.
For these mostly unarticulated
reasons, imperialism is not held to apply to Habsburg and Ottoman
rule.
22
9
Here the postwar Karpovich-shaped consensus that ignored, consciously or otherwise, the
multinational character of the Russian Empire was a determined effort to fend off the more militant
Cold Warriors among the scholars and near-scholars and preserve some intellectual autonomy and
neutrality in an otherwise highly charged ideological climate.23 Certainly, no mainstream Russian
historian ever defended the empire as such; rather, they chose to write the history of Russia more or
less as the history of a nation-state, or at least one in the making. One of the consequences has been
that two (or rather several) distinct bodies of literature developed, the Russian mainstream and the
non-Russian peripheral skirmishers, largely in isolation from one another.
Because empire has too often immediately evoked imperialism (and all the pejorative
connotations provided by the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial tradition) and the adjectival form
imperial has too often been understood as imperialist,24 it has been difficult for historians of Russia
to separate out a history that acknowledges the multinational diversity and complexity that makes it
something very different from a nation-state,25 even in the more "revised" versions of recent
See Hans Kohn's reminiscences of his conversation with
Karpovich in his preface to Hunczak's volume, cited above.
23
Frederick Cooper has observed a similar troubling
character to the uses of "colonialism" in the mostly left-inspired
histories of the British and French empires.
"The `ism' makes
`colonial' an explicitly political issue, and in the twentieth
century `colonialism' was most often used by critics to demarcate
a set of ideologies and practices they wanted to remove from the
body politic; the word has the value and the inadequacies of most
polemicizing terms." AHR Forum, p. 1527n.
24
A related problem has been the acceptance as self-evident
of a Russian identity or identities by many scholars, a tendency
reinforced by the English-language convention of translating both
russkii (an adjective with primarily ethnic connotations) and
rossiiskii (one with primarily politico-territorial connotations)
as Russian. The consensus has been shaped largely in reaction to
Slavophile projections of national character onto the Orthodox
peasantry.
In fact, we have very few studies of the "identity
politics" of the majority of the population in any part of the
Empire, including, and perhaps above all, the "Russian" peasants
themselves. For a recent study of Russian ecclesial communities
25
10
historians of Britain, France, and Germany.
What history of the Russian Empire there has been
until now has focussed on expansionism in its various forms, annexation, conquest, exploitation,
and oppression, along the lines of the "captive nations" narrative. Recently, as mentioned above,
that agenda has now been expanded to include studies of imperial collapse, most of them, however,
incorporating the liberal and leftist bias that empires are doomed to failure; as a consequence, these
social-science-driven generalizations share a very strong deterministic tone.26 What has been
missing in the history of the Russian Empire is much sense of how the empire worked for as long as
it did, how it evolved over time, how it accommodated the very differing communities and
territories that it came to command, and how those communities and territories themselves were
transformed by their place in the imperial system?27
that begins to move beyond the institutional approach of Gregory
Freeze and the ethnographic emphasis of Linda Ivanits, see Vera
Shevzov's 1994 Yale dissertation, "Popular Orthodoxy in Late
Imperial Russia."
The title of Alexander Motyl's essay in Rudolph and Good,
Nationalism and Empire, is characteristic of this determinism,
"From Imperial Decay to Imperial Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet
Empire in Comparative Perspective."
Motyl asserts that "imperial
decay appears to be inevitable" and "empires, in a word, are
inherently contradictory political relationships; they self
destruct." (40)
26
I plan to outline more concrete research agendas in future
essays, but by way of a preliminary list of topics that might be
reconsidered through the prism of empire I propose: the creation
and evolution of imperial political ideologies and practices (both
in
the
center/s
and
in
the
peripheries
of
imperial
administration), including the contributions of non-Russians to
those ideologies and practices and the formation and styles of the
various imperial elites; the social structures of the empire and
the impact of the timing and implementation of especially agrarian
reforms, military manpower policies, and industrialization on the
formation of various sub-imperial communities, including a
reevaluation of the Emancipation itself; the histories of various
protest movements in the Empire and their roles in the uprisings
and revolutions of the modern period; cultural, educational, and
religious policy, the interactions of various cultures in the
larger narrative of imperial cultural history, processes of
27
11
Federalism in Russian History and Historiography
Is there a way out of the dilemma, which, on the one hand ignores the multinational
character of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and chooses thereby to treat the Russian past as
the history of a nation-state, or, on the other hand, highlights the multinational character of those
two state formations only to condemn them, in the name of national liberation and nationalism, as
anachronistic and thereby inevitably fated to collapse as such? Is there an alternative vision or
visions, in other words, between, or beyond, empire and the nation-state, that is neither an apology
for imperialism nor for knee-jerk national chauvinism?
I propose to locate the building blocks of that alternative vision in an undeveloped, certainly
never realized, and later ruthlessly suppressed historiographical, intellectual and political critique of
the Russian Empire that emerged in the nineteenth century and which might be tentatively called
federalism, with its closely related programs of autonomism and regionalism28 and the more
distantly related pan- ideologies29 in political thought. It is difficult to call federalism a movement
identity formation, maintenance, and transformation; the advent of
mass politics at the beginning of the 20th century and its
reflection in and of the multinational empire. Ironically, much
of this research will probably be conceivable for non-CIS
historians; despite the opening of archives and removal of
Marxist-Leninist ideological constraints, the collapse of the
Soviet academic establishment as well as the supplanting of those
constraints with nationalist historical narratives will make an
"transnational" vantage point very difficult to defend in the
post-Soviet states.
Dmitry von Mohrenschildt, Towards a United States of
Russia: Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstruction of Russia in
the Nineteenth Century (Associated University Press, 1981); Serge
Utechin, Russian Political Thought (New York: Praeger, 1963), pp.
148-52; Georg von Rauch, Russland:
Staatliche Einheit und
nationale Vielfalt: Foederalistische Kraefte und Ideen in der
russischen Geschichte (Munich: Isar-Verlag, 1953).
28
Among the most important pan- movements during the last
decades of the Old Regime were Pan-Turkism, Pan-Islamism, PanSlavism, Pan-Germanism, Zionism, and even, with some important
qualifications, the politics of the Armenian and Ukrainian
29
12
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Imperial political thought, because there was very
little if any communication among the various authors in Siberia, Ukraine, or Poland who penned
the most articulate alternative visions of political organization in the Russian Empire.30 Those
visions, however, shared a sense of a reformed, democratic, either liberal or socialist, multinational
state, with generous provisions and guarantees for local autonomy, but otherwise preserving the
economic power, international great power standing, and cultural diversity of the Russian Empire.
After the expansion of political freedoms wrested from the autocracy in the 1905 Revolution, these
isolated spokesmen began to search for fora and vehicles for collaboration, beginning with the
circle of autonomist deputies in the first Duma, persisting during the Great War31, and, in some
national causes. See, for example, the study by Serge Zenkovsky,
Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy
Press, 1960).
In Siberia, the regionalist movement, or oblastnichestvo,
provided the focus for federalist thinking. See the classic study
by N. M. Iadrintsev, Sibir', kak koloniia (St. Petersburg, 1882);
and the monograph about the Siberian oblastniki by Wolfgang Faust,
Russlands goldener Boden: Der sibirische Regionalismus in der
zweiten Haelfte des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Cologne: Boehlau, 1980).
In Ukraine, Myhailo Drahomanov's writings played a similar role
and strongly influenced the ideology of the Ukrainian SocialRevolutionary Party, among the most constant advocates of
federalism among the socialist parties; see the special issue
edited by Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Mykhaylo Drahomanov: A Symposium and
Selected Writings, Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and
Sciences in the U.S. 2, no. 1 (3) (Spring 1952). Among the Jewish
parties, the Bund, and among the Armenians, the Armenian SocialDemocrats, also stood for a Russian version of the Austro-Marxist
solution to the "national question," which incorporated some
features of federalist thinking. In Poland, the party eventually
associated with Pilsudski also favored federalism, see M. K.
Dziewanowski, Joseph Pilsudski: A European Federalist (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 1969).
30
See the memoirs of Karl Tiander, Das Erwachen Osteuropas
(Vienna and Leipzig, 1934) for some little known episodes in the
history of the federalist cause; also von Rauch, Russland,
chapters VII-VIII.
31
13
important sense, culminating pyrrhically in the Congress of Oppressed Peoples of the Russian
Empire convened in Kiev in September 1917 (and historiographically and politically overshadowed
by the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd a few weeks later).32 Even then, the perhaps utopian vision
of federalist arrangements persisted in the several schemes of pan-Turkists, in the short-lived
Transcaucasian Federation of 1918, and in efforts led by the Ukrainian Civil War-era governments
to forge a common anti-Bolshevik front with the Don Cossacks, the Siberian Provisional
Government, and other proto-state formations on the peripheries of the former Russian empire.33
Unlike later Bolshevik experiments with federalism, or Soviet pseudo-federalism as its
critics preferred to call it, which saw the concessions to national culture or administrative autonomy
as both a reluctant compromise and at best a transitional stage toward a more unified, centralized
"international" political system, the liberal and moderate socialist version recommended above was
far more willing to live with a messier political constitution that preserved a range of ethnic,
regional, national, religious, and social sub-systems and far less inclined to value centralism and
unification. The liberal and moderate socialist versions of the federalist vision most closely
Until recently only scattered references have been
available to this remarkable gathering of the leading intellectual
and political figures of the non-Russian democratic camp. See S.
M. Dimanshtein, Revoliutsiia i natsional'nyi vopros, vol. 3
(Moscow, 1930), pp. 443-450.
Recently, two Ukrainian scholars,
Oleksandr Reent and Bohdan Andrusyshyn, have gathered much of the
contemporary press coverage of the congress in Z'izd povolennykh
narodov (Kiev, 1993). The prominent Ukrainian historian Myhailo
Hrushevs'kyi, by that time the chairman of the Central Ukrainian
Rada that was claiming to exercise authority over an autonomous
Ukraine, was elected honorary chairman of the Congress of Peoples.
32
On the pan-Turkic schemes, see Richard Pipes, The
Formation of the Soviet Union (Camrbirdge: Harvard University
Press, 1964), ch. IV; on the Transcaucasian Federation, see Firuz
Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia (New York: 1951), ch.
IV-VII; on Ukrainian efforts during the Civil War, see Anna
Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto:
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1995).
33
14
approximate American political writing on this topic. Most American scholars have focused on
political and administrative aspects of the relationship between two levels of government, usually
understood as a center and regions. For federalism to be meaningful, each level of government
must be assured some area of competence over which it exercises competence. Although most of
these writings presume a democratic system of government,34 they can nonetheless offer many
insights, if approached with caution, to the workings of the pre-modern Russian imperial state.
Because successive Soviet regimes insisted that the political system over which they
prevailed was federalist (and their critics charged them with masking Soviet imperialism as
federalism) and because earlier (and even more recent) versions proved to be failures, federalism as
such has not enjoyed a particularly favorable reputation.
(Furthermore, Soviet federalism
recognized ethnicity or nationality as the key organizing principle, one not accepted in most western
political scientists' definitions or, more inmportantly, in the operation of the Russian Empire itself.)
That generally unfavorable reputation has been reinforced by ruthless criticisms from both the
centralizing unifiers35 and the nationalist separatists.
In other words, we should not delude
See William Riker, Federalism: Origin, Operation,
Significance (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964), esp. p. 11;
Daniel Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of
Alabama, 1987).
Riker distinguishes further between centralized
and peripheralized federal systems.
I thank Steven Solnick for
his suggestions and insights deriving from his own study of
contemporary federal relations in the Russian Federation.
34
Even during the 1920s when the Soviet Union was promoting
nation-building and claimed to working out a "higher" and more
just form of Soviet federalism, its ideologists lashed out at all
other
versions
as
neo-Kantian
idealist,
bourgeois,
and,
ultimately, counter-revolutionary. See, for example, the critique
of Austro-Marxist proposals for extraterritorial cultural autonomy
as neo-Kantian, in S. Semkovskii, Marksizm i natsional'naia
problema, I (Melitopol', 1924); and the attack on nineteenthcentury federalist historians by M. A. Rubakh, "Federalisticheskie
teorii v istorii Rossii," in M. Pokrovskii, ed., Russkaia
istoricheskaia literatura v klassovom osveshchenii (M 1927, 1930),
vol. 2, pp. 3-120.
35
15
ourselves into thinking that federalism was ever more than a marginal phenomenon in Russian or
Soviet political thought; rather, the mainstream remained relentlessly unitary in its vision of the
Russian Empire, regardless of Kadet, Octobrist, Social-Democratic, or Social-Revolutionary Party
affiliation.36 But the fact that both sides have attacked federalism so vigorously identifies it as an
alternative path that both, for their own reasons, found threatening to their centralizing or separatist
agendas; it also identifies a historiographical vantage point from which to critically view the two
competing visions for how to organize the political space of the Russian Empire.37
The most sensitive critics of federalism were the Kadets,
whose writings were more directly political and legal in their
focus.
See, for example, F. F. Kokoshkin, Avtonomiia i
federatsiia (Petrograd, 1917); and B. E. Nol'de, "Edinstvo i
nerazdel'nost' Rossii," in Ocherki russkogo gosudarstvennogo prava
(Petersburg, 1911), pp. 223-554. Their objections centered on the
impracticability of anything approaching genuine equality in the
Russian Empire given the preponderant imbalance sustained by the
ethnic Russian majority; several Kadets nonetheless advocated a
devolution of power from St. Petersburg to regional centers, but
did not recognize ethnicity as an organizing principle, rather
territorial divisions.
Most of the rest of federalist thinking
was highly anti-political in its obsession with the abolition of
the autocracy.
Federalist and regionalist thinkers, while
offering much evidence of the asymmetry in power and its
deleterious consequences for the national welfare, generally
reduced the solutions to those problems to regional self-rule and
devolution of power from the center to the regions or local
communities.
Beyond that, they were little concern with the
institutional or legal details of the new relationships.
The
apolitical, or anti-political, character of much federalist
thinking in the Russian Empire is brought into clearer focus by
contrasting it with the classics of American and German
federalism, including The Federalist Papers and the writings of
Carl Schmitt; see the special edition of Telos (Spring 1992),
which includes a translation and discussion of Schmitt's
"Constitutional Theory of Federation."
36
In distinguishing the practices of the autocratic Imperial
state from its Soviet successor, we observe an irony: whereas the
Imperial ideology vehemently denied its federalism while de facto
preserving many important sub-communities and autonomies virtually
until its end, the Soviet regime officially proclaimed itself to
be federalist (or a commonwealth of socialist states after World
War II), all the while seeking a degree of uniformization of
37
16
Even if we acknowledge that federalist alternatives remained marginal, underdeveloped,
and even suppressed in the political thought of the Russian Empire, I nonetheless contend that such
a perspective is not only justified but that it contains profoundly revisionist potential as we look
back on the Imperial (and Soviet) past from our post-Soviet vantage points. Among the sources for
the renewed interest in empire that I listed at the beginning of this essay were several that revolved
around questions of transnational politics, more sceptical attitudes about state sovereignties, and the
need to reconcile liberal theories of individual rights with the rights and power of groups and
communities. Contemporary social theorists today are much less wedded to unitary models of
states or societies than their predecessors; rather, they are sympathetic to approaches that
acknowledge what Michael Mann has even called the "federal" character of extensive preindustrial
societies, but even view modern societies as asymmetrical alliances, as "loose confederations of
stratified allies."38
The Soviet Union, and empires generally, have been recognized as not
conforming to the model European nation-state, usually France, that has been paraded as the natural
endpoint of political development in classical European political theory.39 And curiously, the
social structures and cultural patterns unprecedented in Russian
history.
But while the Imperial ideologies and central bureaucratic
institutions shaped all-Russian opposition parties that were
primarily unitary in their vision, perhaps even the pseudo-federal
institutions of the Soviet state and the practices of ethnic
privileging in the national republics shaped the opposition
movement to that regime in its federal image as well.
On the
consequences of Soviet-era practices on post-Soviet nationalist
politics, see Katherine Verdery, "Nationalism and National
Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania," Slavic Review 52: 2 (Summer
1993): 179-203; and Iuri Slezkine, "The USSR as Communal
Apartment," Slavic Review 53: 2 (summer 1994): 414-452.
38
Mann, Sources, ppl 10, 14.
See J. P. Nettl, "The state as a conceptual variable,"
World Politics (July 1968): 559-592, for some insightful
reflections on the relevance of continental European theory and
the impact of post-World War II, postcolonial states on the
concept of the state. See also Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its
39
17
Russian Empire, despite the fact that it encompassed over its history a broad variety of political
relationships (with the Emperor at various times a constitutional monarch in Finland and Poland,
with recognition of special corporate rights for Baltic nobles, and many other such "anomalies"),
official autocratic ideology insisted on the unity of the state,40 official policy set as its aim
uniformity and standardization, and thereby chose to actively ignore the diversity that it in fact
presided over and vehemently excluded federalism as such from its political thought.41 In fact, the
experience of the Russian Empire falls neatly into the literature that is emerging about the
"bargains" that central elites struck after conquest or annexation with coopted peripheral elites over
the division of power in early modern Europe.42
Nature, Development and Prospects (Stanford University Press,
1990), esp. ch. 9. For a more recent set of reflections on these
topics, see the Summer 1993 ("Reconstructing Nations and States")
and Spring 1995 ("What Future for the State?") issues of Daedalus.
Soviet historical practice generally reinforced this
misleading sense of unity by removing, for example, the histories
of Poland and Finland, certainly the most glaring anomalies in the
Imperial constitution, from the officially designated "History of
the USSR." What is perhaps less understandable is why non-Soviet
historians largely replicated this intellectual division of labor.
Most Russian historians have not considered Polish or Finnish
history to be integral parts of nineteenth-century Imperial
Russia; of course, this makes their own teaching and research more
manageable from one point of view; but it also allows them to
indulge in overly simplified generalizations about the unity of
Imperial Russian political culture and institutions.
40
On the complicated relationship of parts and whole in the
Russian Empire, see Nol'de, "Edinvsto i nerazdel'nost' Rossii,"
op. cit.; on the stubborn refusal to acknowledge that diversity in
official ideology, see Marc Raeff, "Uniformity, Diversity, and the
Imperial Administration in the Reign of Catherine II," in Hans
Lemberg, Peter Nitsche, and Erwin Oberlaender, eds., Osteuropa in
Geschichte und Gegenwart (Cologne: Boehlau, 1977), pp. 97-113.
41
See Karen Barkey on Ottoman state-building, From Bandits
to Bureaucrats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and
Hendrik
Spruyt,
The
Sovereign
State
and
Its
Competitors
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
42
18
If we turn away from official pronouncements and stated policy to the realm of everyday
practice, we find here too a toleration, if not an occasional encouragment, of multiple loyalties and
situational identities in the empire that we recognize as very characteristic of polyethnic states
generally.43 So, a Baltic German elite, characterized by John Armstrong as a mobilized diaspora,44
maintained its own local political culture and privileges at home, while generations faithfully served
the Emperor as military commanders, diplomats, and governor-generals throughout the Empire.
This appeared to be the normal pattern for peacetime; the position of the Baltic Germans came
under serious threat for the first time during the Great War, which was waged largely as a Slavic
crusade against the Teutonic barbarians and coincided with the rise of popular nationalisms in the
Empire. What wartime policies changed was precisely the considerable space for play with a
variety of identities; war narrowed the definitions of loyalty and transformed some subjects into
"natural" enemies.45 The stakes of assuming one ethnic identity or another, when one even had the
chance to do so, were much higher because the consequences of assuming the "wrong" identity
could be arrest, confiscation of property, deportation, or murder. But this, to repeat, was not the
norm in the Empire's ethnic and national relations; rather, the transformations brought by the war
Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Blackwell,
1986), pp. 150-152.
43
See his "Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas," American
Political Science Review 70 (1976): 393-408; and his "Mobilized
Diaspora in Tsarist Russia: The Case of the Baltic Germans," in
Jeremy Azrael, ed., Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New
York: Praeger, 1978), pp. 63-104.
44
What I describe here for Germans could be replicated, with
important qualifications, for Poles, Jews, Turkic peoples
generally, and Ukrainians. Each people became suspect as "their"
homeland declared war against Russia or because certain of their
"co-nationals" fought on the side of the Central Powers. On the
Germans during the Great War, see Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die
Deutschen im Zarenreich (Stuttgart, 1986); on the Jews, see HeinzDietrich Loewe, Antisemitismus und reaktionaere Utopie (Hamburg,
1978).
45
19
serve to highlight the pre-war arrangements that were rarely consciously articulated, but were
belatedly acknowledged by postwar memoirists reflecting perhaps nostalgically on prewar
conditions.
Where a "federalist" approach to the history of the Empire might improve over the existing
alternatives is in the sensitivity to the diversity and contingency (but not arbitrariness) of religious,
ethnic, ethno-religious, political, and social communities, rather than viewing all these multifaceted
formations as anomalies in the context of more "modern" ethnic nations, for example; in other
words, while not ignoring ethno-religious communities, it would not automatically privilege these
identities as always the primary or exclusive ones that a community might hold.46
Lest I be suspected here of using federalism as a mask for an unbounded eclecticism of
method, I shall try to outline some of the guiding principles for such an approach. Above all,
historians of the Russian Empire must be comparativists; it would be fine and good if they had
some sense of how other empires worked, both contemporary ones and those from other historical
periods, but far more important is the need to compare Imperial relations with a range of subimperial communities, be they religious, estate-based, or ethno-linguistic ones (and this means
An additional intellectual objection that might be raised
against my advocacy of a federalist approach is that I might be
guilty of projecting American values and utopian thinking onto on
an inhospitable environment, but this argument veers too close
(for my comfort) to static or essentialist visions of "Russian"
political culture whose coherence I hope to have at least somewhat
destabilized by the preceding discussion.
A more substantial
objection might come from those who would argue that federalism
has never worked because it never could, given the Russians'
demographic and cultural preponderance, as the Kadets did; or that
successful federations were crafted "from below" by largely equal
and homogeneous units, such as the United States of America or the
Swiss Confederation.
It is altogether another thing to forge a
federation "from above" by reforming an existing empire. Although
the Civil War-era efforts led by Ukraine to build a federal,
democratic Russia from below foundered on several counts, such
arrangements can not be ruled out indefinitely among various
constituent political formations of the former USSR.
46
20
restoring Poland and Finland to the Imperial past for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).47
In other words, the considerable scholarship that has been generated by historians of the nonRussian peoples should be "mainstreamed" into the teaching and research of Russian history, which
should no longer treat the Russian empire as if it were made up exclusively of ethnic Russians (a
"nation" that did not exist for most of Imperial history and whose character was highly contested in
the modern and Soviet periods). The two bodies of literature that have largely existed and
developed in isolation from one another should be brought back into dialogue. It would be
relatively easy to compile a new history of the Empire by simply adding up the existing histories of
the nations that constituted it, but too many of those national histories are shaped by a sense of
special pleading, that their history was unique in the Empire (and usually uniquely tragic). This is
easier to claim when the historian knows little or nothing about the histories of other communities
in the Empire, which, unfortunately, is too often the case. Such an approach also fails to give
adequate consideration to the dynamics and evolution of the various relationships that the center
engaged in with its borderlands or colonies or peripheries.48
Nor is it sufficient to proclaim comparativism; for what to compare, we might well turn to
some of the insightful work in historical sociology, especially that on state- and nation-formation.49
In a similar vein, Alexander J. Motyl called for a
comparativist's perspective in rethinking Soviet nationality
policy; see his "`Sovietology in One Country' or Comparative
Nationality Studies?" Slavic Review 48:1 (Spring 1989): 85-88.
47
See Gerhard Simon's critique of the seriatim approach to
nationality policy in his Nationalism and Policy Toward the
Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship
to Post-Stalinist Society, transl. Karen and Oswald Forster
(Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991), p. 11. Frederick Cooper
warns of another related danger, namely, assuming that "the
histories of all parts of the world that experienced colonial rule
can be reduced to that one essence." AHR Forum, p. 1527n.
48
In particular, I have in mind Michael Mann, The Sources of
Social Power; and Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
49
21
Here too the existing literatures on the communities of the Russian Empire have pursued very
different agendas in relative isolation from one another. Much of the recent work of social history
for especially the late Imperial period has focused on class-formation and particularly the
subordinate classes in Imperial society; it has been typically driven by a marxisante sympathy for
the economically oppressed in its critical orientation toward autocracy and capitalism. Most of the
studies traditionally written about national and ethnic communities have, not surprisingly, identified
ethnic oppression as the defining moment in their critique of autocratic rule and have been less
concerned with criticizing capitalism's inroads into the Imperial political economy than in tracing
the nationalist elites' (usually some parts of the intelligentsia) bringing the nation to its "conscious"
existence.50 The "captive nations" narrative typically shaped a more conservative politics in this
literature.
There have been some heroic efforts, primarily from the left end of the political spectrum, to
bridge the gap between class and ethnicity as organizing principles,51 much as Benedict Anderson,
Eric Hobsbawm, and Miroslav Hroch, among others, have sought to apply a historical-materialist
analysis to the phenomenon of nationalism. These very promising directions for histories of the
Most of the preferred narratives in this mode
paradoxically adopt an almost Leninist-vanguard model for this
"coming to national consciousness" of the "unconscious" masses,
while many of the most recent social historians of class have
downplayed the Leninist model for a more "spontaneous" coming to
consciousness of at least the urban working class.
50
See, for example, Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune,
1918-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution
(Princeton, 1972); and his "Rethinking Social Identities: Class
and Nationality," ch. 1 in The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism,
Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993);
and John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National
Movement in the Nineteenth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1988); and his "The National and the Social in the Ukrainian
Revolution of 1917-20: The Historiographical Agenda," Archiv fuer
Sozialgeschichte 34 (1994): 95-110.
51
22
various protest movements of the empire that integrate class and ethnicity nonetheless share a
hostile orientation to not just the autocracy, but to the empire as such; furthermore, they remain
shaped to a large degree, and understandably so, by the oppositionist political parties whose
programs, newspapers, and leaders' memoirs have provided the richest sources for such studies.52
To date there has been little effort to tie this discussion of the emergence of collective action and
protest movements to another growing body of sophisticated studies that grapple with the evolution
of imperial institutions in the late autocracy and the ways in which those institutions might have
structured communities and identities through their policies' intended or unintended consequences:
conscription, taxation, religion, education and local government, to name only a few of the most
obvious spheres of state-community interaction.53
The aim of these ventures into comparative historical sociology should be to capture and
preserve as many perspectives as is reasonable from the various corners and levels of community in
the Empire, a version of Mikhail Bakhtin's polyphony or heteroglossia (raznogolosost'),54 so that the
On the larger consequences for the reliance on sources
generated exclusively or primarily by the political parties, see
Steven J. Zipperstein, "The Politics of Relief: The Transformation
of Russian Jewish Communal Life During the First World War," in
The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914-21, vol. IV of Studies in
Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, ed. by Jonathan Frankel (Oxford,
1988), esp. pp. 22-24; and Roman Szporluk's critical review of the
conference volume edited by Taras Hunczak, The Ukraine, 1917-1921:
A Study in Revolution in Annals of the Adademy of Ukrainian Arts
and Sciences in the United States, 14 (1978-80): 267-270.
52
For an innovative effort to tie the literatures on protest
movements to that on state-building, see Pierre Birnbaum, States
and Collective Action: The European Experience (Cambridge, 1988).
53
See M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene
Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984); and The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, transl. by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press,
1981).
A nearly contemporary intellectual trend that also
grappled with how to preserve the multiple communities of the
Russian Empire was Eurasianism.
Many of its leading proponents
appeared, however, to share the apolitical, or anti-political
54
23
voice(s) of the Imperial center are brought together with the voices of sub-imperial communities.
This appeal to polyphony should, at the same time, not conjure up some anarchistic equality of
voices, because more often than not the relationships between center and non-center were
asymmetrical in power terms, in favor of the center.55 But neither should that preponderance of
power be assumed in all cases and in all spheres nor can it assumed to have been static. Here again,
federalism seems an appropriate philosophical-methodological stance, even if we judge that its
chances for success in an empire so heavily dominated by one "nation," the Russians, however we
define them, were generally very slim or, relatedly, if we likewise judge the prospects for a
genuinely federal system to emerge out of the Russian Federation or a confederation from the
former CIS states. Any expectation of a greater chance today for the creation of a federation than
after the collapse of the Romanov empire in 1917 does not mean an endorsement of such an
arrangement any more than it ought suggest that federalism is more "true" than it was before; it
merely signals that federation is an alternative worth taking into consideration.56
A federation is by its very composition an unstable arrangement;57 it can maintain the
thinking of most of the federalists, preferring some loosely
articulated authoritarian regime. For the concern with multiple
communities, see E. Trubetskoi, Evropa i chelovechestvo (Sofia,
1920); and K probleme russkogo samopoznaniia (Evraziiskoe
knigoizdatesl'vo, 1927).
Bakhtin warns us that the authoritarian voice (in this
case the imperial perspective; in his case, the avtoritarnoe slovo
of official culture) generally strives to exclude dialogue.
55
William Riker defended his decision to include the Soviet
Union in his list of federalisms, "the mere fact that its
federalism fails to prevent tyranny should not lead to casting it
out of the class of federalisms." Federalism, p. 40.
56
Incidentally, Anthony Smith argues that the nation-state,
too, is by its very definition, an unstable composite, with
alternate pulls toward ethnos and territoriality. See The Ethnic
Origins of Nations (Blackwell, 1986), p. 150.
57
24
balance established at its foundation, it can evolve in the direction of a more unitary state, or it can
dissolve into independent political units. In other words, federal-like systems do not evolve in any
regular direction. Federalism, then, also mitigates against the popular organic, and especially
biological, tropes that are often evoked to characterize the changes of nations and nation states:
birth, awakening, springtime, maturity.58 If we need to employ metaphors from some science,
geology would seem more appropriate. Geological change has no telos, but it is no less a change
for that. It is characteristically described as occurring on several layers and in response to pressures
from layers above and below; such pressures can even produce qualitative changes in materials.59
In abandoning the biological tropes that posit not only a unidirectionally evolving organism,
but one that has relatively fixed, "natural" boundaries (with the natural world; with fellow
organisms), a federalist approach would direct our attention to the processes whereby boundaries
are constantly negotiated and maintained through active agency. There is nothing particularly
natural or fixed about those boundaries that separate communities from one another. Here the
seminal work of the anthropologist Fredrik Barth60 could be adapted to insure that scholars avoid
reifying class or ethnic differences as the sources generated by oppositionist political parties would
often have us believe, but also to reinsert the state and its institutions and cultures into the lives of
See Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1973), for a suggestive study of the logic of
biological metaphors and the ties between national history and
biography, as well as the Bildungsroman.
58
Alfred Rieber has borrowed geological metaphors in
describing Imperial Russia as "The Sedimentary Society," Russian
History 16: 2-4 (1989): 353-376.
In a similar spirit, Michel
Foucault preferred the metaphors of archeology as combining
geology and history in his The Archeology of Knowledge, transl. A.
M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
59
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).
60
25
the communities that that state presumes to speak for and rule over.61 If we understand both states
and societies as federal in their constitution, rather than falling prey to their preferred selfprojections as unitary and unified, fixed and clearly articulated in their identities, we shall be more
sensitive to the boundaries of those entities, to the process of their contestation and maintenance,
and to those individuals who learned how to cross the boundaries, usually to their advantage.62 We
might also identify groups, institutions, and practices that emerge out of the interstitial spaces that
such federally-imagined states and societies harbor. In applying this federalist perspective, then,
historians might well restore some of the sense of the complexities and diversity of the Russian
Empire's organizing and functioning, the Russian Empire as an empire, that have been silenced or
muted by the rise of the nation-state model during the nineteenth century and its apparent triumph
since then in the social sciences and humanities.
Mark von Hagen
Columbia University
For some fascinating suggestions of how to develop Barth's
insights to help elucidate new research problems, see Katherine
Verdery's "Ethnicity, nationalism, and state-making:
Ethnic
groups and boundaries: past and future," in Hans Vermeulen and
Cora Govers, eds., The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond `Ethnic
Groups and Boundaries' (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994), pp. 33-58.
61
Again Frederick Cooper, reflecting on the career of
Leopold Senghor, offers insight into a problem that has
considerable resonance for Russian history: "in between is as much
a place to be at home as any other." AHR Forum, p. 1539.
62
26