Empire

reformers. Another project aimed at increasing Jewish ‘productiveness’ was a programme to encourage Jews to take up farming, in particular in the sparsely populated region north of the Black Sea. Once again, the policy had at best limited effects. A more important change was Nicholas’s abolition of the Jewish kahal (autonomous community) in 1844. Nonetheless, in matters of family life and religious practices, Russia’s Jewish communities were only marginally affected by government policy even at the end of Nicholas’s reign.8

Expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia

Russia, as we have seen, had extended its rule into Asia (Siberia) already in the seventeenth century. By Alexander I’s reign, Russian rule stretched all the way to the New World: Russian settlements in Kodiak and Sitka (Alaska) were founded in 1784 and 1799 respectively. In both Siberia and Alaska, Russia was primarily interested in furs and the actual Russian presence was quite sparse (some 800 Russians in Alaska, for example, in the 1830s).9 It was from Siberia that Russia gradually extended its rule into what is now known as Central Asia. The 1840s saw skirmishes between Russian troops and Kazakhs, a nomadic Turkic people. But the real push into Central Asia was to come in the second half of the nineteenth century.10

In the eighteenth century Russia’s southern frontier between the Caspian and Black seas had gradually reached the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. Indeed, Peter the Great had sent troops to the region to fight Persian and Ottoman forces. But real Russian control over the Caucasus was achieved only in the nineteenth century. In 1801 the Christian kingdom of Georgia was annexed to the empire and in the next few decades the Russian frontier extended southward to include the Armenian capital, Erevan. In both cases, the local Christian elites generally welcomed Russian rule. By mid-century a number of Muslim nationalities including Chechens and Daghestanis found themselves under Russian rule, despite their intense resistence. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims left their homeland, often pushed out by local Christians, and emigrated to the Ottoman Empire rather than live under Christian Russian

8 For more detail on Jews in the Russian Empire under Nicholas I, see Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1 825 –1 85 5

(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983).

9A. Kappeler, Russland als Vielvolkerreich¨. Enstehung-Geschichte-Zerfall (Munich: C. H. Beck,

1992), p. 170.

10On this early period of Russian-Central Asian contact, see Edward Allworth, ‘Encounter’, in E. Allworth (ed.), Central Asia: 1 3 0 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview, 3rd edn (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 1–59.

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rule. Even after their departure, the Caucasus remained one of the empire’s most diverse in religion, language and ethnicity.11

After 1863: the birth of ‘Russification’

Polish insurrection of 1 863

Thus far we have spoken much more of imperial expansion than of ‘nationalities policy’ per se. In fact, it is difficult to discern any one consistent ‘policy’ towards the diverse assembly of non-Russian peoples during this period. St Petersburg was far more concerned while keeping order and collecting taxes than in effecting any major changes on the lands it had conquered. In a sense, this would always be the case: for major programmes of social and ethnic engineering, one must wait for the Soviet period. And yet, the inklings of a more activist nationalities policy do appear in the aftermath of the Polish January uprising of 1863. The uprising, taking place amidst the unsettled situation of the Great Reforms (serf emancipation had been announced two years earlier but had almost nowhere been put into effect), shook the imperial government, including Tsar Alexander II himself. Clearly, the Poles had not reconciled themselves to Russian rule. Nor had they given up the idea of Polish cultural hegemony in the Western Provinces. Tsarist policy in the post-1863 decades would aim to secure the Russian position (militarily and administratively) in the Kingdom of Poland, or as it was now officially called, the ‘Vistula Land’, while limiting Catholic and Polish influences in the Western Provinces. This policy, both in this region and throughout the empire, has been described as ‘Russification’.

Birth of Russification

In an influential article, Edward C. Thaden described three types of Russification: ‘unplanned, administrative, cultural’.12 Unplanned Russification would be the more or less natural spread of Russian culture and language. Administrative Russification refers to the efforts of St Petersburg to enforce centralisation and the use of Russian language throughout the empire. Finally,

11 Muriel Atkin, ‘Russian Expansion in the Caucasus to 1813’, in Michael Rywkin (ed.), Russian Colonial Expansion to 1 91 7 (London: Mansell Publishing, 1988), pp. 139–87. For more detail on the two major Christian peoples of the Caucasus, see Ronald Grigor Suny,

Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1993) and The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

12‘Introduction’ in Edward C. Thaden (ed.), Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland,

1 85 5 –1 91 4 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 8–9.

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Empire

cultural Russification would be the attempt to assimilate non-Russian ethnic groups through government measures such as Russian-language schools, the army, prohibitions on speaking or publishing in certain languages and the like. After 1863, a push for more administrative and cultural centralisation certainly grew. Since Russian officials were pushing this centralisation, it was often tinged – at the very least – with Russifying elements. Even from a completely practical viewpoint, efforts to introduce reforms such as elected city governments and zemstva (rural organs of limited self-government) forced the issue of what language should be used in their deliberations. The same question arose when new schools were proposed. In areas of mixed nationality, none of these questions were easily answered and Russian officialdom often erred on the side of the ‘reigning language’, Russian. The development of modern means of communication only complicated matters further. In 1862 St Petersburg was linked to Warsaw by rail, thereby connecting the Russian railway network with that of the rest of Europe. What language to use in telegraph offices and the railroads? The ‘logical’ – or at least easiest – answer was Russian.

‘Cultural Russification’ is probably best exemplified by policy in the Western Provinces. The uprising of 1863 had convinced St Petersburg that the local Polish nobility and clergy could not be trusted. In the Western Provinces every effort was made to stymy the spread of Polish culture and to weaken the Polish land-owning class economically. Polish estates were saddled with a special tax and Poles could not acquire land here other than by inheritance. Meanwhile, Russian landowners and peasants were offered special incentives to settle here. There was even an effort to introduce Russian into certain Catholic churches in the Belarusian area. Government schools taught only in Russian, though a thriving ‘underground’ school net may have educated nearly as many youngsters in Polish literacy.

Ukrainians and Belarusians were not allowed schools in their native tongue, and censorship did not allow most publications in those languages. To quote the minister of the interior, Petr Valuev, in a notorious circular of 1863: ‘A separate Little Russian [Ukrainian] language never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist.’ No tsarist official could deny the existence of a separate Lithuanian language, but publishing in Lithuanian was also prohibited unless the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet was used. Since a large percentage of literate Lithuanians were Catholic priests, such an alphabet reform could not be accepted. Instead, Lithuanian-language publications were smuggled in from neighbouring East Prussia. Poles continued to publish in their own language, but censorship was considerably stricter in Warsaw and the Western Provinces than elsewhere.

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To get around this fact, a Polish weekly of conservative-liberal views, Kraj, was founded in St Petersburg in the 1880s, where it continued to be published well into the twentieth century.13

Just as Russifying policies were being applied to Russia’s Western and Polish Provinces, Pan-Slav ideas were gaining popularity in Russian society. While Pan-Slavism had little direct influence on official policy, the government could not entirely ignore the popular desire for some kind of tutelary relationship between the Russian state and other Slavic peoples, in particular in the Balkans. Still, Pan-Slavism played little role in the formulation of domestic policy. Most officials (and the emperor himself ) found the Pan-Slavs’ effusions about Slavic brotherhood abstract, unreal and a bit silly in light of the undeniably Slavic Poles’ recent anti-Russian behaviour.14

Baltic Provinces and Finland

The Baltic Provinces were also subject to various Russifying measures, in particular in the century’s final decades. The ethnic situation here was complex: the German ruling classes found their position challenged by rising Latvian and Estonian peasant nationalism. Despite the loyalty of the Baltic Germans, St Petersburg could not ignore the national-cultural demands of Latvians and Estonians. Thus the use of Latvian and Estonian in schools and private organisations was far less circumscribed than, say, Polish. At the same time, Lutheran Estonians and Latvians were encouraged to convert to Orthodoxy and, once converted, found it impossible to return to their original faith. A desire to reduce local privileges while assuring Russian control over the Baltic Sea littoral led to the whittling away of German privileges in courts, administration and education. Most spectacularly, the German university in Dorpat (now Tartu) – whose founding pre-dated Russian rule there – was transformed in the 1890s into the Russian university of Iurev, as the city was renamed. In the end, Russifying efforts in the Baltic Provinces not only did not strengthen Russian culture there but alienated all affected nationalities – Germans, Estonians, Latvians – from tsarist rule. Similar, but far less justified, centralising policies were introduced in the Grand Duchy of Finland around the turn of the century. Particularly resented were the introduction of Russian as the language of official business and the attempt to subject Finns to the Russian

13On Russification in the Kingdom of Poland and the Western Provinces after 1863, see Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1 863 –1 91 4 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996).

14On this movement see Michael Boro Petrovich, The Emergence of Russian Panslavism 1 85 6– 1 87 0 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956).

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