peasant commune was itself proto-communist. Populist ideas took a different turn where the commune was less established, as in Ukraine, for example. Ukraine had played a crucial role in Russian national history, providing Muscovy’s ideologues in the seventeenth century and many of its civil servants in the eighteenth. As Karamzin initiated the new trend toward a Moscow-centric history of the empire during the 1810s and the 1820s, as Romantic ideas reached St. Petersburg during the 1830s and the 1840s, and as the Crimean War brought a sharper Russian nationalism during the 1850s, Ukrainian intellectuals in Kharkiv and Kyiv began to see the Ukrainians and the Russians as separate peoples. The poetry of Taras Shevchenko confirmed not only the distinctive Ukrainian language but the definable place of Ukraine between Russia and Poland. The partitions of Poland had brought right-bank Ukraine into the Russian Empire, and during the 1860s and the 1870s not a few members of the Polish gentry (e.g., the historian Volodymyr Antonovych) chose Ukrainian populism and indeed Ukrainian identity. This Polish influence was cited in the Valuev Decree of 1863, which restricted the use of the Ukrainian language. The 1876 Ems Decree, which prohibited the publication of Ukrainian books, induced many Ukrainian intellectuals to emigrate to Austrian Galicia. The most important example was perhaps Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Antonovych’s student, and the greatest historian of Ukraine.
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Politicized Ukrainians in Kyiv generally stayed on the left, and anticipated that national questions would be resolved within a reformed Russian state.
Similar patterns soon emerged in other Christian national revivals, such as the Georgian and the Armenian. Georgia boasted an ancient civilization, a solid state tradition, and a mature national literature. Its position as a weak Christian country in the Caucasus had moved its nobles to accept Russian overlordship in 1783. Although some of them had conspired against Russia in 1832, a generation later the Georgian nobility was a model service class. Its traditional position was eroding because there were now many wealthy peasant farmers, Armenian merchants were extending their hold on the better districts of cities, and Russian bureaucrats were arriving in large numbers. A new Georgian intelligentsia, educated in St. Petersburg, tried to protect the endangered Georgian language during the 1870s. Insofar as this tendency was political, it involved no more than vaguely socialist leanings mixed with the hope for national autonomy in the empire. The Armenians were also Christian but had their own church; they too had a historically prominent class, but it was the merchants; and they were even more dispersed among Muslims than the Georgians. The Armenians had good reasons for being loyal to the empire, because they stood to lose much in any conflict with the Georgians or the Muslims. For the Armenians, as for many other established national groups in the borderlands, the use of national questions by the center after 1881 was an unwelcome sign of future trouble.
NATIONAL OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, 1881-1905
Alexander III, who ascended to the throne after his father’s assassination in 1881, was more amenable to Russian nationalist ideas than his predecessors. During his reign, national ideas were no longer associated with revolution (as during the early nineteenth century) or with reform (as during the middle of the nineteenth century), but rather with reaction. The 1878 trial of Vera Zasulich for attempting to kill the police chief of St. Petersburg had discredited reform even before another socialist murdered the tsar three years later. During the 1880s, Russian nationalism was an updated and secularized version of the old claim that the Russian nation existed by virtue of its Orthodoxy and its submission to the tsar. Under Alexander III and his successor, Nicholas II, a secular conception of the superiority of the Russians supplemented the traditional divine right to rule. Rule was by now an end in itself, since both external crusades and internal reforms were no longer seriously considered. Cultural Russification was advanced as policy on the grounds that Russians would be better subjects than others, but the tsars ruled in the meantime by turning one group against another. There was a shadow of liberalism here, because the beneficiaries were often peasant nations oppressed for centuries by a traditional gentry elite. In this situation, the peasant nations had, at least for a time, some grounds for optimism: the non-Russian gentry and the Russians themselves had very little.
The most important exponent of this improvi-sational pessimism was Konstantin Pobedonostsev. As over- procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905, Pobedonostsev discriminated against Old Believers, religious minorities, and Jews. He was most influential, however, as tutor to the last two tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II. He came closest to direct power in the aftermath of Alexander II’s assassination, when he drafted the manifesto that delayed reform in the name of the people. For Pobedonostsev, this was no contradiction, since absolutism was Russian and therefore represented the Russian people. Pobedonostsev claimed that Russia was the greatest of nations, and the others were the froth of foreign intrigues. In practice, however, he knew that non-Russians did not share this view and would not wish to become Russian. His policies were grounded in historical temporizing, in the hope that suppressing rival nations now would allow a Russian victory later. Pessimism of this kind was common by the 1880s. One could still find exceptional figures, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who still believed in universal missions. Yet officers and bureaucrats were steeped in a nationalism more like Pobedonostsev’s, facing as they did in practice the problems he perceived from on high. Especially in the borderlands, Russian officials had to reconcile their positive view of Russian culture with the essentially negative task of Russification.
At the periphery, Russification involved a triangle consisting of Russia, the traditional local power, and a rising peasant nation. In one pattern, visible in the Baltic region, Russia supported (to a very limited extent) the peasants against the gentry. In Finland, for example, the local hegemony of Swedes was challenged by the introduction of Finnish schools in 1873 and the equal status granted to the Finnish language in 1886. Within a generation, however, the Finnish movement had oriented itself against the Russian state, Finns prov1007
NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE
ing to be as zealous as Swedes in resisting the full incorporation of their kingdom into the Russian Empire. In the lands now known as Estonia and Latvia, Baltic Germans lost much of their traditional authority, some of it to new national movements. During the 1870s, the 1880s, and the 1890s, Estonian and Latvian patriots tended to expect Russian support against local Germans. In both cases, the quick emergence of a propertied farmer class and the rapid creation of a cultural canon signified a new historical self-consciousness. An Estonian daily newspaper began publishing in 1891, and a Latvian in 1877. In Lithuania the gentry had been Polish, and the Lithuanian movement emerged after the defeat of the 1863 uprising. Lithuanians were seen as a passive and loyal element, but some of the children of prosperous peasants (and some Polish nobles) took Russification and university education in St. Petersburg as a prompting to return to the Lithuanian folk. The first modern Lithuanian periodical appeared in 1883.
The failure of the 1863 uprising in Poland inclined many patriots to reject traditional paths such as emigration, speculative philosophy, and Romantic poetry in favor of a sober appreciation of the national predicament. The hope for rescue from abroad, touchingly portrayed by the novelist Boleslaw Prus in The Doll (1887-1889), had now faded as well. In the former Kingdom of Poland, now officially the Vistula Land and nothing more, positivists such as Prus and Alexander Swieto-chowski urged greater attention to the physical sciences, economics, and pedagogy. They wrote of the possibility of social renewal (a code, under censorship, for national rebirth) through work at society’s foundations. Theirs was a national idea designed to create a national society in the absence of a state. Both its limitations in practice and its emphasis on science made it an effective springboard to the Marxism of the next generation. Some of these Marxists, such as Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, joined the Polish Socialist Party of J?zef Pilsudski, founded in 1892. This party treated national independence as a prerequisite of social revolution, and Kelles-Krauz supported its program with the first serious sociological study of nationalism. The positivists’ attention to the non-gentry classes of society was a model for the National Democrats, whose movement (founded in 1893) added conspiracy and explicit national content to the earlier program of informal mass education. By 1899 the National Democrats had organized some three thousand educational circles. In 1903 their leader, Roman Dmowski, published a polemical tract entitled Thoughts of a Modern Pole, which criticized the traditional leaders of Polish society, the gentry and the post-gentry intelligentsia, and proclaimed a fierce competition between ethnic nations as the wave of the future. Dmowski excluded Jews from the future national community; with time (and later electoral disappointments) anti-Semitism became a central message of National Democracy. Dmowski said little about independence, since he thought the Russian Empire a useful shelter from the powerful German culture; despite this tack he must be considered one of the early modern nationalists of the
