Russian Empire. Like all Polish activists, Dmowski had to account for the division of Poland lands and people among the three partitioning powers, Germany and Austria as well as Russia.
The problem of division was far deeper in the case of other groups, such as Muslims. There were probably more Muslims in the Russian Empire than in the Ottoman, but the latter was a more logical starting point for any national politics. Beginning in the early 1880s, Muslims in Russia had to respond to the more active program of cultural Rus-sification. An interesting reaction was that of Ismail Bey Gaspirali, who believed that Muslims had to learn Russian to resist Russification and secure their proper place in the empire. In his 1881 work, Muslims of Russia, he promoted a national press and a national intelligentsia. Like his Georgian and Armenian contemporaries, Gaspirali was a cosmopolitan who concluded from travel and education that merely cultures were endangered. Himself a Crimean Tatar, he wished to reach Muslims throughout the empire, and his books and newspapers were indeed widely read in Baku and Kazan. The Volga Tatars began a movement of religious and social reform with some limited national content. Shihabeddin Merjani wrote the first history in the Volga Tatar dialect, and, in fact, was the first to call the Muslims of the region Tatars. Like the Muslims, the Armenians found themselves on both sides of the Russian-Ottoman border. Armenian national politics in Russia were initially directed to support for Armenians repressed on the Ottoman side. Penetration by Armenian revolutionaries served as a pretext for massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1894-1896. All of this left Armenians loyal to St. Petersburg. Their immediate Caucasian neighbors, the Georgians, faced internal challenges, and responded with nationally aware socialism.
The Jews were so dispersed that any sort of territorial politics seemed utopian. Since the Con1008
NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE
gress of Vienna, about half of the world’s Jews had been Russian subjects. During the 1880s, at a time when Russian nationalism still left considerable room for certain groups to hope for reform, Jews were immediately touched by its pessimism. Earlier discussions among journalists and liberals about equal status for Jews and Russians were halted by the 1863 uprising, in which Jews were seen (by Ivan Aksakov, for example) as allies of the Poles. The pogroms that followed Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 (in Yelizavetgrad, Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw, and elsewhere) convinced many Jews that emigration from Russia was their best hope. The official association of Jews with revolution (by Pobedonostsev, for example) and the expulsion of Jews from Kiev (1886) and Moscow (1891) convinced others. The leaders of the emigrationist movement organized themselves at Katowice in 1884. Yet flight to Palestine was initially an apolitical aspiration, since the emphasis was placed on the practical task of leaving Russia. The emergence of Theodor Herzl’s brand of Zionism transformed the personal and the practical into the idealistic and the political, and is usually marked as the beginning of modern Jewish nationalism. Its First Basel Congress (August 1897) called for “a home for the Jewish people in Palestine,” a Jewish state. This ideal was influential, but was an imperfect fit with the immediate needs of the world’s largest Jewish community. The failure of Herzl’s high diplomacy, and then his death in 1904, left room for alternative Zionist ideas: socialist Zionism (Ber Borochov and Po’alei Zion), the revival of Hebrew in Russia (associated with Ahad Ha-’Am), and Zionism aware of neighboring national revivals (exemplified by Yitzhak Gruenbaum and Vladimir Jabotinsky, among many others). That said, the internationalist socialism of the Bund (founded in 1897) was far more attractive to young Jews with Haskalah, or secular, education, and played a more important role in Russian politics. From 1901 the Bund advocated national cultural autonomy within a postrevolutionary Russian state. During the Revolution of 1905, it was one of several socialist and leftist parties working in this direction.
MASS MOVEMENTS AND RUSSIAN RETRENCHMENT, 1905-1917
The Revolution of 1905 was the baptism of a new Russian nationalism, not entirely dependent upon the state, and modern enough to pay attention to the Russian people. Before 1905 there was nothing like a Russian national movement, and the people were excluded from political discussions on the right. The revolution prompted monarchists to appeal to the people to support the tsar, and modern nationalists who spoke of a “Russia for the Russians,” to cite Alexei Kuropatkin’s pamphlet about tasks for the Russian army. Russian liberals believed that reform would create a nation that would strengthen the state within its present borders; national liberals such as Peter Struve spoke of a Russian nation in the making. As a social force Russian nationalism was most important in the west, especially in Ukraine, where Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians were blamed for the instability. Polish socialists did indeed work with the Bund to exploit the revolution: but it had begun, awkwardly, in St. Petersburg, as a result of the war against Japan. Non-socialist Polish parties appealed for the Polo-nization of schools and for a national assembly. A few Ukrainian parties also requested an assembly, and the Ukrainian Bohdan Kistiakovs’kyi was an interesting proponent of federalism.
National autonomy within existing borders was the typical national demand of minorities in 1905. Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians all held national congresses and pressed for reform on these lines. Muslims petitioned for legal nondiscrimina-tion at a congress of 1905. Many Turkish nationalists, such as Yusuf Akchura, soon emigrated to the Ottoman Empire to support the Young Turks project in Istanbul. Muslims in Russia sought a reconciliation of the religious and the secular, but did not yet see the secular as necessarily national. Education in the Arab world or in St. Petersburg still appeared to be a complementary and necessary part of this project. Musa Jarulla Bigi, who was secretary of the Muslim congresses between 1905 and 1917, studied in both places. Armenians had seen their church’s lands confiscated by the state in 1903, but internecine violence with Azerbaijani Turks in 1905 left most of them loyal subjects of Russia. The Dashnak movement, founded to support the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, won temporary popularity in Russia by defending the Armenians in Baku and elsewhere in 1905. Georgian socialists initiated some strike actions in 1905 and mediated between the Armenians and the Azerbaijani Turks, but nothing like a Georgian separatist nationalism emerged at this time. Armenian and Georgian socialists alike generally supported some form of cultural autonomy.
The new parliament (or State Duma), established by Nicholas II in 1905, was the only institution that might have channeled these various national sentiments into a reform of the state. Pol1009
NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
ish nationalists led by Roman Dmowski made the most concerted effort to profit from this institution; the Polish Circle they organized was national in composition and goals. Yet their only legislative victory was the return of the Polish language to Polish schools, and this was quickly reversed. Only the First and Second Dumas were vaguely representative; from 1907 the goal of the electoral laws was to ensure the election of a Duma “Russian in spirit.” Prime Minister Peter Stolypin embodied the great irony of Russian nationalism: on the one hand, he changed the electoral law because he believed that Poles would win wherever they ran; on the other, he claimed that Russian nationality was itself a powerful attractive force. Stolypin famously urged Dmowski to admit that being a Russian subject was the greatest of blessings. The only nationalism represented in the Third and Fourth Dumas was Russian. In 1912 the Duma created a new Chelm district, intending to encourage Uniate converts to Roman Catholicism in the region to convert to Orthodoxy. Here was the use of autocracy to identify nationality with Orthodoxy, or at least the deployment of state power to remove attractive national alternatives. Dmitry Sipiagin had earlier considered Polish-Russian population exchanges as a possible solution to the Chelm problem. Forced population movements became policy during World War I, as Russia removed Germans and Jews from its western territories.
Even in 1914, one would have been hard pressed to find much organized national opposition to the Russian Empire. Opposition to the war was not usually articulated in national terms. Nation-states were created in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, once imperial power had been discredited and broken. Russian nationalism was the ideology of Anton Denikin and other White officers, but they were defeated by the Bolsheviks. Living in Cracow (in Austria) in 1912, Vladimir Lenin had come to appreciate European national movements and contemplated their exploitation by a socialist revolution. In 1913 he defined “self-determination” to mean either national independence or nothing at all, forcing a choice on nationally aware socialists while making a show of flexibility. Once in power, Lenin collapsed the two alternatives, promoting Soviet republics with national names. In 1913, Lenin had asked Josef Stalin to critique the proposed nationality policy of the Austrian socialists. Stalin’s response was important in political if not intellectual terms: He defined nations as stable communities and spoke of national psychologies. These views seemed to gain importance in his mind as he gained personal power, and can be linked to his national policy during the 1930s. Lenin and Stalin were unusual Russian subjects, but their assimilation of nationalism was determinative of the fate of many of the peoples of the former Russian Empire. See also:
