1023
Kappeler, Andreas, Kohut, Zenon E., et al, eds. (2003). Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600-1945. Toronto: CIUS Press. Khodarkovsky, Michael (2002). Russia’s Steppe Frontier. The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. Klier, John Doyle. (1986). Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772-1825. Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press. Kohut, Zenon E. (1988). Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absoprtion of the Hetmanate, 1760s-1830s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lantzeff, George V., and Pierce, Richard A. (1973). Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier, to 1750. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Lieven, Dominic. (2000). Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. London: John Murray. Loewe, Heinz-Dietrich. (1993). The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Realism, and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia, 1772-1917. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publications. Raeff, Marc. (1971). “Patterns of Russian Imperial Policy Toward the Nationalities.” In Soviet Nationality Problems, ed. Edward Allworth. New York: Columbia University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1959). Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rogger, Hans. (1986). Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rywkin, Michael, ed. (1988). Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917. London: Mansell Publishing Ltd. Saunders, David. (2000). “Regional Diversity in the Later Russian Empire.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6(10):143-163. Starr, S. Frederick. (1978). “Tsarist Government: The Imperial Dimension.” In Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices, ed. Jeremy R. Azrael. New York: Praeger. Suny, Ronald Grigor, ed. (1983). Transcaucasia. Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thaden, Edward C., ed. (1981). Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thaden, Edward C., with the collaboration of Marianna Forster Thaden. (1984). Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710-1870. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tillett, Lowell. (1969). The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Vucinich, Wayne S., ed. (1972). Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weeks, Theodore R. (1996). Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
ANDREAS KAPPELER
The concepts of nation and nationality are extremely difficult to define. According to one important view, a nation is a sovereign people-a voluntary civic community of equal citizens; according to another, a nation is an ethnic community bound by common language, culture, and ancestry. Civic nations and ethnic nations as defined here are ideals that do not exist in reality, for most nations combine civic and ethnic characteristics, and either civic or ethnic features may predominate in any given community. In national communities where citizenship is seen as a major unifying force, the term nationality usually denotes citizenship; in nations whose unity rests largely on common culture and ancestry, nationality generally refers to ethnic origin.
There is little agreement about the balance between ethnic and civic components within nations, or between subjective characteristics, such as memory and will, and objective elements, such as common language or territory. Most scholars hold that nations are modern sociopolitical constructs, byproducts of an industrializing society. But the nature of the links between modern nations and earlier types of communities (e.g., premodern ethnic groups) is hotly contested.
Several definitions of nation have existed in Russia since the late eighteenth century, and there was no serious effort to regularize the terminology for discussing the issue of nationality until the 1920s and 1930s. Although the concept of nation was developed in Western Europe and was not applicable to Russia for much of the nineteenth century, the question of what constituted a nation and nationality were debated passionately.
1024
In the prerevolutionary period, several different words were used in intellectual and political discussions of what constituted a nation in the context of the Russian Empire: narod, narodnost, natsionalnost, natsiya, and plemya. Despite some efforts to differentiate these terms, they were generally used interchangeably.
In the 1780s and the 1790s, under the impact of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, a few liberal Russian intellectuals began to use the word narod (people) in the meaning most closely approximating the French definition of a nation as a sovereign people. For literary figures like Nikolai Novikov and Alexander Radishchev, nobility and peasantry were united in the narod. They recognized, of course, that such a community was not a reality in Russia but an ideal to be achieved someday. Liberal periodicals of the time proudly printed the word with a capital N. The understanding of narod as referring only to the peasantry was a later invention of the so-called Slavophiles of the 1830s and the 1840s, whose ideas were strongly influenced by German Romanticism, which held that folk tradition was the embodiment of the spirit of the nation. The Slavophiles also explicitly separated and juxtaposed the narod and the upper classes, whom they termed “society” (obshchestvennost), arguing that society, because Europeanized, was cut off from the indigenous national tradition.
In 1819, the poet Peter Vyazemsky coined the term narodnost in reference to national character. A search for manifestations of narodnost in literature, art, and music began. In 1832, the government responded to this growing interest in the national question by formulating its own view of Russia’s essential characteristics. The future minister of enlightenment, Count Sergei Uvarov, stated that the three pillars of Russia’s existence were Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality (narodnost, i.e., national character manifested in the folk tradition).
Whereas the Slavophiles looked for manifestations of narodnost in Orthodox Christianity and peasant culture, the Westernizer and literary critic Vissarion Belinsky insisted, in the 1840s, that the educated classes-the product of Peter the Great’s Europeanizing policies-were the bearers of a modern national tradition. Belinsky was thus arguing against the Slavophiles as well as Uvarov. He also offered a more precise definition of the words used to describe nation and nationality. For him, naro-dnost referred to a premodern stage in people’s development, whereas nationalnost and natsiya described superior developmental stages. Belinsky concluded that “Russia before Peter the Great had only been a narod [people] and became a natsiya [nation] as a result of the impetus which the reformer had given her” (Kara-Murza and Poliakov 1994, p. 25).
Other authors adopted Belinsky’s distinction between narod and natsiya, but the interchangeable usage prevailed. Even the word plemya (tribe), which in the twentieth century was applied to primitive communities, often meant a nation in the nineteenth. Thus, in the 1870s and the 1880s, politicians and intellectuals justified government policies of linguistic Russification in the imperial borderlands by referring to the national consolidation of “the French and German tribes.” Nor did Be-linsky’s search for Russian national tradition in the Europeanized culture of the educated classes have a significant following. Instead, the exclusion of the upper classes from the narod by the early Slavophiles was further developed by the writer and socialist thinker Alexander Herzen in the late 1840s and the early 1850s and by members of the populist movement in the 1870s. After the February Revolution of 1917, in the discourse of elites as well as in popular usage, the upper classes, termed burzhui (the bourgeoisie), were excluded from the nation.
The concepts of nation and nationality began to influence tsarist government policies around the time of Alexander II’s reforms in the 1860s. At the turn of the twentieth century, the government began to use the language-based idea of nationality (narodnost), rather than religion, as a criterion to distinguish Russians from non-Russians and to differentiate different groups of non-Russians. Naro-dnost based on language was one of the categories in the all-Russian census of 1897.
The question of how to define the boundaries and membership of a nation or nationality was as much debated by intellectuals, scholars, and government officials in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries as it is in the early twenty-first century. The bibliographer Nikolai Rubakin’s survey of the debate on the national question in Russia and Europe (1915) divided the definitions of a nation into three categories: psychological- nations are defined by a subjective criterion, such as the will to belong voluntarily to the same community, as exemplified by the French tradition; empirical-nations are defined by objective characteristics, such as language,
