Table of contents

This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery this challenge, was most prevalent in twelve provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, as well as to the Kingdom of Poland. At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist. The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, as well as the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.

The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.

This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject History - Asia, grade: B+ (2), The American Central University (Department of History), course: Colloquium in 19. Century European History , language: English, abstract: The first movement associated with Russian Nationalism was that of the Slavophiles. The Slavophiles were different from their French contemporaries, who saw their identity in relation to the French state. For the Slavophiles, culture, consisting of the Russian language and literature, and the belief in Orthodox Christendom and not so much the state brought about national unity. Vastly influenced by their German neighbors to the West, in the time of Romanticism, Slavophiles tried to cultivate and enhance the idea of a Slavic people and a national community through their writings, and by accentuating the common belief in Orthodox morality and the purity of the rural folk against the decadent West. The Slavophiles had their basis mainly among the intellectuals, what was perceived as Russia’s cultural elite. During the first half of the 19th century, Russia, as the only independent Slav state, with its vast population and its political might, was seen as the heartland of Slavic people. It was after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-56, when Slavophilism emerged into a political ideology and entered the sphere of politics. Now, intellectuals wanted to put Slavophile ideas on the political agenda, which ought to liberate the smaller Slavic communities from Ottoman, Austrian, and Prussian yoke and bring them under the protection of their bigger brothers, the Russians. Despite its attractiveness and support among Russia’s intellectual elite, and other Slavic intellectuals, the Russian Tsar and officials hesitated with the political ideas of Panslavism. Not all of Russia was populated with Slavic people, but there were also Jews, Baltics and Germans. Further, not all Slavs identified themselves as Orthodox and wanted to be ruled by Russia, for example the Poles. Moreover, Panslavic ideas were responsible for nurturing independent national movements, who were fighting for their right of self-determination from any foreign rule. Confronted with the impact of these ideas, the Russian authorities half-heartedly approached Panslavism. Official Russia, in its nationality policy, pursued the russification of its Western territories through Russian language and education, but dismissed Panslavic ideas in its high politics like in foreign policy, despite in rhetoric.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject History - Asia, grade: B+ (2), The American Central University (Department of History), course: The Historian's Craft, language: English, abstract: The Soviet Union, by the time of its creation, was the first modern state that had to confront the rising issue of nationalism. With a progressive nationality policy, it systematically promoted the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and established for them institutional forms comparable of a modern state. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks, seeking to defuse national sentiment, created hundreds of national territories. They trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed national cultural products. This was a massive historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Later under Stalin, these policies had to be revised to comply with emerging domestic and international problems, which resulted from those once progressive policies. This paper will present the issue of Russian nationalism and nationality policy in the Soviet Union. The analysis will be based on six different monographs dealing with the issue at different periods of Soviet history. Each has a different approach and at times a different thesis on Russian nationalism or an interpretation of the political events accompanying the Soviet nationality policy. First, on the following pages, I will give a brief summary of the six books discussed in this paper. Then, I will tell the main thesis of each book and underlie it by the author's arguments. In the conclusion, I will compare the book's arguments in a historiographical manner and see where similarities between the arguments exist, where the books complement each other and at which points they disagree with each other. At the end, I will try to give a comprehensive overview of the issue discussed, due to the frame and limited space of this paper.

Table of contents