Twenty-five years ago practically no self-respecting academic publisher would have taken on a book with the title “Elites in Multinational Empires.” For one thing, biographies were not considered objects of serious historical inquiry—let alone those of dead, elite white men with elaborate facial hair. And as far as Russia was concerned, aside from a handful of scholars like Richard Pipes and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, there was no such thing as a multi-national empire. It would take the Soviet Union’s fragmentation for academics to think otherwise.
Times have changed, and we are fortunate that Tim Buchen and Mathe Rolf saw fit to edit an essay collection that examines the lives of statesmen, generals, industrialists, professors, and other men of high standing (sadly, there are no women) in Europe’s erstwhile continental empires on the eve of their dissolution in the early twentieth century. Readers will be familiar with some of the names, such as Thomàš Garrigue Masaryk, Jan Baudoin de Courtenay, Robert Musil, and Konstantin von Kaufman. Others, like the Romanian general Trajan Dada and the Russian agronomist Nikolai Makarov, are more obscure.
The subtitle, “Imperial Biographies in Russia and Austria-Hungary,” is a misnomer, since the volume also includes a colonial official in Wilhelmine Germany and a banker to the Ottoman Sultan. Based on a conference in Berlin in 2012, the editors have gathered seventeen chapters in German and English that shed light on how a group of well-educated individuals experienced modernity’s challenges to their imperial homelands. It is a useful exercise. According to Faith Hillis, one of the authors: “Recapturing the complexities of imperial lives not only provides a richer and more variegated portrait of how empire functioned on the ground but also reveals the role that personal trajectories and local communities played in shaping all-imperial norms and practices” (179).
The most intriguing question involves Heimat, or homeland. In an age of growing national consciousness, where did the loyalties of these men lie? The answer in almost all instances was to both nation and empire. The former could involve several of them, since aristocrats often boasted mixed bloodlines, as Christoph Augustynowicz notes in his chapter on “Oskar Halecki’s Viennese Genealogy.” Frederik Lindström, another contributor, rightly observes: “It would be fundamentally erroneous to postulate an opposition between national awareness and imperial loyalty because the two did not exclude one another but were symbolically connected” (175). The Finnish president, Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim, who had formerly served as an officer in the tsar’s Chevalier Guards, faithfully kept a portrait of Nicholas II on his desk.
While some saw the need for reform and greater national autonomy, until the very end most did not seek the downfall of their sovereigns’ dynasties. Indeed, as men who enjoyed authority and means, imperial elites naturally had a stake in the existing order. At the same time, to those with ambition, the vast size of Europe’s empires offered more opportunities than many of the continent’s smaller independent nation-states. Ruth Leiserowicz points out that, despite the Russian army’s brutal suppression of two major revolts by their countrymen during the nineteenth century, Polish physicians did not disdain well-paying jobs in the tsarist military. Bradley Woodworth makes a similar observation in his essay about an erstwhile Finnish-Swedish subject of the Russian tsar: “Mannerheim had two homelands, one nesting inside the other, and for him the arrangement—both a political and a personal one—was more attractive than a drawing of borders and boundaries between the two, which could only mean a narrowing of his life, his horizon” (154). Motivated by the potential economic advantages, the Greek banker Yorgo Zarifi even urged Turkey’s Sultan Abdülhamid II to rejoin the independent kingdom to his domains in a Habsburg-style Ausgleich, or dual monarchy, as Christopher Hertzog tells us.
Some of the contributions also examine the possibilities for knowledge transfer between the multinational empire’s heterogeneous components. This was particularly true of academics who were trained in the metropole’s universities and then taught in institutions on its periphery, like Jagiellonian University Professor Józef Dietl, Masaryk, and Baudoin Courtenay. Meanwhile, his experience as a subaltern in the Caucasus taught Turkestan’s first Governor-General, Konstantin von Kaufman, valuable lessons about tolerating the Islamic faith of the Russian Orthodox tsar’s newly conquered subjects. Thus, while there were some exceptions, most notably Mikhail Murav'ev (a.k.a. “the Hangman of Vilnius”), empires could instill a respect for other creeds and nationalities in some of its servitors.
Ironically, such tolerance was not always appreciated by the compatriots of some of the men under consideration in this volume. After independence, Warsaw’s university refused to appoint the distinguished linguist Jan Baudoin de Courtenay as a full professor because it deemed him to be insufficiently patriotic. At the same time, a number of fellow Czechs excoriated Masaryk for his defense of Leopold Hillsner, a Jew accused of ritual murder in 1899.
Eleven of the book’s chapters are in German, which will sadly limit its readership in North America. Nevertheless, Buchen and Rolf have done us a valuable service with their volume, which offers some intriguing perspective on Europe’s former continental empires. One almost cannot help sympathize a little with those men in the volume who mourned their passing. As the editors note: “The empire was their horizon, according to which they navigated their lives. Therefore, the demise of these complex and often paradoxical political structures in 1917–19 did not necessarily come as liberation. Some & even looked back nostalgically to the bygone order” (30).
