As John Darwin recently reminded us, empires are not only normal historical formations; over the centuries they have represented the “default position” in political governance. Since empires were extensive territories in which “ethnic, cultural or ecological boundaries were overlapped,” they had to devise very varied techniques to cope with diversity.Footnote 1 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper made this the central feature of their recent study of empires, concentrating on “rule through difference,” that is, through the regulation and manipulation of difference.Footnote 2
Now Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny have taken up this perception and applied it to the study of Russia, the largest durable land empire in history. They assert that an empire has the following characteristics: (a) it is ruled by a sovereign claiming ultimate sovereignty over its population; (b) it dominates extensive territories that are home to disparate peoples; (c) it is based on hierarchical power relations between a center or metropolis and subordinate peripheries; (d) its rule is exercised through difference rather than through integration or assimilation (the latter strategies being more typical of nation-states) (4).
At the outset, the authors declare that they will “look not only to institutions and practices but also to the emotional ties and claims of reciprocity that bound people to their rulers and to one another” (5). In practice, ties of reciprocity are their main focus, and perhaps in consequence they have rather little to say about institutions. There is almost nothing, for example, on taxation, on the organization and upkeep of the army, on bureaucratic procedures or even on the functioning of the imperial court as a site for the regulation of reciprocity among the elites. A more accurate title might have been “The Cultural Construction of Russia's Empires.”
What Kivelson and Suny set out to do, however, they do very well. Unlike nation-states, empires typically leave local cultures and practices largely intact, but integrate them into a hierarchy of imperial units by co-opting their elites while allowing those elites to rule locally in their own way. Empires are thus a patchwork of distinctive cultures and polities arranged in a hierarchy determined by the center. The authors emphasize that effective power implies a degree of reciprocity: that is, rulers have legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects, especially their elite subjects.
On these criteria, Kievan Rus΄ was no kind of empire. It consisted of principalities “loosely sutured together by ideas of dynastic solidarity” (28). The first real Russian empire was Muscovy. The authors date its creation to the conquest of Kazan΄ in 1552, which accomplished a “shift from equal participation in steppe politics to conquest and control” (64). Muscovy inherited symbolic motifs from Kiev, notably the devotion to Orthodox Christianity, which imposed on the newly self-proclaimed Tsar “the weighty responsibility of ruling with sternness and mercy and leading his … people to salvation at the End Times” (47). Regulating difference while maintaining central hegemony became the state's most important function—but one almost beyond its capacities while operating with relatively primitive instruments in a vulnerable geopolitical location. As the authors point out, though, the Rus΄ peoples’ sense of a common fate was already so strong by the early seventeenth century that, after the chaotic Time of Troubles, even without a Tsar, the loose consultative assembly known to historians as the zemskii sobor managed to found a new dynasty and revive the Russian state.
At this stage, domination remained indirect: “Muscovites conceived of empire as a terrain on which their political and religious superiority could be established through a scattering of outposts that announced and enforced their dominance” (70). This pointillist version of the state proved strong enough to survive the challenges of the seventeenth century and to underpin the evolution to a European great power during the eighteenth century.
Having reached this point, the authors pause for a theoretical consideration of the problems of converting an empire into a nation-state. Industrialization, the spread of popular education, the growth of differential markets and faster communications through railways and steamships all required a more centralized state. These changes made finding a modus vivendi between metropolis and peripheries more pressing.
At this point, “difference” began to become an obstacle, since it impeded the integration and acculturation of local religious and ethnic communities needed by the nation-state. While empires rule over peoples without their consent, the nation-state claims legitimacy on the grounds that it represents the will of the people. Yet empire and nation-state are not two separate entities: “rather than fixed and stable, they may flow into one another, transforming over time into the other” (77). The transition period is full of problems and dangers, because then the diversities and hierarchies of empire are nakedly exposed. First elites and then masses begin to demand that the state reflect their will. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to analyzing how the Tsarist state and the Soviet Union coped with the problem.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the problem seemed not especially urgent. At this stage, “nationality,” officially declared as one of the pillars of the empire, was interpreted in familial terms: Russia was seen as “a single family in which the ruler is the father and the subjects the children” (159). Writers and historians reimagined Russia as simultaneously both national and imperial: the inclusion in it of non-Russian ethnic groups confirmed the greatness both of Russian culture and of its state. There were tensions, though, in this vision: both Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov suggested in their poems on the Caucasus that the conquered tribes had modes of life superior to those of metropolitan Russia.
The Crimean War tore such ambiguities apart. Russia's defeat showed that industrializing nation-states coming from far away could inflict humiliation on Russia on its home territory. The problem of turning empire into nation was exacerbated by the Polish rebellion of 1863–64, which demonstrated that ruling the empire through a multi-ethnic aristocracy was no longer fully viable. Here for the first time the Russian state turned against one of its own elites and instead favored the masses: many Polish nobles were expropriated and exiled, while Ukrainian and Belorussian peasants were offered land on favorable terms.
Alexander II had somehow to move closer to the nation-state model by giving the people some stake in the political system. He took the first step by abolishing serfdom and continued with reform of the judicial, educational, and local government systems. His most radical reform was that of the army: the introduction of universal male conscription created “the most egalitarian and universal institution in the realm” (191). In fact, though, it was contested at all stages, and it was never fully implemented until 1914. The elites clung to their privileges and special positions in the army hierarchy.
In my view, the authors underestimate the thinking of Mikhail Katkov, who was directly influenced by the Polish rebellion and became very influential in the following decades. He actually reinforces their overall argument. His solution to the problem of difference was to propose that the non-Russian “tribes” should, if they wished, use their local languages and cultures for their own local purposes, but that they should have only one political identity—Russian—and use Russian for all discourse outside their “tribe”: “All these tribes and regions, lying on the borders of the Great Russian world, constitute its living parts and feel their oneness with it, in the union of state and supreme power in the person of the tsar.”Footnote 3 He believed that this merging of difference in unity could be achieved only by the symbolic appeal of an autocratic Orthodox Christian ruler.
The problem was that late nineteenth-century Russia was still too diverse and too dependent on difference to adopt it. The people were offered input into local government through the zemstvos, but the electoral system of the new institutions reinstated “difference” through the differentiated soslovnye electoral curiae; moreover, zemstvos were not introduced where Great Russians were not in a secure majority, as in Poland, the western provinces, the Caucasus, and the Baltics. Law courts strengthened the rule of law, but were also hierarchically arranged, the peasants having their own separate form of justice. As the authors state, “while introducing institutions of self-governance, the reformers stumbled over their inability or unwillingness to think beyond categories of difference” (193).
In the non-Russian regions, the status-defining categories moved gradually away from soslovie and religion to ethnicity. The regime was anxious that non-Russian peoples receive at least religious education in their own languages, in order to bolster conservative values and loyalty to the state. But such policies implied their own paradox: “Empire in a variety of ways—by enforcing differences and distinctions, educating non-Russians, and repressing outward expressions of nationalism—was the crucible of national consciousness” (201).
The Soviet state faced the same set of problems, but confronted them in a new way. It “transformed the state from an imperial patchwork into a unitary, federalized “pseudo-federal union” that paid lip service to the autonomy of its constituent parts but in practice subjected them all to dictatorial enforcement of Kremlin mandates” (299). It became “Soviet in form, Russian in content … both an empire-state and a state of nations” (307). The Soviet variety of ethnicization rested, though, not on personal or family identity, but on geographical areas: each nationality was assumed to have its own distinct territory. The policy of “nativization” (korenizatsiia) encouraged non-Russian languages and cultures, and also the training of local administrators who could run the non-Russian republics. At the same time, paradoxically, integration also continued, indeed was reinforced, by the structure of the ruling Communist Party, the army, security police, and Gosplan. I would add that, under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union came closest to realizing the Russian empire-state ideal of Katkov. It was most fully achieved during the Second World War, when the non-Russian people mostly accepted Soviet Russian leadership in repelling the German invasion.
After Stalin's death, though, his successors realized that they could not continue to rule through mass terror; they would henceforth have to cultivate a new relationship with the Soviet peoples, resting partly on trust as well as fear. The result under Nikita Khrushchev and in the early Brezhnev years was an unstable pattern of concessions to local nationalities, leading to the hegemony of ethnic patron-client networks, with sporadic reversions to centrally-enforced anti-corruption campaigns. Mikhail Gorbachev's attempted reforms put an end to this ambiguity, but could not attain a consensus for his mooted union treaty, which would have turned a pseudo-federation into a genuine federation. Instead, he succeeded only in spawning a new clutch of very divergent democratizing nationalisms, which in the end played a major role in destroying the Soviet state.
This is a rich and suggestive book, well grounded in recent scholarship and conveying important insights. It does not fully live up to its title: many crucial aspects of empire are not explored in it. In what it does set out to achieve, however, it is the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and intelligent work on its subject.
