Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

The theme of this book is how Rossiia obstructed the flowering of Rus’, or if you prefer it, how the building of an empire impeded the formation of a nation. So my story concerns above all the Russians. There have been many books in recent years about the non-Russian peoples of the empire, and the problems of their national development.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is time to redress the balance in favour of the Russians, whose nationhood has probably been even more blighted by the empire which bore their name.

Russians, especially in the nineteenth century, have always believed that their distinctiveness – some saw it as their curse – derived from an underlying problem of national identity, but few western historians have taken the notion seriously, preferring to dismiss the Russian obsession with the national problem as an excuse for imperial domination or reactionary politics. I believe the Russians are right, and that a fractured and underdeveloped nationhood has been their principal historical burden in the last two centuries or so, continuing throughout the period of the Soviet Union and persisting beyond its fall. Such an assertion may surprise Russia’s neighbours, who are accustomed to regard Russian nationalism as overdeveloped and domineering. This is an understandable optical illusion, but an illusion nevertheless, as I shall try to demonstrate.

Social scientists have been reluctant to define the term ‘nation’, and indeed, whenever the attempt is made, there invariably turn out to be one or two anomalous ‘nations’ which do not fit the definition. I shall nevertheless try to pin the notion down. A nation, it seems to me, is a large, territorially extended and socially differentiated aggregate of people who share a sense of a common fate or of belonging together, which we call nationhood.

Nationhood has two main aspects. One is civic: a nation is a participating citizenry, participating in the sense of being involved in law-making, law-adjudication and government, through elected central and local assemblies, through courts and tribunals, and also as members of political parties, interest groups, voluntary associations and other institutions of civil society. The second aspect of nationhood is ethnic: a nation is a community bound together by sharing a common language, culture, traditions, history, economy and territory. In some nations, for historical reasons, one aspect predominates over the other: the French, Swiss and American nations are primarily ‘civic’, while the German and East European nations have tended to emphasize ethnicity.

(#litres_trial_promo) I believe that both aspects of Russians’ nationhood have been gravely impaired by the way in which their empire evolved.

Would it have been better for Russians if they had been able to form a nation? I believe it would have made their evolution less unstable, polarized and violent, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nation-state has proved to be the most effective political unit during that time, not only in Europe but throughout the world, because it is the largest one compatible with creating and sustaining a feeling of community and solidarity, such as induces loyalty and reduces the need for coercion. National identity plays an important compensatory role in a period when the operations of the market have tended to break down older, smaller and simpler forms of social solidarity. In an era of large-scale warfare it is even more crucial, as Charles Tilly has commented:

Because of their advantages in translating national resources into success in international war, large national states superseded tribute-taking empires, federations, city-states and all their other competitors as the predominant European political entities and as the models for state formation. Those states finally defined the character of the European state system and spearheaded its extension to the entire world.

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Empires, by contrast, proved to be too large, unwieldy and above all too diverse to generate an equivalent sense of community. That proved to be true of the Hapsburg and Ottoman as well as the Russian Empires.

There is, however, such a thing as compound national identity. Britain in the eighteenth-twentieth century is a good example, resting as it does on four ethnic components: the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. The Irish, being the least well integrated of the four, have provoked easily the most serious internal crises of the British political system during that time. The great question for Russian leaders during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might be formulated as whether they could inculcate an analogous compound national identity in their empire’s more diverse ethnic elements. The attempt was made, both by the Tsars and more systematically by the Soviet leaders, and at one time it looked close to success, but at present it seems ultimately to have failed.

There has been much debate among historians, sociologists and anthropologists over the origins of modern nationhood. Today many theorists would assert that nations are not very old, that they emerged only from the late eighteenth century onwards. In this view what distinguishes them from earlier forms of human community are that:

1. Nations are larger, more socially and economically diverse, offering a framework for the capitalist market, with its complex division of labour and its need for more extensive units than were afforded by regional and kinship boundaries.

2. They embody the Enlightenment vision of the rational and self-governing human being: the nation-state is a community of such people.

3. They are bound together by the printed language, which is needed so that the skills of a high culture can be widely disseminated. The bearers and purveyors of this language, writers, journalists, teachers and the professional strata in general, are those who are likely to identify most closely with the nation-state.

4. They are based on the principle that ethnic and political boundaries coincide. Lower-level entities, duchies, principalities, city-states, and so on, have been amalgamated, while higher-level ones, multi-ethnic empires, have been broken up. This has proved the most contentious and destructive of the characteristics of nations, yet also the hardest to dispense with in practice.

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In this view, nations evolved only with the growth of widespread education, mass media, a diversified economy and social structure, a penetrative urban culture and a civil society. This is when, in the terminology of Karl Deutsch, ‘assimilation’ (to a dominant urban language and culture) and ‘mobilization’ (into a multiplicity of contacts with others) became possible for the mass of the people. The extreme version of this position has been expounded by Ernest Gellner who denies that nationalism is simply the political manifestation of age-old national communities, and asserts roundly, ‘It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.’ He adds, ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that is indeed how it presents itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organisation, based on deeply internalised, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state.”

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It is possible to accept that nations as we know them are products of the modern era, and yet to assert that, in a simpler and cruder form, an ethnic or proto-national awareness straddling different social strata existed much earlier in history. Such awareness can crystallize around a tribe, a royal court, an aristocracy, an armed fraternity or a religious sect. It can be stimulated by various factors, of which probably the most potent is prolonged warfare against powerful neighbours. One theorist, John Armstrong, has specifically taken as an example the national identity of Rus’ during and after the Tatar overlordship.

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If nations do indeed have a pre-history, then the crucial question is why and when they emerge from the chrysalis. Benedict Anderson has hypothesized that the stage is set with the ‘convergence of capitalism and print technology’ and the emergence of monarchical bureaucracies: these ‘create unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars’ and ‘give a new fixity to language’, helping to ‘build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation’.

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In this reading, the central issue is language and the culture and information carried by language, which enable courtiers, intellectuals and bureaucrats to synthesize and project their concept of what binds the nation together. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger called this process, or a later version of it, the ‘invention of tradition’, the tactic by which elites, faced with the crises of social change, overcome them by invoking values and rituals associated with the past, adapting them to suit contemporary means of communication. Thus British royal pageantry was recreated to suit the needs first of newspapers, then of radio, then of television. These values and rituals need not of course be national ones, but experience has taught modern politicians that appeals to nationhood have the broadest and strongest allure.

(#litres_trial_promo) They perform the function of binding elites and masses in a common identity.

Actually, traditions cannot be simply invented: they must have existed in some form in which they can be authenticated. They then have to be rediscovered and synthesized in a form suitable for the contemporary world. The process by which this is done has been examined by Miroslav Hroch. He posits three stages through which all nations pass, though they are chronologically different for each nation. The first, which he calls phase A, is the period of scholarly interest, when linguists, ethnographers and historians investigate the lore and traditions of the people and assemble from them a cultural package suitable for wider distribution. Phase B is the stage when politicians take from this package what they find useful and deploy it for patriotic agitation among the people, and it leads on to Phase C, which is the rise of mass national movements. In each case Hroch finds a particular social group – again different from nation to nation – which plays a central role in the mobilization of national sentiment.

(#litres_trial_promo) Strictly speaking, his theory applies only to nations mobilizing against the state in which they find themselves, but I shall maintain that it is relevant to Russia, since there too nationhood had to be generated partly in opposition to the empire bearing its name.

This ‘nation-building’ is quite distinct from ‘state-building’, though the two processes are easier to accomplish when they accompany each other. State-building is concerned with defending, controlling and administering a given territory and the population living on it, and entails devising and operating a system for recruiting troops and raising taxes to pay for them, as well as matters like conflict regulation, the imposition and adjudication of law, the establishment of a reliable coinage, and so on. Nation-building is more intangible, but has to do with eliciting the loyalty and commitment of the population, which is usually achieved by fostering the sense of belonging, often by manipulation of culture, history and symbolism.

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The thesis of this book is that in Russia state-building obstructed nation-building. The effort required to mobilize revenues and raise armies for the needs of the empire entailed the subjection of virtually the whole population, but especially the Russians, to the demands of state service, and thus enfeebled the creation of the community associations which commonly provide the basis for the civic sense of nationhood. As the nineteenth-century Russian historian Vasily Kliuchevskii once remarked, ‘The state swelled up, the people languished.’

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State-building also necessitated the borrowing of a foreign culture and ethos, which displaced the native inheritance. A potential national identity had already been created for Russia by the ‘invention of tradition’ in the sixteenth century, and it served as impetus and justification for the first stages of empire-building; but it was suddenly repudiated by the imperial state itself in the mid-seventeenth century in circumstances which I examine in Part 2, Chapter 1. This repudiation generated a rift within Russia’s ethnic community whose consequences have not been entirely eradicated even today.

In his recent study of national identity, Anthony Smith distinguishes between two types of nation-building. The first is accomplished by what he calls ‘aristocratic’ ethnies (‘ethnie’ is his term for a proto-nation). They command the mechanism of the state, and so are able to carry out nation-building by using its resources, as well as by economic and cultural patronage. In this way, they assimilate lower social classes and outlying ethnic groups to their heritage. This was the historical path to the nation-state taken by England, France, Spain, Sweden and, up to the eighteenth century, Poland.

The second type of nation-building, which Smith terms ‘demotic’, proceeds from non-aristocratic, localized, often subject communities. Lacking their own state, they have to build the elements of one from below, in opposition to some existing state: to accomplish this they need strongly held views of law, religion, culture and community. Examples of this kind are the Irish, Czechs, Finns, Jews, Armenians and the Poles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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In the case of Russia, we may hypothesize that both types of nation-building were at work concurrently, with the conflict between them reaching special intensity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There were two poles round which Russian national feeling could crystallize. One was the imperial court, army and bureaucracy, with its attendant nobility and increasingly Europeanized culture. The other was the peasant community. Peasants cannot lead a nationalist movement, but they can provide a model for it and, given leadership from outside, they can become its numerical strength. The values of village communities have inspired many politicians in the assertion of their nation’s identity against alien domination: one has only to think of Gandhi, Mao Zedong and many East European politicians after the first world war. In Russia it was the intelligentsia, drawing on imperial culture but trying to break away from it, which provided this leadership.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the notions of authority, culture and community held by the imperial nobility and by the peasantry were diametrically opposed on cardinal points. We may lay out the dichotomy roughly as follows:

The contrast between these views of community was not absolute. Both sides, for example, shared the feeling of reverence for the Tsar and, on the whole, for the Orthodox Church. At times of supreme crisis, like the Napoleonic invasion, the two sides could work together. Nevertheless, the gap between them was very wide and, what was more important, getting wider during the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century, as the crisis of nation-building approached its apogee.

The result was that the two Russias weakened each other. The political, economic and cultural institutions of what might have become the Russian nation were destroyed or emasculated for the needs of the empire, while the state was enfeebled by the hollowness of its ethnic substance, its inability at most times to attract the deep loyalty of even its Russian, let alone its non-Russian subjects. The intelligentsia, trying to mediate between them, to create an ‘imagined community’ as a synthesis of imperial culture and ethnic community, was crushed between them. The culmination of this process was the revolution and civil war of 1917–21.

This book has been written in the belief that we need a new interpretive approach to the history of Russia. Most western accounts of Russia’s evolution revolve around the concepts of ‘autocracy’ and ‘backwardness’. In my view, neither of them is a fundamental or ineluctable factor. Autocracy, I shall argue, was generated by the needs of empire, and had to be reinforced as that empire came increasingly into conflict with nation-building.

The same is true of backwardness. What is striking is not that Russia was economically backward in either the sixteenth, eighteenth or early twentieth century, but rather that every attempt at reform and modernization tended in the long run to reproduce that backwardness. As the history of Germany, Japan and modern south-east Asia shows, backwardness can be not only escaped from but triumphantly overcome and turned to competitive advantage. Russia did not do this: the economic policies deemed necessary to sustain the empire systematically held back the entrepreneurial and productive potentialities of the mass of the people.

In my view, then, autocracy and backwardness were symptoms and not causes: both were generated by the way in which the building and maintaining of empire obstructed the formation of a nation. I deploy the evidence for this assertion in what follows.

If I am right, the implications for contemporary Russia are profound. If she can find a new identity for herself, as a nation-state among other nation-states, autocracy and backwardness will fade out. It may perhaps be objected that the nation-state is not the be-all and end-all of history, and that we are moving into a post-national era.

(#litres_trial_promo) In particular, in the case of Russia, it may be argued that the relatively low level of virulent nationalism has spared the collapsing Soviet empire the spasms of violence which accompanied, for example, the departure of the French pieds noirs from Algeria. (There has been considerable violence, but most of it has been directed by non-Russians against other non-Russians.)

There is something to be said for these arguments, but I believe the nation-state is likely to be with us for a long time yet as the foundation of the international order, and that in Russia the sense of solidarity associated with nationhood would do much to diminish the criminality and the bitter political conflicts which still disfigure its internal order. I do not pretend, of course, that the process of strengthening national identity in Russia can be wholly reassuring either for her neighbours or for the international community at large. But I believe it is preferable to any attempt at rebuilding empire, which I take to be the only serious alternative.

A word about the structure of this book. I decided at an early stage that a purely chronological exposition would obscure permanent or long-lasting features of Russian society – what one might call its ‘deep structures’ – to such an extent as to undermine the presentation of my overall thesis. I have therefore made Parts 1 and 3 structural, and Parts 2 and 4 chronological. Part 1 examines why a Russian Empire arose at all and what were its abiding features, Part 3 its effects on the major social strata and institutions of Russian society. Parts 2 and 4 adopt a more familiar kind of historical narrative. I hope that the accompanying Chronology (pp. 487–492), Index and occasional cross-references will make it easier to understand the way the sections relate to each other.

For the present, I have ended my study in 1917. After that year the problem of the relationship between Russians and their empire certainly remained crucial, but its terms changed radically, as is symbolized by the bare fact that the empire was no longer named after them. If life and energy persist, perhaps I shall one day try to trace that story too. For the moment, I have confined myself to a few preliminary thoughts on the way my story has affected the Soviet and post-Soviet experience.

GEOFFREY HOSKING,

School of Slavonic & East European Studies,University of London.

April 1996