by James Millar
The Polish gentry, the leading class in the departed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, considered itself a historical nation. Before the commonwealth was dismembered by the partitions, much of the middle gentry had been resolutely conservative, perceiving central power as the greatest threat to their traditional rights. In Russia, the same inclination turned the middle gentry into radicals, attentive to the constitution as the source of the tsar’s right to rule Poland as king. The 1830 uprising was premised on social-contract thinking: Since the tsar (Nicholas I) was not fulfilling his obligations as king of Poland, his subjects had the right and duty to rebel. The uprising was national in some sense, since the gentry saw itself as the nation; it was certainly democratic, in that the Polish Diet saw itself as representing a European republic struggling against despotism; but it was not modern nationalism, for its participants neither legitimated their claims on a popular basis nor aroused passions against an enemy nation.
ROMANTIC AND OFFICIAL NATIONS, 1831-1855
The defeat of the 1830 uprising created the conditions for a sophisticated discussion of the nation by Russian subjects. Poland’s ten thousand political emigr?s were highly literate, politically engaged, and determined to explain their military and political defeat. Many of the emigr?s, and most of the leading figures, were of historical Lithuanian origin. Back in Russia, the 1830s and 1840s saw the end of traditional Lithuanian institutions, such as the university and the Statutes. The Uniate Church was merged with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1839. For the Polish emigration as a whole, the old commonwealth remained the touchstone of political thought. But in time a new generation arose that had no actual memory of the old order and reimagined it in ways that reflected various ideas of nationality.
The nationalist politics of Poles in the Parisian emigration can be divided into two main currents: republican and monarchist. Joachim Lelewel, once a professor at Wilno, propounded a democratic republicanism that drew its optimism from a belief in the pacifism of Slavic peoples. Unlike Russians with similar ideas, Lelewel believed that this pacifism could be destroyed by autocratic rule. The Polish Democratic Society, founded in 1832 on French models, soon fell under Lelewel’s influence. The
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leader of the monarchists was Adam Czartoryski, a great Lithuanian magnate and onetime minister to Alexander I. Czartoryski was a liberal constitutionalist who advocated monarchy on pragmatic grounds. One of his disciples, J?zef Bem, led the Hungarian insurrection in Transylvania in 1848. Other Poles justified monarchy in terms of national development. Karel Hoffman argued that a monarch was needed to create cities and middle classes. Janusz Woronicz theorized that a true monarchy mediated between a self-aware nation and the exercise of power. In his view, the partitioning powers were not true monarchies, because they did not represent nations. By the end of the 1830s, the monarchical Party of May 3 had fifteen-hundred members.
The 1830s and 1840s also witnessed intense philosophical discussion of the nation by Russian subjects. The Polish nationalist philosophers of the day generally came from the Polish Kingdom and wrote dissertations at German universities. German philosophy was fashionable in Russia, but the Poles actually completed philosophy doctorates in Germany. Their work was more systematic than that of their Russian contemporaries, and influenced philosophical discussion (especially within Left Hegelianism) rather than simply refracting it through local conditions. Polish philosophy was more open to French ideas than German philosophy, and more open to German ideas than French philosophy. Polish philosophers tended to replace the state with the nation in Hegelian dialectic and supported philosophies in which action was constitutive of the nation. Most of them combined academic philosophy with practical work. The best-known were August Cieszkowski and Karol Libelt.
Polish Romantic poets of the epoch were also concerned with the nation. It should be stressed, however, that many of their preoccupations were unintelligible to later generations of modern nationalists. Adam Mickiewicz’s interest in mysticism or Juliusz S-lowacki’s fascination with spirit are difficult to reconcile with secular ideologies of any kind, even if a simplified form of Mickiewicz’s mes-sianism did become a common trope. Pan Tadeusz, the most beautiful and most prosaic of Mick-iewicz’s major works, became a national poem two generations or so after its completion in 1834. Mickiewicz and S-lowacki were regarded as national figures of the first rank during their lives, but their career as national bards was mainly posthumous. As nationalism came to be associated with the language of the folk, poetry came to matter less for its content than for its form. At the time, the poets (like the philosophers and the politicians) saw the national mission as part of a European or universal regeneration. Polish emigr?s were the only group in Europe to remember the Russian Decembrists and recall the predicament of other peoples under imperial rule.
The Decembrists, of course, had opposed the ascendance of Nicholas I in 1825. Nicholas was a man of imposing prejudices against Poles and Jews, and was capable of great hatred against whole nations from time to time, but he was no modern nationalist. His reign (1825-1855) is generally seen in the early twenty-first century as reactionary, as it was by Polish rebels in 1830. Insofar as there was a philosophy of rule during Nicholas’s reign, it might be sought in the Official Nationality of his education minister, Sergei Uvarov. Nationality was the third term in Uvarov’s famous trio: Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality. Uvarov meant nationality to be subordinate to the first two principles of rule. The Russian nation was the group meant to submit to the tsar according to the teachings of the church. Uvarov’s educational program was thus a kind of reverse Enlightenment. Education was not meant to create individuals capable of independent judgment, but rather a collective understanding that the ruled are to be judged by the ruler.
The printing press allowed an emerging group of literate Russians to interpret national ideas according to their own lights. The generation of the 1830s and 1840s, like those that followed, read Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (published 1816-1826). Two renegade Poles led the way in these years in spreading simple national ideas through the press: Faddei Bulgarin, editor of the Northern Bee, and Osip Senkovsky, editor of the Reader’s Library. The mere existence of such periodicals guaranteed that discussions of the nation, even if not at all revolutionary, were unacceptable in Uvarov’s limited vision. The press mediated between the dynastic interpretation of official nationality prevalent in St. Petersburg and the rival Romantic conceptions emerging around Moscow University. Slavophiles interpreted Uvarov’s trio in their own way: Autocracy left room for the autonomous commune, Orthodoxy was a shield against Catholicism and Protestantism, and Nationality mandated attention to the peasant. This Romantic patriotism, although not meant to undermine Official Nationality, differed on one essential point. Whereas Official Nationality gave priority to the state and sought to consolidate
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Peter’s achievement, the Slavophiles began to emphasize the people and to critique Peter’s cosmopolitan project. Nonetheless, they had little in common with the Polish Romantics of the same generation. Both made reference to the past in the hope of overcoming a crisis of the present. But where the Slavophiles spoke of the unspoiled commune, the Poles imagined a restored commonwealth. The Polish dilemma was statelessness; the Russian dilemma was backwardness.
STATE AND NATION, 1855-1881
This fact was brought home by the humiliation of the Crimean War. The new tsar, Alexander II, accepted that military defeat justified state reform, and that state reform required the emancipation of the serfs. The twenty years after the emancipation proclamation of 1861 saw the emergence of a new group of prosperous peasants in many parts of the empire, and this group recast the national question, especially on the borderlands. Yet the immediate reaction to reform was rebellion. Reforms initiated in Warsaw led to a revolution of rising expectations, the failure of which accelerated the d
evelopment of modern ideas of nationality in Poland, Russia, and the lands between. Although there were a few lonely exceptions, such as Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin, literate Russian society as a whole reacted to the Polish Uprising of 1863 with disgust and antipathy. In this atmosphere, Mikhail Katkov became quite influential. His new journal, Moscow News, publicized the idea that the rebellion was a war of nations and compromise would be deadly for Russia. Katkov endorsed the policies of Mikhail N. Muraviev in Lithuania, because Mu-raviev also cast the struggle in nationalist terms: Russians against Poles and their Jewish allies. Katkov’s exposition of the 1863 uprising marked a transition from the Romanticism of his youth to the pessimism of his later years. His writings expressed to his twelve thousand readers the painful disappointment of the Slavophile on learning that others might reject Russia, and the emerging conviction that state power might yet put matters right.
Similar views found a scholarly articulation in the pan-Slavism of Nikolai Danilevsky. He resolved certain apparent tensions in the earlier Slavophile scheme by arguing that the state embodied the ideals of Christianity and the peasant tradition, and peace-loving Slavs needed to use force to unite them. A new civilization founded on these principles would emerge, Danilevsky contended in Russia and Europe (1869), when Constantinople fell to Russia. Danilevsky also applied his argument about force to the problem of Slavs who rejected Russian rule. Poland, which he compared to a hideous tarantula, could perhaps be coerced into seeing reason. Pan-Slavism was put to the test by international politics during the second half of the 1870s, when Russia made war against the Ottoman Empire in the name of the Serbs and Bulgarians. The disappointing terms of the Treaty of Berlin brought home the objective limits of Pan-Slavism as an international mission.
Populism was another initiative that failed to pass the test of political reality. Fired by a faith in the essential goodness of the peasant, the narodniki went “to the people” in the early 1870s. Had their message been heeded, Russian populism might have followed the path of similar movements toward the ethnic nationalism that many enlighteners embraced farther west. In the event, most of the young people who remained in politics after this failure moved to the hard left, imagining (as in Vera Za-sulich’s famous correspondence with Karl Marx) that the peasant commune was itself proto-communist. Populist ideas took a different turn where the commune was less established, as in Ukraine, for example. Ukraine had played a crucial role in Russian national history, providing Muscovy’s ideologues in the seventeenth century and many of its civil servants in the eighteenth. As Karamzin initiated the new trend toward a Moscow-centric history of the empire during the 1810s and the 1820s, as Romantic ideas reached St. Petersburg during the 1830s and the 1840s, and as the Crimean War brought a sharper Russian nationalism during the 1850s, Ukrainian intellectuals in Kharkiv and Kyiv began to see the Ukrainians and the Russians as separate peoples. The poetry of Taras Shevchenko confirmed not only the distinctive Ukrainian language but the definable place of Ukraine between Russia and Poland. The partitions of Poland had brought right-bank Ukraine into the Russian Empire, and during the 1860s and the 1870s not a few members of the Polish gentry (e.g., the historian Volodymyr Antonovych) chose Ukrainian populism and indeed Ukrainian identity. This Polish influence was cited in the Valuev Decree of 1863, which restricted the use of the Ukrainian language. The 1876 Ems Decree, which prohibited the publication of Ukrainian books, induced many Ukrainian intellectuals to emigrate to Austrian Galicia. The most important example was perhaps Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Antonovych’s student, and the greatest historian of Ukraine.
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Politicized Ukrainians in Kyiv generally stayed on the left, and anticipated that national questions would be resolved within a reformed Russian state.
Similar patterns soon emerged in other Christian national revivals, such as the Georgian and the Armenian. Georgia boasted an ancient civilization, a solid state tradition, and a mature national literature. Its position as a weak Christian country in the Caucasus had moved its nobles to accept Russian overlordship in 1783. Although some of them had conspired against Russia in 1832, a generation later the Georgian nobility was a model service class. Its traditional position was eroding because there were now many wealthy peasant farmers, Armenian merchants were extending their hold on the better districts of cities, and Russian bureaucrats were arriving in large numbers. A new Georgian intelligentsia, educated in St. Petersburg, tried to protect the endangered Georgian language during the 1870s. Insofar as this tendency was political, it involved no more than vaguely socialist leanings mixed with the hope for national autonomy in the empire. The Armenians were also Christian but had their own church; they too had a historically prominent class, but it was the merchants; and they were even more dispersed among Muslims than the Georgians. The Armenians had good reasons for being loyal to the empire, because they stood to lose much in any conflict with the Georgians or the Muslims. For the Armenians, as for many other established national groups in the borderlands, the use of national questions by the center after 1881 was an unwelcome sign of future trouble.
NATIONAL OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, 1881-1905
Alexander III, who ascended to the throne after his father’s assassination in 1881, was more amenable to Russian nationalist ideas than his predecessors. During his reign, national ideas were no longer associated with revolution (as during the early nineteenth century) or with reform (as during the middle of the nineteenth century), but rather with reaction. The 1878 trial of Vera Zasulich for attempting to kill the police chief of St. Petersburg had discredited reform even before another socialist murdered the tsar three years later. During the 1880s, Russian nationalism was an updated and secularized version of the old claim that the Russian nation existed by virtue of its Orthodoxy and its submission to the tsar. Under Alexander III and his successor, Nicholas II, a secular conception of the superiority of the Russians supplemented the traditional divine right to rule. Rule was by now an end in itself, since both external crusades and internal reforms were no longer seriously considered. Cultural Russification was advanced as policy on the grounds that Russians would be better subjects than others, but the tsars ruled in the meantime by turning one group against another. There was a shadow of liberalism here, because the beneficiaries were often peasant nations oppressed for centuries by a traditional gentry elite. In this situation, the peasant nations had, at least for a time, some grounds for optimism: the non-Russian gentry and the Russians themselves had very little.
The most important exponent of this improvi-sational pessimism was Konstantin Pobedonostsev. As over-procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905, Pobedonostsev discriminated against Old Believers, religious minorities, and Jews. He was most influential, however, as tutor to the last two tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II. He came closest to direct power in the aftermath of Alexander II’s assassination, when he drafted the manifesto that delayed reform in the name of the people. For Pobedonostsev, this was no contradiction, since absolutism was Russian and therefore represented the Russian people. Pobedonostsev claimed that Russia was the greatest of nations, and the others were the froth of foreign intrigues. In practice, however, he knew that non-Russians did not share this view and would not wish to become Russian. His policies were grounded in historical temporizing, in the hope that suppressing rival nations now would allow a Russian victory later. Pessimism of this kind was common by the 1880s. One could still find exceptional figures, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who still believed in universal missions. Yet officers and bureaucrats were steeped in a nationalism more like Pobedonostsev’s, facing as they did in practice the problems he perceived from on high. Especially in the borderlands, Russian officials had to reconcile their positive view of Russian culture with the essentially negative task of Russification.
At the periphery, Russification involved a triangle consisting of Russia, the traditional local power, and a rising peasant nation. In one p
attern, visible in the Baltic region, Russia supported (to a very limited extent) the peasants against the gentry. In Finland, for example, the local hegemony of Swedes was challenged by the introduction of Finnish schools in 1873 and the equal status granted to the Finnish language in 1886. Within a generation, however, the Finnish movement had oriented itself against the Russian state, Finns prov1007
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ing to be as zealous as Swedes in resisting the full incorporation of their kingdom into the Russian Empire. In the lands now known as Estonia and Latvia, Baltic Germans lost much of their traditional authority, some of it to new national movements. During the 1870s, the 1880s, and the 1890s, Estonian and Latvian patriots tended to expect Russian support against local Germans. In both cases, the quick emergence of a propertied farmer class and the rapid creation of a cultural canon signified a new historical self-consciousness. An Estonian daily newspaper began publishing in 1891, and a Latvian in 1877. In Lithuania the gentry had been Polish, and the Lithuanian movement emerged after the defeat of the 1863 uprising. Lithuanians were seen as a passive and loyal element, but some of the children of prosperous peasants (and some Polish nobles) took Russification and university education in St. Petersburg as a prompting to return to the Lithuanian folk. The first modern Lithuanian periodical appeared in 1883.
The failure of the 1863 uprising in Poland inclined many patriots to reject traditional paths such as emigration, speculative philosophy, and Romantic poetry in favor of a sober appreciation of the national predicament. The hope for rescue from abroad, touchingly portrayed by the novelist Boleslaw Prus in The Doll (1887-1889), had now faded as well. In the former Kingdom of Poland, now officially the Vistula Land and nothing more, positivists such as Prus and Alexander Swieto-chowski urged greater attention to the physical sciences, economics, and pedagogy. They wrote of the possibility of social renewal (a code, under censorship, for national rebirth) through work at society’s foundations. Theirs was a national idea designed to create a national society in the absence of a state. Both its limitations in practice and its emphasis on science made it an effective springboard to the Marxism of the next generation. Some of these Marxists, such as Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, joined the Polish Socialist Party of J?zef Pilsudski, founded in 1892. This party treated national independence as a prerequisite of social revolution, and Kelles-Krauz supported its program with the first serious sociological study of nationalism. The positivists’ attention to the non-gentry classes of society was a model for the National Democrats, whose movement (founded in 1893) added conspiracy and explicit national content to the earlier program of informal mass education. By 1899 the National Democrats had organized some three thousand educational circles. In 1903 their leader, Roman Dmowski, published a polemical tract entitled Thoughts of a Modern Pole, which criticized the traditional leaders of Polish society, the gentry and the post-gentry intelligentsia, and proclaimed a fierce competition between ethnic nations as the wave of the future. Dmowski excluded Jews from the future national community; with time (and later electoral disappointments) anti-Semitism became a central message of National Democracy. Dmowski said little about independence, since he thought the Russian Empire a useful shelter from the powerful German culture; despite this tack he must be considered one of the early modern nationalists of the Russian Empire. Like all Polish activists, Dmowski had to account for the division of Poland lands and people among the three partitioning powers, Germany and Austria as well as Russia.
