According to Uvarov, nationality was the traditional way of life that was supposed to ensure the continuity of the other two key elements of Russian identity—religion and autocracy—in an age shaped by new European ideas. If in Europe the idea of nation, closely associated with the principle of popular representation, challenged political autocracy, in Russia it was supposed to support the traditional tsarist regime. Uvarov did not seek to justify the tsar’s autocratic rule by claiming that it was based on divine right, as was customary at the time in the imperial capital; nor did he look to the church to legitimize it. Instead he linked autocracy with nationality, claiming that “one and the other flow from the same source and are conjoined on every page of the history of the Russian people.” He stopped short, however, of suggesting that the Russian nation was the source of autocratic power.
Uvarov was clearly being selective in introducing the Western idea of nationality to Russia. He ignored Schlegel’s emphasis on national language and culture, stressing attachment to traditional institutions. Since the Russian Empire was multiethnic, the idea of ethnic particularity threatened it with the kind of mobilization against Russian political dominance that the Poles had demonstrated in 1830. There was also the prospect that Russian nationalists might define their rights and interests differently from those of the monarchy. Uvarov sought to link empire and nationality in the hope that the latter would strengthen the former. He concluded his memorandum with a reference to the responsibility that he felt to “God, Sovereign, and Fatherland.” This was a reprise of the triad enunciated by Admiral Shishkov, Russia’s chief propagandist at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, indicating the link between Uvarov’s formula and established imperial tradition.
Despite Uvarov’s conservative intentions, the introduction of the term “nationality” into Russian politics meant that European nationalism had arrived in the Russian Empire. Peter I’s chief ideologue, Teofan Prokopovych, had used the term “fatherland”; it had now been transmuted into “nation” (prefigured in the Synopsis of 1674, where “nation” was also used in a traditional rather than a revolutionary sense). What “nationality” would mean in practice was not yet clear, either to the author of the new ideological triad or to his addressee, the tsar himself. It would take generations to resolve the political issues implicit in the term. What were the borders of Russian nationality? Did it suffice for a subject of the empire to profess loyalty to the tsar and the Orthodox faith, or were there other essential elements of Russianness as well? Nowhere were these questions more pressing, in the wake of the Polish uprising of 1830–1831, than in the former territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth annexed to the Russian Empire.
6
THE BATTLE FOR THE BORDERLANDS
IN THE SUMMER OF 1831, AT THE HEIGHT OF THE NOVEMBER Uprising, Nicholas I had offered Austria and Prussia some of the Polish lands beyond the Vistula, but now, with the uprising crushed, he changed course. His answer to the new Polish question came in February 1832 with the publication of the Organic Statute, which laid out his plans for the future of the Kingdom of Poland. The Organic Statute took away freedoms previously granted to Poland by Alexander I: the office of tsar of Poland was gone and the Diet abolished, as was the separate Polish army. General Field Marshal Count Ivan Paskevich was given the new title of Prince of Warsaw and appointed ruler of the former kingdom, which he was to integrate into the Russian Empire.
The decision to integrate the Kingdom of Poland with the empire had a major impact on imperial policy in what would become known in official parlance as the “western provinces”—the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian lands annexed by Catherine and located between the Kingdom of Poland and core areas of the empire. For a long time before the November Uprising, the imperial rulers had vacillated on what to do with those territories. Nicholas was no exception. Like his father, Paul, and his brother and predecessor, Alexander, Nicholas did not believe that partitions served the interests of Russia, but, like them, he felt that he could not afford to turn those lands over to the Poles. “As long as I live, I can in no way allow ideas of annexing Lithuania to Poland to be encouraged,” wrote Nicholas to his brother, Constantine, in 1827. He believed, however, that “this does not prevent me from being just as good a Pole as I am a good Russian.” What he probably had in mind was the fulfillment of his duties as emperor of Russia and tsar of Poland. When the Polish revolt broke out in November 1830, the Polish minister of finance quipped that “Nicholas, Tsar of Poland, is waging war with Nicholas, Emperor of All Russia.” With the defeat of the November Uprising, there was no longer any doubt about who had won that war. Poland would not get its former territories back.
On September 14, 1831, only a week after the fall of Warsaw, the imperial government created a special body that became known as the Committee on the Western Provinces, or “Western Committee.” Established on the oral and secret order of Nicholas, the committee was charged with “examining various proposals concerning the provinces regained from Poland.” For the first time since the partitions, the Russian government had created an authoritative body to deal systematically with the annexed territories. The goal was their speedy and complete integration into the empire, to be accomplished much more quickly than the integration of the Kingdom of Poland. Russification (obrusenie), the goal that Catherine II had formulated for Smolensk province and the Hetmanate back in 1763, now became official Russian policy with regard to the former Polish lands. It included administrative, legal, and social measures to bring those regions into line with the Russian provinces of the empire.
The model of imperial expansion and integration of new territories based on the principle of elite co-optation had failed to function in the case of the territories annexed from Poland, and the Polish uprising drove home to the Russian imperial elite this uncomfortable truth. The Polish elites had rebelled, and the government now had no choice but to change its policy. The popular masses at whose expense the deal with the Polish nobility was made were overwhelmingly Eastern Slavs, although their adherence to Uniate Catholicism differentiated them from the Russian Orthodox. In its struggle with the imperial center, the Polish Catholic nobility had appealed for and often obtained support from its Ukrainian and Belarusian subjects because of this religious affinity. The government wanted to drive a wedge between the elites and the ruled. It employed every means at its disposal, including the concept of official nationality formulated by Count Uvarov, to that end.
In November 1832, the Western Committee issued a decree intended to diminish the number of people in the western provinces who could claim noble rights, including the right to buy land and serfs—a measure designed to undermine the status of Polish nobles. In the 1840s, Nicholas promoted initiatives to register and limit peasant obligations to landowners in order to support “Russian” peasants. To the degree that a noble-based empire could do so, it was taking the side of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry against Polish nobility. Other policies included the liquidation of urban self-government and the abolition of the local law code, which went back to the times of Polish and Lithuanian rule over the region. Those policies were applied to the lands that had once belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole, including the former Hetmanate, whose loyalty was no longer in question.
The government also introduced policies to promote cultural Russification of the region. These included the creation of a new historical narrative, claiming the newly acquired lands for Russia, the establishment of new university and school districts, and the conversion of the Belarusian and Ukrainian Uniates to Orthodoxy and their incorporation into the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was these three sets of policies that had the most profound effect not only on the region but also on the way in which the Russian elite imagined itself and the geographic, social, and cultural borders of its nation.
THE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL ELITES HAD BEGUN TO THINK ABOUT THE future of the western provinces of the empire, which were settled largely by Eastern Sl
avs, during the period of Alexander’s liberal reforms. A leader of the Decembrist Uprising (1825), Pavel Pestel, had fully recognized the complexity of the question when he sat down to write the rebels’ manifesto of intentions—a constitution for the future Russian state that he called “Russian Justice,” alluding to the law code of the medieval Kyivan state. He had to reconcile his concern for the preservation and strengthening of the Russian Empire with his belief that every nationality had a right to political independence. Clearly, the empire had no shortage of national homelands. Aside from Russia and Poland, Pestel’s incomplete list included “Finland, Estland, Livland, Courland, Belarus, Little Russia, New Russia, Bessarabia, the Crimea, Georgia, the whole Caucasus, the lands of the Kirghiz, and all the Siberian peoples.” Pestel’s solution to the problem was simple: smaller nationalities would have to forgo their right to independence and become part of the larger and more powerful nationality. “They will find it better and more useful to themselves,” wrote Pestel about the small nationalities, “if they unite in spirit and society with a large state and completely merge their nationality with that of the ruling people, constituting just one people with them, and ceasing to dream uselessly of a task that is impossible and unrealizable.”
Pestel wanted to give independence to the Kingdom of Poland while Russifying most of the lands acquired during Catherine’s partitions of Poland. He considered those lands to be settled by the Russian people, which he defined as a Slavic tribe united by a single language, religion, and social structure. He divided his Russian nation into five subgroups: the Great Russians of the core imperial provinces, the Little Russians on the Left Bank of the Dnieper, the Ukrainians of the region around Kharkiv called Sloboda Ukraine, the Rusyns on the Right Bank of the Dnieper as well as in Volhynia and Podolia, and the Belarusians of the lands annexed to Russia at the time of the first partition of Poland. (Pestel did not consider the inhabitants of the Grodno [Hrodna] and Minsk provinces to be part of the Russian nation and probably envisioned the transfer of those provinces to the enlarged Kingdom of Poland.) Pestel argued that the difference between the Russians of the core imperial provinces and those of today’s Ukraine and Belarus lay in the special administrative status of the western provinces. “Hence it should be established as a rule,” wrote Pestel, that all inhabitants of the Vitebsk [Vitsebsk], Mogilev [Mahilioŭ], Chernigov [Chernihiv], Poltava, Kursk, Kharkov [Kharkiv], Kiev [Kyiv], Podolia, and Volyn [Volhynia] provinces should be considered true Russians and not divided from the latter by any particular names.”
It fell to Nicholas I’s minister of education, Count Uvarov, to find ways of uniting the various branches of Pestel’s “true Russians” in the wake of the Polish uprising. Uvarov was of one mind with Pestel when it came to treating the East Slavic population of the western provinces as Russians, but he did not share Pestel’s belief that the differences were purely administrative. He must have thought that they were much more substantial, had to do with culture, and could be overcome only in another generation—and that even that would require a proper educational program. He wrote to the tsar: “All illustrious rulers from the Romans to Napoleon—those who intended to unite the tribes they conquered with the victorious tribe—invested all their hopes and all the fruits of their labors in future generations instead of the present generation.”
Uvarov had good reason to be cautious and place his trust in the future. In the western provinces, he had to deal with a formidable obstacle in the shape of the Polish language, history, and culture: in the aftermath of the uprising of 1830, more people there read and wrote in Polish than in Russian. Like Pushkin and Pestel before him, Uvarov regarded the Polish question not as a conflict between an imperial center and a province, or between a multiethnic empire and one of its nationalities, but as a conflict between two nations, Russia and Poland, which ultimately had to be resolved in the sphere of education.
As early as 1831, Uvarov began looking for an author who could provide historical justification for the annexation and integration of the western provinces into the empire. His search was triggered by a letter to the Ministry of Education from one of its officials in the Grodno (Hrodna) province of what is now western Belarus. The official argued for the “resurrection, dissemination, and establishment in the western provinces of a nationality closely tied to the general Russian nationality.” In his view, the problem of nationality in the region was to be solved by integrating its history into that of the empire and promoting linguistic assimilation by offering classes in Church Slavonic, a common literary language of the Eastern Slavs throughout most of the eighteenth century.
Uvarov took to heart the request for a new history. His vision of the region’s past was not unlike that of Pavel Pestel. The Decembrist leader argued that the western provinces “belonged to Russia in ancient times and were torn away from it under unfavorable circumstances.” According to Pestel, by “reuniting them with its body” under Catherine II, Russia had “restored its ancient dignity, all the dearer to it inasmuch as it can pay homage to the cradle of the Russian state—in the north, Novgorod and its adjoining provinces, and in the south, Kiev [Kyiv] with the Chernigov [Chernihiv], Kiev [Kyiv], Poltava, Podolia, and Volyn provinces, that most ancient nucleus of the Russian state.”
This line of argument followed the tradition established by Catherine II and Prince Oleksandr Bezborodko after the second partition of Poland but called into question during the liberal rule of Alexander I. It was during the latter’s rule that the statist interpretation of Russian history, presented by Nikolai Karamzin in his History of the Russian State, was challenged by the nationality principle advocated by the Polish and Russian historians. One of the leading Russian historians and journalists of the period, Nikolai Polevoi, published a six-volume history of the Russian narod (people or nation) between 1829 and 1833—a clear contrast to Karamzin’s earlier multivolume work. This challenge to the statist interpretation coincided with the Polish uprising, which dramatically changed the Russian historiographic scene and placed on the agenda the task of uncovering and substantiating the “Russian” past of the western provinces.
Uvarov’s first choice for writing a history text integrating the western provinces into the empire was Mikhail Pogodin, a professor of history at Moscow University who enthusiastically embraced the task. Pogodin, who assured the minister that he would fight the Polish historians as General Paskevich had fought the Polish insurgents in 1831, was approached in November 1834 and submitted his text a year later—Uvarov reported directly to the tsar about the scholar’s progress. But Pogodin turned out to be too good a historian to satisfy the minister’s demands. His book presented the history of northeastern Rus’, or Russia, as distinct—indeed, separate—from that of southwestern Rus’ (Ukraine and Belarus), undermining the project’s main goal of linking the western provinces with Russia in a seamless historical narrative. Uvarov explained the failure to the tsar by citing the novelty of presenting the history of the Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian provinces as a single narrative.
But Pogodin’s failure did not discourage Uvarov. He established a special prize of 10,000 rubles for an author who could present the history of the western provinces as part of Russian history, then asked another history professor, this time from St. Petersburg University, to attempt the task. His name was Nikolai Ustrialov, and he set to work on a four-volume history of Russia. In December 1836, Ustrialov submitted the first volume of his work. Uvarov approved it a month later, recommending the volume as a standard textbook to his subordinates in educational districts throughout the empire. In 1839, Ustrialov produced a one-volume synthesis of his larger work, which Uvarov presented to the tsar. The next year, Uvarov closed the competition for the best textbook of Russian history. The task accomplished, the award eventually went to Ustrialov.
What attracted Uvarov so much in Ustrialov’s compendium, titled Russian History, was Ustrialov’s presentation of the reclamation of the Kyivan lands, which had been lost through treachery
to foreign powers, as the leitmotif of Russian history. Ustrialov wrote: “The major fact in the history of the Russian tsardom was the gradual development of the idea of the need to reestablish the Russian land within the borders it had under Yaroslav [the Wise].… [A]ll our conflicts with Poland, the Livonian Order, and the Swedes… stem from this fact.” In Ustrialov’s interpretation, the Lithuanian state was a dynastic rather than a national rival of Moscow, and he claimed that difficulties in relations between Lithuanian rulers and their “Russian” subjects had begun only with the arrival of the Poles in the fourteenth century. Ustrialov wrote three versions of his survey, which was printed a total of twenty-six times.
In the 1857 edition, Ustrialov claimed that the population of Kyivan Rus’ had constituted one nation, thereby completing the process of supplementing Karamzin’s statist approach with one based on the principle of nationality and extending the scope of Russian history not only in institutional but also in geographic terms. As Ustrialov conceived it, Russian history was now something more than just the history of the Russian state. It also included historically Russian lands that did not belong to that state.
APART FROM HISTORY, RUSSIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE EMERGED as the principal tools of the government’s new policy in the borderlands. Education with Russian as the language of instruction was meant to suppress a sense of separate nationality among Polish youth. To that end, new educational institutions and policies were established in the western provinces of the empire.
The empire needed new people to introduce those policies. In 1802, when the empire created its first ministry of education, it was entrusted to Petro Zavadovsky, a former Cossack official and, more importantly, a graduate of the Kyivan Academy and a Jesuit seminary in the Belarusian town of Orsha, which had then belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Zavadovsky’s subordinates who headed educational institutions in the western borderlands of the empire were Polish aristocrats. Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, an adviser to Alexander I and for some time foreign minister of the Russian Empire, also ran the Vilnius educational district between 1803 and 1817. The district included Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian provinces annexed from the Commonwealth. The Kharkiv educational district, which encompassed eastern Ukraine, was administered during the same period by a fellow Polish aristocrat, Seweryn Potocki. The Poles had more experience than Russian educators because of the pioneering activities of the Polish Educational Commission, created in 1773 in the partitioned Commonwealth to establish a system of public education in the country, including its Ukrainian and Belarusian provinces.
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