Peopling the Empires: Practices, Perceptions, Policies
The recent interest in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union as multiethnic societies has over the past decade sparked excellent, innovative work. The new studies have explored the ways in which these states evolved unique policies to cope (more or less successfully) with this complex human environment, the manner in which their peoples adapted to the social and economic situation that this diversity created, and the cultural adaptation and modes of resistance that gradually emerged among peoples in both the imperial and the Soviet periods.1 The Swiss historian Andreas Kappeler placed himself [End Page 841] at the cutting edge of this new scholarship when, in 1992, he published his general history of the empire under the title of Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall.2 It was a pioneering work, all the more so as the collapse of the Soviet Union had brought home, like no other event in modern Russian history, the diversity of the peoples inhabiting the territory once governed from the imperial center. But Kappeler's work was handicapped by appearing before the outpouring of exciting monographic studies devoted to Russia's multiethnic history and grounded in research in archives made at last accessible by the lifting of the draconian restrictions of the Soviet era. It is not surprising that his argument, though innovative in approach, falls back on the timeworn thesis of the empire's "premodern, prenational order" confronting in its last century "new social and national forces."3 Fifteen years later, scholars can discern the outlines of a different story of empire-building, Russian/Soviet style.
The view that the empire bore striking similarities on its southern and eastern borderlands to Western colonial empires has become in recent years something of a truism.4 The colonial perspective has even emerged in studies exploring the multiethnic world of the Soviet Union, though it has occasioned some controversy by putting aside or minimizing the draconian dictatorial features of the communist order. It has "decentered" the Soviet experience by proposing a conceptual divorce between center and periphery after generations of addressing borderlands' issues from the perspective of the imperial capital. This reframing of imperial history (understood here in a broad sense to extend across the once-great divide of 1917) suggests new ways of writing a history of those states as multiethnic creations in their own right. Specifically, this essay examines the issue of multiethnicity in the two empires by asking the books under review to address three questions: How did state policies take into account (more or less successfully) the diversity of the population? In what ways did the peoples themselves accommodate (or resist) the cultural, social, and economic differences that ethnicity entailed? Finally, how did perceptions of ethnic diversity become a (more or less) invidious distinction differentiating groups into superior and inferior members of the polity? This thematic approach cannot do justice to the richness of [End Page 842] the authors' evidence and arguments. It does open a window onto a field of inquiry that makes the peoples and the "peopling" (understood in the broad sense outlined above) of the empires a key subject of...
