Pietarinsuomalaiset, and: Lootuste linn: Peterburi ja eesti haritlaskonna kujunemine kuni 1917, and: Mnogonatsional′nyi Peterburg: Istoriia, religii, narody (review)

For many, our first glimpses of multiethnic tsarist St. Petersburg come via the stories of Nikolai Gogol′, for whom the strange and fascinating character of the imperial capital was always tied to the ethnic diversity of its population. In a letter he recorded his initial impressions upon arriving in the city in 1828:

Petersburg appeared to me completely not how I expected. I had imagined it much more beautiful and grand. Instead, what people say about it are lies…. Petersburg is unlike all other European capitals or Moscow. In general, each capital is characterized by its nation that casts on it an imprint of nationality, but in Petersburg there is no character whatsoever: foreigners who settled here … no longer resemble foreigners and the Russians, in turn, became neither one nor the other.¹

Gogol′ was discomfited by the combination of ongoing assimilation and persistent heterogeneity characteristic of Petersburg’s minorities. In her new and very impressive study of the discourse of nation in Gogol′’s works, Edyta Bojanowska argues that the writer saw Petersburg’s ethnic diversity as the cause of a profound instability not only within the tsarist capital but in the fabric of imperial Russia itself.² Was Gogol′ right? Did the presence in Petersburg of large numbers of people of varying nationality create an inherently unstable and somehow “unhealthy” population?

The literature on multiethnic cities in the late Russian empire has been increasing in recent years. Most works on ethnicity treat a given ethnic group in a particular urban center (some of this literature is discussed below). A smaller number assess how ethnicity was lived and negotiated within a given town or city as a whole, focusing on the largest ethnic or groups in that locale. The latter include Michael Hamm’s work on Kiev and Ulrike von Hirschhausen’s on Riga.³

The three books under review do not present overarching arguments about the influence of Petersburg’s multiethnic population on either the city’s civic identity or the cohesion of the empire. They demonstrate, however, that Petersburg’s non-Russians in the last century of tsarist rule maintained high levels of ethnic difference and vitality while at the same time becoming integrated into the daily life of the city and the empire.

Although the imperial capital of St. Petersburg is thought of as a Russian city, in fact, non-Russians made up significant portions of the population throughout its history. For the first century of the city’s existence, most of its non-Russian inhabitants were foreigners, non-citizens of the Russian empire. According to an early description of the population of the city founded by Peter I, “Straightaway from his expansive state and lands were sent a huge number of people—Russians, Tatars, Cossacks, Kalmyks, and so forth, as well as Finnish and Ingermanland peasants.”⁴ In the absence of any census data, estimates of the ethnic makeup of Petersburg in the 18th century are little more than educated guesses. It is clear, though, that foreigners made up a large portion of non-Russians throughout the century.

By the mid-19th century, foreigners no longer dominated among the city’s non-Russian population, both in terms of number and position within society. Reliable information about the ethnic makeup of the city is available beginning in 1869, when a census was completed in the city, one of five conducted between that year and 1910. In 1869, some 8,000 individuals worked in the civil administration; only one-half of 1 percent of these were not subjects of the tsar. Judging...