Nation and Empire: Reflections in the Margins of Geoffrey Hosking's Book

It has been 15 years since Geoffrey Hosking's Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 appeared in print.¹ Thinking back to the first time I read this book, it seems that I more often disagreed with Hosking than agreed with him. However, this impression might very well be an aberration of memory—as a rule, we tend to remember our points of contention with a scholar's work better than we remember all that we have borrowed from it. Nonetheless, one can say with certainty that the book was a major statement in both the historiographical and the political context of the period.

Russia: People and Empire was written in the first half and middle of the 1990s. At that time, historians in the former Soviet Union were busy constructing and endorsing national narratives in which Russian imperialism and nationalism were cast as the chief villains. Hosking regarded as an "optical illusion" the view that "Russian nationalism [was] overdeveloped and domineering," instead offering his own balanced description of the politics of the empire's periphery that engaged in neither embellishment nor demonization.² By 1997, the passions of this historical debate had abated slightly, but at the beginning of the 21st century, amid a new cycle of the politicization of history in Eastern Europe, Hosking's message seems once again relevant.

In terms of attitudes within Russia itself at the time of the book's publication, Hosking was likewise paddling against the current. By the mid-1990s, liberals in Russia were not particularly in favor, and nostalgia for the USSR and regret over the Soviet collapse were very much in evidence—and not only among Communists. All the same, Hosking insisted that Russian "nationhood [had] probably been even more blighted by the empire" than the nationhood of other former imperial territories. Along with Russian liberals, he argued that it was far better to be a nation than an empire. This position, which we will revisit at the end of this article, is essentially the one to which Hosking still adheres today.³

In the historiographical context of the period, Hosking's claims came across as rather polemical. In 1992, the first German-language edition of Andreas Kappeler's magnum opus appeared in print, detailing Russia's history as a multiethnic empire.⁴ (The English-language edition of Kappeler's work would not appear until 2001.)⁵ In Kappeler's book, which synthesized historiographical findings up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the multiethnic nature of the entire Russian Empire was painted in full. However, there was a gaping hole in the center of Kappeler's canvas, since he paid scant attention to the importance of Russians or, more accurately, "Great Russians." Hosking undoubtedly wrote his book as a reaction to Kappeler's work, arguing that it was "time to redress the balance in favor of Russians."⁶ Hosking by no means suggested that we simply forget about the empire's borderlands; instead, he sought to examine the national development of Great Russians and the empire's other nationalities in relationship to one another.

For historians in Russia, this approach was especially important. At the time, there was almost no work on Russian nationalism and nation building in the Russian Empire. Moreover, there loomed the obvious risk that in filling this gap, Russian historians, following the example of their colleagues in neighboring countries, might construct a national narrative that would sacrifice the imperial dimensions of these issues.⁷ In his book, Hosking outlined a range of themes that historians would engage in the years to come; these included the relationship between empire and the Russian nation, and the nexus of political, social, and ethnic factors in nation building among the various populations of the Russian Empire.

Seen from today's perspective, Hosking's approach in many ways remained in line with existing historiographical conventions. At the same time, there was much in his book that was engaging and thought-provoking. While it is difficult for me to judge the extent of Hosking's...