Response

I am tremendously grateful to my colleagues for their diligence in reexamining my published work. It has come as an agreeable surprise to me to see it being seriously discussed by other scholars. I had become accustomed to not getting much attention in the scholarly journals, but did not worry too much about it, since I felt my main calling was to write for students and the general public. This was always a rather old-fashioned view and points to what I now see as a weakness in my own development: my reluctance to undertake a theoretical justification of what Mark Edele rightly says I was doing or to engage in a methodological debate about it. (This article is my first appearance in Kritika, for example!) I was perfectly conscious of mixing genres by suggesting that "totalitarian" theorists were basically right but ought to pay much more attention to social history. I should have articulated my ideas more consciously, and I am glad to be challenged to do so now. I have focused on the tensions between nation and empire, and on the way primary collectives and personalized patron-client networks have held Russian society together. But only on one occasion have I argued explicitly for the merits of this approach.¹

Alexei Miller provides the most detailed critique of my work, so let me turn to him first. In People and Empire I offered evidence for a strong thesis, that in Russia state-building had impeded nation-building.² I did so for a number of reasons. Fifteen to twenty years ago, when I was writing the book, Russia had just emerged from the Soviet Union as a potential nation-state. Some observers seemed simply to assume that as a result it would automatically become a liberal democracy, while others gloomily foresaw the inevitable restoration of autocracy in a new form. Both approaches seemed to me to underestimate the complexities of the transition from empire to nation-state. Hence I wanted to explore the historical relationship between state and nation.

I also wanted to suggest—in the teeth of most Western scholarship at that time—that Russians had a perfect right to their own national consciousness, and even their own nationalism, and that this consciousness did not necessarily imply overbearing imperialism. I recall giving an interview to Literaturnaia gazeta in which I stated—to the horror of the editor interviewing me—that I was a "Russian nationalist." I hastened to explain that my use of the term implied that I was not a supporter of Russian imperialism, and that I thought an important part of nationhood was a developed and diverse civil society. It seems strange now, but at that time few people thought of Russia as having an "ethnic" identity. The term "ethnic" was always used to denote minorities or subordinate nationalities, and nobody applied it to the Russians, the Germans, or the English. Thus Andreas Kappeler's excellent book on the formation of national identities in the Russian Empire did not consider the Russians.³ I wanted to fill that gap. Today the situation is transformed. We have had a large number of books and articles investigating most aspects of the national identity of both the Russians and the non-Russians. We know far more about how the nature of that identity was influenced by their position in empire and their relationship to one another. The problems of imperial, dominant, or "missionary" ethnicities have also been thoroughly explored.⁴

One reformulation of the empire-nation relationship is to postulate the creation of "state-nations," as Miller suggests. I have not seen the book he mentions by Stepan, Linz, and Yadav, but their articles have made a tenable case for using the concept.⁵ Yet it is not really an advance on the view of nation-building advanced by Anthony D. Smith in a number of works published in the 1980s and 1990s. Smith suggested there were two main ways in which nations were formed: "demotic," through localized subject communities reacting against an alien state, or "aristocratic," through an aristocracy using their command of the state to assimilate lower classes...