Politics at the Margins and the Margins of Politics in Imperial Russia

In recent years, cultural history and political history have joined in a fruitful symbiosis which continues to generate valuable and inspiring scholarship.¹ They have mutually enriched each other, both thematically and methodologically. Political historians are now employing categories such as gender, class, empire, semiotics, and behavior, while cultural historians are increasingly interested in the world of politics, the mechanics of power, and international relations. In the case of Russian and Soviet history, politics and culture have traditionally been intertwined more closely than elsewhere. The work of Iurii Lotman, Marc Raeff, and Richard Wortman reflects the particular nature of Russian political interference in and use of culture and literature, especially since the time of Peter the Great, when new cultural forms became a constituent element of political power and discourse.² Wortman’s Scenarios of Power especially seems to have inspired the first of the two books under review here—indeed, Wortman contributed an essay.³

Both volumes are in their main parts the results of recent scholarship conducted within two large research clusters (Sonderforschungsbereich, abbreviated SFB) at German universities, here Universität Bielefeld and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Abundantly funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), such clusters are meant to raise the academic profile of a university and to allow for fundamental research to be carried out. They unite vastly different fields, approaches, and periods under a broad common theme (e.g., poverty, representations, communicative space) which is then (ideally) also reflected in the resulting publications. Both books are thus a reflection of current historiographic trends in Germany and, to a lesser extent, Russia and the United States. They are, if you will, reports from the workshop floor, and as such they are a pleasantly stimulating and inspiring read.

How does the empire reach into the provinces? This question has long been discussed among historians of Russia. But their focus was usually on institutional modernization, economic development, and social mobilization. Imperiale Herrschaft in der Provinz, which consists of 15 chapters, approaches this issue differently. As Jörg Baberowski persuasively argues in his introduction, the empire in the minds of people mattered about as much as its manifestations in the real world. Imperial representations and their perceptions by local people were crucial for the successful transmission and long-term establishment of political power. Yet as he also shows in his own chapter about persisting forms of premodern rule in the late imperial period, a rational, modern, bureaucratic administration often came into conflict with older traditions of governance that were still built on personal trust and patronage. This was particularly the case in the multiethnic borderlands, where long-established local elites tended to be marginalized by bureaucrats who were sent out from St. Petersburg and replaced every few years. But it also applied to the Russian heartland, where reforms of the legal system in the late 19th century promoted the rule of law over local patronage networks—with different degrees of success.

In an autocratic state, the monarchy was obviously at the very heart of any representation of the political order. Richard Wortman in his chapter reiterates some of the points he has made previously in Scenarios of Power, in particular the importance of the symbolic sphere of monarchical rule, its visual and emotional qualities, and its potential for dynamic change from one ruler to the next. But he also points out that his research has not really focused on representations of monarchical power in the provinces and the imperial periphery, where two aspects will be...