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7. Travel, Railroads, and Identity Formation in the Russian Empire
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7 Travel, Railroads, and Identity Formation in the Russian Empire Frithjof Benjamin Schenk Historians often perceive railroads primarily as an infrastructure helping a state to consolidate its territory and to integrate distant regions into one economic and political space. This is also true for most of the literature on the history of railroads in nineteenth century Russia. Undoubtedly the steam engine was an important tool in the Tsarist Empire to link various geographical parts of the large country one with another and thereby to enhance the exchange of commodities and the mobility of the population. In the second half of the nineteenth century both the government and private investors helped to create an iron network, which was envisioned already by contemporary cartographers as a skeleton strengthening the cohesive forces within the huge polyethnic empire. But by increasing the mobility of a significant number of Russian subjects, railroads also opened new opportunities for people to experience ethnic and religious diversity. Contemporary travel accounts bear witness that travelers on Russian railroads perceived the empire less as a homogeneous space of communication than a fragmented territory inhabited by a great and sometimes uncomfortable variety of ethnic and religious groups. Moreover, the railroad proved to be an effective tool in the hands of those political actors who were trying to undermine political stability. In particular , in the western borderlands railroads repeatedly became a target of politically motivated violence and were used by militant groups to spread the seeds of ethnic hatred. The Russian example bears witness that the railroad, envisioned by its proponents as a golden path to social and spatial integration, in the immediate term enabled violence and contributed to developing social disintegration. My essay may be read—in a more general sense—as a plea for the inclusion of railway history into the broader discourse on the history of the borderlands of European empires in the long nineteenth century. As a matter of fact historians have treated the history of infra- Travel, Railroads, and Identity Formation 137 structure in general and of railroads in particular for a long time as an exclusive domain of scholars studying either economic or technical history. Railway historians, conversely, have often neglected the great cultural and social impact of the construction and the use of networks of modern infrastructure in the era of the steam engine, but in recent years there has been a “cultural turn” in railway history.1 In this spirit, we have to bring the history of infrastructure back into the general narrative of the development of European societies in the era of industrialization. The history of the borderlands of the Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Hohenzollern empires in particular gains substantially from insight into the social and cultural impacts of the construction and the use of modern infrastructure in the era of the steam engine. The construction of railway networks altered significantly the structures of social spaces within these contested regions of the continent’s polyethnic empires. In the imperial capitals the invention of the railroads inspired far-reaching spatial fantasies by politicians, military experts, and geographers alike. Both the state and private actors made a strong effort to use the new means of transportation in order to transform geographically and culturally heterogeneous territories into politically and economically integrated spaces. But in the borderlands of the continental empires of Europe, populated by a variety of ethnic and religious groups, the introduction of networks of modern transportation had extensive and often unintended social and cultural side effects. On the one hand, railways became an effective tool of imperial rule, helping imperial administrations to exert political and military control more effectively over large territories at the empires’ peripheries; construction of railroads thereby helped to integrate borderland areas into the political, economic, and cultural space of their respective empires. On the other hand, the construction of railroads led to a significant increase in human mobility in all countries encountering the process of modernization of their infrastructure. Increasingly mobile societies became a growing threat to the social and political order of the anciens régimes in the polyethnic empires for various reasons. The new means of transportation opened up new possibilities for an increasing number of people to explore the various geographical regions of the imperial territories personally and thereby to encounter the empires’ ethnic and religious heterogeneity. It is an open question whether this confrontation between an increasing number of subjects and the “imperial characters” of their respective empires consolidated feelings of imperial identity or—on the...