Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930

17. Imperial Political Culture and Modernization in the Second Halfof the Nineteenth Century

17 Imperial Political Culture and Modernization in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Sviatoslav Kaspe Russia between the Poles of Empire and Nation-State: Conceptual Landmarks The new phase of modernization Russia is experiencing today once again raises the question of modernization’s impact on the essential characteristics of Russian civilization, including what may be called Russia’s “paradigm of statehood”—that is, the complex of cultural, religious, mental , psychological, and other conditions that determine the structure of an institutional design. Although this paradigm is only partially articulated in social-political theory and practice, it in fact de¤nes both of them, and we can assume that it possesses its own internal logic, coherency, and potential for evolution. It has become a commonplace in both scholarship and journalism that a choice has not yet been made between the two possible variants for the reorganization of the Russian state paradigm. These alternatives are described in ethno-political terms as the empire and nation-state paradigms. (The latter term has multiple possibilities, since a nation-state can be based upon ethnic as well as upon a purely civil, constitutional understanding of the word “nation.”) The natural attempt to take into account the experience of the past in order to answer this question leads us to consider the events of another period when Russia faced a similar problem. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a ¤rst round of systemic modernization , initiated by the Great Reforms, led to signi¤cant changes in the ethno-political structure of the Russian empire. These changes in their turn predetermined to a great extent the course and the outcome of the systemic crisis that shook the empire in the early twentieth century. The more precise chronological limits of my study are 1855–1894, the reigns of Alexander II and Alexander III. These temporal boundaries encompass large-scale transformations of the regime, a crisis (with an ethno-political dimension) initiated by these transformations, measures taken to overcome this crisis, and a temporary stabilization in the mid-1890s. Although in many ways the reign of Alexander III signi¤ed a break with the principles of his predecessor and a turn toward counter-reform, a national-cultural policy continued without interruption throughout this period.1 The chronological boundaries of my research re®ect this continuity . An analysis of this period allows us not only to uncover the presence of an explicitly imperial component in the Russian statehood paradigm, but also to describe the speci¤cs of its operation. My analysis provides a basis for understanding the impact of modernizing processes during the second half of the nineteenth century upon the imperial dimension of the statehood paradigm. This chapter derives from my larger study of the imperial component of the Russian statehood paradigm and is based upon the conceptual approach I introduced in my article, “Empire: Genesis, Structure, Functions .”2 I attempted to shift from a symptomatic de¤nition of empire that describes it as a collection of certain attributes to a genetic de¤nition that reveals the roots of the imperial phenomenon, its contents, and therefore its possible courses of development. Of course, such a de¤nition can only be an ideal type in the Weberian sense. It does not claim to cover the entire temporal and spatial spectrum of real empires, but nonetheless provides a general conceptual foundation for analysis of the question at hand. In the course of reconstructing an ideal type of an empire, I isolate the following critical attributes, critical in that they are common to the majority of symptomatic de¤nitions: a considerable territorial scale, ethnocultural and ethno-political heterogeneity, and the presence of universalistic perspectives in mechanisms of legitimization and in political practices , going as far as claims to the universal signi¤cance of the particular empire’s existence. This formulation of the question allows me to propose the following working hypothesis: Imperial political systems represent a method of resolving con®ictridden tensions arising from the collision of universalistic, culturally motivated political orientations with the de facto variety and diversity of political cultures represented within a particular political space. This hypothesis allows us to analyze to what extent and by what means particular components of the imperial structure provide for cultural and 456 Sviatoslav Kaspe political integration of the imperial territory. It thus lays the ground for a structural-functional analysis of imperial systems, as well as for a shift...