In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 1 7 4 While Little Russian activists portrayed the southwestern borderlands as the spiritual center of an Orthodox, East Slavic nation, social, political, and economic processes unrelated to the de-polonization campaign were transforming everyday life in the region. The 1860s marked the beginning of several decades of rapid urban and industrial development across the empire, spurred by new state incentives encouraging investments in trade and manufacturing as well as the emancipation of the serfs, which compelled many peasants to leave their communes in search of wage labor.1 In the southwest, a new capitalist elite coalesced in the regional center of Kiev, acquiring property and cultural capital that the decimated szlachta had abandoned. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of peasants and townspeople struggling to survive in one of the empire’s poorest and most densely populated corners descended on the city, finding work in the factories and artisanal workshops springing up on the urban periphery. As a diverse array of newcomers crowded out the bureaucrats, Orthodox clergy, and Little Russian intellectuals who had already gained a foothold in Kiev, new communities—and new conflicts—emerged in the city. The role of urban politics in shaping national and ideological identifications in nineteenth-century central and western Europe has been well documented. In the first two-thirds of the century, bourgeois liberals seized control of city governments and the urban professions across the continent, creating attractive and orderly urban spaces and founding dense networks of schools, associations, and cultural institutions . Presenting themselves as the architects of a universal modernity built on reason and expertise, they challenged the authority of landed elites and central states while they struggled to both control and acculturate the lower classes.2 In the last third of the century, representatives of the lower-middle and working classes who resented bourgeois attempts to speak for them mobilized to denounce the liberal order. To 1. See Brower, Russian City. 2. On the liberal-bourgeois order, see Alan S. Kahan, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York, 2003); Derek Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (New York, 1979); Gordon A. Craig, The Triumph of Liberalism (New York, 1988); Berthold Grzywatz, Stadt, Bürgertum und Staat im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2003). Nationalizing Urban Politics 118 c h a p t e r f o u r compensate for their limited access to political institutions, they created a massoriented and emotionally charged style of politics that defined itself against the staid respectability of bourgeois society. This “politics in a new key” described so elegantly by Carl Schorske gave rise to radical nationalist and antiliberal movements in many European cities, beginning the transition from the era of notable politics to the age of mass mobilization.3 Emphasizing the constraints that the autocratic regime placed on political organization and expression, the literature on Russian urban politics tends to focus on the troubled relationship between individual segments of the urban population and the imperial state. Numerous studies have examined how radical intellectuals and labor organizations courted followers and formulated protest.4 While scholars have demonstrated that late imperial Russian cities gave rise to a small but influential middle class that managed to create a vibrant civic life for itself, the autocracy’s efforts to manage the fledgling public sphere emerging in Russian cities frustrated and alienated educated urbanites.5 Works that examine the experience of the men who ran Russia’s semidemocratic municipal governments come to a similar conclusion: although they testify to the existence of a public-spirited urban elite, they also chronicle its growing disenchantment with the paternalism and intrusive behavior of the imperial state.6 This chapter, which examines the internal political ecology of Kiev between the 1860s and early 1900s, unearths rather different patterns of political mobilization. It focuses on the intense conflicts that emerged within society itself as Kiev residents debated how best to govern the city and struggled to define the proper place of the southwestern borderlands in the empire. In its political and associational activities, the city’s new capitalist elite challenged the nationalizing vision associated with the Little Russian idea. Capitalist Kiev’s beau monde—which consisted of Poles, Russians, Little Russians, foreigners, and an especially large number of Jews—prided itself on its cosmopolitanism, welcoming all men who had proven their business acumen . At the same time, it showed limited interest in the welfare of the city’s working classes. In response, an emergent class of populist politicians, some of whom can be traced...

Share