Poles, Jews, and Tartars: Religion, Ethnicity, and Social Structure in Tsarist Nationality Policies

The tsarist empire and the Soviet Union were perhaps the world's multinational states par excellence. Even though they tended to exaggerate, Soviet ethnographers counted between 127 and 175 different nations and ethnic groups; the newest Western study still records more than 70. ¹ With such numbers alone it must have been challenging both for tsarist bureaucrats and Soviet commissars to develop a coherent nationalities and minorities policy. Who is so ambitious--or foolish--to harbor the illusion that it is possible to discover the main characteristics of such a policy or that such a policy even existed?

This article sets itself the rather more modest task of discovering patterns that might have been the referential system of tsarist nationality policies with respect to the three most important nationalities (if we exclude Ukrainians and White Russians) or ethnic groups of European Russia. We have to ask, first, what common characteristics Poles, Jews, and Tartars shared in the eyes of their contemporaries and of historians; second, which patterns of policy developed on the basis of those common characteristics; and, finally, how far structural peculiarities of the Great Russian nation and of the tsarist empire acted as constraints on policies toward different nationalities. The aim is not to maintain that the three groups were treated in the same way but rather that patterns of tsarist minority policies emerged, often at different points in time and with differing intensity, and were applied toward the three major minorities. Tsarist nationality policy can be understood as a set of patterns in which a certain similarity of measures was modified by temporal and geographic differentiation, and other factors, as well.

At first sight, the selection of the nationalities or ethnic groups treated here might seem arbitrary. However, they supplied the numerically strongest non-Russian groups within the empire, with the Poles at 6.3 percent, the Jews at 4 percent, and the Tartars at 2.9 percent of the population. ² But not only statistically were these groups of particular importance. The Russians fought for centuries against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for supremacy in Eastern Europe. The Tartars of the Kazan Khanate formed the first large nation, which--as a group of former suppressors--was subjected only after a protracted struggle. As mediators between East and West, between Europe and Asia, they were used to "civilize" and to pacify more unruly tribes to the east, but they were also seen as an impediment to Russian influence. The attitude toward the Jews, finally, has always been characterized-- with the exception of a certain benign indifference in the very begin-ning--by a deep distrust stemming from age-old prejudices and the feeling that this ethnic group was somewhat too modern--too advanced in comparison to the more backward Russians--and therefore dangerous to the rest of society and the Imperial body politic. In addition, they were often, though not consistently, regarded as possible allies of the dreaded Polish nobility. From a different angle, their treatment could always be seen as a sort of litmus test by which the openness and flexibility of a given state and society could be measured.

All three groups presented a problem to the tsarist state because in many respects they did not fit into the Russian social system, particularly not the one created by Catherine the Great in 1775 and 1785 and that, in many of its features, was to survive far into the nineteenth century. Jews and Tartars, and to a lesser degree Poles, therefore faced similar prejudices and accusations: that they shied away from agricultural and physical work and had an exaggerated inclination toward commercial activities, which was supposedly combined with a tendency toward shady business and deception. Also, many Jews and Tartars of Kazan lived in the countryside, although they pursued so-called "urban" occupations and therefore had to be registered with an urban estate. ^3...