“Russia,” from the Vistula to the Terek to the Amur

In December of 1864 Prince D. I. Sviatopolk-Mirskii was in Abkhazia, carefully negotiating a conclusion to the long relationship between the imperial throne and Mikhail Shervashidze, the head of the ruling Abkhaz family. As a result of the conquest of the North Caucasus the imperial regime was gradually transforming the many previous forms of rule in the region into the more familiar okrugi (districts) within oblasti (regions) that were common to the rest of the empire. The process also entailed the severing of numerous longstanding relationships with families such as that of Mikhail Shervashidze, who were not happy about this turn of events. "I fulfilled the will of the tsar and passed on the administration of my domains to my successors," complained Shervashidze to Sviatopolk-Mirskii, reminding the imperial official on another occasion that he and his family had been "significantly useful to the Russian throne" in the course of some 40 years of service. Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii was firm but careful in the negotiations he had been selected to handle. He too, after all, was a noble and privileged servant of the tsar, and they shared the common culture of imperial obshchestvo (educated society) as well. And Shervashidze, as the head of a ruling family from a frontier region only recently and tenuously conquered, one still very much of interest to other powers such as the Ottoman empire, was well aware of his sources of strength. Uneasy with the prospect of seeing the Shervashidzes settle in Ottoman lands, imperial officials placed the prince in Imeretia (Georgia).¹

Roughly four decades later Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii was still busy serving the tsar in delicate frontier situations, this time in the western region of the empire among Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Jews, Belorussians, and Ukrainians. He also served briefly as the Minister of Interior, and figures in Witold Rodkiewicz's rich discussion of nationality policy in the western provinces from 1863 to 1905. As we might expect, Sviatopolk-Mirskii was well attuned to the historic sources of imperial cohesion in the borderlands. Rodkiewicz describes Sviatopolk-Mirskii's reluctance to view non-Russians as "inherently and incorrigibly disloyal"; instead he believed the "government should try to win their loyalty by offering them religious tolerance, cultural rights, possibilities of careers in state bureaucracy and of acquisition of landed property" (224). Rodkiewicz draws upon Andreas Kappeler's pathbreaking work on the formation of the empire, and refers to this strain of thought and policy as the "Imperial strategy" in the borderlands, a contrast to what he refers to as "Bureaucratic Nationalism." The subject of Rodkiewicz's book is an exploration of these two competing versions of the empire in the western provinces. Kappeler as well emphasized a series of challenges to the traditional empire, which he explored on numerous frontiers over the course of several centuries with the help of Soviet and Western secondary sources. Rodkiewicz, on the other hand, draws on extensive archival work to explore the implications of the transition in policy and empire-building in a single region.

Most scholars agree that the Petrine state before the Great Reforms was a world of social hierarchy and state-sanctioned social difference, administered by a service nobility...