“Западные окраины Российской империи” и проблема сравнительного изучения окраин

SUMMARY:

In his essay, Mikhail Dolbilov offers his response to critical comments by reviewers of the volume Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire as well as reflections on the series Borderlands of the Russian Empire, as the editor of the book series HISTORIA ROSSICA of the New Literary Review Publishing House. Summarizing the cumulative value of all the volumes published in the series, Dolbilov stresses the fact that the project was an attempt to redress the balance of historical scholarship on empire. By focusing on borderlands and their role in the evolution of the imperial government, this project warns of the danger of over-simplifying imperial policies and dilemmas or reducing them to a single imperial pattern or a binary pattern of assimilation and colonialism. Dolbilov regrets that the authors of separate volumes did not have sufficient opportunities to discuss comparative aspects of imperial rule in different borderlands. He conceives this direction, alongside an investigation of the transfer of bureaucratic personnel and ideas, as the most promising avenue for further historical scholarship of the Russian Empire. Turning to the volume Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire, Dolbilov defends the focus on local and central imperial government on the grounds that the vicissitudes and historical entanglements of these policies, in conjuncture with the challenge of Polish resistance and ruling the composite borderland, were not sufficiently explored in previous historiography. He concurs with the critical point by Smolenchuk that this focus inadvertently led to a reduction of the complexity of imperial experience in western borderlands to the conflict between Polish forces and Russian imperial authority. At the same time, Dolbilov notes that in his review, written from a Byelorussian perspective, Smolenchuk reduces the complexity of the borderland’s history to that of the history of the Byelorussian people, avoiding discussion of the degree of advancement of Byelorussian nation-formation, and denying the existence of multiple and non-exclusive identities of the region’s population in the nineteenth century.