Historycy Cesarskiego Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 1869–1915: nauka i polityka by Anna Bazhenova (review)

Not only the "Russian occupants"

"While Polish poets and writers perfectly managed to show various Russians and various Russias, historians faced more difficulties with this," writes Mirosław Filipowicz in the introduction to Anna Bazhenova's study Historians of the Tsar's University of Warsaw 1869–1915: Scholarship and Politics. Following Filipowicz, I also see a need for writing a history of Russians and Russia that goes beyond the narrative of an "eternal enemy." Bazhenova's book is one of the studies that promises to offer a more complex vision of the past, and its topic seems to be a good illustration of the entangled nature of Polish-Russian history. Bazhenova carefully examines the cohort of history professors who worked at the University of Warsaw during the years 1869–1915, when the university lost its national Polish character. Russian became the language of instruction and most of the professors came from other regions of the Russian Empire. The few exceptions were Polish professors who previously taught at the Warsaw Main School (Szkoła Główna Warszawska).¹ The periods 1816–1832 and 1862–1869, when the University of Warsaw had a Polish national character, are fairly well-studied in Polish historiography. In contrast, the "Russian" period of the university has not captured the attention of scholars so far and has generally been discarded as an episode of the punitive politics of Russification.

The aim of the book is to challenge this vision of the University of Warsaw during the late imperial period as simply an instrument of Russification. That might be the goal of the Russian authorities, which is eagerly accepted by Polish national historiography. Bazhenova shows that even though Russian professors sent to Warsaw were expected to play a role as Russificators, in practice their academic contribution was much more complex. As Bazhenova argues, history professors viewed themselves as scholars par excellence, rather than agents of any government policy (Pp. 71, 350).

The book consists of three chapters. The first outlines the structure of the university's history department and the place of the university within the higher education system in the Russian Empire. This comparison reveals that in contrast to other Russian universities, the University of Warsaw enjoyed a larger autonomy and offered its faculty better promotion opportunities. This type of comparative approach is new for Polish historiography: previously, comparisons involved only the universities located on the territory of the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the rule of Prussia, Austria, and the Russian Empire. Focused on the problem of national autonomy for Poles, traditional comparative studies of universities have paid little attention to those universities that did not accommodate Polish national interests. Therefore, by studying the University of Warsaw during its

"Russian" period in the broader Russian imperial context, Bazhenova's book becomes a major contribution to the field.

In the second chapter Bazhenova examines the history curriculum at the university and the professors teaching it. Drawing on rich archival materials, the author offers a very detailed picture of professors' lives. The focus on the people's agency allows Bazhenova to demonstrate convincingly the complexity of the professors' stance vis-à-vis the politics of Russification, thus avoiding the binary oppositions characteristic of Polish national historiography. Reasons for accepting a position at the University of Warsaw were rather far from participating in Russification. Moving to Poland was seen by some professors as a career opportunity, or working in closer proximity to Western archives and academia (Pp. 103, 110–113). Bazhenova demonstrates that among the faculty were those interested in promoting research and popularization of Polish history in Russian society, actively socializing with their fellow Polish professors (Pp. 263–268).

The prosopography of the history faculty includes statistical information on the numbers of history professors at different periods, their ages, confessional affiliations, places of birth, social backgrounds, the universities they graduated from, and average age of gaining a degree. Sometimes information provided...