The Russian Empire, the Russian Nation, and the Problem of the 19th Century

Histories of Russia often begin with a description of its geography, of its large size and largely inhospitable climate, explicitly or implicitly implying that geography and environment influenced the history that is to come. In these visions, Russia is cold, vast, with few natural borders, and sparsely populated.¹ In his history of the steppe, David Moon describes such descriptions as “environmental-determinist” and finds their interpretive power to be “not sustainable.”² As historians have moved away from environmental-determinist interpretations, they have also tended to see Russia’s vast spaces as distinctly less sparsely populated. Instead, authors have drawn attention to the diversity of peoples who lived in this space—to, in essence, the ways that Russia’s geography was the geography of an empire.³ Geography, and particularly human geography, becomes a way into a fundamental question: what do we mean when we talk about the Russian Empire? Or, even more fundamentally, what do we mean when we talk about Russia?⁴

In their varied and wide-ranging recent publications, Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny, Serhii Plokhy, the contributors to Ot tsarstva k imperii, and Nancy Shields Kollmann all grapple with these questions of empire, nation, and the meaning of Russia. Only Kollmann explicitly discusses environment, and she finds it to be a “potent backdrop” but not a sufficient explanation for historical events (27–28). Although the other authors view geography only tangentially, if at all, for all of them the question of the intersection between the Russian nation and the Russian Empire is on some level a question of mapping. The contributors to Ot tsarstva k imperii do not address geography explicitly, but they are nonetheless interested in questions of changing borders and in Russia’s place on the map of European powers. Kivelson and Suny open with a statement that their object of study will be “the long history of the lands that will at various times compose a Russian polity” (1)—whether that polity was a nation or an empire. Plokhy sees the distinction as in part a distinction between a mental map and a political one: “Russia today has enormous difficulty in reconciling the mental maps of Russian ethnicity, culture, and identity with the political map of the Russian Federation” (x). Each of the four books offers an approach or a series of approaches to the interrelated concepts of “Russian empire’ and “Russian nation” that get at this conundrum. These approaches both clarify and complicate how we might think productively about these concepts in the telling of Russian history.

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Kivelson and Suny are the most explicitly concerned with the idea of empire and also set themselves the biggest task of any of the authors at hand. Their subject is the multiple versions of the Russian Empire that formed, reformed, fell, and reemerged over more than a millennium. As they note, they choose to “adopt the analytical framework of ‘empire,’ so central to ideas and stereotypes about Russia … not to presume imperial practices of domination, but rather to test the concept of empire” (1). They begin “before empire,” with the “mafia-like network of merchants and warlords” (17) of the Rus´ lands and end with the return of Putin to power and the ways that imperial narratives continue to inform...