Abstract
If one believed in the existence of an innately liberal national character that ushered into being the British Empire and made it into a progressive force for the spread of the rule of law and democracy throughout the world, in the manner of Niall Ferguson,1 then it would be virtually impossible to elaborate a comparative framework for the analysis of liberal imperialism. Every other case would lack the necessary organic relationship between liberalism and empire. The inclusion of the case of the Russian Empire in a volume devoted to liberal imperialism might then seem strange, given the traditional association of the Russian Empire with oriental despotism and archaic and/or illiberal political culture.2 While the condition of empire has been firmly documented as foundational for Russian history in the classical and new historiography,3 the extent of Russian liberalism had been contested in a historiography that has pondered the question of aborted reforms and the revolution of 1917. It remains similarly contested in new studies charting the impact of empire on Russian history. Yet the inclusion of the Russian case seems justified in view of recent studies of both empire and liberalism. In order to properly situate the Russian case of relations between liberalism and empire, it is necessary to deal with these recent studies of empire and liberalism before moving to consideration of the Russian case.
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Notes
Niall Ferguson, Empire. The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xxii.
The history of development of the connection between Russia’s symbolic position outside of Europe’s and Russia’s backwardness, on the one hand, and Russian illiberal politics, on the other, has been treated among others by the following: Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) and
Martin Malia, Russia Under the Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954);
Ronald Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out! Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identiry, and Theories of Empire,” Ronald Suny and Terry Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23–66.
Dominic Lieven, Empire. The Russian Empire and Its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (London: John Murray, 2000).
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
See also Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov (eds.), Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009), 3–32.
The idea of an imperial rights regime as the constitutive pillar of imperial citizenship, in which the right of belonging overshadows the right of participation and the principle of uniformity is superseded by differentiated treatment of particularisms, is developed in Jane Burbank, “An Imperial Rights Regime. Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 7(3), 2006, 397–431.
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth Century Political Thought and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 36, 37.
Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1980–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 56.
Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1995), 55.
Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 59–60. The changing Weber’s views on the course of the war after October 1917 is analyzed in Wolfgang Mommsen, “Max Weber and the Regeneration of Russia,” The Journal of Modern History, 69(1), 1997, 1–17.
Mark Bassin, “Russia Between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographic Space,” Slavic Review, 50(1), 1991, 1–17. An instructive comparative case of “Ottoman orientalism” is analyzed in
Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review, 107(3), 2002, 768–773.
Ilya Gerasimov, “From the Editors. Modernization of the Russian Empire and Paradoxes of Orientalism,” Ab Imperio, 4(1), 2002, 239–248;
Vera Tolz, “The West,” in William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord (eds.), A History of Russian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 197–216.
Paul Miliukov, “Ot russkikh konstitutsionalistov,” Osvobozhdenie, 1, 1902, 7–12.
On polemics with Fustel de Coulanges and political implications of Western exceptionalism for Russian liberalism, see M. M. Kovalevsky, Moia zhizn’ (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 157. See also
M. M. Kovalevsky, Obshchinnoe zemlevladenie, prichiny, khod i posledstviia ego razlozheniia, part 1 (Moscow: Tip. FB Millera, 1879);
M. M. Kovalevsky, Tableau des origines et de l’évolution de la famille et de la propriété (Stockholm: Samson & Wallin, 1890).
See the analysis of the enduring commitment of Russian liberals to the paradigm of evolutionism: Marina Mogil’ner, Homo imperii: Istoriia fazicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (Moscow: NLO, 2008), 26–36, 187–236.
See Alexander Semyonov, Ilya Gerasimov, and Marina Mogilner, “Russian Sociology in Imperial Context,” in George Steinmetz (ed.), Sociology and Empire: Colonial Studies and the Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Maxime Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia, Being the Ilchester Lectures for 1889–90 (London: David Nutt, 1891), 33.
Maxim Kovalevsky, Russian Political Institutions. The Growth and Development of These Institutions from the Beginnings of Russian History to the Present Time (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1902), 22.
Ibid. See also Willard Sunderland, “Russians into Yakuts? ‘Going Native’ and Problems of Russian Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s–1914,” Slavic Review, 55(4), 1996, 806–825;
Anatolii Remnev and Natalia Suvorova, “Russkoe delo’ na aziatskikh okrainakh: ‘russkost’ pod ugrozoi ili somnitel’nye kul’turtregery,” Ab Imperio, 10(2), 2008, 157–222.
Gary Hamburg argues that the origin of modern Russian liberalism should be located in the period of Great Reforms, which marked the appearance of a special genre of political literature in the form of semi-publicly circulated manuscripts that discussed the concrete plans for political reform while the political reform was seen to be possible in the near future: Gary Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828–1866 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Russkii liberal (Konstantin Kavelin and Boris Chicherin), “Pis’mo k izdateliu,” Golosa iz Rossii. Sborniki A.I. Gertsena i N.P. Ogareva, vyp. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 22.
Boris Chicherin, O narodnom predstavitel’stve (Moscow: Tip. Gracheva, 1866). This treatise, its foreign sources of inspiration (with the exception of Constant), intellectual originality, and reception in Russia are discussed in Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 272–308.
In this regard, Chicherin reflected the growing influence of Russian nationalism in the era of Great Reforms. The context of the Great Reforms as a watershed in the development of Russian nationalism is analyzed in Alexey Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest: CEU-Press, 2003);
Darius Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007);
Mikhail Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Etnokonfessional’naia politika imperii v Litve i Belorussii pri Aleksandre II (Moscow: NLO, 2010);
Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation Through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Chicherin, however, is careful not to fully equate the position of the Russian peasantry with the “Asiatic peoples.” In his works he places the Russian peasantry and the national character based on the Russian peasant culture in between the “European” and “Asiatic” types, see [Boris Chicherin], “O krepostnom sostoianii,” Golosa iz Rossii, 138–139.
Chicherin as the key representative of Russian liberalism as different from Russian democratic political theory and even a forerunner of neo-liberalism of the twentieth century is treated in Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 105–164.
Wlodzimierz Spasowicz, “Vospominania o K.D. Kaveline,” K. D. Kavelin, Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 2. (St. Petersburg: N. Glagolev, 1906), xii.
A. D. Gradovsky, “Retsenziia. B.N. Chicherin. O narodnom predstavitel’stve. Moscow, 1866,” Russkii Vestnik 70, 1867, 717–748; 71, 1867, 287–315.
A. D. Gradovsky, “Liberalizm i zapadnichestvo,” A. D. Gradovsky, Sobraniie sochinenii A.D. Gradovskogo, Vol. 6 (St. Petersburg: N. Glagolev, 1901), 394–400.
A. D. Gradovsky, “Natsional’nyi vopros v istorii i literature,” Gradovsky, Sobranie sochinenii A.D. Gradovskogo, Vol. 6 (St. Petersburg: N. Glagolev, 1901), 4.
Compare it with the assessment by a Polish positivist and liberal Aleksander Świętochowski of the Habsburg Empire: “the embodiment of political nonsense, a state like a barrel knocked together with rotten hoops in which every stave originates from a different tree trunk and none of them fits the others,” quoted in Maciej Janowski, Polish Liberal Through Before 1918 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004), 194.
A. A. Shakhmatov, Kratkii ocherk zhizni i deiatel’nosti A.D. Gradovskogo (N. Glagolev: St. Petersburg, 1904), XXXV.
Ibid., XXXIX–XL: A. D. Gradovsky, “Pis’mo k I.S.P. Po povodu pol’skogo voprosa,” Gradovsky, Sobraniie sochinenii A.D. Gradovskogo, Vol. 6 (St. Petersburg: N. Glagolev, 1901), 603–605; Gradovsky, “Pis’mo k N.I. Kostomarovu,” Ibid., 620.
I borrow the term “imperial revolution” from Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review, 113(2), 2008, 319–340.
The latter aspect is analyzed in Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow and New York: Pearson Education, 2001), 328–369;
Alexander Semyonov, “‘The Real and Live Ethnographic Map of Russia’: The Russian Empire in the Mirror of the State Duma,” in Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov (eds.), Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009), 191–228.
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left In Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
This aspect is emphasized by the definitive contribution of Michael Freeden, who sought to restore the historical sense of evolution of liberalism against the ahistorical view of neo-liberalism of the twentieth century: Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); idem, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth Century Progressive Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
See Geoff Eley, “Imperial Imaginary, Colonial Effect: Writing the Colony and the Metropole Together,” in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (eds.), Race, Nation, and Empire, Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010), 217–236;
Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004), 144–146; and
Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, 54–55.
For the standard biography of Struve, see Richard Pipes, Struve, Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970;
Richard Pipes, Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
M. A. Kolerov, Ne mir, no mech’. Russkaia religiozno-filosofkaia pechat’ ot “Problem idealizma” do “Vekh,” 1902–1909 (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 1996).
Velikaia Rossiia. Sbornik statei po voennym i obshchestvennym voprosam. Part 1 and 2. Ed. by V. P. Riabushinksii (Moscow, 1910). On this trend in Russian liberalism, see James West, “The Riabushisky Circle: Burzhuaziia and Obshchestvennost’ in Late Imperial Russia,” in Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, and James West (eds.), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 41–56.
Struve’s long-time opponent Paul Miliukov used the concept of “Greater Russia” in the course of his negotiations with representatives of the German High Command in Ukraine about prospective settlement of borders after the end of the war: P. N. Miliukov, Dnevnik P.N. Miliukova, 1918–1921 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 36. Boris Nol’de came to embrace this concept as a sociological description of the expansion of the Russian Empire when he revised in the émigré period his pioneering history of the Russian state law in the imperial context:
Boris Nolde, La formation de l’Empire Russe. Etudes, notes et documents, Vols. 1, 2 (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1952, 1953).
Richard Pipes, “Peter Struve and Ukrainian Nationalism,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 3–4, part 2, 1979–1980, 675–683;
Olga Andriewsky, “Medved’ iz Berlogi: Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Question, 1904–1914,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies XIV(3–4), December 1990, 249–268;
Olga Andriewsky, “The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse and the Failure of the ‘Little Russian Solution’, 1782–1917,” Andreas Kappeler, Zenon Kohut, Frank Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen (eds.), Culture, Nation, and Identity. The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600–1945 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2005), 182–214.
Later, in the period of World War I, Struve emphasized more the Orthodox and ethnic boundaries of Russian nationalism in the formula “Greater Russia and Holy Rus’,” see: P. B. Struve, “Velikaia Rossiia i Sviataia Rus’,” Russkaia Mysl’, 35(12), 1914, 176–180.
The polemics was started by Struve’s reply to Valdimir Zhabotinsky and continued with a reply to Bogdan Kistiakovsky: P. B. Struve, “Chto zhe takoe Rossiia,” Russkaia Mysl’, part 1, 32(1), 1911, 175–178;
P. B. Struve, “Obshcherusskaia kul’tura i ukrainskii partikuliarizm, otvet ukraintsu,” Russkaia Mysľ, 33(1), 1912, 65–86, 70–71, 76–77.
P. B. Struve, “Na ocherednye temy,” Russkaia Mysl’, 30(1), 1909, 194;
P. B. Struve, “Past and Present of Russian Economics,” J. D. Duff (ed.), Russian Realities and Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 47–48. Struve was behind the translation of Seeley’s The Expansion of England into Russian: John Seeley, Rasshirenie Anglii (St. Petersburg, 1903).
On Seeley and his vision of “Greater Britain,” see Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and also
Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Remarkably, Struve was almost the only Russian intellectual who supported the basic scientific foundations of Ludwig Gumplovicz’s sociological theory of struggle for collective survival and between cultures and races as the foundational dimension of politics: P. B. Struve, “Novaia kniga Gumplovicha,” Russkoe Bogatstvo, 11(6), 1892, 25–30. For the negative Russian reception of social Darwinism and Gumplovicz, in particular, see
Alexander Vucinich, Social Thought in Tsarist Russia: The Quest for a General Science of Society, 1861–1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976).
P. B. Struve, Patriotica. Politika, kul’tura, religia, sotsializm (Moscow, 1997), 58. Struve called for the halt of politics of Russification in Russian Poland: “Prussia seeks … to germanize Poznan; the idea to russify Poland, following the example of the attempts by Germans to germanize own Polish lands, is absolutely unattainable utopia. The de-nationalization of Russian Poland could not be achieved by the Russian people or the Russian state. There cannot be any cultural or national competition between the Russians and the Poles on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland: the Russian element on this territory is represented by the army and civil service” (Ibid., 57–58). Compare Struve’s description of the presence of the Russian cultural potential in Poland by Struve with Seeley’s description of the British presence in India, “where the English nation … is just a drop in the ocean of Asiatic people” (John Seeley, The Expansion of England (Leipzig, 1884), 56).
Bogdan Kistiakovsky, “M.P. Dragomanov. Ego politicheskie vzgliady, literaturnaia deiatel’nost’ i zhizn’,” M. P. Dragomanov, Politicheskie sochineniia, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Tip. I.D. Sytina, 1908), ix–lxxix;
Ivan Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1987), 203–253, 255–281;
Alexei Miller, Ukrainskii vopros v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina 19 veka) (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2000), 220–223. On Dragomanov’s place in the tradition of Russian federalist and decentralist political thought, see:
Dmitrii von Mohrenschildt, Toward a United States of Russia, Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstruction of Russia in the Nineteenth Century (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981);
Mark von Hagen, “Federalisms and Pan-movements: Re-Imagining Empire,” in Burbank, von Hagen, and Remnev (eds.), Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 494–510.
Peter Struve, “Ot redaktsii ‘Osvobozhdeniia’,” in M. P. Dragomanov (ed.), Sobranie politicheskikh sochinenii M.P. Dragomanova, 2 vols (Paris, Osvobozhdenie, 1905), v, vi. See also:
Boris Anan’ich and Rafail Ganelin, “M.P. Dragomanov i P.N. Miliukov o samoupravlenii i federalizme,” in Boris Anan’ich and Jutta Scherrer (eds.), Russkaia emigratsiia do 1917g. Laboratoriia liberal’noi i revoliutsionnoi mysli (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 1997), 70–89.
M. P. Drahomanov, Vol’nyi Soiuz-Vilna Spilka. Opyt Ukrainskoi politiko-sotsial’noi programmy (Geneva: Tip. Gromady, 1884).
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Sernyonov, A. (2012). Russian Liberalism and the Problem of Imperial Diversity. In: Fitzpatrick, M.P. (eds) Liberal Imperialism in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137019974_4
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