Defining Us and Them: Poles and Russians in the “Western Provinces,” 1863-1914

Slavic Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore R. Weeks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Polish Question ◽  
National Movements ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Imperial State

Like other multinational states in Europe, from the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire found itself confronted, indeed threatened, by the growing strength of non-Russian national movements. Unlike other contemporary national “awakenings,” however, the Polish question in the Russian Empire had roots extending beyond the eighteenth century and posed, at least in the minds of Russian administrators, a serious and persistent threat to Russian national interests in the empire’s vulnerable western borderlands. From the 1830s an anti-Polish policy had been pursued in these areas, but only after the 1863 uprising did the Russian imperial state dedicate itself to a policy of radical elimination of Polish influence in the so-called “western provinces,” a fusion (sliianie) of these territories with the Russian interior in terms of administration, economy, culture and nationality.

scholarly journals National Sentiment: Nation Building and Emotional Language in Nineteenth-Century Finland

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-83
Author(s):  
Jani Marjanen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Collective Emotion ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Sentiment ◽  
The Russian Empire

AbstractDuring the course of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the term “national sentiment” was coined and subsequently established in several European languages. The emergence of the term in several different languages at roughly the same time is indicative of changes both in the experiences of nationhood and of emotion. This chapter explores the development of the term “national sentiment” in Finnish public discourse and argues that it was transformed during the course of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, it denoted an individualistic feeling that romantic intellectuals hoped people would turn to, whereas it later became a description of a collective emotion. It was used to describe the atmosphere among one of the nationalities in Finland in particular, or the Russian empire in general. In this process, the term became more restrictive and lost its links to performing emotions relating to the nation.

‘Black spots on the map of Europe’: Ireland and Finland as oppressed nationalities,c.1860–1910

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (160) ◽  
pp. 180-199
Author(s):  
Andrew G. Newby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Eastern Province ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Black Spots ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Imperial Capital ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Political Economic

AbstractIn late 1909, the liberal Russian newspaperBirzhevye Vedomostiexpressed the fear that Finland could become ‘Russia’s Ireland’. The implication was that by restricting the autonomy that Finland had enjoyed within the Russian Empire for much of the preceding century, Russian nationalists risked creating a chaotic, discontented eastern province, dangerously close to the imperial capital. The ‘Russia’s Ireland’ motif became so prominent in the following eight years – before Finnish independence in 1917 – as to become an international cliché. The discourse of imperial subjugation that existed in both Ireland and Finland in the first decade of the twentieth century has rather obscured the fact that, despite obvious superficial parallels, the nineteenth-century experiences of these nations differed considerably. Both Finland and Ireland were part of larger imperial systems in the nineteenth century, and national movements emerged in both countries that sought to develop political, economic and cultural autonomy. Finland became a sporadic model for diverse Irish national aspirations, but the analogy was rejected consistently, and often vigorously, by Finns in the nineteenth century. This article charts the development of the Finnish–Irish constitutional analogy from the middle of the nineteenth century to the eve of both nations’ independence. It demonstrates that despite the similarities in overall historical timelines, contemporaries perceived differences between the two cases.

Prerequisites for the reforms of the Russian Empire in the 1860s: a historical analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Political Economic

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.

scholarly journals Barga as a part of the Russian strategic interests in Eastern Asia in the first quarter of the XX century: treaty aspect

2020 ◽  
pp. 12-25
Author(s):  
Pavel Nikolaevich Dudin
Keyword(s):  
Eastern China ◽  
Far East ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Eastern Asia ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Far East ◽  
Legal Nature ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Russian Empire

Based on the previously unexamined treaties and agreements, this article analyzes the civilian mechanism of ensuring Russia’s interest in Manchuria on the background of establishment and development of statehood of Hulunbuir District, also known as Barga. Having lost the Russo-Japanese War and a number of backbone territories, the Russian Empire took all necessary steps towards retention and strengthening of its influence in the region, was able to form the zones of primary interests, and this control the process of acquisition of relative autonomy by Barga. It is concluded that within the framework of considered agreements, Russia’ national interests in the Far East were reliably protected. It was achieved by the concessions, which by their legal nature significantly differed from the concessions and settlements created by the foreign powers in Eastern China, although were capable of ensuring Russia’s presence and safeguarding the strategic interests. Despite the fact that the created system demonstrated its effectiveness, it did not survive the political crises caused by the revolutionary events and demise of the Russian Empire. China’s leadership took advantage of the situation that unfolded in Russia, and liquidated the autonomy of Outer Mongolia, and later the status of Hulunbuir, stipulated in the agreements.

scholarly journals Visual Stereotypes of Tatars in the Finnish Press from the 1880s to the 1910s

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Ainur Elmgren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Grand Duchy

Visual stereotypes constitute a set of tropes through which the Other is described and depicted to anaudience, who perhaps never will encounter the individuals that those tropes purport to represent.Upon the arrival of Muslim Tatar traders in Finland in the late nineteenth century, newspapers andsatirical journals utilized visual stereotypes to identify the new arrivals and draw demarcation linesbetween them and what was considered “Finnish”. The Tatars arrived during a time of tension inthe relationship between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian Empire, withthe Finnish intelligentsia divided along political and language lines. Stereotypical images of Tatarpedlars were used as insults against political opponents within Finland and as covert criticism ofthe policies of the Russian Empire. Stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities like the Tatarsfulfilled a political need for substitute enemy images; after Finland became independent in 1917,these visual stereotypes almost disappeared.

Fugitives, Vagrants, and Found Dead Bodies: Identifying the Individual in Tsarist Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 366-388
Author(s):  
Alison K. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Eye Color ◽  
Physical Measurements ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Identification Practices

AbstractIn the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Russian Empire, a new set of state-sponsored provincial newspapers began to include notices seeking fugitives and trying to identify arrested vagrants and found dead bodies. The notices were part of a larger effort to match individuals with specific legal identities based in social estate (soslovie). In principle, every individual subject of the Russian Empire belonged to a specific owner (in the case of serfs) or to a specific soslovie society (in the case of nearly everyone else). The notices were an effort to link people who had left their proper place to their “real” identity. To accomplish this, the notices also made use of a kind of simple biometrics or anthropometrics in order to move beyond an individual's telling of his or her own identity. By listing height, hair and eye color, the shape of nose, mouth, and chin, and other identifying features, the notices were intended to allow for more exact identification. This version of identification developed out of previous practices grounded in the documentary requirements of the tsarist state, and they were slightly ahead of their time in the context of nineteenth-century developments in the sphere of identification practices. They were also distinct from other kinds of anthropometric practices of classification developed at the same time or soon thereafter—where many sought to use physical measurements to classify people by race or by inclination to criminality, the Russian system had no such goals.

Reflective Colonization: Domination, Consent, and the Self in Imperial Russia

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Fournier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Self ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Russian Politics ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Historical Periods

Historians have pointed out that as a terrestrial rather than an overseas empire, the Russian empire has had to grapple with a blurry boundary between imperial center and periphery. Ektind goes a step further to show that the Russian empire was the stage for intensive colonization of the imperial core itself and the attendant processes of self-orientalization and self-alienation. The review identifies and explores three dimensions of the process of internal colonization. In the first, colonization by consent, Russian historical writers’ interpretations of the origins of the state in terms of consent to (foreign) domination are contextualized by drawing on colonizers’ fantasy of consent across contexts and historical periods, and by pointing to resistance as an important aspect of the relation between Russian imperial elites and the colonized. The second dimension is the idea of colonizing “one’s own,” whereby elites not only coerced people of the imperial core into various practices, but also viewed them through an orientalizing lens, and this, from the beginnings of serfdom through the nineteenth-century populists’ efforts at rapprochement (the perceived divide between rulers and ruled is, it is argued, still salient in Russian politics). The last dimension, strangers to ourselves, deals with the “splitting of the self” from a postcolonial studies perspective but it is pointed out that the use of psychoanalytic frameworks and literary theory may reproduce orientalist interpretations of the Russian imperial self. Instead, it is argued that self-orientalizing discourses in the Russian context may serve to divert attention away from one’s actual power.

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