Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy

The failure to resolve the Polish question by the traditional expedient of assimilating the elites of the conquered territories forced the Russian imperial elite to reexamine its own identity. It came up with a formula that combined its traditional loyalty to autocratic imperial rule and the dominance of the Orthodox Church with the new concept of nationality. In historiography, that triad came to be known as “official nationality.” It would define Russian imperial nation-building projects for the rest of the century.

The undoing of a major historical injustice through the restoration of the Polish state could and did rouse the martial spirit, inspiring mass Polish participation in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and lending international legitimacy to the war.

The kingdom was created out of the Polish lands taken over by Prussia, with its capital in Warsaw. Without renouncing his title of emperor of Russia, Alexander thus assumed the new title of tsar of Poland, thereby creating the semblance of a dynastic union to justify Russia’s continued domination of that country. This was also a step toward the realization of his old dream of becoming a constitutional monarch: if he could not become one in Russia, perhaps he could do so in Poland. He granted the kingdom quite a liberal constitution that provided for a Diet, a separate government and administrative structure, and even an army. Catherine’s notion of making all parts of the empire homogeneous was discarded in favor of particularism, now under the banner of the Polish constitution. Alexander hoped that one day the rest of the empire would get its constitution as well. As things turned out, it would have to wait another ninety years.

Conservative sections of Russian society opposed the idea of constitutionalism as such. Progressives who wanted a constitution complained that the Poles had gotten one while the Russians had not. Persistent rumors about Alexander’s plans to transfer to the kingdom the territories annexed by Russia in the second and third partitions aroused protests from both camps.

Pushkin defined the November Uprising and the Russian suppression of it as “a quarrel of Slavs among themselves.” At the center of that conflict was the Russian program of the unification of the Slavs. “Will the Slavic streams merge in the Russian sea? Will it dry up?”—that is how Pushkin formulated the main question to be resolved in the conflict between the “bumptious Pole” and the “faithful Russian.” Unlike Zhukovsky, Pushkin was not just building the empire but also defending the pan-Russian nation and creating a pan-Slavic one. For him, the Russo-Polish struggle was about the future of Slavdom in general: all the Slavs eventually had to become politically Russian.

“theory of official nationality” by the new imperial minister of education,

Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.

Uvarov found inspiration in Guizot for developing a position between the extremes of conservatism and revolution. He followed with great interest Guizot’s efforts to establish a national system of education in France (the two happened to be ministers of education at the same time), but rejected what he considered the French claim to have produced a universally valid educational model.

Schlegel was among the first writers to promote a model of the nation based on common language and customs.

“What rule should we use in dealing with the European Enlightenment, with European ideas that we can no longer do without, but that threaten us with inevitable demise unless we adapt them skillfully?”

“Without love of its ancestors’ faith, a people, like an individual, must perish,”

“Autocracy is the basic condition of Russia’s political existence in its current state. Let dreamers deceive themselves and find obscure manifestations of some order of things corresponding to their theories and prejudices: they may rest assured that they do not know Russia, do not know its condition, its needs, its desires.”

understood “nationality” as native tradition rooted in Russia’s historical development, linking the throne and the church in order to ensure their stability.

According to Uvarov, nationality was the traditional way of life that was supposed to ensure the continuity of the other two key elements of Russian identity—religion and autocracy—in an age shaped by new European ideas.

If in Europe the idea of nation, closely associated with the principle of popular representation, challenged political autocracy, in Russia it was supposed to support the traditional tsarist regime. Uvarov did not seek to justify the tsar’s autocratic rule by claiming that it was based on divine right, as was customary at the time in the imperial capital; nor did he look to the church to legitimize it. Instead he linked autocracy with nationality, claiming that “one and the other flow from the same source and are conjoined on every page of the history of the Russian people.” He stopped short, however, of suggesting that the Russian nation was the source of autocratic power.

The Organic Statute took away freedoms previously granted to Poland by Alexander I: the office of tsar of Poland was gone and the Diet abolished, as was the separate Polish army. General Field Marshal Count Ivan Paskevich was given the new title of Prince of Warsaw and appointed ruler of the former kingdom, which he was to integrate into the Russian Empire.

In November 1832, the Western Committee issued a decree intended to diminish the number of people in the western provinces who could claim noble rights, including the right to buy land and serfs—a measure designed to undermine the status of Polish nobles. In the 1840s, Nicholas promoted initiatives to register and limit peasant obligations to landowners in order to support “Russian” peasants. To the degree that a noble-based empire could do so, it was taking the side of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry against Polish nobility. Other policies included the liquidation of urban self-government and the abolition of the local law code, which went back to the times of Polish and Lithuanian rule over the region. Those policies were applied to the lands that had once belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole, including the former Hetmanate, whose loyalty was no longer in question.

the creation of a new historical narrative, claiming the newly acquired lands for Russia, the establishment of new university and school districts, and the conversion of the Belarusian and Ukrainian Uniates to Orthodoxy and their incorporation into the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church.

smaller nationalities would have to forgo their right to independence and become part of the larger and more powerful nationality.

Uvarov’s first choice for writing a history text integrating the western provinces into the empire was Mikhail Pogodin, a professor of history at Moscow University who enthusiastically embraced the task. Pogodin, who assured the minister that he would fight the Polish historians as General Paskevich had fought the Polish insurgents in 1831, was approached in November 1834 and submitted his text a year later—Uvarov reported directly to the tsar about the scholar’s progress. But Pogodin turned out to be too good a historian to satisfy the minister’s demands. His book presented the history of northeastern Rus’, or Russia, as distinct—indeed, separate—from that of southwestern Rus’ (Ukraine and Belarus), undermining the project’s main goal of linking the western provinces with Russia in a seamless historical narrative. Uvarov explained the failure to the tsar by citing the novelty of presenting the history of the Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian provinces as a single narrative. But Pogodin’s failure did not discourage Uvarov. He established a special prize of 10,000 rubles for an author who could present the history of the western provinces as part of Russian history, then asked another history professor, this time from St. Petersburg University, to attempt the task. His name was Nikolai Ustrialov, and he set to work on a four-volume history of Russia. In December 1836, Ustrialov submitted the first volume of his work. Uvarov approved it a month later, recommending the volume a...

In Ustrialov’s interpretation, the Lithuanian state was a dynastic rather than a national rival of Moscow, and he claimed that difficulties in relations between Lithuanian rulers and their “Russian” subjects had begun only with the arrival of the Poles in the fourteenth century. Ustrialov wrote three versions of his survey, which was printed a total of twenty-six times.

The foot soldiers of the new policy—and, indeed, some of their field commanders—were cadres from the former Hetmanate. This seemed an obvious choice: they knew the local language, culture, and conditions, and they were as anti-Polish as one could imagine at the time. In time, however, the government’s reliance on natives of the Hetmanate would become problematic. By the late 1840s, the inhabitants of that region would acquire a national agenda of their own, presenting an unexpected challenge to the empire. For the time being, however, the Ukrainians from the former Hetmanate did their best to fight Polish influences.

The Archeographic Commission, established in 1843 under the supervision of the governor general, went on two years later to issue its first collection of documents from local depositories that were intended to demonstrate the inalienably Russian identity of the region. In decades to come, it would issue hundreds of volumes of valuable sources that ultimately supported local inhabitants’ claims to an identity distinct from the Russian.

Semashko redoubled his efforts. His promotion of the “Orthodoxization” of Uniate parishes went hand in hand with their cultural Russification.

“In order to warm the hearts of the Uniate clergy with the Russian spirit, every possible opportunity was taken to revive the memory of their origins, the Polish repressions that they had suffered, and the paternal concern of the Russian government for their welfare,” wrote Semashko in 1837. He thought his efforts were bringing some results: “The previously alien notion of taking pride in the Russian name and heritage,” he wrote, “is now treasured by a very considerable portion of the clergy subordinate to me.”

There was no doubt that this manifestation of disloyalty came from the very institutions that had been created to ensure the loyalty of the region’s inhabitants to tsar and empire.

A new Ukrainian nation was emerging from the cocoon of the old Little Russian identity. The imperial government would do everything in its power to stop its development and put the Ukrainian genie back into the Little Russian bottle.

“Slavophiles” was applied to a group of intellectuals, located mainly in Moscow, who took the issue of nationality—Slavic in general, and Russian in particular—very seriously. Their views coincided only in part with the government’s understanding of the principle of nationality as presented in Count Sergei Uvarov’s triad of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. The Slavophiles held Orthodoxy in great esteem but were much less enthusiastic about the government. Moreover, they believed that with the introduction of Western practices by Peter I, Russia had almost lost its unique character.

By stressing the uniqueness (samobytnost’) and self-awareness (samosoznanie) of the Russian nation, the Slavophiles, for all their pan-Slavic ecumenism, set an example to non-Russian Slavs who wished to celebrate the distinctiveness of their own peoples and, consequently, their right to autonomy and independence.

In the 1830s, Kharkiv became the center of the Ukrainian Romantic movement, with a promising Russian philologist, Izmail Sreznevsky, and the descendant of a local noble family, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, among others, writing on Ukrainian topics and trying their hand at expressing themselves in Ukrainian.

“that the Little Russian poets pay insufficient attention to the fact that they often write in such a dialect as does not exist even in Russia: they unceremoniously rework Great Russian words and phrases in Little Russian fashion, creating a language for themselves that has never existed, that none of all possible Russias—neither great, nor middle, nor little, nor white, nor black, nor red—could call its own.”

The differences between the Russian and Ukrainian nationalities did not manifest themselves in language alone. History became another point of contention.

It would soon become clear that language, history, and culture could be used not only to construct a past separate from that of the Great Russians but also a different future. In that new vision, Little Russia would turn into Ukraine, an entity still close to Russia but also very different and quite separate from it.

If the Russians were ruled by an autocratic tsar and the Poles had an overbearing caste of noble landowners, the Ukrainians were a peasant nation that cherished its democratic Cossack traditions. What were the distinguishing characteristics of the Ukrainians, aside from their egalitarian social structure? According to Kostomarov’s friend and fellow suspect Panteleimon Kulish, those characteristics were language and customs. Another co-conspirator, Heorhii Andruzky, envisioned Ukraine as encompassing not only the lands settled by Ukrainians in the Russian Empire but also territory extending into Austrian Galicia. Kostomarov saw the future Ukrainian state as a republic in a union of equals with other Slavic states.

Faced with the Polish threat in the western provinces, and using the idea of Russian nationality as a weapon in the struggle for control of the region, the government had to be careful not to allow the idea of nationality to undermine the principle of autocracy and the unity of the empire. It was a difficult balancing act, but the authorities understood the complexity of the task.

“In the south, in Kyiv, a society has been uncovered whose goal was a confederal union of all Slavs in Europe on democratic foundations, on the model of the North American States.… It is said that all this was brought to light by the representations of the Austrian government.”

I have no pity for him: if I were his judge, I would do no less. I hold a personal grudge against liberals of that sort. They are the enemies of achievement of any kind. With their impertinent idiocies they irritate the government and make it suspicious, ready to see rebellion where there is nothing of the kind, and provoke harsh measures that are deadly to literature and education.”

Equating language with nation, Pogodin suggested that it was Great Russians, not Little Russians, who had inhabited Kyiv during its golden age and created its history and annals. The Little Russians, he went on to argue, had appeared in the region only after the Mongol invasion, which pushed the Great Russians farther north.

the impulse to separate the histories of the Great and Little Russians now began to originate from Moscow, not Kyiv. The bone of contention was no longer the Cossack past, as it had been for Kostomarov, but the Kyivan Rus’ past, which both sides considered their own.

Kostomarov set new terms for the debate on nationality, shifting attention to the popular masses, whom he regarded as the main object of historical study. “No law, no institution will be important to us in themselves, but only their application to the people’s lives,” argued Kostomarov. “Features unimportant to the historian who puts the life of the state first will be a matter of the first importance to us.” The debate was clearly entering a new stage.

The Russian fleet was sunk because it turned out to be of little use in stopping the joint French-British-Ottoman invasion of the Crimea—sails were no match for the steam engines of the British and French battleships, and the empire had no steam-powered battleships on the Black Sea.

St. Petersburg was forced to abandon imperial possessions in the Caucasus and the Danube area, and eleven years later, the cash-strapped government sold Alaska to the United States, lacking the resources to defend it. It kept the Crimea but was banned from maintaining a fleet or fortifications on the Black Sea littoral. Even more significant was the empire’s loss of face as a great power.

It was during the public debate of the first years of Alexander II’s rule that Russia first began to take on the character of a tripartite nation of Great, Little, and White Russians.

Semashko’s supporters claimed that Ukrainophilism was nothing but a Polish intrigue. In 1859, Sylvestr Gogotsky, a professor at Kyiv University and one of the leading lights of the pan-Russian movement, put forward a program to stop the advance of the Ukrainian movement. Gogotsky’s program was as follows: a) We should immediately take measures to educate the people on both sides of the Dnieper; b) From now on we should support the idea of the unity of the three Russian tribes; without that unity, we shall perish very quickly; c) The Russian literary language should be the same for all in primers. Faith and language should be binding elements. But it will do no harm to add something in our simple language as well; d) By no means should we promote discord between Great Russia and ourselves. The desire for change can be expressed in other ways. Do not forget that our enemies are the Poles and Rome!

THE RETURN OF THE “POLISH QUESTION” IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE gave new urgency to the “Ukrainian question” in imperial politics and culture.

By emphasizing the democratic nature of Ukraine’s Cossack past, he provided historical justification for treating the Ukrainians as a distinct people.

He believed that the South Russians had a better chance of establishing equal relations with the Great Russians than they did with the Poles.

In 1828, that name was given to the Uniate eparchy of the region, and in 1829 it was applied to the educational district that included both the eastern and the western lands of Belarus. But the uprising of 1830–1831 changed the political connotation of the term. Polish intellectuals who had earlier referred to their homeland as Lithuania, such as the poet Adam Mickiewicz, a native of the Brest region, adopted the name “Belarus” after the revolt. Spelled “Białoruś” in Polish, it was applied to the region east of the core Polish territory that was also considered historically, culturally, and lingustically Polish. The new interest in the language and customs of the simple folk no longer allowed culturally conscious Polish nationalists to refer to Belarus as “Lithuania,” whose inhabitants spoke a language profoundly different from Slavic.

Neither Nazimov and his advisers, who argued for the use of the Belarusian language, nor the Polish publishers of The Peasant Truth equated Belarusian with any particular nationality or considered the Belarusians a distinct ethnic group. Nazimov regarded the local peasants as members of the Russian nation, while Kalinowski called on them to fight for the Polish cause. Neither man appeared to take the Belarusians seriously as independent political actors, and both hoped to manipulate them by making effective use of the local Belarusian dialect.

but he did not regard language and ethnicity as criteria for defining a separate group within the big Russian nation. In his opinion, nationality was defined in social terms and shaped by common historical experience. Thus, he divided the Russian nation into two parts, but unlike Kostomarov, who had divided Rus’ into northern and southern branches, Koialovich posited an east-west division.