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military draft. St Petersburg’s refusal to compromise despite considerable and well-organised Finnish resistance led in 1904 to the assassination of the Russian governor-general, N. I. Bobrikov, in Helsinki.15

Central Asia and Muslims

Russian rule in Central Asia differed in almost every particular from the situation in the west. On the one hand, from the 1860s to 1890s Russia extended its rule over huge territories including the cities of Tashkent, Khiva, Merv and Samarkand. Thus, by the 1890s, the Russian Empire abutted to the south on Persia and Afghanistan – to the considerable annoyance of the British in India. Economic motivations, in particular the cultivation of cotton, played a role in this expansion, but probably more important was the desire to prevent other powers from gaining a foothold in the region. By the early twentieth century, Russians had built railways that connected the major cities of the region to Russia. Another major construction project was the founding of Russian Tashkent, a European-style colonial city from which Russia ruled Turkestan. On the whole the Russian administrators in Central Asia avoided offending local sensibilities; in particular missionary activity among local Muslims was tightly circumscribed. Little attempt was made to bring Russian culture to the local population.16 When the Russian authorities interfered with everyday life – usually in the context of public health and hygiene – their efforts were greatly resented and often actively resisted, as the cholera riots in Tashkent in 1892 show. But even greater anger was engendered by the opening of Turkestan to Russian settlement in 1907. The increasing numbers of Russian settlers in the southern Kazakh steppe would lead to a large-scale revolt against them and Russian rule in 1916.17

While the tsar’s new Muslim subjects in Kokand, Merv and Bukhara remained for the most part untouched by Russian culture, a very different situation existed among the Volga Tatars. After all, this region had by now been under Russian rule for over three centuries and there had developed over that time significant numbers of Christian Tatars or Kriashens. A mixed Russian and Tatar city, Kazan also housed the empire’s only university in a largely

15 Besides the excellent articles in the volume edited by Thaden cited above, see Heide W. Whelan, Adapting to Modernity: Family, Caste and Capitalism among the Baltic German Nobility (Cologne: Bohlau,¨ 1999).

16Nonetheless, at least at an elite level, Russian rule helped crystallise Muslim modernisers in the jadid movement. See Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

17On Central Asia after 1860, see the articles by Hel´ene` Carrere` d’Encausse in Allsworth (ed.), Central Asia, pp. 131–223.

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Muslim region. From the late 1850s a new effort was inaugurated to strengthen the faith of the Christian Tatars (who were notorious backsliders into Muslim influences) and at the same time pave the way for broader knowledge of Russian. The pedagogue Nikolai I. Il’minskii pushed for a new type of missionary school using native languages written in Cyrillic script and where possible employing native teachers. By the 1870s, the ‘Il’minskii system’ was used in hundreds of schools in the Volga-Ural region but also in Siberia and Central Asia. Il’minskii was a sincere Russifier believing, however, that Russian identity derived primarily from Orthodoxy rather than language. Thus Il’minskii held that limiting the influence of Muslim Tatars was far more important than pressing the Russian language on local populations. Il’minskii’s system was always controversial but enjoyed the support of central authorities at least during his lifetime (to the 1890s).18

The Caucasus

Aside from the Volga region and Central Asia, the Caucasus contained a large Muslim population. Here an extreme level of ethnic and religious diversity complicated Russian rule. Besides the Muslims (present-day Azeris, but at the time generally called simply ‘Tatars’; Chechens, Daghestanis and others), there were Christian Armenians and Georgians. The region had been incorporated into the empire by the first decade of the nineteenth century but, as the stories of Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy attest, the mountain peoples were not subdued until well past the middle of the century. The establishment of Russian rule was accompanied by the mass involuntary emigration of Muslims from the Caucasus (in particular over 300,000 Cherkessy in the 1860s and 1870s) across the border to the Ottoman Empire. The capture of the Muslim ‘freedom fighter’ Shamil, in 1859 may be seen as the beginning of the end for active armed resistence to Russian power.19 The subdued territory was divided administratively into a half-dozen provinces under the leadership of the governor-general in Tiflis (Tbilisi).

Ironically it was a Christian group who came to be seen as the greatest threat to Russian rule in the Caucasus. From the 1880s Russian policy increasingly took on an anti-Armenian tone, beginning with efforts to force Armenian schools to adopt more use of Russian and, in effect, to Russify them. Armenians lived throughout the Caucasus both in towns and as peasants, but

18On Il’minskii and his ‘system’, see Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

19On this process, see Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain People and the Georgian Frontier 1 845 –1 91 7 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

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it was their urban presence that unsettled tsarist authorities. By the 1890s Russian officials identified Armenians with revolution, rather similarly to official Russia’s attitudes towards the Jews. In particular the anti-Armenian governor-general Prince G. S. Golitsyn pressed for a hard line against Armenians and narrowly escaped assassination in 1904. The other large Christian nationality in the Caucasus, the Georgians, was seen as a lesser threat which in retrospect may seem ironic ( J. Dzhugashvili was born in 1879).

The 1905 Revolution and after

The turmoil associated with Russia’s poor military showing in Manchuria and against the Japanese navy unleashed severe civil unrest among Russia’s ethnic minorities. In particular the Baltic region, Russian Poland and the Caucasus were convulsed with revolution. In effect, the government lost control of Warsaw, Riga, Baku and other major cities in 1905. While the October Manifesto of that year did not specifically mention non-Russians, it did promise basic civil rights and a legislature, the Duma. An earlier ukaz (decree) of 12 December 1904 had promised, among other things, ‘to carry out a review of all existing decrees limiting the rights of non-Russians and natives of distant locations in the Empire [inorodtsev i urozhentsev otdel’nykh mestnostei Imperii] in order to leave in effect only those [laws] demanded by fundamental state interests and the obvious needs [pol’za ] of the Russian [russkii] people’. Thus already before the October 1905 Manifesto, commissions were reviewing, for example, whether to allow teaching in Polish and whether restrictions on Jews should be mitigated.

The Duma election law was deeply undemocratic, based as it was on the Prussian model. Still, when the first Duma was convened in July 1906, among the delegates were dozens of Poles, dozens of Muslims and a smattering of other non-Russians. All in all, at least a third of the Duma’s 490 delegates can be described as ‘non-Russian’.20 To be sure, the national question played but a small role in the quick demise of the first two Dumas, but St Petersburg and the tsar himself were deeply suspicious of the Jewish, Armenian, Polish and Muslim deputies’ loyalties to Russia. The reactionary new electoral law of June 1907, pushed through by the dynamic new prime minister Peter A. Stolypin, specifically limited representation from borderland regions. The law contained a lengthy preamble with one sentence of prime importance for

20Kappeler gives the figures 220 ‘non-Russians’ to 270 Russians, but he apparently includes Ukrainians and Belarusians in the former number, which may not adequately reflect their own perceived identity. For details, see Kappeler, Russland als Vielvolkerreich¨, p. 278.

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the tsar’s non-Russian subjects: ‘Created to strengthen the Russian [rossiiskoe] State, the State Duma must also be Russian [russkoiu] in spirit.’ In the third Duma (1907–12) the number of Polish deputies dropped to less than a third of representation in the first Duma; there remained only nine Muslims and a single Jew.

At the same time, the Russian government pressed forward with policies to turn back the liberalisation that had occurred since 1904. Polish and Ukrainian cultural organisations and schools were shut down, Muslim activists were jailed and Finnish autonomy was attacked. St Petersburg’s obsession with the ‘Jewish menace’ came out in the open in the grotesque Beilis trial. A Kiev worker, Mendel Beilis, was accused of ritually murdering a Christian lad. The minister of justice, I. V. Shcheglovitov, worked diligently behind the scenes for a conviction, but the government’s case against Beilis was so weak that the mainly peasant jury acquitted him. The court’s decision did, however, leave open the possibility – against all evidence – that the crime may indeed have been a ritual murder, only carried out by some other Jew.21

While the post-1907 period is characterised by more activist pro-Russian and Russifying policies, there is some reason to question whether the government would have continued along this line. Peter Stolypin, the architect of the 1907 electoral law and other Russian nationalist policies, was clearly on his way out when an assassin’s bullet caught him in Kiev in September 1911. At the same time, nationalism in both cultural and political guises grew rapidly among non-Russians in the post-1907 period. Despite government harassment, private Polish and Armenian schools, Ukrainian and Yiddish newspapers, and Muslim political and cultural organisations flourished.

First World War

The outbreak of war in August 1914 utterly changed the dynamics of nationalities policy in the Russian Empire.22 Suddenly it became crucial to woo the Poles and a decree of mid-August promised a reunited Poland under the tsar’s sceptre at the end of the war. Germans, on the other hand, had their cultural organisations shut down and were even subjected to a prohibition from speaking German in public. The Ottoman Empire’s decision to join the

21A recent account of the Beilis trial is Albert Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1 894–1 91 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

22Indeed, a recent book argues convincingly that the war allowed the Russian government to embark on hitherto-unseen ‘nativising’ policies: Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Central Powers raised the fear of a Turkic-Muslim fifth column, but the only serious outburst of anti-government violence among Muslims was caused by St Petersburg’s own policies in Central Asia. Strains that had long been building over Slavic colonisation exploded into a major rebellion when Russia unwisely attempted to draft local Muslims to do labour duties for the army (unlike Jews, Muslims were exempt from the military draft). Before this 1916 uprising was quelled, over 3,000 Russians and many more Muslims (mainly Kyrgyz and Kazakhs) had lost their lives.

It bears remembering that the First World War in the east was fought in non-Russian regions. As the front moved eastwards (Warsaw was lost to the Germans in mid-1915, Vil’na/Wilno that autumn), the military and civilian authorities pursued a brutal policy of forcibly displacing large numbers of local inhabitants, in particular Jews and Germans, but including many others.23 As in other European countries, the war fuelled nationalist rhetoric but on the whole policy towards Russia’s national minorities did not significantly change. The Russian Empire was fighting, after all, for its survival, a battle it ultimately lost in 1917. Whether more conciliatory and enlightened policies towards non-Russians could have prevented that defeat is a question that can be endlessly debated but not unambiguously supported or refuted.

23For more on this tragic story, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

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