Discussion on the Issue of National Outskirts in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

The monograph “National outskirts in the policy of the Russian Empire and Russian social thought” is a comprehensive study of the strategy and tactics of imperial integration of foreign ethnic peripheries, the causes of political decisions of the authorities and public debate of the 19th — early 20th centuries on the problems of borderlands. The geographical coverage is large: Poland and Finland; the Western and Southwestern regions; the Baltics; the Caucasus; and Central Asia. Each of the considered outskirts had a unique juridical status and its own legislation, economy, social classes, diverse national structure, and a complex history of mutual relations with St. Petersburg. In the last twenty years the methodological approaches to the study of imperial history have been significantly supplemented. The combination of new archival sources with extensive historiographical heritage allows the authors of the reviewed monograph to form a new substantiated view on the relations between imperial center and national periphery. They involved mutual influence of the peripheries and the capital: the public and the tsarist bureaucracy. The modernization potential of the Empire by the beginning of the 20th century had been exhausted, and the inability to reorganize the system of regional government led to a protracted crisis. The clash of conservative and liberal concepts of Empire building is evident in the detailed source analysis of periodicals and journalism of the era. Diverse natural and geographical zones of Russia, ethnic and religious population, rich natural resources determine the exceptional civilizational significance of Russian border policy in 19th — early 20th centuries, and the attention to it of contemporary researchers.