Imperial Expansion and Collective Identity
As our class on Imperial Russia comes to a close, I am left reflecting on the blank slate of perceptions I had towards Russia prior to registering for the class. My understanding of Russian history did not go beyond vague visualizations of autocracy, revolution, and globally acclaimed literature. Needless to say, my experience in class has proven beyond illuminating; not only do I have a much stronger grasp of a historical “overview” of imperial Russia, but I was also permitted the chance to zoom in closely on primary sources that reveal historical moments and temporal attitudes. Through these close readings of documents, I became fixated on one particular aspect of Russian history: imperial conquest. From Peter the Great defining service to the empire in terms of military expansionism to Vladimir Lenin radically decrying imperial structures, Russian state elites have understood, rationalized, and explained imperial ventures in different terms. These changing understandings of empire do not merely “reflect” changing values; the application of imperial practices has also served to create entirely new conceptions of collective identity. By ruling peoples through difference, imperial structures construct collective identities -- an ideological basis for collective action, eventually leading to the downfall of the empire.
As Peter the Great, the Russian Empire’s first distinctly more Westernized Tsar, ascended to the throne, powerful understandings of the road to imperial military “glory” arose with him. Essentially, the Petrine reforms represent the “road to modernity”: centralization and bureaucratization for the purposes of imperial expansion. As I have previously argued on the midterm paper, Peter the Great not only criticized his son for a lack of enthusiasm for military affairs, but also keenly pushed the Empire in the direction of imperial expansion. Suddenly, a previously Muscovite, “Eastern” Tsar brandished himself in Western military clothing -- and imperial Russian policies followed suit. As Ricarda Vulpius contends, Russian imperial policies can be demarcated into “before” and “after” Peter -- tying the Petrine reforms with “civilizing” projects of 18th century European empires. The Russian Empire, eternally trapped between the ideologies of the “East” and the “West,” distinctly conformed with the latter on the question of imperial expansion and growth in the 18th century.
However, an expanding imperial power inherently suggests an expanding geographical jurisdiction, bringing the issue of minority policies to the fore. While the Tsar defined his relationship to his Russian Orthodox subjects in a relatively simplistic logic of class hierarchy and serfdom, new ethnic and religious minorities proved to be a problem to the empire. Across different Tsars and throughout different ethnic and religious minority groups, imperial policies towards minorities swayed violently from ethnic cleansing and forced conversions to cooptation and relative autonomy. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the Empire restricted the Polish Jews into the Pale of Settlement, ethnically cleansed its Circassian populations, and forcibly converted its Old Believers and Uniates to Orthodoxy. Evidently, the Empire had no “system” of dealing with minorities, proving just how problematic these new communities became to the Tsar.
Meanwhile, imperial policies have served to entirely redefine conceptions of collective identity -- both within Russian populations and peripheral ethno-religious groups. In Russia, an active intellectual movement of redefining Russia in terms of a homogenous “nation” began to emerge as a resistance to the Tsarist hierarchy. From the Decembrists, to the 19th century radical intelligentsia, to Bloody Sunday and the dawn of the Revolution, a shift towards adopting the rhetoric of a Russian “nation” motivated the movements of undoing the unjust premises of empire. As for peripheral minority groups, institutionalized difference also drove new conceptions of collective identity. Considering my own research has pertained to the murid resistance movement of the North Caucasus, they can be taken as a powerful case study of resistant collective identity formation. Previously delineated along tribal and communal lines, the Muslims of Dagestan and Chechnya synthesized a cross-cutting conception of an Islamic political entity in resistance to the Russian Empire. Rallying around Imam Shamil, the murid army as a collective entity battled and ultimately lost to the Empire -- yet their rise and fall illustrates how collective identities shift according to imperial policies of differentiation.
It is easy to view history with a fatalistic, retrospective lens -- to understand the fall of the Russian Empire as simply inevitable due to the unsound logic of imperial premises. While the causal link between “ruling through differentiation” and the eventual collapse of the Empire can be drawn, I have found that none of it can be taken for granted. Collective identities form and reform according to historical circumstances. Changes to the social order often fail -- as we have seen time and time again, from the fumbling of the Decembrists to the confusion surrounding assassinating Tsar Alexander II. It would be a tremendous error to view the eventual end of the Romanov Dynasty as suddenly invalidating of the individual experiences of imperial subjects, who understood the world through the structures empire for centuries.
By reading closely how men and women in the Russian Empire have rationalized their roles within the cosmos, I have found myself interrogating my own mode of thinking. My lived experience as an Arab Muslim in the United States of America, in the age of globalization and the nation-state, informs how I understand the need for social change. Just like the subjects of the Russian Empire, I have my own understanding of a “collective identity” as I have just explained it -- Arab Muslim in the United States of America. It’s ultimately an identity formed by my own lived experiences: the post-9/11 Islamophobic War on Terror, the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring, and the jadedness towards a now war-torn Syria. Though I think I love studying history because it allows me to move beyond my lived experience and understand the world through different eyes, I cannot help but always return to reflecting on my own life at the end of it all. This thrilling journey through Russian history has only gotten me closer to understanding an entirely different, equally valid set of experiences to my own -- and for that, I would really like to thank the both of you, Professors Suny and Kivelson.
