Russian Nationalism and Tsarist Nationalities Policies in Semi-Constitutional Russia, 1905-1914

"Unfortunately, the heartland of Russia did not possess sufficient "Unfortunately, the heartland of Russia did not possess sufficient sources of cultural and moral strength which could have served as an instrument of ... assimilation, all the more so as many border regions - because of their special historical and geographical development - stood culturally on a much higher plane than the centre. Therefore endeavours directed at their russification (obrusenie), mostly amounting to intervention by force, proved futile and only angered local populations. At the same time these endeavours drained the Russian national centre because they made it necessary to squander its little developed forces over the huge expanse of the empire and to lower the average level of the serving class that was called upon to fulfil the demands of the state" [1] .

This was the considered opinion of S. E. Kryzhanovskii, a former Deputy Minister of Interior, who committed these lines to paper after many years of exile. It is basically a very pessimistic view of Russian nationalism and of the possibilities and chances of Tsarist nationalities policies. At first glance it seems to contradict statements made by Petr Struve already in 1910:

"This whole official nationalism is indispensable under the present political circumstances because it can conceal in people's minds the powerlessness and the humiliation of the representative chamber. It dupes the assembly and `justifies' absolutism and its anti‑liberal and anti-democratic policies" [2] .

This describes the function of a nationalism purposefully employed as a means of deflecting attention from the inner tensions and contradictions of the Tsarist system after the enactment of the October Manifesto, and especially after the new electoral law of the 3rd June 1907 which reduced the importance of the voters of the lower classes dramatically. Two years earlier Struve had stressed the point even more strongly: "Psychologically and objectively the forces of reaction can only continue to exist because they rely on the inorodtsy. The inorodtsy are the last psychological weapon of the reactionaries" [3] . By this he obviously meant that only by playing up the largely imagined threat against the Russians from the side of the non-Russians could the old undemocratic and partly pre-modern system of the 3rd of June 1907 be kept together. However, this was only one side of Struve's analysis. On the other side he saw very clearly the artificial character and the weakness of this officially sponsored nationalism of Russia's constitutional period. Going beyond the judgement of the representative of the old system he believed that the causes of this weakness and artificiality lay in the continuing claim of the bureaucracy and nobility to a monopoly of power. The lack of modernity and democracy, which was evident in this, meant for him that this Russian nationalism could never be a viable political movement and that Russian nationalism as such had not been able to reach its full potential yet [4] . His criticisms leads one to suspect that it was this very weakness of Russian nationalism which lay at the bottom of repressive legislation against other nationalities as it justified officially sponsored nationalism in the eyes of its practitioners. Both official nationalism, the nationalism from above, and also "general" nationalism, the nationalism from below, were weak, because, in Struve's analysis, the political and social structure of the Empire was backward and was deliberately kept backward to defend social and political privileges which would not survive in a modern society. This structural deficiency suggests - as does Kryzhanovskii's statement - an a priori assumption to the effect that the policy of Russian governments towards their nationalities could not be based on any clear concept, nor be directed towards a single overriding goal. Basing itself on these introductory remarks, this paper is an attempt to describe official nationalities policy, to investigate some of its motives, and to look at the character of (Great-) Russian nationalism.

Russian policy towards other nationalities since Catherine II had for a long time been primarily geared towards eliminating any historical political and social structures which had developed independently from those of the Great Russians and which were different from them, and to replace them with the general structures of the Empire. This policy did continue for some time, although it must be added that the policy was never rigorously applied, nor could it be. At least since Nicholas I another element came into play, whereby many, but not all, peoples were forbidden the use of their language in schools and in the administration. Part and parcel of this policy was, already since Catherine, the mobilisation of the orthodox church for Russian purposes on the one hand, and on the other an energetic interference in the affairs of other denominations or religions. Under Alexander II, certainly due to a good degree to his reforms, there appeared for the first time a "societal" nationalism which, supported by a still very narrow and small public, but at least independent from "official" Russia, attempted to drive the government towards a nationalities policy, which aimed not only at administrative but also at cultural russification. However, the government deflated such pressure already under the "Tsar-Reformer" by forbidding or restricting the sphere of activities for nationalist organisations such as the Slavic Welfare Committees [5] . Still, this policy of repression against movements of Russian nationalism was accompanied by more or new measures to russify by suppressing the cultural and language rights of others and by the official promotion of Russian culture, especially under Alexander III.

This policy stifled independent initiatives from "society", from the grass-roots, even patriotic and nationalistic ones among the Russians themselves. Equally it was the same fear of independent political action that blocked necessary reforms and adjustments - as a result of which the development of the obshchestvo [society], one should say: of a civic society, was retarded. Worse, the reactionary direction of internal politics particularly under Alexander III brought serious attempts at clawing back the space granted "society" for (relatively) independent action, and the involvement of the population in the anyway only rudimentary representative bodies of local government was restricted to even smaller groups. As there is a direct link between these forms of "civic society" on the one hand and nationalism and the development of a national consciousness on the other, all this meant that Russian nationalism remained weak, because the gulf between the privileged few and the masses could not be narrowed quickly enough. Indeed it may even be appropriate to speak of a retarded process of nation-building in Russia. A new boost of political modernisation, i.e. a new level of political mobilisation and participation was therefore necessary, before Russian nationalism, for better or worse, could take a leap forward. Just such a phase of accelerated modernization was a cause as well as a result of the revolution of 1905. The introduction of a representative system of government therefore institutionally reinforced the newly awakened nationalism. But at the same time it restricted it and limited its effect, among other things, because of the rather unequal electoral law of the 3rd June 1907 with its politically demobilising and depoliticizing effects.

Official policy towards non‑Russian nationalities mellowed somewhat in the period before and after the promulgation of the October-Manifesto of October 17th, 1905, with which the short period of Russian constitutionalism was heralded in. However, it was to prove only a brief interruption of the general trend in the empire's nationalities policy. Since the Manifesto aimed at winning various opposition groups for a long-term co‑operation with the regime, concessions were also directed at the nationalities. Thus in many regions tuition in the mother tongue was granted in schools for the first year, in some cases even until the second, as was the setting up of private schools where tuition was always in the mother tongue, and where a minority culture could be advanced. Grammar schools in Poland, an area which had been more strongly affected than most by the generally repressive nationality policy, could at least offer Polish as a school subject taught in Russian, and were allowed to teach catholic religion in Polish. Lithuanian books, which for a long time might appear in Cyrillic only, could now be printed in the Latin alphabet again and for the first time ever two Lithuanian newspapers were tolerated by the censor. Another first was the appearance of a newspaper in White-Russian in 1906, although Russian nationalists and many moderates, like certain elements of the zemstvo-movement, denied - just as in the case of the Ukraine - that there was something like a White-Russian language or a White-Russian nation [6] . On the other hand the Council of Ministers saw itself not in a position to create at the University of Iur'ev two chairs in applied theology where theology would have been taught in Estonian and Latvian [7] . Polish townspeople and nobles, who had been forbidden to buy land in the nine western provinces of the Empire, were now at least allowed to buy land from other Poles, while the determination of nationality in this ethnically mixed region was still based on religion. Catholic peasants now even had the right to buy land from anybody - even if the Peasant Land Bank, a state institution, continued its policy of selling to orthodox peasants only. Peasant communities in Poland were once again allowed to conduct their affairs in Polish. But even at this time of official magnanimity it was insisted that after 1910 only people who spoke both Polish and Russian could assume positions in peasant self‑government in Congress Poland. Nor did anybody seriously consider granting the concession of making the Russian university in Warsaw into a Polish one. Yet at least the schools of the Finance Ministry in Poland were permitted to teach in Polish. For the first time ever, Polish lawyers now were granted the right to set up a professional body (sovet priiasnykh poverennykh). In Central Asia the right was promised to teach in the mother tongue in state schools, and the right for non‑Christians to become private tutors - both measures, however, never materialized [8] . Many restrictions still in place could occasionally no longer be enforced as a result of the general weakening of the government during the revolution. On the other hand the existing nationalities policy was not fundamentally reformed. Of primary importance was the imperial manifesto of November 1905, as a result of which the constitutional status quo ante 1899 of relations between Finland and the Empire was restored. But it was not to remain valid for long. Despite these (partly very minor) concessions the various national movements experienced a hitherto unknown growth. To the context of nationalities policy also belonged, as we shall see, the Edict of Religious Toleration of 17th April 1905, according to which the conversion from Orthodoxy to another denomination was permitted for the first time.

Such hesitant readiness to grant concessions soon waned after the coup d'etat of 3rd June 1907 and made way for a newly aggressive official nationalism, i. e. for a return to a policy of restrictions against non-(Great)-Russian groups. A basic assumption of this nationalistic domestic policy was the conviction among large sectors of the bureaucracy that the revolution was the work of inorodtsy, of non-Russians. This was why the electoral law of the 3rd June tried to filter out non‑Russian elements and to reenforce the position of ethnic Russians in the Duma (and later in the zemstva, municipal administration, the assemblies of the nobility and in the Imperial Council) as a stabilising factor. The "national" clauses in the new electoral law were justified thus:

"the Duma must be Russian in spirit, since it was created to safeguard the Russian Empire. Those foreign peoples who have come into our dominions must have representatives in the Duma for their needs, but they should never appear in such numbers which permit them to decide purely Russian questions. In those border regions where the population has not attained a sufficient level of civil education, the Duma elections must be suspended for the time being" [9] .

More informal means were also used to artificially prop up "Russian" interests and to ensure political stability. For the defining of the relationship between modernization and nationalism it is worth noting that the Prime-Minister, Petr A. Stolypin, repeatedly emphasised, that constitutionalism was a decisive means to mobilize the national Russian element in the provinces and especially in the okrainy, the border-regions where non-Russians dominated.

These efforts of the central authorities were paralleled by a movement primarily in the periphery, where Russians were only in a minority and where they saw themselves locked in constant conflict with non‑Russians. It was mainly under the influence of the Duma elections, but also as a reaction to the national awakening of other peoples, that Russian nationalist groups formed here, which fought for the "the supremacy of the Russians" and the "supremacy of the Orthodox Church" because they saw in this the only way of protecting their own interests. To ensure supremacy, or the "right to rule", for the Russians they demanded from the start that a new electoral law be passed with national curiae, as otherwise they would not be represented in the newly created imperial "parliament" [10] . The electoral law of 3rd June 1907 fulfilled this demand and thus granted a quite disproportionate influence not only to the nobility and to the upper classes in the towns, but also to the generally very radical right‑wing groups of Russians in the border regions [11] . Non‑Russian, by contrast, lost the vast majority of their deputies. From this it followed that on the one hand a policy of granting concessions to non-Russian nationalities could hardly be implemented, and on the other that general reforms had a chance of success only when they were closely connected to (Great-) Russian interests [12] . However, it must be emphasised that the coup of June 3rd 1907 was intended to make the continuation of the constitutional experiment possible, not to end it, and that therefore nationalism could be used as a means of making it impossible for the extreme conservatives to return to absolutism or to block all plans for reform.

Given this constellation of political forces it cannot surprise that the short period of toleration towards the cultural aspirations of other, especially smaller, nations, ended soon and that once again a policy was pursued which sought to limit these rights. The Council of Ministers expressly refused to recognise in law Ukrainian as a language of tuition for the first two years. Rather, it made its opinion very clear that state schools had to be entirely Russian in their character [13] . The Ukrainian movement hardly experienced even unofficial toleration. In 1905 the prosvita [14] in Kuban Province was forbidden, the one in Chernigov was effectively forced to dissolve itself and those in Odessa and Podolia were paralysed by the local administration. In other places branches were never even permitted. Local authorities forbade the reading of Ukrainian books and the use of Ukrainian even in private conversations at local teacher-training seminars. The inspector of the Kiev school district banned non-Russian languages from school celebrations - not only at state-schools, but also at private ones. Polish was similarly subjected to persecution in the Western provinces as was secret private tuition in the subject. Young Poles were thus denied any tuition in their native language. In Vilnius the authorities closed a Polish library and the Inspector of the school district Vilnius demanded, contrary to what the law stipulated, that catholic religion be immediately taught again only in Russian. In the regions which were later annexed from Congress Poland as Kholm Province, Catholic peasants were no longer allowed to buy land: here the use of Polish was forbidden even in private welfare organisations, in the fire brigade, in credit co‑operatives, and in primary schools. Polish was not even on the curriculum or used in religious instruction, while private schools and kindergartens were also outlawed [15] . In the draft bill on the annexation of Kholm Province by Russia, the government even refused to allow local peasant communities to use Polish. At the same time the Russian system of trial by jury was not extended to the new province in order that "Catholic‑Jesuit" or "Jewish‑Talmudic" morality should not hinder the due process of law [16] . The school authorities tried to ensure that Jewish educational institutions would not serve the cause of Jewish national renaissance. If there was ever any suspicion that a school was led by Zionists, the head of the school district generally closed it. The head of the Kiev school authority, responsible for a third of the cherta (the Jewish Pale of Settlement), even tried to limit drastically the access of Jews to any kind of school education. Jewish schools in the Vilnius educational district experienced similar difficulties [17] .

Economic and political penetration of non‑Russian regions often went hand in hand. Especially when the Russian population was too weak for economic penetration, let alone cultural domination, the long arm of the law had to step in, as, for example, with the nationalisation of the Warsaw-Vienna railway (where the strategic argument was advanced) [18] , in the draft law on municipal self-government in Poland, or in the annexation of Kholm Province from Congress Poland [19] . The last, amounting to an annexation of Polish territory, occurred mainly as the result of political pressure from clerical circles and especially from the local bishop, in order to strengthen the Russian influence, and to prevent the Polish pany from polonising the Russian (really Ukrainian) peasants. The annexation was doubtless a reaction to the fact that after the Edict of Religious Toleration of 17th April 1905 two thirds of those forcibly converted formerly Uniate peasants returned to Catholicism, which was seen as nothing less than a massive growth in Polish influence. The legislation on Finland replaced the Manifesto of November 1905 and denied any special constitutional status to this country. Superficially most of the laws on Finland corresponded to the tradition of "administrative integration" of historically different parts into the Empire. But they were obviously intended to strengthen Russian - i. e. ethnically Russian - influence in this region as well. Since this would not have been possible with Finnish administrative personnel, naturally Russians had to be given "equal" rights in order that they could be installed in the administration and as teachers in Finnish schools [20] . The Imperial government furthermore had plans to introduce the law on languages in the schools of the border regions also into Finland, so that Finnish would only have been on the curriculum as a school subject, to be taught in Russian [21] . The central government had also required local administrations in other regions to employ mainly Russians, especially of course in the police [22] .

Attempts to prevent non-Russians from buying land, or to drive them off the land also remained a constant element in "national" policy. In 1914 public companies in general, and especially those with Jewish directors, were restricted acquiring land in the countryside. Some draft laws, though never enacted, had aimed in the same direction - they were meant to prevent foreigners and esp. German colonists (even as Russian subjects!) from acquiring land. Russian nationalists threatened the Czechs, who seemed unwilling to vote for extreme Russian nationalists in zemstvo-elections, that they would be included in this law if they did not support "true" Russians. An even more draconian bill which would have allowed German colonists who had not become russified enough to be expropriated by administrative fiat of the local governors was withdrawn by the government. The Peasant Land Bank continued its policy of discriminating on grounds of nationality [23] . Even in European Russia the settlement of old‑believer peasants was encouraged to combat Polish influence, which led to violent disputes [24] . In the outer regions of the Empire, in Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus, millions of desiatiny of land were taken away from the indigenous population and opened up to "orthodox" or (depending on the distance from the centre) "christian" settlers. An increasingly strong and often spontaneous movement of settlers, as a result of which especially nomadic peoples lost their traditional grazing grounds and the property rights on other land, was supported by the Prime Minister, Stolypin, and his agriculture minister, although a senatorial revision under Senator Pahlen had called attention to the increasingly unbearable situation and had demanded that settlement be slowed down. The situation in Central Asia thus became increasingly explosive, until in 1916 long-repressed grievances blew up into an uprising which had to be bloodily suppressed [25] .

A further act of wilful policy aimed against other nationalities was the banning of the Catholic‑Constitutional party of the bishop of Vilnius, Eduard von Ropp. Although the bishop was certainly socially conservative enough and as a half-German no simple tool of Polish influence, he aroused the distrust of the authorities because he succeeded in fostering a special catholic and regional consciousness through his party which superseded ethnic boundaries by uniting Poles and Lithuanians - something which Petersburg evidently feared would lead only to the polonisation of the region or at least to renewed demands for regional autonomy. Besides, Tsarism, it seems, could not tolerate a political bishop who did not belong to the Orthodox Church. The watch dogs of official nationalism in the chancellaries of St. Petersburg considered the bishop so dangerous that, provoking a row with the Vatican, they rather unceremoniously removed him from office [26] .

Despite all these measures of "official" nationalism the Council of Ministers still felt unable to do without the strength of the Orthodox Church in relations with other nationalities. Without the Church, the pacification of Tartar and other muslim elements after the revolution of 1905/1907 and their russification seemed impossible. Ministers, and in particular P. A. Stolypin, wanted to stop the wave of re-conversions to Islam and to contain the influence of the new Tartar national movement with its new schools and new and better trained clergy. The founding of many new orthodox parishes should work here as it had in Orel province in combating socialism, the Prime-Minister argued [27] . In the Western provinces, the Orthodox Church was given several times the financial support than that normal for central regions, in order to combat Polish or Catholic influence [28] . Very often representatives of the church did not need any prompting in pursuance of their "national" duty. Many demands for a policy with russificatory tendencies, e. g. the demand for making the schools exclusively "Russian", came directly from priests or higher clergy, especially from those in the western provinces, in Poland or from other okrainy [29] . The "orthodox fraternities" attached to parishes in these regions saw themselves as the spearhead of Russian influence and they were indeed established as such by political bishops and by local authorities. Even during the elections for the zemstva and the Duma priests and bishops were leant on to urge, and often they did so without prompting, the people that they should support "Russian" interests, not those of the Poles, Germans or Jews, and that they should vote for ethnic Russians. At the same time eager clergy-men kept watch over elections in the peasant volosti and their results [30] . All this was especially true of Kholm Province. Even the political struggle against the Ukrainian movement was waged mainly by the Orthodox Church, and partly understood as a disagreement between different confessions [31] . Religious militancy displayed by the state and by nationalist groups against non‑orthodox denominations even after the Edict of Religious Toleration of 17th April 1905 can be explained by the all too worldly functions of the Russian Orthodox Church and by a treatment of other religions which should be understood in political terms. The Edict of Religious Toleration aroused sharp criticism from monarchists and nationalists. At the "Congress of the Representatives of Western Russia" - that demanded among other things the introduction of zemstva (organs of rural self-government) in some of the western provinces and the annexation of the Kholm territory from Poland as a measure to strengthen ethnic Russian influence in the western periphery - the formalization of the Act of 1905 through the Duma was attacked thus [32] :

"For our region, whose history has always developed as the fight of Catholicism against Orthodoxy, or, what amounts to the same, as the fight of the Polish element against the Russian, this is a question of life and death: The reduction [in status] of the indigenous Orthodoxy would be the same as national suicide".

The attempt to extend the religious freedoms of Old Believers also failed because its opponents did not see this as a question of religious toleration but as an attack on the strength and unity of the Russian state [33] . In the same way demands from the Georgian Church for autocephaly could only constitute a call for revolution [34] .

To this context belongs the quite open support given to a catholic sect, the Mariavites, which the state legalised in 1906 immediately after the Vatican had excommunicated its members. Orthodox priests even demanded in a petition to St. Petersburg that this group should be used to found a national Russian Catholic church. Still, the Russian state gave the sect massive financial support in Congress Poland so that within a short time it had considerable means at its disposal which it used for extensive welfare activities and for mutual assistance in the sphere of economic activities, via, among other things, numerous credit co-operatives. The financial means of the Mariavites equalled those of the generously provided Russian Orthodox Church in Congress-Poland [35] . The aim of such measures must clearly have been to weaken a competing nationality, although Russian authorities could not have deluded themselves that these measures would ever be anything more than a mere irritation for the Poles and the Catholic Church.

A great irony lay behind the fact that national differences in many regions were still so weak and underdeveloped that for all practical purposes a Russian could still not be defined by the language spoken or by the nationality of parents. The defining criterion for being Russian in most legislation was the membership of the Russian Orthodox Church. This had been so under Alexander II when Poles of the western provinces lost the right to buy agricultural land [36] . It was still true in 1905 when this legislation was modified and somewhat liberalized. The same principle was applied in the elections to the newly introduced western zemstva and to the Duma with their national (i.e. religious!) curiae through which a limit was placed on the number of non-Russian representatives before any vote had been cast [37] .

However, nationalist rhetoric could not consistently be translated into politics. In many cases this would have been quite pointless even in the eyes of the politicians in St. Petersburg, as, for example, in the case of the German Balts, who anyway might have had enough influence in the Empire to prevent any return to Alexander III's policy towards the Baltic. Even in the Caucasus, which was not directly under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry or of the Council of Ministers, a thorough nationalist policy could not be consistently carried out. The interests of the Empire and the interests of Russian nationalism could conflict even in the eyes of the Petersburg bureaucrats. Thus the Ministers of Finance and of Trade & Industry refused to pursue a policy of "nationalisation" (i.e. russifi-cation) of the economy and in particular of credit. Rather, they employed officials of all nationalities and supported credit co-operatives and enterprises with capital, irrespective of the  nationality of their owner. This was the case even with Jewish co-operatives and entrepreneurs. The Finance Ministry, among others, tried to encourage capital investments and to attract experience from the national minorities in order to develop the country quickly and to pursue the Great Power interests of the Empire [38] . The Tsarist state here operated from two kinds of rationale: on the one hand it seemed expedient for domestic political reasons to favour the Russians and to limit the rights of non-Russian groups, and on the other hand it was thought necessary to ignore or abolish any restrictions against non-Russian nationalities in order to modernise the country and to develop its power [39] . But precisely because the nationalities policy had no underlying concept, and was implemented not consistently but opportunistically to damage other nationalities or to limit their influence, it appeared all the more arbitrary and thus became all the more unbearable for the non‑Russians. In many respects the anti-Semitic policy of the government and of local authorities was a good example of the lack of underlying principles in official policy. There were doubtless various old concepts on the minds of both local and central decision makers, as for example that Jewish "solidarity" and "unity" should be broken in order to speed up the assimilation of the Jews, even though this aim had in practice been widely abandoned and was futile where the Jews of 1905 (or before) were concerned. There remained then only a policy of pin-pricks, or of bitterly resented acts of repression which were intended to hit Jewish capitalism as the spearhead of social and political change or Zionism as a force of Jewish national regenration. Further attempts to lash out at "revolution" then led to the scandal of the Beilis trial. Its only rationally understandable aim, as far as the historian is concerned, was to manipulate a change in the climate of opinion at home, which would have made it possible to pursue a much more reactionary course - with far-reaching restrictions on press freedom and maybe even with the demotion of the Duma to a mere consultative assembly [40] . These policies toward the nationalities show that important groups even within the government increasingly saw themselves in a kind of domestic state of war in which - in order to preserve the empire - it seemed necessary to repeat the military conquests of the Empire again and again in daily politics [41] .

This does not mean that nationalities policy was merely the result of short-term calculations by St. Petersburg leaders. The party with whose policies the Prime Minister, Stolypin, increasingly went along was the "National Union", or the Nationalists' party, which in large measure owed its existence to the electoral law of 3rd June. The party was largely limited to the Western provinces, above all the South‑West, and it concentrated on representing the interests of (Russian) landowners and of certain elements of city life [42] . Nationalism was an important part of the Nationalists' programme because it enabled them, they argued, to represent their class interests, and because it at the same time held the nation together above and beyond class differences. It is significant that there was something thoroughly artificial in their understanding of nationalism. For them "national" education played the decisive role in developing a national consciousness, and they accorded exaggerated importance to it. Like politicians and officials close to them, they believed that the "Russian spirit" could be and had to be spread by schools, even in the sense of russifying other nationalities. In such a belief two elements are visible: the conviction that schools had educated both bureaucrats and ordinary people in a "cosmopolitan", instead of in a "national", i. e. "Russian" way. This was thought to have been one of the causes of the 1905 revolution. "National" education, therefore, had the clear purpose of educating "away" revolution [43] . On the other hand, the feeling was abroad among Nationalists, though seldom articulated, that, so to speak, the process that made Russians into Russians was incomplete in large sections of the population and that the forces which bound Russians together into a common heritage and a shared social structure were substantially weaker than with other nationalities [44] . This was always clear when nationalists compared Russians to their worst enemies, the Poles and the Jews: among these they recognised a highly developed sense of national solidarity against which the Russians themselves compared badly. In this they also believed to have discovered the reason why the Russians had repeatedly fallen behind in the struggle for economic and cultural hegemony even in their own country, with the consequence which they feared and expected that they would lose political domination as well [45] . In the historical consciousness of the Nationalists and of those on the Right generally, Russia experienced such critical situations, for example in the decades before the first and second Polish uprisings, when Polish culture threatened to drive out Russian culture in the Western provinces: similar dangers loomed large in the 1905 revolution, which they understood as an attack by the non-Russians (inorodtsy) of the empire on the historical Russian state. They justified their participation in the "Congress of Representatives of Western Russia" which demanded the incorporation of the Kholm province and the introduction of zemstva in the western provinces by maintaining that the question was still open whether this region remained Russian or would once more turn Polish [46] . Concessions and attempts at reconciliation, in their view, only encouraged revolution and separatist movements. Consistent legislation in a nationalistic spirit, i. e. the installation of Russians into all important positions, education in all schools only in Russian, settlement of Russians not only in Siberia and Central Asia but also in the okrainy of European Russia at the expense of the indigenous populations, strong "Russian" political influence and the suppression of other nationalities, and encouragement of one's own kind through the power of the state - this alone created stability. If the supremacy of the Great Russian nation, its right to rule, could be firmly rooted in the political system, this would end all separatism [47] . To this end they even introduced a law into the Duma which would have done away with the last appearances of a separate Polish political entity [48] . Such attitudes were, however, not based on racist beliefs: many assimilated Ukrainians, Germans and others became active members of the Nationalists. The St. Petersburg National Club, though not mainstream "Nationalist" and really part of an older political aegis, put it thus: The completely assimilated peoples, they declared, were one heart and one soul with the Russians, "those tribes however, which strive to live separately, as foreign organisms in the great body of Russia, have to remain in this state of natural inequality which is constituted by their own separateness" [49] .

When they analyzed the weaknesses of the Russian nation, the Nationalists often came to conclusions which are quite surprising. They thought that the causes of this weakness lay in the consequences of serfdom, in the paternalist traditions of the Russian state and in what they called its state socialism, which manifested itself in constant intervention in the economy and in the building up of a large state industry [50] . This was why the Russians and Russian culture was so weak [51] . In other words, the Nationalists argued that the weakness of the Russian nation was a result of the insufficient modernisation of the country. Unlike other right‑wingers they did not baulk at admitting Russian backwardness. But they did not like the modernisation which they observed around them and in some respects they were groping towards a different model [52] . From this it followed logically that many Nationalists developed a programme for modernising the country and mobilising the population in the widest sense of the word, wedding modern economic and constitutional ideas to thoroughly traditional concepts and institutions. A starting point had to be compulsory education for all, in which schools controlled by the Russian Orthodox Church would not only teach reading, writing and "things Russian", but also skills which would help the population in the country-side and the lower middle classes in the towns to be economically more successful. Not by pogroms one had to fight against the Jews, it was argued, but by hard work [53] . Thus the "Russian" claim to political supremacy would gain an economic basis. The sharpest weapons for this programme of mobilising the Russian nation and for rolling back the non‑Russian elements would have to be societies for mutual assistance, above all for cheap credit. Non-Russians should be excluded from this field by the State Bank turning off the financial tap and by further legislation. Without discrimination against other nationalities things still seemed pretty bad for Russians. As A. I. Savenko, a prominent Nationalist, put it: "Yes, give equal rights to the Jews and there will be no Russian trade here with us in Russian Kiev...[Therefore] we are not only political, but also economic nationalists" [54] . Basically, Nationalists wanted to create an exclusively national Russian milieu, which would cater for all needs, especially in those areas where Russians had become dependent on non-Russians. It is striking that this programme had much in common with those late-comers among the East European minorities and non-historic nations that began to assert themselves against the domination of the ruling national group. It is possible that they had studied how Polish and Jewish attempts to assert themselves as a nation had developed [55] . However, Russian Nationalists differed from them in that they never succeeded in winning the intelligentsia to their cause. It was to a large degree because of this that this Russian nationalism before 1917 was never able to develop into a mass movement. Representatives of the National Union were painfully aware of this problem and part of their economic program has to be seen in this light. They argued that a "democracy of property" and a national bourgeoisie were essential to spread the panaceas of nationalism among the intelligentsia and their reliance on the orthodox clergy was a conscious attempt to make good for lack of support from that quarter [56] .

Seen paradigmatically, here began, next to a more conservative nationalism, the way towards a more modern nationalism with more broadly democratic tendencies (in the sense of political mobilisation rather than that of political freedom) which had to be problematic for the regime. This nationalism was based on reform and nurtured an idea of nation which was stripped of many old-fashioned accessories such as the estates or the established Church. The Nationalists accepted a constitution - or at least a representative system - as an indispensable framework within which alone Russian nationalism could develop fully, although it was by no means love at first sight [57] . That the Nationalists paid lip service to the idea of a more democratic form of nationalism was an indirect recognition of this pressure. They repeatedly emphasised that the Nationalist Party had to be "national-democratic" (narodno-demokraticheskaia), whereby admittedly the Russian word "narod" may have meant the people organised within the estates system [58] . Their positive disposition towards the system of the 3rd June 1907 was based above all on the fact that it had increased their influence. Thus the demand that the Duma should be demoted to a merely consultative assembly was heard less and less from them [59] . Rather, the Nationalists' most important policy demand became the introduction of the zemstva in the West (in contrast to the beliefs of the 1860s), albeit with national curiae to ensure "Russian" supremacy - that is to say, they demanded the introduction of a system of local government based on elections for the main purpose of strengthening the Russian element not only administratively but also to mobilise it in a wider political sense. That peasant deputies on the Right were partly able to satisfy their demand that peasants should have a stronger influence in these institutions also demonstrates the trend towards greater democracy inherent in this nationalism [60] . This tendency was further nourished by the fact that the Nationalists' - to be true to nationalism - had to present themselves in their main constituency as defenders of the interests of Ukrainian and White Russian peasants (whom they regarded as purely Russians) against Polish landowners. However, here the danger became apparent that nationalist policies could turn into a class struggle against the landowners, many of whom were the very Nationalists who attempted to operationalize nationalism as a means of defending their own interests [61] . Also the fact that shortly before the First World War a small group of Nationalists broke away in order to advance a more democratic kind of nationalism demonstrates the existence of this tendency within the "National Union", even though it was a weak one. This group, called "Lado", called for universal suffrage at a time when representatives of the main party wanted voting rights to be even more restricted than they already were [62] . A similar split off to the left, less radical than the first, but more significant, occurred under the pressure of the First World War. A not inconsiderable section of the Nationalists' faction in the Duma grouped together as "Progressive Nationalists" to form with the non-socialist parties to their left the "Progressive Block" as a pro-reform majority in the Duma in order to organise the country better for the war effort, and to wrest from the Tsar a ministry of "public confidence", which was widely understood as the first step towards a parliamentary cabinet [63] .

The Nationalists had to grapple with a similar dilemma as the bureaucrats and the government. This lay in the fact that the interests of the empire and of Russian nationalism were not identical. This conflict became particularly pronounced in foreign policy when the country moved into the direction of the First World War. But, if at the top the bureaucrats of the government were in the last resort willing to give precedence to the interests of empire over those of an exclusively "Russian" nationalism, the Nationalists were by no means thus inclined. As one of their most prominent politicians, A. I. Savenko, put it:

"Now we are told imperialism is a higher notion than nationalism. Yet, gentlemen, if it is true that imperialism is placed above nationalism because an empire is wider, larger and greater than a people, then - if we allow that logic - the world is above empire. Therefore, cosmopolitanism should be placed above imperialism. But we will not follow that logic... The imperial idea is that ideological cement by which the various national parts of the state are bound into one permanent body. We must emphasize that any such imperial idea can only be the Russian national idea" [64] .

In spite of the rhetorical solution to this insoluble contradiction in the last sentence quoted, the Nationalists found themselves in an impossible position. As consequence of this they fell silent on questions of foreign policy, as their most recent historiographer put it. They virtually had no answer to the problem that in the interests of Russian conservatism and nationalism - in the sense they understood them - they could not possibly accept a war with Germany. Their dilemma was spotted early on by Peter Struve who in 1908 attacked the nationalist journalist M. O. Men'shikov because he had advocated a peaceful Russian policy in one of the crises unfolding on the international scene. To Struve this moderation only demonstrated that the reactionaries stood helpless before the task of restoring the external power and prestige of the Russian empire [65] . From here it was only a short step to his call to wrest the weapon of nationalism from the hands of the government and the reactionaries.

An important defensive feature of this form of nationalism was consciously to seek support from the Russian Orthodox Church. "Reform" and mobilisation of the population in the sense of a cautious modernisation was desirable only with the closest co-operation with the Russian Orthodox Church. Nationalists were not at all averse to organizing their own group inside the church to move it along the lines they thought desirable [66] . The church was supposed to embrace all aspects of life for all Russians, expressly not only as a spiritual but also as a national institution. The local parish was seen as the organisational centre around which everything else should be grouped, from the school to the care for the poor and to economic mutual assistance. The role of the church was seen as absolutely fundamental: only Orthodoxy made a Russian [67] . At least in part this emphasis on the Church was a reflection of the lack of support for Nationalists and nationalism among the intelligentsia. Another defence mechanism was that Nationalists wanted to preserve the estates system at least for the peasantry - as this might serve as another element of social control. This was exactly why they were up in arms against the suggested reforms of rural self-government and of the peasant courts. Such reforms counted as the first step towards a new revolution or at least to an elimination of the "Russian" character of the country and to the triumph of "cosmopolitanism", i.e. of Jewish and generally foreign capitalism [68] .

There were two groups who were fundamentally opposed to this direction, but who were in practice both politically allied with it and at the same time in constant conflict with it: the legitimist nobility, which demanded a return to the pre-constitutional order soon after the publication of the Manifesto of October 17th 1905 by agitating in the nobility's corporatist organisations [69] , and the "Union of the Russian People", together with similar groups also known as the "Black Hundreds", who were politically close to the nobles but, to varying degrees, of a different social make-up. The latter mobilised support on the streets and even resorted to counter-revolutionary terrorist activity. Such methods undermined their legitimist ideology and lent the movement a colouring that has been called "proto-fascist" [70] . These groups and the "National Union" were, however, united by a kind of administrative nationalism: at almost any cost they sought to eliminate all historically developed special forms of administration or autonomy for non-Russians. There was broad parliamentary support for various bills to abolish Finland's special status within the empire and to refuse all demands for autonomy regardless from whom they came. There was general agreement that the Russian nation had to count as the "ruling" one, which meant that even the cultural rights of other nationalities were denied. Similarly the Orthodox Church had to exist not only as the State Church, the official church, but also as the "ruling" one, with the result that any public act of worship by other religious groups had to remain illegal, and the conversion from Orthodoxy to other denominations had to be made a crime again. Religious toleration in the modern sense of the word seemed more or less unacceptable to all groups on the Right, because religion and nationality seemed so insolubly bound together and perhaps because nationality could often be determined only with the help of religion.

Opinions were divided over the constitution, over the question of the estates system for the non‑peasant population and over the question of modernisation in general. The "monarchist" right, i.e. the legitimists and the Black Hundreds believed either that despite the 17th October 1905 Manifesto the Tsar remained a monarch with unlimited powers or that the status quo ante had to be restored. The Nationalists had at least developed into advocates of the Duma as it stood and many, probably the majority, even of a fully developed constitutional order. At the same time they wanted to maintain the estates system as far as the peasants were concerned. Yet they were increasingly forced to neglect the corporatist factor in the "national" interest. Their readiness to do this led to a constitutional crisis during the passage of the law introducing the zemstva in the West [71] . In general right-wing monarchists completely rejected modernisation and the development of capitalism. Their ideology was anti-capitalist with the goal of preserving the old estates system with the Tsar at its peak [72] . Their dislike for industry showed clearly in an attack on what they called "cotton patriotism" for which Russia had no need; in their opinion the truly "Russian" product was flax, not cotton, and they thought it inadmissible that in the interests of Moscow's or Lodz' textile-industry this "Russian" product - and therefore the "Russian" producer, the peasant, could be put at a disadvantage [73] . The Nationalists accepted the newly emerging economic order but not without an inner ambivalence. They feared that their interests would be difficult to defend within it. That was why they demanded the "nationalisation" of the economy, i.e. the state‑enforced elimination or at least a serious reigning back of all non-Russians in the economy of the empire, especially of Jews and Poles. Thus they hoped to ensure that the Russians, and by extension they themselves, would not go under in a freely competitive society.