Challenges to imperial authorities’ nationality policy in the Northwest Region, 1905-15

ENThere are different approaches toward the longevity of the Russian Empire in historiography. Some researchers claim that the Romanovs’ recipe for success lay in the effective integration of the peripheries (primarily their elites) into imperial ruling structures, and that the state collapsed in 1917 due to the particular circumstances created by the war. Others argue that the Russian Empire did not collapse earlier thanks to its military power. Only a small part of this fundamental debate will be analyzed here. The question raised in this study is whether the tsarist government had a clear nationality policy concept in the Northwest region in the late imperial period, that is, one that in its own view could produce results, at least to ensure the loyalty of non-dominant national groups. I argue that tsarist officials had problems finding this kind of strategy, and essentially reconciled themselves to the disloyalty of the non-dominant national groups (or at least their elites) in the Romanov Empire. The policies of the tsarist government on the western periphery of the Russian Empire following the 1905 Revolution have received much less attention than the period after the quelling of the 1863–64 uprising. This is because in the post-1905 period, the imperial government did not experiment much in terms of politics, passing only a few decrees based on nationality policy motives (for example, the creation of Cholm [Chełm] province and the introduction of the zemstvo system in six of the Western region’s provinces), while public life was significantly more active, consequently drawing greater interest from researchers. Additionally, between 1905 and 1915 as compared with the post-1863 era, the centers of power changed somewhat.During the earlier period, especially between 1863 and 1865 when Mikhail Murav’ev was the governor-general of Vil’na, many nationality policy innovations were implemented at the initiative and through the efforts of local authorities (banning the Lithuanian press in the traditional script, the introduction of Russian into supplementary services in the Catholic Church, the mass conversion of Belorussian Catholics to Orthodoxy, etc.), while at the beginning of the twentieth century, the powers of the Vil’na governor-general were much less extensive. The reduced influence of the Vil’na governor-general was related to numerous developments: the officials who took up these posts, Alexander Freze (1904–1905) and Konstantin Krshivitskii (1905–1909), did not have the same authority as, for example, Murav’ev. The jurisdiction of the Vil’na governor-general at the beginning of the twentieth century spanned only three provinces: Vil’na, Kovna, and Grodna, whereas in the 1860s, it also extended to the “Belorussian” provinces of Minsk, Vitebsk and Mogilev, where the government often applied the same anti-Polish measures. Furthermore, starting at the end of the nineteenth century, there was increasingly more discussion among bureaucrats about the need to abolish general-governorships on the empire’s peripheries, which is what happened in the case of Vil’na in 1912. There were even more differences between these two epochs that are noteworthy. Starting in 1905, Russia was a constitutional monarchy, and all decrees had to be approved by the parliament (Duma). Even though the first two Dumas opposed to the government were dissolved and the third and fourth Dumas in effect supported the government’s policies, this new government institution limited the ability of tsarist authorities to experiment in the field of nationalities policy.At the same time, there were numerous situations where members of non-dominant ethnic or confessional groups participated at the discussion stage on certain measures in the fields of education, local self-governance, and religion. This also reduced the potential for drastic discriminatory measures. Nevertheless, this approximately ten-year period was important in the evolution of the tsarist government’s nationalities policy in the Northwest region. It is important for our understanding of how the imperial government tried to manage old and new challenges: growing nationalism among Russians and non-Russians; the strengthening of the revolutionary movement; the (at least formally) legalized constitutional regime; and the influence of the international situation on the empire’s domestic affairs. Although the focus of this chapter is on the post-1905 period, tsarist nationalities policy in the last decade of the Empire cannot be analyzed without at least briefly discussing the changes that took place in nationalities policy in the early twentieth century. [p. 33-35].

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