Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (original) (raw)

The late imperial period in Russia was marked by intense debates about how to achieve social, political, and, in some instances, cultural cohesion within the context of the empire's multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism. To use our contemporary terminology, we can define the challenge that faced Russian politicians and intellectuals as a resolution of tension between the country's imperial structures and the forces of modern nationalism. 1 Among the various actors whose role in developing the new thinking about the management of the empire has recently been attracting increasing attention are imperial scholars. Particularly since the 1880s, some of them began advancing, through their research, various integrationist projects as liberal Moscow anthropologists searched for a definable "imperial race" on the territory of the Russian state, whereas linguists explicitly related their own work on Russian Research for this article was funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council.