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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2019
This article argues that apart from a couple of cases, there were no situations where the Russian imperial government would have supported Lithuanian national culture as a counterbalance against Poles, and more generally, that the policy of “divide and rule” was in principle not applied on the empire's western periphery regarding other non-dominant ethnic groups. A more general reason for not implementing such a policy was related to many officials’ belief that the government should seek integration, acculturation, or even assimilation of non-Russian ethnicities. At the same time, on the Russian mental map, the Northwest Region was understood not just as part of the empire, but as part of Russian national territory. In such a territory, most of the government subscribed to a discourse of nationalism that permitted no means of support for the strengthening of non-Russian nationalisms. Finally, social radicalism of the Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian national movements was another obstacle for tsarist officials to support these “peasant” nationalities.
For helpful comments I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers, as well as Vladimir Levin, Karsten Brüggemann, Jussi Jalonen, Alexander Semyonov, Anton Kotenko, and Johannes Remy.
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8. Specialists might find some episodes on mid-nineteenth century in this article as summarizing earlier scholarship, but that was unavoidable in order to show all the important contexts when a policy of divide et impera was discussed among the bureaucrats.
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14. RGIA, f. 733, op. 62, d. 1224, l. 27–32 (Official letter from the minister of internal affairs to the minister of education, December 10, 1852).
15. RGIA, f. 733, op. 62, d. 1224, l. 10–13, 19–22, 72–75, 85–86, 88–89, quotations from 85–86, 89 (Reports from the Vil΄na governor general to the minister of education, June 15, 1852 and November 27, 1853; Official letter from the minister of education to his deputy minister, July 5, 1852; official letter from the minister of education to the minister of internal affairs, December 19, 1853; report from the superviser of the Vil΄na educational district to the minister of internal affairs, January 29, 1854). I should add that in the beginning, there was some miscommunication between the officials: sometimes “Samogitians” were understood as being all ethnic Lithuanians, in other cases, as just one of the Lithuanian ethnic groups.
16. RGIA, f. 733, op. 62, d. 1224, l. 107–15, quotation from l. 115 (Document signed by the Minister of Education “On the elimination of joint education of the Polish and Samogitian youth,” with the emperor’s resolution, “I agree”).
17. Dolbilov, Mikhail, “The Emancipation Reform of 1861 in Russia and the Nationalism of Imperial Bureaucracy,” in Tadayuki, Hayashi, ed., Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia (Sapporo, 2003), 205–35Google Scholar; Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii, Mikhail Dolbilov and Alexei Miller, eds., (Moscow, 2006), 139–40.
18. At that time, the Western Region referred to the nine provinces of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Right-bank Ukraine—Vil΄na, Kovna, Grodna, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mogiliev, Kiev, Volhynia and Podolia.
19. For more details, see Głębocki, Henryk, Fatalna sprawa. Kwestia polska w rosyjskiej myśli politycznej (1856–1866) (Kraków, 2000)Google Scholar.
20. RGIA, f. 1267, op. 1, d. 11, l. 34 (Report from the Vil΄na governor general to Alexander II with a resolution dated August 27, 1862). Like all other Russian officials who held the position of the Vil΄na governor-general, Nazimov started his career in the military, however, unlike the other in the late 1830s, he became a mentor for the future emperor Alexander II. His arrival in Vil΄na in 1855 was warmly welcomed by the local elite, who still remembered how Nazimov, acting as the chairman of the temporary Commission in 1841, came to the conclusion that there was no wide-ranging conspiracy against the government, contrary to the local officials who tried to prove otherwise. At first Nazimov was in good relations with the local elite, but the situation changed in the early 1860s when the Poles started to make greater demands.
21. For more on these categories, see Miller, Alexei, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research (Budapest, 2008), 163Google Scholar.
22. LVIA, f. 567, ap. 4, b. 915, lapas (l.) 8 (Report from the Vil΄na governor general to the minister of education, June 15, 1862).
23. RGIA, f. 1267, op. 1, d. 11, l. 34 (Report from the Vil΄na governor general).
24. RGIA, f. 1282, op. 2, d. 334, l. 11–14 (Report from the Vil΄na governor general to the Alexander II with a resolution, February 14, 1862).
25. RGIA, f. 1267, op. 1, d.11, l. 34 (Report from the Vil΄na governor general).
26. After spending some time in the military, Shirinskii-Skikhmatov continued his career in different institutions related to the Ministry of Education, even rising to the position of Deputy Minister (1874–80). In line with his proposals regarding the Lithuanian language, he also favored the usage of Belarusian dialects in order to isolate Belarusian Catholics from the Poles.
27. LVIA, f. 567, ap. 21, b. 15, l. 22 (Secret report from the chief of the Vil΄na Educational district to the minister of education, April 19, 1863).
28. For more on this see Staliūnas, Darius, “Between Russification and Divide and Rule: Russian Nationality Policy in the Western Borderlands in the Mid-19th Century,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 3 (2007): 357–373Google Scholar.
29. For more on Gil΄ferding’s attitudes towards the Lithuanians see the next section.
30. RGIA, f. 940, op. 1, d. 3, l. 3–41.
31. RGIA, f. 940, op. 1, d. 4, l. 1–40, 87–100, 111–15.
32. RGIA, f. 940, op. 1, d. 4, l. 100.
33. We do not have reliable national statistics for this period, but the information we do have lets us claim that the number of Orthodox believers who would have identified themselves as Lithuanians was quite small.
34. Murav΄ev’s task was not only to suppress the uprising, but also to implement a new nationality policy that would make a new uprising impossible. Usually this policy is described as Russification. On Murav΄ev’s Russification policy, see: Merkys, Vytautas, Knygnešių laikai 1864–1904 (Vilnius, 1994)Google Scholar; Weeks, Theodore R., Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier 1863–1914 (De Kalb, 2008)Google Scholar; Rodkiewicz, Witold, Russian Nationality Policy in the Western Provinces of the Empire (1863–1905) (Liublin, 1998)Google Scholar; Komzolova, Anna, Politika samoderzhaviia v Severo-Zapadnom krae v epokhu Velikikh reform (Moscow, 2005)Google Scholar; Staliūnas, Darius, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam, 2007)Google Scholar; Dolbilov, Mikhail, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Etnokonfessional΄naia politika imperii v Litve i Belorussii pri Aleksandre II (Moscow, 2010)Google Scholar.
35. Miller, Alexey, Imperiia Romanovykh i natsionalizm. Esse po metodologii istoricheskogo issledovaniia (Moscow, 2006), 67Google Scholar, 89, 92; Balkelis, Tomas, The Making of Modern Lithuania (London, 2009), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36. Gil΄ferding, Aleksandr, “Neskol΄ko zamechanii o litovskom i zhmudskom plemeni,” in Sholkovich, S., ed., Sbornik statei raz΄iasniaiushchikh pol΄skoe delo po otnosheniiu k Zapadnoi Rossii (Vilnius, 1885), 123Google Scholar. The same ideas: “Pol΄skii vopros,” in Sobranie sochinenii A. Gil΄ferdinga, vol. 2: Stat’i po sovremennym voprosam slavianskim (St. Petersburg, 1868), 330.
37. Subačius, Giedrius, “Lietuviška ir rusiška lietuviškų spaudinių kirilika 1864–1866 metais,” in Staliūnas, Darius, ed., Raidžių draudimo metai (Vilnius, 2004), 139–73Google Scholar.
38. The introduction of Cyrillic in Polish writing only lasted briefly: Strycharska-Brzezina, Maria, Polskojęzyczne podręczniki dla klasy i szkoły elementarnej w Królewstwie Polskim drukowane grażdanką (Kraków, 2006)Google Scholar.
39. One of the indications of the concept that a certain area was part of Russian “national territory,” and not just of the empire, was its identification as Rus΄ (be it Western, Northwest, or Lithuanian). The term Rus΄, as we know, was used to describe a historically-formed, ethnically and confessionally homogeneous East Slavic territory: Staliūnas, Darius, “Poland or Russia? Lithuania on the Russian Mental Map,” in Staliūnas, Darius, ed., Spatial Concepts of Lithuania in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boston, 2016), 23–95Google Scholar.
40. Staliūnas, Making Russians, 233–82.
41. Merkys, Vytautas, “Lietuvių draudžiamosios spaudos ir tautinės tapatybės sąsajos,” Knygotyra 44 (2005): 11Google Scholar.
42. The imperial government introduced Cyrillic in Latvian writing in Latgala (i.e., in the Vitebsk province, which, as already mentioned, was part of the Western Region), but not in the Baltic provinces.
43. Romanowski, Andrzej, Pozytywizm na Litwie: Polskie życie na ziemiach litewsko-białorusko-inflianckich (Kraków, 2003), 126Google Scholar.
44. Klier, John D., “Why Were Russian Jews not Keisertreu?” Ab Imperio 4 (2003): 41–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45. For more on this see Staliūnas, Darius, “Changes in the Political Situation and the ‘Jewish Question’ in the Lithuanian Gubernias of the Russian Empire (1855–April 1863),” in Nikžentaitis, Alvydas, Schreiner, Stefan, and Staliūnas, Darius, eds., The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews (Amsterdam, 2004), 21–43Google Scholar.
46. For more on the “Jewish Question” see, for example, Nathans, Beyond the Pale; Avrutin, Eugene M., Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2010)Google Scholar.
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48. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 1729, op. 1, d. 1576, l. 67–68 (Alexey Kharuzin’s letter to Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii, August 9, 1904)
49. Jurkowski, Roman, “‘Kurjer Litewski’ w latach 1905–1907,” Kwartalnik Historii Prasy Polskiej 22 no. 1 (1983): 79–81Google Scholar. Yet, more research is needed in order to explain whether this delay was somehow related to nationality-policy reasons.
50. Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii, 388.
51. In the 1860s, a numerus clausus was introduced for Poles in Russian universities that at first was applied to Lithuanians as well, because they too were Catholics. However, in 1872 the Minister of Education Dmitrii Tolstoi, having received the emperor’s permission, declared that this clause no longer had to apply to Lithuanians. See file LVIA, f. 567, ap. 27, b. 49 (Otnositel΄no zhmudinam, okonchivshim kurs v gimnaziiakh, postupat΄ v Universitety na obshchikh osnovaniiakh). It is hard to say whether it had any practical significance or not. After spending a couple of decades in the military, in 1867 Kakhanov was appointed as the governor of the Piotrkow province and later became Vil΄na’s governor-general.
52. Žaltauskaitė, Vilma, “Imperskaia vlast’ i rimsko-katolicheskie dukhovnye seminarii posle 1863 g.,” Ab Imperio 4 (2012): 174–78Google Scholar.
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55. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 194, 1907, d. 49, l. 6 (Suwałki governor’s report for 1906).
56. Up until becoming governor-general, Krshivitskii spent all his career in the military and even participated in the suppression of the 1863–1864 uprising in Poland and Lithuania.
57. RGIA, f. 821, op. 2, d. 73, l. 45–46 (Report from the Vil΄na governor general to P. Stolypin, August 20, 1906).
58. This part of the document was crossed out.
59. LVIA, f. 378, Bendrasis skyrius (BS), 1903, b. 583, l. 51–53 (Report from the Vil΄na governor general to P. Stolypin, January 11, 1907).
60. LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1903, b. 583, l. 57 (Official letter from the minister of internal affairs to Vil΄na governor general, January 26, 1907).
61. The Vil΄na Diocese covered the Vil΄na and Grodna provinces.
62. LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1903, b. 583, l. 58–59 (Secret letter from the minister of internal affairs to Vil΄na governor general, May 5, 1907). The minister had in mind Estonian and, in particular, Latvian social radicalism that had been demonstrated during the period of the 1905 Revolution. The government’s apprehensions over “annoying” the Poles were mentioned in a notice on this topic sent by the Department for Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions under the Ministry of Internal Affairs (report from January 12, 1907, ibid., l. 54). In his answer to these arguments given by the minister, the governor general also added that Lithuanians did not need to be feared, as they were incapable of assimilating other nationalities, but this did not change Stolypin’s opinion.
63. Merkys, Tautiniai santykiai, 379–84.
64. RGIA, f. 821, op. 2, d. 79, l. 26 (Official letter from Vil΄na governor to Kharuzin, February 4, 1909). Someone added the following comment in handwriting in this spot—“at least in the Belarusian dialect.”
65. Kharuzin wondered whether at first it would be possible to publish a newspaper in the “Belarusian dialect,” but later a “truly Russian” [istinno russkii] publication would have to appear: GARF, f. 1729, op. 1, d. 1576, l. 68 (Kharuzin’s letter to Sviatopolk-Mirskii, August 9, 1904).
66. As a military man, Trotskii spend many decades in the eastern parts of the empire. He was also not known to propagate subtle nationality policy methods. For example, as governor-general he vehemently opposed proposals to lift the ban of Lithuanian writing in the Latin script.
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78. Further research might still find some specific cases when local officials had supported Lithuanian cultural activities while not giving the same advantages for Poles but that would not change the general conclusion that such a policy was a very rare exception.
79. Rolf, Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland, 179.
