Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia Edited by Madhavan K. Palat palat/95518/crc 1/5/01 10:32 am Page 1 Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia palat/95518/crc 1/5/01 10:32 am Page 2 Also by Madhavan K. Palat IDEOLOGICAL CHOICES IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA palat/95518/crc 1/5/01 10:32 am Page 3 Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia Edited by Madhavan K. Palat Professor of Russian and European History Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi India in association with Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts palat/95518/crc 1/5/01 10:32 am Page 4 Editorial matter, selection and Chapter 5 © Madhavan K. Palat 2001 Chapters 1–4, 6–10 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–92947–0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Social identities in revolutionary Russia / edited by Madhavan K. Palat. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–92947–0 (cloth) 1. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894–1917. 2. Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921. 3. Nationalism– –Russia—History. I. Palat, Madhavan K. DK262 .S53 2001 947.08’3—dc21 00–054532 10987654321 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents Acknowledgements vii Glossary viii Notes on the Contributors x Introduction xiii 1 The Russian Idea: Metaphysics, Ideology and History 1 V. V. Serbinenko 2 Agrarian Unrest and the Shaping of a National Identity in Ukraine at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 18 Bohdan Krawchenko 3 Identity and Politics in Provincial Russia: Tver, 1889–1905 34 Hari Vasudevan 4 Historical Views of the Russian Peasantry: National Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century 65 A. V. Buganov 5 Regulating Conflict through the Petition 86 Madhavan K. Palat 6 The Stolypin Land Reform as ‘Administrative Utopia’: Images of Peasantry in Nineteenth-Century Russia 113 Judith Pallot 7 Broken Identities: The Intelligentsia in Revolutionary Russia 134 Dietrich Beyrau 8 ‘Democracy’ as Identification: Towards the Study of Political Consciousness during the February Revolution 161 Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii 9 All Power to the Parish? The Problems and Politics of Church Reform in Late Imperial Russia 174 Gregory L. Freeze v vi Contents 10 The Poetics of Eurasia: Velimir Khlebnikov between Empire and Revolution 209 Harsha Ram Index 232 Acknowledgements The conference which gave rise to this volume was supported and financed by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in Delhi in 1996 as part of its programme of encouraging academic pro- grammes on the history and culture of Russia and Central Asia. I am most grateful to the participants. Let me also thank the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), London, for so generously meeting the international travel costs for Boris Kolonitskii and Judith Pallot respect- ively; the IGNCA funded both V. V. Serbinenko and A. V. Buganov from Moscow, as well as those who had to travel to Delhi from within India. Gregory Freeze was unfortunately unable to attend, but it is a pleasure to include his substantial contribution. I am especially grateful to Rekha Kamath for translating Dietrich Beyrau’s article from the German, and to Hari Vasudevan for translating the three Russian con- tributions. The conference was held at the India International Centre, which as usual provided the ideal setting for a conference of this sort. M. K. P. vii Glossary chelobitnaia a formal address or a humble submission demokratiia democracy gorodskie dumy municipal councils guberniia province hromady local committees iuridicheskoe litso juridical entity khokol pre-national Ukrainian peasant kraevedenie regional and local studies krai region kulizhnye allotment lands letopisi medieval chronicles lubochnaia literature sold around shrines meshchane petty townsmen of the estates hierarchy murza member of Tatar gentry narod the people narodnost’ nationality natsiia the nation obrok quit-rent obshchestvo the public or society obshchina land commune opeka tutelage or guardianship pochvennichestvo nativism pomestnyi sobor national church council popechitel’stva parish guardianships predaniia traditions prikhodskie sovety parish soviets prosveshchenie ‘enlightenment’ raznochinets people (usually professionals) who do not belong to any specific estate sokha measure of arable land serving as unit of taxation sotsializm socialism sverkhnarodnoe supranational svobada freedom temnyi narod ignorant and primitive people tserkovnyi starosta church elder uezd county viii Glossary ix volnodumtsy freethinking peasants during serfdom volost’ administrative unit below the uezd or county vsechelovecheskoe universal human brotherhood bratstvo vsechelovechnost’ human universalism zemliachestva regional associations zemskii sud local court zemstva elected local self-government institutions zemtsy officials of the zemstva Notes on the Contributors Dietrich Beyrau is Professor at the Institüt für osteuropäische Geschichte und Landeskunde, University of Tübingen, Germany. He has worked on the military in tsarist Russia and the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union. His publications include Militär und Gesellschaft im vorrevolutionären Russland (Cologne, 1984); Inteligenz und Dissens: die russischen Bildungsschichten in der Sowjetunion, 1917–1985 (Göttingen, 1993). A. V. Buganov is at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. His research interests include Russian peasant folklore and the history of the Church. Among his publications is Russkaia istoriia v pamiati krest’ian XIX veka i nat- sional’noe samosoznanie (Moscow, 1992). Gregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History at Brandeis University (USA). He has published a number of monographs and articles on Russian religious and social history, served as editor-in-chief for the Russian Archive Project, and most recently edited Russia: A History (Oxford, 1997). He is currently completing the two-volume study Church, Religion and Society in Modern Russia, 1740–1940. Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii is at the Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg. He has been working on popular political culture in revolutionary Russia, especially on the political culture of 1917. He has frequently travelled to the West and his work has been translated in Slavic Review. He has published, jointly with Orlando Figes, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven and London, 1999). He is currently preparing a new book, Simvoly gosudarstvennogo perevorota i perevorot v gosudarstvennoi simvoliki. Bohdan Krawchenko is Vice-Rector at the Academy of Public Administration, Office of the President of Ukraine. He was formerly in the Department of Slavic and East European Studies, and Director of x Notes on the Contributors xi the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His major publications include Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (Basingstoke, 1985). Madhavan K. Palat is Professor of Russian and European History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has worked on labour policy before 1917, the multinational Russian Empire and Soviet Union, the Russian conquest of Central Asia, and Eurasianism. His main publications are Ideological Choices in Post-Soviet Russia (New Delhi, 1997), ‘Eurasianism as an Ideology for Russia’s Future’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 51 (18 December 1993), and ‘The Russian Conquest of Inner Asia’, Studies in History (1988) no. 4. Judith Pallot is a lecturer at the University of Oxford and Official Student of Christ Church, and she is currently researching the history of the Russian peasantry and contemporary problems in post- communist rural society. She is the author of several books on the Russian peasantry, the most recent being Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1907: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford, 1999). Harsha Ram is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Language and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on a book tracing the evolution of imperial discourse in Russian poetic and literary culture, from