3 - Geographies of imperial identity

Summary

Introduction

The problem of identity in modern Russia is commonly framed in terms of the elemental tension between the country’s alternative embodiments as empire or nation. Without any question, this has been a critical distinction for Russia, and the inability to negotiate it successfully must be seen as a key factor in the collapse of Soviet civilisation at the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, it may be argued that for earlier centuries the distinction was, if not less salient, then at least salient in a rather different way. This is neither to deny the emergence of a recognisably modern sense of nationhood in Russia by the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, nor to discount its affective significance, at least for educated Russians. The fact remains, however, that national discourses in pre-revolutionary Russia stood not in contradistinction to an imperial identity, but rather were subsumed almost without exception within a broader and more fundamental geopolitical vision of Russia as an empire. Indeed, one must search very hard to find any significant subjective sense of mutual exclusivity between the two. Identity was of course problematic and contested, in Russia as everywhere. This contestation was not, however, expressed through the nation–empire juxtaposition, but rather through alternative visions of Russia as an empire. This chapter seeks to explore identity in pre-revolutionary Russia by examining three different configurations of the imperial vision.