This collection of fifteen well-researched articles by scholars from Russia, the United States, Finland, and Germany establishes continuity and change in the construction of alterity, mainly on the part of ethnic Russians vis-à-vis minority peoples of the Russian state, from the medieval era into the dawn of Soviet power. On the faculties of Finnish universities, the editors begin with a preface that provides theoretical orientation to using verbal and visual images as interpretive tools, with special attention to the formation and dissemination of stereotypes. The essays appear in chronological order, divided into three sections, respectively introduced by the historians David M. Goldfrank, Michael Khodarkovsky, and Stephen M. Norris.
Antisemitism threads through the book, beginning with the lead article, Charles J. Halperin's masterful “Varieties of Otherness in Ivan IV's Muscovy.” Halperin observes that Jews at the time were judged so alien to Russian Orthodoxy that they could not even “step on Russian soil and continue breathing” unless they converted. “No allowance was made whatsoever for ameliorating or qualifying Jewish Otherness” (46, 50). Distinguished by “their headscarves (or special cap for the rabbis)” (65), Jews figure as relatively neutral strangers vis-à-vis the Muscovite self in Jaakko Lehtovirta's study of the miniatures in the Illuminated Codex (1560s–70s). On the other hand, Maksim Moiseev's exploration of Russian intellectuals’ and officials’ perceptions of Tatars in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries notes that the Primary Chronicle vilified Judaism by linking it to “repulsive” images of Muslims and more generally stigmatizing Islam as a “depraved,” “deeply sinful and perverted” faith (79). Nikita Khrapunov's “‘In a Menagerie of Nations’: Crimean Others in Travelogues, c. 1800” argues that although visitors deemed Tatars the emblematic populace of a stagnant, backward Crimea antithetical to western civilization, the accounts tended to cast the non-Talmudic, Turkic-speaking Karaite Jews in the same mold. Interestingly enough, however, a Scot in Russian service spoke up for the Karaites, only to endorse reigning stereotypes of Jews elsewhere: “[In the Crimea], to the surprise of those acquainted with the Polish or Northern Jews, the children of Israel are found with an air of cleanliness and prosperity seldom seen among the former” (209). Dealing with the period from 1905 into 1917, Marina Shcherbakova shows how Isaak Lur΄e and other members of Russia's Ashkenazic intellectual elite toyed with ideas of a harmonious multiethnic Jewish community throughout the empire but ended up digging an “Orientalist,” “colonial” divide between their “civilized” selves and their “primitive” religious brethren of the shtetl, Central Asia, and the Caucasus (250, 263, 273). Finally, Oleg Minin's investigation of the clash between Russian monarchists and their foes during 1906–1908 highlights the frenzied antisemitism of the Black Hundreds, right-wing politicians, journalists, and newspaper caricaturists who collectively fashioned Jews as “the source of all evil in holy Russia” (391).
While antisemitism was remarkably persistent, the rhetoric of enlightenment versus backwardness bespoke an important change that occurred in modeling the Other, beginning in the seventeenth century and solidified under Peter the Great. Socioeconomic and cultural identity came to coexist with or supplant religion as the boundary between “us” and “them”—a shift epitomized in the construction of “wild,” “uncivilized” peoples requiring Russian acculturation. Ricarda Vulpius's essay on images of otherness in eighteenth-century Russia provides a brilliant overview of this newly “complex interaction” (123) between various criteria of alterity. Along with the contributions of Khodarkovsky, Khrapunov, and Shcherbakova, three other articles elaborate this development: Yuri Akimov on Siberian “savages” (140–67), Vladimir Puzanov on the nomadic Oirats (Dzungars), whose military prowess scared seventeenth-century Russians; and Dominik Gutmeyr-Schnur on photographs of Caucasian peoples taken and publicized between 1864 and 1915.
The book's concluding section (where Minin's essay appears) presents a diverse set of Others produced under the pressures of political conflict, social crisis, and war in the late imperial period. Anna and Alena Rezvukhina and Sergey Troitskiy probe Russian newspaper caricatures of the Japanese and other “enemies” as animals (295–328). Andrey Avdashkin analyzes how an influx of migrant Chinese laborers generated a “yellow peril” panic in Russia (424–52). Immo Rebitschek demonstrates that although Volga Tatars suffered exceptional deprivation during the famine of 1891–92, Russian authorities denied them proportionate relief by classifying them as generic “peasants” (329–52). Johanna Wassholm shows how Russia's flexing imperial muscles toward the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1899–1900 provoked Finnish nationalists to mount an aggressively anti-Russian campaign scapegoating Russian peddlers and other itinerants roaming the Duchy. Finally, Il΄ia Rat΄kovskii recounts General L.G. Kornilov's (1870–1918) degeneration in the eyes of soldiers and leftist workers: initially embraced as a hero of “our” kind, he met a grisly death relished by the revolutionary cohort that he alienated through punitive measures to sustain the war effort of the Whites. Those drastic steps included firing machine guns at units in retreat (453–77).
Consisting mainly of the names of people and places, the book's index oddly short-changes ethnic and religious groups. Ethnically marked “hordes” and “khanates” appear, but no Tatars, Jews, Tungus, Muslims, or Georgians are listed. The reader will likewise look in vain for topics such as antisemitism, war, trade, or Christianization. As for proofreading, a few jarring cases of incorrect English have slipped through the net, and Aleksandr Pushkin's famous poem features as both The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Captive of the Caucasus (3, 229).
These, however, are minor blemishes in a collection that richly expands knowledge of the ways Russians processed religious, ethnic, socioeconomic, cultural, and political difference within their homeland and in the world beyond, in a variety of contexts over a long time span. The book envisions an audience of specialists as well as advanced students, who will find here not only a trove of fresh material but also effective demonstrations of how to use primary sources.
