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Empire in Boris Mironov's Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Willard Sunderland
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Abstract

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a “normal” European state and that it was not a “true colonial state.” The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

Type
Forum
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , Fall 2001 , pp. 571 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2001

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References

1. Mironov, Boris N., Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.): Genezislichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem´i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999).Google Scholar

2. For examples of such references, see ibid., 1:206-9, 2:58-59, 2:305-17, 2: 326-32.

3. Ibid., 1:64.

4. Ibid., 1:17.

5. For comparative references vis-à-vis the empire, see, for example, ibid., 1:42 and 1:51-53.

6. Ibid., 1:16-17.

7. Ibid., 1:62.

8. Mark von Hagen and Karen Barkey make this point in reference to the Russian as well as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. See their edited volume, After Empire: MultiethnicSocieties and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and HabsburgEmpires (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 182.

9. Mironov is not alone in pointing to the place of federalist alternatives in imperial Russia's development. See, for example, von Rauch, Georg, Russland: Staatliche Einheit undnalionak Vielfalt: Föderalistische Kräfte und Ideen in der russischen Geschichte (Munich, 1953)Google Scholar; von Mohrenschildt, Dmitri, Toward a United States of Russia: Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstructionof Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Rutherford, N.J., 1981)Google Scholar; and von Hagen, Mark, “Writing the History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective of Federalism,” in Evtuhov, Catherine et al., eds., Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire (Moscow, 1997), 393–410 Google Scholar.

10. Mironov, Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, 1:30.

11. See, for example, Martin, Virginia, “Barimta: Nomadic Custom, Imperial Crime,“ in Brower, Daniel and Lazzerini, Edward J., eds., Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples,1700-1917 (Bloomington, 1997), 249–70Google Scholar; and Demko, George J., The Russian Colonizationof Kazakhstan, 1896-1916 (Bloomington, 1969)Google Scholar.

12. Mironov, Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, 1:36.

13. See the remarks, for example, in Soobrazheniia soveshchaniia po bashkirskim delam…o merakh k podniatiiu ekonomicheskogo polozheniia i umstvennogo i nravstuennogo urovnia bashkirskogonaseleniia Orenburgskoi gubernii (Orenburg, 1902); Krasheninnikov, N. A., Ugasaiushchaiabashkiriia (Moscow, 1907)Google Scholar; and V. Filonenko, Bashkiry (Ufa, 1915).

14. Mironov, Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, 1:51-53.

15. Ibid., 1:20.

16. Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,“ in Farragher, John Mack, ed., Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New York, 1994), 31 Google Scholar. The literature on Turner's thesis (pro and contra) is enormous. For one intelligent critical statement of Turner and the larger implications of his vision of the frontier in U.S. history, see Limerick, Patricia Nelson, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,“ in Grossman, James R., ed., The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley, 1994), 67–102, esp. 75-78 and 89-95Google Scholar.

17. Mironov, Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, 1:62-63.

18. For two recent studies that place Russian imperial policies in a pan-European context, see Ferro, Marc, Histoire des colonisations: Des conquêtes aux indépendences, xiii-xxèsiècles (Paris, 1994)Google Scholar; and Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge andthe Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (New York, 2000). For another recent work that draws parallels between imperial Russia and the British empire, see Lur'e, S. V., “Russkie v srednei azii i anglichane v indii: Dominanty imperskogo soznaniia i sposoby ikh realizatsii,“ Tsivilizatsii i kul´tury (Moscow, 1995), 2:252–73Google Scholar.

19. Andreas Kappeler, “'Rossiia—mnogonatsional´naia imperiia': Vosem’ let spustia posle publikatsii knigi,” Ab imperio: Teoriia i istoriia natsional´nostei i natsionalizma v poslsovetskomprostranstve, 2000, no. 1, published on the internet at aimag.knet.ru (last consulted, April 2001).

20. Avery recent effort at this kind of broader comparison is Lieven, Dominic, Empire:The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar. See also the bilateral comparison in Orest Subtelny, “The Habsburg and Russian Empires: Some Comparisons and Contrasts,“ in Hara, Teruyuki and Matsuzato, Kimitaka, eds., Empire and Society: New Approaches to RussianHistory (Sapporo, 1997), 73–92 Google Scholar; as well as the essays in von Hagen and Barkey, eds., After Empire.

21. Mironov, Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, 1:65.

22. Ibid., 1:206-8, 2:314, 2:350.

23. For one general description of Russian attitudes toward non-Russians, see ibid., 1:34.

24. Ibid. 1:47.

25. For a few recent western studies that emphasize or explore this realm of social experience in tsarist Russia, see Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers: Religious Dissent and Russian Colonization of Transcaucasia, 1830-1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998); Barrett, Thomas M., At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and theNorth Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860 (Boulder, Colo., 1999)Google Scholar; Werth, Paul W., “From Resistance to Subversion: Imperial Power, Indigenous Opposition, and Their Entanglement,“ Kritika:Explorations in Russian andEurasian History 1, no. 1 (2000): 21–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sanborn, Josh, “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination,“ Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 267–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Austin Jersild, “Faith, Custom, and Ritual in the Borderlands: Orthodoxy, Islam, and the ‘Small Peoples´ of the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus,” and Charles Steinwedel “The 1905 Revolution in Ufa: Mass, Politics, Elections, and Nationality,” both in Russian Review 59, no. 4 (October 2000): 512-29 and 555-76.

26. For example, Kappeler, Andreas, Russland als Vielvolkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte,Zerfall (Munich, 1992)Google Scholar; and Hosking, Geoffrey, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)Google Scholar.