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More Than Imagined: A Few Notes on Modern Identities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Josh Sanborn
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Extract

I was tremendously pleased when I read Steve Smith's thoughtful and erudite comments. Smith's piece is a work of substantial scholarship in its own right, and it nicely complements the discussion articles. I am quite in agreement with most of what Smith has to say, but I do want to respond briefly to the two significant criticisms that Smith makes. The first is that the articles do not sufficiently “attend to the issue of continuity between national identity and earlier forms of politicized ethnicity,” since Seregny and I “implicitly subscribe to the modernist paradigm of nation building.” The second is that the “interplay between nation and empire” and the “relationship between national and class identities” were more conflictual than we allowed.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 330 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

1. Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983)Google Scholar; Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991), quotation on 28Google Scholar.

2. There is a current debate within this literature concerning the relative weight that ideology plays in motivating soldiers. For most of the postwar era, scholars have tended to agree that soldiers derive their motivation from loyalty to their combat unit rather than to larger political ideals. This argument has been challenged recently, most notably by Omer Bartov and James McPherson. See Bartov, Omer, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar, and McPherson, James, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford, 1997 Google Scholar). But neither of these excellent books argues that men simplistically fought “for the nation,” just that ideology was an important component of the broad set of factors that led men to kill and die in war.

3. These questions of memory and the nation are fruitfully probed in Amin, Shahid, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992 (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

4. Excerpts from a letter from la. Nikolenko to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, n.d. but prior to 9July 1915, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (RGV1A), f. 2000, op. 3, d. 1194,1.23.

5. “Ubezhashche,” clipping from Russkoe znamia, 12 November 1915, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg (RGIA), f. 1292, op. 1, d. 1337,1. 8.

6. Speech of deputy A. I. Shingarev delivering report of State Duma's Committee on Military and Naval Affairs to the closed twelfth meeting of the fourth session of the Fourth State Duma, 19 August 1915, RGIA, f. 1278, op. 5, d. 216,11. 13-14.

7. Speech of deputy Tregubov to closed third meeting of the fourth session of the Fourth State Duma, 28 July 1915, RGIA, f. 1278, op. 5, d. 205,11. 211-12.