Suchergebnisse

SUMMARY:
In his essay, Mikhail Dolbilov offers his response to critical comments by reviewers of the volume Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire as well as reflections on the series Borderlands of the Russian Empire , as the editor of the book series HISTORIA ROSSICA of the New Literary Review Publishing House. Summarizing the cumulative value of all the volumes published in the series, Dolbilov stresses the fact that the project was an attempt to redress the balance of historical scholarship on empire. By focusing on borderlands and their role in the evolution of the imperial government, this project warns of the danger of over-simplifying imperial policies and dilemmas or reducing them to a single imperial pattern or a binary pattern of assimilation and colonialism. Dolbilov regrets that the authors of separate volumes did not have sufficient opportunities to discuss comparative aspects of imperial rule in different borderlands. He conceives this direction, alongside an investigation of the transfer of bureaucratic personnel and ideas, as the most promising avenue for further historical scholarship of the Russian Empire. Turning to the volume Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire , Dolbilov defends the focus on local and central imperial government on the grounds that the vicissitudes and historical entanglements of these policies, in conjuncture with the challenge of Polish resistance and ruling the composite borderland, were not sufficiently explored in previous historiography. He concurs with the critical point by Smolenchuk that this focus inadvertently led to a reduction of the complexity of imperial experience in western borderlands to the conflict between Polish forces and Russian imperial authority. At the same time, Dolbilov notes that in his review, written from a Byelorussian perspective, Smolenchuk reduces the complexity of the borderland's history to that of the history of the Byelorussian people, avoiding discussion of the degree of advancement of Byelorussian nation-formation, and denying the existence of multiple and non-exclusive identities of the region's population in the nineteenth century.

SUMMARY:
Mikhail Dolbilov explores the broad state-led campaign of conversion to Orthodoxy in the Western borderlands after the January uprising of 1863. The author situates his research in the context of recent studies of religion and confession in the Russian empire that highlight the secular and etatist approach of the imperial government to the Orthodox Church and conversion to Orthodoxy. Focusing on middle-rank bureaucrats who were in charge of confessional policy in the Western borderlands, Dolbilov argues that the development of popular Catholicism (as a pan-European phenomenon of moving toward a more visceral and mystical mode of religiosity) brought about a perception of Catholicism as ill-suited for the collective identification of subjects with the sovereign. The author analyzes in detail the growing desire of middle and high ranking functionaries to engage in an interventionist policy by way of using police and administrative coercion in the process of converting of the local Catholic population to Orthodoxy. The author further analyzes the details of the conversion campaign with accompanying misdemeanors, violence, and fraud. He notes that this large scale social engineering effort to link political allegiance with confessional status brought about unexpected consequences. It exacerbated conflicts between local functionaries and high-ranked bureaucrats, as well as those between the Orthodox community in the Western borderlands and newly converted Orthodox lay people. The article concludes with an analysis of the failure of the state-led conversion campaign, the key to which was the growing concern with the spread of atheist ideas and concomitant rise of political radicalism. The author infers that the Western borderlands' campaign demonstrated the limits of mass proselytizing and interventionist policy in a confessional state and suggests that it ushered imperial bureaucrats toward the path that ultimately resulted in the acceptance of freedom of conscience in 1905.

SUMMARY:
Mikhail Dolbilov's article focuses on what can be called a "bureaucratic history" of the 1865 ban and the parallel official Cyrillization of the alphabet. These issues are analyzed in relation to the government's nationalist agenda and as a kind of window on the bureaucracy's mentality, the "inner world" of the Empire's managers serving in the Western borderlands.

Dolbilov seeks to reveal the rather intricate mechanics of bureaucratic decision-making on the question of introducing the ban. Based on a range of archival sources, the study challenges the widespread historiographical notion that the Vilnius higher administrators, Mikhail Murav'ev and Konstantin Kaufman, were the principal initiators of this ban (Murav'ev even seems to have tolerated the preservation of the Latin script for religious publications) and demonstrates the crucial role that lower officials affiliated with the Ministry of Public Education, especially the inspector of the Vilnius Educational District in Kaunas Province ( gubernia ) and Slavophile-oriented journalist Nikolai Novikov, played in the prohibition process. The excessive influence of this local middle-ranking official has come to be treated as a reflection of a broader political and cultural phenomenon in terms of a liberalized model of administrative subordination, which emerged during the Great Reforms, and the growing interaction of enterprising, energetic bureaucrats with the nationally-minded segment of public opinion.

The article goes on to discuss the notions Novikov and his fellow officials were developing about the significance of the alphabet's Cyrillization for the "Russification" of the Lithuanians. Dolbilov argues that these Russifiers were definitely interested in dealing with the Lithuanians in this way, paying a lesser share of attention to fighting the perceived threat of Polonization (i.e., the concept of Lithuanians as potential Poles). Moreover, thanks to such activities, the educational branch of Imperial administration for decades became an informal centre for the provision of special expertise on the Lithuanians and more influential, in this individual instance, than the Ministry of the Interior.

Novikov's attitudes were shaped far less by a linguistically-based knowledge of how to transform Lithuanian peasant children into loyal, Russian-speaking subjects than by the populist and anti-elitist values of the Great Reform era. He heavily accented the social aspects of assimilating the Lithuanians, who he saw as part of the Empire's liberated peasantry. In this light, Cyrillization was intended to help overcome the divergence of the Samogitian and Lithuanian dialects, which had probably been exaggerated by the officials. This unification, for Novikov and his collaborators, was particularly important in that it meant a step towards a supposedly civilizing and integrating social homogenization of the rural masses in Kaunas Province, making them receptive to Great Russian communal ( obshchina ) ways and practices. Such a vision strongly affected the Russifiers' ideas about teaching methods and, moreover, the teaching objectives in the so-called 'people's schools' in Kaunas Province. Even when the Imperial government's reformist spirit began to evaporate, the Cyrillic script continued to be viewed as both a tool and a sign of the benevolent liberation of the peasantry en masse from the domination of a selfish and backward elite, namely the Catholic clergy: the overriding official myth of emancipation having come from the tsar proved to be tenacious.

Until the turn of the nineteenth century, the combination of bureaucratic inertia and lack of co-ordination between the different branches of the administration, on the one hand, and the legacy of the 1860s reformist aspirations, on the other, prevented the Lithuanian case from being thoroughly considered in the bureaucracy from an ethno-linguistic perspective beyond the realm of social stereotypes. In 1881, Lev Makov, the director of the Department for the Religious Affairs of Foreign Faiths under the Ministry of the Interior, supported an attempt by Telšiai Bishop Aleksandr Beresniewicz to lift the 1865 ban, pointing out that it was not the Latin alphabet but its prohibition that was facilitating the assimilation of the Lithuanians by the Poles. However, the attempt was killed by the Ministry of Public Education which saw this concession as a dramatic and compromising break in the continuity of the policies it had been pursuing since the mid-1860s, including restrictions on the Catholic clergy's educational activities.

SUMMARY:
Mikhail Dolbilov's work analyzes discursive practices of the imperial Russian power in the Western Borderlands in the aftermath of the Polish rebellion of 1863. The author argues that the negative, anti-Polish aspect of these practices were inseparably tied with the positive, assertive aspects that promoted "Russianness" of the highly contested areas. Focusing on the figure of Mikhail Muraviev, the Governor-General of the Northwest Region, Dolbilov argues that Muraviev represented one of the transitional periods when different choices of empire or nation building were available. Muraviev, according to Dolbilov, was still "imperial" administrator, even if his policies sometimes reflected the nationalist tensions. The article dwells on the problem of Russification in the western borderlands, imperial policies to the local gentry and peasantry and the issue of gentry colonization.

Finally, drawing on the methodological insights of Richard Wortman, Dolbilov discusses the transitional role and place of Muraviev's policies between the imperial conception of Nicholas I and the nationalist transformations of the monarchy in the 1880s. The symbolic element of these policies is the empirical ground for the work.

SUMMARY:
Ricarda Vulpius, Mikhail Dolbilov, and Darius Staliūnas, contributors to the forum "Alphabets, Language, and National Identity in the Russian Empire" ( AI 2/2005), returned to one of the issues that emerged out of this forum – the problem of the relationship between the analytical concepts used by historians of Imperial Russia and non-Russian nationalisms, and the original political and cultural language of historical actors. Here, they explicate their understanding of such analytical constructs as the "Greater Russian nation," and the meaning of such terms as "Maloross," "narod," "Ukrainophile," or "Russophile," in their specific historical contexts. AI sees this very interesting exchange as a beginning and as a good example of the larger discussion on "languages of self description", and of their subjects, objects, and corresponding imperial and national contexts. The clarification of the key terms and concepts used by scholars and the objects of their study is the first and absolutely necessary stage of such a discussion.

SUMMARY:
The guest editors of the Ab Imperio special forum on "Alphabet, Language and National Identity in the Russian Empire" introduce in their foreword the general historiographic context for discussing alphabet reforms in the Russian Empire, as well as present the contributions published in this forum. Mikhail Dolbilov and Darius Staliūnas note that the alphabet question in the Russian Empire does not appear to be a narrow subject in so far as alphabet preservation and reforms were intrinsically linked to the symbolic dimension of language as a marker and instrument of national identity. The guest editors trace the history of alphabet reforms in respect to the Russian language and stress the acute character of linguistic debates in the wake of the Great Reforms, when processes of constructing and negotiating national identity swept the emancipated peasantry. The guest editors collate the findings of the articles' authors, noting the diverse structure of governmental decision making and the impact of governmental policies on the multifaceted competition between different nation-building projects and visions of national and cultural boundaries. They also explicate the rationale for excluding from consideration the language policies and alphabet reforms of the Volga-Kama region, observing that government policy there was to a much greater extent influenced and mediated by an expert community of linguists. Finally, Dolbilov and Staliūnas trace the political and symbolic significance of alphabet preservation and reform in the history of the 20 th century and in the context of globalization and contemporary political and legal debates on the Latinization and Cyrillicization of languages in the Russian Federation.