Cadiot Searching for Nationality

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Juliette Cadiot
Searching for Nationality: Statistics and National Categories at the End of the
Russian Empire (1897-1917)
This paper analyzes hesitant efforts in the Empire’s last years to register and
institutionalize the category of nationality. As a result of these efforts, nationality was
transformed into a crucial indicator of individual identity. By examining both statistics
and legal regulations that aimed to identify everyone in terms of national identity, my
project contributes to current work that underlines the impact of official categorization in
the formation of individual identities.
1
By describing shifts in institutions and ideologies
at the end of the imperial era, it shows as well how nationality became an essential
component of political life.
At the end of the XIXth century, nationality was at most a marginal administrative
or legal category in the Russian Empire
2
, unlike the categories of estate (soslovie) and
religion, which as Charles Steinwedel has shown, were registered in identification
documents (parish registers, the passport).
3
Further, an examination of the 1897 imperial
census makes clear that the concept of nationality remained weakly defined. Statisticians,
in fact, decided not to ask individuals a direct question on nationality, arguing that the
population would not know how to respond to such a question, or would answer so
poorly that the results would not be a true reflection of “reality”.
4
Instead, the 1897
census contained a question on language; statistics on language, the statisticians believed,
would allow them to establish data pertaining to the ethnic make-up of the Empire. They
planned to transform raw data on language into information on nationalities.
1
Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds.,
Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices
since the French Revolution
(Princeton University Press, 2000)
2
Daniel Beauvois,
La bataille de la terre en Ukraine, 1863-1914, Les Polonais et les conflits socio-
ethniques
, Presses Universitaires de Lille, Lille, 1993. L. E. Gorizontov,
Paradokcy imperskoj politiki :
poljaki v Rossii i russkie v pol’_e (XIX- na_alo XX v),
Indrik, Moscou, 1999
3
Charles Steinwedel, “Making Social Groups, One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate,
Religious Confession, and Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia,” in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds.,
Documenting
Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices since the French Revolution
(Princeton University Press,
2000), 67-82; Charles Steinwedel, ”To Make a Difference: The Category of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russian
Politics, 1861-1917,” in
David L.
Hoffmann and
Yanni
Kotsonis, eds.,
Russian Modernity
(St Martin’s Press, New
York, 2000), 67-86.On the structural continuity of a multi-ethnic empire in imperial and Soviet Russia, see Andreas
Kappeler,
The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History
(Harlow, England, 2001).
1
After the Revolution of 1905, even though imperial jurists and the statisticians did not
establish a universal and direct registration of nationality, it became increasingly
important to both diverse administrative authorities and the population. In 1910,
planning began for the census of 1915, which was eventually cancelled due to the war. At
this time, planners cautiously discussed the direct registration of nationality, but once
again, asked only linguistic questions.
In the 1910s, the search for a new model of State unity in the semi constitutional
period, the turn toward the foundation of a Russian nation state, as the geopolitical
tensions had drastically changed and deepened the issue of what are nationalities and
what to do with their presence in the empire. The ambiguities of the central State toward
the registration of nationality reveals the scale of the spreading of the national ideology in
the empire.
Moving Beyond the Ancien Régime.
Soslovie and Nationality
Descriptions of the Russian Empire had long included information about its
different peoples and the various languages they spoke. Authors relied on scattered
information to provide approximate lists of the peoples inhabiting a given region.5 It was
not until the second half of the nineteenth century, however, that the statistical study of
nationalities, which relied on language use to assign each individual a national identity,
gradually emerged in Eastern Europe and Russia.6 This new vision focused on counting
individuals and on mapping ethnic regions. The work of members of the Imperial Russian
Geographic Society (IRGO) first advanced such a conception 7, while efforts to collect
4
S. Patkanov, “Razrabotka dannykh o iazyke v tsentral’nom statisticheskom komitete,”
Istoricheskii
vestnik
72 (June 1898): 999.
5
Works describing the peoples of the Empire date to the eighteenth century, notably those by Peter Simon
Pallas and Iogann Gottlin
Georgi
. On the descriptive tradition of the eighteenth century, see Yuri Slezkine,
“Naturalists Versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity ”
Representations
47 (summer 1994): 170-195.
6
Morgane Labbé, « Le projet d’une statistique des nationalités discuté dans les sessions du Congrès
international de statistique (1853-1876) », in Hervé Le Bras, Francis Ronsin, Elisabeth Zucker-Rouvillois,
eds.,
Démographie et Politique
(Presses Universitaires de Dijon, Dijon, 1997), 127-142; Cadiot,
La
constitution des catégories nationales.
7 In the nineteenth century, cartographic work or maps dealing solely with the European part of the empire
were published by the Imperial Russian Geographic Society. In particular, see the various statistical
surveys done by Petr I. Keppen, using questionnaires for clergymen
or the revisions
, which sought to
2
military statistics gave it form.8 It reached maturity with the 1897 census, which included
a question on native language (rodnoi iazyk) whose explicit purpose was to elicit
information on “the peoples and tribes” of the empire.
The linguistic data collected brought to the fore questions about the
correspondence between language and the “ethnographic composition” of the country.
Statisticians maintained that, while language was the most useful criterion for obtaining
data on nationality, language and nationality did not always correspond. Moreover, in
response to a request by the local authorities in the Caucasus, the census in this region
included a question on nationality in addition to the question on language. Elsewhere,
language was transformed by statisticians into nationality during the coding process.
During the 1897 census, one of the methods they employed to determine an individual’s
“true” nationality was to compare the responses on language to that on estate (soslovie).9
It was not just census-takers, but respondents as well who viewed ethnic
denomination as indicative of a particular status within the imperial social hierarchy. The
census sheets are replete with ethnic qualifiers to answers that were intended to determine
estate.10 Respondents themselves drew a connection between estate and ethnicity. For
example, during the 1897 census, members of the Siberian community of Ust’ Olensk
responded “peasant” to the language question, thus distinguishing themselves (more so
than by the Iakut language they spoke) from the surrounding Iakut population.11 Russian
obtain precise information on national composition, based as much as possible on individual data:
Ob
etnograficheskoi karte evropeiskoi Rossii, izdannoi imperatorskim russkim geograficheskim obshchestvom
(St. Petersburg, 1853); “O narodnykh perepisiakh v Rossii.”
Zapiski IRGO
(po otdelenie statistiki) 6 (1889,
St. Petersburg), 1-94. See, also, the map by A. F. Rittih,
Etnograficheskaia karta evropeiskoi Rossii,
sostavlena po porucheniiu Imperatorskogo Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva
(St. Petersburg, 1875).
This was the first map to differentiate the Little Russians, Belorussians, and Russians.
8 A. F. Rittih,
Plemennoi sostav kontigentov russkoi armii i muzhskovo naseleniia evropeiskoi Rossii
(St.
Petersburg, 1875); Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and
Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Terry Martin and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds.,
A
State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Soviet Union
(Oxford University Press, New York,
2001); David Rich,
The Tsar’s Colonels
(Cambridge-Harvard, 1998); David Rich, “Imperialism, Reform
and Strategy: Russian Military Statistics 1840-1880,”
Slavonic and East European Review
74 (no. 4,
October 1996): 621-639.
9 On the estate system, see Gregory L. Freeze, “The S
oslovie
(Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social
History,”
American Historical Review
91 (February 1986, no. 1): 11-36.
10
Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 g..
Obshchii svod po Imperii
rezultatov razrabotki
dannykh
pervoi vseobshchei perepisi naseleniia
, ed. by N. A. Troini
ts
kii, vol. 2
(CSK-MVD, St. Petersburg, 1905), I.
11 Y. Slezkine,
Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North
(Cornell University Press, New-
York, 1994), 98.
3
colonists relied on legal status, more than language, to affirm their “Russianness”. Thus,
in areas colonized by Russians in the distant past, where a long history of cohabitation
blurred the boundaries between Russians and non-Russians, conquerors and locals, the
soslovie system was viewed as having preserved the Russianness of the ancient
colonists12.
Seraphim Patkanov, of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society (IRGO), was an
expert on Siberia who was appointed to process the data on language-nationality. In
numerous official census publications and his own articles, he analyzed the ways that the
estate system worked to discriminate and to segregate.
In Western countries, he wrote:
…almost all the nationalities are regularly leveled socially, legally and in other
ways, and it is impossible to divide the population of a province into its various
ethnic groups, except in the most approximate fashion. This is not the case with
most Russian provinces. There are entire regions within the empire, where the
indigenous population leads a different existence than that of the Russians, with
regard to rights, taxes, etc . . .13
Se référant plus spécifiquement à la catégorie juridique des allogènes (inorodcy) dans
l’empire and comparing Russia to the United States, Patkanov embraced an explicitly
racial perspective to focus on the collection of demographic data. He observed that, in
America,
…it is not possible to obtain reliable data on the demographic growth of the
Indian population, or to differentiate those of mixed race and mulattos (they might
have forgotten or hidden their origins) from the “pure blood” (chistokrovye); in
the empire, however, the Russian population is differentiated according to estates.
When statisticians processed the census, the Ministry of Finance criticized the results
because they identified the Lopars and Samoeds of Archangel indifferently as either
12
Instances where the ways of Russians and the indigenous population in these regions melded, obliterating
distinctions between the two groups, were viewed as anomalous at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Willard Sunderland, “Russian
s
into Iakuts ? “Going Native” and Problems of Russian National Identity in
the Siberian North,1870’s-1914,”
Slavic Review
55 (winter 1996, n°4): 806-825.
4
peasants or natives (inorodtsy).14 The Ministry insisted that groups classified along
estate lines were homogeneous, drawing a direct connection between ethnic community
and estate. However, the Central Statistical Committee (CSC) noted that the existing
system allowed for individual mobility, citing recent laws that specified how sedentary
natives could decide on their own to become peasants or bourgeois by enrolling in a
guild.15 The Committee therefore recognized that the nationality issue needed to be
distinguished from the official hierarchy of estates. The Committee indicated that if one
wanted to obtain a count of the Lopars, Samoeds, and other natives of Archangel, one had
only to consult the table on language. Even more than the possibility of mobility within
the estate system, the CSC’s implicit claim that ethnic identity was immutable called into
question the equivalence between estate and nationality. In keeping with assimilationist
theories, particularly the writings of Speranskii, founder of the inorodets status,16 it
would have been possible to argue that an individual’s move from inorodets to peasant
equated assimilation into the Russian population. The refusal to consider change in status
as a reflection of assimilation demonstrates that the traditional structures of imperial
integration were no longer viewed as resolving the issue of the presence of non-Russian
communities and the question of ethnicity was now strictly differentiated.
Confession and Nationality
Confessional differences structured the imperial edifice and the lives of
individuals and communities as much as distinctions based on estate at the end of the
empire. Confession acted as an ethnic marker in numerous provinces of the empire, both
for the population and the administration. Therefore, during the 1897 census, respondents
in Central Asia answered "Muslim" to the question on language, while respondents in
13 International Institute of Statistics, session 1899,
Christiana,
Dépouillement des données sur la
nationalité et la classification des peuples de l’Empire russe d’après leur langues (Central Statistical
Committee, St. Petersburg, 1899), 7.
14
Posobiia pri razrabotke pervoi vseobshchei perepisi,
13.
15 Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), f. 1290, op. 10, d. 13, 26 April 1900. The
Committee cited the 1876 regulation “On regulations concerning the
inorodtsy
”.
See “Polozhenie o
inorodtsakh,” in
Obshchii svod zakonov
, vol. 16, 2 (1802), 777-826 et vol. 9, 504-507, 552-640, 835-989.
16 Marc Raeff,
Siberia and the Reforms of 1822
(University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1956); Virginia Martin,
Law and Custom in the Steppe
(Curzon, Richmont Surrey, 2001), 34; Paul W. Werth,
At the Margins of Orthodoxy
(Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2002); 127-139. John W. Slocum, “ Who and When, Were the
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