Racial categories and the politics of difference in late imperial Russia

Kritika, Wntr, 2007 by Eugene M. Avrutin

The past two decades have produced a virtual explosion in academic interest in racial theory and the history of race and racism. Historians, literary critics, and moral philosophers have published a staggering number of books, articles, and journals and organized countless conferences, symposia, and seminars devoted to these themes. The study of race and racism has emerged as a worldwide concern that knows no geographic boundaries or chronological limitations. Yet in the romance with racial matters, scholars have used race and racism so loosely, uncritically, and unreflectively that these terms have lost their analytical rigor and historical specificity and have become a "cliched vocabulary." (1) Some scholars have even advocated "forsaking once and for all the inflammatory and exceedingly ductile category of 'racism' save as a descriptive term referring to empirically analyzable doctrines and beliefs about 'race.'" (2) Others, however, continue to debate the significance of race in contemporary society and culture and use such provocative titles as Race Matters and Against Race to market their books to a wider audience. (3) In recent years, researchers have even broadened their inquiry to include previously uncharted geographic and chronological territories that range from the Greco-Roman world ("proto-racism") to modern France ("soft-racism"). (4)

While the popularity of racial studies continues to grow and attract ever more attention from the academy, scholars of imperial Russia have shown little interest in the recent theoretical and historical discussions of race. (5) The "absence" of race in Russian imperial historiography, however, needs to be raised as a historical problem that requires explanation and analysis. If racial categories began to play a significant role in ordering social relations and behavioral practices in 19th-century Europe, why did these enormously influential ideas not penetrate Russian political culture and society? How unique was the Russian scientific community in its acceptance of environmental or neo-Lamarckian theories of development? To put it somewhat differently, did resistance to racial ideology symbolize Russia's alternative path to Western civilization and modernity?

This article seeks to integrate "race" into discussions of imperial Russian culture and politics by analyzing the multiple and often contradictory intersections of the world of ideas (the debates between environmental and biologically deterministic theories of human development) and everyday social relations (the role that antisemitism and intolerance played in a multicultural and multi-religious empire). In particular, I examine the politicization of racial difference in the context of the anti-liberal shift that took place toward the end of the 19th century. As a deep conservatism and pessimism gripped Russian politics and culture, Jews emerged as the most visible "others" who were often perceived as a threat to the health and prosperity of the imperial "nation." Yet to argue that Jews proved to be the exception in an otherwise tolerant and flexible imperial order is to overlook the very problematic (and still not well understood) meanings of Russianness, the politics of belonging and exclusion, and the ways in which differences were constructed, defined, and maintained at the end of the old regime.

In late imperial Russia, race had two broad meanings that could--but did not always--overlap. The first signified color and designated "races" as white, yellow, red, dark, and black. The second, more ambiguous meaning categorized groups such as Slavs, Semites, Caucasians, Greco-Romans, and Turko-Tatars as well as "smaller" ones such as Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews as distinct "races" (rasy), "types" (tipy), or "ethnicities" (narody) based on highly elaborate and often contradictory physical categories and ethnographic descriptions. (6) While Jews could not be distinguished from Germans or Slavs by skin color, they could be identified as "Jews" by physical characteristics and ethno-cultural descriptions. In other words, as ethnicity (narodnost' and natsional'nost') began to acquire popular and administrative-scholastic currency to classify peoples by a combination of factors such as language, cultural practices, and religion, so did the belief that these differences were racially fixed--that is, intrinsic, unchangeable, and permanent. This gradual shift in documentation practices--from religion and social estate to ethnicity and race--reflected the reorientation of the empire's population along "cultural" lines and did not prove in any way remarkable in the fin de siecle. (7)

Following George Frederickson, I therefore do not regard ethnicity and race as two distinct phenomena; rather, as Frederickson points out, race may be defined "as what happens when ethnicity is deemed essential or indelible and made hierarchical." (8) This conceptualization of race allows us to analyze the dynamic process of racialization (the ways in which social attitudes and administrative practices constructed, validated, and justified a hierarchy of human difference) without restricting our focus solely to scientific studies of race. The tsarist regime may not have established a racial order based explicitly on biological theories of human development, but it did promote racial consciousness (the awareness of ethno-cultural differences based on religion, customs, and ancestry) and racist attitudes (institutional and popular discriminations based on essential and ultimately unbridgeable differences).