Official Nationality

OFFICIAL NATIONALITY

In 1833, Sergei Uvarov, in his first published circular as the new minister of education, coined the tripartite formula "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality" as the motto for the development of the Russian Empire. The three terms also became the main ingredients of the doctrine that dominated the era of Emperor Nicholas I, who reigned from 1825 to 1855, and that came to be called "official nationality." About two dozen periodicals, scores of books, and the entire school system propagated the ideas and made them the foundation for guiding Russia to modernity without succumbing to materialism, revolutionary movements, and blind imitation of foreign concepts.

The meaning of Orthodoxy and autocracy were clear. The Orthodox faith had formed the foundation of Russian spiritual, ethical, and cultural life since the tenth century, and had always acted as a unifying factor in the nation. It also proved useful in preaching obedience to authority. Autocracy, or absolute monarchy, involved the conviction that Russia would avoid revolution through the enlightened leadership of a tsar, who would provide political stability but put forth timely and enlightened reforms so that Russia could make constant progress in all spheres of national life. Political theory had long argued, and Russia's historical lessons seemed to demonstrate, that a single ruler was needed to maintain unity in a vast territory with varied populations.

The third term in the tripartite formula was the most original and the most mysterious. The broad idea of nationality (narodnost ) had just become fashionable among the educated public, but there was no set definition for the concept. In 1834, Peter Pletnev, a literary critic and professor of Russian literature at St. Petersburg University, noted: "The idea of nationality is the major characteristic that contemporaries demand from literary works… ," but, he went on, "one does not know exactly what it means." A variety of schools of thought on the subject arose in the 1830s and 1840s.

The romantic nationalists, led by Michael Pogodin and Stephen Shevyrev of Moscow University and the journal The Muscovite, celebrated Russia's absolutist form of government, its uniqueness, its poetic richness, the peace-loving virtues of its denizens, and the notion of the Slavs as a chosen people, all of which supposedly bestowed upon Russia a glorious mission to save humanity and made it superior to a "decaying" West. The Slavophiles, led by Moscow-based landowners including the Aksakov and Kireyevsky brothers, opposed such western concepts as individualism, legalism, and majority rule, in favor of the notion of sobornost : a community, much like a church council (sobor ), should engage in discussion, with the aim of achieving a "chorus" of unanimous decision and thus preserving a spirit of harmony, and brotherhood. The people then would advise the tsar, through some type of land council (zemsky sobor ), a system, the Slavophiles believed, that was the "true" Russian way in all things. The Westernizers, in contrast, sympathized with the values of other Europeans and assumed that Russian development, while traveling by a different path, would occur in the context of the liberal tradition that valued the individual over the state. All three groups, however, agreed on the necessity for emancipation, legal reform, and freedom of speech and press.

The doctrine of official nationality represented the government's response to these intellectual currents, as well as to the wave of revolutions that had spread through much of the rest of Europe beyond Russia's borders. The proponents of this doctrine, however, did not speak with one voice. For instance, because of their support for the existing state, the romantic nationalists are often defined as proponents of official nationality. However, the most influential group, sometimes called dynastic nationalists, included Emperor Nicholas I and the court, and their views were propagandized in the far-flung journalistic enterprises of Fadei Bulgarin, Nicholas Grech, and Osip Senkovsky. Their understanding of narodnost was based on patriotism, a defensive doctrine used to support the status quo and Russia's great-power status. For them, "Russianness," even for Baltic Germans or Poles, revolved around a subject's loyalty to the autocrat. In other words, they equated the nation with the state as governed by the dynasty, which was seen as both the repository and the emblem of the national culture.

Sergei Semenovich Uvarov's own views of nationality straddled the many schools of thought. He shared the bulk of the opinions of the dynastic nationalists, patronized the romantic nationalists and their journal, praised the Slavophiles for their Orthodox spirit, and accepted some Westernizing tendencies in Russia's historical development. But this architect of official nationality espoused a doctrine that lacked appeal and vitality. Instead of regarding the people as actively informing the content of nationality, Uvarov believed that the state should define, guide, and impose "true" national values upon a passive population. In a word, his concept of narodnost excluded the creative activity of the narod and made it synonymous with loyalty to throne and altar. The doctrine, while it achieved the stability which was its aim, proved anachronistic and did not survive Nicholas I and Uvarov, both of whom died in 1855.

See also: nationalism in tsarist empire; nationalities policies, tsarist; nation and nationality nicholas i; slavophiles; uvarov, sergei semenovich; westernizers

bibliography

Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1978). Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1967). Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Whittaker, Cynthia H. (1984). The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786–1855. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

Cynthia Hyla Whittaker