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Confession, Language, Ethnicity, and the Many Faces of Russian Empire

SUMMARY: While discussing the general framework of Darius Staliūnas’s monograph, Juliette Cadiot highlights the main subject of his analysis of power discourse and Russification policies in the 1860s, namely, the coexistence and conflict between the two systems of governance in the Russian Empire: while one was oriented to the imperial elites, the second was adjusted to the needs of the broad masses. The reviewer emphasizes that Staliūnas downplays the argument of clear-cut intentionalism in historiographical debates, showing sometimes asymmetrical and uneven aspects of governmental policy in the Northwest Provinces. In the book under review, Cadiot seeks to answer the question of whether the Russian national project of integration encompassed all of the imperial diversity? She finds the answer to be quite nuanced. Staliūnas represents the imperial state policy as multilayered and sometimes asystematic, constructing as its objects not only ethnic groups but also confessional and social ones. Cadiot thus claims that the very term “Russification” acquired different meanings in a diapason from assimilation and acculturation to segregation. She suggests that the term and meaning of “integration” should be more carefully contextualized and that the concept of integration and the theme of imperial governmental techniques in the borderlands need further investigation. She proposes the lines of such an investigation that are suggested by Staliūnas’s monograph: the interaction of central and local bureaucrats, the coexistence of neighboring communities on a local level, and their resistance to the assimilative drive at the everyday level.