



























CEY. Vol.6.Sessums.Revised+Historiographic+Essay+Submission.docx


 
 

Russification and Russianization in 
Modern Historiography: Recent 
Developments and Future 
Directions 
 
Nicholas W. Sessums 

 
Abstract 
 
As the Soviet historical archives became accessible to Western scholars beginning in the 
1980s, renewed scrutiny was placed on the imperial-colonial policies of the Russian Empire 
toward its borderlands. These scholars began to interrogate the policies of the imperial 
administration toward ethnic and national groups in the borderlands from the imperial 
administrative perspective. In this essay, I geographically circumnavigate the borderlands 
of the Russian Empire through secondary studies published since the 1980s to understand 
how scholars have reinterpreted these policies since gaining access to the imperial 
administrative perspective. I find that they began to challenge the notion that the empire 
had cohesive and consistently applied policies to Russify its subjects. Instead, scholars now 
generally argue that policies were applied on a more ad hoc basis depending on the ethnic 
and national contexts of individual borderlands. Consequently, the concept of ‘Russification’ 
(obrusenie in Russian) became opaque, difficult to define, and inadequate in capturing the 
range of imperial policies toward the peoples of the borderlands. Therefore, the application 
of the term ‘Russianization’ is now more popular among scholars in describing 
non-assimilatory policies. Further distinction between the two concepts, however, is 
required in order to understand the full range of policies enacted toward imperial 
ethnicities and nationalities. Therefore, I also argue in favor of two promising new 
frameworks in the historiography, namely, the shifting usage of the term inorodtsy (aliens) 
by imperial administrators over time, and the concept of national indifference. Study of the 
former, I contend, would highlight the “othering” of non-dominant ethnic and national 
minorities. The latter permits an understanding of the limits of national constructions, 
thereby enabling a greater understanding of processes of national construction and, 
therefore, imperial responses to those constructions. Both would ultimately further clarify 
the historiographic distinction between Russification and Russianization. 
 
Introduction 
 
 The challenges and questions of the present often inform historical scholarship. 
Following this principle, scholars of imperial Russia’s borderland territories will likely 

42 



 
 

initiate new studies in the coming years due to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of neighboring 
Ukraine. Indeed, Putinism bears many of the hallmarks of nineteenth and 
early-twentieth-century imperialism in the Russian empire, a reality that is inspiring 
renewed scholarly interest in the region. This resharpened focus on Russian 
imperial-colonial policies in its historical borderlands invites a look back at the recent 
scholarship on this subject.  
 
 Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, studies of nationality within these 
borderlands generally fell into two distinct historiographical schools. The first mainly 
comprised of authors from the modern nation-states that emerged out of the borderland 
territories following the First World War. This scholarship tended to focus on 
nineteenth-century ethno-national movements and their responses to imperial policies 
rather than the imperial administration itself. Studies of this type are numerous in the 
historiography of each individual borderland territory, due in part to the focus on 
nation-states in the twentieth century, and also due to the dearth of Russian archival 
sources during this period. In many ways, then, the scholars working in this vein acted as 
representatives of local ethnonational traditions, and their respective histories tended to 
highlight the development and spread of local national character despite imperial rule.  
 
 On the other hand, Western historical studies and those originating from within 
Russia itself did not focus much on imperial nationality policies. Instead, these scholars 
concerned themselves with Russian narratives about the empire and its borderlands rather 
than the ethnonationalities on the empire’s fringes, thus contributing to popular 
contemporary perceptions of the imperial state as a despotic Russian monolith. As access to 
Russian state archives in the lead-up to and following the dissolution of the Soviet Union 
gradually increased, however, these frames of interpretation started to shift. Beginning in 
the first half of the 1980s, nationality within the Russian empire gained greater prominence 
in western scholarship as the prospect of independence for these ethnonationalities grew. 
Local, western, and Russian historians began to study imperial policies, thereby developing 
several new historiographical themes and currents in the process.1  
 

In this essay, I trace the convergence of these two historiographical schools 
following renewed access to the archives beginning in the 1980s. I identify similarities and 
differences in how scholars depict the construction of national and imperial identities 
throughout the borderlands after 1863-1864 when an uprising in the Polish territories 
supercharged imperial nationality policies in peripheral regions. Through the works 
chosen, I seek to geographically circumnavigate the major borderlands of the Russian 
Empire, specifically through studies of the Northern borderlands (Finland), the 
Northwestern borderlands (Lithuania and Belarus), the Central Asian Borderlands 
(Uzbekistan), the Southwestern borderlands (Ukraine and Poland), and the Far Eastern 
borderlands (Siberia and The Amur region). I pay particularly close attention to scholars’ 

1 The late Mark von Hagen’s discussion on whether Ukraine has one definite historical narrative upon which to base 
its national identity provides a good example of the historiographical shift toward studying local national 
movements in imperial contexts and an overview of how scholars began to approach nationalism in Eastern and 
Central Europe from new perspectives after the fall of the Soviet Union. See Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have 
a History?” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (1995): 658–73. 

43 



 
 

conclusions about processes of imperial identity construction despite studying different 
borderlands, their insights about the goals and policies of imperial administrators 
throughout the borderlands as well as the frameworks and methodologies scholars use in 
their analyses. I find that, over time, scholars identified two distinct processes for the 
construction of imperial identities: Russification, which can be understood in general terms 
as the assimilation of a non-dominant ethnic group, and Russianization, which can be 
understood as the acculturation and or/integration of a non-dominant ethnic group. Finally, 
considering the renewed relevance of these historical questions given recent events in 
Ukraine and the impending possibility of further Russian expansion into other imperial 
borderlands, I also consider promising new directions and frameworks for the future study 
of these questions with the hope that they may contribute fresh insights into the past and 
present Russian Empire.  
 
Russification or Russianization? 
 
 A substantial difficulty faced by western historians of the Russian Empire before 
1991 (and now again after February 2022) was the general inaccessibility of Russian 
archival material, particularly before the implementation of Glasnost by Mikhail Gorbachev 
in the latter half of the 1980s. In his discussion on the impact of the archives on 
contemporary scholarship, historian Donald Raleigh noted that he was only able to gain 
access to the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction 
(TsGAOR, today GARF) in 1986.2 Even when he gained access, Raleigh remarked, “The terms 
of admission imposed from above also put me on edge. For one thing, I was shown—and 
then only after frustrating delays—a mere twenty archival files (dela). I could not consult 
archival inventories (opisi) or catalogs, discuss my research with archivists willing to help, 
or inspect files in the same building in which our Soviet colleagues conducted their 
research.”3 Clearly, Soviet archival authorities were highly protective of their materials and 
conscious of the potential impacts that Western use of them could have. 
 

The publication of Tuomo Polvinen’s Imperial Borderland, one of the first 
monographs written outside of the Soviet Union to make extensive use of the heavily 
guarded archives and analyze imperial policy from the Russian perspective rather than 
from the perspective of local sources, thus marked the first step in a new historiographic 
direction. First published in Finnish in 1984 and then translated to English in 1995 by 
Steven Huxley, the author could access and use documents in the archives of Moscow, 
Leningrad, and St. Petersburg years before Raleigh’s visit. Archival research in the Soviet 
Union was an essential undertaking in the author’s goal to “clarify Russia’s policy on 
Finland” because it is the main source type missing from the Russian general and historian 
M.M. Borodkin’s 1905 history of Finland under Governor-General N.I. Bobrikov. Borodkin’s 
work was clearly a major source of inspiration for Polvinen’s project, given that no other 
work had been centered on the perspective of Bobrikov, who, as Governor-General, was 

3 Ibid. 

2 Donald Raleigh, “Doing Soviet History: The Impact of the Archival Revolution,” The Russian Review (Stanford) 
61, no. 1 (2002), 16. 

44 



 
 

responsible for implementing tsarist policies that sought to suppress Finnish autonomy.4 
The influence of the imperial policies themselves on this historiography is emphasized by 
the fact that, despite writing roughly 80 years apart, both Borodkin and Polvinen choose to 
interrogate them from the point of view of the man most responsible for their 
implementation. Indeed, Polvinen making Bobrikov his main character was an excellent 
choice expressly because he had access to the archives. This combination of structure and 
evidence allowed for a much more nuanced understanding of imperial policy toward the 
Finnish people than previously conceived.  

 
Though this work only became accessible to non-Finnish speakers once translated to 

English after the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives to the world, 
Polvinen’s intervention nonetheless marks an important step forward. Indeed, the English 
translation of the book was an important factor in the development of this historiography 
(a testament to the necessity of translational work in the field of historical research) as 
several Western historians had begun to ponder these same questions in the decade prior 
without access to Polvinen’s work. Thus, Imperial Borderland highlights the importance of 
archival material as the way that historians craft narratives of the past. As a result, virtually 
no monograph on imperial Russia written in the modern day can be considered complete 
without access to Russian archival material. One would not be wrong to wonder if and how 
these narratives may change in the context of present events.  

 
In addition to being one of the first authors of the Russian borderlands to combine 

the state archives with the policy-focused approach and the lens of the top imperial 
authorities, Polvinen taps into several important historiographical discussions upon which 
numerous authors would seize in the decades after. Perhaps the most broadly conceptual of 
these debates is over the pandora’s box that is Russification. The term is notoriously 
difficult to define and characterize within historiographic circles, though one might 
understand it (in highly general terms) as a process through which non-Russians become 
Russians via assimilation. The concept of Russification acts almost as a boogeyman to many 
scholars of the late Russian Empire because it was never defined or standardized by the 
imperial authorities and was often carried out on an ad hoc basis in different borderlands. 
Darius Staliūnas, for example, largely sidesteps the debate of Russification as a term in his 
2007 book Making Russians, stating that “an analysis of Russian national discourse, 
especially the semantics of the terminology, is important, but the results of such analysis 
can give only very limited information about the aims of such policy.”5 Even more extremely, 
Stephen Velychenko avoids both the debate and the term itself entirely in his 1992 book 
National History as a Cultural Process despite tracing “Ukraine’s past in survey histories of 
Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.”6 Indeed, scholarly dialogue about Russification has become so 

6 Stephen Velychenko, National History as Cultural Process: A Survey of the Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past in 
Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of 
Ukrainian Studies Press, 1992), xiv. 

5 Darius Staliūnas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 21. 

4 Tuomo Polvinen, Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898-1904 (Durham: 
Duke University Press, 1995), viii. Italics included in original. 

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focused and nuanced that it can fall out of the scope of studies that are not wholly dedicated 
to its discussion. 

 
Often, then, substantive discourse on Russification can only be found within tertiary 

sources. Raymond Pearson, for example, was one of the first Western historians of the era 
to comment directly on the issue in his 1989 paper “Privileges, Rights, and Russification.” 
Reflecting on the historiography prior to the late 1980s, Pearson alludes to the ongoing 
historiographical debate in which some historians used the terms “Russification” and 
“Russianization” interchangeably whereas others draw the distinction between 
“Russification” as a process requiring the erasure of ethnic identity through assimilation 
and “Russianization” as a process perpetuating the dominance of Russian language, culture, 
and institutions without the total erasure of local identity. Pearson concludes that “what 
has in the past generally been dubbed ‘Russification’ would be better named 
‘Russianization,’ especially in the light of the strengthening view that the tsarist state 
possessed neither the totalitarian ambition nor the modern resources to undertake the 
ethnic assimilation of its minorities (other than perhaps the Ukrainians and 
Belorussians).”7 Indeed, modern historiographical interpretations of imperial policy 
towards national minorities in the Russian empire’s disparate borderlands can largely be 
broken down along the lines of efforts to Russify populations (assimilation or forced 
integration) and efforts to Russianize populations (acculturation or unforced integration).  

 
Edward Thaden also wrote extensively about conceptions of Russification in the 

historiography. In his 1990 essay his essay “Russification in Tsarist Russia,” for example, he 
finds that the term was first developed in the 1860s by German and Polish intellectuals, 
“who attributed to the Russian government the goal of forcibly making Russians out of 
non-Russians.”8 Thaden understood this as a definition selectively used by those opposed to 
tsarist rule. He, therefore, saw the need to differentiate between three types of Russification 
in the historiography: unplanned (suggesting the voluntary acceptance of Russian identity 
by imperial subjects), administrative (suggesting Russification of language, laws, and 
institutions), and cultural (which sought to supplant borderland culture with Russian 
language and culture).9 Thaden, however, does not differentiate between Russification and 
Russianization on the basis of assimilation or non-assimilation as Pearson does. In 
Pearson’s logic, administrative and cultural Russification on their own would imply 
Russianization since they do not by themselves result in the erasure of the non-Russian 
identity. This conceptual misalignment and the resulting historiographic tensions have 
powered historical conversations about Russification and Russianization into the present 
day.   

The conversation around the contours of Russification also led to the debate 
surrounding how imperial authorities applied policies across the borderlands, a debate 
which Polvinen’s work provided commentary on in the Finnish context. This debate was 

9 Ibid, 211, 213. 

8 Edward Thaden, “Russification in Tsarist Russia,” in Interpreting History: Collective Essays on Russia’s Relations 
with Europe, ed. Marianna Forster Thaden and Edward Thaden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 211. 

7 Raymond Pearson, “Privileges, Rights, and Russification,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and 
Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 89-90. 

46 



 
 

sparked largely by an oversight on the part of previous generations of historians, who, 
according to Pearson, 

 
focused myopically upon a few highly visible minority nationalities 
who seized and then monopolized international attention, and made 
sweeping generalizations from this limited sample… To attempt to 
generalize about the one hundred or more national minorities within 
the empire on the basis of just three patently unrepresentative 
nationalities must be indefensible for any professional historian.10 
 
While Pearson referenced Finns as one of the overly studied minorities, he is 

specifically talking about the historiographic family that focuses on Finnish responses to 
Russification rather than policies from the imperial perspective. From this imperial 
perspective, in which Polvinen is a pioneer in the Finnish historiography, it is notable that 
leading up to Bobrikov’s appointment as Governor-General, “the special status of the Grand 
Duchy of Finland had gradually become firmly established… Even during the reign of 
Alexander III.”11 They were allowed “their own police force, their own currency, their own 
postage stamps, their own railway system and, most obvious to Russians, the Finns spoke 
their own local languages of Finnish and Swedish.”12 Certainly, the tsarist government had 
been attentive to the challenges of national minorities in the borderlands for decades 
before Polvinen’s period of study and had, at times, acted to crush those movements. 
Imperial bureaucrats were evidently not as lenient with Ukrainian nationalists in the 
empire’s southwest borderlands, Polish nationalists in the west, relatively neglected Central 
Asian and Siberian subjects, or Jews confined to the Pale of Settlement, each having their 
own unique experiences with imperial policy. In this light, Polvinen’s findings contribute to 
the thesis that imperial authorities applied policies toward nationalities in an imbalanced 
manner across the borderlands. From a historiographical perspective, if imperial 
authorities unequally applied policies across borderlands, then through which 
methodologies could these inequalities be analyzed? Could the distinctions between 
Russification and Russianization be further refined? 

 
Indeed, Polvinen himself weighed in by understanding Russian policy in Finland as 

initially focused on integrating Finns into Russian culture and society before fully 
assimilating them. He points out that “In 1881… Finland’s newly appointed 
Governor-General, the former Chief of the Russian General Staff Count Fedor Logginovich 
Heiden, outlined far reaching integration measures in a memorandum to the Tsar… 
integration policy was to be implemented step by step” but “in 1891… in a memorandum 
concerning the ‘Finnish provinces’ he now refused altogether to recognise Finland’s status 
as an autonomous state.”13 Here, Polvinen suggests that Russification and Russianization 
policies were not mutually exclusive and inflexible but could complement one another 
depending on the situation in a given borderland.  

13 Polvinen, Imperial Borderland, 22.  

12 Peter Waldron, “Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland [Review],” 
Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 7 (1996), 1244. 

11 Polvinen, Imperial Borderland, 21-22. 
10 Ibid, 87. 

47 



 
 

 
Yuri Slezkine was another early contributor to these debates. Though only 

dedicating a few chapters to the imperial period after 1864, Slezkine’s geographically and 
temporally expansive study of Russia’s northern borderlands in his 1994 monograph Arctic 
Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North supports Polvinen’s implications and 
makes its own novel contributions. Most interestingly, Slezkine highlights the “conflicting 
rationalist and romantic impulses” of imperial administrators in applying Russifying and 
Russianizing policies (though Slezkine equates the two in his book through the exclusive 
use of the term Russification).14 These conflicting impulses are evident in imperial 
administrators adopting the term inorodtsy (aliens) during the nineteenth century. The 
term was used for subjects who “were different from others in ways that were legally 
recognized but had no legal justification. By the early nineteenth century ‘foreigners’ 
(inozemtsy—people from a different land) had become ‘aliens’ (inorodtsy— people of a 
different birth).”15 This change in terminology implies that imperial authorities considered 
inorodtsy, such as the peoples of the North, the Central Asian steppe, and the Russian far 
east, among other groups, to be geographically part of the Russian Empire, but not 
necessarily so in the social, cultural, economic, or political sense. Slezkine, therefore, 
demonstrates that the language and attitudes of imperial bureaucrats toward 
borderlanders can be used to reveal the former’s policy priorities at different times and in 
different places.  

 
The combined reemergence of Russian archival sources in the 1980s and 1990s and 

renewed scholarly interest in how imperial Russian authorities managed their 
heterogeneous empire fundamentally reshaped the historiography of the Russian Empire. 
Historians began to take a closer look at assumptions that had governed their work for 
decades, finding that many needed to be reconsidered. In particular, the idea that 
Russification was a coherent, desired, and consistently applied policy to turn the empire’s 
non-Russian subjects into Russians warranted further investigation. Was it true that 
Russian authorities did not necessarily want an all-Russian Empire? Did imperial 
authorities seek less intrusive means to hold the empire together in the form of 
Russianization? If Russianization was its own process separate from Russification, then 
how was it different in practice? These questions were central in the minds of Russian 
borderland scholars at the turn of the twenty-first century. 
 
Twenty-First Century Development 
 

In the 2000s, the ideas that emerged around Russification and Russianization in the 
1980s and 1990s were further developed and taken in interesting new directions. Seizing 
on the work done in the two decades prior, particularly that of Pearson and Thaden, 
Benjamin Nathans developed the differentiation between Russification and Russianization 
based on assimilation vs. non-assimilation more sharply in his 2002 book Beyond the Pale, 
stating, 

15 Ibid, 53. 

14 Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 
389. 

48 



 
 

 
Assimilation should be understood as a process culminating in the 
disappearance of a given group as a recognizably distinct element 
within a larger society. By contrast, acculturation signifies a form of 
adaptation to the surrounding society that alters rather than erases 
the criteria of difference, especially in the realm of culture and 
identity. Integration is the counterpart of acculturation (though the 
two do not necessarily go hand in hand) in the social realm—whether 
institutional (e.g., schooling), geographic (patterns of residential 
settlement), or economic (occupational profile).16 
 

In Nathans’ view, as in Pearson’s, the criterion for assimilation is the erasure of a unique 
socio-cultural identity. Acculturation is defined by an adaption or alteration to a unique 
cultural identity rather than erasure, and integration is cast as the social “counterpart of 
acculturation” because it is also defined by adaption rather than erasure, but to a social 
identity rather than a cultural one. It is also noteworthy that, though supporting Pearson’s 
assertion that Russification and Russianization were different processes based on 
assimilation, Nathans also adopted Thaden’s three-type framework wherein non-dominant 
group cultures and/or institutions could be made more Russian/Russianized, or these 
non-dominant groups could be fully assimilated and Russified. Thus, by using Thaden’s 
framework to support Pearson’s assertions, Nathans took a significant step toward 
resolving the core historiographic tension established by Pearson and Thaden. 
 

Darius Staliūnas added further nuance to Nathans’ thoughts five years later in his 
book Making Russians. The author suggests that, 

 
We would even broaden the concept of integration and also regard the 
measures by which the imperial authorities sought to turn people of 
other nationalities into loyal subjects as integration. Thus, Making 
Russians does not necessarily mean Russian policy sought to 
assimilate people of other nationalities. Acculturation or integration 
also shows the authorities’ aim to turn people of other nationalities 
into Russians in the political, rather than the ethno-cultural sense. 
Acculturation or integration policy could also use methods of “divide 
and rule.” The aim of such policy was to support those non-dominant 
national groups, which, in the opinion of imperial officials, were loyal 
to the empire and would thereby serve as a counterweight to a 
disloyal nation, which was the authorities’ main opponent in a given 
region.17 

 
Staliūnas posits multiple new ideas here. First, he believes that if one focuses on 

policies of integration and acculturation, they demonstrate that the imperial Russian 

17 Staliūnas, Making Russians, 2. Italics included in original.  

16 Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, Los Angeles: 
University of California Press, 2002), 11. 

49 



 
 

bureaucracy was not solely focused on assimilating nationalities into the empire and was 
not necessarily focused exclusively on ethnonational identities. Second, he posits that 
attempts to acculturate and integrate borderland populations made use of strategies 
distinct from strategies of assimilation. In cases where imperial authorities attempted to 
acculturate and/or integrate, one may find strategies that can be described as “divide and 
rule,” an approach that he defines as supporting non-dominant groups loyal to the empire 
in opposition to national groups that were not.18  

 
Jeff Sahadeo’s 2007 monograph Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 

represents another work that asked these novel questions and implemented these new 
methodologies as well as one that strongly supports Staliūnas’ assertions. Sahadeo places 
his focus on the tsarist administration in imperial Tashkent, a leading city in the empire’s 
Central Asian borderlands, asking whether imperial policy toward Central Asian minorities 
could be classified as Russification or Russianization and what means were used for these 
ends. Indeed, Sahadeo’s choice of geographical and cultural focus brings much to the 
discussion. Imperial administrators tended to view their Central Asian colonies as 
“oriental,” a term that Edward Said has noted “connotes the high-handed executive attitude 
of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism.”19 Much like the 
subjects in Slezkine’s study, the conception of Russia’s Central Asian borderlands as 
uncivilized, oriental, and non-national by imperial administrators is likely a major reason 
for the region’s underrepresentation within the historiography of nationalism in the 
borderlands.  

 
Sahadeo’s monograph plugged this gap. He found that “Tsarist administrators 

needed the cooperation of important sections of the Central Asian population to rule the 
region in a cost-efficient manner. Native notables in Tashkent pledged outward allegiance to 
the tsar in exchange for assurances of political and cultural autonomy.”20 Despite being 
unaware of Staliūnas’ discussions and findings since the two authors published in the same 
year, Sahadeo’s work provided strong evidence for the idea that “divide and rule” was 
utilized as a strategy by imperial administrators in the borderlands. This suggests that 
imperial policy was focused on acculturation and/or integration and, therefore, represents 
Russianization rather than Russification. These conclusions further prove that Russification 
and Russianization were distinct processes and should not be conflated in the broader 
historiographical conversations.  

 
Six years after Staliūnas and Sahadeo took this step, Faith Hillis applied many of 

their ideas for the first time to the context of imperial Russian Ukraine in her 2013 work 
Children of Rus’. Hillis too finds that imperial administrators clearly applied “divide and 
rule” strategies to this borderland by allying with apparently loyal “Little Russian” 

20 Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 
230. 

19 Edward Said, Orientalism, First Vintage books edition. (New York: First Vintage Books, 1979). Unfortunately, 
this online edition of the book does not include page numbers. 

18 Staliūnas has since further discussed and clarified the nuances of defining this approach and its applications in the 
northwest and western borderlands of the late empire. See Darius Staliūnas, “Affirmative Action in the Western 
Borderlands of the Late Russian Empire?,” Slavic Review 77, no. 4 (2018): 978–97. 

50 



 
 

intellectuals, whom she defines as “activists who saw local traditions as compatible with 
imperial rule” against seemingly disloyal Ukrainians, whom she defines as “activists who 
questioned the unity of the East Slavs and the authority of the imperial state.”21 Hillis’ work 
also adds to a recent and relevant historiographic subtheme that focuses on the role of 
modernization and urbanization in perpetuating Russification and Russianization.22 The 
development of Right-Bank Ukraine’s (the portion of the country West of the Dnipro River) 
infrastructure and urban spaces during the nineteenth century and the increase in the 
urban population that occurred as a result meant, in part, that intellectual circles 
flourished. It was within these circles that imperial authorities found the Little Russian 
intellectuals with whom they sought to develop an Orthodox East Slavic identity that could 
unify the empire, and also within these circles that they found Ukrainian intellectuals who 
needed to be undermined.  

 
However, citing Making Russians and other texts in an oblique reference to the 

Russification vs. Russianization debate, Hillis semantically adopts “a set of policies that 
some referred to as ‘Russification’”23 for the policies in Right-Bank Ukraine rather than 
Russianization. Given the conceptual development of Russification and Russianization prior 
to her work, a more meaningful engagement with and application of the terminology may 
have enhanced scholarly understanding of the “Little Russians” that Hillis studies. While 
Russification was an affectual force in contemporary Right-Bank Ukraine, it was primarily 
within policies directed toward Ukrainian activists. Russianization, on the other hand, 
seems to be the more appropriate way to categorize policies directed toward the Little 
Russians. The author herself states, “By the early twentieth century, official tolerance for 
nationalist agitation on the right bank permitted activists to create a socially variegated and 
mass-oriented Russian nationalist movement, which soon became the preeminent political 
force in the region.”24 Therefore, while this work supports the distinction between 
Russification and Russianization conceptually, it also shows that this distinction is not yet 
fully deployed linguistically within recent historiography.  

 
Malte Rolf’s Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, first released in German 

in 2014 and subsequently translated into English in 2021, applied the term “Russification” 
more thoughtfully. His work offers a refreshing perspective on a borderland that is well 
represented in the historiography, from which imperial administrators’ first real experience 
with an agitated national group came in 1831 and again in 1863-1864. In characterizing the 
Kingdom of Poland as “a test ground where the imperial government devised and 
developed ways to secure power and to force integration,” Rolf adopts the conceptual 
language of Russification to support this characterization.25 His extensive citation of both 
Thaden and Staliūnas further alludes to the fact that a secondary objective of Rolf’s work 

25 Malte Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864-1915 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh 
Press, 2021), 5. 

24 Ibid, 2.  
23 Hillis, Children of Rus’, 4. 
22 Staliūnas, Sahadeo, and Rolf also fit into this trend.  

21 Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Cornell University 
Press, 2013)., xiii. 

51 



 
 

was to develop the contours of Russification as a concept, thereby making the book one of 
the field’s most up-to-date works. 

 
The implications of this decades-long discourse now appear to be spreading into 

neighboring historiographical fields. In his book Beyond the Amur, published as part of the 
University of British Columbia Press’ Contemporary Chinese Studies series, Victor 
Zatsepine’s primary goal is “to describe and analyze the emergence of the Amur frontier 
society and how the region was claimed and divided by two states [Imperial Russia and 
Qing China] despite difficult natural conditions.”26 In approaching the claims of imperial 
Russian bureaucrats over a borderland from an adjacent historiographical perspective, 
Zatsepine highlights the core of the field’s recent debates and broadly summarizes their 
findings without needing to engage with them directly. The author accomplishes this by 
concluding that “Russia engaged in a variety of initiatives to expand its influence in the 
region,” that “one persistent feature of this frontier was inconsistent and insufficient 
support from central governments,” and that “this frontier region came to symbolize the 
ambiguity of imperial attitudes, which ranged from high expectations to neglect.”27 
Zatsepine identifies both a primary motivator for these historiographical conversations 
(the ambiguity of imperial attitudes) and the consensus that has resulted (a variety of 
attitudes and policies that represented high expectations for a region and its peoples 
and/or relative neglect). Indirectly, and from a historiographic outsider’s perspective, the 
author supports the notions that imperial authorities applied policies inconsistently across 
time and space, that they depended highly on the perceptions and attitudes of 
contemporary actors, and that they employed particular strategies depending on these 
attitudes and goals of said actors.  

 
By interrogating and refining the initial historiographic thoughts from the 1980s 

and 1990s, the authors of the twenty-first century have made great progress in defining 
what Russification and Russianization mean, how they are different, and how their different 
policies were applied in the empire. The recent scholarship highlighted here strongly 
supports the idea that imperial administrators adopted different policies depending on the 
contexts of different borderlands at different times. Indeed, Russification and 
Russianization now seem to be generally accepted as different processes involving different 
policies with different goals. In cases of Russification, historians tend to agree that policies 
were oriented toward assimilation. In cases of Russianization, however, policies were 
oriented toward acculturation and/or integration through strategies like “divide and rule.” 
Simultaneously, however, authors like Hillis illustrate the fact that the distinction between 
“Russification” and “Russianization” is either not fully accepted or fully deployed as of the 
2010s. While the overall development of this historiography has done much to clarify the 
differences between the two, a definitive comparative analysis of these processes 
throughout the empire remains extremely challenging given the necessity of understanding 
the diverse cultures and languages of the empire’s many non-dominant groups and how 
imperial authorities treated each one. Nonetheless, historians must continue to understand 

27 Ibid, 6, 160, 162-163. 

26 Victor Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters Between China and Russia, 1850-1930 (Vancouver: 
UBC Press, 2017), 16. 

52 



 
 

Russification and Russianization more deeply, given that both are being implemented in the 
Russian Empire’s borderlands today. This reality raises important questions. Must 
historians again innovate to generate new insights? If so, how? What new analytical tools 
are available, and how can they help us make further progress? In fact, one does not have to 
look far to find promising possibilities. 

 
Historiographic Frontiers 
 
 I advocate for two potential new frameworks that could be of use in analyzing 
Russification and Russianization. Both lenses proposed here have precedent within the 
current historiography, though to different degrees. The first potential new lens for 
understanding Russification and Russianization within imperial policies is through the 
concept of inorodtsy. As highlighted by Slezkine in Arctic Mirrors, the term technically refers 
to a legal category used administratively throughout the empire (generally translated into 
English as “aliens”). However, John Slocum points out that it “was used, often in a pejorative 
sense, to refer to all of the empire's non-Russian inhabitants,” and that historians have 
“remarked on the shift in usage whereby, in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth 
centuries, the formal sense of the term gradually gave way to the informal one.”28 Given the 
scholarly focus in the historiography on the relationships between imperial authorities and 
local peoples, it would reasonably follow that most works would at least include a mention 
and discussion of inorodtsy in the context of their respective borderlands. Curiously, 
however, there does not appear to be a deep focus on inorodtsy in the literature. While 
Staliūnas uses the term throughout his work and Slezkine and Hillis define its significance 
in theirs, it is absent from Polvinen’s, Sahadeo’s, Rolf’s, and Zatsepine’s monographs. How 
might this be explained?  
 
 Staliūnas positions this inconsistency as “the problem of what kind of general term 
could be used to describe the ‘objects’ of nationality policy.”29 He correctly identifies 
inorodtsy as the term used for “aliens” or “when national groups were differentiated from 
Russians,” but states that separate analytical categories are required to analyze the 
relationship between “Russians” and “inorodtsy.”30 Why can the concept of inorodtsy not be 
used as a category of analysis in and of itself? Indeed, Slocum’s essay suggests that it can 
and perhaps should be. He highlights the fact that “The changing usages of the term 
inorodtsy are bound up with changing conceptions of ‘Russianness’ and the Russian nation, 
and evolution in the concepts of nationality and nationhood… the evidence presented here 
relates to broader questions concerning changing conceptions of identity, difference, and 
“otherness” in Russian history.”31 It seems, then, that the development and usage of the 
term inorodtsy in the empire over time can be used as an analytical framework through 
which to interrogate identity in the empire as well as strategies of control, but this has not 
happened for one reason or another as far as I am aware.  
 

31 Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy?” 175. 
30 Ibid. 
29 Staliūnas, Making Russians, 22. 

28 John Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial 
Russia,” The Russian Review (Stanford) 57, no. 2 (1998), 173. 

53 



 
 

Another potential new lens within the historiography of the Russian Empire’s 
borderlands is “national indifference.” None of the monographs analyzed in this essay use 
this analytical lens, and the only mention of it is found in Hillis’ introduction.32 National 
indifference was most cohesively hypothesized as an analytical category in a 2010 work 
published in the Slavic Review by Tara Zahra.33 It should also be emphasized that by 2010, 
multiple works analyzing national indifference as an influential force in constructing 
national identities in various European regions had already been released, including one by 
Zahra herself.34  

 
Zahra’s essay, however, made two novel and critical points relevant to the 

historiography of nationalism and imperial Russia. First, “while national indifference has 
long been an obsession of nationalist activists in east central Europe, it has only recently 
become a subject of historical research.”35 Indeed, while the concept of national indifference 
is as old as the concept of nationalism, it has received scant scholarly attention within the 
historiography. Second, “Making indifference visible… enables historians to better 
understand the limits of nationalization and thereby challenges the nationalist narratives, 
categories, and frameworks that have traditionally dominated the historiography of eastern 
Europe.”36 Understanding national constructions in the empire and how imperial 
administrators responded to them enables historians to interrogate distinctions between 
“Russification” and “Russianization.” At the same time, understanding national 
constructions also necessarily means understanding their limits, and so works that fail to 
do so might be considered incomplete analyses.  

 
 While the lack of analysis of national indifference and its nonuse as an analytical lens 
is understandable in Polvinen’s, Staliūnas’, and Sahadeo’s monographs given when Zahra’s 
article was released and in Zatsepine’s given that nationalism is not a central focus, the 
oversight of both Hillis and Rolf to incorporate this novel framework into their studies 
appears to be a missed opportunity.37 To her credit, Hillis does explicitly point out that, 
“Scholars of national awakenings have generally taken for granted the transformative 
power of nationalism—a tendency recently challenged by historians who argue that the 
traditional focus on nation-building has obscured the fact that popular indifference and 
even hostility toward national ideas persisted well into the modern period.”38 However, she 
continues on by stating, “Rather than focusing on expressions of consciousness or 

38 Hillis, Children of Rus’, 11. 

37 Sahadeo’s work, in particular, would benefit from the utilization of National Indifference as an analytical lens 
because attempts to nationalize the peoples of the Central Asian steppe were so weak, as the author points out. 

36 Ibid, 94.  
35 Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities,” 93. 

34 See James Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European 
Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: 
A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Pieter Judson, 
Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge: Harvard University 
Press, 2006). Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian 
Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 

33 See Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic review 69, 
no. 1 (2010), 93–119. 

32 Hillis, Children of Rus’, 11. 

54 



 
 

indifference, this book analyzes how nationalist agendas evolved through time and across 
space, often in convoluted and nonlinear ways.”39 While Hillis does not reject the concept of 
national indifference as an analytical framework, her choice not to incorporate it seems to 
in some capacity limit the overall historiographical impact of the book. Understanding 
indifference and hostility toward national ideas in the Right-Bank is an important 
component in understanding the development of national movements, imperial responses 
to those movements, and categorizations of those responses because indifferent or hostile 
people represented a problem for spreading nationalist agendas. Given the failure of tsarist 
officials to implement Official Nationality40 in Right-Bank Ukraine and throughout the rest 
of the empire, its absence seems a disappointing choice when considering Zahra’s point 
about interrogating the limits of nationalization. The disappointment of this choice is 
further felt through Hillis’ nonuse of the term “Russianization,” an important aspect in the 
evolution of nationalist agendas in the southwestern borderlands. 
 

In Rolf’s case, this omission seems particularly egregious given that James Bjork’s 
monograph on national indifference in the Polish-German borderlands was released more 
than a decade prior.41 Both Hillis and Rolf could have placed their work into a novel and 
rapidly evolving historiographic framework, thereby giving it greater meaning and 
relevance without detracting from their overall points and goals. For Hillis, this is perhaps 
not as pressing today, considering the tragic relevance of her work to contemporary events 
in Ukraine. A focus on national indifference in Rolf’s monograph, however, would have 
added strong evidence to a work premised on the belief that “giving a dense description of 
the particular weave of interaction found [in the monograph’s region and period] is the best 
way to demonstrate the complexities, inconsistencies, and formative dimensions of the 
imperial context.”42 Certainly, the inclusion of national indifference as a category of analysis 
should feature more heavily in the historiography of nationalism in the Russian Empire’s 
borderlands going forward. I would argue that this need is even more pressing in the 
historiography of the Russian Empire’s borderlands given the ad hoc nature of the empire’s 
construction, its geographical vastness, and the heterogeneous composition of its 
population.43 

 

Considering the relevance of these two lenses to current historiographical debates, 
one would hope to see more extensive use of them by scholars in the near future. Studying 

43 Brian Boeck’s case study of the Don Cossack Host in the Russian Empire touches on all these points. See Brian 
Boeck, Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter the Great (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2009). Additionally, for a more direct focus on ad hoc imperial policies through 
different periods of Russian history, see Kees Boterbloem, Russia as Empire: Past and Present (London: Reaktion 
Books, 2020). 

42 Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 5. 
41 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole. 

40 Official Nationality was an ideology developed by Tsar Nicholas I and Count Sergei Uvarov for the cohesion of 
the Russian Empire. It espoused three interdependent concepts: religious orthodoxy, political autocracy, and imperial 
nationality. For a translation of Uvarov’s original phrasing, see A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated 
Public in Russia, 1801-1855, trans. Nicholas Riasanovsky (Oxford: Carendon Press, 1976), 108. In terms of 
secondary discussions on Official Nationality, extensive scholarship exists. For an up-to-date example, see Valerie 
A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, “Imperial Russia in the Moment of the Nation, 1801-1855” (New York, NY: 
[Oxford University Press], 2017).  

39 Ibid. 

55 



 
 

the use of the term inorodtsy over time in different borderlands would allow historians to 
understand how imperial administrators and Russians in general “othered” non-dominant 
national minorities. This understanding, in turn, would enable more in-depth analysis of 
whether tsarist officials used strategies of “Russification” or “Russianization” to control 
these groups, potentially adding to the further understanding of “Russification” and 
“Russianization” within the historiography. National indifference also offers a promising 
new analytical framework. Through an understanding of the limits of national 
constructions, the lens would enable scholars to better investigate the processes and 
results of these constructions. This, in turn, would facilitate a greater understanding of 
imperial responses to those constructions, thereby further clarifying the line between 
“Russification” and “Russianization.” 
 
Conclusion 
 

The reemergence of Russian archival documents after the Brezhnev era was 
revolutionary for non-Russian scholars of the Russian Empire. Westerners studying the 
region’s history through the lens of the Cold War generally tended not to differentiate 
between Tsarist and Soviet imperialism, thereby creating historiographical blind spots. 
Although access remained somewhat limited to Western academics until the fall of the 
Soviet Union, historians from countries that fostered warmer political relationships with 
the Soviet Union made extensive use of state archives, reshaping the subsequent 
historiography in their wake. Polvinen’s 1984 publication is a prime example of this 
phenomenon. Part of a new wave of archivally-informed scholarship, Polvinen’s work was 
at the forefront of Finnish historiography on the period of imperial rule and the vanguard of 
Western historiography on the Russian Empire. Part of this is attributable to his 
commentary on the concept of Russification. 

 
Russification has long been an opaque concept to historians. The shifting intentions 

and inconsistent applications of Russifying policy by imperial authorities mean that a clear 
definition or universal criteria for identifying the process remains elusive. Since the 
opening of the Russian archives, however, the concept has come to be more generally 
understood as a process that results in the assimilation of a non-dominant group through 
the erasure of its unique ethnic identity. Pearson was among the first to suggest that 
processes of Russification should be viewed as distinct from processes of Russianization on 
the basis that Russification necessitates the erasure of local identity, whereas 
Russianization does not. Though Thaden did not necessarily adopt Pearson’s ideas initially, 
he did provide a three-type framework for assessing imperial policy in the form of 
unplanned, administrative, and cultural Russification. Nathans resolved some of this 
tension by combining Pearson’s ideas and Thaden’s framework to posit that assimilation 
generally acts as a means toward the ends of Russification whereas acculturation and 
integration generally act as the means toward Russianization. Furthering the idea that 
Russification and Russianization were separate policies, Staliūnas found that processes of 
acculturation and integration deployed their own unique strategies, such as “divide and 
rule.” Importantly, Slezkine provided a framework of analysis for understanding why 
imperial authorities applied certain policies at different times and in different places 
through the language and attitudes of the imperial administrators applying them.  

56 



 
 

 
These findings imply that policies were applied piecemeal and unequally in different 

borderlands, often on a haphazard basis. This oversight on the part of previous generations 
of scholars of the Russian Empire is generally attributed to a combination of the 
inaccessibility of the archives as well as the fact that their focus was on a very limited 
sample of highly prominent national minorities in the borderland. From this limited 
sample, scholars attempted to justify overgeneralized conclusions. Staliūnas and Sahadeo’s 
monographs represent a historiographical school that is changing these conceptions. They 
both contribute evidence to new hypotheses suggesting Russification and Russianization 
were separate processes based on unequal policy applications in the borderlands which are 
evidenced by the presence of “divide and rule” strategies.  

 
Still, not all authors of recent works have been completely in tune with these new 

hypotheses. While Hillis’ work does support the hypothesis of unequal policy applications 
in the borderland and the idea of “divide and rule,” her choice not to differentiate between 
Russification and Russianization in her work despite her awareness of Staliūnas’ 
framework somewhat softens its impact, though the work remains valuable to other 
historiographic conversations. It seems, perhaps, that more time is needed for the concepts 
to fully penetrate the language of scholars when discussing nationality policies in the 
imperial borderlands. Malte Rolf, on the other hand, demonstrates that the nuance of this 
historiographical debate is being picked up in some areas of recent scholarship. Citing 
many relevant works and adopting the appropriate language, Rolf’s represents the most 
up-to-date scholarship on the Russian Empire’s imperial borderlands. Demonstrating the 
overall importance of these historiographic conversations and trends to adjacent 
historiographic fields, Victor Zatsepine indirectly incorporates and supports many of the 
aforementioned findings into his own study from an outsider historiographic perspective.  

 
As is always the case with historiographic developments, new questions are arising, 

and new analytical tools are being utilized to generate new narratives. One potentially 
promising route to further understanding Russification and Russianization is to analyze it 
through conceptions around inorodtsy populations over time. Slezkine’s work has long 
implied the potential of this concept for understanding the opaque attitudes and policies of 
imperial administrators toward different borderlands. Nonetheless, this framework is 
contested within the historiography, and little appears to have been done in terms of 
exploring it since the publication of Arctic Mirrors. The framework of National Indifference, 
on the other hand, is much more developed in terms of theoretical background. 
Unfortunately, it has not been widely deployed for analyzing imperial nationality policies in 
the Russian Empire’s borderlands despite allowing historians to interrogate where national 
constructions failed or were underdeveloped.44 There is no time to waste asking and 
answering these important historical questions. Ongoing efforts to Russify and Russianize 
borderland populations today will not wait for historians to understand them, and the 
prospect of accessing Russian archives is the most uncertain it has been in nearly fifty 
years. Though it is certain that historians will continue finding new ways to understand the 
Russian Empire’s imperial borderlands in the future, the time to start is now.  

44 It has, however, been relatively extensively deployed in the study of Soviet nationality policies. 

57 



 
 

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