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Theodore R. Weeks. Nation and State in Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. xiv, 297 pp. u.s. $32.00 cloth.
This well-researched and densely written study challenges widely held assumptions about the nationalities policy of the late Russian Empire. What was previously thought of as a master-plan to Russify the non-Russian nationalities of the empire was, says Weeks, hardly a "policy" at all. Rather, we should speak of "the confused, disparate, and uncoordinated actions of the Russian administration vis-a-vis its non-Russian subjects" (p. 5). Far from pursuing a consistent Russian nationalist course, the government reacted to the varying challenges of nationalism and modernity on an ad hoc basis.
Informed by theories of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, the book under review proposes a feasible explanation of the ancien regime's ultimate failure in dealing with the nationalities question. Weeks shows that the "nationalities policy" of the empire was far from modern nationalism: "its primary goal was to preserve the unwieldy, utterly non-national empire" (p. 9). Here Weeks turns to Anderson's (I would add-and Hobsbawm's) idea of the fundamentally antagonistic nature of the dynastic regime and national politics. The "official...