Ministry of Darkness by Lesley Chamberlain;

Author:Lesley Chamberlain;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350116719
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

15

Politics devours everything

Where Official Nationality was extended into a policy for the empire, the strain on Uvarov became enormous. The goal was to contain and unify diverse peoples of increasingly divergent educated views within one Russian state. He argued characteristically that the aim could be achieved gradually, accompanied by gently persuasive policies, but the obvious adverse evidence of reality undermined his position.

He was also in theory on infirm ground. It was a seminal piece of political sleight-of-hand to use the word ‘nationality’ in the imperial context. Purged of its Romantic content ‘Nationality’ meant autocracy. In fact Uvarov’s entire slogan could be reduced to a tautology and the sheer starkness of the imperial policy it summarized was clearest in the parts of the empire where appeals to the Russian church and Russian history held no magic. Nationality was the principle intended to compel the Poles and the Baltic Germans to recognize a force majeur rather than investigate and revive their own roots. Its repressive potential was magnified particularly in Poland, where the imposed system was deeply alien.

Paradoxically … the Tsarist system called for a greater degree of conformity and submissiveness from its wayward Polish subjects than from its submissive Russian core. And it called not merely for blind obedience but for what in a later age was to be called ‘internal censorship’. The good citizen … was taught to discipline his thoughts actively, to cleanse from his mind all trace of personal will. Politics were reduced to the point at which the subject strove to divine the will of his superiors in advance, as a form of spiritual exercise. The Tsar-Otets, the ‘Little Father’, was to be trusted implicitly. … People were encouraged to think communally, denouncing and expelling all wilful elements form their midst.1

Uvarov passed into Polish history as an entirely negative figure.2 And yet his own career was fraught with its own paradoxes, not least that he tried to convey to the ‘subject’ peoples that political conformity would bring its own relative emancipation, as long as the authority of the tsar was not undermined.3

The moderate in him was always apparent, and it pained him to betray that moderation, even to himself. Where, as in the western provinces with a population mainly either Polish or Ukrainian, he found himself promoting Russification in the schools and universities where it was not wanted, he believed he was doing his best to tread softly. As he put it in 1835, he was doing this in the case of the western provinces:

in order not to frighten from the outset minds blinded by continuing and recent mistakes, and above all to win the trust of the region in maintaining these institutions, according to a firm plan, [the idea is] to come first of all to meet those local demands which are not openly opposed to that plan, and in the meantime to introduce without compromise in the spirit and the form of the teaching the main conditions which relate directly to the aims we have in mind.

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