Nation Building by Andreas Wimmer

Nation Building by Andreas Wimmer

Author:Andreas Wimmer [Wimmer, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691177380
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00


WHO RULED?

Our understanding of ethnic politics in Romanov Russia would be incomplete without a brief discussion of the ethnic composition of the tsarist regime against which these various political movements struggled. Given the lack of political ties across ethnic divides, we would expect that most minorities would not be represented in the inner circles of power, unlike the situation in Qing China. At the very top of the political pyramid, however, the Romanov state was more representative of the ethnic makeup of the population than was Qing China, which was ruled by a tiny Manchurian elite. The tsar and his family as well as the high nobility were of Russian-speaking and Russian Orthodox background. Apart from the imperial household and its entourage, the power center of the empire consisted of the top echelons of the administration and the army. Here, the comparison with Qing China leads to opposite conclusions.

Table 4.5 gives an overview of the religious background of the political-military elite. Unfortunately, there are only limited data on the mother tongues spoken by members of this elite. Since there is a great deal of overlap between religion and language, however, we can draw some conclusions about the linguistic representativity of the regime as well. The more limited information on the linguistic background of elite members will be discussed further below. Leaving details aside, Table 4.5 shows two outstanding characteristics of the configuration of ethnopolitical power. First, Russian Orthodox individuals were clearly overrepresented at the top of the civilian administration. While making up 70% of the population, almost 90% of the 215 State Council members (which advised the tsar on budgetary and legal matters) were Orthodox under Nicholas II, and the same is true of those who held one of the top 568 administrative positions. The army was comparatively more multiethnic: 77% of the officers in 1867 and 85% in 1903 were Russian Orthodox.

Second, in both the administration and the army, Lutherans, almost all of whom were of German background, were dramatically overrepresented. While not even counting 3% of the population, 12% of the State Council members, 7% of the top-ranking administrators, and a full 27% of the generals in 1867 were of Lutheran faith. In the army, the share of Lutheran generals declined to 10% in 1903, a consequence of the Russification policy, but it remained at 14% among the top generals. Clearly, the German minority formed part of the ruling coalition of the Romanovs.

Identifying Germans by religion vastly underestimates their role in the imperial state because only the Baltic German nobles retained their Lutheran religion, while many others had over time converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Lieven (1981) gives a detailed breakdown of the membership in the State Council and notes that of the 61 non-Russian members, 48 were of German origin, and only 16 of these (the Baltic nobles) were Protestant—and thus show up in Table 4.5. Given the dynastic logic of imperial politics, the role of Germans in the Romanov empire perhaps does not come as a surprise:



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