“Russians of all borderlands, unit!”* Russian okraina-nationalists in the late Romanov Empire (1905-1914) * „Russkie liudi vsekh okrain, soediniaites‘!“ in: Okrainy Rossii (9/1/1907), p. 1.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Malte Rolf
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 435681695

With the Revolution of 1905, Russian nationalism as a political force gained in strength. At the same time, Russian representatives of the okrainy – the borderland provinces of the Empire – became more influential in nationalists’ circles in St. Petersburg. E.g. they dominated the State Duma where Russian delegates from the border regions were highly over-represented. Although at first, local case studies have depicted some of these nationalists from the imperial peripheries, their overall impact on the political system in Russia before the First World War requires further research.This project will shed light on the political (self-)mobilization of Russian nationalists from the okraina-territories. It aims at exploring their rise within local Russian communities, their strategies of connecting trans-locally, and their influence in political institutions of the imperial capital.By doing so, the project opens up new perspectives on the transformation of Russia’s political system in four dimensions.First, it portrays the leading players of local political mobilization and identifies their key notions of (Russian) national identity. Building on case studies of Warsaw and Kishinev – two centers of Russian okraina-nationalism – the project inquires into practices of local community building and forms of political institutionalization in the borderlands.Secondly, the project elaborates the initiatives of the radical right to connect trans-locally and to create distinctive okraina-organizations and pressure groups in St. Petersburg. How did borderland nationalists contribute to the political debates in the capital? What kind of strategies of agenda setting did they develop? How influential were they in shaping the policy guidelines of the Tsarist government?Thirdly, the project intends to explain why representatives from the Empire’s fringes succeed in dominating the heterogeneous milieu at the right wing of Petersburg’s political scene. The rise of okraina-nationalists must be told as a story of tensions and frictions that in the end led to the “provincialization” of Russia’s political right.Fourthly, the project highlights those imperial images and semantics of nationalists that shaped the general political discourse in the late Romanov Empire. It explores how activists from the Empire’s margins managed to communicate an image of the peripheries as a homogenous okraina and how they reshaped and monopolized key contemporary slogans, e.g. the “Russian cause”.Combining these four dimensions allows the project to examine the crucial importance of okraina-activists and debates in the context of an intensifying nationalization of the Empire after 1905. Taking a closer look at nationalists coming from the imperial fringes and exploring their imprint on the metropolitan political scenery also opens up comparative perspectives, as destabilizing dynamics of borderland-radicalization can be traced as well in other large-scaled or colonial empires.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants