Toward a United States of Russia: Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstruction of Russia in the Nineteenth Century

309 Pages·1981·4.851 MB·English

by  Dimitri Sergius Von Mohrenschildt

Toward a United States
of Russia
Also by Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt:
Russia in the Intellectual Life
of Eighteenth-Century France
The Russian Revolution of 1917:
Contemporary Accounts (editor)
Toward a United
States of Russia
Plans and Projects of Federal
Reconstruction
of Russia in the Nineteenth Century
Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt
Rutherford Madison Teaneck
• •
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
^
London and Toronto: Associated University Presses
© 1981 by Associated University Presses, Inc.
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Associated University Presses
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Von Mohrenschildt, Dimitri, 1902-
Toward a United States of Russia.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Russia—Politics and government—19th
century. 2. Federal government—Russia.
I. Title.
DK189.V66 320.^47 79-56853
ISBN 0-8386-3013-8
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface 7
1. Plans for Decentralization of the Empire under
Alexander I 13
2. The Decembrists 18
Nikita Muraviev’s Constitution 19
The Society of United Slavs 24
3. Petrashevtsy and Federalism 31
4. The Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius 40
5. The “Federal School” of Historiography: 46
N. I. Kostomarov and A. P. Shchapov 46
N. I. Kostomarov (1817-1885) 47
A. P. Shchapov (1830-1876) 61
6. Siberian Regionalism 85
Historiography 85
The Reforms of M. Speransky 87
The Development of Siberian Regionalism 90
The Siberian Circles and the Affair of the Omsk
Separatists 98
Siberian Regionalism and Populism of the 1870s 108
Siberian Regionalism in the Last Quarter of the Century 112
7. Mikhail Dragomanov: Russian-Ukrainian Federalist 131
8. Populism and Anarchism: The Federalist Trend 166
Definition of Populism 166
The Pioneers of Russian Populism: Herzen, Ogarev,
and Chernyshevsky 167
The 1860s 172
M. A. Bakunin (1814-1876) 178
Bakunin’s Influence: The 1870s 195
Prince Peter A. Kropotkin (1842-1921) 198
Neopopulism and Federalism in the 1880s and 1890s 204
9. The Russian Marxists and the Nationality Problem,
1883-1900 219
10. The Liberal Opposition and Federalism 232
Conclusions 253
Appendix: Maps of the Provinces and Regions of the
Russian Empire 262
Bibliography 266
Index 297,

Preface
How important was the federal-regional trend in
nineteenth-century Russian history and political thought?
This study aims to find an answer by bringing together plans
and programs of a federal nature advanced during the century
by the opposition to the imperial regime and, to some extent,
by the government itself. The approach has been partly
biographical and partly descriptive-analytical with an em­
phasis on the development of federal ideas and the sources of
these ideas, whether native or Western.
Georg von Rauch’s book Russland: staatliche Einheit und
nationale Vielfalt (1953) covers federal ideas and programs

just prior to and during the Revolution of 1905, the Duma
period, and the Provisional Government. It thus seemed
advisable to limit this study to 1900, since the formation of
major Russian political parties early in the twentieth century
belongs more to the period of the Revolution of 1905 and is
covered by Dr. von Rauch’s book. The arrangement of
material is strictly chronological for the first half of the
century and topical-chronological for the second. Pan-Slav
federal projects have not been included as they have been
dealt with by Frank Fadner, Edward C. Thaden, and others.
In connection with the chapter on Siberian regionalism, I
regret the inaccessibility of the Siberian journals, especially
Vostochnoe obozrenie, as well as of a number of investigations

of the subject by Soviet scholars. This material would have
also benefited the section of the chapter dealing with the life
and works of A. P. Shchapov.
7
8 Toward a United States of Russia
Before the Revolution of 1905, censorship would not have
allowed discussions of federalism. There appears to be only
one prerevolutionary study of the subject, by the legal scholar
A. Iashchenko. It contains a brief survey of Russian
federalism.1 The author’s point of view is that of the Russian
political Right. Federalism, he believes, is not suitable for
Russia; sovereignty must not be fragmented, and Russia must
remain one and indivisible. In the Soviet Union, democratic
federalism has been an even less popular subject for investiga­
tion than under the imperial regime. In a limited way and for
a brief period the subject was discussed just before the
pseudofederal organisation of the Soviet Union was estab­
lished. Basically, Marxism-Leninism has always been and
remains inimical to federalism as understood in the West. In
1930, however, there appeared a monograph by M. A.
Rubach, “The Federalist Theories in Russian History”.2 The
author analyzed from the Marxist standpoint the various
federal projects from N. Muraviev’s to M. Grushevsky’s. He
associated Russian federalism primarily with the borderlands
and the populist movement. The rapid development of
capitalism in Russia in the last quarter of the century
strengthened, Rubach believed, the ties between the border­
lands and the center and “prepared the ground for economic
centralism.”3 This development, he concluded, effectively
put an end to Russian federalism. His attitude to Ukrainian
nationalism is one of contempt. “The new federalism in the
Ukraine inspired by the father of anarchy, Proudhon,” is an
absurdity he thinks, which cannot last long.4
Traditional Russian historiography has always emphasised
the basic unity of the state and paid little attention to nation­
ality, regionalism, and local autonomy. An exception to this
was the émigré scholar S. G. Svatikov (1878-1942), who
approached Russian history from the point of view of re­
gionalism with a special emphasis on autonomy and
federalism. He was professor of history at the University of
St. Petersburg from 1906 to *1917. In the 1920s he taught
courses on Russian history at the University of Paris and the
Institut de Hautes Etudes in Brussels. He published exten­
sively on Russian regional movements, in Siberia, the Don,
Preface 9
and the national movement in the Ukraine.5 Svatikov’s un­
usual approach to Russian history provided a stimulus and
inspiration for this study.
The material for this book has been gathered in the Library
and Archive of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution
and Peace at Stanford University, where most of the research
was done; in the libraries of Stanford and Columbia Univer­
sities; in the Archive of Russian and East European History
of Columbia University; in the Widner Library at Harvard
University; in the New York Public Library; in the Bib­
liothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine,
Nanterre, France; in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; and
in the Bibliothèque de lTnstitut d’Etudes Slaves, Paris.
I wish to thank the following for permission to reprint
material from published works: the Russian Review, for per­
mission to use my article “Shchapov: Exponent of Region­
alism and the Federal School in Russian History,” Russian
Review 38, no. 4 (October 1978): 387-404; Anthony Sheil

Associates Ltd, for permission to quote from George Wood­
cock, Anarchism, New York, 1962 (U.S.A., Meridian Books;

U.K., Penguin Books); Professor Thomas S. Fedor, for
permission to reproduce two maps from Patterns of Urban
Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Cen­
tury, Chicago, 1975; and Professor Marc Raeff, for per­
mission to quote from Plans for Political Reform in Imperial
Russia Englewood, 1966.
y
I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the
Earhart Foundation for a grant which made it possible for me
to do research in various libraries of the United States and
France. Thanks are due to the Hoover Institution for enabling
me to use its magnificent resources and to the Hoover Library
staff for their unfailing courtesy and friendly assistance. I am
indebted to Professor Pushkarev of Yale University, who was
an early inspirer of this study. Thanks are due also to Profes­
sor Emmons of Stanford University and Mrs. A. Bourguina,
Curator of the Nicolaevsky Collection at the Hoover Institu­
tion, for bibliographical advice. Last but not least, I cannot
thank enough Sutapâ of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pon-
10 Toward a United States of Russia
dicherry, India, who typed the entire manuscript—selflessly
and with characteristic devotion to perfection.
I have used the Library of Congress system of translitera­
tion with simplifications: the soft sign was omitted, except in
a few cases where it seemed advisable to retain it; Russian
family names ending in skii arç rendered by y, Polish names
by i; the Ukrainian h is transliterated by g, except in titles of
books and articles, when it is rendered by h.
Dates are according to the Old Style (Julian calendar),
which was 12 days behind the Western (Gregorian calendar)
in the nineteenth century and 13 days behind in the twentieth.
—Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt
Pondicherry, India
Notes
1. A. Iashchenko, Teoriia federalisma. Opyt sinteticheskoi teorii prava i
gosudarstva (Iuriev, 1912), pp. 747-91.
2. M. A. Rubach, “Federalisticheskie teorii v istorii Rossii,” in M. Pokrovsky, ed.,
Russkaia istoncheskaia literatura v klçssovom osveshchenii (Moscow, 1930),
2:3-120. It was written in 1924-25; two chapters were omitted in the 1930
edition, one of which was on Dragomanov. See Rubach, p. 3 fn.
3. Rubach, p. 112.
4. Ibid., pp. 113-15.
5. The following are some of his publications: Obskchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii,
1700-1895 (Rostov-on-Don, 1905)\Rossiia i Don, 1549-1917 (Belgrade, 1924);
Rossiia i Sibir (Prague, 1929). Svatikov’s major archive, consisting of extensive
correspondence, manuscripts, notes, and reprints of articles from various Rus­
sian periodicals in Czechoslovakia and France, is at the Archive of Russian and
East European History at Columbia University. The Nicolaevsky Collection at
the Hoover Institution at Stanford also has a number of items, mostly notes and
manuscripts of several articles.