Russia полностью

Meanwhile the use of Romanian in schools and churches was being restricted in Bessarabia; integrationist policies were reinforced in the Crimea and in Transcaucasia, while in Ukraine what remained of independent institutions disappeared and Russian became the sole language of administration. From the 1880s measures were also taken to stifle any cultural assertion by Armenians, and particularly oppressive language policies — including a ban on printing in the vernacular — were introduced into Georgia, and succeeded in damping down the nationalist movement. But Russification policies were doomed to failure in many areas not only because the multifarious peoples of the Empire varied so much in cultural level, but because the state had been so slow to introduce universal education. In particular, the peasants were overlooked until too late, and they were eventually to embrace the rising creed of nationalism most strongly. Nevertheless, Russification was not entirely without success. Nikolai Gogol, though Ukrainian, wrote in Russian and always saw himself as Russian. So did the historian George Vernadsky a century later. Many Tatars and members of other minorities preferred Russian to their own vernacular because Russian was associated with a stronger culture, and because it gave access to greater opportunities.

But outside the government there were Russians who tried to exploit language issues to promote imperial expansion though pan-Slavism, an idea which used the common origin of the Slavonic languages as a basis for constructing a movement that advocated the common interests of the Slavonic-speaking peoples. The original pan-Slavists were not Russians but Czechs, Slovenes, Serbs and others in the German-dominated Austrian Empire who had gathered in Prague in 1848 to assert their rights against the dominance of German. The movement, though influential culturally, was based on a romantic idea, and too impractical to have much political effect. However, Russian nationalists - particularly proponents of Orthodox unity - took up the idea and shaped it into an instrument of Russian imperialism.

The regime itself did not favour pan-Slavism, although in 1858 the Tsar endorsed the setting up of a Slavonic Benevolent Committee, whose purpose was to promote the Orthodox religion, education and national development among the south Slavs. In 1867 this body organized an ethnographic exhibition in Moscow to stimulate interest in the idea, but it raised more concern about Russian expansionism abroad than it drew interest from the Russian public. ¹⁵ Of more account was a poem called The Eagle, written as early as 1835 by A. S. Khomiakov, a former cavalry officer and religious enthusiast who believed that God had chosen Orthodox Russia to serve as his instrument. The eagle, of course, represented Imperial Russia, and the other, emerging, Slavonic nationalities were represented as eaglets in need of the older bird’s protection.

You have built your nest high,

O eagle of the North.

You have spread your wings wide

To fly deep into the sky

Fly on …

… but do not forget

Your younger brothers!

There are many of them there,

There, where the Danube rages,

Where clouds gather round the Alps,

In the creviced cliffs of the dark Carpathians,

In the dales and forests of the Balkans …

Your enslaved brothers await your call.

When will your wings spread out

To protect their vulnerable heads?

Remember them, O eagle of the North.

Let them hear your piercing screech in greeting.

It will comfort them in the darkness of their slavery

Show them your bright light of freedom …

Their time will come. Their wings will stiffen,

Their young talons spread.

The eaglets will cry out - and your iron beak will shatter

The cruel chains which holds them captive. ¹⁶

The poem may not have gained wide popularity immediately, but it was to be read, declaimed and savoured by the literate classes over the years. The message certainly reached the officials and army officers who made and implemented policy. And it gained particular resonance in 1875, when a crisis flared up in the Balkans.

The chain of events that was to lead to war began in the hard land of Hercegovina. The harvest had been particularly bad, and the peasants rose against Turkish tax-collectors and landowners. The rebellion spread to Bosnia, and received support from independent Serbia and the tiny principality of Montenegro. The rebels also had Russian sympathy. In this way a peasant revolt developed into a war between Orthodox states and Ottoman Turkey The Russian consul-general in Dubrovnik had done nothing to foment the insurgency, but he was a keen pan-Slavist, and did his best to help the rebels by channelling money to them once it started. Since he was also Russia’s agent in Cetinje, Montenegro’s capital, he was well placed to do so, and he was aided by a deputy and two Russian colonels, one representing the Slavonic Benevolent Committee, the other from the Ministry for War. ¹⁷ The insurgency spread further.