Graždanskaja identičnost’ i sfera graždanskoj dejatel’nosti v Rossijskoj imperii. Vtoraja polovina XIX – načala XX v. Otv. red. B. Pietrov-Ėnnker i G. N. Ul’janova. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2007. 302 S. ISBN: 978-5-8243-0862-4

Graždanskaja identičnost’ i sfera graždanskoj dejatel’nosti v Rossijskoj imperii. Vtoraja polovina XIX – načala XX v. Otv. red. B. Pietrov-Ėnnker i G. N. Ul’janova. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2007. 302 S. ISBN: 978-5-8243-0862-4.

The collection under review features contributions by an international group of eleven historians of Late Imperial Russia, some of whom participated in the agenda-setting roundtable on “Civic Identity” organized for the VI ICCEES World Congress in 2000 (Tampere, Finland). The editors have compensated for the multiple disparities in style and methodology of individual scholars and their national academic cultures by skillfully arranging the chapters in four parts: a methodological Introduction; Part I, focused on “civic initiatives” (lumping together private or corporate philanthropic activities and zemstvo administration); Part II mostly dedicated to the entrepreneurial class; and Part III discussing the phenomenon of “civic identity” and its formation.

This collection exhaustively summarizes the results of studies of Russian civil society in Russia, Germany, and the United States that had been completed by the new millennium, and thus can be viewed as a benchmark of the scholarship of the 1990s. This is the strength of the book, but also its weakness, as seen from 2012, or even 2007 (when it was published). The conflicting and even mutually exclusive methodological approaches of contributors (as can be seen even in two articles in the introductory part, by the editors and by Lutz Häfner) are formulated in a way very typical of debates of the late 1990s. This was a bifurcation point in the development of the social history of Russia, a parting of the ways.

One path, overrepresented in the book under review, was that of rigid structuralism and epistemological fetishism. This is a view of society as mechanically assembled from distinctive “bricks” and “layers” of social groups (classes, legal estates, nationalities, etc.), and of a theoretical apparatus which appears inseparable from the reality it is supposed to describe and analyze. Hence, fierce battles over the “true” meaning of the notions of “modernity,” “civil society,” or “bourgeoisie”: it is believed that no understanding of a phenomenon is possible without its proper naming, and a good definition amounts to a perceptive understanding. It is likewise believed that “civil society” (or “peasants,” or “entrepreneurs”) is a “thing” properly institutionalized and legally codified: if a public association is formally registered by the Ministry of the Interior, it is a particle of the civil society; in this case, an informal network of solidarity and opinion exchange would not even be noticed. The anthropological and linguistic turns, postcolonial theory and nationalism studies are among the conceptual models demonstratively ignored by this type of social history.

An alternative approach to social reality and the analytical apparatus employed to study this reality is almost absent in this collection, with the important exception of the chapter by Joseph Bradley. Bradley is fully aware of the fundamental distinction between the categories of analysis and the categories of practice. To him, the analytical concepts of “civil society” or “public sphere” are just methodological instruments that are needed to explore the broader issues of political culture. Accordingly, Bradley does not study the “phenomenon” of civil society as a really existing “thing,” but he uses this concept to highlight and interpret certain patterns of social interactions. Following the argument fully elaborated in his earlier publications, he also demonstrates the methodological and historical fallacy of a belief in the reality of some normative (“Western”) civil society or self-conscious autonomous middle classes. The primary target of Bradley’s criticism is the popular idea of “west-östliches Kulturgefälle,” but the deconstruction of the European “normative” scenario also gives new impetus to comparative studies.

The productiveness of this approach can be seen in the chapter by Tatiana Sviridova, arguably the most suggestive in the entire collection despite her abstaining from discussing “big” theoretical issues. She places the debates of the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the institution of local self-government (zemstvos), newly established in Russia, in a broader European context. The Russian case is set against the background of the fascinating story of the “invention” of the British system of self-government by German jurists and historians of law, whose interpretations affected the legal discourse in continental Europe, in the Russian Empire, and, ultimately, in Great Britain itself, leading to a new round of mutual projections and borrowings.

With the exception of the chapters by Bradley and Sviridova, the collection offers a comprehensive summary of older approaches to the study of Russian imperial society, and as such is of mostly historiographic interest.

Ilya Gerasimov, Kazan’

Zitierweise: Ilya Gerasimov über: Graždanskaja identičnost’ i sfera graždanskoj dejatel’nosti v Rossijskoj imperii. Vtoraja polovina XIX – načala XX v. Otv. red. B. Pietrov-Ėnnker i G. N. Ul’janova. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2007. 302 S. ISBN: 978-5-8243-0862-4, http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Gerasimov_Grazdanskaja_identicnost.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)

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