The Russian Empire had become a conglomerate of two very different sorts of empire, each posing its own problems for St. Petersburg. At the same time as the failure in the Balkans, a new empire arose in Central Asia, where Russian generals overwhelmed the local khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva. The first was entirely annexed to the empire, while the latter, much reduced in territory, became Russian protectorates. By the 1880s all of Central Asia was directly or indirectly under Russian rule. In explicit imitation of British India, Russia set out to build a modern colonial empire.
On the western border, the issues were mainly those of nationality, not colonialism. The Poles posed the chief national issue throughout the nineteenth century and, after mid-century, it was the Jews. For quite different reasons, neither Poles nor Jews fit well into the imperial structure. The Poles were seen in the government as a hostile element, and for many government officials the Jews were not able to assimilate and exploited the local peasantry. The Polish revolts and the pogroms directed against Jews added an element of violence absent in relations with the other European minorities of the empire. Finland, in contrast, was quiet and largely loyal to the tsar until the 1890s. Both Poland and Finland were important to a large extent for military reasons, as they both formed part of the crucial western frontier. The economies of both western borderlands contributed to the overall prosperity of the empire, but Russians had few investments there in either land or industry. In population together the Poles and Finns were less than ten percent of the total population of the empire. The largest non-Russian group in the European part of the empire was actually the Ukrainians (about seventeen percent), whose ambiguous ethnicity and national consciousness kept them on the margins of Russian politics until 1905.
The integration of the western borderlands of the Russian Empire had depended since the eighteenth century on the inclusion of local elites in the imperial power structure. The ruling circles of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg were very far from uniformly Russian. Prominent Germans included Nicholas’ minister of finances Georg Kankrin, his foreign minister Karl von Nesselrode and the head of the Third Section, Alexander von Benckendorf. Among the Ukrainians in the imperial elite were minister of internal affairs Viktor Kochubei and the victorious field marshal Ivan Paskevich, the viceroy of Warsaw after 1830. Finlanders were important in the army and navy, and two of them (Arvid Adlolf Etholén and Johan Hampus Furuhjelm) were governors of Alaska in its Russian period. The diplomatic core had several princes Lieven, Baron Nicolai, and a host of others, as did the court and the army. Only the Polish nobility, loyal to its traditions of Polish statehood, held back from Russian service, aside from a few prominent exceptions.
The reliance on noble supporters of the Romanov dynasty, so successful earlier on, had one shortcoming. In the course of the century the development of commercial and then industrial capitalism, however slow by European standards, changed the society of the empire. In the western borderlands the result was the declining economic fortunes of the nobility, the principal support of the empire. Businessmen, on the other hand, in Finland, Poland, and other western areas benefited considerably from the imperial market and were willing to cooperate (within limits), but the aristocratic conservatism of the court and most of the ruling elite made an arrangement with newer social groups difficult or impossible. The Russian empire could not fully abandon its alliance with the local nobilities, nor could they survive without the tsars, and they all went down to destruction together in 1917.
POLES IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The outcome of the Congress of Vienna meant that the historically Polish lands incorporated into the Russian Empire fell into two areas with quite different character and status, central Poland (Congress Poland) and Poland’s former eastern territories. In both parts the Polish nobility did not cooperate in large numbers with the Russian Empire, and instead provided the social basis for nationalist revolt.
The central Polish lands around Warsaw formed the Kingdom of Poland, an autonomous unit within Russia, with the tsar as king of Poland. Its population was overwhelmingly Polish, and until the 1830 revolt, the Kingdom of Poland had its own government, legislature, and army under the general aegis of the tsar and his viceroy in Warsaw. After the revolt was crushed, the Russian viceroy field marshal Paskevich ruled the area directly, with the assistance of appointed officials. Polish émigrés in France and Britain formed a series of revolutionary societies aimed at overthrowing Russian rule, but none of them had any success until after the Crimean War. The eastern territories of the old Poland, today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and the western Ukraine, were quite different in their fate. There the Poles were primarily the nobility, owning serfs of different nationalities whose relationships to the Polish cause ranged from somewhat friendly in Lithuania to quite hostile in the Ukraine. As the townspeople were largely Jewish and thus not part of the Polish nation in the eyes of the revolutionaries, the potential base of the Polish cause in these areas was thin indeed. To make matters worse, these areas were never autonomous within the empire, though the Russian authorities continued to apply Polish law in civil and criminal matters until the 1830s.
To make things even more complicated, the Kingdom of Poland, where serfdom had been abolished by Napoleon, developed more rapidly than the Russian interior. Textile industries came into being in Warsaw, Lodz, and other cities, mostly the work of Jewish, German, and other immigrant entrepreneurs but attracting Polish and Jewish workers and gradually building more modern cities in place of the old centers with their noble palaces and impoverished artisans. Warsaw became the center of unrest in the area. The Russian authorities’ reactions to the new revolt of 1863–64 was to further reduce the limited autonomy of Poland, the policy that came to be known as “Russification.” Even the official name was changed from Kingdom of Poland to “Vistula Provinces” and the school system was henceforth required to teach in Russian. The Russian government enacted reforms of landholding more favorable to the peasantry, seen as a potential counterweight to the nobles. The Polish response to the defeat was a generation that avoided politics and turned toward smaller deeds, the building of civil society through education, even if in Russian, and taking advantage of the booming economy. The irony was that much of the prosperity of Poland’s economy was the result of the huge market provided by the Russian Empire, where Polish goods, uncompetitive in Western Europe, found ready customers. The revival of Polish politics in the 1890s brought new groups into the underground, the National Democrats, a middle-class nationalist group and the various socialist parties, all of whom would play a major role in 1905.