Classroom and Empire: The Politics of Schooling Russia's Eastern Nationalities, 1860-1917.

Classroom and Empire: The Politics of Schooling Russia's Eastern Nationalities, 1860-1917. By Wayne Dowler (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. xiv, 296pp. $65.00).

Russia's rulers and educated public in the late 19th century assumed that their states vast array of non-Russian peoples needed to become more Russian, but the particulars of Russification remained elusive and questions were numerous. How was one to turn "aliens" (inorodtsy) as diverse as Poles, Georgians, or Giliaks (Nivkhs) into Russians? How "Russian" should they become how quickly? And, perhaps most saliently, what exactly was the content of the Russianness whose acquisition seemed so necessary? Did non-Russians have to know the Russian language, adopt Orthodoxy, develop a liking for kasha, and call themselves Russians, or was becoming Russian somehow more intangible, a matter of acquiring a particular sort of "spirit"? If so, could the "spirit" in fact really be acquired? Wayne Dowler's book examines the late imperial debate about Russification as it centered on the problem of primary education for non-Russian easterners, in particular the Mar, Mordvins, Chuvash, Udmurts, Tatars, Bashkirs, Kalmyks, and K azakhs of the Kazan school district, one of the largest and most ethnically diverse of the Russian "East." Dowler's findings about the relationship between "classroom and empire" are not startlingly new, but his work does provide a helpful overview of the complexities involved and offers a useful perspective on why the late empire's road to "modernization" was so fraught with trouble.

The central focus of the book is the strange and curious fate of the so-called Il'minskii method, a pedagogical approach emphasizing the instruction of non-Russian languages and Orthodox religion in the early grades of non-Russian elementary schools. Developed in the 1860s by Nikolai Il'minskii, Oriental linguist, Orthodox missionary, and pedagogue, as the surest way to counteract a perceived rise in Islamic influence among the "small," nominally baptized peoples of the Middle Volga region, the "method" was broadly (though not entirely) endorsed by the Russian government in its 1870 regulations on non-Russian primary schooling and remained, as Dowler puts it, "a powerful force in non-Russian elementary education in eastern Russia until the 1917 revolution" (p.40). It also remained controversial. To Il'minskii and his supporters, Russianness was first and foremost a matter of Orthodoxy and the best way to instill it in non-Russian children seemed to lie through a "moral" Russian education offered not in Russia n, which the children could not understand, but in their own languages. In some cases, this meant in effect creating literary languages out of spoken vernaculars. These literary languages would be written in Russian letters and "enhanced" with Russian loan words, but ultimately the "method" presupposed a pursuit of Russification based on encouraging rather than rejecting "alien" language. To Il'minskii's critics, however, all of this was not just impractical (native languages, even with their Russian loan words, were simply too "primitive" to express "the great truths of Christianity" [p.70]); it was also dangerous because the essential determinant of nationality was not religion but language. The encouragement of "alien" languages seemed tantamount therefore to the encouragement of "alien" national belonging, both of which would inevitably set back rather than advance the cause of Russification.

Educated Russians in the government and the public naturally argued over these matters and Dowler makes clear that disagreements over Il'minskii's pedagogical method and the right road to Russification remained largely unresolved by the close of the imperial era. Yet even with all that, Il'minskii's method did not go away. Instead, it was extended, stripped of its Russifying intentions, and redeployed by the Bolsheviks in pursuit of their own "bold experiment in language planning" in the 1920s (pp.232-234).

For what it is, this book succeeds well. As an informative overview of the politics of non-Russian schooling, both applied and theoretical, it seems to confirm the broad scholarly consensus that late imperial government and "society" had trouble devising effective solutions to the challenges of ethnocultural diversity. If historians in the West seem to agree that primary schooling was one of the success stories of late imperial Russia, Dowler makes clear that it was certainly not an uncheckered one in the Russian "East." As such, the book makes a valuable contribution to the Western literature on late imperial schooling whose major works tend to concentrate on the politics of education in central Russian areas. At the same time, the book is not perhaps as imaginative or searching as it could be. The complicated "East-West" contortions of intelligentsia identity, for example, are not much explored, though they certainly informed debates about the meanings of Russification; there is no substantive engagement with recent Western research on the dynamics of ethnicity, religion, and imperialism in the Middle Volga region (I am thinking in particular of the dissertations and articles by Robert Geraci and Paul Werth); and interesting propositions, such as the fact that Muslim Tatars pursued their own "regional imperialism" within the larger imperialism of the Russian empire or that the Ilminskii method ultimately proved much more successful in the Middle Volga than in any of the state's other "alien" regions, are stated but at best only barely explained (pp.121, 98). There are also some misleading implications, such as the suggestion that the Bashkirs and Kazakhs were only "weakly Islamized" in the late 19th century (see, for example, p.236)-an assertion that repeats the bias of late imperial Tatars and Russians, Il'minskii in particular (p.74), but does not interrogate the meanings of Islam to the people involved. Lastly, readers should know that this is the sort of book that Francis Bacon would probably recommend "tasting" rather than "swallowing" or "chewing and digesting." Dowler has a number of interesting things to say, but his presentation is dry and, because of this, his central protagonists (Il'minskii, Ismail Bey Gaspirali, Pobedonostsev, and others) are not really given the chance to become the "intriguing cast of character s" they are advertised to be on the dust jacket.