“Racial traits are rooted deeper in the nature of the ... · Web view“Racial traits are rooted deeper in the nature of the human organism” The elusive race concept in imperial

GHI-Moskau (English version) Not for citation Karl Hall

“Racial traits are rooted deeper in the nature of the human organism”

The elusive race concept in imperial Russia

Friedrich Maximilian Klinger (1752-1831), the restless Hessian dramaturge who gave the name to Sturm und Drang, did not much care for Russians. In the court of Catherine II this was not an immediate obstacle to a status-conscious Bürger of suitable military bearing, and after sixteen years of service the man of letters rose to director of instruction of the cadet corps in 1801, retiring to a more comfortable sinecure as overseer of the German-speaking university in Dorpat not long thereafter.1 An impressionable pupil in the corps later recalled how the stern headmaster perversely insisted on distinguishing between die Menschen und die Russen, for Klinger “regarded Russians as a kind of separate breed [poroda, plural porody], degenerated from Asian barbarity and superficial European civilization.” Penning his memoirs in the 1840s, Faddei Bulgarin (1789-1859) hastened to convey his youthful eagerness to dispute Klinger’s unjust misanthropy toward the Russian people.2 The renegade Pole Bulgarin (born Tadeusz Bułharyn near Minsk) is better known as one of the founding figures of “thick-journal” culture in the 1820s. A novelist and prolific essayist, the combative Bulgarin energetically cultivated a commercial Russian readership in various venues, and his readiness to court state patrons in service to his literary ends won him many enemies; his peers rightly suspected ties to the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery.3 Bulgarin’s ambitions to shape the self-understanding of readers of all classes extended to history, geography, and statistics as well. After several false starts in announcing subscriptions to the forthcoming publication, in 1837 he finally shepherded into print the first volume of the grandly titled Russia in Historical, Statistical, Geographical and Literary Terms. A Handbook for Russians of All Estates. We need linger on this rather derivative compilation only long enough to establish the mature Bulgarin’s formal position (contra Klinger) regarding the relation of the Slavs (sic) to humankind:

It, like all the porody of the earth, is also divided into porody (races) [sic], while porody are subdivided into tribes [plemena] or generations [pokoleniia]. The difference between porody and tribes is obvious and indisputable. The Mongolian race [poroda], the Caribbean (in America), Negroes and Europeans are distinguished by skin color, hair and even some nuances in internal constitution, in the form of the bones, in the shape of the eyes and so forth. Tribes are also distinguished from each other by skin color, physiognomy and bodily form. The characters of different races and even tribes are sharply delineated and are not effaced by the centuries... Enlightenment and civilization give other forms to the character and natural properties of a people, but the foundation changes only by the crossing of races and tribes... The Slavic tribe belongs to the European race and is the most numerous among the civilized tribes...4

1 Christoph Hering, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger; der Weltmann als Dichter (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966).2 Faddei Bulgarin, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg: M. D. Ol'khin, 1846)., pt. 1, ch. 7.3 Т. Shishkova, “O Bulgarine starom i novom: osnovnye tendentsii sovremennogo bulgarinovedeniia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 88 (2007); Faddei Bulgarin, Vidok Figliarin : pis'ma i agenturnye zapiski F.V. Bulgarina v III otdelenie, ed. A. I Reitblat (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998); Mikh. Lemke, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tsenzury i zhurnalistiki XIX stoletiia (St. Petersburg: Trud, 1904), 369-427.

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There was actually little here that was “obvious and indisputable”—Bulgarin deliberately ignored the formal relation of Russians to the Slavic tribe—while the very ambiguity of his terminology demonstrates the complexity of the historical reception of the race concept in the Russian empire. Wiser scholars than I would not lend much credence to Bulgarin’s confident ethnographic pronouncements—his authorial relation to the handbook is still disputed—but this unreliable narrator is well suited to the fragmentary nature of my story, which examines the interrelationships between many of the tropes treated as established knowledge in his handbook. Race was a promiscuous concept, bandied about by many intellectuals, yet conspicuous by its absence in the making of any concrete social policies in Russia until the tale end of the imperial era.5 Its elusiveness as a marker of the political power of one group over another in the imperial context does not warrant casual dismissal, however. The porousness of the race concept and its uncertain relation to macro-political trajectories is in fact more the rule than the exception in nineteenth-century Europe, so the “anomalous” Russian case may actually shed light on the broader problem.6 As Vera Tolz and I demonstrate with complementary emphases in this volume, racial categories were both more widely discussed and assimilated earlier in Russia than previous scholarship has acknowledged.7 The inchoate nature of Bulgarin’s usage is thus crucial here, as we shall see when exploring the meanings of this expansive and unstable discourse from the late eighteenth century until the early Soviet era.

For much of the nineteenth century rasa and poroda were thoroughly interchangeable, while tribe (plemia) was more often equated with than subordinated to each of them. In our search for the sources of race as a visible economy of difference, to evoke the resonant phrase of Evelynn Hammonds, we need to understand where Russian intellectuals began learning to “read” exterior appearances and interiorize them as signs of something more essential. If the neologism rasa was adopted late, this signals little: scholars in the Russian empire were already up-to-date with closely related concepts by means of poroda and plemia. There was moreover no etymological or ethical turning point when Russian thought “knew sin,” so to speak, with regard to race. If we are to understand its complex relation to the broader racialization of European political discourse after the fin-de-siècle, we must set aside our preconceptions about the principled rejection of race by Russian liberals and radicals, or its superficial and purely opportunistic adoption by extreme reactionaries after the 1905 revolution. Nor, by the same token, can we simply push the genealogy back to the first generation of the intelligentsia in the 1830s, with Slavophile Orthodox religious principle subsequently screening out “alien” particularistic scholarly discourses that tempted early Westernizers. As for the generations between, Russian critiques of (Spencerian) “social Darwinism” (whose Western advocates so often invoked racial superiority toward national ends) have been broadly documented.8 Yet even here we must take care not to flatten the Russian narrative vis-à-vis

4 Faddei Bulgarin, Rossiia v istoricheskom, statisticheskom, geograficheskom i literaturnom otnosheniiakh. Ruchnaia kniga dlia russkikh vsekh soslovii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: A. Pliushar, 1837), XIX-XX.5 Amir Weiner, “Nothing but certainty,” Slavic Review 61 (2002): 50.6 Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial histories and their regimes of truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 183-206.7 Eugene M. Avrutin, “Racial categories and the politics of (Jewish) difference in late imperial Russia,” Kritika 8 (2007): 20.8 N. K. Mikhailovskii, “Teoriia Darvina i obshchestvennaia nauka,” Otechestvennye zapiski [Sovremennoe obozrenie] 188 (1870): 57-98; N. K. Mikhailovskii, “Sotsiologiia cheloveka-zveria (Iz Frantsii),” Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 1 (1899): 142-174; Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley: University of

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its English, German, and French counterparts, speaking about reception, rejection, or mere indifference. Intellectuals of many political stripes and scholarly predilections had recourse to the race concept throughout this period, and we do them a disservice if we assume that race could only have had relevance in regard to a single, clearly defined national-ethnic program. The race concept was also fodder for other universalizing programs in the imperial context. If it was “Russians” themselves who most often benefited from these discourses at the expense of the remaining inhabitants of the empire, we must keep in mind that even the most severe critics of nascent narrow Russian nationalism also employed the race concept at times by means of the Slavic tribe, in order to preserve the “organic” anthropological ties of imperial culture with European civilization.

How are we to sort out the essence of the race concept in Russia, given the “amazing power of this magical word” to give “complete clarity and specificity,” to serve “as the key to the solution of all questions of social science,” in the sarcastic words of G. V. Plekhanov, who was quite hostilely disposed to such tendencies.9 To begin with, there is no mistaking the absence of Russian thinkers, for good or for ill, in the rising tide of Western literature on race and science in nineteenth-century Europe.10 If we confine ourselves to scholarly work on Russia, we find that until recently the focus has been far more on the early Soviet period than on imperial Russia, with ethnicity rather than race as the dominant category of investigation.11 Historian of science E. I. Kolchinskii has recently addressed this lacuna in his comprehensive comparison of Russian and German biology, which features skeptical readings of the most relevant race texts, but is less concerned with their functions within contemporary imperial society than it is with establishing their derivative and unscientific nature.12 With her clear framing of the problem of transfers, Marlène Laruelle is moving discussion of the race concept beyond mere appropriation of “alien” ideas, though we need to cast our nets

California Press, 1988); J. A. Rogers, “Racism and Russian revolutionists,” Race & Class 14, no. 3 (1973): 279-289; Michał Bohun, “Nikolai Mikhailovskii and Konstantin Leont'ev. On the political implication of Herbert Spencer's sociology,” trans. Guy R. Torr, Studies in East European Thought 54 (2002): 71-86.9 G. V. Plekhanov, “O knige L. I. Mechnikova: 'Tsivilizatsiia i velikie istoricheskie reki' [1890],” in Sochineniia, vol. 7 (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1923), 19.10 Herbert H. Odom, “Generalizations on Race in Nineteenth-Century Physical Anthropology,” Isis 58 (1967): 4-18; John S. Haller, “The species problem: Nineteenth-century concepts of racial inferiority in the origin of man controversy,” American Anthropologist 72, no. 6, NS (1970): 1319-1329; Nancy Stepan, The idea of race in history: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: Archon, 1982); Werner Conze, “Rasse,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 135-178; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996); Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Eric Voegelin, The History of the Race Idea from Ray to Carus, trans. Ruth Hein, vol. 3, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Eric Voegelin, Race and State, trans. Ruth Hein, vol. 2, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997). V. V. Bunak, “Rasa kak istoricheskoe poniatie,” in Nauka o rasakh i rasizm, ed. M. S. Plisetskii, Trudy Nauchno-issledovatel'skogo instituta antopologii MGU 4 (Moscow-Leningrad: Izd. MGU, 1938), 5-46. remains a valuable general history of the concept.11 Lydia T. Black, “The concept of race in Soviet anthropology,” Studies in Soviet Thought 17, no. 1 (1977): 1-27; G. A. Aksianova, ed., Rasy i rasizm: istoriia i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Nauka, 1991); L. Godina, M. L. Butovskaya, and A. G. Kozintsev, History of Biological Anthropology in Russia and the Former Soviet Union, vol. 3, International Association of Human Biologists Occasional Papers (Newcastle upon Tyne: IAHB, 1993); T. I. Alekseeva and L. T. Iablonskii, eds., Problema rasy v rossiiskoi fizicheskoi antropologii (Moscow, 2002); Francine Hirsch, “Race without the practice of racial politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 30-43; Francine Hirsch, Empire of nations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Terry Martin, The affirmative action empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). For an anthology of Imperial Russian texts, see V. B. Avdeev, ed., Russkaia rasovaia teoriia do 1917 goda (Moscow: Feri-V, 2002)..

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beyond the canonical Slavophile and pan-Slavist thinkers she addresses.13 Eugene Avrutin has effectively demonstrated the potential of such investigations with respect to the varied imputations of Jewish ethnicity in the late imperial period.14 My own paper goes deeper into the natural-historical background of the concept in part because I believe we should not grant too uniform a role to neo-Lamarckianism as a marker of what was supposedly unique about the Russian position toward race. Natural history more generally furnished a poorly-differentiated disciplinary landscape with concepts and tropes that helped hold together the readerly mosaic of thick-journal culture, yet simultaneously highlighted the constant problem of “translating” ill-formed European scientific ideas into this “mixed” intellectual milieu.15

To date the most successful effort to wrestle with the problem has been the survey of imperial Russian physical anthropology by Marina Mogilner, which provides comprehensive arguments for the fragile dominance of a liberal anthropological paradigm governing the permissible uses of race in fin-de-siècle professional discourse.16 This essay follows in the wake of her path breaking work primarily by ranging well beyond anthropology—whose disciplinary coherence vis-à-vis “conservative” ethnography should not be taken for granted for present purposes—in order to link the race concept to a broader web of intellectual discourses, whether natural historical, philological, philosophical, sociological, literary, or historical. By bringing unreliable narrators like Bulgarin and other figures of uncertain scientific status into play, I will demonstrate that race was not a post-Darwinian borrowing, and that many of the palimpsest qualities evident in its European circulation among folk taxonomy, nation-building politics, and scientific discourse were both present and plagued by the same ambiguities in Russia. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to appreciate that the competing disciplinary discourses and the terminological imprecision evident in the Russian empire are not evidence of a Sonderweg, but of the broader European intercalations of racial meaning since early-modern times. There was no monotonic approach to “scientific racism” in Europe or Russia, but rather what Sujit Sivasundaram has called “a story of recapitulations.”17 As such my story will range widely, although the analysis will not extend to purely political conceptions of race, and will instead be driven by the many instances in which race served to naturalize Russian approaches to the problem of human diversity. What emerges is a picture of race that is, to be sure, a good deal less tainted by moral culpability than elsewhere in Europe. But a wide-ranging intellectual commitment to an ontology of Slavic tribe and Caucasian race nevertheless underwrote a Janus-faced discourse of internal imperial assimilation and European belonging, with Russians (and various Bulgarins) as occasionally ambivalent mediators. It furthermore often essentialized culture as a higher form of existence, because (as one of the lesser Viazemskii princes put it in 1906) “the

12 E. I. Kolchinskii, Biologiia Germanii i Rossii--SSSR v usloviiakh sotsial'no-politicheskikh krizisov pervoi poloviny XX veka (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Historia, 2007), 193-227.13 Marlène Laruelle, “Transfers culturels autour du concept de Race. Lectures de Darwin en Russie,” in Transferts culturels et comparatisme en Russie, ed. Michel Espagne, vol. 30, Slavica Occitania (Toulouse, 2010), 291-305; Marlène Laruelle, “Regards sur la réception du racialisme allemand chez les panslavistes et les eurasistes russes,” Revue germanique internationale, no. 3 (2006): 145-155.14 Avrutin, “Racial categories.”15 M. A. Antonovich, “Teoriia proiskhozhdeniia vidov v tsarstve zhivotnom,” Sovremennik 101 (1864): 64.16 Marina Mogilner, Homo imperii: Istoriia fizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008); “Russian physical anthropology in search of 'Imperial race': Liberalism and modern scientific imagination in the imperial situation,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2007): 191-223.17 Sujit Sivasundaram, “Race, empire, and biology before Darwinism,” in Biology and ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, ed. Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 128.

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higher power of the white race is solidarity, philanthropy, and the labor of all for the greater good.”18 Most Russian intellectuals would not have put it as crassly as Viazemskii, but with respect to the alien tribes of the empire, the vast majority believed in the leading role of the Russian tribe. The normative civilizing impulse was indispensable to intellectuals of all political stripes, for the history of culture, as Andrei Belyi put it, “relies upon the description and systematization of the products of creativity by eras, races, and tools of production.”19 If modern post-Darwinian society was indeed a realm dominated by artificial selection, then its activity would lead “to the making of a race more suited to the cultural life of the twentieth century.”20 None of this was race-as-fate, however. More representative in its optimism, perhaps, was Ilya Mechnikov’s contention late in life that race was merely an artifact that helped identify the traces of our evolutionary past, like rudimentary organs or latent instincts whose existence could not be denied, but which modern social life—properly organized—could successfully transcend.21

I. “These peoples are predestined by nature not to escape their state”: The problem of global human diversity

If early Muscovite princes had ritually invoked Biblical usage in proclaiming that “all are of a single Adamic tribe,” the age of exploration introduced new challenges into Russian categories of humanity.22 Where plemia more often meant the immediate princely family and his extended retinue to the earliest ethnographers of Russia,23 it also acquired the intermediate sense of lineages somewhere between the Adamic and the princely: “Russia is populated by peoples of different tribes (raznoplemennye narody).”24 Narod itself was evidently compatible with the Latin gens, which simply designated local inhabitants, but gave corresponding meanings to English people, to French peuple or nation, and to German Volk in the “pre-national” eighteenth-century sense.25 We should keep in mind that narod (and sometimes natsiia) were simply used as a variety of the human race in the sense of natural history, albeit less frequently than in the first three cases. But as in other European languages, narod gradually lost its genealogical sense while acquiring more modern political meanings, although it retained its connection with tribe (plemia) in the nineteenth century.26 Our challenge consists in accounting for the unstable function of the race concept (poroda) as a category of humankind. 18 N. V. Viazemskii, O psikhicheskoi zhizni chelovechestva (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1906), 223.19 Andrei Belyi, “Problema kul'tury,” in Iz knigi statei "Simvolizm", vol. 1, Kritika. Estetika. Teoriia simvolizma (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), http://az.lib.ru/b/belyj_a/text_0320.shtml.20 V. M. Shimkevich, “K teorii mutatsii. (Predvaritel'noe soobshchenie),” Raboty, proizvedennyia v laboratoriiakh zoologicheskago i zootomicheskago kabinetov Imperatorskago SPb. Universiteta no. 16 35, no. 4, Trudy Imperatorskago S.-Peterburgskago Obshchestva Estestvoispytatelei (1900): 61.21 Il. Mechnikov, “Psikhicheskie rudimenty,” Nauchnoe slovo, no. 9 (1904): 25-42.22 Semen Bashilov, Russkaia letopis' po nikonovu spisku, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1768), 359; Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists versus nations: Eighteenth-century Russians scholars confront ethnic diversity,” Representations 47 (1994): 170-195; Richard Wortman, “Texts of exploration and Russia's European identity,” in Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 90-117; Giulia Cecere, “Russia and its 'Orient',” in The anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 185-208.23 G. F. Miller, Opisanie sibirskago tsarstva i vsekh proizshedshikh v nem del, ot nachala i osoblivo ot pokoreniia ego rossiiskoi derzhave po sii vremena, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1750), 254.24 S.v. “plemia,” in Slovar' akademii rossiiskoi, vol. 4 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1793), 878.25 Christoph Cellarius, “gens,” in Kratkoi latinskoi leksikon s Rossiiskim i Nemetskim perevodom, dlia upotrebleniia sanktpeterburgskoi gimnazii (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1746), 129. See also A. Miller’s essay in this volume.26 S.v. “razhdaiu,” in Slovar' akademii rossiiskoi, vol. 5 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1794), 43.

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In the latter half of the eighteenth century the term of choice for this sense of the genealogical in English, French, and German became race (with minor variations in spelling), though with German in particular there was a similar ambiguity in relation to Stamm (tribe). Nicholas Hudson has described how the early meanings of race and nation, once linked by gens, slowly diverged functionally in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only later acquiring their dangerous modern connections in the name of racial purity at the level of national polity.27 While the Russian case does not track perfectly to the others, this was not due to the supposed absence of rasa from the early-modern pairing: poroda played that role. In Russian poroda included the senses of espèce (in French poorly differentiating kind and species), Geschlecht or Art (German), kind or species (English).28 Just as with its European analogues, poroda retained the meaning of family origin (“from a renowned princely line”) and the meaning relative to the three kingdoms of Nature (type of animal, vegetable, or mineral).29 Another related term, koleno, could conceivably have been favored to sustain a separation between human classification and the rest of the natural world, but by the end of the eighteenth century Russian scholars, no matter their attitude toward the impieties of French naturalists and philosophers, uniformly favored poroda in their researches.30 The term which sustained the connection between poroda and plemia into the modern era was pokolenie (generation), earlier equated more frequently to the level of rod (kind), but more often used as a subdivision of tribe in the nineteenth century.31

The looseness of these distinctions becomes apparent when we consider the Russian translation of J. S. Bailly’s Third Letter to Voltaire (1777) on the ultimate unity of human diversity, where he suggests that “La race des Lapons est évidemment une race dégénérée; leur petitesse fait croire que la race humaine s'abâtardit & dégénere par le froid.”32 In Russian translation this became “The tribe of Laplanders is obviously a tribe that has changed; their diminutive stature forces one to believe that humankind is exhausting itself and being transformed into another species from the severe cold.”33 Vid here, as with the French espèce, is ambiguous, and establishes only the similarity of things within a kind, in a meaning nearly identical to poroda.34 How to combine ethnographic, philological, historical, and natural-historical descriptions in a single narodoslovie (ethnology)—a

27 Nicholas Hudson, “From 'nation' to 'race': The origin of racial classification in eighteenth-century thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 3 (1996): 247-264.28 Christoph Cellarius, “genus,” in Kratkoi latinskoi leksikon s Rossiiskim i Nemetskim perevodom, dlia upotrebleniia sanktpeterburgskoi gimnazii (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1746), 131; “razhdaiu,” 28-52. Cf. “rod” (2d. meaning); “poroda” (47-48).29 In this latter sense one encounters an early use of rasa (about a breed of rabbit) in Osip Beliaev, Kabinet Petra Velikago (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia tipografiia, 1800), 70.30 S.v. “koleno,” in Slovar' akademii rossiiskoi, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1792).31 Prokhor Zhdanov, “Race (stock),” in Novoi slovar' Angliskoi i Rossiiskoi (St. Petersburg: Morskoi shliakhetnyi kadetskii korpus, 1784); J. C. Adelung, “Stamm,” in Vollständiges Deutsch-Russisches Lexicon, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: J. J. Weitbrecht, 1798), 555-556; Michel Parenago, “race,” in A New Dictionary English and Russian, Composed Upon the English Dictionaries of Mrs. Johnson, Ebers and Robinet, vol. 3 (Moscow: N. S. Vsevolozhskii, 1816), 1; Auguste Oldecop, “race,” in Dictionnaire français-russe et russe-français, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Fd. Bellizard et Co., 1830), 456; J. Heym, “race,” in Dictionnaire français-russe-allemand, allemand-russe-français, français-russe-allemand, ed. F. Svaitnoi, revised. (Riga & Dorpat: Edouard Frantzen, 1835), 437.32 Jean Sylvain Bailly, Lettres sur l'origine des sciences: et sur celle des peuples de l'Asie, adressées à M. de Voltaire (London and Paris: Chez M. Elmesly, 1777), 113-114. 33 Jean Sylvain Bailly, “Prodolzhenie pis'ma G. Bal'i k Volteru,” trans. Timofei Kiriak, Rastushchii vinograd 4 (1786): 2.34 S.v. “vid,” in Slovar' akademii rossiiskoi, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1789).

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term which sadly lost out to its Greek cognates—was seldom clear.35 But insofar as ethnographers were gradually expanding the role of “mores and traditions” in their writings, new opportunities and difficulties arose in the categorization of races (porody) and peoples (narody)—and new hierarchies. As a rule historians trace the various concepts of political systems and discourses connected with narod, which most often means the history of autonomous culture in Herder’s sense, separate from poroda as the kingdom of God’s creations or physical circumstances as such. But the division did not come so neatly in its day, and we must take seriously the engagement of Russian Enlightenment thinkers with both aspects as they pondered the dilemmas of “natural law.”

In the 1780s the minor noble, civil servant, and avocational historian Ivan Boltin struck a middle course between Helvetius and Montesquieu, and his familiar mention of “national character” (natsional’nyi kharakter) must be understood in this context, since he was trying to reconcile educational and climatic causes in order to explain the existence of “different kinds of peoples” by natural law. It seems to me that “national” here scarcely grants primacy to modern political meanings, but rather emphasizes the local variation of the zoologist—albeit already with a richer store of ethnographic characteristics for comparison. What is more, claimed Boltin, “national character” is highly stable for natural reasons.36 Shortly thereafter he argues that stark bodily differences between Huns and Russians are not only of very long standing, but are properly understood as follows:

If one can say that Hottentots, Negroes, and Albinos (a) issue from a single root, then one may also believe that Kalmyks are of the same origin as Russians. In a word, the Hun to the Russian, the Hottentot to the Albino, the beardless Americans to the residents of the old world are in no generation relatives (b): [sic] the only thing they have in common is that the one and the other are humans, but of diverse kinds and origin…. I do not venture to say decisively exactly which people the Russians come from….: I only find it certain that after all their mixing with the Sarmatian and Gothic tribes they were made, as it were, into co-tribesmen. Finally their unification and crossing with the Slavs made them diverse from all, and all the more concealed from our searches their original race or stock (poroda).37

This may serve, if you will, as the origin of a dominant trope in imperial anthropology, that Russians ought to be an identifiable single natural kind in the present, but are simultaneously the product of extended mixing that will ever obscure their “true” poroda.

The Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, where scholars generally point to the first scientific definition of race, presented a special challenge to Russian scholars developing a language of human diversity.38 In addition to placing great emphasis on climate as the cause of physiological 35 The term narodoslovie is used in “Opyt iz"iasneniia drevneishikh o Severnykh narodakh izvestii, nakhodiashchikhsia v Irodotovoi IV i V knigakh,” Rastushchii vinograd 4 (1786): 30-44.36 I. N. Boltin, Primechaniia na Istoriiu drevniia i nyneshniia Rossii g. Leklerka, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Gornago uchilishcha, 1788), 6-9.37 Ibid., 1:20-21, 29.38 “Biuffon i Russo,” Vestnik evropy 2, no. 8 (1802): 339-343; “Biuffon,” in Entsiklopedicheskii leksikon, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg: A. Pliusher, 1836), 616-617; “Neskol'ko slov o Biuffone,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 111 (1852): 75-88; E. M. Chepurkovskii, Ocherki po obshchei antropologii, vol. 1, Trudy gosudarstwennogo dal'nevostochnogo universiteta (Vladivostok, 1924), 108; I. I. Kanaev, “Biuffon i Rossiia,” in Izbrannye stat'i po istorii nauki, ed. K. V. Manoilenko et al. (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2000), 120-139.

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differences, Buffon tirelessly mined travelogues of the tsar’s domains in service to his global enterprise. This was much more than a catalogue of the exotic, for Buffon sought a causal derivation from man’s original unified type.39 He went the furthest in his day in trying to establish sub-groupings of the human race, and in contrast to Linnaeus, Buffon was comparatively more inclined to reason on the basis of genealogy than morphology: poroda, not as a problem of taxonomic abstraction, but a purely genealogical one.40 There is no threat to the rationalist unity of mankind here, but tribal variations now begin to take on more systematic normative connotations—as his Russian readers well understood, sometimes to their discomfort. To be sure, Buffon was far from consistent in his usage of race in French, ranging from the broadest possible continental subdivisions according to climate, but sometimes reverting to much more local usages in keeping with generation (pokolenie). (In his translation of Buffon’s “On the varieties of mankind” physician and explorer Ivan Lepekhin adopted poroda, despite using koleno more often in his earlier writings.)41 Buffon’s general hierarchy of species-race-nation had the most lingering influence, but where he referred to “la nation Tartare,” his Russian translators preferred pokolenie to narod (there was no talk of natsiia). Yet in another place, “Pour connaître les différences particulières qui se trouvent dans cette race Tartare,” says Buffon, “il ne faut que comparer les descriptions que les voyageurs ont faites de chacun des différents peuples qui la composent.” Here the Russian translators preferred Tatar tribe and different people respectively. Similarly, the inhabitants of the Maldives (“un peuple mêlé de toutes les nations”) became “this people is a mixture of all peoples.”42

To Buffon the Tatars seemed to have been shaped by the superior cultures of the Chinese on one side and “les Russes Orientaux” on the other, with the “indigenous tribe” proving curiously durable, however, as witness “beaucoup de visages Tartares” among the Muscovites. Lepekhin felt compelled to comment: “Through baptism and by service many Tatar clans have russified, for which reason it is also not surprising that there are Tatar visages among Russians (Rossiane), for these clans issue directly from the Tatar.” Buffon himself remained uncertain whether the Tatars were ultimately a “special breed” (osoblivaia poroda), but regarding Russians it was crucial to the reader that according to Buffon “this people issues from the same blood as other Europeans.”43

In 1795 the third edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s De generis varietate nativa was published, with a Russian edition appearing the following year.44 Following Buffon, Blumenbach famously claimed to have established the existence of five human races (porody): Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malaysian (the last added in later editions). More than his predecessors, however, Blumenbach relied more systematically on anatomical arguments. The Göttingen anatomist was highly esteemed in Russia, where his five-fold continental scheme easily 39 Later Russian naturalists well understood Buffon’s role in “nominalizing” the species concepts: V. Shimkevich, “Transformizm,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 66 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1901)..40 Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére, avec las description du Cabinet du Roy, vol. 3 (Paris: D'Imprimerie Royale, 1749); Phillip R. Sloan, “Buffon, German biology, and the historical interpretation of biological species,” British Journal for the History of Science 12, no. 2 (1979): 109-153.41 Ivan Lepekhin, Dnevnye zapiski puteshestviia doktora i Akademii nauk ad"iunkta Ivana Lepekhina po raznym provintsiiam rossiisskago gosudarstva, 1768 i 1769 godu, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1795), 155.42 Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Vseobshchaia i chastnaia estestvennaia istoriia, trans. Ivan Lepekhin, vol. 5 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1797), 78-80, 113.43 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére, avec las description du Cabinet du Roy, 3:384. Buffon, Vseobshchaia i chastnaia estestvennaia istoriia, 5:83.44 J. F. Blumenbach, Rukovodstvo k estestvennoi istorii, trans. Petr Naumov and Andrei Teriaev (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Vil'kovskago, 1796).

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dominated until the mature Karl Ernst von Baer began to publish extensively on anthropology in the 1850s.45 In the first half of the nineteenth century poroda and plemia remained mutually exchangeable within the bounds of Blumenbach’s scheme—his Russian follower A. L. Lovetskii preferred five plemena of humankind.46 Blumenbach’s primary legacy, the incorporation of cranial features among the defining traits of race, was fully appreciated in Lovetskii’s day, and a broader commitment not to cede the ground of these investigations to mere “speculative systems” was slowly taking hold. Already by mid-century anthropology was acknowledged—in philosophical principle if not in ethnographic practice—as a separate branch of the natural sciences charged with “classification of the various human tribes.”47 When the dilettante Bulgarin included physiognomy and bodily form in the distinguishing features of the tribe, this was already more than mere metaphorical usage, perhaps even more than assertion of the “ethnographer’s gaze,” but rather a limited acknowledgment of the role of the natural scientist. Even the pious anatomist could now defend the idea “that our immaterial side cannot otherwise act than by means of material organs; that the bodily life of man, although consisting of purely material-organic functions which form and support the body, is nonetheless a tool of his intellectual/spiritual life.”48 A. I. Galich, a follower of Schelling, further stressed that “external and internal organs are mutually dependent upon one another. The kind of person one is is the way one’s exterior will appear to us as well, and the way one appears is the way one is.”49

Following Blumenbach, Russian naturalists by the 1830s also embraced the notion that facial angles were markers of developmental hierarchy, with Caucasians at the top.50 Though less severe than their French peers, they largely accepted the proposition that “Natural history, taking as its foundation physical characteristics, alone is able to specify the place that different tribes occupy on the ladder of humanity.”51 Speaking of peoples outside the “European order,” historian Mikhail Pogodin suggested that “these peoples are predestined by nature not to escape their state; the Negro has a cranium in no way similar to the European.”52 With this came the broader conviction that cast of mind was tied to physical circumstance. And while phrenology found few advocates in Russia, as elsewhere it was a direct forebear of craniometry, which thanks in part to Baer became the central methodological tool of anthropology in the 1860s.53 “All peoples (liudi) reason according to the same laws,” wrote zoologist S. S. Kutorga in 1850, “but each nationality (natsional’nost’) has its

45 M. G. Levin, Ocherki po istorii antropologii v Rossii (Moscow: Izd. AN, 1960), 11-13.46 A. L. Lovetskii, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k poznaniiu plemen chelovecheskago roda (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1838).47 “Issledovaniia o negrskom plemeni,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 67 (1850): 44.48 V. Kirkhner, “Kratkii ocherk i razbor sistemy Galia,” Maiak sovremennago prosveshcheniia i obrazovannosti 1, no. 7 (1840): 205.49 A. I. Galich, Kartina cheloveka, opyt nastavitel'nago chteniia o predmetakh samopoznaniia dlia vsekh obrazovannykh soslovii (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1834), 632-633.50 G. E. Shchurovskii, “O golovnykh pozvonkakh vysshikh zhivotnykh,” Uchenye zapiski imperatorskago moskovskago universiteta, no. 9 (1834): 475.51 Étienne Serres, “Publichnye lektsii sravnitel'noi antropologii g. Serra, professora Parizhskogo universiteta,” Otechestvennye zapiski 42 (1845): 30; “Vyvody sravnitel'noi antropologii,” Otechestvennye zapiski 42 (1845): 117-122.52 Mikhail Pogodin, Istoricheskie aforizmy (St. Petersburg, 1836), 14-15.53 K. E. von Baer, “Crania selecta ex thesauris anthropologicis Academiae Imperialis Petropolitanae iconibus et desriptionibus illustravit,” Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg 8, Sciences naturelles (1859): 241-268; A. P. Bogdanov, “Znachenie kraniologii,” in Sbornik antropologicheskikh i etnograficheskikh statei o Rossii i stranakh ei prilezhashchikh, ed. V. A. Dashkov (Moscow: Katkov, 1868), 45-56; “Sovremennoe sostoianie etnologii v otnoshenii k izucheniiu cherepa,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 98 (1858): 7-13.

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own cast of thought, and it develops only when everything related to the thought process takes place unimpeded in that mold.”54 Kutorga held no brief for materialism, but he did regard phrenology as having pointed to a basic truth that would help scholars in reaching judgments about the connections between cast of mind, outward appearance, and tribal suitability to a given climate: “the face of man and his entire exterior must express his internal meaning.”55

II. The cognition of similarity and difference: The discovery of the “diversity of the human races”

The earliest usages of rasa stemmed directly from the early-modern naturalist’s vocabulary, and unsurprisingly found expression in descriptions of Africa. In a section on African man, the immensely ambitious but uncompleted Encyclopedic Lexicon noted in 1835 that

This part of the Globe is remarkable above all for the diversity of the human races (raznoobrazie chelovecheskikh ras). We will present only a general outline of the distribution of tribes along its surface… For now we cannot yet think about classification of the Abyssinian peoples: they probably contain many subdivisions of humankind, the remains of extinguished nations (natsii), or are the result of crossing of different tribes.56

To be sure, the article was largely a regurgitation of other European accounts of Africa, but it serves to illustrate the rough equation of rasa and plemia in contemporary usage, with natsiia still very much retaining the naturalist’s sensibility.

In the 1830s it was the expanded scope of the readerly fare becoming available on the empire’s own inhabitants that first generated further debate about human diversity. Baer famously announced to European colleagues the new imperial resolve to study “the internal construction of man, modified according to tribes and peoples,” and so far as possible “in the anthropological sense.”57 The Imperial Geographic Society issued a popular guide that included a brief resume of contemporary anthropological challenges, noting the recent French and German tendencies toward polygenism, but invoking religiously-motivated English monogenism as well, and awaiting the verdict of further research. Baer himself insisted that “it is as if the fate of peoples and all of humanity is foreordained in the physical properties of a locale; but of course only urges and capacities innate to man realize and develop this fate.”58 A book-length essay in 1850 on the human being in natural history then

54 S. S. Kutorga, “Obshchii zakon poiavleniia, sushchestvovaniia i ischezaniia organizmov,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 99 (1850): 23.55 S. S. Kutorga, “Lafater i Gall',” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 72 (1845): 1-32.56 “Afrikanskii chelovek,” in Entsiklopedicheskii leksikon, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg: A. Pliushar, 1835), 470-472. This volume had an extended prospectus for Bulgarin’s Rossiia appended to it.57 K. E. von Baer and Graf von Helmersen, “Ankündigung,” Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Russischen Reiches und der angränzenden Länder Asiens (1839): 3; K. E. von Baer, Kurzer Bericht über wissenschaftliche Arbeiten und Reisen..., vol. 9, Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Russischen Reiches und der angränzenden Länder Asiens (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1845), 171. The scaling-up of the ethnographic enterprise in the IGO is a story well told in Wladimir Berelowitch, “Aux origines de l'ethnographie russe: La Société de Géographie dans les années 1840-1850,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 31 (1990): 265-274; Nathaniel Knight, “Science, empire and nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845-1855,” in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 108-141.

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established him as the founder of anthropology in Russia.59 For Baer, the ability to interbreed made all humans a single species and race, even as his skepticism about Blumenbach’s outdated five-fold division made the specification of lower-level distinctions much more central to anthropological practice. “[T]oday’s European peoples are not the pure descendents of a single ancestral root, but more or less mixed with the blood of other ancestral nations,” wrote Baer.60 So long as interfertility held, there was no point in talking about different species of mankind, not least because the species concept itself was unclear, as the Moscow zoologist K. F. Rul’e had likewise complained as early as 1841 regarding inconsistencies between how tribe was applied to humans and variety (vidoizmenenie) to animals.61 To Baer it made no difference whether the naturalist’s Sonderung was the product of his expert discretion or stemmed from something in Nature itself, since there were not sufficient epistemological grounds to distinguish the two in practice. “A need to derive all men from a Single Pair governs me not in the least,” he declared, and set to work measuring skulls.62 Baer’s commitment to the spiritual unity of humankind was impeccable, but the new techniques of investigation of the bodily realm proved rather more centripetal in their effects. Despite his own doubts that divisions by race were “inconsistent and arbitrary,” Baer gave his blessing to illustrated efforts to instruct the public in the recognition of national types in an explicitly normative manner, while the “father” of Russian anthropology, Rul’e’s student A. P. Bogdanov, would do much the same thing for the following generation with his anthropological physiognomy.63

Many new peripheral sources of information and forms of reasoning were feeding into the refinement of a metropolitan discourse of similarity and difference for official usage. Narodnost’ (usually “ethnicity” in later usage, but with contemporary links to the nascent discourse of nationality) is by far the best-known example of an attempt to create a category both comprehensive enough for the empire and, just as importantly, amenable to parallel Russian usage consistent with Europe’s own increasing focus on internal differentiation with respect to the rest of the world.64 “The question of the human races has become a burning one ever since we started founding a new narodnost’ for ourselves,” as Petr Chaadaev gloomily remarked.65 N. I. Nadezhdin’s famous

58 Karmannaia knizhka dlia liubitelei zemlevedeniia izdavaemaia ot Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva (St. Petersburg: Vtoroe otdelenie Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1848), 126-128, 230.59 K. E. von Baer, “Chelovek v estestvenno-istoricheskom otnoshenii,” in Russkaia fauna ili opisanie i izobrazhenie zhivotnykh, vodiashchikhsia v imperii rossiiskoi, ed. Iu. Simashko, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: K. Vingeber, 1850), 389-623; D. N. Anuchin, “O zadachakh russkoi etnografii (Neskol'ko spravok i obshchikh zamechanii),” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 1 (1889): 1-35; B. E. Raikov, Karl Bеr: Ego zhizn' i trudy (Moscow: Izd. AN, 1961); Jane M. Oppenheimer, “K. E. von Baer and anthropology,” Folia Baeriana 6 (1993): 97-101.60 Baer, “Chelovek v estestvenno-istoricheskom otnoshenii,” 446, 614, 619.61 K. F. Rul'e, “Somneniia v zoologii, kak nauke,” Otechestvennye zapiski 19 (1841): 12-13.62 K. E. von Baer, “Über Papuas und Alfuren. Ein Commentar zu den beiden ersten Abschnitten der Abhandlung Crania Selecta...,” Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg 8, Sciences naturelles (1859): 345. For the connection with French anthropology, Paul Broca, “Obshchie instruktsii dlia antropologicheskikh izsledovanii i nabliudenii,” trans. A. P. Bogdanov, Izvestiia antropologicheskago otdeleniia Obshchestva Liubitelei estestvoznaniia 1 (1865): 47-134.63 “Izobrazheniia natsional'nykh tipov g. Geizera,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 117 (1863): 97-102; A. P. Bogdanov, “Antropologicheskaia fiziognomika. Predvaritel'nye zametki,” Izvestiia Imperatorskago Obshchestva Liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii 31 (1878): 1-30. 64 Nathaniel Knight, “Ethnicity, nationality and the masses: Narodnost' and modernity in imperial Russia,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: St. Martins, 2000), 41-64. and A. Miller’s essay in this volume.65 Письма 140, 141, P. Ia. Chaadaev, Otryvki i raznye mysli (1828 - 1850-e gody), 1854, http://az.lib.ru/c/chaadaew_p_j/text_0110.shtml.

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definition of narodnost’ should be re-read in light of the above to emphasize his conviction that porody were substantive divisions of humanity and occasionally complicated the specification of “national physiognomy.”66 The temptation is to contrast the imperial natural history of Baer with the Volk ethnography of Nadezhdin, and then map universal “nature” to Baer’s enterprise and particular “culture” to Nadezhdin’s in historical terms. That would be hasty, because drawing neat distinctions between nature and culture as realms for essentialization of human traits would be premature at best in the 1830s.67 Nadezhdin, moreover, was no less committed than Baer to “a single and unchanging human nature.” Although he says in more pre-modern terms that “some peoples (narody) are more vital, hot-tempered, fiery, others are colder, more reserved, more sluggish,” his opinions about the causes of diversity refer directly to the unchangeability of national physiognomy “as a consequence of genealogical origin, as a consequence of inherited continuation of narodnost’,” in some poorly-specified sense beyond relevant criteria about “skin color, height proportions, and other exterior physiological differences.”68

An important channel by which eclectic modes of reasoning about similarity and difference found their way into mainstream discourse was via interaction with the work of Victor Cousin and especially François Guizot.69 Guizot, hostile to hereditary privilege but no friend of the demos as political actor, offered certain attractions to contemporary Russian advocates of rational administration in an autocratic setting.70 During the second restoration in France this legitimist discourse enjoyed a certain respectability in the court of Nikolai I, whose sons were tutored in world history by Ivan Shul’gin, an unabashed imitator of Guizot who claimed the French Minister of Public Instruction as his inspiration for incorporating “the mores of peoples, Geography, Ethnography, natural History” into historical narrative.71 Though Shul’gin made gestures toward Africa and Asia, the main thrust of his rather unremarkable but widely reprinted textbook was to align Russian history with European history while conveniently embracing narodnost’ as a natural criterion of difference: “Nature itself demands this distinction and supports it.”72 Pogodin also advocated Guizot to the Russian public in official venues, while arguing that the French historian’s focus on class conflict as a driver of history had little applicability to the Russian experience.73 If narod and narodnost’ were rather more important to Pogodin in his monarchist apologetics, it is 66 N. I. Nadezhdin, “Evropeizm i narodnost', v otnoshenii k russkoi slovesnosti,” Teleskop (1836), http://www.philolog.ru/filolog/writer/nadejdin.htm.67 Diane Paul, “"In the Interests of Civilization": Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 1 (1981): 115-138.68 N. I. Nadezhdin, “Ob istoricheskoi istine i dostovernosti,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 20 (1837): 158-162.69 E. K., “Filosofiia i filosoficheskaia kritika g. Kuzena,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 7 (1834): 63-84; A. Kraevskii, “Izvestiia ob inostrannykh uchebnykh zavedeniiakh,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 2, no. 2 (1834): 78-92; S. Stroev, “Obozrenie russkikh gazet i zhurnalov za pervuiu polovinu 1835 goda,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 10 (1835): 108-114. On the connection with the concept of civilization in the work of Guizot, see the article of M. Velizhev in this volume and Catherine Evtuhov, “Guizot in Russia,” in The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789-1991, ed. Catherine Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 55-72.70 B. G. Reizov, Frantsuzskaia romanticheskaia istoriografiia 1815-1830 (Leningrad: Izd. Leningradskogo universiteta, 1956), chap. 6. (gl. 6)71 Ivan Shul'gin, Izobrazhenie kharaktera i soderzhaniia novoi istorii (St. Petersburg: N. Grech, 1837), IV, 303.72 Ivan Shul'gin, Izobrazhenie kharaktera i soderzhaniia istorii trekh poslednykh vekov, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: N. Grech, 1833), 27. A subsequent edition received a favorable review in V. G. Belinskii, “review of Shul'gin, Izobrazhenie kharaktera i soderzhaniia novoi istorii,” Otechestvennye zapiski 43 (1845): 21-22. On intra-European differentiation, Gustav Jahoda, “Intra-European Racism in Nineteenth-Century Anthropology,” History and Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2009): 37-56.

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worth noting his conviction that “All these distinctions, varieties, inflections [of peoples] issue in part from the original distinction of tribes.”74 We screen out the vaguely “naturalist” aspect of his conception of tribe because we are too accustomed to reading his work strictly as legitimist politics, hostile to the comprehensive scientism of Comtean positivism.

It was St. Petersburg Orientalist Osip Senkovskii (Józef-Julian Sękowski, 1800–1858), however, who explicitly connected the politics and natural history in Guizot’s work, in a lengthy essay in the popular journal he edited, Biblioteka dlia chteniia (The Library for Reading).75 By dint of his Polish origins and his creative engagement with the real historical and the imagined literary Orient, Senkovskii worked much mischief in contemporary Russian debates about empire and nation, and would often “mock the Slavic world” to the irritation of his peers.76 His journal repeatedly pointed to the unsteadiness of the national identity that Romanticism had to offer to its Russian epigones.77 Senkovskii in turn mocked philosophical system-builders in the face of the burgeoning diversity of human knowledge, dismissing as merely fashionable any a priori tenets about the equality of all people. Is human diversity a consequence of the planet’s physical formation alone? “If not,” asked Senkovskii, “then how do races (rassy: sic) regenerate and how do new species of animals and humans arise?” Senkovskii used rasa and poroda interchangeably as he invoked examples from the animal, plant, and mineral realms to argue that the natural sciences were treacherous sources of analogy when we move to the realm of politics and try to demonstrate propositions like “all men are created equal.” Therein lay the appeal of Guizot’s historical science, for the Frenchman took ideas as gradual and continuous in their development, and—like Cousin—he had the brilliance to turn eclecticism into a virtue, rather than pursuing fruitless system-building.

Senkovskii’s position was manifestly conservative in that he scorned any speculative philosophy as a challenge to established authority, but he was by no means simply hostile to natural science. Indeed, he was responsible for publishing an abridged version of British monogenist J. C. Prichard’s The Natural History of Man in 1843, helping make this style of discourse more respectable in Russian society.78 A judicious nominalism regarding any general conclusions to be drawn “from this chaos of concepts” generated by newly-discovered empirical phenomena suited his purposes well.79 Sensitive to the overweening pretensions of comparative philology in his day, he disputed stronger claims of ethnographic difference drawn from fragile textual genealogies. “All tribes, white and black, red and brown, however distinct they may appear to the eye, originate decisively and indubitably from a single family and a single pair of people,” asserted Senkovskii. “Debates between polygenic and monogenic theories would be as inappropriate today as disputes about the systems of Copernicus and Tyco Brahe. Polygenism hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”80 Senkovskii further affirmed his opposition to the political rationales underwritten by polygenism by publishing 73 M. Pogodin, “Istoriia prosveshchevniia i grazhdanskago obrazovaniia,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 2, no. 2 (1834): 93-104; N. L. Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriografiia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1941), 262.74 Mikhail Pogodin, Istoricheskie aforizmy, 27.75 O. I. Senkovskii (?), “Gizo, kak istorik,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 16 (1836): 1-40., John McNair, “The 'Reading Library' and the Reading Public: The Decline and Fall of "Biblioteka dlia chteniia",” Slavonic and East European Review 70, no. 2 (1992): 213-227. The unsigned essay bears all the marks of the ubiquitous general editor.76 M. A. Maksimovich to O. M. Bodianskii, 26 March 1838, in M. A. Maksimovich, Listi (Kiev: Libid', 2004), 32.77 Melissa Frazier, Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers, and the Library for Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).78 J. C. Prichard, “Estestvennaia istoriia cheloveka,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 61 (1843): 1-53.79 O. I. Senkovskii, “Teorii v estestvennykh naukakh,” in Sobranie sochinenii Senkovksago (Barona Brambeusa), vol. 9 (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1859), 8.

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extracts from Harriet Martineau’s writings on American society, replete with abolitionist sentiment.81 But if “our era sometimes wants terribly to be eclectic,” as the critic Apollo Grigor’ev put it regarding Senkovskii, “every eclectic urge turns out to be unsustainable.”82

The next stage of Russian discussions of race would no longer take a simple Biblical narrative for granted, but a variety of participants would make a more concerted effort to tie the unity of mankind to the unity of knowledge in empirical terms, not so distant from the sensibility that Susan Cannon has dubbed “Humboldtian science.”83 For the sake of brevity let us simply invoke Alexander von Humboldt himself, held in high esteem among Russian scholars, not only for his travels to their homeland, but for his grand synthesis, Kosmos.84 Senkovskii’s Library for Reading already began publishing a translation of the first volume in 1846, where one encounters the famous passage on race:

Assuming the unity of humankind, we must thereby protest against the hypothesis of the division of humankind into higher and lower tribes [Menschenracen]. Upon the earth are found tribes [Volksstämme] more civilized, more ennobled, but not nobler than others. All of them are equally destined to enjoy freedom, which in the savage state is the possession of the indivisible [sic: dem Einzelnen]; in a civilized society—one enjoying political independence—of the entire people.85

Other contemporary translations of this passage also employed tribe, but avoided the ethnological marker savage entirely, taking considerable liberties with Humboldt’s meaning.86 The erasure of the individual here is significant, because its subsequent restoration proved so contentious for Russian progressives in the vein of Mikhailovskii, whose “subjectivism” should of course not be seen as a species of methodological individualism. What might be called the “ethical Humboldtianism” that predominated among Russian thinkers even after the philological basis for Humboldt’s own reasoning had yielded to explicitly Darwinian arguments did not lessen the commitment among various currents of liberalism to some form of regularity linking the individual (lichnost’) and society without giving ontological priority to the former. By the time of Humboldt’s centennial in 1869, this same passage was subtly modified to suit the more liberal political environment:

Standing for the unity of humankind, we must also reject the assumption of so-called higher and lower tribes and classes [sic!]. Naturally one cannot but agree that there

80 O. I. Senkovskii, “Kritika: O srodstve iazyka slavianskago s sanskritskim. Sochinil A. Gil'ferding,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 124 (1854): 5.81 Harriet Martineau, “Sostoianie obshchestva v Amerike,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 30 (1838): 1-90. 82 Apollon Grigor'ev, “Bibliografiia [review of Sobranie sochinenii Senkovskogo],” Russkoe slovo, no. 1 (1859): 46.83 Susan Faye Cannon, Science in culture : The early Victorian period (Kent, Eng.: Dawson, 1978).84 Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, vol. 1, 1st ed. (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta Verlag, 1845). On Humboldt in Russia, N. G. Sukhova, Aleksandr fon Gumbolʹdt v russkoi literature: annotirovannaia bibliografiia (Sankt-Peterburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2006).85 Alexander von Humboldt, “Kosmos (Mirozdanie),” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 74 (1846): 43-138., “Kosmos (Mirozdanie),” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 76 (1846): 69. The original passage (p. 385) reads: „Indem wir die Einheit des Menschengeschlechtes behaupten, widerstreben wir auch jeder unerfreulichen Annahme von höheren und niederen Menschenracen. Es giebt (sic) bildsamere, höher gebildete, durch geistige Cultur veredelte, aber keine edleren Volksstämme. Alle sind gleichmässig zur Freiheit bestimmt; zur Freiheit, welche in hoheren Zuständen dem Einzelnen, in dem Staatenleben bei dem Genus politischer Institutionen der Gesammtheit als Berechtigung zukommt.“86 Alexander von Humboldt, “Kosmos. Soch. Aleksandra Gumbol'dta,” Otechestvennye zapiski 46 (1846): 52; M. Khotinskii, “review of Humboldt, Kosmos,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 65 (1847): 96-97.

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exist tribes more capable of development, more developed, ennobled by higher culture, but there are not nobler peoples? [sic] All of them are equally called to enjoy freedom; freedom belonging as a right, at a time of savagery of mores, to the lone individual; during further development, to the entire people.87

One abstraction—Humboldt’s Staatenleben is replaced by another, the capacity for development, but the latter is not merely an outgrowth of Marx, but of Baer as well. The several senses of development are not distinct here, because at the time plemia/rasa did not invariably force a cut between historical actors and natural processes.88 We know well how important it became to many intelligenty of the following generation that Nature not limit the ability of the creative individual (lichnost’) to act upon history. Nikolai Plotnikov has captured the conceptual dilemma of lichnost’ as simultaneously a (collective) developmental problem and a summons to differentiation from the group.89 Plotnikov’s critique is surely relevant to understanding the durability of Humboldtian race in Russian thought. There were after all an entire series of reasons why P. L. Lavrov thought that the science of races (ethnology) and the science of peoples (Völkerpsychologie) required a closely complementary science of the typology of individuals.90

III. Natural history and history naturalized

In the two decades before the Crimean War Russia’s educated classes learned to cast the empire as a historical space caught between East and West, and largely as a consequence of their engagement with other European thinkers (primarily German), they gradually came to regard its eastward reaches as a deeper problem for the anthropological understanding of Russians and Slavs.91 With good reason, we have subsequently adopted dichotomies of idealism and materialism, historiosophy and geography as dominant modes for discussing Russia’s place in history, because these were the grander categories that gripped Slavophile and Westernizer alike.92 Yet “Slavophile” and “Westernizer” reify differences that were not always so strongly felt by the protagonists, at least in the early days of the culture of circles (kruzhki), when there were basically only two parties of “noble” and “lesser” people, as the Moscow historian Timofei Granovskii put it to Ivan Kireevskii in 1845 about their relation to the editor of Library for Reading and similar figures.93 “[Senkovskii’s] criticism constantly strove… to destroy the authority of the author,” which was no

87 A. S--kii, “Aleksandr von Gumbol'dt,” Vestnik evropy, no. 12 (1870): 799.88 As discomfittingly recognized by K. N. Leont'ev, “Vizantizm i slavianstvo,” in Vostok, Rossiia i Slavianstvo: Filosofskaia i politicheskaia publitsistika (Moscow: Respublika, 1996), 125-129.89 Nikolai Plotnikov, “Ot 'individual'nosti' k 'identichnosti' (istoriia poniatii personal'nosti v russkoi kul'ture),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 91 (2008), http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/.90 P. L. Lavrov, “Antropologicheskie etiudy,” Otechestvennye zapiski [Sovremennoe obozrenie] 2, no. 6 (1868): 480-483.91 Ana Siljak, “Between East and West: Hegel and the origins of the Russian dilemma,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 335-358.92 For historiosophy, Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)., for geography, Mark Bassin, “Russia between Europe and Asia: The ideological construction of geographical space,” Slavic Review 50 (1991): 1-17; Imperial visions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).93 Грановский Киреевскому, 1845, F. F. Nelidov, ed., Zapadniki 40-kh godov: N. V. Stankevich, V. G. Belinskii, A. I. Gertsen, T. N. Granovskii i dr. (Moscow: I. D. Sytin, 1910), 244-247.

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help to the scholar in search of the universal elements of world history, with Europe and Asia as resurgent categories for comparison.94

The early Slavophiles were not immune from problems of classification as they sought rationales for Russia’s place in history. In his early attempts to formulate a historiosophy, A. S. Khomiakov did not so much emphasize the instability of the East-West dichotomy for Russians as he inverted its Hegelian premises, with “Eastern” Russia still the noble outcome of a world-historical trajectory.95 Yet his Notes on World History nonetheless embrace the idea that man possesses “marks transmitted unchanged from generation to generation, [which] serve as the basis of division of all humanity into several tribes distinct from one another.” If his idealist dualism conventionally privileged the higher life of the mind, it is nonetheless striking that states and faiths were not the only foundations for Khomiakov’s world history: tribe, too, he asserted, deserved careful study, and not just at the continental-geographical level. “Division by the contingent borders of societies changes constantly, and division by confessions will disappear entirely,” acknowledged Khomiakov, while “division by tribes will probably remain forever,” and what is more, “the white tribe surpasses all the others in all respects.” Although Khomiakov was reasoning more philologically than physiologically, his modern stance consists in the assertion that Germans and Slavs are “porody of white peoples,” while the Slavic family “retains its original traits in rather greater purity than the Germans.” And pity the Poles for diluting their true Slavic character through mixing with Celts!96 Khomiakov, whose English was superb, spoke elsewhere of both “the German race” and “the more potent German nations (Allemans and Francs)” in a manner which his editors later plausibly translated as plemia in both instances.97

The “naturalization” of historical discourse with respect to imperial diversity both preceded Darwin and cut across the divide between Hegelianism and geographical determinism. The mediating figures in this European discourse were Guizot’s contemporaries, the brothers Augustin and Amédée Thierry, and the German classical historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, with Granovskii (1813-1855) as their crucial interlocutor.98 While developing the general history curriculum at Moscow University in the 1840s, Granovskii did a great deal to inspire a younger generation of historians to adopt critical methods that included aspects of Niebuhr’s work.99 Niebuhr offered not so much a post-Enlightenment historicist alternative to Hegel and Schelling, so much as he articulated a conservative synthesis of Enlightenment thought that incorporated ethnography and philology into historical method.100 Although he was largely swept aside among Russian scholars by

94 L., “O polonizme v russkoi literature tridtsatykh godov,” Otechestvennye zapiski 159 (1865): 81.95 Siljak, “Between East and West,” 355.96 A. S. Khomiakov, Zapiski o vsemirnoi istorii, vol. 1, 3rd ed., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, v. 5 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900), 5-13, 123.97 A. S. Khomiakov to the reverend G. Williams, 14 January 1846, A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900), 453.98 For the French context, M. Seliger, “Race-thinking during the Restoration,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 2 (1958): 273-282.99 N. Kareev, Istoricheskoe mirosozertsanie T. N. Granovskago, 3rd ed. (Moscow: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1905); M. N. Petrov, Lektsii po vsemirnoi istorii, ed. A. N. Derevitskii, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: V. Berezovskii, 1907); P. N. Miliukov, Glavnye techeniia russkoi istoricheskoi mysli, 3rd ed. (St. Petersburg: M. V. Averianov, 1913).100 Peter Hanns Reill, “Barthold Georg Niebuhr and the Enlightenment tradition,” German Studies Review 3 (1980): 9-26.

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German Romantic currents of thought, Niebuhr’s work came to be understood as a golden mean between history as metaphysics and history as an abstract theory of natural development.101

An important respect in which Niebuhr “naturalized” history was his diminution of moral conflict as a driving element in narratives of ancient Rome. Tribal animosities were the stuff of nature, not proxies for virtue and vice in the telling of history. "Es scheint der Gang der Weltgeschichte zu seyn,“ as he put it in an unusually blunt passage, „daß Eroberungen und vielfache Vermischung die ursprünglich zahllosen Stämme in einander schmelzen, und die welche dieser Verschmelzung unfähig sind, austilgen." [The course of world history appears to be that conquests and repeated mixing dissolve the countless original tribes into one another, and exterminate those not able to assimilate.]102 Weltgeist could be reconciled with natural history, as one educator put it in the year of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, citing Niebuhr as critical inspiration.103 To a later general historian, Niebuhr was rather the Cuvier of historiography.104 Disaggregation and reassembly, comparison and contrast in the manner of the anatomist provided more attractive natural historical analogies to historians unsatisfied with the legal historical school’s reliance on national spirit.105 Beginning with Granovskii, Russian historians hesitatingly began to grapple with tribal differences of peoples, and some of them hoped to draw upon the natural sciences in order to make their methods more rigorous.106 “For the historian, for example, the difference of human races exists as a kind of given of nature, fated, inexplicable in either its causes or its consequences,” explained Granovskii in the pages of Sovremennik (The Contemporary). “One can guess that this difference is found in close connection with the principle (nachalo) of nationalities…” and physiology would be able to lead us to the corresponding regularities.107

The Thierry brothers were notable for grappling with the historical function of “nation” in post-revolutionary France, nominally egalitarian and aggressively assimilationist. Briefly put, the Thierrys made race—as distinct from nation—function as “an important political statement about the right to social difference” in a setting where universal civic principles looked like they might not serve as historical apotheoses after all.108 The French physiologist William Milne Edwards in turn worried that the Thierrys relied too heavily on old-fashioned climatic explanations of diversity, and in 1829 he published a letter, “Des caractères physiologiques des races humaines”, which Granovskii translated a generation later.109 Granovskii used poroda and plemia interchangeably, and

101 T. N. Granovskii, “Bartol'd Georg Nibur,” in Sochineniia, vol. 2 (Moscow: V. Got'e, 1856), 3-50.102 Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1811), 15. Hannaford (238) quotes this passage, translating “Stamm“ as “race.” 103 V. Vodovozov, “Sushchestvuet-li teoriia Slovesnosti i pri kakikh usloviiakh vozmozhno eia sushchestvovanie?,” Russkoe slovo, no. 3 (1859): 6.104 M. N. Petrov, “Ob otnoshenii istoricheskikh nauk k estestvoznaniiu,” in Lektsii po vsemirnoi istorii, ed. A. N. Derevitskii, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: V. Berezovskii, 1907), 395.105 Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriografiia, 289-312.106 Kareev, Istoricheskoe mirosozertsanie T. N. Granovskago, 30.107 T. N. Granovskii, “Istoricheskaia literatura vo Frantsii i Germanii v 1847 godu,” in Sochineniia, vol. 2 (Moscow: V. Got'e, 1856), 241-242.108 Lisa Moses Leff, “Self-definition and self-defense: Jewish racial identity in nineteenth-century France,” Jewish History 19 (2005): 13. See also Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).109 William Milne Edwards, Des caractères physiologiques des races humaines considérés dans leurs rapports avec l'histoire; lettre a M. Amédée Thierry (Paris: Compère Jeune, Libraire, 1829); O fiziologicheskikh priznakakh chelovecheskikh porod i ikh otnoshenii k istorii, trans. T. N. Granovskii (Moscow: Aleksandr Semen, 1852).

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approved of Edwards’ caution about the urge to impute moral properties to separate human races, while emphasizing Edwards’ conclusion about the relative stability of races. We must keep in mind that Granovskii was no mere precursor to Dmitrii Pisarev’s aggressive positivism, and by no means rejected the humanist legacy, but was engaged in a very local struggle to wrest Russian historical practice away from the hands of litterateurs and exegetes of a nationalist bent, and to rely on more than philology and jurisprudence for new methods. For Granovskii, Edwards was completing the argument implicit in Niebuhr by showing the relation between physiology and history. “Acting as one with anthropology, [history] must mark out the bounds which the great races of humanity have attained and show us their distinguishing properties, given by nature and manifested in the movement of events.”110

Granovskii’s strongest critic was his own student and colleague, P. N. Kudriavtsev (1816-1858), who objected to the element of determinism which the projection of world history onto nature seemed to impose on our concept of “event”. Yet it was geographical rather than physiological explanation that was ultimately more worrisome to him and other observers, for despite their elusive origins, physiological distinctions between groups were by now taken as constantly acting elements in history. The standard (European) strategy was simply to argue that their manifestations were strongest at earlier stages of human history, only to be moderated by the acquisition of civilized status. Kudriavtsev, it should be noted, is the one who introduced the neologism rasa instead of poroda into the discussion, for which he was faulted for using superfluous foreign words (kul’tura and faza as well).111

III. On the significance of colonization and race in history

Granovskii’s Moscow colleague S. M. Soloviev (1820–1879), best known for his massive History of Russia from Earliest Times (begun in 1851), is seldom acknowledged as a student of world history, who regarded Guizot as the inspiration for the comparative method, and who subscribed to a “positivist” view of progress even before the appearance of Henry Thomas Buckle’s immensely popular History of Civilization in England (1857).112 While his magnum opus famously stressed that “the course of events is constantly subordinated to natural conditions,” its geographical explanations of the unfavorable hand dealt to Russia by Stepmother-Nature did not reach much beyond Montesquieu, and estate quickly displaced tribe as an explanatory category.113 Buckle’s Russian translator, St. Petersburg historian K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, readily grasped Soloviev’s engagement with world history, however, and reminded his readers that understanding the influence of natural conditions was central to grasping the role of colonization in Russian history.114 Manuscript empiricism and state-centered narrative were yielding to “the physiology and even pathology of 110 T. N. Granovskii, “O sovremennom sostoianii i znachenii vseobshchei istorii,” in Sochineniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: V. Got'e, 1856), 13.111 “Peterburgskii vestnik,” Panteon 8, no. 4 (1853): 3-4; “Russkaia literatura v 1853 godu. Stat'ia tret'ia i posledniaia,” Otechestvennye zapiski 93 (1854): 1-28.112 Ana Siljak, “Christianity, science, and progress in Sergei M. Solov'ev's History of Russia,” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 215-238.; Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriografiia, 312-342; Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 2nd ed. (Princeton: D. van Nostrand Co., 1958), 98-106.113 S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1959), 60., S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vol. 13 (Moscow, 1962), 8-13.114 On Bestuzhev, A. V. Malinov, K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin: Ocherk teoretiko-istoricheskikh i filosofskikh vzgliadov (St. Petersburg: Izd. SPU, 2005), 123-124.

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society” as historians sought to emulate Buckle’s search for law-like historical explanations, and in the case of the Great Russian tribe, which had taken up many alien elements, it turned out that “specifying the qualitative meaning of these admixtures was a task entirely worthy of the historian.”115 Soloviev’s mild geographical determinism did not quite satisfy Bestuzhev-Riumin’s desire for a more scientific explanation of a central fact of Russian history:

The fact of colonization as not aggressive, but peaceful, [the fact] of peaceful assimilation of non-Slavic tribes, their subjugation to Slavic-Russian forms of civilization [grazhdanstvennost’] and at the same time the mixtures, the blendings with them and even to a certain degree concessions to them, is obviously the distinguishing feature of Russian history, so that the closer we look at it, the more brightly this fact appears.116

Soloviev’s methodological response to Bestuzhev-Riumin is effectively found in a series of essays entitled “Observations on the historical life of peoples” (1868–1876).117 In keeping with the sensibilities of many contemporary European historians, he saw three basic forces at work: climate, “national physiognomy” with its complex of innate capacities, and education (vospitanie), the formative power of social, religious, and political influences shaping the mental and physical development of a people at any given moment in history. When Soloviev spoke of the nature of the tribe, tribe served as the operative term in the standard five-fold division of humankind, with Aryan rather than Caucasian as the label for the dominant tribe by this point. The singular confluence of natural, tribal, and historical conditions that had ultimately enabled the dominance of the ancient European peoples over their eastern rivals eventually accumulated such a store of advantages that the renewed dominance of modern Europeans over the other Blumenbachian races now seemed truly insurmountable. With a tinge of regret Soloviev wrote,

But we do not have any right to say that further movement is possible amid deterioration of these conditions, that the Mongolian, Malaysian, and Negro tribes can copy from the Aryan tribe the business of civilization and carry it further. We acknowledge love and respect toward the Mongols, very fine sentiment toward the Malaysians and Negroes, we only declare that we cannot introduce the result of this sentiment into science, for it is not based on observations, on established fact.

This was no casual European triumphalism, however, for Soloviev was quick to add that the modern European peoples—of whom the Slavs were a part—were not the inevitable continuers of civilization. Soloviev deliberately adopted the tone of the modest observer merely reporting hard-won empirical conclusions, however, and did not venture any alternative future scenarios of development. The climatic conditions acting on the tribe were strictly analogous to those acting on the individual, but by the same token, the nature of the tribe had little to do with Hegel’s idealist “geographic foundation of world history” that had once fascinated the youthful Soloviev. As with the individual, it was constrained by the capacities with which it was born. Though he was careful

115 K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, “review of Solov'ev's Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vols. I-IX,” Otechestvennye zapiski 132 (1860): 3, 20.116 K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, “Sovremennoe sostoianie russkoi istorii, kak nauki,” Moskovskoe obozrenie, no. 1 (1859): 121-122. For a concise survey of the colonization problem in Russian and Soviet historiography, Sándor Szili, “A „kolonizáció” problematikája az orosz és a szovjet historiográfiában,” Világtörténet (2000): 3-22.117 S. M. Solov'ev, “Nabliudeniia nad istoricheskoi zhizn'iu narodov,” Vestnik evropy 3, no. 11 (1868): 676-707. et seq.

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not to privilege tribe over climate or education, Soloviev was consciously rendering it markedly more biological in its historical meaning.

The sources of Soloviev and Bestuzhev-Riumin’s comparatively mild musings were several, not least the fact that the scholarly dialogue of the two capitals was no longer sufficient. Elena Vishlenkova has highlighted the nascent role of Kazan University in the 1830s as a self-conscious mediator between “East and West”, describing in a recent essay the abortive but fascinating attempt by V. Ia. Bulygin (1789-1838) to persuade the university to pursue “thorough observation of the national tribes” of Kazan in the spirit of the Thierry brothers (and taking into account Edwards’ criticism).118 The first Russian survey of anthropology by a natural scientist was also published in Kazan in 1839 by professor of physiology V. F. Bervi (1792-1859), who, by contrast, composed his work more in the vein of the Reverend William Paley marveling at the “fit” between man and his environment, than with any evident concern for the conflictual currents of French thought.119 Kazan was the starting point as well for many of the key figures who went on to found Oriental studies.120 Commenting on Alexander Herzen’s famous sentiment about the metaphorical passage from West to East in Kazan, Robert Geraci identifies the Romantic legacy that “treated different lands and peoples as embodiments of philosophical principles in and of themselves”.121 What we find in our pursuit of the race concept is that these “embodiments” were becoming more than metaphorical—or perhaps rather: multiply metaphorical—because of the gradual appearance of indigenous Objects as scholarly Subjects teaching in the Russian university, and because these same philosophical principles could not keep up with the burgeoning empirical realities of the colonial enterprise.

It was Granovskii’s successor and former student, S. V. Eshevskii (1829-1865), who first attempted to place the colonization question in an ethnographic framework that made tribal explanations scientifically respectable to historians. While teaching in Kazan in the mid-1850s, Eshevskii began incorporating materials from the Ethnographic Museum in his lectures.122 If the autonomy of the Russian people in the population of the northeast was crucial to Eshevskii, the methodological examples of Nibuhr and Edwards nonetheless reminded him how difficult (though vital!) it was to attribute ethnic traits to a given people. “We find few pure races on the stage of history,” Eshevskii emphasized, but the colonizing role of Russians was evidently noble in its obscurity: “In embracing foreign tribes, transforming them into its flesh and blood, the Russian tribe stamped upon them the indelible mark of Europeanism, opening up for them the chance to participate in the historical movement of the European peoples.”123 Eshevskii likewise referred to the “mildness of Slavic culture, which was not exclusive, which did not look with enmity upon foreign kinds (chuzherodtsy),” but he regretted that Russian missionaries now found themselves forced “to be 118 Elena Vishlenkova, “Chelovecheskoe raznoobrazie v lokal'noi perspektive: 'Bol'shie teorii' i empiricheskie znaniia (Kazan', pervaia polovina XIX veka),” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2009): 265.119 V. F. Bervi, “Osnovnye nachala antropologii,” Uchenye zapiski imperatorskogo kazanskogo universiteta, no. 1 (1839): 3-128; “Osnovnye nachala antropologii,” Uchenye zapiski imperatorskogo kazanskogo universiteta, no. 4 (1839): 3-81.120 Vera Tolz, “European, national, and (anti-)imperial: The formation of academic oriental studies in late tsarist and early Soviet Russia,” Kritika 9, no. 1 (2008): 53-81., David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientialism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).121 Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 5.122 K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, “Stepan Vasil'evich Eshevskii. Biograficheskii ocherk,” in Sochineniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: K. Soldatenkov, 1870), LI-LII.123 S. P. Eshevskii, “Russkaia kolonizatsiia severovostochnago kraia,” Vestnik evropy 1, no. 1 (1866): 215, 217.

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historians of a tribe disappearing before their eyes.” To Eshevskii’s eyes Russian colonization was not having the pernicious effects that were already becoming apparent among the indigenous peoples of America and the Pacific islands after contact with Europeans. “It is possible,” wrote Eshevskii in 1857, “much depends on the natural conditions of the Slavic race that has served as mediator.” Certainly Eshevskii did not invoke “different orders of creation” in the manner of so many early European missionary accounts, and “assimilation” (sliianie) in Russian usage perhaps leaves a milder impression than other European discourses of the day.124 Yet there is no mistaking the brutal historical imperative to the “uncivilized” tribes of the empire: regenerate or be destroyed (pererodit’sia ili unichtozhit’sia). “The Russian tribe does not act destructively on other nationalities (narodnosti),” Eshevskii reassured his readers, “it takes them into itself, if they do not have the conditions of independent development of existence.”125

It is most likely geographers who began mixing poroda and rasa in the ethnographic work read by Eshevskii.126 Rasa was becoming standard vocabulary for Russian geographers interacting with European colleagues like the tireless Dresden collector Gustav Klemm, author of General Cultural History of Humanity (1843-1852), an early attempt to synthesize world history based on the race concept.127 One could venture that the tipping point in terms of familiarity among the literate public was crossed in about 1859, when one lexicographer assembling a dictionary of foreign terms reasoned that rasa was a word not used exclusively by specialists, but not already taken for granted by lay readers; he equated it with both plemia and poroda.128 As for Klemm, he saw the symbiosis of “active” and “passive” races as the central dynamic of world history, with amalgamation leading eventually to more egalitarian futures further up the hierarchy of civilizations.129 Since Klemm cast the Slavic tribe as “passive”, he did not win other Russian advocates, even as his underlying assumptions were slowly being taken up. “Everyone well understands that one cannot assert a priori whether a given human race is capable of development or not,” assured one critic. “First one has to present it with the freedom to develop, and then pronounce judgment.”130 Eshevskii became the best interpreter of Klemm (whom he visited in 1860), because he transformed the “passivity” of the Russians into the more acceptable role of mediator.131

Eshevskii soon moved beyond Klemm, however, urging his Moscow students in the early 1860s to attend more closely to man’s relation to nature, which “turned out to be not nearly as powerless has it might have looked in the initial burst of abstraction.” The only Russian intellectual of note to pay

124 Konstantin Ushinskii, “Kritika,” Sovremennik 40 (1853): 62. is an early invocation of the benefits of mixing for the dominant tribe.125 S. P. Eshevskii, “Missionerstvo v Rossii,” in Sobranie po russkoi istorii (Moscow: M. i S. Sabashnikov, 1900), 337, 340-341, 361.126 The earliest instance of a Russian geographer adopting the new term is perhaps K. F. Neumann, Afganistan i anglichane v 1841 i 1842 godakh, trans. P. V. Golubkov (Moscow: V. Got'e, 1848), 136..127 “Korrespondentsiia,” Vestnik imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva 22 (1858): 79-80; A. N--v, “Zadachi istorika tsivilizatsii,” Vestnik evropy 4, no. 3 (1869): 330-351; P. L. Lavrov, “Tsivilizatsiia i dikiia plemena (III),” Otechestvennye zapiski 186 (1869): 93-128.128 A. S., “rassa,” in Ob"iasnenie 1000 inostrannykh slov, upotrebliaiushchikhsia v russkom iazyke (Moscow: L. Stepanova, 1859), 121; V. N. Uglov, “rasa,” in Ob"iasnitel'nyi slovar' inostrannykh slov upotrebliaemykh v russkom iazyke (St. Petersburg: Eduard Veimar, 1859), 157. Ivan Pavlovskii, “rasa,” in Vollständiges Russisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2 (Riga: N. Kimmel, 1859), 254. 129 Voegelin, Race and State, 2:157-174.130 Mikh. Mikhailov, “Zhenshchiny. Ikh vospitanie i znachenie v sem'e i obshchestve,” Sovremennik 82 (1860): 336.131 S. P. Eshevskii, “Pis'ma iz-za granitsy,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 130 (1860): 352.

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any mind to the works of the American polygenists (Morton, Nott, Agassiz), Eshevskii kept some distance from their stronger claims, but became ever more persuaded of the “remarkable stability of tribal character.” Eshevskii insisted that the mixing of races, and not their purity, was the more important problem for the historian, since the “[m]ain historical peoples, having successively been representatives of civilization, cannot be celebrated for the purity of origin.”132 Thus the world-historical tribal role of Russians was not unique vis-à-vis Germans, French, or English, yet their mastery of mixing constituted a “victory of European civilization” that would remain an important trope for the next generation of ethnographers.133

It was the Kazan (and, briefly, St. Petersburg) historian A. P. Shchapov (1830–1876) who made the most concerted effort to emulate both Buckle and Darwin’s newly available Origin of Species when writing the history of Russian imperial expansion. (Bestuzhev-Riumin claims that it was Eshevskii who introduced the young Shchapov to ethnography.)134 Shchapov is generally credited as one of the first historians to attempt a history of the Russian lands without the Muscovite state as the prime mover, and with the native peoples as participants in that same history.135 His modest Siberian origins, his mixed ethnic background—his mother was Buryat—and especially his youthful enthusiasm for the historical role of the peasant commune helped make him a favorite among the populists.136 But it is his advocacy of a Darwinian view of Siberian Russia that concerns us here—and it is no coincidence that Russkoe slovo provided the platform for his attempt to write a natural history of Russian colonization.137 Shchapov’s enthusiastic conversion to scientific historiography in the mid-1860s was more than an attempt to bring elements of ethnography into history, however, something establishment historians like Bestuzhev-Riumin could easily embrace provided that Great Russians retained primacy.138 What began for Shchapov as a project devoted to the influence of climate and geography quickly extended to natural history and anthropology.139 Shchapov imagined a “typical” Russian mind whose “dullness of nervous receptivity” had been a major cause of Russian backwardness, and that newly dominant forms of social organization did not mean the disappearance of these natural forces “in the national type.”140

132 S. P. Eshevskii, Etnograficheskie etiudy. Vvedenie v kurs vseobshchei istorii (St. Petersburg, 1862), 11, 29, 14-15, 64-65. This essay originally appeared as S. P. Eshevskii, “Etnograficheskie etiudy. Vvedenie v kurs vseobshchei istorii,” Otechestvennye zapiski 143, no. 6 (1862): 82-119, 534-570., later reprinted posthumously under the more provocative title “O znachenii ras v istorii,” in Sochineniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: K. Soldatenkov, 1870), 13-122., which was reprinted in 1900. It should be stressed that in the original version rasa is used sparely and is merely corollary to the dominant term, plemia.133 A. N. Pypin, “Ob istoricheskom sklade russkoi narodnosti,” Vestnik evropy 109 (1884): 245-248.134 Bestuzhev-Riumin, “Stepan Vasil'evich Eshevskii. Biograficheskii ocherk,” LII.135 A. P. Shchapov, Sochineniia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: M. V. Pirozhkov, 1906).136 Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 196-203; Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 113-114, 118-119; Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought, 101; Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 146-151; Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriografiia, 377-388; Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (New York: Viking, 1980), 180-225.137 A. P. Shchapov, “Istoriko-etnograficheskaia organizatsiia russkago narodonaseleniia,” Russkoe slovo 7, no. 1 (1865): 1-38, 81-107, 166-217.138 K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, “O kolonizatsii velikorusskago plemeni,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 134 (1867): 776-784.139 A. P. Shchapov, “O vliianii gor i moria na kharakter poselenii,” Russkoe slovo, no. 3 (1864): 105-116; “Istoriko-geograficheskoe raspredelenie russkago narodonaseleniia,” Russkoe slovo, no. 8 (1864): 1-54, 95-130, 179-211; Sochineniia, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: M. V. Pirozhkov, 1906).

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Shchapov was not so naïve as to suppose that science already understood the differential physiological development and ethnographic organization of native peoples sufficiently in order to guide their reintegration into history at the present moment. But the historian must follow the anthropologist and ethnographer in asking, “what sort of race (poroda) are they—pure or mixed, from which ethnographic elements did they develop, what made them up, are they capable by their very physiological form and structure of developing civilization or not.” To be sure, anthropologists were not in agreement about how to settle these matters, said Shchapov, though the prevailing view seemed to be that (ceteris paribus) “pure races (rasy) are higher than mixed ones.” There indeed lay the dilemma of the Russian lands. “The West European nations (natsii) representing the higher race (poroda) of humankind have long since completed the original development of their national organization by means of natural, tribal selection,” while “the ethnographic disorganization of the Russian nationality is evident from the fact that tribally diverse elements still stand out too sharply in its composition.”141 The Siberian tribes had the advantage of relative uniformity, while the Slavic-Russian tribe did not possess it in the same degree, though it was generally the bearer of civilization. How had this dynamic been sustained?

Shchapov mistakenly (but far from exceptionally among his contemporaries) understood natural selection as something that could also take place collectively and discretely at the tribal level—rather than solely among a statistical population of varying individuals in Darwin’s sense—and this raised problems for his understanding of the rise of the Slavs in Siberia as a good example of “modification (vidoizmenenie) of races and nations.” The lessons Darwin drew cautiously from domestic cross-breeding of pigeons, dogs, and horses were transferred by Shchapov directly to the crossing of Russian and Siberian tribes, which he discussed at considerable length. Adopting an expansive notion of crossing and métisation, Shchapov reasoned that in various cases a regional variety (raznovidnost’) of the Great Russian people had formed, and these Siberian varieties were more sharply differentiated from their ancestors than the Little Russian, White Russian, and Great Russian varieties had been after their purported crossings with Finnic and Indo-European peoples. All of these tribal crossings must have been governed by general physiological laws of inheritance.

It was the stability of race in its continuous encounters with assimilating forces that counted most for Shchapov. Drawing on both Quatrefages and Darwin (but without appreciating the tension between their positions), Shchapov argued that the Slavic-Russian race had grown strong precisely because it had successfully crossed with many tribes, acquiring a hereditary preponderance of the bloodline in almost all cases. Although it sometimes acquired physiological traits of other tribes, it invariably smoothed them out, absorbed them over generations, or, “without destroying the essence of its nature, they provided only diversity to its own physiological type.” What always dominated was the “striving toward a natural, national type of the Slavic-Russian race… For all these reasons, the Russian race or nation, in all its crossings with foreign tribes, has almost always retained its physiological preponderance as a result.” The Russian people persisted thanks to a “metamorphosis of modification and conversion of the foreign race into the Russian nationality.”142

140 A. P. Shchapov, “Estestvenno-psikhologicheskiia usloviia umstvennago i sotsial'nago razvitiia russkago naroda,” Otechestvennye zapiski 189 (1870): 175; “O vliianii gor i moria na kharakter poselenii,” 116. 141 Shchapov, “Istoriko-etnograficheskaia organizatsiia russkago narodonaseleniia,” 2-4, 5, 7.142 Ibid., 97, 99-100.

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Shchapov’s imprecise use of race is little marred by stereotypical obsessions with skin color and savagery, however, even as it permits him to move from Darwin’s breeding stock to the heritable virtues of civilization without any sense of contradiction. His Enlightenment notion of physiological efficacy permitted a continuum from the “primitive” phenomena like light, sound, heat, electricity, and, yes, skin color that early man had once instinctively feared upon first encounter, to the more complex phenomena of civilization, whose natural philosophical ideas and sociological doctrines could act upon humankind in analogous fashion.143 If the disaffected French nobleman Gobineau had notoriously linked “the decline of civilizations to the successive loss of purity among conquering races,” Shchapov’s optimism about mixing of the Russian tribe with inorodtsy surely stands in strong contrast, notwithstanding his complacency regarding the attitudes of the inorodtsy themselves toward the blessings of civilization.144

Other Shchapov contemporaries also found his colonization work appealing. The more general notion of the overall stability of the Caucasian poroda despite the destabilizing forces creating particular nationalities also had defenders in popular science venues.145 Several public health figures who trained or taught in Kazan echoed Shchapov’s praise for the utility of the Siberian encounter, for “this mixture could not but tell upon Russians in the most beneficial fashion, from the anthropological point of view.”146 Shchapov’s modest influence was unsurprisingly strongest among prominent ethnographers of Siberia, but his comparatively irenic take on tribal struggle was seen in a harsher light by some.147 Mechnikov pointed to the less-than-admirable behaviors of some Europeans in their encounters with “primitive” peoples, and worried that Russians were showing similar callousness toward the Kalmyks, with no compensating benefit in civilizational terms. Yet he still left room on utilitarian grounds for colonization at the expense of indigenous peoples, merely cautioning that the host of causal factors involved permitted no simple moral or scientific grounds for domination.148 The rising star of Russian anthropology, D. N. Anuchin, essentially echoed Shchapov when explaining the successes of the Russian narodnost’ in Siberia:

Most inorodtsy, having adopted the Russian faith and the Russian lifestyle, gradually forget their native language and, when entering into marital unions with Russians, take on the Russian physiognomy as well, although they also retain certain marks of their original type. But a phenomenon of this kind is not the loss by Russians of their narodnost’, but on the contrary, is the triumph of the Russian race over our foreign tribes.149

143 Shchapov, “Estestvenno-psikhologicheskiia usloviia umstvennago i sotsial'nago razvitiia russkago naroda,” 394-406.144 Stephen Kale, “Gobineau, racism, and legitimism: A royalist heretic in nineteenth-century France,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 1 (2010): 51. On Russian anxieties about “mixing”, Willard Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts? 'Going Native' and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s-1914,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (1996): 806-825.145 N. Kondyrev, “Ocherk klassifikatsii chelovecheskikh plemen,” Znanie, no. 11 (1872): 243-268. 146 V. E. Portugalov, Voprosy obshchestvennoi gigieny (St. Petersburg: A. Morigerovskii, 1873), 616; V. M. Florinskii, “Usovershenstvovaniie i vyrozhdenie chelovecheskago roda,” Russkoe slovo 7, no. 8 (1865): 11.147 A. N. Pypin, “Russkaia narodnost' v Sibiri,” Vestnik evropy 153 (1892): 276-323; N. M. Iadrintsev, Sibir' kak koloniia v geograficheskom, etnograficheskom i istoricheskom otnoshenii, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: M. Sibiriakov, 1892); A. Kaufman, “Sibir' (III. Naselenie),” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 58 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1900).148 Il. Mechnikov, “Bor'ba za sushchestvovanie v obshirnom smysle,” Vestnik evropy 72 (1878): 450.149 D. N. Anuchin, Remeslennaia gazeta (1876), as cited by Pypin, “Russkaia narodnost' v Sibiri,” 294.

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In addition to work on the Russian Far East, Anuchin did more than anyone else to advance craniology as a means to demonstrate that “every race, even every more isolated tribe, expresses its particular type.”150 Even though the cumulative effect of this craniological work would be to destabilize folk typologies of race based on skin color and simple physiognomy, Anuchin’s early career did much to ensure that the empire’s “regional types” could be endorsed scientifically by ethnographer and geographer alike.

Military geographer and Oriental specialist M. I. Veniukov (1832-1901) did not hesitate to draw Darwinian conclusions from the ethnographic literature.151 What is more, he was reflexively aware of the tendency of Europeans to exaggerate their “civilizing” influence on the East—not a reason to abandon the project, according to Veniukov, but rather to proceed with less condescension and greater rigor.152 While casting Kamchatka as the “reserve territory of the Russian tribe” in conventional geopolitical fashion, he also emphasized the relation of the Russian tribe to the European race. Administratively ill-informed, Russia should emulate the Reports of the North American Emigration Bureau as it learned to follow population movements in the Caucasus and calculate how many people the land could support. More starkly, Veniukov warned that Russian participation in “Europeanism” brought with it the obligation to colonize responsibly, for the Russian narodnost’ had to earn the right, if necessary, “to drive the careless race from the stage of world history.”153 Taking his message to state publications as well, he urged proper management of colonization in order to transform “the physiognomy of the entire country”.154 Where once he had been confident in the racial effectiveness of “mingling affably” with non-Russians, in due course he added “degeneration” to his concerns, noting that “at least for several human races degeneration and extinction have commenced and even run their course.”155 Russians had not been dealt a terribly favorable lot by Nature, claimed Veniukov, creating the risk that “the Russian tribe will slowly be delegated to the second rank at home by foreigners.”156 A scientific response would be the best guarantee against that outcome. As we saw with Anuchin, the valences were unstable, but Veniukov and other theorists of colonization like Prince A. I. Vasil’chikov set the pattern, with tribe as the positive valence for those prevailing in the civilizing process, while the more local sense of race was the negative valence for those succumbing in the struggle.157 The working assumption for most

150 D. N. Anuchin, “Materialy dlia antropologii vostochnoi Azii, I. Plemia ainov,” Izvestiia Imperatorskago Obshchestva Liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii 20 (1876); “O nekotorykh anomaliiakh chelovecheskago cherepa i preimushchestvenno ob ikh rasprostranenii po rasam,” Izvestiia Imperatorskago Obshchestva Liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii 38, no. 3 (1880): 120.151 M. Veniukov, Rossiia i Vostok. Sobranie geograficheskikh i politicheskikh statei (St. Petersburg: N. Bezobrazov, 1877); Milan Hauner, What is Asia to Us? Russia's Asian Heartland Yesterday and Today (London: Routledge, 1992), 43.152 M. Veniukov, “Ocherki krainiago vostoka,” Vestnik evropy, no. 3 (1871): 156-207. offers ascerbic criticism of the European and American entrepots in China.153 M. Veniukov, “O fiziko-geograficheskikh usloviiakh razseleniia russkago naroda,” Russkaia mysl', no. 1 (1881): 70.154 Writing in Sbornik gosudarstvennykh znanii (1877); M. Veniukov, The Progress of Russia in Central Asia, trans. F. C. H. Clarke (London: Harrison and Sons, 1878), 4; Peter Holquist, “To count, to extract, and to exterminate,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 120.155 M. Veniukov, “O vyrozhdenii roda chelovecheskago,” Russkaia mysl', no. 9 (1887): 65.156 Veniukov, “O fiziko-geograficheskikh usloviiakh razseleniia russkago naroda,” 52.157 A. I. Vasil'chikov, Zemlevladenie i zemledelie v Rossii i drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: M. Stasiulevich, 1876), 926.

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intellectuals in the first generation after Origin of Species, however, remained that “these lower races can be civilized.”158

What we must not lose sight of is that culture was not invariably an antinomy to nature, but itself the manifestation of physical development, whose harmonious upward progress could not be taken for granted. As Mechnikov speculated analogically, “the lower races are, as it were, held back at a certain stage of development, similar to how Triton retains its long tail, while Shizopoda has bilateral limbs.”159 Physical anthropology was thus potentially superior to ethnography in explaining the processes of imperial miscegenation, and not because it excluded the culture concept from its domain of expertise in favor of physiological characterizations. Rather it suggested that the differential morphology of culture ought ultimately to be susceptible to zoological explanations in terms of instinct, selection, or some other yet-unknown mechanism. As Mechnikov put it, “the motives moving people to mix races are incomparably stronger that both mutual hatred and esthetic ideals.” His own critique of Darwin’s theory urged caution regarding how to draw such causal explanations, but the answer was not to deny race or render it “merely” social if skin color and the like turned out to be secondary, as Mechnikov suspected—it was to push the search for causes further into the bodily interior, for “racial traits are rooted deeper in the nature of the human organism.”160

True, the “tenuousness and poverty of the general suppositions” of anthropology stood in the way of this enterprise.161 But Mechnikov maintained that “natural selection, dividing humanity into victors and vanquished in the struggle for existence, is guided therein, not by the standard features of race that strike the eyes, but rather by deeper-lying ethnic and in part physiological properties.”162 Kirill Rossiianov has demonstrated with consumate skill how Mechnikov’s anthropological study of man’s “primitive” past informed his investigations of the body’s own immune responses, with race as an important conceptual mediator for the zoologist’s efforts to understand how threats to organismic integrity could stem from internal causes.163 Despite the particular—or perhaps unique—ends to which Mechnikov employed this metaphorical reasoning, it surely fell within these broader discourses about colonization, race, and the internal benefits or threats to the Russian tribe from the less “developed” peoples of the empire. After all, “Great Russians, the most prominent tribe of all the Slavs, originated from a host of mixtures of pure-Slavic blood with various tribes of the Mongol race, Lithuanians, and others.” The generation after Shchapov, “in view of the expansive colonization movements of today and of the great mutuality among the peoples of the globe,” would increasingly inquire “what kind of influence the properties of diverse tribal parents have on the life of their descendents,” and whether hybridization ought itself be subject to regulation.164 If accumulated anthropological data suggested that not all imperial narodnosti were dying out as a

158 I. N. Berezin, “plemia,” in Russkii entsiklopedicheskii slovar', vol. 4, 3 (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol'za, 1876), 139-145.; Pypin, “Ob istoricheskom sklade russkoi narodnosti,” 221.159 Il. Mechnikov, “Vozrast' v vstupleniia v brak: antropologicheskii ocherk,” Vestnik evropy 9, no. 1 (1874): 236. 160 Il. Mechnikov, “Antropologiia i darvinizm,” Vestnik evropy 10, no. 1 (1875): 179, 183. On Mechnikov’s critique of Darwin, Todes, Darwin without Malthus, 82-103.161 From Mechnikov’s introduction to Paul Topinard, Antropologiia Topinara, trans. Il. Mechnikov (St. Petersburg: L. F. Panteleev, 1879), VII.162 Mechnikov, “Antropologiia i darvinizm,” 188.163 Kirill Rossiianov, “Taming the primitive: Elie Metchnikov and his discovery of immune cells,” Osiris 23 (2008): 213-229.164 “Skreshchivanie ras i narodov,” Znanie, no. 7 (1874): 27, 4-5.

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consequence of these encounters, the possibility that the durability of the Iakuts, for example, might be at the expense of smaller tribes, and thus ultimately transitory, did give pause (if not always explicit acknowledgment of the Russian role).165 Though the cultural prejudices at work here are all too familiar, what is striking is that the internal tribes were seldom consigned to oblivion as undifferentiated Other—the Kirgiz, for instance, were thought to show great potential for the transition to higher culture—while the Russian colonial burden was most often taken up with a keen awareness of the destructive examples set by the British, French, Spanish, and especially American colonial experiences.166

Soloviev’s prize student, the young V. O. Kliuchevskii, admired Shchapov’s attempt to explain mental development in this fashion, but took the Siberian to task for treating society as a dull organism in need of exterior prodding.167 While he went on to become the preeminent historian of Russia, Kliuchevskii was methodologically idiosyncratic, little interested in general history, and never attempted this kind of systematic engagement with natural historical concepts.168 But there can be no question that he worked comfortably in the famous Course of Russian History with many of the commonplaces that mediated scientific notions of human diversity among historians of his generation: physiognomy, type, mixture, and climate all played their part in forming the “tribal character of the Great Russian” in his lectures.169 Perhaps his oft-cited dictum about colonization as the basic fact of Russian history should be reconsidered in light of the shared understanding, that “Tribal mixing is the primary factor in the formation of the Great Russian tribe,” because the resonance with Eshevskii and Shchapov and their naturalizing presuppositions was stronger for his contemporaries than we now appreciate.170

IV. “Enmity on the tribal field, in the struggle of two races”: Slavs and other civilizations

Was peaceful “conversion of the foreign race into the Russian nationality” and the like only post hoc rationalization by Russian scholars of the historical deeds of the empire, in no way justified by their own disciplinary knowledge? The disconnect between knowledge and power in the administration of the Russian East certainly seems general and complete in Nathaniel Knight’s narrative of Orientalist V. V. Grigor’ev’s time in Orenburg, to give one prominent example.171 In a 165 F. Ia. Kon, Fiziologicheskie i biologicheskie dannye o iakutakh (Antropologicheskii ocherk), Byloe i nastoiashchee sibirskikh inorodtsev (Minusinsk: V. I Kornakov, 1899), 87.166 E. Iu. Petri, “V Kirgizkoi stepi,” in Vos'moi s"ezd russkikh estestvoispytatelei i vrachei v S.-Peterburge, ed. D. I. Mendeleev, 8th ed. (St. Petersburg: V. Demakov, 1890), 38-45.; N. N. Romanov, “Kolonizatsiia,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 30 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1895). Romanov treats the European powers, but his qualms are strikingly absent from the analogous article on Russia, P. N. Miliukov, “Kolonizatsiia Rossii,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 30 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1895)..167 V. O. Kliuchevskii, “Tserkov' po otnosheniiu k umstvennomu razvitiiu drevnei Rusi,” in Otzyvy i otvety. Tretii sbornik statei (Moscow: P. P. Riabushinskii, 1914), 133-169.168 P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia (1859-1917), ed. M. M. Karpovich and B. I. El'kin, vol. 1 (New York: Izd. im. Chekhova, 1955), chap. 3. (ch. 3)169 V. O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii (Moscow: Sinodal'naia tipografiia, 1904), lecture 17.170 For recent work on the broader topic, Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (London: Routledge, 2007).171 Nathaniel Knight, “Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851-1862: Russian Orientalism in the service of empire?,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (2000): 74-100.

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conceptual survey dominated by the thick-journal milieu, I am unable to offer any instance of the race concept rendered operative in ministerial practice. Yet as Peter Holquist has argued, military statistics made inroads among influential Russian state officials as early as the 1860s, incrementally helping establish a “grid of ethnicity” for the empire.172 It would indeed be imprudent to assume a conceptual void regarding the race category among civil servants before the upheavals of 1905. Some meager evidence suggests that longtime Foreign Minister A. M. Gorchakov (1856-1882) was by no means ignorant or indifferent regarding the notion of race, exclaiming with respect to his Habsburg rivals in the 1860s, “Austria has realized that an impassable abyss henceforth lies between us: the question of the Slavic races.” Gorchakov’s assumptions about the nationalist intentions of the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Slovenes (but not Poles!) may have been overly sanguine, but his claim that “Russia alone can cement the different races and interests” was geopolitics without any pan-Slavic philosophical undercurrent, and demonstrated merely that race and tribe remained almost identical concepts.173 General R. A. Fadeev, one of the figures urging more elevated rationales upon a reluctant Gorchakov for Russia's geopolitical responsibilities toward the rest of Slavdom as “the head of a great race,” still insisted, “We are far from the thought of any sort of caste exclusivity by blood and race [poroda].” But in lamenting the fate of Slavs on the wrong side of the Sava river in 1870, Fadeev unmistakably invoked modern terminology, foreseeing “on the other [shore] a gradual disappearance of national individuality [narodnaia lichnost’] as it is Germanized or Magyarized, and until that time an existence as a lower race [rasa], without the slightest hope before them—how is this possible?”174 Tatars and Kalmyks, however, were not the objects of such classificatory tropes, because “wherever you look in the circle of phenomena of racial, religious, social, economic and political life,” they did not possess the cultural status conferred by the clash in the 1870s between Slav and German in the Habsburg lands, for whom “this enmity is now becoming ever more cruel, apparent, and intransigent on the tribal field, in the struggle of two races.”175 This “struggle for existence” was never solely ethnographic, but necessarily political, religious, and socioeconomic at the same time. As such it was difficult to employ race so that the latter qualities were understood as derivative of some prior ethnographic essence.

And what about the “struggle for existence” within the empire? Absent any rigorous theory of inheritance, an ethnographer like A. N. Pypin (1833-1904) could expand Shchapov’s “conversion” to the broader notion that “the Russian man in his ability to ‘get along with any nationality’, as is known, is in no way similar to the German, the Englishman, or the Frenchman.”176 But just as for Shchapov, Pypin in an 1885 essay “On the tasks of Russian ethnography” was hard pressed to identify the ethnographic type of the Russian people, since “the Great Russian tribe exists now in a

172 Holquist, “To count, to extract, and to exterminate.” Holquist’s argument slides quickly from the 1860s to the 1910s before building the central case for the extensive population control techniques developed during the Great War. For rich detail on military anthropology in the interim, Mogilner, Homo imperii, 397-451.173 V. N. Vinogradov, “Kniaz' A. M. Gorchakov - ministir i vitse-kantsler,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (2003): 33, 74.174 R. A. Fadeev, Mnenie o vostochnom voprose (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Departamenta Udelov, 1870), 22-23.; R. A. Fadeev, Russkoe obshchestvo v nastoiashchem i budushchem (chem nam byt'?) (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol'za, 1874), 900.175 A. Budilovich, “Neskol'ko dannykh i zamechanii iz oblasti obshchestvenni i ekonomicheskoi statistiki Chekhii, Moravii i Avstriiskoi Silezii, za poslednie gody,” Slavianskii sbornik 1 (1875): 314-315. 176 Pypin, “Russkaia narodnost' v Sibiri,” 302.

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whole series of shades and variations” as a consequence of these historical mixings.177 Four years later in an essay by the same name, Anuchin could add little beyond the claim that working out the classification of the imperial tribes would lead to better governance.178 Those of a more conservative mien could claim the Slavic tribe as “a unique kind of colonizer,” with the crucial additional supposition that its branch, “the Great Russian tribe has taken upon itself naturally much foreign blood and not remained a pure tribe.”179 Such Great Russian patriotism more often invited mockery, however, especially if it played into capital rivalries.180 The mixing once celebrated by Shchapov became an even trickier virtue to sustain in the 1880s, as Russian ethnographers and anthropologists hesitantly began making consistent distinctions between race-as-anatomy and narod-as-ethnicity.181 The absence of racial purity was not evidence of the absence of race itself, but rather that “[there] still remains for science a great deal for any kind of precise historical conclusions about the property of races, their mutual relations and influences and about the historical outcome.”182 A reviewer of Anuchin’s quantitative efforts to explain the variation of height in the male population of Russia despaired at the plethora of causal factors involved, pointing ambivalently to the current French focus on “race, i.e., tribal heredity” as a more suitable methodological device.183 In this more demanding biological context Shchapov’s benign Russocentric miscegenation left little trace as anthropologists struggled to articulate a sober “realist” professional footing, one that could not be suspected of “flippancy and playing the liberal.”184

The prolific Pypin had actually wrestled with the race concept since his first essay on pan-Slavism in 1864, where he expressed impatience with any hint of historical fatalism. “In itself the origin of a people, its race, only provides natural material,” asserted Pypin, “which is capable of extreme varieties and at opposing points of its development does not represent any originary unity.”185 In short, no historical “naturalism” could violate his humanist tenets. In a lovely irony for the philosophy of history, it was ichthyologist N. Ia. Danilevskii who mounted the most influential attempt in Russia to discredit naturalist modes of thinking in positivist historical practice. His hostility to Darwinism is well-documented, although his supporters often failed to realize that he did not entirely oppose transformism.186 Danilevskii enjoys even greater fame (or notoriety) as the

177 A. N. Pypin, “O zadachakh russkoi etnografii,” Vestnik evropy 112 (1885): 791. Пыпина не интересовало различение понятий раса, племя: A. N. Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii, vol. 4 (St. Petersburg, 1892), 408.178 Anuchin, “O zadachakh russkoi etnografii (Neskol'ko spravok i obshchikh zamechanii).”179 I. Babst, “Znachenie plemennago kharaktera v narodnom khoziastve,” in Sbornik antropologicheskikh i etnograficheskikh statei o Rossii i stranakh ei prilezhashchikh, ed. V. A. Dashkov (Moscow: Katkov, 1868), 106.180 “Roskoshnyi pir moskovskoi nauki,” Otechestvennye zapiski: Sovremennoe obozrenie 182, no. 2 (1869): 280-306.181 “Nauchnyi obzor: Antropologiia i etnografiia,” Russkaia mysl', no. 12 (1884): 188-189.182 Pypin, “Ob istoricheskom sklade russkoi narodnosti,” 223.183 A. V., “Literaturnoe obozrenie,” Vestnik evropy 139 (1889): 408.184 I. S. Ivin, “Predislovie k russkomu izdaniiu,” in Antropologiia Ed. B. Tailora (St. Petersburg: Bilibin and Co., 1882), X.185 A. N. Pypin, “Vopros o natsional'nosti i panslavizm,” Sovremennik 100-101 (1864): 209.186 N. Danilevskii, Darvinizm: Kriticheskoe issledovanie, ed. N. Strakhov, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: M. E. Komarov, 1885); Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought, 118-129; Todes, Darwin without Malthus, 41-43; Robert E. MacMaster, Danilevsky, a Russian Totalitarian Philosopher (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); N. Strakhov, Bor'ba s zapadom v nashei literature: Istoricheskie i kriticheskie ocherki, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Panteleev, 1890), 342-350.Kolchinskii, Biologiia Germanii i Rossii, 197-199; Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, 513-517.A. S. Famintsyn, “N. Ia. Danilevskii i darvinizm: oprovergnut li darvinizm Danilevskim?,” Vestnik evropy 135 (1889): 616-643.K. A. Timiriazev, “Oprovergnut li Darvinizm?,” Russkaia mysl' 8, no. 5 (1887): 145-180.

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patron saint of pan-Slavism for the series of essays entitled Russia and Europe.187 The massive anti-Darwin volume need not detain us, other than to note that its metaphorical devices cut both ways, with Muscovite politics demonstrating the development of a “general Russian reigning type, reigning species” that had rendered any new incipient species of state virtually impossible.188 More important for our purposes will be a brief consideration of certain tropes employed by Danilevskii in Russia and Europe, tropes which by no means negated the universalizing anthropological figurations of Shchapov. The point is not to rehearse Danilevskii’s main arguments, familiar to all. Instead, note first that the central notion of “cultural-historical type” is often paraphrased as “cultural-historical tribe,” keeping Danilevskii firmly within our field of interest. While he seldom uses rasa, and then only for non-Slavs, Danilevskii does heap scorn on the Anglo-Saxon race. More importantly, however, tribe is used with much the same generality that we have seen in natural historical discourse, because Danilevskii is intent on equating it with the naturalist’s family, above nation [narod] in his taxonomy, rather than as a nascent form of nation. Perhaps this is where Danilevskii’s utility lies, for despite his obsession with the unified purpose of each successive civilization, he can afford to be indifferent to dangerous equations of nation and race, since the various ethnographic elements that make up the cultural-historical type can only ever serve federative state functions, and will only find fulfillment qua tribe.

Danilevskii’s historical classification scheme required a flat, lateral differentiation, but he was not much interested in restoring Negroes (still a proper major division for him) to parity, and once he began assigning psychic traits to various nations, any pretensions to abandon cultural hierarchy were quickly lost, as—in a complete reversion to phrenological terminology—the innate “tendency to violence” (nasil’stvennost’) of the Germano-Roman tribe and the “tolerance” of the Slavic tribe were granted causal efficacy in history. Kolchinskii is surely correct in suggesting that Danilevskii’s cultural-historical type is in essence an extension of Baer’s constrained teleological transformism.189

It displaced the Germanic type from the top of the racial hierarchy and opened up the possibility of a Slavic ascendancy that was both historical and very much rooted in physiological being.

Among other things, it was Danilevskii’s incorrect use of hybridization (skreshchivanie) as proof of reversion to type (and thus the impossibility of incipient speciation) that alienated prominent Russian Darwinists like K. A. Timiriazev, helping to ensure that the distance between naturalist’s concept and historian’s metaphor was stretched well beyond what the earnest Shchapov had originally applied to the colonization process a generation earlier.190 For the zoologist of the 1890s, “the mixing of some tribes, the absorption of one tribe during an encounter with another one, has formed in the end that infinite gradation among tribes that ethnologists are vainly trying to grapple with.”191 Although Anuchin cautiously strove to keep Russian anthropology engaged with contemporary evolutionary thought, his colleagues were hard pressed to counter such a charge on the zoologist’s own terms.192 As St. Petersburg anthropologist D. A. Koropchevskii acknowledged,

187 N. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa. Vzgliad na kul'turnye i politicheskie otnosheniia slavianskogo mira k romano-germanskomu, 4th ed. (St. Petersburg, 1889). 188 Danilevskii, Darvinizm: Kriticheskoe issledovanie, 1:250.189 Kolchinskii, Biologiia Germanii i Rossii, 198.190 K. A. Timiriazev, “Bessil'naia zloba antidarvinizma. (Po povodu stat'i g. Strakhova: 'Vsegdashniaia oshibka darvinistov'),” Russkaia mysl' 10, no. 6 (1889): 45.191 M. Menzbir, “Nauchnyi obzor: Korennoi vopros antropologii,” Russkaia mysl', no. 7 (1893): 137.192 D. N. Anuchin, “Antropomorfnye obez'iany i nisshie tipy chelovechestva,” Priroda, no. 1 (1874): 185-280; Mogilner, Homo imperii, 187-199.

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“the term race is contingent and extremely unstable, [the anthropologist] cannot but reckon with the effort to juxtapose to this concept another more real and constant one.”193 The continuing elusiveness of race was driving the reluctant scientific anthropologist toward explicitly social explanations, with all the dangers this signaled. In the modern age, mixing and hybridization as elemental facts of the historical behavior of human populations was becoming a less important object of explanation than the growing possibility of directing selection for the sake of an “aristocracy of the mind.”194 Following the 1897 census, for example, statistician S. Patkanov called on the state to track “mixed race” systematically, but with the larger aim of population improvement in mind.195 Despite the abstractness of the race concept, Anuchin reported to Moscow physicians in 1902, joint work was necessary “for society, in the interests of our own future, to assist those outstanding individuals (osoby) who exceed the norm to strengthen their types, and to provide them with the opportunity to start a family and give a healthy and suitable education to their children and prepare them to become bearers of culture.”196 Quite apart from its purely political appeal, Danilevskii’s scientific invocation of the Slavic type did not require emphasis on racial purity in order to appeal to professionals looking to put anthropological concepts to work. Even Russian physicians, generally still strong defenders of environmental explanations of disease, ought to attend “to the role which racial and tribal particularities of the human organism play in the etiology of diseases… medicine must work out the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the races.”197 Even as liberal anthropologists like Anuchin promoted the idea of mixed physical types as characteristic of the empire, and consequently discouraged Russian race as a viable category, this did not invariably place them in opposition to establishment conservatives.198 The process of hybridization undoubtedly influenced the course of national cultural development, claimed St. Petersburg Seminary professor and author of The Question of the Origin of Man From the Viewpoint of Biology and Ethics N. G. Debol’skii. If “race and nation constantly interact, race on the one side influences the development of the nation, and on the other side is itself changed with the nation’s development,” then it is the business of science to explain this interaction.199

V. “From race to tribe, from tribe to people, from people to state”

These shifting trends among the professionals most invested in the race concept did not entirely disable the positivist impulse among historians, whether with respect to Russia’s place in world history, or with respect to slippery nature/culture distinctions. Оne of the more inspiring practitioners of “natural historical method” in the third quarter of the century was Hippolyte Taine,

193 D. A. Koropchevskii, “Tip i rasa v sovremennoi antropologiia,” in Protokoly zasedanii Russkago Antropologicheskago Obshchestva pri Imperatorskom S.-Peterburgskom Universitete za 1893 i 1894 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1895), 31.194 N. Kholodkovskii, “Dlinnogolovye i kruglogolovye (Estestvennyi podbor u cheloveka),” Nauchnoe obozrenie, no. 50 (1894): 1612.195 Juliette Cadiot, “Searching for nationality: Statistics and national categories at the end of the Russian Empire (1897-1917),” Russian Review 64 (2005): 443.196 D. N. Anuchin, “O zadachakh i metodakh antropologii,” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal 3, no. 1 (1902): 88.197 P. Minakov, “Znachenie antropologii v meditsine,” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal 3, no. 1 (1902): 89.198 Mogilner, “Russian physical anthropology in search of 'Imperial race': Liberalism and modern scientific imagination in the imperial situation,” 212. The 1887 statute of the Russian Anthropological Society at St. Petersburg University had as its aim “the study of the human races which populate and have populated Russia.” “Antropologiia,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1890), 867-871.199 N. G. Debоl'skii, “Zhguchie voprosy antropologii i etnografii,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 4, NS (1906): 114.

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whose Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1864) in particular outdid Buckle in its efforts to explain culture scientifically, and he found a ready circle of readers in Russia. For Taine, remarked one bemused critic, “the human being is a walking formula,” and the story of man is the story of his increasing self-awareness about his natural function within an integrated world.200 Taine’s trio of factors—race, milieu, epoch—was not that novel, but it was precisely his desire to render the creative act a product of social and material confluences rather than Romantic genius that left some early Russian critics dissatisfied.201 Taine found a loquacious advocate in V. I. Ger’e (1837-1918), professor of general history at Moscow University and frequent contributor to Herald of Europe.202 Once a student of Granovskii, the temperamentally conservative Ger’e enjoyed a long career that eventually saw him condemning the Second Duma and finally expiring with the Bolshevik apocalypse at hand.203 Attempting to emulate his teacher, the young historian had found that he liked Herder’s Perfectibilität more than Montesquieu’s climate, and infused his work with an Enlightenment fondness for the immanent power of ideas that was not always consistent with the modern historical “science” he proclaimed in print.204 As a young docent he fell short of the votes necessary to succeed Eshevskii in 1868, but managed to win initial appointment by the Ministry of Education as supernumery ordinary professor.205 While this did not endear Ger’e to his colleagues, it also ensured lasting insecurity in his dealings with his students, who included N. I. Kareev, P. A. Vinogradov, and P. N. Miliukov. Ger’e and, in turn, Vinogradov were the key figures developing the seminar dynamic for Moscow historians.206 It was Miliukov, whose relations with his colleagues were famously volatile while he taught there in the 1890s, who proved to be especially influential in shaping the discipline’s narrative of both the broader engagement of Russian history with general history, but also the narrower issue of its rejection of the race concept within scientific historiography, marginalizing Ger’e in the process.207

Ger’e’s anodyne rendering of Taine’s concept of race is worth quoting at length, for it illustrates nicely why particular nineteenth-century meanings of race have been elided from subsequent histories of the concept: narodnost’ in this instance can be made to straddle a nominal nature/culture dichotomy.

Besides milieu, and occasionally along with milieu, the character of a literary or 200 Vladimir Fuks, “Estestvenno-istoricheskii metod v filosofii (po Tenu),” Vremia, no. 11 (1862): 199.201 “review of Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise,” Vestnik evropy, no. 5 (1871): 479.202 V. I. Ger'e, “Metod Tena v literaturnoi i khudozhestvennoi kritike,” Vestnik evropy 139, no. 5 (1889): 71-144; V. I. Ger'e, “Ippolit Ten kak istorik Frantsii,” Vestnik evropy 70, 71, 73, 74 (1878): 534-569, 117-171, 234-277, 511-582.203 V. I. Ger'e, Timofei Nikolaevich Granovskii. V pamiat' stoletniago iubileiia ego rozhdeniia (Moscow: A. I. Snegireva, 1914); V. I. Ger'e, Vtoraia gosudarstvennaia duma (Moscow: S. P. Iakovlev, 1907); D. A. Tsygankov, V. I. Ger'e i Moskovskii Universitet ego epokhi (Moscow: PSTGU, 2008).204 V. I. Ger'e, Ocherk razvitiia istoricheskoi nauki (Moscow: Katkov, 1865). V. I. Ger'e, “Filosofiia istorii Gerdera,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 32-33 (1896): 169-195, 374-404. In V. I. Ger'e, “O. Kont i ego znachenie v istoricheskoi nauke,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 42-45 (1898): 440. he insisted that the continuity of man with the animal kingdom was merely rhetorical ornament in Comte’s scientism.205 “Izvestiia o deiatel'nosti i sostoianii nashikh uchebnykh zavedenii,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia 145 (1869): 59-61.206 A. V. Antoshchenko, “Das Seminar: Nemetskie korni i russkaia krona (o primenenii nemetskogo opyta "seminariev" moskovskimi professorami vo vtoroi polovine XIX v.),” in "Byt' russkim po dukhu i evropeitsem po obrazovaniiu": Universitety Rossiiskoi imperii v obrazovatel'nom prostranstve Tsentral'noi i Vostochnoi Evropy XVIII-nahala XX v., ed. A. Iu. Andreev (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 263-278.207 N. I. Kareev, Osnovy russkoi sotsiologii (St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 1996), 155-157; Miliukov, Vospominaniia (1859-1917), 1:79-81.

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artistic monument bears the imprint of nationality [narodnost’], or, as Taine puts it, race, to which the monument is bound by its origin. The significance of race in history has long been noted by scholars, but it is not easy to define and show its influence on the course of historical events. This influence is too profound and remote; it is obscured by other, more apparent influences—antecedent events, accidents, ideas appropriated by culture and education, and finally by the individuality of individual actors [individual’nost’iu lichnykh deiatelei], who are not always pure or uncomplicated types of their race. As a consequence of this the influence of race is felt more strongly in historical events than can be formulated.

Taine's attempt to render history explicable by “mechanical” theories was praiseworthy, declared Ger’e, but they were powerless to capture the full dynamic of history, for the effect of the individual in history (deistvie lichnosti v istorii) was not susceptible to such a reduction.208

For a more systematic account of historians’ response to the race concept we must turn to Kareev. In the early 1880s the young historian published an ambitious survey of the philosophy of history, a work which helped secure him teaching positions in St. Petersburg following a five-year stint in Warsaw. The lengthy chapter on “The variety of historical life” constitutes the most extended discussion of race concepts by a Russian historian, and it reflects a keen critical understanding of its usages among other European historians up to that time.209 While Kareev adopted the language of race and degeneration without hesitation, he mostly deflected the more culturally pessimistic aspects. Notice where race (as against stock) falls on the nominal nature/culture divide for Kareev: “If racial stock [poroda] is a product, like an animal species, of the struggle for existence, then race [rasa] is a product, similar to a cultural group, of psychic interaction: the Negro cannot become white, but he can become an Englishman.” Yet this is not grounds to posit automatic filiations between race and nationality, cautioned Kareev, for “one mustn’t confuse nationality with race, much less with racial stock.” “The natural nationality is race, in which psychic interaction has been developed to the point of producing a general culture,” he argued, reminding his readers that one should also make allowances for artificial nationality as in the Swiss case. To the historian, long-term shared social development encompassing a single racial stock provided the most natural trajectory, but this was by no means dictated by historical laws. “Nationality is the higher product of psychic interaction within the bounds of race,” went the argument, but as an attentive reader of Steinthal and Lazarus on Völkerpsychologie, Kareev stressed that the nation was nonetheless a subjective concept .210 For Kareev race was no artificial construct, but as one of the few Russians to read Gobineau in the 1880s, he had no patience for the French nobleman’s fatalism, devoid as it was of any attention to concrete historical circumstances.211

Kareev was easily the most philosophically inclined of his generation of professional historians, but his intercalated readings of every conceivable European text on race were distant in temperament from the historiosophy of an earlier generation. That the historian ought to master the biology, psychology, and sociology sufficient to his synthetic tasks seemed moreover increasingly

208 V. I. Ger'e, “Ippolit Ten i ego znachenie v istoricheskoi nauke,” Vestnik evropy 141 (1890): 16, 500.209 N. Kareev, Osnovnye voprosy filosofii istorii, vol. 2 (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov & Co., 1883), 152-236.210 Ibid., 2:154-156.211 Ibid., 2:175-178, 186-189, 193, 198, 221-222, 229.

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implausible in practice.212 If Kareev was an outlier, we should note that the gradual professionalization of history meant that consideration (and dismissal) of the race concept was no longer a matter for general history, but for Russian history as well.213 In his inaugural lecture for the Russian history chair at Dorpat University, for example, E. Shmurlo sought to integrate nature, race, language, religion, and economic and legal factors into the telling of Russian history, claiming renewed inspiration from the methods of natural science. Development is again the dominant metaphor for Shmurlo, who insisted that Russian history cannot be understood in isolation, but must be analyzed in terms of analogies and contrasts with universal history, first among them “the unity of race and religion.”214 Slavophile/Westernizer distinctions were now passé, for Russia was the Eastern half of a Europe, possessing not only a common heritage, but a common heredity. Russia was tied to the “Germano-Roman world” by “common racial origin, common foundations of Christian culture, common geographical proximity, and nearly simultaneous emergence on the historical stage.”215

In a series of public lectures on the idea of progress in 1898 Vinogradov commented in passing on the relevance of tribe and race in establishing synchronic classifications that aid the historian trying to identify the elements of diachronic progress in the past. The analogy between spatially distributed distinction and civilizational hierarchy remained strong, but Vinogradov now seemed ready to acknowledge the element of convention involved in its usage.

It stands to reason that transitions from one form to another, from race to tribe, from tribe to people, from people to state can be extremely gradual, and that in actuality the characteristic traits of this or that form: power, consciousness, typical distinction, are arrayed more in the form of shadings than in the form of sharp boundaries, but we must nonetheless recognize these basic differences and correspondingly establish classifications with them.216

Vinogradov’s race differs from the anthropologist’s in that it marks a certain level of social organization in definite temporal sequence, with the historical role of power and of collective consciousness manifested more readily in the higher form of the state. This was far from Gumplowicz’s race-as-state-conflict, for while race remains very much a viable category of analysis, it is largely relegated to the role of archaism in historical practice. Race exists only to be transcended by human institutions.

In his influential Outline of the History of Russian Culture Miliukov dealt rather more directly and abruptly with the relation of national’nost’ and rasa.217 On the record in the Duma as a defender of the liberal agendas of the Moscow anthropologists, Miliukov regarded nationality as passé, if understood as something unchangeable handed down by political and social tradition.218 The rise of 212 L. Z. Slonimskii, “Zakony istorii i sotsial'nyi progress. Po povodu sochineniia N. I. Kareeva, Osnovnye voprosy filosofii istorii,” Vestnik evropy 104 (1883): 253-282.213 Wladimir Berelowitch, “History in Russia comes of age: Institution-building, cosmopolitanism, and theoretical debates among historians in late Imperial Russia,” Kritika 9, no. 1 (2008): 131.214 E. Shmurlo, “[Vstupitel'nye lektsii po istorii],” Istoricheskoe obozrenie 3 (1891): 201-203.215 As cited in T., “review of E. Shmurlo, Vostok i Zapad v russkoi istorii,” Vestnik evropy 175 (1895): 839-840.216 P. G. Vinogradov, “O progresse,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 42 (1898): 297-298.217 P. N. Miliukov, “Natsionalizm i obshchestvennoe mnenie,” in Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul'tury, vol. 3, 3rd ed. (St. Petersburg: M. A. Aleksandrov, 1909), 3-4.218 On Miliukov’s run-in with the reactionary deputy Purishkevich, Mogilner, Homo imperii, 142.

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modern sociology and anthropology had done more than merely reframe national identity in “scientific” terms, but had even shown the incoherence of rooting nationality in nature:

Above all one must treat as irretrievably gone the time when one could look for the unchangeable basis of nationality in the natural-historical concept of race. Quite apart from the fact that, in the strict sense, there is no such thing as race, since one can encounter pure race at present only where there is artificial selection; but at large, in nature, we encounter only mixed races, and one has to trace the origin of this race mixing to the very earliest ages of mankind.

Miliukov’s language could have been borrowed directly from Anuchin, stressing as it did the mixed racial constitution of modern nationalities, especially Great Russians.219 Nationalism as such could only be adjudicated in the political realm, for no appeal to physical traits could yield coherent groupings in the imperial context. Yet this did not mean that race as such was an empty category, for Miliukov was committed to a species of typological thinking that resonated uncomfortably with nationalist figures like Danilevskii and K. N. Leont’ev, and his embrace of the distinctiveness (samobytnost’) of modern Russian cultural history was at odds with his Comtean positivism regarding universal regularities linking the natural and social worlds.220 Only in exile did Miliukov adopt a Boasian distinction between nature and culture,221 but as early as 1893 he had offered a seminal interpretation of the legacy of Slavophilism that made Danilevskii and Leont’ev the end points in a story of decline toward xenophobia.222 Miliukov actually came to his critique of Comte’s famous three stages from a reading of Danilevskii, who gave him warrant for treating that “law” as something enacted on a nation-by-nation basis. To the young Miliukov this was not incompatible with the desire to “base these stages on the picture of physiological and psychological change of the human organism.” Miliukov was right, in other words, about Danilevskii’s “Cuvierism”, but he remained very much a child of the fin-de-siècle in his desire to redefine nationalism in scientific and evolutionary-sociological terms as in-principle democratic, untainted by the false dichotomy of conservative vs. liberal.223

VI. “Improvement of the innate properties of the race” as a matter of science and/of culture

The working assumption that “racial traits are retained with astounding durability,” yet were only manifested indirectly via an infinite variety of tribal mixing, underwrote an open-ended program of

219 D. N. Anuchin, “Velikorussy,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 10 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1892), 828-843; “Rasy ili porody chelovechestva,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 51 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1899), 356-360.220 Terence Emmons, “The problem of 'Russia and the West' in Russian historiography (with special reference to M. I. Rostovtsev and P. N. Miliukov),” in The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789-1991, ed. Catherine Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 95-108.221 For many Franz Boas’ work circa 1911 on the New York immigrant population undermined typological distinctions based on craniology once and for all. A Russian reviewer acknowledged the methodological difficulty in “introducing a sharp boundary between the influences of social conditions and of heredity”: K. A. Bari, “Vliianie nasledstvennosti i okruzhaiushchei sredy na rost,” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1913): 174.222 P. N. Miliukov, “Razlozhenie slavianofil'stva. Danilevskii, Leont'ev, Vl. Solov'ev,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 3 (18) (1893): 46-96; Patrick Lally Michelson, “Slavophile religious thought and the dilemma of Russian modernity, 1830-1860,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 240.223 P. N. Miliukov, Natsional'nyi vopros (Proiskhozhdenie natsional'nosti i natsional'nye voprosy v Rossii) (Prague: Svobodnaia Rossiia, 1925), 86-88, 24.

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research that enabled Moscow anthropologists to sustain superior disciplinary enlistment networks at the expense of rival nation-oriented programs of research.224 While carefully demarcating the two concepts, Anuchin continued to insist on race and narod as viable analytic categories, but with growing cynicism he placed the attainment of any “complete and rational” systema well beyond the horizon, for lack of adequate information on the enormous diversity of racial and ethnic types of man.225 The biometric critique of anthropometry led by Karl Pearson also found echoes in Russia, mostly in the person of E. M. Chepurkovskii—but this only weakened the liberal research program, while actually offering new mathematical tools that kept the race concept viable.226 The increasing incoherence of the imperial mixed types discourse in anthropology was exacerbated by fresh developments in neighboring scientific domains. In the early years of the twentieth century zoologists, physiologists, and anthropologists alike were coming to recognize that contemporary classification schemes did not take adequate account of hereditary processes.227 A growing interest in psychological typologies created yet another arena for disputes over the relevance of race.228 The centripetal tendencies were becoming more pronounced, and their full ramifications lie beyond the scope of the present essay. One problematic category should not be neglected, however. Even for the anthropologist who believed in the “natural physiological inequality of the human races,” class might hold as much interest as ethnicity. But so long as he was unable to specify more precisely how physical and psychic traits caused these processes of differentiation, the prospect of attaining a true “bio-political science” seemed remote.229

Although racial politics was on the ascendancy in certain narrow nationalist circles, it remained marginal to natural science, not least because a liberal consensus generally denied it any direct connection to the scientific discourse of race.230 Yet the race concept remained very much alive for Russian intellectuals, thanks to what Lavrov had once called the “zoological element of culture.”231 The intelligentsia search for the zoological element of culture sustained the discourse of race as a means of tracking the effect of the individual in the framework of civilization. More than its other

224 A. A. Ivanovskii, “Klassifikatsiia chelovecheskikh ras I. Denikera,” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal 2 (1901): 82; “Ob antropologicheskom izuchenii inorodcheskago naseleniia Rossii,” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal 3, no. 1 (1902): 112-134; “Ob antropologicheskom sostave naseleniia Rossii,” Izvestiia Imperatorskago Obshchestva Liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii 105 (1904): 1-287; Mogilner, Homo imperii, 151-186. 225 D. N. Anuchin, “Na rubezhe polutora- i polustoletiia,” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal 10, no. 1 (1916): 6. Ivanovskii employed similar rhetoric even as he extended his research to span the globe.226 E. Tschepourkowsky, “Contributions to the study of interracial correlation,” Biometrika 4, no. 3 (1905): 286-312; O klassifikatsii chelovecheskikh ras i nekotorykh zadachakh antropologii v Rossii (Moscow: Imperatorskii Moskovskii Universitet, 1912).227 V. M. Shimkevich, Izmeniaemost' i nasledstvennost' (St. Petersburg: B. M. Vol'f, 1894); “Nasledstvennost' (fiziol.),” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 40 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1897); A. Gertsen, “Usloviia, opredeliaiushchiia nashi deistviia,” Russkaia mysl', no. 1 (1901): 110; A. A. Ivanovskii, Naselenie zemnogo shara: opyt antropologicheskoi klassifikatsii, vol. 121, Izvestiia Obshchestva liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii (Moscow: P. P. Riabushinskii, 1911), 394.228 P. Iakobii, “Religiozno-psikhicheskiia epidemii: Iz psikhiatricheskoi ekspertizy,” Vestnik evropy 224 (1903): 717; P. Orshanskii, “Chto takoe dushevnoe zdorov'e?,” Russkaia mysl', no. 5 (1904): 12.229 R. Veinberg, “Biologicheskie osnovy tsivilizatsii,” Nauchnoe slovo, no. 6 (1904): 116, 112.230 V. A. Vagner, “Renan i Nitsshe. O zvere v cheloveke,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 57 (1901): 199-217; L. E. Obolenskii, “Neudachnaia popytka postroit' etiku i politiku na biologii,” Russkaia mysl' 24, no. 9 (1903): 139-166; V. Shimkevich, “Chelovek, zoologicheskii ocherk,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 75 (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz & Efron, 1903); L. Sinitskii, “Ob odnom antropologicheskom zabluzhdenii (Antroposotsiologia, eia teorii i 'zakony'.),” Russkii antropologicheskii zhurnal 7, no. 3 (1907): 183-197. 231 Lavrov, “Tsivilizatsiia i dikiia plemena (III),” 121.

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European counterparts, the Russian case demands our attention because its biologization of social categories was so often moderated by the shared conviction that “self-improvement or improvement of the individual is the condition sine qua non of social progress.”232 But improvement was not just a Herderian concept, it was a well-established Darwinian one, and it was taking on new meanings after 1900 that reinforced the obligations of the individual to society.233

Which brings us back to race as poroda. It is well known that eugenics thrived for a time under the Bolsheviks, and that the erstwhile anthropometric program of “imperial race” became subordinated to it in part.234 Kolchinskii rightly suspects that the timeline should be extended earlier, for the obsession of Soviet eugenicists with the qualities of the human breeding stock available was not only the consequence of the wartime apocalypse of the empire’s elites and subsequent fears of a lost intellectual patrimony.235 Certainly the movement’s first historian saw an earlier heritage for discussion of improvement of the human race (poroda).236 Indeed, thanks to the dominance of the paradigm of mixed types, early Russian eugenics circa 1910 was largely unconcerned with ethnicity, and remained firmly Galtonian in orientation. It was the focus on scientific improvement that made the new science “destined, without a doubt, to play a huge role in the future fates of humanity.”237

An apt illustration of this thinking comes in the person of P. B. Struve, who in 1910 famously worked out a rationale for Russian nationalism within his liberal politics. Whereas narodnost’ had been a tool of state bureaucrats, Struve saw a transitional role for nationalism in a more natural historical process, provided one blocked off the self-doubt that drove the racist nationalism of М. О. Men’shikov. What we tend to ignore is that Struve’s call for “free rivalry and competition of nationalities”—a contemporary political commonplace that we recognize as such—was based on another contemporary commonplace that has far less purchase on us today: “the need for national hygiene.” For Struve national hygiene already had nothing to do with genealogical purity, since “all great nationalities are of extremely complex composition. The Russian nationality is like this, too, having assimilated with the Slavic core a whole host of other racial elements.”238 His readiness to exempt Finland and Poland from these assimilation processes suggests the nature of the problem, for it is not purely ethnic physiognomy that is at stake, so much as an incrementally biologized understanding of how culture is constituted.

232 L. E. Obolenskii, “Lichnoe sovershenstvovanie i izmeniia obshchestvennykh form,” Russkaia mysl', no. 7 (1893): 94-95.233 Charles Darwin, O proiskhozhdenii vidov v tsarstvakh zhivotnom i rastitel'nom putem estestvennago podbora rodichei, ili o sokhranenii usovershenstvovannykh porod v bor'be za sushchestvovanie, trans. S. Rachinskii (St. Petersburg, 1864); V. M. Florinskii, “Usovershenstvovaniie i vyrozhdenie chelovecheskago roda,” Russkoe slovo 7, no. 8 (1865): 1-57, 1-43, 1-25, 27-43; Usovershenstvovaniie i vyrozhdenie chelovecheskago roda (St. Petersburg: Riumin, 1866).234 Loren R. Graham, “Science and values: The eugenics movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s,” American Historical Review 82 (1977): 1133-1164; Mark Adams, “Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 153-216.235 Kolchinskii, Biologiia Germanii i Rossii, 194.236 M. V. Volotskoi, “K istorii evgenicheskogo dvizheniia,” Russkii evgenicheskii zhurnal 2, no. 1 (1924): 50-55. Florinskii is singled out as the direct forebear.237 E. N. Matrosov, “Evgenika, ee predmet i zadachi,” Vestnik znaniia, no. 12 (1910): 1236-1242.238 P. B. Struve, “Dva natsionalisma,” in Natsiia i imperiia v russkoi mysli nachala XX veka, ed. S. M. Sergeev (Moscow: Skimen'/Prens, 2004), 227.

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To see this, let us move from this familiar political text to a much more obscure essay that Struve composed for the Kliuchevskii Festschrift the previous year. In it he was at pains to demonstrate that theories of economic and social change invariably suffered from assumptions of monotonic growth and progress, but failed to account adequately for the recurrent phenomena of contraction and regress. Evolution as such did not favor progress over regress, intoned Struve, echoing the degenerationist assumptions of the day.239 What is crucial for our discussion is that he saw a need to link the individual analytically to macroeconomic productivity and social progress via the concept of godnost’ (efficiency, Tüchtigkeit). It was not only Max Weber who informed his discussion, but Francis Galton, whose science Struve regarded as addressed to the problem of fitness: “Eugenics is the science which studies all those influences which improve the innate properties of race, as well as those which raise them to a higher level.”240 The political economist’s challenge lay in not conflating individual fitness and social fitness, which could lead to contradictions and political quietism in cases when maximized collective productivity did not seem to coincide with the elimination of class injustices. Notice the language he employs to sort out the contradictions:

Economic (and also cultural and intellectual) productivity might not coincide with biological productivity. Marx saw this case and even advanced it as an argument against Malthus. He just didn’t see that among other things this very case abolishes the generality of his theory of social development. A society with low development of productive forces, but one which is energetically propagating itself, can by sheer mass crush a society with highly developed productive forces, but which is not augmenting spontaneous life. Though economically weaker, certain lower forms may, as a kind, become biologically stronger than higher forms, and this correlation may turn out to be the decisive moment in economic competition and thus in social development. That is the general sense of the problem of the encroachment of the Chinese and in general the yellow-skinned [peoples] into the economic milieu of the higher races, for cheapness of labor is defined by mass of labor, i.e. in the final accounting by the propagation of the population.241

Despite Struve’s personal fate, that larger context for fitness and race only became more prominent after the revolution, for in a classless society a smoothly functioning economy was thought to be attainable as “a result of massive, highly precise calculations of the productive forces of humanity, of climatic, soil, racial, and other conditions and factors of production over the entire globe.”242 The imperial legacy was in part a biological one. While class rather than ethnicity would become the primary contested category in recurrent processes of biologization in Soviet discourse, imperial métissage would long be embraced as the racial virtue exhibited best by Soviet populations.243 More importantly, the Promethean labors of constructing socialism could not be undertaken by just

239 M. A. Engel'gardt, Progress kak evoliutsiia zhestokosti (St. Petersburg: M. Ia. Minkov, 1899); Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The human sciences and the fate of liberal modernity, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 27-96.240 P. B. Struve, “Problema rosta proizvoditel'nykh sil v teorii sotsial'nago razvitiia,” in Sbornik statei, posviashchennykh Vasiliiu Osipovichu Kliuchevskomu ego uchenikami, druz'iami i pochitateliami ko dniu tridtsatiletiia ego professorskoi deiatel'nosti v Moskovskom Universitete (Moscow: S. P. Iakovlev, 1909), 463.241 Ibid., 475.242 M. Smit, “K voprosu ob izderzhkakh revoliutsii,” Krasnaia nov', no. 3 (1921): 213-222.243 A. I. Iarkho, “Antropologicheskie issledovaniia v Srednei Azii,” Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, no. 8 (1933): 107.

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anyone. This would be a task reserved for a Bolshevik breed of people (bol’shevistskaia poroda liudei).244

244 I. Vardin, “O politgramote i zadachakh literatury,” Na postu, no. 1 (1923): 100.39

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