Jane Burbank

An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire

What difference can empire make to citizenship? In this article, I address the question of imperial citizenship in Russia through an exploration of imperial law, rights, courts, and their use by lowly members of the polity. I want to enable a more expansive notion of citizenship that includes polities based on differentiated but activated rights and to escape from a framework that privileges the “nation-state”—a short-lived phenomenon but a long-lived construct. I challenge the notion that citizenship—both as a practice and a construct—need be restricted to polities that declare themselves founded on the principles of shared nationality and uniform rights—based on ethnicized or other homogenizing identifications of their populations. Categories such as “equal rights” and “national identity” may be getting us off on the wrong foot—or just one leg—if we want to describe the modes of political expression, claim, and exercise of rights characteristic of the Russian empire. This article sketches out what I call Russia’s “imperial rights regime” and focuses on the law and courts as areas where citizenship is practiced. I describe Russia’s “umbrella of imperial law,” address the confusing category of “difference,” explore the significance of the imperial rights regime for both elites and commoners, set out the parameters of lower-level court practice in the late 19th century, engage briefly a 20th-century conflict between liberal plans for and peasant experience of local courts, and conclude with a consideration of the significance of an “imperial social contract.” I suggest that both rulers and subjects of the Russian empire—and later of the Soviet Union— held conceptions of the state, its powers, and its significance in social life that derived from their experience of a regime of differentiated, alienable, but

Eurasian Sovereignty: The Case of Kazan

From 1917 through the present, sovereignty has been repeatedly recovered and reconfigured in Kazan and its hinterlands as the area was transferred from one complex polity to another. It is the frequent renegotiation of authority over multiple and redefinable units of political and economic control, rather than stability of institutions, that keeps the political class engaged in the reproduction of both the state and the Eurasian sovereignty regime.

Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism 1917-1922.

For five years following the Bolshevik victory in 1917, the Russian revolution inspired a brilliant outburst of theory and criticism among Russian intellectuals struggling to comprehend their countrys vast social upheaval. Much of their intense speculation focused on issues that are still hotly debated: Was this socialism? Why had the revolution happened in Russia? What did Bolshevik power mean for Russia and the Western world? This compelling study recovers these early responses, and analyzes the specific ideological context out of which they emerged. Jane Burbank explores the ideas and experiences of diverse prominent intellectuals, ranging from the monarchists on the right to the Mensheviks, Socialist revolutionaries, and Anarchists on the left. Following these thinkers through the turbulent years of civil war and the rebuilding of state power, she shows how revolution both revitalized their political culture, and exposed the fragile basis of its existence.