Seeing Beyond the Seemingly Omnipotent State: Examining the Imperial Russian Self through the Lens of Class, Gender, Nationality

This project will for the first time publish in a single collection autobiographies written by individuals from different nationalities, social estate groups, and sexes who lived in Imperial Russia. To avoid any bias associated with texts previously chosen for publication under varied regimes, the volume will include many autobiographies never published before. Since most specialists in the region do not know the languages of the ethnic minorities of the Empire-who made up half the population-they will be able for the first time to read them. Despite Twentieth Century calls to ethnic primordialism and separatism, individuals were classified in Imperial Russia according to social estate, rather than ethnicity, and the vast majority of nationalities coexisted peacefully with Russians, presenting a model of inter-ethnic relations. The annotated volume will also include two scholarly introductions on the specialties of the co-participants in the project, one on the formation of national identities and ethnic relations, the other on social relations and the self-understanding of selfhood in the Tsarist empire.