Educating non-Russians in late Imperial Russia: An historical study of educational development in a multiethnic setting, 1885-1914

This dissertation combines two broad topics---the expansion of primary education and the development of national identities---in a case study of late Imperial Russia. It concentrates on the expansion of educational opportunities for non-Russian ethnic groups living in St. Petersburg, Saratov, and Nizhnii Novgorod Provinces between 1885 and 1914. It also assesses the interaction of local ethnic communities with regional officials, the Ministry of Education, and educational authorities during this period of considerable political, economic, and social change. Chapter One reviews the historiography on the arrival of non-Russian speakers and the formation of ethnic communities in the three provinces selected. Chapter Two assesses the development of primary education in the Russian empire between 1861 and 1917. The third chapter investigates the creation and financing of non-Russian primary schools, and Chapter Four analyzes administrative interaction, language policies, and daily life in non-Russian schools in these provinces. Based primarily on archival documents and locally published materials written in Russian, Finnish, German, and Estonian, the dissertation argues that local initiative remained the driving force behind the expansion of primary education among non-Russians through the end of the nineteenth century. The transfer of non-Orthodox church schools and non-Russian schools to the Ministry of Education's purview, which began in 1869 and lasted into the 1890s, affected those schools only gradually. The German and Finnish church schools of St. Petersburg remained among the best in the empire, and Volga German church schools retained their national and religious character. Whereas the standard historiography views the transfer of non-Russian schools as part of a conscious plan of Russification, the author concludes that the transfers were part of the Ministry of Education's competition with the Holy Synod and were one component of a campaign to modernize the empire's educational systems. Muslim and Jewish schools were unaffected by those transfers. The history of non-Russian schooling in the late Imperial era demonstrates that the Russian empire's ethnic minorities shaped the empire's development and future just as much as its Russian-speaking majority, and that primary schooling was a key site at which that development was negotiated.