“Sedimentary Society” as an Imperial Practice of Self ... - Ab Imperio

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Ilya Gerasimov
“Sedimentary Society” as an Imperial Practice of Self-Organization
Viewing Russian imperial history as a complex, open-ended process and not as a straightforward
vector culminating in the 1917 collapse is a relatively recent phenomenon,
inaugurated most notably by the magisterial 1991 collection Between Tsar and People. 1 A
growing body of studies has emerged that more or less explicitly departs from what is
informally called the “Haimsonian Orthodoxy” that has dominated the historiography of late
imperial Russia in the West for almost three decades since the publication in the mid-1960s of
Leopold Haimson’s groundbreaking two-part article “The Problem of Social Stability in
Urban Russia, 1905-1917.” 2 Haimson’s paradigm retrospectively sealed the fate of the
Russian Empire by advancing a structuralist formula of “dual polarization” (between the
tsarist government and educated society, and between the latter and the working class) as the
main characteristic of the longue durée processes that shaped the last decades of imperial
Russia. The revisionist approach of the 1990s instead concentrated on the social practices and
intermediate groups that bridged the alleged polarization in pre-revolutionary Russian
society. 3 However, the new research agenda was from the very beginning effectively limited
by the methodological assumptions put forward in the classic texts that initiated this new
historiographic trend. A special role was played by the articles “The Sedimentary Society” by
Alfred Rieber and “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and
Soviet Russia” by Laura Engelstein. Both articles presented the methodological quintessence
of highly acclaimed recent books by those historians. 4
Alfred Rieber replaced Haimson’s clear-cut image of Russia as a society composed of
(predominantly) capitalist classes with a subtle vision depicting a social fabric woven from a
mosaic of archaic and modern social identities coexisting simultaneously and overlapping
with one another. 5 Rieber’s snapshot revealed a “sedimentary society,” but could not provide
insight into the direction of its evolution in late imperial Russia. However, this static picture
1 Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People. Educated Society
and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
2 Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” Slavic Review 23
(December 1964), 619-642; Vol. 24 (March 1965), 1-22.
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4 Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, 1982); Laura Engelstein, The
Keys to Happiness. Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca and London, 1992).
5 Alfred J. Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” in Between Tsar and People, 343-366. First published as: Alfred
J. Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” Russian History 16 (1989), 353-376.

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was perceived by many as a diagnosis of social processes underway in early 20 th century
Russia. Here is where the popular thesis originates about the fatal fragmentation of prerevolutionary
Russian society, which allegedly explains its collapse in 1917 6 —a thesis that
became standard in the work of some social historians in the 1990’s. 7
Laura Engelstein did for a new stage in the studies of Russian culture and ideologies what
Alfred Rieber did for a new social history of Russia. She was among the first to introduce the
themes and concepts developed by Michel Foucault into the field of Russian history, and
provided valuable commentary on their applicability to a new historical context. In her
“Combined Underdevelopment,” Engelstein opened a new venue for the study of ancien
régime society as a (partially) modern society of professionals and intellectuals who used
modern techniques and produced modern discourses. She also laid the ground for subsequent
interpretations of the Soviet regime as “an alliance between the old tutelary state and the new
disciplinary mechanisms.” 8 Her critical and balanced application of Foucault kept Russian
studies from being overwhelmed by the vulgar reading of this European thinker so widespread
in American academia in the early 1990s. At the same time, she built into her model of
emerging pockets of modernity in Imperial Russia a rather simplistic juxtaposition of an
advanced “Europe,” where the disciplinary power of professionals (i.e., institutions of civil
society) was guaranteed and regulated by the law, and “Russia,” where “both the reign of law
and the ascendance of bourgeois discipline remained largely hypothetical.” 9 Engelstein based
her powerful argument about the vulnerability of modern institutions in Russia on metahistorical
speculations, using “Europe” as a self-explanatory trop, relying on the then nascent
literature on Russian professions, and avoiding any reference to the relevant European
historiography. As a result, the subsequent studies of modern ideologies and social practices
6 A catalogue of fatally fragmented social entities in pre-1917 Russia can be found in a 1996 article by Robert
McKean, which summarized the first stage in the revision of the “Haimsonian Orthodoxy” and triggered an
important discussion in Revolutionary Russia: “One of the outstanding features of the Duma political system was
the fragmentation of politics… the nobility was ethnically and religiously diversified; it was divided by
occupational allegiances..; it was stratified by income and landownership. …Furthermore, ethnic diversity and
regional economic rivalries divided merchants and entrepreneurs. …Politically divided in 1905, the professions
fragmented after the failure of that revolution… Furthermore, there existed a deep divorce and a gulf of
suspicion and misunderstanding between the professionals and the intelligentsia… and the industrial middle
class…” Robert B. McKean, “Constitutional Russia,” Revolutionary Russia, 9 (June 1996), 34-36.
7 Cf.: “…imperial Russia was slow to produce a massive political and industrial transformation comparable to
that which had fundamentally altered much of west and east-central Europe by the time of the First World War.
Most important in this regard were the traditional fragmentation of Russian society, including its mobility and
porous boundaries; the limited development of formal (though not necessarily informal) societal structures; and
the accompanying dispersion of resources and cadres.” Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial
Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 97.
8 Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,”
American Historical Review 98 (April 1993) 349.
9 Ibid., 348.

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in late imperial Russia were overshadowed by the sense of their inherited inadequacy and
failure to emulate some normative European scenario. 10
Thus, the attempt in the 1990s to revise the “Haimsonian orthodoxy”—which was
structuralist in a Marxist or rather Braudelian sense, and was moved by the “trauma of 1917”
and the necessity to explain its historical inevitability—was itself bound by the equally
structuralist criteria of “normality” (class social structure, institutionalized civil society, party
politics, etc.) and a Sonderweg vision of Russian development, largely caused by a lack of
interest in a truly comparative perspective. Little wonder that, when multiple empirical
lacunae were filled in by a new wave of research on professions, local social networks, and
interaction of different social groups at various levels, a conflict emerged between the general
methodological scheme of post-Haimsonian studies and the newly studied, rich body of
sources suggesting a different vision of late imperial society—one that is much more dynamic
and probably more vital.
I have encountered this conceptual inadequacy while studying both the Russian peasantry and
Jewish townspeople in the early 20 th century. The historiographic tradition, influenced by the
“revivalist” paradigm represented by Roberta Manning and Gregory Freeze, 11 suggested that
the archaic category of social estate was an even more powerful mechanism of social
identification during the last decade of the Russian old regime than it had been before.
Alternatively, the notion of class was reinforced and presented as a major element of social
structure. 12 As a result, the Russian countryside was presented as a world apart from the
modernized urban society: Russian peasants have been typically portrayed as an isolated
community with its particular values, economic rationality, and culture. At the same time,
Jewish commoners in Odessa were conceptualized in terms of belonging to conventional
social categories (confession, class, political party, occupation), and those who failed to fit
into one of these categories (such as thousands or tens of thousand of criminals) simply did
not exist for historians. Any attempt to set this map of social fragmentation in motion only
reinforced the essentialization of social categories: dealing with a social group in a dynamic
10 In a recent book, Peter Holquist has brought these themes of the existence of some “aggregated Europe” and
its “normative historical scenarios” to a lapidary formula: “The absence of the institutions necessary to secure a
true civil society… [b]ecause Russian society telescoped phases of development that unfolded sequentially in
western Europe…” Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921
(Cambridge, MA, 2002), 14. Note the sources of these bold generalizations: Leon Trotsky, The Russian
Revolution, 3 vols. (New York, 1932), 1: 4-6; Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and
the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia.”
11 Roberta Thompson Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia. Gentry and Government (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1982); Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social
History,” in American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (1986).

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perspective presupposes that the object of research is not changing significantly in time in
terms of its composition. It is easier to monitor a social object over time by focusing on a
limited reference group, supposedly representative of the entire entity, hence the widespread
belief in the internal coherency and solidarity of individual fragments of Russian society.
The notion of social identity turned out to be particularly useful for those who tried to study
the social dynamics of complex and broad groups of the population. The pioneering role here,
in the context of Russian history, also belonged to Leopold Haimson, who in 1988 published
another important article, “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century
Russia,” followed by a discussion (first of all, by William Rosenberg and Alfred Rieber). 13
While individual readings of the problem differed, there was a common belief that collective
identity was a stable element that could allow one to identify the boundaries of social groups
throughout their evolution and transformation. I am not going to reiterate here the arguments
of Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper put forward in their seminal 2000 article, 14 but
would just point out that the concept of social identity has not solved the initial structuralist
dilemma. Only now it was some mysterious “built-in” identity, rather than a formal belonging
to an estate or a class, that remained unchanged throughout all transformations. To be sure,
William Rosenberg attempted to demonstrate the conventional and circumstantial nature of
political and social identities, and even suggested the possibility of their alternation and
combination, 15 but this revisionist approach has been underappreciated in historiography. As a
result, over the past fifteen years we have read studies about peasants who were always
peasants, intellectuals that never got close to the people, and Jews that have been nothing else
but Jews. We have not composed a meaningful jigsaw puzzle out of the fragmented sediments
of Russian imperial society, and have never gotten beyond identity.
Primary sources by themselves cannot serve as a remedy for inefficient theory. What shall we
make from the case of a nobleman serving as a district zemstvo clerk, under a peasant-born
supervisor, or the case of a peasant carrying hundreds of rubles in his wallet while in town, or
the case of a honorary citizen, who is a pickpocket, or another nobleman – the conman, or
Jewish gangsters robbing Jewish enterprises The most obvious answer would be that the
social structure of late imperial Russia was rapidly disintegrating, and that the social
categories of the epoch were all but meaningless. Yet other stories suggest different
12 Theodor Shanin can be mentioned as a major authority in the historiography of rural Russia throughout the
1990s, who analyzed peasants as a class, if only “awkward.” Cf.: Theodor Shanin, Russia as a “Developing
Society.” Volume 1: The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century (London: Macmillan, 1985).
13 Slavic Review, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 1-38.
14 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society, No. 1 (2000), pp. 1-47.
15 William G. Rosenberg, “Identities, Power, and Social Interactions in Revolutionary Russia,” Slavic review,
Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 21-28, particularly p. 25.

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interpretations. Consider, for instance, the case of a small group of agriculturists in Samara
Province called panki. These panki were descendants of one of the numerous, once privileged
groups of farmers, who, unlike the odnodvortsy, managed to secure their noble status,
although they did not differ from peasants in their economic standing and occupation. Their
estate status was irrelevant to them for most of the year, except for the election campaign to
the Provincial Noble Assembly. Desperate candidates would bring panki, who were eligible to
vote, from their villages, dress them in rented tuxedos, and invite them to the Noble Assembly
for a lavish reception and ballot. 16 It is unknown whether any other material compensation
was involved, but it is clear that those people tried to get as much as they could from their
formal estate status, and it was only one or two days a year that they were able to effectively
validate it. 17
Apparently, it was important for a Jew to be a honorary citizen by estate status in order to
reside outside the Pale of Settlement. At the same time, a Russian honorary citizen could
become a pickpocket or a robber in Odessa, where estate status by itself was not a market
commodity. Nobility was more important in the army or the Ministry of Interior, and much
less in the booming sphere of professions. For an Odessa thief, Jewishness meant something
different from the Jewishness of an Odessa dock worker or banker, or the Jewishness of a St.
Petersburg lawyer. The mosaic of social categories coexisting in late imperial Russia allowed
people to rely on those that suited best their particular circumstances. The multiple and often
overlapping social identities and niches appear then as a crucial mechanism allowing a rigid
and archaic imperial society to adapt to the challenges of modernity. Seen as a weakness by
structuralist-minded scholars, the complexity of the social fabric in late imperial Russia could
be regarded as an indicator of the vitality of a society that found its way beyond the rigid
structures of less dynamic state institutions, an even more rigid legal structure, and an
underdeveloped political system. By manipulating the authorized social categories, social
actors participated in a variety of interactions. Thus, the “sediments” could be regarded as
social roles rather than groups, as “tools” applied in particular situations and under certain
circumstances by social actors, which by no means could be defined exclusively in the official
(legal) categories of the epoch. The “Sedimentary society” thus becomes a synonym for a
society involved in the process of self-organization, or to be more precise, an imperial society
that is in principal heterogeneous and preserves the “memory” of its previous stages and the
particular pasts of its composite parts in the legal order and social structure.
16 Vladimir Teitel, Iz moikh vospominanii (Berlin, 1924), pp. 76-77.
17 Otherwise, their “nobility” was rather a handicap. For example, they had to be tried by jurors even for minor
charges, while peasants could settle their conflicts in the county (volostnoi) court.

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I apply the concept of self-organization in a sense informed by the natural sciences’ model of
stochastic processes in complex open-ended systems. The largely pre-modern imperial society
can be viewed as such a system, preoccupied with the challenges of maintaining its integrity
and stability and capable of enforcing only a few universal requirements and norms (such as
political loyalty or common crime control). As social dynamism and mobility increased in the
second half of the 19 th century, a great majority of day-to-day social interactions became the
subject of negotiation, rather than of detailed and universal legislation. The law did not define
the language of conversation on the Kazan tram, the relationship between the peasant and the
agronomist, or whether a Russian landlord could rent out rooms to a Jewish family in Odessa.
The mosaic of social “sediments” constituted the language of social interaction that was
understood across the empire, and also a reservoir of social roles and strategies available for
facilitating social mobility.
Apparently, the question of why the category of social estate was still in use in the early 20 th
century is irrelevant; rather, we should ask: what did different people do with their formal
estate status Similarly, the alleged fragmentation of Russian society adds little to the pile of
statistics counting hundreds of ethnic and dozens of confessional groups in the Russian
Empire. What we really need to know is whether this fragmentation facilitated or hampered
individual mobility and collective action: was it a factor slowing down the dynamism of
society, or making it more inclusive These questions are part of a broader agenda of a new
imperial history of Russia that goes beyond national narratives and approaches imperial
society as an open-ended system. Former disciplinary boundaries between national, social,
political, or economic histories are being erased by a growing understanding of imperial
society as a complex environment in which class, confession, and gender were equally
important elements of the system of social identification. At the same time, the accuracy of
the structuralist snapshot of the sedimentary society is by no means disputed by the new
imperial history approach. Apparently, not all sediments had the same potential for social
dynamics in all circumstances. Indeed, there was no conventional hierarchy of social
categories in late imperial Russia, no official or unofficial “exchange rate” of different types
of social status. The whole picture comes into focus only when we approach imperial society
as a dynamic system rather than a static structure, and see the uneven character of social
dynamism in different regions, cultures, and agencies. The chief of criminal police in Odessa
and the zemstvo agronomist in Ufa Province recorded the names of their “clients,” ignoring
their ethno-confessional status and spelling their patronymic names in full form, as it was
common in dealing only with upper classes of the society according to Russian traditional
standards of record keeping. At the same time, the Kazan provincial Committee for Granting

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Conscription Deferments used the archaic form of addressing individuals, while some rural
cooperatives in Odessa region were concerned with the national identity of their members. It
seems that only particular circumstances of social interaction added meaning to otherwise
hollow structuralist categories of Russian imperial society.