Was It Social Nationalism? The Language of Symbols and Rituals in the Branches of the Union of the Russian People in the Urals, 1905–1914 1

Abstract

This article was born out of an interest in two problems, each of which is worthy of a separate exploration. The first one is the aggressive anti-Semitism in the regions of the late Russian Empire outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, which exploded in mass pogroms in October 1905. The second is the serious and reverential attitude toward imperial emblems and ecclesiastical symbols on the part of ultraconservative Russian patriots who coalesced during the First Russian Revolution into radical rightist associations. I was intrigued by the notion of combining the two problems by posing the following questions. What did antiSemitism signify in a region without Jews? How did the language of symbols and rituals of the “Black Hundreds” function? Were ethnic markers an instrument for constructing the concepts of “us” and “them,” or did ethnic categories obscure other social hierarchies and conflicts? To answer these questions, it seems reasonable to take the following steps: first, illustrate both problems in the case of the 1905 pogroms and the activities of the rightist monarchists in the Urals— one of the regions without Jews; then, secondly, try to interpret the Black Hundreds’ symbolization and ritualization in terms of the sociology of communications. The third step is to ascertain how signs and ritualized communications made it possible to lay down the boundaries between what was near and dear and what was hostile by using ethnonyms in a metonymic manner, as symbols of political and social processes and problems. The subsequent structure of the text is in keeping with the above steps.