Sir George Buchanan, Great Britain's ambassador to Russia during World War I, published his widely read memoirs in 1923. In those pages, he provided an influential account of the response of the Russian people to Germany's declaration of war:

It is widely accepted that Russia's failure in the Great War derived from the fact that its peasants were not “citizens.” Peasants remained isolated and particularistic, in part because Russia's elites had failed to integrate them politically or culturally into anything resembling a “nation.” When Russian peasants dreamed, it was not as members of an “imagined community” but as peasants, with their own agenda of land and local power and in their own language and cultural codes. As a result, Russia did not represent a “nation at arms,” and most peasants lacked deep commitment to or understanding of their country's war effort.

Historians of late imperial Russia have been categorical in asserting that Russian peasants lacked any form of national identity. Scholars as diverse as Orlando Figes, Geoffrey Hosking, John Keep, Bruce Lincoln, Richard Pipes, Robert Service, Ronald Suny, and Allan Wildman have agreed that Russian peasants were too rooted in Gemeinschaft, too particularistic in their social identities, to be capable of identifying with the polity and territory of Russia. John Keep expresses the consensus concisely when he writes:

I was tremendously pleased when I read Steve Smith's thoughtful and erudite comments. Smith's piece is a work of substantial scholarship in its own right, and it nicely complements the discussion articles. I am quite in agreement with most of what Smith has to say, but I do want to respond briefly to the two significant criticisms that Smith makes. The first is that the articles do not sufficiently “attend to the issue of continuity between national identity and earlier forms of politicized ethnicity,” since Seregny and I “implicitly subscribe to the modernist paradigm of nation building.” The second is that the “interplay between nation and empire” and the “relationship between national and class identities” were more conflictual than we allowed.

More than a decade ago, in a discussion in this journal, Leopold Haimson argued that peasant soldiers’ perception of Soviet power in 1917-18 “did not encompass any conception of the relationships between themselves, their village communities, or even the peasant estate as a whole, and other social groups—let alone any generalized view of the Russian body politic as a whole.” He went on to note that this peasant particularism “reflected a continuity in the mentalité of Russian peasants stretching back to the very inception of the Russian state.” Peasants rejected any superordinate authority and consistently acted out “a profound urge to be left alone.” Haimson's description of Russian peasants at the outset of civil war is a powerful evocation of peasant mentalités, not only of peasants in Russia but of peasants the world over, and would seem to preclude their inclusion in a nation.

Long before Moscow's annexation of Novgorod in 1478, relations between the two principalities had been troubled. Novgorod had repeatedly defied successive Moscow princes, disrupting trade, defaulting on tax and rent payments, and refusing to accept the jurisdiction of Muscovite legal authorities. By the middle of the fifteenth century, chronic disputes intensified into overt hostilities. Moscow conducted three military campaigns against Novgorod in 1456, 1471, and finally 1478. The last campaign was followed by the introduction of Muscovite governors into Novgorod, the wholesale eviction and resettlement of the local land-owning elite, as well as other measures undertaken to consolidate Muscovy's authority.

In recent years the historiography of Catherinian Russia has made small but perceptible strides toward engendering or at least toward discussing women as historical subjects outside the specific context of the household. Beginning with Brenda Meehan's 1976 article “Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule,” most attention has focused, appropriately, on female rule and the question of how a patriarchal culture accommodated itself to the preponderance of female rulers in the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. In the interim, several scholars have had occasion to expand upon this theme, and yet most would agree that much remains to be explored on this topic.

Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism, as Colin Rhodes points out, “does not designate an organized group of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment, but rather brings together artists’ various reactions to ideas of the primitive.” Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of the century, “ideas of the primitive” that were taking shape in the then stillemerging discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the new discipline was emphasized by Jan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued that “a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however, must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition, consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly arises the question: to be or not to be.” Karlowicz's remarks point toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the “invention of tradition.”

Of the many unexplored aspects of the history of Russian Poland on the eve of the Great War, the condition of peasant agriculture during this time of fundamental social and economic change is one of the more striking. While it has long been acknowledged that the years following the revolution of 1905 “brought excellent conditions for every producer,” that “the advances in agriculture in Congress Poland were considerable,” and that “this progress extended … to the peasants as well,” the role of the Russian state in the development of the Polish countryside, particularly during the period of agrarian reforms associated with P. A. Stolypin, has escaped the attention of historians.