Russification became official policy only after subject nationalisms had already emerged

Evidence

How uneasy Romanov autocracy initially felt at ‘taking to the streets’ is excellently shown by Seton-Watson. As noted earlier, the language of the court of St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century was French, while that of much of the provincial nobility was German. In the aftermath of Napoléon’s invasion, Count Sergei Uvarov, in an official report of 1832, proposed that the realm should be based on the three principles of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality (natsionalnost). If the first two were old, the third was quite novel – and somewhat premature in an age when half the ‘nation’ were still serfs, and more than half spoke a mother-tongue other than Russian. Uvarov’s report won him the post of Minister of Education, but little more. For another half-century Czarism resisted Uvarovian enticements. It was not until the reign of Alexander III (1881–94) that Russification became official dynastic policy: long after Ukrainian, Finnish, Lett and other nationalisms had appeared within the Empire. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 352

Related

• Russification targeted the empire’s most loyal nationalities first (similarity 0.85)