ABSTRACT
During the first phase of the imperial transformation, between the First Russian Revolution (1905–1907) and the collapse of the Tsarist government in February–March 1917, left-liberal nationalism came to dominate the empire’s political debates extending to broader public circles, although still mainly confined to urban areas. Oppositional public rallied around the idea of the self-organized imperial nation. Although left-liberal nationalism was inclusive, some of the imperial hierarchies remained in place and there was no consensus on the distribution of universal and special rights. Buryat-Mongol, Korean, Ukrainian, and other minority nationalists, regionalists, and advocates of other particularistic ideas were able to join the debates, yet the issues of autonomy and political representation remained undecided. Furthermore, despite its strong civic and progressive connotations, left-liberal nationalism remained state-centered, since the good of the Russian state was among its ideals. The two major modern wars – the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and World War I (1914–1918) – which proved the Tsarist government ineffective in defending the Russian state consolidated left-liberal nationalism as a heterogeneous oppositional and patriotic discourse and as a program of imperial self-organization. It was in this context when the Russian Far East consolidated as a new imperial region.
