ABSTRACT
What difference can empire make to citizenship? In this article, I address the question of imperial citizenship in Russia through an exploration of imperial law, rights, courts, and their use by lowly members of the polity. I want to enable a more expansive notion of citizenship that includes polities based on differentiated but activated rights and to escape from a framework that privileges the “nation-state”—a short-lived phenomenon but a long-lived construct. I challenge the notion that citizenship—both as a practice and a construct—need be restricted to polities that declare themselves founded on the principles of shared nationality and uniform rights—based on ethnicized or other homogenizing identifications of their populations. Categories such as “equal rights” and “national identity” may be getting us off on the wrong foot—or just one leg—if we want to describe the modes of political expression, claim, and exercise of rights characteristic of the Russian empire.
