National Policy Of the Russian Empire in the North Caucasus in the 19th - early 20th centuries

The article reviews the national policy of the Russian Empire in the North Caucasus in the 19th - early 20th centuries. The purpose of the research is the historical and political reconstruction of the inclusion of the peoples of the North Caucasus into a single state and socio-cultural space of Russia in the imperial period. The research methodology is based on a combination of elements of historiographic, historical-comparative and historical-political analysis. The imperial nationality policy of this period was based on the desire to build a national state based on the principle of unitarity, linguistic and cultural Russification, and the formation of imperial identity. The characteristic features of the national policy of the Russian Empire in the North Caucasus were the desire to eliminate the economic and socio-cultural backwardness of the region, to pursue a course towards Russification and the inclusion of mountain peoples in the Russian socio-cultural space. At the same time, a certain flexibility of approaches to the formation of the public administration system can be traced, expressed in the preservation of elements of administrative and cultural autonomy of mountain peoples. Until the end of its existence, the Russian Empire retained a complex class hierarchy, laws and administrative practices that hindered the unification of the state and the strengthening of imperial identity. The reforms of the early 20th century were incomplete and largely declarative. The result of the reforms was not so much the strengthening of the civil law and state principle, as the further growth of the national self-awareness of the mountain peoples and the formation of North Caucasian political elite that was opposed to the tsarist government. The imperial national policy was unable to find a balance between preserving the unity and indivisibility of Russia and the implementation of the demand for national autonomy, which was one of the factors in the weakening of the state and the surge of nationalism and separatism in the North Caucasus during the revolutionary period.