Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia

In recent years, scholars of late imperial Russia have paid considerable attention to the empire's nationalities issues and, in particular, the experience of its Jewish communities. This book, based largely on the author's use of regional and central archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev, is a significant contribution to the literature.... Much of this slender but delicately nuanced volume is devoted to exploring the creative ways that Jews used the instruments of the czarist regime to their own advantage: 'At times, Jews forged passports, refashioned their social identities, and even converted in an attempt to subvert a maze of legal codes.' The new documents, many Jews soon realized, were 'a ticket for participation in the imperial social order.'.

Jews and the Imperial State is a concise and suggestive analysis of how tsarist bureaucrats attempted to make the People of the Book 'legible' in prerevolutionary Russia and how individual Jews in turn inscribed themselves into the imperial order. Rarely has a study of population management so richly captured the hidden effects of counting and classifying.

This absorbing book is a fine contribution to the growing literature on official identification and the administrative life of the state, including its characteristic product, the paper document. Eugene M. Avrutin digs beneath the level of Jewish self-identity and the tsarist state's claim to regulate and integrate the Jewish community, and unravels the state's attempts to know and track Jews as individuals, without losing itself in the labyrinth of its own paper. With an indefatigable appetite for bureaucratic intricacy and a pleasing eye for detail, Avrutin shows the Russian state and its Jewish inhabitants engaged in a perpetual and often baffling tussle over the issue and accuracy of the identity documents that were increasingly indispensable in everyday life, from personal names to residence, from marriage to mobility.

This very important and timely book is a wonderfully illuminating study of the Russian state's administrative culture and the gap between its aspirations and its capacities. Eugene M. Avrutin makes a substantial contribution to recent debates over the nature and extent of `imperial identity' on the part of Russian subjects.