The Great Reforms provoked social and political mobilization and implied a restructuring of the imperial social space. For many members of the educated public, however, the structural changes of the 1860s appeared unsatisfactory and incomplete. At the same time, the reform era created opportunities for the emergence of new national projects.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of the “nation” became central to the political legitimation of imperial states and the communities within them. In this context, the Russian Empire could be seen as irregular — lacking a clear geographical boundary between metropole and its colonies. Russia’s imperial status was therefore called into question due to the uncertainty of its imagined national body; a sense of imperial inadequacy became part of domestic public discourse. 

These imperial anxieties had been articulated even before the 1860s by the slavophiles. Slavophilism emerged as a response to the ambivalent status of the Russian Empire as both colonizer and colony. The term “colony” had an epistemological meaning. The dominant and stable Western system of knowledge was contrasted with local, discursively unarticulated knowledge unable to resist Western hegemony.

The concept of “epistemological colonialism” is relevant in order to explore how intellectuals with different political and ideological views opposed the hegemon they perceived in the post-reform empire. The dominant discourse was not uniform for different members of the imperial intelligentsia. The hegemon was constructed through various analytical languages and instruments; modern scientific knowledge — especially sociology, ethnography, and history — played a particularly prominent role in the search for epistemological emancipation.

Three well-known intellectual and ideological traditions of the late Russian Empire are examined: Narodnichestvo, Siberian Regionalism [oblastnichestvo], and Ukrainophilia. The three movements relied on the concept of the “people” [narod] — a broad imagined community of solidarity. Narod could be Russian, Siberian, or Ukrainian but it always presupposed the figure of the peasant as the bearer of local knowledge opposing the epistemological hegemon.

The aim is to analyze one representative of each movement: the narodnik sociologist Sergei Iuzhakov, the oblastnik geologist Grigory Potanin, and the ukrainophile historian Mikhailo Drahomanov. The goal is to examine how these intellectuals constructed their versions of narod and then demonstrated its progressiveness and independence from the discursive domination they identified.