The Romance of Our Trees (1920)

The central challenge to imperial powers entering the modern era was the schooling of their peoples. How could they insure the literacy that modernity required without providing a foundation for nationalism among the colonized? In Russia’s eastern empire in the late nineteenth century, Orthodox Christianity vied with Islam for people’s souls; Russian language competed with Tatar and local vernaculars in market squares, peasant cottages, and schoolrooms; Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets clashed in school textbooks; and western secularism undermined traditional religious authority among both Muslim and Orthodox faithful. Russian nationalism peaked in the early twentieth century and public support for policies of the russification of non-Russian minorities increased. The inevitable clash with local languages shook the stability of the empire.