ON THE ROLE OF THE SYMBOLIC DIMENSION OF THE HISTORICAL PROCESS: READING A BOOK BY MALTE ROLLEF ON POLISH LANDS UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF ST. PETERSBURG

The article combines a review of the Russian translation of Malte Rolf's study on the interaction between the Russian administrative apparatus and the Polish population during the "long 19th century" with a reflection on the importance of investigating the symbolic perception and behaviour of historical actors to interpret ethnic conflicts. The book successfully set and solved the task of using Polish-Russian material to show how the Russian Empire functioned between the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of World War I. Rolf succeeded in convincingly demonstrating that the mutual distrust of tsarist officials and the Polish population did not exclude mutual interest and constructive interaction. The author criticizes the widespread clichés about the permanent conflict between the "reactionary" state and the "progressive" society both in imperial Russia as a whole and – especially – in western provinces. The attention to the symbolic component of the Polish-Russian conflict allowed the author to plastically switch the perspective of research and representation between macro- and micro-historical approaches, to understand the optics of the vision of the own and the foreign, and the logic of the actions and interactions of the parties of the community in conflict. Communication between Tsarist officials, Polish society and the Russian diaspora, as persuasively demonstrated by the German historian, provided a complex learning process for all its participants, in which some stereotypical ideas about each other were reinforced, others were modified, others became outdated and went out of the political, social and symbolic practice.