Maps are an intriguing image of space and the perception of space in a given period. Political maps in particular hold strong fascination, because they remind us of the fleeting nature of borders and supposed political certitudes; in brief, they visualize history. Many historians in turn use—and misuse—maps as sources for their arguments. Steven Seegel masterfully deals with Eastern and East Central European cartography as a tool for state and identity building, as well as for establishing control over contested territories. He begins his story with the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, when Russian troops looted the cartographic department in Warsaw's National Library. This act of force was not only about improving Russian knowledge about its newly acquired territories, but also about destroying Polish statehood and identity, because whoever has no maps has no control over space. The book ends with the year 1919, when various states and ethnic groups presented a plethora of maps to the Paris Peace Conference with competing claims to national territories.
During the period under study, cartography served three interrelated purposes. Ever since the reforms of Peter the Great, Russia had tried to institutionalize cartography to strengthen political structures and increase the administrative control of the vast empire. Not only in Russia was cartography part of the Enlightenment project. During the last decades of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, maps also became tools for reform and improvement of state power. Both countries, and Russia in particular, were short of data, cartographic technologies, and trained personnel; therefore, scholars and knowledge were imported from the West, especially from the German Lands, and adapted to local needs.
The second aim of producing maps was to prove a country's or a people's membership in Europe. Catherine II and her successors wished to inscribe Russia within the European system of great powers not only by ruling the world's largest empire but also by insisting on the country's civilizing mission. Polish geographers, on the other hand, stressed the loss that Poland's dismemberment meant for Europe and Christianity. Polish scholars, both those in Russia and those who had emigrated, supported a resurrection of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in its historical borders for the sake of humanity. After the failed uprisings of 1830/31 and 1863, it became increasingly difficult to print maps with romantic claims to pre-partition borders. Only when Poles received de facto autonomy in the Habsburg province of Galicia in the decades following the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise were Polish cartographers able to rely on some institutional support for the production and printing of maps remembering and claiming Poland's historical borders.
The third purpose for drawing maps, closely intertwined with the former two, was to create national coherence and identity. Here, the strong influence of German scholarship comes into play. Herder's concept of nationality based on language was gradually introduced into Eastern European cartography, resulting in an increasing number of maps indicating linguistic borders. This ethnoschematization, as Seegel calls it, served the purposes of the Habsburg and Romanov Empires in their aims to refute Polish claims. Austrian cartographers tended to present a multilingual empire where Poles were one ethnic group among many, not only across the whole empire but also even in historically Polish Galicia, where Ruthenians/Ukrainians now appeared on the map. Russian cartographers also recorded the presence of multiple languages in the western territories of the empire. At the same time, they declared Ukrainian-speaking Little Russians and Belarusian-speaking White Russians to be part of the wider orthodox Russian nation, blurring the formerly separate categories of rossijskij (adjective relating to the empire) and russkij (adjective relating to the language). Russian nationalists claimed Ukrainians, who are Orthodox, essentially to be Russians. Such a claim could not be made for Lithuanians, because they were Catholic. On the other hand, Russian nationalists, in constant distrust of the Polish nation, were happy Lithuanians, despite their Catholic faith but on linguistic reasons, would not be subsumed as Poles. If in the late eighteenth century we had three competing imperial claims to parts of East Central Europe, a Polish, a Russian and a Habsburg one, by the end of the early twentieth century new players, having internalized ethnoschematization, appeared in the cartographic gamble. Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and partly also Belarusian cartographers and ethnographers started to map their claimed national spaces, even though they had only limited access to map-producing technologies and resources.
Paying attention to these various claims by analyzing the development of cartography is one of the many strengths of Seegel's book. He tells the story mostly by introducing the reader to several biographies of cartographers and intellectuals—perhaps some of them could have been omitted without harming the argument. Seegel looked through hundreds of maps and geographic and cartographic texts, mainly in Russian and Polish, to draw the picture of the political and national implications of cartography in, what he calls, the East European borderlands. This term, borderland, actually seems less convincing and more reflective of trendy labeling. Almost every square meter between Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow seems to be part of this borderland. The space Seegel deals with is more or less the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in its pre-1772 borders. A fortiori, the book's subtitle is misleading—fortunately, Seegel offers much more than an analysis of Russian cartography.
This book is not only interesting but also beautiful. Bibliophiles will appreciate the included maps even though some are difficult to read in a conventional book format. Unfortunately, the bibliography of primary sources lists only the geographic and cartographic texts and omits the maps consulted for this study. The comprehensive index, however, will make Seegel's book of great help for researchers interested in the interrelation of space, empire, and nation-building in Eastern Europe.
