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.

Classroom and Empire tells the story of the politics of alphabets, languages, and schooling in the eastern empire of Russia from 1860 to 1917. Wayne Dowler presents an intriguing cast of characters, including Nikolai Il'minskii, whose method of schooling non-Russian children lay at the heart of nationalist controversy; Ismail Bey Gaspirali, whose new method schools attempted to reconcile Islam with modern secular philosophy and science; Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod and éminence grise of the reigns of Alexander III and his son Nicholas II; and Sophia Chicherina, feisty defender of the Il'minskii school.

Dowler shows us that the problem of schooling non-Russians was unresolved by the fall of the Romanovs in 1917, smouldered through much of the Soviet period, and has re-emerged today as a major source of divisiveness in the Russian Federation.