Seismic Solidarity: Intra-Imperial Earthquake Aid in the Late Romanov Empire

In 1887, the head of the Bērzaune Charitable Society, in a small village near Madona in present-day Latvia, petitioned the governor of Livland for permission to organise a lottery to benefit victims of a recent earthquake in Semireche region, in today’s Kazakhstan. This was not an isolated initiative: the tremors of such disasters reverberated far beyond their epicentres, as towns and villages across the Romanov Empire mobilised to support relief efforts following a series of major earthquakes in Central Asia and the Caucasus at the turn of the twentieth century – Semireche (1887), Akhalkalaki (1899), Shamakhi (1902), and Almaty (1910). Joining up pecuniary records of fundraising and fund distribution from multiple archives, the paper reconstructs flows of donations from the perspectives of both givers and recipients, and offers initial conclusions about who participated in intra-imperial philanthropy, why people gave, and how collections were organised. It argues that an expansive horizontal philanthropic network developed alongside more well-studied forms of state relief and local charity, and that its uneven contours expose the ethnic, religious, and political frictions that both sustained and constrained solidarities in an imperial context.

Catherine Gibson is Associate Professor of East European Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, and the head of the Centre for East European and Eurasian Studies (CEURUS). She is the author of Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (OUP, 2022) and is currently working on a new project on philanthropic solidarities in the Romanov Empire, funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant.