Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest
45-2 | 2014
Historiographies après 1989
New Imperial History
Post-Soviet historiography in search of a new paradigm for the history of
empire and nationalism
La nouvelle histoire impériale. L’historiographie post-soviétique à la recherche
d’un nouveau paradigme de l’histoire de l’empire et du nationalisme
Marina Mogilner
Publisher
Éditions NecPlus
Electronic version
URL: http://receo.revues.org/1562
ISSN: 2259-6100
Printed version
Date of publication: 15 June 2014
Number of pages: 25-67
ISBN: 9782358761147
ISSN: 0338-0599
Electronic reference
Marina Mogilner, « New Imperial History », Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest [Online], 45-2 | 2014,
Online since 01 March 2017, connection on 28 March 2017. URL : http://receo.revues.org/1562
© NecPlus
Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest, 2014,
vol. 45, n° 2, pp. 25-67
NEW IMPERIAL HISTORY.
POST-SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY IN SEARCH
OF A NEW PARADIGM FOR THE HISTORY
OF EMPIRE AND NATIONALISM1
MARINA MOGILNER
Associate professor, Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair, University of
Illinois, Chicago; [email protected]
Abstract : The main trends are examined in historical relection, since 1991 and the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, on the imperial and national past of Russia and the
USSR. The revival of national historiography is placed in the epistemological and
political context of postmodernity, which fuses late 19th-century paradigms with
the Soviet concept of “ethnos” and with postcolonial sensitivities. The problematic
national history of Russians is seen in relation to this complex methodological and
ideological background. The evolution of imperial history is traced from the statecentered rediscovery of “empire” to different interpretations of “empire” as a general
framework for the region’s entangled history. The new paradigm of imperial history is
then introduced with its focus on the “imperial situation” of complex societies and
multilayered, irregular diversity. This understanding of imperial history is precisely
what has made studies of the Russian Empire relevant internationally. Students of
the Russian and Soviet empires and their successor states have much to contribute
to this ield of intense scholarly activity.
Key words: nation, empire, ethnos, ethnogenesis, postcolonialism, essentialism, structuralism, diaspora, Orientalism, “imperiology”, post-imperial, Eurasia, internal colonization, comparative perspective, borderlands, cognitive shift, imperial situation.
1. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Ilya Gerasimov, Sergei Glebov, and
Alexander Semyonov, who not only read this article and shared their comments,
but have been inluencing my understanding of nationalism and imperial studies for
more than a decade. Many of the ideas presented in this article were formulated in the
course of our work on the Ab Imperio quarterly.
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Marina Mogilner
NatioN
The process of formation of post-Soviet states and societies had
an important “historical” dimension: it created an acute demand for
legitimizing narratives of sovereign states and communities as well as
for coming to terms with the former common historical narrative and
approach to history. All too often the general mode of historical writing
did not change after 1991, except that the former common narrative
was divided among the newly emerged states on the “territorial” principle, just like any other asset inherited from the USSR, and reformatted to suit national needs. This process, however, was not as simple as
it may look. It involved conlicts, ruptures, and censorship, even to the
extent of canceling “secondary school exams and discard[ing] existing
textbooks as virtually useless” in some of the former Soviet republics
(Sherlock, 2002; 2007; 1991).
Nationalizing historiography provided a discursive form for a new
appropriation of history and became a key instrument in identity politics, which legitimized the ethnocultural underpinnings of new national
conigurations and the territorial claims of new states. Still, formally
trained scholars, amateur historians and politicians who wanted to use
history all relied on the late Soviet, essentially primordial understanding of the “nation” as based on the biosocial phenomenon of ethnicity
(ethnos) that combined biological descent with cultural traits acquired
through common historical experience.
This concept of ethnos was introduced in the early twentieth century by the Russian student of the ethnography of East Asia, Sergei
Shirokogorov (1887-1939)2 whose non-Marxist works were censored
during the Soviet era. However, his ideas reached the broad academic and nonacademic public through the works of the director of the
Institute of Ethnography of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, Julian
Bromley,3 and a maverick historian of nomadic societies and geographer, the author of the theory of ethnogenesis, Lev Gumilev (Gumilev,
2002; Laruelle, 2006). Bromley’s biosocial interpretation of ethnos as
the basis for any national groupness informed many post-Soviet national “revivals,” particularly when a given national tradition had a welldocumented “pedigree” in the form of local polities and cultures succee2. For an example on his works, see Shirokigirov (1923).
3. For a complex explication of Bromley’s theory, see Bromley (1983); on Bromley
and his concept of ethnos, see Kozlov (2003).
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new iMperial History
ding one another. Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis was fashioned like
the natural sciences, and described the development of stable human
collectives with the categories of “energy,” “natural cycles,” and “laws
of development.” Gumilev’s fascination with the vitality of “younger,”
“less civilized,” and thus “closer to nature” peoples, especially appealed to those post-Soviet societies where modern nations experienced a
particularly heavy impact of Soviet-era social engineering. In a new circumstances, they stressed their relations to “superethnoses” of the past
(particularly the great nomadic confederations).4 The same approach
also made it possible to “rehabilitate” nations whose roles in the “great
Russian historical narrative” were compromised by association with
the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” (for example, Tatars) (Gumilev, 2008).5
Gumiliev’s theory of “passionarity” − a particularly high (in comparison with the normal situation) absorption of energy from the environment by a young, vital ethnos – offered a framework for a longue duree
“national” history as evolving through periods of birth, maximum “passionarity,” and gradual decline. This historical framework is obviously
reminiscent of Arnold Toynbee’s global metahistory based on universal
rhythms of the rise, lourishing, and decline of civilizations. Both promote the naturalistic and teleological idea of “nation” (ethnos), support civilizational thinking, which is highly popular among post-Soviet
intellectuals, and relativize cultural “challenges” in favor of more basic
geographical, biological, and environmental ones.
Such an essentializing understanding of the “nation” came to dominate Soviet social sciences and political vision in the 1930s and 1940s.
The post-Thaw generation of Soviet ethnographers formally “forgot”
Stalin’s wording from that time – “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common
language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” (Stalin, 1942 [1913]) –, but the substance
of his deinition, recast in the light of Shirokogorov’s works, survived
4. See, for example, Pavlinskaia (2002).
5. See his Drevnie tiurki (Gumilev, 1993), Drevniaia Rus’ i Velikaia step’ (Gumilev,
1992), and other works. In 1996, on the initiative of the Kazakhstan president,
Nursultan Nazarbayev, a university in Kazakhstan’s capital of Astana was named
after Gumilev (“Eurasian National university named after L. N. Gumilev”). In the
capital of the Republic of Tatarstan (Russian Federation), a monument to Gumilev
was unveiled in 2005. The dedication on the monument reads: “To a Russian who
all his life defended Tatars from slander.”
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in Bromley’s interpretation of ethnos as an “ethnosocial” or, even more
explicitly, a “biosocial” organism. Its core structure, ethnicos, signiied
a “sustainable intergenerational group of people, historically formed on
a particular territory, who, beyond common features, possess relatively
stable cultural (including language) and psychological characteristics,
and a shared sense of mutual belonging and difference from all other
similar groups…” (Bromley, 2008) The majority of post-Soviet national
historians remained faithful to this understanding of “nation”/ethnos, if
only somewhat shifting their focus of attention − from “nation” as a
biological and historical process to “nation” as a result of biological and
historical evolution (nation-state).
The persistence of ethnos is only one aspect of the prevailing naturalistic and rigidly structural thinking about social, cultural, and political
phenomena, with an obvious underappreciation of constructivist dimensions of social reality and historical experience.6 This state of affairs
relected the fact that social sciences in the Soviet Union missed many
paradigmatic revolutions of the twentieth century, including debates on
the methodology of poststructuralism and constructivism, the rise of
postcolonial studies, the powerful appearance of gender studies, and
so on. On the other hand, the persistence of naturalistic, systemic, and
structuralist thinking in post-Soviet historiography was meant to compensate for the ambiguities and uncertainties of the post-1991 transition, offering a stable and unambiguous deinition of spaces of social
and political belonging at the moment of revolutionary change.7
This brings us to another feature of the post-Soviet nationalization
and essentialization of historical narratives: the rather uncritical appropriation of the pre-1917 state of scholarship as of direct relevance.
Discarding the entire intellectual baggage of the twentieth century together with its Soviet “compartment,” many national historians became
dependent on the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century historiography that was making a transition from the national romantic to the
positivist stage during the pre-1917 decades. For them, that transitional
6. For the analysis of this type of thinking, see Lipovetsky [Leiderman] (2010a and
b), Sokolovskii (2008), Oushakine (2009, Ch. 2).
7. No wonder cyclical and path-dependency explanations became prominent among
academic historians in Russia (KliaMKin, 2007; pivovarov, 1998; pivovarov
& andrei Fursov, 1999; aKHiezer, 2002a and b, 1998; aKHiezer, KliaMKin &
iaKovenKo, 2005).
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new iMperial History
stage marked the formative period in the development of national projects, brutally suppressed or radically altered by the Bolsheviks. Hence
the desire to directly reach toward the prerevolutionary tradition (for
those “nations” that had developed one), the omnipresent rhetoric of
the scholarly “legacy,” and a profound dependence on the conceptual
language and political imagery of the turn of the twentieth century.
Obviously, there were differences in how this pattern of historical
retrospection unfolded itself in, say, independent Ukraine or Lithuania,
Kyrgyzstan, or Georgia. In some cases, academic diasporas abroad have
been instrumental in the formation of a new historical agenda (e.g., in
Ukraine with its extensive academic diaspora in the United States and
Canada). In the case of Russia, the role of the “diaspora” was played by
the post-1917 emigration of the interwar period. Multiple references to
its intellectual heritage can be found both in the works of post-Soviet
historians and in the speeches of politicians, including Vladimir Putin.8
In other post-Soviet cases, where the diaspora was not a weighty factor, the state established itself as the supreme authority in the interpretation of history, deining not only the content of the national historical
narrative but even its poetics (Turkmenistan is a typical example here9).
In yet other instances the key role was played by foreign countries,
whether pressure from the European Union with its standards of political correctness in the Baltic states, or the appeal of a more “European”
alternative “motherland,” as in the case of Moldovanism competing
with pan-Romanian nationalism in Moldova (Kushko & Таki, 2003).
On a structural level, all the varieties of post-Soviet deconstruction of
the former common historical narrative and the creation of separate
8. In his Presidential Address to the Duma (Russian Parliament) in 2006, Putin
quoted a Slavophile-type émigré philosopher with pronounced fascist sympathies,
the ideologist of the Russian All-Military Union in emigration (ROVS), Ivan
Aleksandrovich Il’in. See “Poslanie Prezidenta Rossii Putina…” (2006). Until the
1990s, Il’in was virtually unknown in Russia, between 1993 and 1999, ten
volumes of his collected works had already come out in Moscow, while his
and his wife’s remains were reburied in the necropolis of Donskoi Monastery
(il’in, 1993-1999).
9. The president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, authored the foundational
historical narrative for his nation, Ruhnama (The Book of the Soul). It is a combination of spiritual/moral guidance, autobiography, and revisionist history.
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national narratives can be conceptualized within the paradigm of postimperial nation building, with two important reservations.10
First of all, despite its established record of national discrimination
and even ethnic cleansing, the Soviet Union was a much more complex
phenomenon than could be unproblematically reduced to the narrow
model of a classical colonial empire. Equating the USSR with a colonial empire underlines the importance of national resistance to imperial domination, but ignores the role of the Soviet Union in creating
cultural, economic, and political frameworks for the development of
Soviet nations through various versions of “afirmative action” policies (Martin, 2000). Therefore the crystallization of nucleuses of new
national historical professions during the 1990s led logically to consolidated criticism of oversimpliications of history, despite the emancipatory potential of this version of the usable past. Besides falling short
of high academic standards, the “anti-imperial ixation” of post-Soviet
narratives implicitly denied the subjectivity of the nation that is viewed
solely as an object of manipulation and victimization. For example, in
2008, a group of leading Ukrainian historians set up a committee to
monitor Ukrainian textbooks (Yakovenko, 2008). Natalia Yakovenko,
one of the most internationally esteemed Ukrainian historians, summarized the main critical concern of her colleagues in the committee:
We ind it unacceptable to disseminate by means of a textbook the socalled “pessimistic” view of the past, relying on numerous examples
and utilizing emotionally charged language. I mean the presentation of the history of Ukraine as a victim of all those who wanted to
conquer, occupy, and destroy her, beginning with the Mongols and
ending in 1991. Potentially, this paves the way to an inferiority complex, and does not produce any positive experience. In the end, to tell
the truth, this does not correspond to historical reality, as the people
of Ukraine perfectly knew how to survive even under the “colonial
pressure” with which our textbooks are so concerned.
N. Yakovenko (2010).
The committee volunteered to design new programs for teachers
of Ukrainian history that would advance a different understanding of
nationhood (Ibid.). This Ukrainian story is indicative of the widening
10. Descriptions of this structural situation may be found in Shnirelman (1996),
Aimermakher & Bordiugov (1999).
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gap between the politics of history rooted in the ideology of nationalization of states and societies of the 1990s (along the scheme “one
nation−one state”), and the development of a modern historical profession advancing alternative visions of a nation (Portnov, 2010).
Yakovenko’s sarcastic reference to “colonial pressure” as the leitmotiv of Ukrainian school textbooks suggests the second complication of
post-Soviet and post-imperial remaking of historical narratives. A good
deal of their anti-imperial and postcolonial rhetoric is based on assumptions that are fundamentally alien to postcolonial theory as a claim for
nonimperial – not just anti-imperial – principles of political community.
This can be seen when a leading historian from Uzbekistan criticizes
the tsarist and Soviet authorities for treating Central Asia as a colony,
but on the very same page complains that the tsarist government never
appointed professional Orientalists as Central Asian general-governors.
Obviously, the whole semantic complex associated with Orientalism as
a colonial discourse (in Edward Said’s original interpretation or later
revisionist versions) is alien to this supericial usage of postcolonial
rhetoric. Consider another example: post-Soviet Azerbaijani school
textbooks offer no information about the Russian Empire as a polity, or
Moscow and St. Petersburg as its major centers of power, but they do
include chapters on the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and the regions
of present-day Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. This selective “provincialization” of the former imperial metropole, to borrow the title of
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe, could have been
relected in terms of postcolonial theory – but it was not. It is “just” a
consequence of obscuring the broader historical view in order to carve
out a coherent national historical past from the complex, prenational,
or anational historical context. I am not implying that a retroactive
arbitrary deconstruction and selective “provincialization” of the former imperial space would have been more persuasive if it had been
the result of a consciously motivated application of some postcolonial
agenda. However, in this particular case the very emancipatory postcolonial potential is undermined by the deliberate appointment of new
dominant foreign “metropoles” (such as Ankara and Istanbul) for the
newly constructed national historical space.11
The tendencies outlined above can be explained as a revival of national historiography in an epistemological and political situation of post11. For a more detailed discussion of this example, see Gasimov (2012).
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modernity. Unlike the romantic nationalisms of the nineteenth century,
these post-Soviet and postmodern nationalisms do not necessarily imply a democratizing, liberating, or revolutionary effect as part and parcel of the creation of a new homogeneous community of equals. More
often, they serve as a successful manipulative ideology for the regimes
of “managed democracy” and produce deep divides in post-Soviet professional historical communities – divides that are both scholarly in
nature and ideologically driven. At the same time, this nationalism is
highly adaptive to the requirements of modern political correctness and
postcolonial sensitivities. It combines Soviet and postcolonial tropes
with nineteenth-century historical teleology and postmodern selectivity
to address the challenges of the post-imperial situation. Due to both
political reasons and outdated methodology, self-conscious national
historians do not perceive as a fundamentally liberating process the
deconstruction of the very categories upon which the hegemonic political discourse is built. Therefore, only rarely does mainstream historical
writing question categories such as “Russians,” “Ukrainians,” “Tatars,”
“Uzbeks,” “Orient/Occident,” “femininity/masculinity,” “colonizer/
colonized,” and others. This “post-Soviet postcoloniality,” (Oushakine,
2011)12 as Serguei A. Oushakine has recently dubbed it, still awaits its
students and interpreters.
Against this background, the national history of Russians in the
Russian Federation has remained one of the most complicated and politically charged cases. The deconstruction of the former Soviet historical
narrative along national lines created an almost unresolvable problem
for Russians castigated from the outside as “colonizers” − the “imperial
nation” that had never had its own ethnic/national history and pure ethnic genealogy. During the boom of early nationalizing historiography
of the perestroika period and the irst post-1991 decade (1985−2002),
the leading Russian professional historical monthly journal Problems
of History (Voprosy istorii, hereafter VI) published only thirteen articles
and one roundtable dealing with nationalism and problems of national
history writing (Sabirova, 2006). Up to the early 1990s, the majority of
VI authors writing on the subject were not historians but ethnographers
trying to adjust their principal analytical categories such as ethnos to the
12. Oushakine draws attention to discursive and performative gestures of estrangement and alienation of the Soviet past that differ in many important aspects from
the logic of the “classical” postcolonial consciousness.
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new iMperial History
new research ield of nationalism studies (Arutiunian & Drobizheva,
1987; 1992; Bromlei, 1898; Filippov, 1991). The main epistemological
challenge to these attempts came from the West, as in the course of
the 1990s many classical works by theoreticians of nation and nationalism were translated into Russian (Gellner, 1991; Koroteeva, 1993;
Kohn, 1994 [1955]; Eric Hobsbawm, 1998; Kimlika, 2000; Brubaker,
2000a and b; Anderson, 2001). The earliest direct discussion between
representatives of the two disciplines – western nationalism studies
and Soviet ethnography – took place in the pages of another major
Russian academic historical periodical, Modern and Contemporary
History (Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, hereafter NiNI) in 1989. Under
the rubric “dialogue of scholars,” were published texts by Ernest
Gellner of Cambridge University and Julian Bromley of the Institute
of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Gellner, 1989;
Bromley, 1989). Restating major points of his Nations and Nationalism,
Gellner reminded his Russian readers that nationalism was a modern,
living political phenomenon, not a thing of the past, while Bromley
criticized his opponent for a cultural rather than sociopolitical understanding of industrial society and for neglecting ethnos as the basis for
national mobilization under capitalism.
Historians only joined this debate (which hardly facilitated the
mutual translation of two very different analytical languages) somewhat
later. They were less concerned with the language of analysis and more
with its object. They searched for the early forms of “Russian nationalism” in modern history, and rediscovered the national politics of the
Russian imperial state (D’iakov, 1991; Diakin, 1995; 1996; Buldakov,
2000; Churkina, 2001; Bukhovets, 2002). However, this interest in
things national did not prove to be particularly helpful in differentiating between the Russian imperial and Russian national histories. While
ethnographers eventually changed their old primordialist schemes in
favor of a more constructivist understanding of nation, championed
by the new director of the academic Institute of Ethnography, Valery
Tishkov,13 historians – of course, with some important exceptions –
failed to elaborate a theoretical framework for writing a national history of the Russians. The only coherent framework still seems to be the
old primordial paradigm that persists in post-Soviet textbooks where
“Russian history” begins with Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy, if not much
13. See esp. Tishkov (2003).
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earlier. This paradigm is essentially romantic and comes from the imperial period (Gerasimov, 2013).
Until Vladimir Putin’s second term as president, the state political
elite remained rather indifferent toward Russian nationalism as a political resource. Historians in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Dagestan, and
other national republics of the Russian Federation produced primordial accounts of their nations’ past that did not undermine the historical
legitimacy of post-Soviet federalism based on the national-territorial
nomenclature inherited from Soviet times. Against this background,
Russians again found themselves to be a national group without a
speciic national (ethnic) territory and leadership. The pillars of the
post-WWII Russian identity were cultural superiority and the status
of the “older brother” in the family of Soviet nations. Obviously, the
post-Soviet transformation undermined both these pillars. As victims of
“afirmative action” nationalizing policies in the national regions of the
Russian Federation, Russians could not beneit from similar, ethnically
based “afirmative action” policies designed speciically for Russians.
This political situation was exacerbated by wholly insuficient investment by the regime and the intellectual elite in the new ideology of
Russian inclusive citizenship beyond ethnicity. At the level of history
writing, this political conjuncture translated into the very modest openness of practitioners of Russian history to an epistemological critique of
nationalism, and the virtual absence of research on imperial citizenship.
Only the change of political priorities under Vladimir Putin, from
federalism to a centralized state, put forward the task of mobilizing
an appropriate ideology for such a state. The traumatic reading of the
past was deemed politically dangerous, and the oficial demand for an
optimistic national history was clearly formulated. The new universal
textbook that is currently under preparation in Russia is supposed to
promote the new version of positive history for the nation (Portnov,
2013). Beside the obvious ideological nature of this project, there are
many reasons to believe that a nation-centered narrative does not describe the inherently “imperial situation” of Russia and the post-Soviet
world. We explore this problem further in the next part of the article.
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EmpirE
The end of the European colonial empires not only generated a wave
of new national histories but also stimulated a new postcolonial paradigm in empire studies, and these two processes went hand in hand. Can
we observe something similar in the post-Soviet situation?
Old classical narratives of Russian history traditionally focused on
the state as a source of historical agency. This was a dominant trope
of Russian historiography from its founder, Nikolai Karamzin, through
Pavel Miliukov, and on to the Soviet historiography of Russian prerevolutionary history, which included such prominent historians as Andrei
Zaionchkovsky. The other side of this ixation on the state was a general disbelief in the independent signiicance of forces of societal selforganization. No wonder the post-Soviet rediscovery of empire became
immediately linked to the question of the imperial state, and hence most
of the research in the 1990s and early 2000s was carried out in the central (former imperial) archives of St. Petersburg and framed by a topdown perspective on state-generated policies (Vorobieva-Campbell,
2001a and b; 2005; Pravilova, 2000; 2006; Arapov, 2004; Diakin, 1998;
Khristoforov, 2000; 2002). Only gradually has this traditional Russian
model of historical synthesis been replaced, or rather supplemented, by
a trend characterizing present-day imperial studies worldwide, that is,
privileging other objects of research: different kinds of imperial mediators and agents, zones of contact and interaction, gender, race, and other
regimes of difference, and multiple social experiences. The analytical
decentering of the state that was needed for such a reorientation has
begun with its literal – that is, geographical – decentering. Students of
Russian Empire went to local archives (often for the mundane reason
that funding for academic travel was absent) and started forming a view
from the periphery that eventually helped to elucidate the lack of systematization of central imperial policies and to demythologize the vision
of empire as a rationally organized and smoothly governed space.14 At
the same time, other historians began to address the question of the
imperial state from the viewpoint of a dynastic regime. They were inspired by fundamental works on the history of the Russian monarchy by
Richard Wortman, who, in his seminal Scenarios of Power, exposed
the disconnect between the logics of the bureaucratic state and dynastic
14. For the works of the most distinguished founder of this trend, Anatoly Remnev,
see note 77; Usmanova, (2005; 2006), Novikova (2011) and many others.
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rulership (Wortman, 2006).15 The persistent pattern of what Wortman
calls imperial sovereignty, rooted in nonterritorial and nonbureaucratic
ways of rule, was further explored by Russian scholars (Tsyrempilov,
2011; Dolbilov, 2012; Semyonov, 2009). Their works call into question
the Weberian deinition of the state and its application to the history of
imperial governance and imperial authority, as they established the lack
of a monopoly on violence and the hegemony of a territorial understanding of sovereignty in the history of the Russian Empire.
Another road to conceptualizing the common past through the prism
of empire was laid by Andreas Kappeler. His landmark book on Russia
as a multinational empire (Kappeler, 1992)16 had equally revolutionary
effects on post-Soviet, European, and North American Russian studies.
It offered a possible path between the Scylla of isolated national histories and the Charybdis of treating the Russian Empire as a “Russian”
polity and cultural community. Kappeler described a peculiar state
consisting of many nations that developed along the typical path of
national awakening–liberation movement–national self-determination17. Ethnic Russians as a nation were no different in this respect, if
only less lucky.18 One important aspect of the success of “Russia as a
Multinational Empire” in this part of the world consisted in exactly this
fractured, mechanical wholeness of Kappeler’s model, which did not
question the credentials of the nationalizing turn in post-Soviet historiography. Any national history could potentially be included as a separate brick in his general structure, but the question of whether it was at
all possible to mechanically assemble all the individual pieces into a
single jigsaw puzzle of an empire remained unanswered. The same can
be said about the location of empire as a polity and society beyond the
“sum of nations” that had presumably composed it.
A paradigm shift began crystallizing at the turn of the millennium:
the scandalous excesses of the new national historiographies, the
15. This is a shortened one-volume edition that followed the original two volumes
published by Princeton University Press in 1995 (vol. 1) and 2000 (vol. 2).
16. The book was translated into Russian in 2000 (Kappeler, 2000).
17. According to Miroslav Hroch’s three-phase model (HrocH, 1996).
18. This argument received the most detailed treatment in Geoffrey Hosking
(1997). Hosking argued that the empire did not allow Russian nationalism to fully
develop.
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new iMperial History
methodological novelties of postcolonial and nationalism studies, and
the expansion of transnational forms of sovereignty (irst of all, the
EU), all contributed to the relativization of the nation-centered historical narrative. A growing understanding emerged among historians of
the former Soviet Union that “empire” could no longer be analyzed
simply as a constellation of a number of “nations.” There was a need
to deine Russia as an empire in positive terms, as a phenomenon in
its own right, but there was no readily available meta-framework or
analytical language for describing and explaining the imperial past. The
search for a new approach to imperial history expanded in different
directions and took many years.
One popular euphemism for empire became “Eurasia” − a geopolitical concept originally rooted in the intellectual and political situation
of the turn of the twentieth century. In the words of one of the most
perceptive students of classical Eurasianism, Sergei Glebov:
Among the various ideological products that emerged in modern
Russia it is hard to ind a more “imperial” doctrine than the teaching
of the Eurasianists. Born in the aftermath of the imperial dissolution and the “gathering of Peoples” by the Bolsheviks, Eurasianism
attempted to reinvent the Russian Empire as a cultural, political, and
geographic unity, and to reconcile a particular, illiberal vision of
modernity with ethnic and cultural diversity of a multinational state.
Glebov (2005, p. 299) 19
In the irst half of the twentieth century, the ideology of Eurasianism
underpinned the creation of a coherent (structuralist) research paradigm
in history (George Vernadsky), geography (Petr Savitsky), and linguistics (Nikolay Trubetskoy, Roman Jakobson)20. As an epistemological
system, Eurasianism emphasized holistic and systemic analysis and the
importance of acquired characteristics, developed through historical
encounters within the Eurasian space (Seriot, 1999; Glebov, 2010).
19. Glebov, 2005, p. 299. Also on classical Eurasianism, see Laruelle (1999).
20. For the analysis of structuralist underpinning in history, see Halperin (1983;
1985). In geography, see the original work by Savitskii (1927), and interpretative
studies by Bassin (1991), Glebov (2005). Regarding linguistics, see the original
work of Jakobson (1931), and the recent studies by Toman (1995) and Glebov
(2010).
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Formally speaking, the post-Soviet “Eurasians” respond to similar
political challenges like their historical predecessors. However, their
new Eurasianism has never become a paradigm but rather a salad bar of
political rhetoric, antiwestern clichés, and organicist metaphors. What
today’s Eurasianism shares with classical Eurasianism is a rejection
of modern culture and liberalism and an attempt to ind a “third path”
between capitalism and total state regulation. These are exactly the
traits that brought historical Eurasianism close to fascism, and these
traits are no less alarming in the contemporary Russian political context
(Glebov, 2011). One of the most politically and intellectually acclaimed
contemporary “Eurasian” thinkers, Moscow-based Alexander Dugin,
combines ideas of the European new right with Eurasian rhetoric in his
concept of the great continental empire that is historically opposed to
“Atlantic maritime states.”21
Conversely, other takes on “Eurasia” are born out of the imperatives
for national self-deinition on the part of non-Russian nationalities in
the wake of the collapse of the USSR. In Kazakhstan, Eurasianism as
a claim for simultaneous belonging to “Europe” and “Asia” conceptualized in civilizational terms has become an oficial ideology and
an inluential framework for historical analysis, while in Tatarstan
within the Russian Federation the same ideology competes with the
ethnocentric historical narrative and generates new concepts such as
“Euro-Islam.” Thus, post-Soviet “Eurasia” is not a paradigm of a new
history for the region, but an umbrella term for various politically motivated neo-imperial and national projects. No wonder the attempts by
American Slavists in search of a new disciplinary identity to actually
turn “Eurasia” into a new research paradigm, centered on hybridity and
mutual translatability of experiences in the region, have not found much
understanding among post-Soviet “Eurasian” historians, philosophers
and social scientists (Hagen, 2004).22
21. Dugin’s The Basics of Geopolitics is broadly used as a textbook at Russian
institutes of higher learning of military and security professional proiles (Dugin,
1997). For more on Dugin, see Sokolov (2006), Umland (2003), Laruelle (2008).
As examples of Eurasianist historiography see: Pashchenko (2002), Dzhanguzhin
(2002), Ochirova (2004).
22. Russian translation, Mark von Hagen (2004). As Hagen suggets, “The use
of Eurasia signals a decentering of historical narratives from the powerful perspectives of the former capitals, whether imperial St. Petersburg or tsarist-Soviet
Moscow” (p. 446), “‘Eurasia,’ inally, signals a determined effort by historians to
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A more analytical approach to accounting for the historical connectivity and hybridity of the post-Soviet world has been advanced by
Alexander Etkind. In the late 1990s, he began to elaborate the concept
of Russia’s “internal colonization,” blurring the boundaries between
Russia’s imperial expansion outward and internal colonization and
modernization. Etkind located cultural distances and hierarchies that
deine colonialism in the empire’s treatment of Russian peasants and
religious sects, and in the dramatic clash between the Russian intelligentsia and “the people.” His conclusion that “missionary activity,
ethnography and exotic travels, these characteristic phenomena of colonialism, in Russia bore predominantly internal character…” sounded
paradoxical and very fresh back in 1998 (Etkind, 2002; 2010). Etkind
completed his story of Russia’s internal colonization after he relocated
to Cambridge University and, technically, became a foreign scholar
(Etkind, 2011), but his ideas continue to inluence the understanding of
Russian empireness as a set of historically speciic cultural distances
that made the imperial state and its elite equally colonial toward its
ethnically Russian and non-Russian subjects (Etkind, Uffelman &
Kukulin, 2012). Etkind’s concept of Russia’s “internal colonization,”
which some see as a metaphor rather than an analytical model, provokes debates, but its important liberating impact on Russian studies
cannot be denied: it offers a way to account for the imperial imagination
and internal social divisions that never fully coincided with ethnic ones.
Another promising avenue in Russian imperial history that, not
unlike Etkind’s model of “internal colonization,” dismisses external
and homemade Sonderweg interpretations of Russia’s past as a unique
type of “civilization,” is represented by studies that consciously engage
the comparative perspective. As Russia has been undergoing the postSoviet transition, comparative, transnational, and global history has
experienced a virtual boom worldwide. The latecomer post-Soviet
scholars could theoretically choose from a quite broad repertoire of
free themselves from some of the limitations of the former reigning paradigms in
the ield, and in this sense Eurasia today is deployed as an anti-paradigm” (p. 448).
See also Bruce Grant (2012 [2011]). As Grant writes, “Being Eurasian, in this
context, is nothing more than a reminder of how dificult it is to do what the best of
scholars from our community have long already known for decades − keeping our
eyes and ears open to the multiple lows of sense, sensibility, context, and experience that constitute the worlds we seek to better understand” (p. 5). See also Steven
Kotkin (2007a and b).
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approaches to comparison. Thus, one trend in setting the research agenda for global history promoted a shift of the focus of historical research
away from political and social structures of classical comparative history to new types of agencies and connectivities, such as migrations,
networks of capitalism, global agencies of international and nongovernmental actors (Bayly, 2004; Osterhammel, 2009).23 A different approach
included accounts of systems of imperial rule and colonialism in the
research agenda of global and world history, which as the argument
goes, was shaped to a great degree by the globally reaching forces of
imperial expansion and the management of difference (Metcalf, 2007;
Burbank & Cooper, 2010).24 However, the early stages of addressing
Russia’s imperial experience within a comparative framework relected
not so much these dominant (poststructuralist) tendencies, as a preoccupation with the state and structural interpretations of history typical of
this region. Russia’s imperial experience was made sense of through the
grid of typologies of land-based vs. maritime empires that irmly placed
the Russian Empire alongside the land-based and dynastic empires of
Eurasia writ large. The volume most representative of this stage was
published in 2004, and although it was called The Russian Empire in
Comparative Perspective, its main focus was a comparison of Russia’s
imperial expansion, rule, imagination, elites, and economy with the
Ottoman and Habsburg empires (Batalina & Miller, 2004). In its own
way this was a welcome change from the Eurocentric preoccupation
of Russian historiography, but any discussion of colonialism and the
modernizing empire was characteristically absent from this volume.
Subsequently, the comparative perspectives on Russia’s imperial
experience evolved to include a discussion of Russian imperial rule
over “Russia’s Orient” as well as the transfer of practices and intellectual frames between the Russian Empire and colonial empires.25
23. For an interesting example of this trend that engages students of the postSoviet world, see the thematic forum guest-edited by Serguei Oushakine (2012).
See especially Oushakine’s pp. 53-81. Another interesting example of comparative methodology that engages Russian material is Alessandro Stanziani’s research
(stanziani, 2011; 2008a and b).
24. In the discussion of their book, Burbank and Cooper argue that they wanted to
fulill an important criterion of the new global history: to decenter the Eurocentric
biases built into it and to provide a longer span coverage that avoids exclusive
focus on modernity (Mogilner, seMyonov & gerasiMov, 2010).
25. See in particular Vladimir Bobrovnikov (2010).
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However, even today, the comparative and entangled history of imperial imagination and practices remains underexplored and undertheorized. All too often historians think that an empire they study is too
large a world in and of itself to be compared with other formations. The
main problem still lies in the unintentional reiication of the compared
imperial experiences, whether a comparison of one imperial periphery
to another (say, Central Asia to the British Raj) or the whole empire to
another system of imperial rule (for instance, the Ottoman and Russian
Empires): the former approach tends to lose the imperial threads across
the imperial space, while the latter appoach risks overlooking the irregularities of the imperial space and politics of exceptionalism that made
those irregularities the norm of imperial social and political reality.
Whereas decentering of the state, a passion for “Eurasia,” the theory
of “internal colonization,” or structural comparative approaches manifested themselves by the early 2000s, other innovative paradigms took
more time to ripen. By 2007, almost simultaneously, a number of book
collections were published that summarized the results of the paradigm shift in studying Russia as a composite imperial society. Japanese
scholars along with Russian historians have, perhaps, made the most
pronounced attempt to theorize imperial studies. Kimitaka Matsuzato,
the driving force behind this effort, published a collection of articles
under the ambitious title Imperiology: From Empirical Knowledge to
Discussing the Russian Empire (Matsuzato, 2007). The very title of the
collection reveals the goal of offering a new metatheory of empire as
a particular political formation (“imperiology”). The strong inluence
of political science approaches on this version of “imperiology” is
obvious: a theory is expected to be generated on the basis of a number of empirical case studies that reveal some ixed structural elements
and regularities in data series.26 Contributors to the collection suggested
replacing the “bipolar scheme” of center vs. periphery with a “tripolar”
one, involving the imperial center, “aristocratic/dominant nations,” and
“peasant/unprivileged” nations of the region. Curiously, while the tripolar system itself was presented as an analytical construct, the “nations”
were regarded as self-evident, fairly stable entities. This constellation
of “weighty actors” was measured against the background of “macro26. Matsuzato describes the purpose of the collection as “to summarize the accumulated empirical studies and to abstract widely applicable theories from these
studies” (Matsuzato, 2007, p. 4).
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regions,” such as Volga-Ural, Left-Bank Ukrainian, Western and Ostsee
provinces, Steppe, Western and Eastern Siberia. “Imperiologists” believed that all of these regions had “relatively autonomous histories” (and
hence genealogies and ixed boundaries), while interactions among the
regions themselves and between the regions and the imperial government determined the characteristics of imperial rule. Thus, the elusive
notion of “empire” was stabilized in this approach through a combination of ahistorical analytical models of political science with essentializing categories of geopolitics (arbitrarily distinguished regions as
subjects of historical process and parts in political interaction) and ixed
national identities.
A different perspective on the spatial foundation of Russia’s “empireness” is demonstrated by the authors of the multivolume publication
Okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (The Borderlands of the Russian Empire).27
Not unlike the imperiology collection, this series of volumes, written by
a cohort of distinguished Russian historians and their colleagues from
the former Soviet republics − now independent states – emphasizes the
structures and practices of imperial governance and the interdependent
relationship of the imperial center and peripheries of Western borderlands, Caucasus, Siberia, Central Asia, and Bessarabia (“borderlands”
is a historical term used by the Russian imperial government to map
the space of imperial sovereignty). It is logical therefore that in this
project the peripheral regions are not the products of present-day geopolitical mental mapping, but the historical categories that produced
elaborated narratives of self-description and representation in the past,
including the substantiation of their boundaries. Though rich in insights
and coverage, decentering the typical post-Soviet historical attention
to territories of the Russian Federation in the borders of 1992, and telling the nuanced stories of dilemmas of imperial government and the
emergence of modern projects of nationalism, these volumes fail to
address directly the underpinning structure of this reconstruction of the
past − the division of the imperial space between the imperial center
and the borderlands. There is no volume on the imperial center, as if
its reconstruction from the “margins” of empire is suficient. Yet this
imperial center as viewed from the varying perspectives of the series’
27. For more precision, see Dolbilov & Miller (2007), Dameshek & Remnev
(2007), Bobrovnikov & Babich (2007), Abashin, Arapov & Bekmakhanova
(2008), Kushko & Taki (2012).
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volumes appears to be congruent with either the dynastic regime, or the
nationalizing project of the “Great Russian nation,” or the bureaucratic
regime of technocratic modernization, or the Orthodox Slavic population of the empire, or bourgeois colonial power. This luctuating representation of the imperial center calls into question its self-referential
nature and the chosen mode of accounting for the imperial experience.
The contributors to the volumes masterfully reconstruct the complex
web of imperial government in which the imperial authorities in the
borderlands and some local agents could formulate their own policy
and inluence the decisions of the central authorities. Still, the imperial
historical experience in this nuanced analysis remained conined to the
management of space and population by the state and evidently does
not include social and cultural relations and nonstate forms of authority
and agency. Moreover, the chosen focus on empire as a structure of
space and power conines the story of historical developments in that
space to the emergence of modern nationalisms (both Russian and nonRussian) as the only possible mode of describing historical dynamics.
It leaves open the question of whether empire is a meaningful category
for exploring the reproduction of asymmetries of power and differentiated space under the challenge of modern conditions.28
A possible answer to this dilemma is offered by another set of relatively recent works that problematize the very knowledge and imagery
that have historically informed the understanding of imperial and national phenomena and politics and underpinned the regime of making
difference. We may classify this approach as poststructural and functionalist. Its representatives place their sophisticated semantic inquiry
within a given “imperial situation” at a particular historical moment,
thus treating empire not as a structure or a type of polity that is speciic
and ixed in time, but as a context-setting category.29 These kinds of
studies are focused on knowledge–power relationships in the broadest
sense and internal mechanisms of the imperial regime of making difference. While reintegrating the world of the former Russian Empire
and the USSR as an “empire of knowledge,” representatives of this
trend rely on the analytical language that has been productively used by
28. Some volumes in the series, such as the one on Western Borderlands and
Siberia, claim that empire withered away with the advent of nationalism and nation-building projects in the modern age.
29. On empire as a context-setting category, see Alexander Semyonov (2008).
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their colleagues in European studies or world history, a language that
includes concepts such as Orientalism, subalternity, carnal knowledge,
civilizing mission, and others. Not surprisingly, this particular trend is
well integrated into international scholarship, touching upon all key
topics of modern imperial studies.
The political rationality and mindset of imperial and Soviet bureaucracy and their conceptual universe are the subjects of studies by
Mikhail Dolbilov,30 Darius Staliunas (Staliunas, 2007), and Sergei
Abashin (Abashin, 2002; 2003; 2009; 2012); in addition, Dolbilov and
Staliunas have explored the history of religious categorizations and
religious self-identiications and written regionally speciic stories
of continuum and rupture between state-endorsed Christian and nonChristian religions and rival conceptions of social and political belonging in the form of nationality.31 Elena Vishlenkova’s studies turn to
visual representations of imperial diversity as a prerationalized stage
of imperial self-cognition (Vishlenkova, 2011). The science of imperial
geography as a ield developed by multiple agents with different, sometimes mutually exclusive, ideological and scholarly agendas is deconstructed by Marina Loskutova (Loskutova, 2002; 2003; 2007; 2009).
The process of “construction of traditions” in the Northern Caucasus
by legal experts, ethnographers, and activists is a central theme for
Vladimir Bobrovnikov (Bobrovnikov, 2002; 2004; 2007). The history
of imperial universities that never developed into nucleuses of “national” scholarship, although they greatly contributed to studies of local
folklore, languages, and ethnography, thus producing hybrid scientiic
and ideological discourses, has been explored by Alexander Dmitriev
(Dmitriev, 2007; 2012). The author of this article herself has contributed to the reconstruction of the state of race science and “liberal” and
“illiberal” racial discourses in the Russian Empire (Mogilner, 2013).
The pathbreaking works of the late Anatoly Remnev instituted the
regionalist approach in imperial history, with special attention to spatial mental maps of different agents and subjects of empire (Remnev,
2001; 2002; 2003; 2004a and b; 2005, and others). The phenomenon of
nascent imperial social engineering of the turn of the twentieth century
is analyzed by Ilya Gerasimov (Gerasimov, 2009a). Writing the history of Russia’s imperial parliament, Alexander Semyonov documents
30. For the synthesis of his long-term research project, see Dolbilov (2010).
31. See notes 67 and 68, and their multiple articles.
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the moment when different imperial regimes of identiication and selfidentiication collided with one another in the Russian State Duma (irst
convoked in 1906). Semyonov formulates a concept of “uneven diversity” that helps to keep in the picture rival and overlapping forms of
difference in the space of empire without reducing them to the category
of nationality (Semyonov, 2009).
These and many other scholars who pursue the “cognitive” approach
do not necessarily deine their ield of expertise as imperial history and
their object of study as “empire.” However, taken together, they accept
as the point of departure the uneven heterogeneity of the societies and
polities that they study, and the cultural and historical conditioning of
human social imagination, past and present, and try to turn this fact
into a research perspective. As a result, they replace the question “what
is empire?” with the question of how the imperial space is populated,
lived in, experienced, and perceived.
BEyoNd thE “EmpirE aNd NatioN” BiNary oppositioN
The transitional post-1991 period in historiography in the region of the
former Soviet Union, characterized by the passive reception of diverse
trends and methods in modern history writing and the reinterpretation
of old “domestic” paradigms, is over. Many historians have mobilized
behind the agenda of Putin’s normalization of Russian imperial history
through the focus on the state, while quite a few scholars are engaged
in producing historical knowledge that sets new standards in several
ields. It is the project of “new imperial history” that provides the latter
with a coherent focus and common methodological framework.
The scholarly brand of “new imperial history” in the post-Soviet
countries is associated with the international quarterly Ab Imperio,
hereafter AI.32 The journal was established in 1999 as a venue for intro32. Ab Imperio was founded in 1999 by a group of Russian historians, all of whom
have both Russian and Western degrees, to provide a forum for exchange of opinions about nationalism in the post-Soviet world. Published in Kazan, the capital
of Russia’s Muslim Republic of Tatarstan, and in the United States, the journal
presents articles in both English and Russian and involves cooperation between
Russian, North American, Japanese, and East and West European scholars. Ab
Imperio is indexed in Historical Abstracts, the American Bibliography of Slavic
and Eastern European Studies (ABSEES), and The European Reference Index for
the Humanities (ERIH), where it received the highest rating INT1 (“international
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ducing to Russia the discipline of nationalism studies, but soon came to
a point where it had to redeine its mission as the investigation of epistemological possibilities of accounting for the experience of sociocultural
and political heterogeneity. Being unafiliated with any academic institution and tradition, it provides a politically and ideologically neutral
space for professional communication between post-Soviet scholars
and their colleagues worldwide. AI’s editors and contributors study
multiple “imperial situations” (cf. “imperial formations” in the work of
Ann Stoler) of multilayered and uneven heterogeneity. Understood in
this way, “imperial situations” are limited neither to historical empires
nor necessarily to the region of the former Russian Empire and USSR.
Therefore, “new imperial history” cannot be a Russian project or even
a collective post-Soviet enterprise only. Social heterogeneity, hierarchical constructions of power and the production of difference, colonial
practices that formed the self-understanding of colonial “metropoles,”
patterns of direct and indirect domination, normative powers of nationalism, postcolonialism as a form of nationalism – these and many other
issues that inform the post-Soviet “new imperial history” agenda and are
so visibly present in our region – have recently entered the repertoire
of historical debates everywhere. Sufice it to mention the example of
British “new imperial history,” or the recent attempt by two well-known
American historians (one a student of the Russian Empire, and the other
of the French Empire), Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, to redeine
the traditional world-history narrative as a history of imperial polities.33
Hence, it is important to stress that “new imperial history” as developed by modern post-Soviet scholars is not so much about “empires” –
historical or retrospectively classiied as such – as about the study of
complex societies, with special attention to the empirical materials
provided by the cases of the Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, British, and
other Early Modern and Modern empires. As such, it provides historians from post-Soviet countries, who are experts on “their” region and
its empire(s), with some important advantages beyond irsthand access
publications with high visibility and inluence among researchers in the various
research domains in different countries, regularly cited all over the world”). For
more on AI see www.abimperio.net.
33. For an analytical overview of the development of British “new imperial history,” see Stephen Howe (2011a); for comparative observations on the development of empire studies in Russia and in the West, see Howe (2011b); Burbank and
Cooper (2008) .
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to local historical sources in various local languages. In addition to
these obvious assets, the ield of “new imperial history” offers them
the rare possibility of fresh and original interpretations of problems
that have not yet received conventional solutions in historiography and
sometimes do not even have conventional wordings. Hence in the ield
of “new imperial history,” it may be argued, post-Soviet “Russian studies” emerge in the vanguard of international critical historiography
that revisits the problem of modernity, Eurocentrism, and the hegemony
of nation-centrism in the writing of world history.
“New imperial history” is still a project in the making, and its
research agenda, which transcends the binary opposition of nation versus empire, is constantly being updated and negotiated. The development of this agenda has already passed through a number of stages.
For example, a sustained focus on imperial experiences and attempts
to articulate them by historical actors have led to an elaboration of the
concept of “languages of imperial self-description,” which encompass
a broad array of narratives, both textual and nontextual.34 It is a paradox
that empire became “visible” to modern social sciences as a distinctive
phenomenon and a research problem only at the very end of the “age
of empires,” and only as a historically doomed type of society. The
very perception of empire as an archaic polity that was destined to die
out and give way to the nation-state was formed by the advance of
the nation-centered perspective as a normative framework of modern
knowledge in the course of the nineteenth century. This a priori dismissive paradigm of the nation-centered worldview raises the question of
whether modern empires were capable of generating alternative metanarratives (possibly carrying a different diagnosis of imperial societies)
that would be compatible with nationalizing social sciences and recognized as part of the modern episteme. The repertoire of such “authen34. For a conceptualization and examples of the application of this concept, see
Gerasimov, Kusber, and Semyonov (2009). See also four thematic volumes of AI in
2005: n°1, “Empire: The Lexicon of Practice and the Grammar of Analysis”; n°2,
”Languages of Self-Description in Empire and Multinational State”; n°3, “Empire
and the Challenge of Nationalism: Searching for Modes of Self-Description”; n°4,
“Discussing Imperial Legacy: Archaisms and Neologisms.” The theme continued in
2006: n°1, “Language Dificulties: How and Why We Write the History of Empires
and Nations”; n°2, “Conversations About Motherland: Individual and Collective
Experiences of ‘Homeland’”; n°3, “The Chorus of Nations: Constructing and
Describing Group Unity”; n°4, “The Letter of the Law: The Institutionalization of
Belonging to Polity.” See also other issues of AI up to the most current.
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Marina Mogilner
tic” and self-descriptive narratives may include ideological, political,
or scientiic languages, alongside nondiscursive social acts and gestures
that can also be conceptualized as a speciic language, thus inding new
registers in which even imperial “subalterns” have a chance to be heard
as “speaking” in their own way.35
The discourse of nationalism and the modern taxonomic mindset can
only imagine legitimate political communities and cultural spheres to
be nations or similar groups constituted as clearly bounded and internally homogeneous elements of cultural and social space. For the sake
of clarity and differentiation of the ideal type of nation, this discourse
and politics may be called strategic essentialism (a term originally
suggested by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). It is possible to imagine that
different elements of imagery and mythology, forms of social and cultural statuses, mental mapping of territory or deterritorialized thinking
can be fused together in the stance of strategic essentialism to produce
a nation, ethnic group, diaspora, national minority, or cultural group,
one or many, as in the nationalizing policy of the USSR. The common
effect of this stance is to be found not in the content of signiication of
groupness, but in the nature of the imagined and projected boundaries
of groupness.
The opposite case constituting the distinguishing feature of the
imperial cognitive framework can be assembled, at least partially and
not always as a conscious and well-relected option, from the “new
imperial histories” of the Russian and Soviet past. This approach may
be termed strategic relativism (Semyonov, 2008), which should be
understood as the discourse and stance that relativizes the bounded
and internally homogeneous nature of the constituent elements of the
sociopolitical space and governance. The latter stance of rule and the
cognitive frame of sociopolitical interaction and imagination produce a
situation of uncertainty, incommensurability, and indistinction, in short,
an “imperial situation.” Developing this logic, it is possible to suggest
that the palimpsest of religious faith, legal estate, nation (as the imperial political nation or as many ethnically deined “nations”), regional,
local identities, and civilizational hierarchies deine Russian empire as
a common space of experience and a context-setting category (for any
speciic study of the past), while what made the Soviet Union an empire
35. As an example of such an approach, see Gerasimov (2010; 2009b).
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was the relativizing employment of class and nationality in redeining
the spaces of social and political belonging.
On a more general level, the direction taken by “new imperial history” in the region can be conceptualized (and is conceptualized in
the pages of AI) as a cognitive turn in empire studies. This cognitive
turn enters into the dialogue with a cognitive and constructivist turn
in nationalism studies that brings to the fore of historical research the
situation of an actual and semantically constructed encounter with difference and all of the inequalities and imbalances of power this usually
entails. Difference as a norm of sociopolitical reality and its perception
take center stage in this paradigm. At the same time, “new imperial
history” retains a focus on power imbalances and inequalities as well
as on personal and group experiences of living through them, thus preventing the romanticizing and idealizing of past imperial diversity. The
imperial mechanism of the production of difference itself becomes a
promising research agenda and a common framework for the history
of the region. In other words, empire is a useful analytical category not
only because certain polities used this internationally legitimate name
for self-description but also because, as a matter of ideal types, empire
helps us to identify the logic and strategy of those political regimes that
for various reasons did not pursue the path of homogenization of space
and population, and instead developed various regimes of accommodating and manipulating difference. These regimes were found to be
not only an offshoot of the typical imperial practice of divide et impera
but also a result of the intentions of communities under imperial rule to
retain their particularism and separateness as well as the consequence
of the relative weakness of the imperial state in mastering vast space
and diverse populations. Historians of various imperial experiences
agree on this point of interpretation whether they study the history of
the Ottoman Empire or the Raj – that is, imperial formations that are
conventionally classed differently as maritime or land-based empires.36
This perspective is fruitfully developed using the material of Russia’s
imperial experience, notwithstanding the persistent reliance of historians of Russia’s history on the conventional wisdom of Russian classical historiography, which offered the story of the Russian imperial
government as bent on centralization and uniication.37
36. See among others Burbank & Cooper (2010), Barkey (2008), Breyfogle (2008).
37. Mark von Hagen offered a persuasive critique of the statist school of Russian
49
In the post-Soviet region, empire persists as a complex societal structure, a memory, a political frame of references, an ideological bugaboo,
and a euphemism for the lost feeling of wholeness and unique historical
subjectivity. The persistence of empire (Beissinger, 2008)38 on so many
levels and in such multiple forms has made the task of its analytical
estrangement even more vital. However, as this article has argued, this
analytical enterprise possesses value far beyond one particular region
and one particular academic community. Today, “new imperial history,”
as the study of complex societies and multilayered diversity, forms an
international and multidisciplinary ield of intensive scholarly communication to which students of Russian and Soviet empires and their
successor states have much to contribute.
BiBliograpHy
aBasHin Sergei (2002), “Obshchina v Turkestane v otsenkakh i sporakh
russkikh administratorov nachala 80-kh gg. XIX v. (Po materialam
gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Respubliki Uzbekistan” (Russian oficials of the 1880s on the peasant commune in Turkestan [based on
the materials of State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan]), in
Sbornik Russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, Vol.153, n°5: “Rossia
i Sredniaia Aziia”, Moskva: Russkoe obozrenie, pp.71-88.
aBasHin Sergei (2003), “Islam v biurokraticheskoi praktike tsarskoi
administratsii Turkestana (Vakufnoe delo dakhbitskogo medrese.
1892–1900),” (Islam and burocratic practices of Tsarist oficials
in Turkestan [The waqf ile of the Dakhbit madrasah]), in Sbornik
Russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, Vol.155, n°7: “Rossia i
musul’manskii mir”, Moskva: Russkaia Panorama, pp.163-191.
historiography and accentuated a rival canon of thinking about Russia’s imperial
political history in the form of the federalist discourse in the nineteenth century
(Hagen, 2007; 1997).
38. For the Russian-language version, see Ab Imperio 1 (2008), pp. 157-176.
new iMperial History
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