The current issue of Ab Imperio ends the annual program entitled “Russian Empire/USSR and Paradoxes of Modernization”. From the point of view of the orthodox 1940s – 1950s theory of modernization (as well as in the minds of many contemporary historians and social scientists) “modernization” appears as a linear process of the emergence of modern institutions, such as rational bureaucracy, market economy, parliamentary democracy, etc. This usage, which describes social, political and economic processes using verifiable positive data of social sciences, has outlived itself. Essentially, scholars have approached the study of modernization without a theory of the latter, which led to some new questions postulated under the impact of the cultural and linguistic turn in historical studies.
A new conception of modernity, which in many senses emerged from the ambiguous and often traumatic experience of the 20th century, was gradually substituted for the traditional theory of modernization. While accepting the innovative character of social, political, cultural and economic processes of modern history, the concept of “modernity” turns into the subject of analysis the paradoxical nature of these processes. Thus, historians looked at the combination of liberal models of social organization with racism and orientalism, of the Enlightenment project of rationalization of state and society with totalitarianism and genocide, etc.
Nevertheless, the concept of modernity, which took shape in the era of the “postmodern” and of the essayistic style of historical writing, could not turn into a new historical metanarrative. While partly replacing the old-fashioned theory of modernization, the new concept keeps intact our understanding of specific features of the modern period, in which we are still dealing with such questions as what is Enlightenment, how to handle the constantly increasing pace of historical time, how to control the future and how to comprehend pre-modern times, which were innocent of all these questions.
In 2002 we attempted to problematize processes of modernization and the concept of modernity, approaching them in the context of research into imperial and national phenomena. We believe that we succeeded to demonstrate the significant explanatory potential of the two paradigms, which were treated by our authors in the broadest way possible: from the narrowly functionalist understanding to the global view, where modernization (and even plural “modernizations”!) appear as element(s) of the phenomenon of modernity, loading the latter concept with a universal quality (see AI 1/2002). While accepting necessity for the diversification of the historical narrative of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union through the inclusion of different regional and national histories and problematizing the existence of the “archaic” empire in the age of social, economic, cultural and political changes, we also attempted to show relevance of the paradigms of modernization and modernity (whose theorists rarely thought about these paradigms’ compatibility with the historical fact of multinational societies) for the study of such phenomena as ethnicity, nationhood and nation building, which in the East European region are firmly written within the context of empires and multinational states.
Finally, in the last issue “Social and Economic Structures and Paradoxes of Imperial Modernization” we paid attention to the topic, which was central for the old modernization theory and its critics. As before, we were interested in the problem of the realization of some ideal historical scenario under specific conditions of the maximally heterogeneous social and economic space of empire. Thus, leaving aside the deterministic and teleological principles of the orthodox modernization theory, we do not want to leave aside the very idea of the vectored character of historical processes in modern Russia. We appeal for a more adequate perception of the spatial component of the imperial chronotop and of its multidimensional and nonlinear character.
Considering the above mentioned, it should not appear peculiar that we open the issue with the first Russian language publication of Alexander Gerschenkron’s classic “Economic backwardness in historical perspective”, exactly half a century after the English original publication. This work by Gerschenkron, which appeared at the peak of popularity of the modernization theory and which had survived this theory’s decline, has always been deeper than it seemed to apologetic or critical readers.
Essentially, Gerschenkron questions the very linear and irreversible nature of modernization and builds foundations for the multifactor analysis of economic, historical, social and cultural preconditions and consequences of economic modernization. The article by P. Gatrell and B. Anan’ich, which follows that of Gerschenkron, is an example of such analysis, whose purpose is to “test” theoretical models (those of F. Liszt, A. Gerschenkron, E. Gellner) using material of the Russian and Soviet imperial histories. Gatrell and Anan’ich also aim at defining to what degree national interests influenced the economic strategy of authorities in different periods of Russian/Soviet history as well as at establishing the results of processes of social and economic changes in the Russian and Soviet imperial space. Anan’ich and Gatrell remind researchers of the importance of the economic component of empire and nation building processes and of the role of the now largely forgotten fact of economic theories’ impact upon theorizing nationalism. Anan’ich and Gatrell’s analysis demonstrates that the multifactorness and ambiguousness of the modernization paradigm become most apparent exactly when the object of research is “synthetic”, that is, when the presumption of interaction, mutual impact and mutual dependence of different processes in the social, economic, political or cultural sphere is already built in the object.
“The cost” of empire, “the settlers’ society” as a social and economic organism, the economic foundations of political processes and vice versa, mechanisms of constructing social and economic reality in a multinational state (thematic bloc on censuses in the Russian empire/USSR), that is, all the problems debated in the current issue of AI, reflect, independently of a specific author’s “ideology” or methodology, the main “paradox” of modernization. This paradox consists in its synthetic character, its transcendence of mere economic, mere political or mere institutional processes. Thus, modernization emerges as a “national” specificity and, simultaneously, as an “international” universality, which is still modern and relevant for our generation. As Alexander Gerschenkron put it, “the historian’s contribution consists in pointing at potentially relevant factors and at potentially significant combinations among them which could not be easily perceived within a more limited sphere of experience. These are the questions. The answers themselves, however, are a different matter. No past experience, however rich, and no historical research, however thorough, can save the living generation the creative task of finding their own answers and shaping their own future.”

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov