Ab Imperio's first issue in 2005 introduces a new annual theme and sums up the journal's contribution to recent debates on empire, nationalism, and history-writing in the post-Soviet space. It appears that the main result of the development of the journal as an intellectual project is the formulation of the problem of languages of self-description of empire and multinational state, which will be explored in the four interconnected thematic issues of the journal in 2005. The very logic of the journal's development, which pursued a systematic and multidimensional discussion of imperial studies with contribution by almost five hundred scholars from more than thirty countries, led us to pose the current problem in a dialogue with what has been explored in our annual themes and with the contemporary state of research on empire and nationalism.
Ab Imperio was initially conceived as a project for “translating” debates in the Western field of nationalism studies into the post-Soviet academic context. However, the first attempts to uncritically project methodological assumptions and historiographic models of nationalism studies onto the material of Russian imperial and Soviet history proved their relatively limited interpretative and heuristic value. The Russian empire and even the Soviet Union were not merely political unions of nations or “proto-nations.” The post-Soviet national states do not have an unambiguous genealogy in the imperial and even pre-imperial past. The category of ethnicity, not to speak of confession, was only one source of articulation of social identity in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union among many others, which included but were not limited to rank, estate, occupation, profession, class, wealth, ascribed status, political affiliation, and gender. What is even more important, it is hardly possible to correlate all these elements of social identification into a single and universal hierarchy. However, a comparison between the historiographic discussion of imperial experiences in Eurasia and the well developed field of studies of Western overseas empires suggests that “empire” is not just a form of political organization but rather an open-ended system of social, political, and cultural entanglements. For that reason, the arguments related to the definition of “the essence of empire” are of secondary significance, since empire appears to be a nexus of historical entanglements rather than a structure, a research situation rather than a historically given phenomenon. The field of scholarly inquiry that the editors of Ab Imperio aspired to popularize in the post-Soviet academic context turned to become in this new light a problem that required critical reflection and extensive research.
From its very first issue, Ab Imperio has evolved as a collaborative research project, which at the same time mapped the contours of a new field of inquiry that might be called “new imperial history of Russia and the post-Soviet space.” A combination of a consistent division of the contributions into regular journal’s sections with a principle of thematic issues was the first step taken by the editors to secure a sustainable critical reflection and discussion of new research. Various key problems of historical experiences of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union (nationalism and religion, nationalism and liberalism, empire and war) were explored in the same format: critical reflection of the problem on the basis of cross-fertilization of different theoretical canons, historical research, exploration of the problem from the vantage point of political science and sociology, illuminating archival documents, inquiry into the way the present problem is reflected in historical memory and recurrent popular mythologies. Work on thematic issues has led to an ad hoc tradition of holding virtual exchanges of commentaries and mini-forums on current trends in historiography and social sciences. As a result, each issue of Ab Imperio functioned as a virtual workshop with a defined thematic agenda and moderation of the discussion. In parallel to and connected to the development of “virtual workshops,” the editorial team continued to regularly hold “real” international conferences and workshops.^[1]
Since 2002, the logic of the journal’s development suggested that a new format of annual foci as thematic umbrellas for each year’s four issues should be introduced. This innovative editorial policy came as a result of an understanding of the ambiguity of mechanical coupling of previously articulated questions with the “vantage point” of research on empire. More importantly, this policy was an attempt to counter the growing ghettoization of nationalism studies in East European context. Very often these studies revolved around a fixed number of questions and used a limited number of theoretical references. Thus, for example, an inquiry into ethnicity tended to ignore a large corpus of literature on the social stratification and the historically determined estate order in imperial Russia. Students of national movements used the interpretative scheme of modernization developed for analyses of modern nationalism by E. Gellner and, especially, M. Hroch. The discussion of borderlands (okrainy) of the Russian empire often ignored the broader field of cultural construction of boundaries.
Further reflection on the history of the post-Soviet space from the viewpoint of imperial predicament required a transition to a discussion of existing metanarratives of social sciences in relation to the problem of empire. Annual themes drew on such metanarratives, meta-concepts, and their self-reflection as modernization and modernity, borders and boundaries, and historical memory.^[2] The practice of annual themes allowed to map the contours of an emerging field of new imperial history and to place it in the context of the now dominant research paradigms. We attempted to fixate scholarly intentions, the added heuristic value, and the boundaries of this field of inquiry in a separate collection of articles, New Imperial History of Post Soviet Space (Kazan, 2004), written by authors from six countries and supplied by the bibliographic and historiographic surveys of literature in four languages.^[3]
Such is the pre-history of the “linguistic turn” that Ab Imperio is to undertake in its four issues this year. (See the description of this year’s annual program in the information section of this volume). The discussion of metanarratives of social sciences against the background of imperial history aided in the process of crystallization of the problem of language and modalities of signifying of empire. The exploration of imperial historical experiences through the prism of the concepts of modernization and memory yielded important results. However, we also realized the profound limits of the optics of modern social and political concepts (such as “nation,” “nationalism,” “elites,” “politics”) in its application to the pre-modern phenomenon of empire, which experienced significant transformations in the context of modernity. Significantly, historic empires failed to produce an authoritative tradition of self-reflection that might have been translated into the language of modern social sciences. Therefore, it is not accidental that recent attempts to construe empire as an ideal-type were structured by the distillation of the analytical model from analyses of historic empires and of their specific features.^[4] This comparative approach ignores the basis of self-perception of any empire as a unique polity, which structures its social space and landscape in the image of a cosmic order, be it in order to follow the will of gods or recommendations of a newest social theory. Borrowing economic and military modes of organization, court etiquette, and even elements of the symbolic regalia, each empire perceives itself as an improved and, in fact, the only possible model of an absolute order.^[5] That is why “imperial comparative studies” per se cannot be viewed as a universal method for creating an analytical model of empire: we can directly compare only those elements that were present in all social and political organizations of an era. The unique internal world of empire, though, remains a thing in itself, for it was never formulated rationally and therefore cannot be built into the modern system of universal scientific knowledge.
An alternative to the approach of comparative distillation of the characteristic features of empire lies in the reconstruction of the modalities of representation and self-description of each historical empire. What scholars usually assume to be the most typical discourses of empire, in fact, seems not to have any specifically imperial ideological focus and appears instead as a combination of a dynastic myth and some religious messianism. It does not mean, however, that empires did not leave any authentic traces of (self)-representation and should therefore be considered merely speechless objects for projecting upon them such modern concepts and models as “the prison house of nations,” or “empire as a multinational state.” The problem here is that traces of representation and self-reflection left by empires cannot be related to our modern conceptual apparatus and socio-political experience. In this respect, the study of empire is not a “genealogy” since it is hardly possible to find an unambiguous continuity between consecutive imperial polities, even in the case of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, as has been suggested by old and recent scholarship on nationalities policies in the USSR. Similarly, studies of empire cannot be carried out in the mode of “archeology” understood in terms of socio-philosophical analysis of Michel Foucault. Archeology of empire is impossible because modern political experiences and discourses erase and re-define the legacy of empire. Rather, it might be possible to conceive of studies of empires as a form of paleontology, i.e. a kind of approach that reconstructs various forms of social and political organizations and their specific contexts not immediately or easily comprehensible in the modern world. We suggest to view the “imperial text” as a dead language, the grammar and semantics of which remained locked in the past. It goes without saying that there remains the problem of an adequate “translation” of this deciphered language into the language of modern social sciences. Yet, with respect to epistemology, this problem also encapsulates a research agenda which is different from the archeology of knowledge: it directs scholars to focus on the original semantics of empire as different from the later palimpsest of projections and appropriations of the concept of empire in modern rational discourses. In other words, this research agenda is different from interpreting the past with epistemological concerns of the present. Neither does this mean that by deciphering a dead language of empire scholars would be able to understand better the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen war.” However, this focus will enable us to comprehend better, for example, what kind of a worldview and/or rationality of social behavior was nourished in empire. Thus, the reconstruction of “dead languages” of representation and of lost semantics of empire is the first aspect of the problem of “languages of self-description of empire and nation” that will be explored in thematic issues of Ab Imperio in 2005. It is obvious that this type of research should be based on a much broader definition of “languages of imperial self-description,” which along with legal, political, artistic discourses would include practices of social self-organization and interaction in the context of a complex and multiethnic society: in heterogeneous societies with low levels of literacy a social action and even a gesture acquire additional semiotic meaning.^[6]
The second aspect of the problem of languages of self-description of empire and nation is the question of the transfer and “translation” of imperial experiences into the language of modern rationality and reflection. Modern social sciences emerged in the second half of the 19th century in the context of national or nationalizing states of Western Europe. The discourse of modern social sciences was driven by analyses of social reality through the prism of nationhood as a normative and “natural” condition of socio-political organization. Consequently, continental and multinational empires were increasingly perceived in the 19th century as archaic and reactionary polities, well before these empires entered the period of crisis. Hence the question emerges as to what was the mechanism of rupture in the self-representation and self-reflection of these empires and whether an archaic language of imperial self-description was suppressed, forgotten or redefined in the process of evolution of the dominant discourses of nationhood.
This introduces yet another theoretical question: why advanced intellectuals in Central and Eastern European empires could not (or did not want to) formulate an alternative to the emerging discourse of nationhood at the end of the 19th century? The latter question appears to be especially acute given that such imperial centers par excellence as Vienna and St. Petersburg fell into the logic of nationalizing discourse. A hypothesis might be advanced that the evolving positivist pre-structuralist paradigm of social sciences led scholars to unearth certain basic elements of any social and political organization. “People” and “nation” were picked as natural building blocks of social chemistry and engineering. Thus, even imperial sponsorship did not induce social sciences to ponder an alternative model that would de-essentialize the basic elements of social and political space and construe them analytically and interchangeably (alternating between peoples, confessions, social groups and economic classes). On the contrary, the positivistic perspective mapped the whole of social and political space as a cumulative sum of basic elements (nationality-nations) and thereby encapsulated the possibility of deconstruction. World War I reached its apex with the declaration of the right of nations to self-determination. Notwithstanding the radical changes during the war, this principle was only an explication of fundamental assumptions of modern social sciences. The paradox of epistemology of social sciences in the European periphery lies in inability to devise an alternative to the nation-centered optics of representation of social reality because of a lack of an authoritative language for conceptualizing and thematizing the problem of the imperial state and society. Does this suggest that discourses and practices of social sciences in continental empires were in no way different from the social sciences of self-proclaimed national states of Western Europe? Can we equate the lack of an alternative language for representing imperial experiences with ignorance of and disregard for the specificity of complex societies on European periphery? Paradoxically enough, contemporary scholars have to reconstruct potential “languages of self-description” of the imperial polity and society in the same way as they construct metanarratives for retrospective description of historical reality. The nature of this new field of inquiry is not to distance oneself from the historically imbued semantics of empire but to unpack it in the context of mutual reinforcement, hybridization, and antagonism vis-а-vis the discourse of nationhood.
Finally, the third aspect of the problem of languages of self-description of empire and nation is the question of intended and unintended implications of imperial studies in the immediate context of the growing fashion of empire both in terms of practice oriented discussions of political scientists and in terms of popularization of empire in politics of memory and popular culture. It is granted that historians cannot control the ways in which the results of their intellectual pursuits will be used outside of academia. However, this should not make them less cognizant of responsibility for consequences of articulating a certain research agenda. And the consequences of the recent upsurge of interest in empire might turn out to be very unpredictable. What the editors would like to focus on is a phenomenon of a different epoch, which is connected with the present day realities only through the work of political rhetoric and language. We believe it is possible to differentiate between categories of analysis and categories of political practice and to approach empires as a bygone practice. Yet, this epistemological situation is reversible to the extent that categories of analysis will inform new types of political attitude and practice. Such a possibility is encapsulated in the very interest of social sciences and historiography in empire, which leads to an actualization – at least, intellectual – of imperial legacy.
Scholarly pursuits can hardly be effectively censored. Yet, projecting possible consequences of taking empire as a usable past, we would like to underscore the critical potential that is also possible to realize in the field of studies of empires and nationalism. First of all, a sophisticated view of empire and nation highlights the centrality of situation at the expense of structure. This optics thereby provides for a distance between the subject and the object of analysis and prevents any valorization of and identification with the object of study. The analysis of imperial practices and languages of self-description allows capturing the superficiality of the view that construes empires as monolithic and all-mighty powers. It also allows discovering the diversification and distribution of power between the center and local actors, whose interaction was one of the pillars of stability in imperial polities. It also allows seeing a dramatic difference between the context and the conceptual world of these archaic polities and the modern semantics of implications that some experts try to derive from the imperial legacy in order to devise solutions for problems of the contemporary world.
Approaching empire through the prism of imperial practices and languages of self-description, scholars acquire a perspective that transcends the institutional framework of historical processes and reveals historical actors behind institutions and speech acts. This perspective leads to an important modification of the optics of analysis, i.e. it requires elaborating such a model that accounts for a possibility of existence of multiple actors, whose interaction or mere cohabitation gave birth to peculiar perception or practice of empire. In general, the epistemological modality of new imperial history may be characterized as negative in respect to the habit of deriving models from the past and critical of the authoritarian and holistic mythologies of empire.
Before tackling a detailed investigation of the political language of empire and nation in the issue 2/2005, the discussion of modalities of description of socio-economic and cultural plane of empire and nation in the issue 3/2005, and the problem of imperial legacy in the issue 4/2005, we would like to situate the problematics of “linguistic turn” in the context of new imperial history. Condensing the five-year-long research experience of Ab Imperio to only one section of the journal, we dedicate the methodological section of this volume to a discussion of different problems and questions generated by the project of new imperial history. This bloc of texts opens with the English version of the originally Russian editorial Introduction to the collection New Imperial History of Russian and the Post-Soviet Space. The Introduction is followed by comments offered by historians who occupy themselves with different aspects of empire studies in the contexts of Russian, European, and American history (A. Kamensky, A. Sked, R. Chu). Dominic Lieven offers an alternative vision for a further development of imperial studies, a vision founded upon a revision of the tradition of typology and comparative studies of empires. The section ends with the interview with Anthony Pagden, who offers his own reading of the phenomenon of imperial “language” understood as a development of conceptions of (shared) sovereignty in the context of intellectual history of the early modern period. Pagden also discusses possibilities for synthesizing recent historiographic developments, first of all of political history of empires and post-colonial and subaltern studies, as a way to deepen our understanding of languages of imperial self-description.
The “History” section of the journal, which traditionally hosts original historical contributions, is taken this time by a historiographic forum dedicated to Yuri Slezkine’s recent book, The Jewish Century. From our point of view, Slezkine’s book is one of the most significant recent attempts to find a method for mutual translation of pre-modern and modern categories with the help of meta-historical tropes (in this case, a description of the phenomenon of modernity with the help of a pre-modern figure of a “Jew”). Published almost simultaneously in the U.S. and Russia, Slezkine’s book seemed to be an ideal historiographic event from Ab Imperio’s point of view, whose editors are fully committed to creating and maintaining a single and open academic space across national boundaries.
In the archival section the reader will find Y. Petrovsky-Stern’s article and documents which illustrates the specifics of a research approach within new imperial history. Petrovsky-Stern does not limit himself to an analysis of “vertical” and isolated ties between “metropolis” and “colonies”, the center and the periphery, the subject of the discourse and the subjugated “Other”. He pays more attention to “horizontal” ties between unprivileged actors (not necessarily mediated by the metropole and its agents). The main actor of Petrovsky-Stern’s publicaton, Grigorii Kerner, a representative of a Jewish clan of capitalists from the Ukrainian Guliai-Pole, at the end of the 19th century chooses the path leading to the integration into the emerging Ukrainian national project. In contrast to modern theories of nationalism, which predict a likelihood of integration of a representative of the “dominated minority” into a dominating national culture (in this case, into the official Russian or into the no less prestigious and more inclusive Polish), Kerner accepts the name of Gryt’sko Kernerenko and begins writing poetry in Ukrainian language, casting his Jewish identity in terms of Ukrainian national renaissance.
The “Politology and Sociology” section contains articles by Dmitry Gorenburg on the language situation in Tatarstan and by Joan Chevalier on the language legislation in the Russian Federation. As always, we proceed from the assumption that the models of social sciences are relevant to historians, and vice versa.
The volume also contains information on the new international initiative of Ab Imperio (a program of educational partnership between the Rutgers University in the U.S. and the Kazan University in Russia), and indexes to all issues of Ab Imperio for the past five years.
On the whole, we regard this issue, which we offer to our readers’ attention, as the beginning of a new page in the development of the collective research project of Ab Imperio.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

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