The semantics of the term “empire” is overloaded with superlatives and loud epithets. The concept of empire is so universal and all-encompassing that it appears to have no particular meaning at all. Indeed, empire embodies the grim totality of unlimited domination and coercion; at the same time, it turns out to be a synonym for the clumsy neologism of “world-system” (or “world civilization”) and evokes a unifying principle for a universe surrounded by the destructive elements of chaos and barbarism. Empire is simultaneously associated with the bygone splendor of upper classes in metropolises and with exploitation and domination in the colonies. An empire is at once a tireless and undefeatable aggressor and expansionist, and a colossus standing on clay feet, unable to keep in check the centrifugal forces that lead to its downfall, and always ready to collapse from a minor disturbance. Empire is the “the prison of peoples,” but it is also the guarantor of the preservation of local originality and difference in the face of standardizing projects. What, then, is the purpose of using the term empire (apart from the fact that for the two millennia of Anno Domini it had been employed to describe the legal status of the greatest polities of the Old World, and, retrospectively or by analogy, of the entire world)?

THE POST-NATIONAL SITUATION

The nation-state, which only recently appeared to be the “natural primary element” of the world political order and of national self-realization, is currently facing a crisis. It would seem that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the newly independent states in Eastern Europe and Eurasia have reconfirmed traditional assumptions about the unavoidable disintegration of multinational polities. However, this disintegration was followed by studies of “new nationalism” and of crises in the post-World War II balance in international relations, which questioned both the unconditional legitimacy and the self-evident nature of the nation-state principle. The nation-state became an object for reconsideration in the context of discussions of historical and contemporary processes in the world.^[1] On the other hand, the European Union, with its principle of voluntary partial renunciation of sovereignty by the participating states, has led many observers to again question the nation-state as the basic unit of international political space. Ongoing discussions of the relevance of intervention in the affairs of sovereign states in the name of humanitarianism have underscored doubts about nation-states and their legitimacy.^[2]
Against the background of globalization and the unprecedented intensification of contacts between different cultures, the category “empire” all too often appears as a semi-conscious attempt to employ a pre-national category to designate the realities of an emerging post-national situation, characterized by a hierarchically consolidated system of sovereign polities, specific economic regimes, and ethno-confessional areas and subcultures within the framework of a given political space.^[3] It is not accidental that empire has become a fashionable topic of scholarly debate and of political writing, provoking ambiguous attempts to turn empire into a category of analysis.^[4] A short excursion into the history of the conceptual evolution of empire should guide us better through the causes and the character of today’s boom in “empire studies.”

AB IMPERIO

In the political rhetoric of recent times the empire label has often been used as an important element in discrediting a political regime and as a symbol of repressive and undemocratic political organization. It suffices to invoke Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech to demonstrate the entire cargo of negative connotations associated in mass consciousness with the historical or metaphorical phenomenon of empire.^[5] However, the image of empire as one overloaded by negative associations is not only endemic to rhetorical and popular myths: for the most part, empire is also presented in modern political language as a despotic (and therefore illegitimate) political regime, incompatible with human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. A normative judgment of empire easily transcends the boundary between foreign and domestic policy. In international relations discourse, empire is represented as an aggressive state aimed at conquest of and control over vast spaces and numerous peoples (see the critique of imperialism).^[6] If from the point of view of contemporary political culture the internal structure of empire is illegitimate because of the regime’s appropriation of legitimacy rightfully belonging to the civic nation, then empire’s external expansion is assessed negatively for infringing upon yet another fundamental political principle of the modern era – the principle of nation-state sovereignty. The political language of modernity is pregnant with particular assumptions about empires’ historically predetermined doom, at least since the classic works by Eduard Gibbon and Charles Montesquieu.^[7]
Obviously, contemporary political discourse describes empire as an archaic object alien to modern man. This description is based upon philosophical assumptions about the “norm” of modernity (including the concept of “normal” political organization). Evidently, the norm of modernity incorporated the right of nation-states to exercise colonial domination throughout the world. Hence, the British and French empires were perceived as justified and morally defensible introductions of civilization to “backward” and unenlightened corners of the planet. At the same time, from the point of view of the symbolic positioning of the norm, it is quite revealing that the concept of empire served to describe the extra-European political experiences of Europeans (as was the case with the coronation of Queen Victoria as the “Empress of India”), or was employed to overcome crises of modern political forms (as was the case with the Napoleonic empire, which put an end to attempts to realize the republican ideal in the course of the French Revolution). The 20th century completed the process of the de-modernization of empire, which became an archaic term, partly against the background of the results of World War I and partly in the course of the disintegration of colonial systems. Even as early as the 19th century, though, the idea of imperial legitimacy and benevolence did not preclude a harsh critique of the empires that incorporated more or less “European” peoples, and which were understood as composite multiethnic polities. The emergence and accumulation of these negative connotations of empire continued gradually and irregularly as the political, international, and socio-cultural order of modernity was being born.

SUMMA IMPERII: EMPIRE AS A POLITICAL CATEGORY

Initially, empire (imperium) designated supreme authority built upon military prowess and success. Subsequently, the specific semantics of empire was determined by the political thought of each given epoch. During the Renaissance and the beginning of the fragmentation of the single West European cultural space, the tradition of classical republicanism, especially in Niccolo Machiavelli’s version, formulated a thorough critique of empire. This tradition preserved its influence on the emergence of early modern European political language, during the formation of the first British Empire, and upon the Enlightenment up until the American Revolution.^[8] Classical republicanism criticized empire as the opposite of its republican political ideal. For classical republicanism, empire was an illegitimate political construct prone to crises and decline.^[9] Later, British publicists saw the development of colonial commerce as a possible threat leading to the moral decomposition of the domestic political regime, even as they celebrated the grandeur, might, and expanse of their empire.^[10] American revolutionaries viewed empire as an obstacle on the way toward a new political regime (the mixed constitution) in the colonies, which moreover created opportunities for abuse by the crown administration and for the moral degradation of civic virtues.^[11] European adepts of the Enlightenment perceived empire through the magic lantern of Orientalism, as they attempted to prove the fundamental difference between European monarchies and Oriental despotic kingdoms, which lacked a proper balance between the power of the sovereign and the rights of the noble estate.^[12] We can still see echoes of this political delegitimization of empire in the public discussions of our own day. It reverberates in a critique of globalization as a process leading to corporations becoming more concerned about overseas markets than their own domestic economies, or in warnings that human rights abuses in international military conflicts will undermine rights domestically in the participating democracies.
It was the classic Roman Empire of antiquity that played the role of the archetypical empire for the republican thinkers who outlined early modern theories of constitutionalism and democracy. The second key tradition of modern political language was rooted in the historical experiences of the Holy Roman Empire. The disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire, accompanied by the disintegration of the pre-modern worldview, gave rise to contemporary conceptions of sovereignty. The Holy Roman Empire, which, according to Voltaire’s sarcastic remark, was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire,” formed perceptions of an imperial political and cultural regime among thinkers of the modern period. Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation carried a certain contradiction in its very name, between the legacy of the Christian tradition of political authority, on the one hand, and the crisis of Europe’s religious unity, on the other. The Christian tradition presupposed a transcendental vision of authority, in which empire functioned as a worldly form of God’s Kingdom. The crisis of Europe’s religious unity clashed with that vision as it related to the abundance in Germanies of local, popular, and Protestant principles.^[13] The recognition of empire as an illegitimate political form incapable of securing religious order or promoting true religiosity coincided with the growing secularization of the language with which political reality was described. The possibility to condition political legitimacy on existing social and cultural realities – including national categories – emerged. Thus were modern politics and political conceptions born, among them the concept of sovereignty. The “first death” of the Holy Roman Empire was legally inscribed in the Peace of Westphalia signed in 1648. The conditions of the peace, which together with the UN Human Rights Charter and the decisions of the Nuremberg tribunal, constitute the foundations of the international order up to our day, began the process of “sovereignization” of perceptions of political reality. These processes fundamentally altered the very bases of legitimacy in domestic and foreign affairs.^[14] The French Revolution triumphantly completed the process: the nation took the place of the territorial dynasty as the carrier of sovereignty. It was this new sovereign that Renan famously defined as an “everyday plebiscite.”^[15]
The principle of national sovereignty acquired broad support with the spread of Romanticism in Europe. The people as the subject of sovereignty defined through the exercise of civic rights and duties now received a spiritual and mystic body, inspired by a national spirit particular to a specific people.^[16] This sovereignty – even when it remained a potential sovereignty as with the movements headed by Mazzini, Garibaldi, Ypsilanti, Kossuth, or Kosciusko – throughout the modern history of Europe pitted itself against empire, be it that of the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, or the Ottomans. European Romanticism helped to bring about a state of mind according to which the multinational, single-state societies of the 19th century were viewed as atavisms of the imperial past, as obstacles on the path of progress, civilization, and freedom. Such polities were perceived as doomed for collapse and disintegration.
Since modern nationalism provided the main framework through which political, social, and cultural reality were interpreted in the overwhelming majority of the economically and socially most developed countries of Europe that constituted what Ernest Gellner has called “the Atlantic belt,”^[17] the mainstream development of humanities and social sciences took place within the framework of the national paradigm.^[18] This explains why empire never became one of the basic concepts of modernity, on a par with state, society, or even nation.^[19]
We cannot claim that empire disappeared altogether from the conceptual horizon. It appears that it has been incorporated in modern political and cultural discourse as the “other” of modern politics, international order, and progress. What else can explain the fact that in today’s world no states exist (with the exception of the now passed Bokassa’s “empire”) that openly identify themselves with hypothetical or historical empires in order to legitimate their domestic or foreign policies? One cannot fail to note, though, that the status of the concept of empire in contemporary political discourse is being altered under the impact of stormy changes brought about by the era of globalization and the struggle against international terrorism. We can only guess whether empire will become a basic political category of the “new world order” in the form of a synthesis of revisionist attempts to put forward empire as a real political alternative to the inefficient regime of nation-state sovereignty and the body of international law founded on that regime. It is quite possible that future scholars of political semantics will fail to understand the rhetorical device of the American diplomat John Brady Kiesling, who in 2003 compared the US invasion of Iraq to “the Russia of the late Romanovs… a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self destruction”. It is also possible that future scholars will not understand the archaic and Orientalist connotations that Kiesling ascribed to empire.^[20]

PRO IMPERIO: EMPIRE AS A CULTURAL CATEGORY

The growth of interest in empire and the imperial over the past decade is to a large extent the result of the obvious exhaustion of resources at the disposal of the conceptual apparatus of modernity, which is supposed to describe processes of the “post-modern” era. Curiously, this interest emerged at the very dawn of an era that witnessed the disintegration of the great colonial empires of the West. As it turned out, the colonial empire disappeared, but left its ineffaceable mark on the world. The need to conceptualize the development of nationalism in the post-colonial states and struggles against remnants of the colonial order forced theorists in the former colonies, and later in the former imperial capitals, to address the history of Western overseas empires. However, post-colonialism did not create its own conceptual frameworks and methodologies for the systematic analysis of the imperial phenomenon.^[21] Partly, this can be explained by the fact that post-colonial studies treat empire (equated with colonial power) as an essential characteristic of Western society as such, thus making no distinction between the imperial center and the colonies.^[22] Post-colonial critique focuses exclusively on the cultural practices through which empire as a form of power was realized, while ignoring the problem of the relations between structures, such as nations, states, and collective identities.^[23] Accordingly, no “post-colonial” history of the British Empire provides a narrative of the direct interaction (not mediated by London) or mutual influences between the groups, peoples, and territories included in the empire has been written. Post-colonial studies, despite their significant achievements in the study of cultural practices in situations of predetermined unequal cultural or social contact, were not interested in empire as a special form for organizing multi-confessional and multi-ethnic polities. They tended to overlook empire as a situation of undetermined boundaries and mutually open channels of influence that emanate not only from the culturally and technologically dominant center, but also from the imperial periphery. These mutual influences, a factor overlooked by post-colonial studies, would have allowed for a reconsideration of the phenomenon of “imperial context”, which often promoted the realization of a classic scenario of Western nation-building in situations best described as imperial (e.g., the emergence of a British identity on the Isles).^[24] On the other hand, increased attention paid by colonial studies to cultural practices and power in the context of modern Western society led to the reification of the discursive boundary between the “East” and the “West”, despite the a priori proclaimed intention by theorists of post-colonialism to deconstruct this line of separation.^[25]
Thus, the reluctance of post-colonial studies to pay attention to the problem of horizontal interactions between different elements and their obsession with the opposition East and West in the concept of Orientalism forces us to search for new models to rethink the uneven space circumscribed by indefinite and porous boundaries.^[26] It appears to us that studies of continental European empires provide rich material for analyses of the processes we are witnessing on the global scene today. Correspondingly, the very concept of empire should move from the category of a historical term empirically fixating the reality of the past (multinational dynastic empires) to a category of a modern analytical model that helps to understand historical experiences in an era marked by a crisis of modern categories of analysis and politics. Following Negri’s logic, empire is needed today not in order to reestablish it as a category of political practice, but as an analytical conception to explore various processes in a rapidly changing world, in which the problem of “managing diversity” has become a leading priority.^[27]

EMPIRE IN RUSSIAN STUDIES: LIMITS OF THE NATIONAL PARADIGM

Despite the fact that historians of Russia have had to deal with a state that proclaimed itself the “Russian Empire”, the problem of the functioning of a heterogeneous political, social, and cultural space has not been at the heart of the discipline. Studies of Russia as a multinational empire were partly a result of the renewed interest in the nationalist perspective after the Revolution and of the temporary disintegration of the empire. For the most part, representatives of this renewed interest focused on the legal status of peoples incorporated into the empire.^[28] Later, Richard Pipes offered his concept of the formation of the Soviet Union as an exclusively forced and repressive restoration of the Russian Empire by the Bolshevik Party, an idea that proved extremely influential during the Cold War. Many German scholars shared this concept.^[29] The growing crisis of the USSR in the late 1980s again brought to the fore the question of the heterogeneity of the Russian and Soviet historical experiences, as a result of which the first studies of Russia as a multinational empire appeared. The most important of these was undoubtedly the work of Andreas Kappeler.^[30] However, it focused more on the sum of national experiences of the peoples incorporated into the Russian empire rather than on the problem of imperial space. The work reduced the complex configurations of national, confessional, and estate relations to binary oppositions between the “Russifying center” and the national borderlands (with the possible exception of the Baltic provinces).^[31] Kappeler’s Rußland als Vielvoelkerreich undoubtedly opened a new stage in the historiography of the Russian Empire, but it could not set itself entirely free from the then dominant climate of the “renaissance of national history”, which proliferated in the post-Soviet period and which tended to use retrospectively ethnic research frameworks.^[32]
By that time, Western researchers had accumulated a certain amount of material on the history of particular peoples and ethnic, confessional, and cultural groups in the Russian Empire. Emigration by representatives of national intelligentsias facilitated this process. Among the most important works, one can point to studies of the histories of Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltics, the Volga region, and Ukraine.^[33] The sum of separate national histories did not in itself create an imperial perspective, but it was an important precondition for further syntheses. For example, crossing the boundaries of Russian history proper, the history of Russia’s Jews placed processes in Russia and the USSR into European and world contexts.^[34] On the other hand, the powerful historiographic tradition of Ukrainian studies that emerged in the diaspora created the preconditions for further reflection upon the dynamic (and boundaries) between “us” and “them” within the empire.^[35] If the history of the Russian Jews, who traditionally served as the archetypical “other,” has helped to clarify (or, to be more precise, to complicate) the external contours of the empire, the history of Ukrainians in the Russian Empire and the USSR has problematized the idea that some homogeneous/primordial/fundamental “nucleus” opposed to the periphery existed.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union – the last multinational empire in Europe – became one of the factors determining the renewed interest in empire in the late 20th century. In this way, the particular situation of Russian studies over the past decade was that the problem of “regional studies” was superimposed upon a new global research agenda in the study of Russia and the USSR. Historians of Russia and the USSR are today in search of a new narrative and new conceptual frameworks for researching and describing the past of a complex and composite imperial entity. As the dynamics of the development of this research have demonstrated, this geographic and temporal entity cannot in principle be reduced to any of the paradigms that has emerged over the past decade: neither the conception of a composite multinational empire^[36] nor attribution of the social and political working of the empire to the distant past can be seen as optimal models capturing the heterogeneity of the Russian Empire and the USSR. The discussion of the limits and foundations of the application of the classic colonial empire model to the historical experiences of Russia and the Soviet Union has not ended in definite consensus. In particular, it remains to be seen whether the post-structuralist genealogy of the basic concept of this model – that of the modern subject and its power – can be successfully employed in the Russian and Soviet contexts.
The 1990s passed in the shadow of a radical deconstruction of traditional explanatory schemes and analytical models in Russian studies in the West and the emerging national historiographies.^[37] Yet, no adequate integrating interpretative structure was found to match the traditional ones. Nevertheless, some general contours of a new methodology for analyzing Russia’s heterogeneous imperial society have become clearer and are defined by the needs of the current research agenda. We are lacking theory to understand how archaic institutions manage to preserve their specific character while being transformed under the impact of modernization processes and the intrusion of normative modernity from the West; we still cannot answer for certain the question about the character of nation-building processes in multinational contexts, taking into account the various horizontal and vertical ties penetrating imperial society. We do not have a model describing the dynamics of society’s development in the imperial context. Should the boundaries of that society necessarily coincide with that of the state? Or do we need to determine the degree of integration of each ethnic, social, or cultural segment into the empire on a case-by-case basis? Finally, scholars lack a theory to explain the empire’s disintegration (the question of the unavoidable/relative predetermination of disintegration remains open). We also need more theory to understand the specifics of the post-imperial situation, in which many imperial practices have been inherited by the newly independent successor nation-states.

A NEW IMPERIAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION

We offered the reader a collection of articles that attempted to reflect on the state of the art in an emerging field within Russian and Soviet studies.^[38] As we hope, this field will grow into a New Imperial History of Russia. As the articles in this collection illustrate, several research paradigms exist simultaneously in the field of Russian studies. First, the tendency to uncover “white spots” of history, which began during the perestroika years, remains highly relevant. This tendency attempts to explore various specific historical subjects and to help erode the “centripetal” narrative of Russian history. It is within this paradigm that we detect traditional perceptions of history as, first of all, a history of the nation. The latter appears as an entity that equals itself throughout the centuries and lives on through “formations” within the framework of a homogeneous “national body.” One encounters the Romantic narrative in its pure form quite seldom today. However, the narrative remains a significant part of many studies, especially at the level of methodological assumptions and research frameworks, which artificially separate one’s “own” subject of research from that of the “others” (empire, other ethnic groups, “non-national” elite behavior, etc). While criticizing such an approach, we have to admit that our new imperial history ought to rely upon the multiplicity of situations in which groups interact with each other (including interaction between nations) and therefore it should always remain involved in a dialogue with the national perspective.^[39] Besides, the national perspective compensates for one of the shortcomings of the concept of empire; that is, the tendency to treat the latter as a historical experience frozen in an archaic form. This tendency, as we attempted to show above, is built into the political language of modernity.
An alternative and broadly generalizing research perspective is represented by the collection of articles in the New Imperial History of Post-Soviet Space.^[40]This perspective is rooted in traditional political and institutional histories. Originally, this tradition of scholarship substituted the study of central organs of power through their archives for the history of the enormous and infinitely diverse country. However, a modified version of this historiographic perspective is relevant for the formation of New Imperial History. It counterbalances the perspective of national history, which precludes research on such phenomena as diasporas, displaced and non-titular (in the definition of nation-builders) groups of population (with the Jews being the most conspicuous example in the Western provinces of the empire).^[41]National history also excludes research into proto-national identities, which were formed on the basis of regional, confessional, and estate markers in the East European region of belated and incomplete modernization. These identities did not necessarily connect their carriers with the national language, national territory, or the national past. National history does not presuppose a study of how empire stimulated the nation-building of non-titular nationalities through policies of preservation or even strengthened traditional institutions and customs in the course of conscious attempts by the imperial center to balance competing national projects. Finally, the nation-oriented framework of analysis ignores the supranational identities that formed as a result of co-habitation by various ethnic populations in given regions or as the empire attempted to implement social and political practices of imperial citizenship. All these subjects require a panoramic and pan-imperial view and perspective.
In reality both approaches – the “exclusive” national and the comparative, generalizing imperial – are merged and mixed in most of the articles that were included in our collection. It seems to us that it is in this coming together of different research perspectives that we can identify the most powerful potential for a New Imperial History. A New Imperial History allows us to focus on problems of method for the analysis of empire and not on classifications and definitions. Indeed, as many attempts have clearly demonstrated, no “imperiology”, a universal theory of empire equally applicable to Russia, Great Britain, Ancient Rome, or the Aztecs, is possible, and the very undertaking is absurd.
In recent years such attempts at a structural and typological imperiology have been made in the framework of increasingly popular comparative studies of empires. The basic assumption here is that having left the boundaries of a particular empire, having compared certain empires identified on a number of certain features, having discovered “the general and the particular” in their functioning, one can distill the structural element of the empire and explain the mechanisms of its operation.^[42] No doubt, comparative studies of empires can alter our perceptions of the uniqueness or specificity of certain processes and phenomena; they suggest mutual “borrowing” by empires or even (in some cases) their logic of development. The principal methodological weakness of this approach is caused by a conceptual “natal trauma.” It is genealogically connected to the structuralist paradigm of social analysis. Structuralism leads to the reification of borders between objects necessary to run comparisons, which damages the exploration of areas of interactions (boundaries or regions that untied rather than separated populations). It also tends to perceive common social and cultural characteristics as the result of typologically similar autonomous development, but not as the potential product of mutual influences, common experiences, and reactions to common challenges. It is exactly because of the need to compare single objects rather than complex composite hierarchies that the structural and typological comparative studies ascribe internal homogeneity to the extremely heterogeneous and dynamically changing territory of empire. Besides, existing comparative history projects limit themselves to the experiences of continental empires, such as that of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, or the Ottomans, thus tending to downplay the cultural component of imperial history, which is already suffering from an overt inclination toward conventional political and social historical methods. An approach that compares the Russian Empire exclusively to continental empires precludes investigation of processes of Europeanization, without which one cannot adequately assess practices of cultural colonization, mapping, and description of the territory and interpret imperial ideologies.
Thus, “imperial comparativism” as such cannot be seen as a universal method for the creation of an analytical model of empire. One can only compare directly those phenomena that were characteristic of all social and political structures of a given era,^[43] whereas the sought after historical semantics of empire remains a Ding an sich. Its reconstruction requires a totally different framework for “thick description.” As a result, comparative studies tend to reduce the meaning of empire to aggressive foreign policy and to various schemes for the mobilization and distribution of resources, both of which are equally characteristic of “non-imperial” states (the differences are really in the scale of these actions). Often, these characteristics were simply borrowed from the more efficient nation-states of Western Europe.
The inadequacy of the research paradigms described above obviously cannot be “aufgehoben” through a mechanistic synthesis. Such a synthesis, moreover, is precluded by the indefinite epistemological status of empire in modern social sciences and humanities. Is empire a historical category, an analytical concept, a metaphor for heterogeneity, or simultaneously all of the above? In our view, empire is a research context rather than a structure, a problem rather than a diagnosis. Any society can be “thought of” as an empire, just as features characteristic of nation-states – indeed characteristic of entire epochs – can be discerned in any empire.^[44] The key to the paradox is the fact that the analytical apparatus of modernity is entirely “national” and thus empire cannot be described within any single model or meta-narrative. One can see empire only by combining different research frameworks. By pointing to the redundancy of scholastic debates about the “true” essence of this or that term, new imperial history offers a multidimensional view of social, political, and cultural actors, and of the spaces in which they function. At the same time, it takes into account specific effects of modernization in the Eurasian territory, where a particular mixing of modern and pre-modern social identities took place.^[45]
Thus, new imperial history appears in the form of an “archeology” of knowledge about empire. We understand “archeology” in the sense of a Foucauldian post-structuralist paradigm, which deconstructs basic and normative concepts of the social sciences and humanities.^[46] Despite the lack of consensus on the applicability of Foucauldian approaches to Russia’s imperial history, this method has immense potential for a revision of the recently formed orthodoxy in evaluating the Russian empire as a political, cultural, and social space neatly divided by national – and only national – lines and boundaries. An archeology of knowledge about empire allows the demonstration of how a “common” past is appropriated in multiethnic regions and cities (St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Odessa, Vilna, Baku, Kiev, etc). This archeology of knowledge permits the restoration of the palimpsest of social identities (regional, confessional, estate, etc.) that are usually narrated into the teleological and mono-logical paradigm of the building of a nation, class, or confession. The archeology of knowledge renders possible a contextualization of the contemporary processes of constructing the national past through historiography as a purposeful act and an instrument of political struggles.
One note is in order on this particular aspect of the post-structuralist mode of writing new imperial history. Quite often the concept of “imperial history” is perceived as an attempt to interpret or even to resurrect the political space of empire through a rejection of clear national lines of division in a diachronic perspective. Of course, it is upon the assertion of these lines of division that the logic of any national history rests. Such a perception clearly points to the positivist and Marxist foundations of the methodological principles of post-Soviet historiography and reveals an inability on the part of many professional historians to distance their scholarly research from political discourses. The latter point once again demonstrates specific features of the political language of nationalism in Eastern Europe (at least currently), which is determined more by national images of the past than, for example, by legal discourses. This professional position also appears to be impacted by a traditional paradigm of historical knowledge untroubled by innovative approaches, such as “history from below”, micro-history, post-structuralist anthropology, and oral history – in other words, by critical and democratizing approaches within Marxist and post-Marxist thought. Within the framework of the traditional historical paradigm, the history of stateless peoples (however remote in time and ambiguous the desired statehood) with no aristocracy and elite culture was perceived as not entirely legitimate because it was based on insufficiently rich historical experience. Such an attitude by professional historians is often transformed into myth-making and, even more importantly, it precludes exploration of potentially fruitful directions of analyses into an empire’s national, supranational, and non-national aspects of historical processes. We hope that the emerging field of New Imperial History will not become a political battleground. We envision a dynamic area of scholarly research and theoretical reflection, especially important at a time when issues of interethnic communication and imperial legacies have become increasingly acute.