As part of the intellectual project “New Imperial History,” the editors of Ab Imperio decided to address the problem of the conceptual apparatus that the empires’ contemporaries and historians of empire had at their disposal. We entitled this annual program “Languages of Self-Description in Empire and Multiethnic State.” Our “linguistic turn” is founded upon an increasing understanding that empires, while indeed pre-modern forms of political, social, and economic organization, were nevertheless engaged in the processes of modernization. Scholars of modern Europe have emphasized the concept of “nation” as a key block in the construction of political and social space. Modern humanities and social sciences, as we know today, emerged and matured within this normative framework. Empires, in contrast, left virtually no rationalizing and complex self-description that we can compare with the discourse of modern nationalism, that is, no self-description profoundly different from the “nationalizing” mode of modern social thought. In order to understand to what extent nation-centered historical analysis influences our perceptions of “empire,” we invited the contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio to reconstruct the possible languages of imperial self-description in scholarship, art, geopolitics, law, dynastic myth, religion, etc. We are also interested in the evolution of these languages under the impact of the encounter between pre-modern concepts (e.g., “dynasty” or “estate”) and modern ones (“state” or “class”). Among other directions in New Imperial History, our search is for signs of collusion between the autochthonous realities of empires and the ideas and practices borrowed from the modern nation-state.
For this issue of Ab Imperio, we have decided to focus on the problem of political language and language policies in the multiethnic and culturally heterogeneous continental empires. Realpolitik, as a sequence of documented and rationally founded actions , is among the most obvious subjects for a narrative of imperial self-description. On the other hand, the internal dynamics of the imperial space are revealed through the functioning of languages of those ethnic and confessional groups that were incorporated into empires (that is, “language” in the direct sense of the word). In this case, scholars have focused either on the specific situation of language contacts in imperial settings or on the dominance of the “imperial nation” and regional cultural centers, while language policies in the empire have been viewed as the authentic language of self-description of empire as a polity.
The main problem with the study of politics as an imperial metalanguage (of which language policies constitute a part) is stipulated by the fact that in the past decades research on the phenomenon of the political and of language developed along colliding trajectories. Such developments of the late 20th century as the anthropological and linguistic “turns,” postcolonial studies, and new political history ensured that “language” and “politics” came to be defined and studied interdependently and even tautologically: language contacts are ever more theorized in terms of political conflict, whereas political acts are analyzed in linguistic categories (such as “grammar” or “syntax”). The introduction of such a binary model as “language-politics” into imperial studies can lead to confusion due to the many subjects of politics and the polyglossy of imperial space. Hence we see the task of this issue as de-coupling the traditional formula “language-politics” and as searching for ways to overcome the tautological analyses of these two key phenomena.
First, in our methodological section, we address the experience of nuanced studies of language and politics in imperial contexts. The rubric opens with an article by Andrew Thompson, who explores the semantics of “empire” in British political discourse at the turn of the 20th century. Despite widely held opinions about the fundamental difference between overseas-modern empires and continental-archaic ones, Thompson’s method of analysis and his conclusions appear extremely relevant to the study of the Russian Empire. Thompson demonstrates the heterogeneity and many meanings of British political language and shows that the interests and intellectual horizons of political actors defined it. “Empire” as a political reality appears defined by competing discourses; a change in the dominant “political projection” leads to a change in the nature and character of the British Empire. In a postscript written at the editors’ request, Thompson discusses the importance of understanding mutual influences and ties between national and imperial discourses in an era that saw a parallel existence of empires and national states.
The experience of postcolonial studies is yet another important resource for our field. The traditional postcolonial approach treats language not just as a part of politics but as its quintessence. Bill Ashcroft critically explores this orthodox approach in postcolonial studies. Analyzing the colonial language situation from the point of view of a linguist, Ashcroft rejects the fixed opposition of “power-subjection” in favor of a complex and nuanced model that takes into consideration the specifics of each situation of communication, mechanisms of generating meanings, and the ability of language to create new cultural distances and redefine relations of power and subjection. While admitting that the emergence of meaning in a language act is always situational and is always a process, Ashcroft insists upon the dialogical nature of language contact and political interaction. The Russian reader will recognize in Ashcroft’s model the semiotic triangle “Author – Artistic Text – Reader” as a single system generating meaning, elaborated by the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. However, Ashcroft radically complicates this system by superimposing it upon the situation of cultural conflict and political hierarchies, which separates the Author and the Reader in the post-colonial situation. In this situation only the invisible sphere of text-language can fulfill the role of a medium that ties together representatives of different worlds in complex ways. Ashcroft’s model of language functioning in a heterogeneous polity interestingly reverberates in the context of Russian imperial studies.
Finally, Vladimir Alpatov discusses language policies in the Russian Empire and the USSR in an interview. He suggests that these policies were always defined by the dynamics of two forces: on the one hand, the need for mutual understanding (strengthened by modernization processes of language homogenization), and on the other, the need for identity and the necessity to take into account and sometimes even utilize language differences as markers of local ethnic or nationals particularities. From this point of view, imperial language policies appear to be fundamentally different from the normative language situation inin in a nation state, where language homogenization is simultaneously one of the conditions for the efficient functioning of the national market and a product of nationalizing institutions, such as schools or mass media. In empires, under conditions of unceasing dynamics of interaction between imperial institutions, regional national centers of gravity, and multiethnic populations, language homogenization is by far not the only unconditional choice of social and political actors.
Similarities between language policies in the Russian Empire and West European countries were only conditional. They can be found in Russian case, for instance, in the proclaimed long term goals of Russifying minorities. However, the need to counterbalance cultural influences of large ethnic or confessional groups (e.g., Poles in the Western borderlands or Tatars in the Volga region), and sometimes even the Orthodox missionary drive, often required the authorities to support and develop local languages and dialects. At the same time, importantly, the very proclaimed rational desire for language homogenization demonstrates that imperial bureaucrats perceived the nation-state model as “natural.” There is an apparent contrast between the perception of the language space as ideal and corresponding to a norm derived from the conception of the national state on the one hand, and the diverse space of empire with its unique configurations of ethnic, national, cultural and language identities, on the other.
The dynamics of this conflict are described in the forum “On Alphabet Policies in the Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire,” which occupies our history section this issue. Thematically, this forum echoes the publication in our archival section, which illustrates competing political projects with respect to the Ukrainian language in Left Bank Ukraine’s schools in the early 20th century. Political struggles and societal debates surrounding the most “material” and semiotically meaningful aspect of a language, its alphabet, appear to be a natural point of departure for studies of language policies in the Russian Empire. Articles in the forum focus on the Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian linguistic situations and demonstrate that the key contemporary concepts – “language,” “dialect,” “nationality,” “Russianness” – had multiple meanings whose signification was dependent on particular circumstances. Often, linguistic policies were dependent on a range of factors completely outside the realm of the linguistic or the political altogether. Our section on Political Science, Sociology, and Ethnology hosts analyses of language policies in today’s Ukraine and Kazakhstan, while the Newest Mythologies section offers an article on the complex problem of language, national identity, and sovereign statehood in Moldova. As part of our continuing project “The Art of History Writing in Empire and Nation,” we publish articles dedicated to studying and teaching history in contemporary Azerbaijan.
Our book review section offers a range of partial yet always well founded comments by scholars of eastern Europe on new works in history and contemporary problems in the post-Soviet realm.
The editors of Ab Imperio thank our guest editors, Mikhail Dolbilov and Darius Staliūnas, for preparing the thematic forum: “Alphabet, Language and National Identity in the Russian Empire”.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

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