The current issue of Ab Imperio, planned within the annual program of the journal on Paradoxes of Modernization in the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, is focused on the political aspects of imperial and national history as well as on the theoretical problems that the researchers of socio-political processes and discourses face. The materials of the issue illuminate the specificity of the political in the imperial and national contexts and suggest possible interpretations of geographic, linguistic, social, and cultural realities through the prism of political history.
There is a growing discussion of the need for some “new political history” among historians of Russian history. This new trend is projected as a ground for reassessment of approaches to and interpretations of the political biography of Russia. The possibility of a new look at Russia’s political history appeared as a result of 1) the deliverance of post-Soviet historiography from the sociological determinism and ideological orthodoxy of Soviet Marxist historiography, 2) the increased importance of politics in the process of Russia’s transition to a new political regime. However, the first response to the post-Soviet conceptual challenges was a reincarnation of the “old” political history with its focus on political biography, history of the state, institutions, and political elites. As Russian historical scholarship catches up with the social and cultural history developed in the West, Russian historians and their foreign colleagues encounter the problem of incorporating the rich legacy of social and cultural history into the field of political history, which faces the need of adaptating to the sophisticated methodological environment of contemporary humanities. The need to modernize political history is especially evident in the field of the history of empires.
The search for a “new” political history is a recurrent issue in Western historical scholarship. Traditional historical writing was in fact the “old” political history, which studied and, to a certain extent, embodied the history of the state, rulers and political elite. Frequent waves of revisionism in 20th -century historical studies were attempts to depart from the traditional political history that was imbued with event-centered historical narrative, orientation toward “high” politics and hegemonic classes, and depiction of history from above. At the same time, finding itself under the pressure of methodological innovations in social and cultural history, as well as of the leftist political thought, political history underwent changes in its forms and approaches, retaining, though, its significance in a world in which states constitute “the basis of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms.” It is possible to assert that a “new political history” has emerged approximately every half a century. Indeed, although F. Guizot’s “The History of the English Revolution” (6 volumes, 1826–1856) was not labeled as “new” political history, it was only because of its absolute novelty, for it was the first contemporary historical work of that type. Guizot was among the first to attempt to extricate the space of the political proper from the traditional synergy of dynastic-institutional-eventful history.
The label of the first “new” political history is usually attributed to the American historiographic tradition of the 1890s – 1910s associated with Frederick Jackson Turner. Much of its novelty was linked to Turner’s conceptualization of the specificity of American political history counterposed to the European tradition through a different model of party politics, the impact of the geographic factor on US political history (the very idea of frontier was a novel political concept), and regional specific features in general.
The next wave of “new political history” surged in the US and Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Historians started to examine politics proper with the help of modern statistical models and quantitative methods, which ranged from the content analysis of political rhetoric to the investigation of correlation of factors that influenced the electorate. At the same time an attempt was made to reconsider the field of political history from the perspective of social science theories and concepts. This new turn in political history acknowledged the variety of contacts and transfers between political and social realities, which subsequently led to the blurring of the boundary between political and cultural history. Under the impact of leftist political movements and the protest against traditional political history, on the one hand, and the influence of the French post-structuralist trend, on the other, there appeared histories of “marginalized” groups. The authors of these histories discovered manifestations of power (and politics) in sundry loci of social life, e.g., family, everyday life, education, relationship between men and women, racial and ethnic groups, etc. Historians who followed anthropological insights offered by C. Geertz tended to dissolve the political space and politics proper in the realm of symbolism and semantics, emphasizing the primacy of political gesture and ritual over political action and machinery.
Recently, there have appeared indications of the formation of yet another “new political history” or “new” political history with a capital “P”. It aims at rehabilitating the political component, which got lost in historical writings of the preceding decades among various social, economic, and even demographic hierarchies and conflicts. In 1998 at a meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, a group of US historians formulated what amounts to be a mission for the next generation’s students of the new political history: “uncover politics in all its manifestations and identify political players everywhere — in the streets, at the post offices, in voluntary associations of all classes and races…”.^[1] The approach of previous historiography is turned upside down, now politics in a narrower and more traditional sense is reconstructed on the basis of its emanations in the adjacent spheres of society rather than vice versa.
Thus, students of Russian history can choose from a plethora of new political history paradigms while incorporating various insights made available by the past 30 years of reorientation of Russian history studies toward anthropology and linguistics, “new literary historicism,” and post-structuralism. In the context of contemporary humanities, it is impossible to contemplate a new political history without an “archeology” of analytical categories (including such ideologically loaded ones as “society” and “culture”), a reflection on the historian’s narrative and its discursive and ideological underpinnings, an analysis of social and symbolic aspects of power relationships, and, last but not least, without a correction of the structuralism of the social and cultural history approach through focusing on the “eventuality”, varieties, and subjectivity of political practices.
However, even such a traditional object of political history as the state lends itself to a reinterpretation under a new historiographic turn. Current political changes such as migrations and globalization, the formation of the supra-national European Union and the dissolution of the multinational states of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, despite different implications pose the problem of absolute and relevant concepts of the nation-state and national sovereignty. In a search for alternative conceptualizations of political space of the state, scholars turned to empires, whose historical experience was imbued with regional and ethnic heterogeneity. In the West, the concept of empire significantly enriches the traditional nation-centered historical narrative. It allows the positioning of experience of Western nation-states in the context of world history and the relativizing the assumption of their ethnic homogeneity. This concept provides for conceptualization of heterogeneous and supra-national political space in terms of regional and national variety. In the East European context, the concept of empire has been influenced by the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the revitalization of nation-building, and the formation of new nation-states. On the one hand, the history of empire emerges as a projection brought about by the collapse of multinational states that essentially corrects the quasi-national optics of previous historical scholarship, which reduced the history of empire to the history of nation-state. On the other hand, the historical experience of an empire is being eliminated, fragmented or appropriated by a growing tide of national historical narratives. Empire serves as a point of departure for the existence of new nation-states. It is put forward as an opposite (and negative in an axiomatic sense) ideal type to those of nation and nation-state.
The political implications of the categories of empire and nation are especially visible in the East European context (given that empire is not a category of self-description but a projection born out of the nationalist discourse). These categories present contrastingly different modes of legitimization of political regimes, state boundaries and the relationship between population and territory and ultimately delegitimize multinational states, not only those that have an ethnofederal structure but those that aspire to the centralism of the nation-state.
Contemplating a thematic issue of the journal dedicated to the political dimension of the modernization of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, the editors tried to chart in a very approximate way the contours of a “new political history” for the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, which yet awaits a formulation in terms of a research agenda or scholarly trend. Exactly for this reason the notion of “political space” was chosen over a more abstract and therefore more vague notion of “politics.” We propose to approach “political space” both in its geographic and geometric senses, i.e. as a territory and a dimension, which intersects with other dimensions of historical experience, such as the social, cultural, and economic. The editors and contributors to the issue are also interested in the historical genealogy of different “political spaces” (as geographic realities and as historical traditions of states and societies), which have been defined by the discursive practices and historical experience of empires and nations – political phenomena par excellence.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

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