The 7th ICCEES World Congress was held under severer financial conditions than the 6th Congress in Tampere, Finland. Decreasing donations and public financial aid resulted in a significant decrease in the number of East European scholars who were fortunate enough to receive stipends to visit Berlin. This meant that we not only enjoyed fewer chances to get acquainted with local realities of the region, but also that it is becoming more difficult for the ICCEES to realize one of its important missions, i.e., to internationalize and modernize academic activities in Slavic Eurasian countries.
It is questionable to what extent the European focus of the congress (its title was “Europe: Our Common Home?”) was timely. Having attended a number of panels dedicated to EU expansion, I had an impression that this issue is becoming exhausted, at least academically. I wonder if the new situation in international politics after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine will cause one or another innovation on this matter. Slavic Eurasian studies during the last five years have been characterized by the “Eurasianization” of foci (studies of Eurasian Islam, of regional conflicts in Central Eurasia, etc.), but this trend did not find its repercussion in the congress. The Tampere congress was more Eurasia-oriented, partially because the Finnish foundations provided generous support to invite scholars from Finno-Ugric and other national republics of Russia.
A number of panels would have been more successful had their organizers pursued quality, rather than quantity, of papers. In this regard, it would have been desirable if the Congress organizational committee had “filtered” panels and papers, as it is done in the preparation of the AAASS annual conventions. Of course, in contrast to the AAASS, the ICCEES is an umbrella organization and its member dues are minimal and, therefore, participation dues of world congresses play a decisive role in the ICCEES budget. Even understanding this difficult situation, I cannot but remark that a strict “quality control” (but not well-organized accommodation) by the organizers will be the best guarantee to secure a sufficient number of participants.
Reflecting the recent trend in Slavic Eurasian studies, there were a number of panels focused on Russian “imperiology”. This is a result of contributions made by Ab Imperio, Kritika, and other journals that have promoted this field of study in recent years. On the other hand, however, Russian “imperiology” has come to an important turning point: based on the individual empirical studies accumulated during the last several years, we need to propose an analytical framework to study (or discuss) the Russian Empire. For example, at the panel titled “Languages of Imperial Self-Description: Science, Ideology, and Identity in the Russian Empire,” the initiators of the present boom of Russian imperial studies (Marina Mogilner and Alexander Semyonov) gave papers. These papers per se were interesting, but the common ideas of the panel were not made clear. This panel was organized quite “liberally,” each speaker talked almost 25 minutes and there was little time left for discussion. Ilya Gerasimov, serving as the discussant of the panel that I organized, “New Trends in Russian ‘Imperiology’: Interimperial Comparison, Regional and Socio-Ethnic Approach,” raised the same questions: “there is no definition of ‘imperiology’” and “it is not clear how these papers contribute to Russian ‘imperiology’.” I welcome the new project initiated by Stephen Velychenko and Don Rowney, focusing on non-Russian officials in the peripheries of the Russian Empire. Here we find common purposes and plans according to which scholars are mobilized. However, as for the Berlin conference, this group organized too many panels and as a result not all of the panels were academically solid.
Adeeb Khalid in his review of the “New Imperial History in the Post-Soviet Space” (Kazan, 2004) also remarks that the contributors of the volume did not build their argument according to the “parameters” the editors tried to set.^[1] This is unsurprising because nineteen contributors are too many to compile a collection based on common parameters and there was not enough communication between the editors and contributors, and among the contributors themselves. Perhaps we need to have small workshops, not grandiose conferences (which inevitably become medleys of individual empirical papers) to work out the methods of “imperiology”.
It is very important to extract new interests and trends from the bulk of empirical studies of the Russian Empire. Here, I might list three trends: mental geography (Andrei Zorin, Leonid Gorizontov and others); studies of border territories (Alfred Rieber, Ilya Vinkovetsky, etc.); and influences of the outer world on imperial management. The latter two trends might be summarized as “trans-border history.” Here we find an example in A. Miller’s idea of Russian imperial management as a component of a mega-system of continental empires. The scholarly interest in mental geography and trans-border history as devices to understand the Russian Empire does not seem accidental. Slavic Eurasia, in which four modern empires (Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Rzecz Pospolita) functioned, is a mega-area that has no natural geographic borders, common racial features, or objective institutional identity (such as Christianity, Western democracy, etc.). Empires in this territory can be consolidated by common will for coexistence. Therefore, the spatial imagination of the people plays a more important role than in other mega-areas in the world. Slavic Eurasia is an open system, the components of which can widen, curtail, and intertwine with each other with fewer costs than other regional systems in the world. To sum up, “imperiology” has the potential to contribute to area studies of Slavic Eurasia.^[2] Perhaps, this is the fundamental (subconscious) reason why Russian “imperiology” produced so many panels in the ICCEES convention.