For some years, the cultural turn has significantly influenced historical research on Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union.^[1] This similarly applies to the historical preoccupation with what is associated with the field of “empire studies.” The definition of empire loses its sharpness the more intensively one studies this phenomenon. Herfried Münkler, in his synchronically and diachronically comparative political study of empires, has developed a catalogue of criteria to describe the phenomenon of empire that includes the spatial extent, the possession of formally or informally held territories or colonies, and the exercise of power through interventions.^[2] With an eye on the sole world power at present, the United States, Münkler is of the opinion that the possibility of ultimately unchallenged intervention (that is, intervention that is impossible for other states and powers to prevent) is the only justifiable criterion for an imperium. In many cases taking up and bringing together older theories on imperialism,^[3] he starts out from the need for a catalogue of criteria, reduced to a few items, for the definition of an empire, in order to obtain the possibility of systemic comparison from the perspective of political history. The more recent history of civilization would consider such a view from outside to be questionable, because it disregards those situations in which a state entity is perceived by its inhabitants as being an imperium. It is thus limited in many cases to the “reconstruction of historical environments”^[4] and calls the comparability of such large units as empires into question. And, certainly, there is a rationale in cultural studies’ critique of the bird’s eye perspective of comparative studies. If one wishes to turn to the history of empires, it is certainly not sufficient to just take the power of external intervention as a criterion for a definition. To put the Russian example at the center: the tsarist realm, which, by the way, Münkler only analyzes on a very limited basis,^[5] was therefore not only an “empire” because it was in position, for instance in the epoch of Catherine the Great, to make gains in territory in the South in the wars against the Ottoman Empire and in the West in the course of the Partitions of Poland. It was an empire not only because it was able in the nineteenth century to establish a colonial empire more successfully in Central Asia than in the Far East,^[6] which came to be regarded as evidence of imperial greatness in comparison to the British Empire or the US after 1898. It was an empire because, in addition to its physical expanse and power potential, a large number of actors within the state came to perceive the Russian state as an imperium. It was this awareness that constituted if not a guiding principle for historical actors’ actions, then a component of their own environment.^[7] I consider this to be essential in the light of the observation that not only did imperial elites feel the fall of the empire in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, but the Soviet Union was accepted or rejected as the defender of an imperial idea. One could also apply this perspective in order to comprehend the phantom limb pain over the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU. Admittedly, this is a hypothesis that could only be substantiated by a large number of individual studies. For the Russian Empire, and at least for its elites, the term imperium was employed at the latest after the conclusion of the Great Northern War, since in 1722 Feofan Prokopovich vested the tsar’s autocracy with a new ideology and Peter the Great let himself be crowned as imperator.^[8] Here, too, the comparison and the category of prestige accompanied the act. Then, at the latest, the concept imperium also became firmly established in Russian discourse; it is to be assumed that the term spread among ever wider sections of the population as an attribute of the state in which they lived – with progressive modernization, the emergence of a public and with a (greatly varying, admittedly) rise in the level of education.^[9] The more powerfully the “local society”^[10] and “liberal milieu”^[11] developed, the more those involved in this development had to concern themselves with the empire. Groups of actors were able to define themselves with respect to the imperium by generating themselves as its representatives or custodians, or, conversely, by regarding it as an obstacle, ultimately even as a prison, such as did the nationalities of the tsarist realm.^[12]
It is thus no accident if, after the first wave of cultural history case studies, the history of civilization is turning to the phenomenon of “empire” and challenging the traditional school of thought on imperialism (with an admittedly still uncertain outcome). In this respect, it has also to be conceded that Münkler is right when he speaks of the “surprising return of empire in the post-imperial age.”^[13] But Ab Imperio, which has brought about a new boom in studies on the Russian and Soviet empires, will also have to take stock in a few years time^[14] of what the large number of stimulating individual studies that it has published^[15] are able to say about the new view of the empire and whether, on the basis of them, a sound comparison of empires using the paradigm proposed by Herfried Münkler is possible.
The World Congress of East European Research in Berlin in July 2005 dealt with Russia as an empire in many different ways, admittedly in a manner characteristic for the situation in East European research. First of all, the history, political science, and contemporary history sections were presented separately; interdisciplinary dialogue was not encouraged. On the other hand, the Congress also suffered in its historical sections from a narrowing down – which has already been observable for some time – to the epoch of the close of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, precisely in those sections that showed explicitly their preoccupation with empire in their titles. In general, it is deplorable that the eighteenth century and also the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Russian Empire became a player in great power politics, are not given more attention, even when dealing with such aspects as how the interaction of human beings and empire functioned, where its content and significance could lie, and what forces of integration were inherent in it.^[16]
If we turn to the topics discussed at the Congress, then we can state that the topic “empire” was at the center of quite a lot of sections that sought to systematize the imperial dimension of the Russian Empire. The majority of the papers started out from the object of their consideration, and less from the chosen method.
In this connection it is first of all astonishing that the more intensive consideration of empire, urged, among others, by Karl Schlögel,^[17] did not find any greater expression in the sections. Heuristic definitions of empires started out initially from maritime empires, and not from continental ones. This approach was explicitly at the center, for example, of the paper given by Claudia Weiss on the acquisition of the Siberian region. Siberia could be understood as an integral part of “the other” in the Russian Empire and as a possible point of departure for reflection on Russian identity. Her concern was the representation of Siberia in Russian discourse on identity. Against the background of regionalization and the regional historiography^[18] that was clearly apparent at the Congress, one could also investigate similar phenomena on the western periphery of the Empire or the significance of the Russkii sever, which did indeed belong to the tsarist realm earlier than did Siberia or the Far East.
Since Andreas Kappeler’s pioneering study on “Russia as a Multinational Empire,” it has justifiably become customary to pay greater attention to the nation-building process, because for a long time the mantle of the Russian and Soviet empires particularly prevented any historiographic description of these processes. In my opinion, this strategy led to two recognizable trends at the Berlin Congress. This includes, on the one hand, the trend to write nationally oriented Ukrainian, Latvian, or Estonian history, or to emphasize the “victim perspective,” as the sections on Stalinist terror, for instance in the Ukraine. On the other hand, it would be wrong to disregard the importance of the intermingling of the elites (beyond their national affiliations) particularly for the final days of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.^[19] If one wants to examine the adhesive forces of empire, a look at the meeting of different identities seems to be important. Studies on “encounters” in a positive sense or on “clash” in a negative one are able to furnish information on the building of identities and the change of larger or smaller groups. It is not just by chance that the encounter of the advancing tsarist forces with the Muslim population and with Cossack communities was just as much a subject of conference sections as was the meeting of Orthodoxy and Islam. Moreover, the encounter between the Russians and the Poles (in the paper presented by Malte Rolf), and the Russians and the Lithuanians (by Darius Stalunias) shed light on the fact that for the notion of empire the western periphery was eminently important.
In addition to examining actors’ identity from the viewpoint of the relationship between nation, religion, and empire, the field of research can also expanded to include the question of the relationship between social and cultural identity. In some cases, the question is obvious. Susanne Schattenberg’s cultural approach to the study of Russian diplomacy, combining a reconstruction of the way of life and imperial aspects of diplomats’ political duty, is just as much part of this research as Aleksandr Semyonov’s inquiry into the liberals’ imperial visions after 1905. Richard Wortman even turned directly to the “makers” of empire: on the basis of chronological sections in the epochs of Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Alexander II, he attempted to show that for discoverers and conquistadors the empire as an idea and expression of greatness had been the driving force for their trade. Power elites are therefore an important subject for examination for any breakdown of the phenomenon of “empire.”
Did the empire have any effect on the way of life of social groups that have been examined under the aspect of social or estate categorizing up to now? Aleksandr Kaplunovskii’s contribution on the meshchane, that intermediate group that is difficult to describe, or Marina Mogilner’s study on Russian anthropologists, who are only supposedly concentrated on the narrower scientific objective, point in this direction. This group of studies should certainly be supplemented by further case studies.
Once again, it became clear at the Congress that identity building is not a one-dimensional process. In the Russian Empire, too, there is no woodcut-like imperial identity in charge of, for instance, the activities of the bureaucracy, the military, or interested entrepreneurs. Indeed, Geoffrey Hosking already made the observation some time ago that there was only a poorly developed Russian nationalism in the tsarist realm and thus also an only poorly formed group identity in comparison with other ethnic groups.^[20] However, if that is the case, it also means that (at least) the elites of the Empire made a contribution to the imperial presence, either by regarding it as relevant for their own everyday world, by combating it in the medium-term perspective, or by attempting to make it powerful. The Berlin Congress showed that it is not sufficient to describe the history of the Empire by referring to the “rises” and “declines” that first catch the eye. From a research strategy aspect, it is worthwhile to follow the phenomenon of empire from the actors’ perspective, and to continue to compile the imperial history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union from such a wealth of tesserae. In the light of such studies, “rises” and “declines” in Russian history will have to be analyzed, and only on the basis of such work will the sensitive comparison into the depth of what empires made exist for centuries also become possible.