Among the many thoughtful and innovative arguments in their seminal work on empire, the editors of Ab Imperio suggest that historians should approach empire “as a nexus of historical entanglements, rather than as a structure, a research situation, rather than an historically given phenomenon.” The arguments “related to the definition of the ‘essence of empire’”, they contend, are of secondary significance. What they have hoped to popularize in the post-Soviet academic context “in this new light [is] a problem that required critical reflection and extensive research.”^[1] Most recently, they have argued that among other approaches, empire needs to be seen through the “prism of imperial practices and languages of self description,” a vantage point that allows scholars to “acquire a perspective that transcends the institutional framework of historical processes and reveals historical actors behind institutions and speech acts.”^[2]
To their great credit, the editors of Ab Imperio have succeeded splendidly in this effort. The 21 journal issues published since 2000 and the rich summary volume Novaia Imperskaia Istoriia Post-Sovetskogo Prostranstva^[3] have taken the lead in encouraging scholars to disaggregate empire as a large and undifferentiated subject category, and to concentrate on the diverse processes of transaction and exchange that create variegated relations of domination and subordination. I think they have been especially successful in moving scholarship away from a limited conception of empire centered on patterns of political subjugation (although Ronald Suny and others still follow theorists like Michael W. Doyle rather closely in arguing that principles of differentiation and hierarchy are essentially constructed politically, and are essentially incompatible with democratic representation and egalitarian citizenship. In this perspective, empire is still largely centered on the formal ruling structures and systems of authoritarian regimes.)^[4]
As the editors of Ab Imperio have themselves argued in various places, however, and as Linda Colley has recently put it very nicely in coining the word “connexity” in this context, it seems to me much more fruitful to understand imperial relationships in terms of the multiple and sometime antagonistic connections they make between and among their variously integrated social formations.^[5] Despite impressive gains in this direction in the exploration of other empires, empire scholarship in the Russian and Soviet fields still needs to further explore the ways power may be exercised imperially through cultural, economic, social, and linguistic interactions, however difficult this is to do this historically, and in such an incredibly diverse socio-cultural context.^[6] These interactions obviously create and affirm hierarchy and domination every bit as much as the crude exercise of force, perhaps even more so, since institutionalized cultural and socio-economic practices are notoriously more difficult to change than political institutions and relations. Imperial interactions of these sorts also occur in more democratic as well as more authoritarian empires, and with greater or lesser commitments to representative governance and equal civil rights. If access is by nature democratic, and the restriction of access anti-democratic, political democracies, which sharply limit equal access to social, cultural, and economic resources, can recreate in sometimes quite deliberate fashion the imperial relations that the formal collapse of their empires has discredited. Among the most powerful myths of “democratization” is that civil liberties and equal political rights will bring the wealth and prosperity fully enjoyed everywhere in developed democratic orders only by the relatively few.
As the readers of Ab Imperio know, the question of “boundaries” is particularly important in this regard, provided they are understood as a set of cultural, socio-economic, and psychological lines of demarcation, as well as physical separations. Despite some very good work on the subject by a number of scholars, the boundary problem also remains a thorny one in Russian Empire studies. Space has always been more readily transgressed by socio-economic, cultural, and socio-psychological relations of domination and subordination than by overtly political ones, and how these processes work historically is inherently more difficult to research. In the complex interactions of empire, the actual and imagined borders that are, paradoxically, commonalities that divide, clearly play a complex role in the formation of individual, social, and national identities, the ways public spheres are delimited from private ones, and in the conceptions and practices of “nationality” and “nationhood.”^[7]
The “boundary question” also connects to another important argument advanced by the Ab Imperio collective: that imperial interactions, practices, and relations affect the constitution and reconstitution of the hegemon as well as the subaltern. As some of the discussion in Ab Imperio 1/2005 suggests, language and other forms of discourse are a way into this complex dimension of empire, since the discursive construction of “others” is obviously a powerful element as well in all self and collective images and representations. Images of all kinds, whether visual or textual, also tend to reinforce the perceptions that underlay their creation, although it takes a good deal of careful work to understand how this process actually works in specific historical contexts, say, through the photographs of Russian imperial subjects or the lavish illustrations of Soviet nationality costuming and performance. As we know, “orientalism” and “occidentalism” readily define the views of the viewer, but not so easily their contingent consequences.^[8]
If the efforts of Ab Imperio to reposition empire as an analytical problem in these and other ways have been remarkably successful, however, and if the new imperial history is now well established as a field of enquiry placed critically in the context of dominant research paradigms, as our Ab Imperio colleagues have put it, I would still suggest that empire has not been insufficiently placed in the context of historically situated problems and predicaments. That is, in all of the forms and meanings that Ab Imperio has helped elucidate, empire also needs to be conceptualized as a set of solutions, in practices as well as in perceptions and ideologies, intended or otherwise, to a series of central and interrelated historical problems challenging both tsarist and Soviet Russia. In both cases, imperial interactions and their underlying subjectivities and belief systems developed dialogically in relation to very real problems of everyday national life. These required some form of action or “solution.” The creation, development, and political collapse of empire in this vast geopolitical region might well be further interrogated in these historically situated terms. Even the concept of “collapse” needs to be historicized in terms of the ways the complex “nexus of entanglements” and discourses that helped constituted empire no longer worked well, or well enough, to solve the problems with which they had symbiotically developed. Especially as the problem of empire is approached in comparative terms, as indeed in some senses it has to be, I would argue that empires might even be typologized best not so much in terms of the structures of dominance and subordination they all reflect or their representational discourses of self and other, but in terms of the categories of problems they were assumed to be addressing, and in terms of the ways and effectiveness in which these problems were and were not solved.
I cannot take the time here to rehearse these categories, but their taxonomy is not difficult to construct. They range from the relatively simple issues of economic growth and expansion to the highly complex socio-cultural questions of national definition, societal “coherence,” and the ideological “realization” of various messianic as well as prosaic ideologies, some of which have worked historically (and continue to work in the present-day world) with horrific consequences. In the latter instance, there is enough literature now on the elusive phenomenon of “social memory” for one to understand that the playing out of ideologized imperial teleologies is also related to the coalescence in the process of individual and collective identities, even if this dimension of the issue again begs further exploration. Rather, let me focus on two closely interrelated sets of problems that each of these papers presented here touches upon in different ways, and for which the relations of empire were increasingly ineffective solutions at the end of the tsarist regime, and hence increasingly problematic: the management of international conflict and the issue of governance.
The range of issues associated with the first of these, the struggle to manage international conflict, seem to have fallen away from the interests currently preoccupying most academic historians, some notable exceptions notwithstanding. I suspect this is partly because “traditional” history and historians have beaten common-place diplomatic history into uninteresting dullness, partly, perhaps, because the field of historical writing on international relations has so long been occupied by political scientists and popular historians fixated on war. Yet interactions between states raise portentous issues of discourse, anthropomorphic conceptions of nation and state, and the experiences of interaction that characterize empire relations more locally. An invigorated “post-traditional” international history that concentrated on socio-cultural as well as more narrowly understood political and diplomatic issues would be a fruitful extension of disaggregated empire studies.
In terms of the three papers presented here, what seems to me most important about the connections between empire and international conflict is the obvious fact that the conjunctural moment of the late tsarist period was one of rapidly expanding “modern” imperial formations: a time of extraordinary international competition by and between empires in which conflict itself was embedded institutionally in the forms and ambitions empire reflected (including the American one), and empire itself inscribed in Spenserian terms as a positive value. Moreover, the inherently aggressive policies and practices of imperial expansion at the beginning of the 20th century were also internalized in large sectors of different populations as a positive good. This was not simply because patrimony and masculinity, with all of their embedded processes of hierarchy, dominance, and subordination, were by now foundational parts of anthropomorphic understandings of the imperial state and increasingly written large in its symbolic discourse. It was also because it was ideologically easy to link the spread of empires to the extension of particular national goods. For the United States, this connected “remembering the Maine” to the “democratic liberation” of Cuba and the Philippines – a depressing harbinger of the present. For large sectors of British society, the never setting sun metaphorically spread a particular (and particularly self-sacrificing) variant of Enlightenment, especially to the “dark” continents, while the always rising Eastern sun set modern Japanese ambitions and identities firmly within the contemporary values of national dignity and cultural superiority. Meanwhile, for many in even the liberal sectors of educated Russian society, the imperial good was located primarily in increasing economic expansion and well-being, and the importance of maintaining Russia’s share of international markets. Once empire was institutionally and ideologically naturalized in this way, and layered with moral values, the “inexorable” processes of imperial “globalization” were as difficult to link at the beginning of the 20th century to any clear understanding of the destructive capacity of imperial expansion as they have sadly proved to be at its end.
Surprisingly (at least to me), a good deal of new literature on empire seems to have lost sight of the titanic struggle between and among empires that the late 19th century brought forth, or the ways this struggle may have filtered into anxious and gendered socio-cultural constructions of “strength” and “weakness.” It is important in this regard that the practices and values of imperialism and empire were affirmed as positively by relatively democratic political systems (US, Britain, France, the Netherlands) as autocratic ones (Russia, Japan, Austro-Hungary, Germany). The historical value of imperial expansion as a set both of institutions and concepts clearly transcended different political systems.
Although Vladimir Lenin is understandably absent from much of the discussion these days, it is not insignificant that he and many of his Social Democratic comrades understood the multiple social and political implications of this now idealized, institutionalized, and globalized set of practices, as well as (although some will deny it) its humanitarian implications. Linking imperialism to the last stage of capitalism, however, naturalized empire for Leninists every bit as much as it was naturalized for the great imperialists themselves: as an “inevitable” and “unavoidable” aspect of historical “progress.” The logical dilution of boundaries this conceptualization entailed may well have grounded Leninist conceptions of a historically appropriate Soviet empire, but equally if not more important, it also provided Bolsheviks and Menshevik Internationalists with the same potential for political mobilization that under girded powerful anti-imperial movements of “national liberation.” The international context of empire and imperial competition thus conditioned the internal politics of late imperial Russia by affecting the meanings of class, progress, and the promises of material prosperity. Even before its competitive institutions, ideologies, and impulses climaxed in the unimaginative horrors of a war that, for some, was to make the world safe for the democratic practices that had helped produce it, struggle was everywhere understood as the means to secure and protect the political, cultural, social, and economic fruits of its encompassing practices themselves.
This mindset and its accompanying system of values were forcefully reflected in Russia not simply by partisans of the autocracy, as we know, but by Miliukov, Guchkov, Maklakov, and other liberal constitutionalists. Empire was the solution to the broader problem of Russia’s economic and political security. In a pamphlet entitled “Why and for What are we Fighting?”, published shortly after the 1917 revolution, Miliukov laid the blame for the war on German “imperialists” but argued that Germany’s guilt lay not in its striving for power and dominance, but only in its effort to impose hegemony by force. Victory over Germany would protect for Russia a global system of open economic and political competition. A “firm and enduring peace” would not deprive the Balkan nations and certain others of the right to self-determination, perhaps even within tsarist Russia itself, so long as their interests were not prejudicial to the “great powers.”^[9]
For Miliukov and others, the key case in point was Constantinople and the Dardanelles Straits. With exquisite poor timing, Miliukov published in January 1917 the first of a series of pieces on the problem, distinguishing Russia’s need to control the Straits, and hence for security purposes Constantinople itself, from “traditional imperialism.” Russian possession of the Straits and the city was “completely necessary” for elementary reasons of economic development and national defense. In this sense, Constantinople could not really be seen as a “Turkish” city, which privileged ethnicity over geopolitics. It was an “international trading center,” a great locus of Western civilizations, whose prosperity and culture, like that of the Balkans, had been constrained by a “heavy and bloody tyranny.” It could thereby by right be “liberated” from despotic rule in the name of Western values.^[10]
Miliukov’s depressingly contemporary perspectives, reflecting a broad range of political intelligence before 1917, thus positioned empire as the only effective solution in both political and moral terms to the problems of Russia’s security and economic well-being. Balanced imperial power was still a better international safeguard against military conflict than any other available set of solutions, assuring “good” empires could contain their evil competitors. Yet the imperial solution remained a nearly impossible basis on which to mobilize the diverse populations of tsarist society itself in support of these “necessary” objectives, since its embedded relations of domination and subjection constituted the essence of imperial political culture, its socio-political and socio-cultural core. (Here, incidentally, was one of the several key reasons why even a liberal Provisional Government dominated by “revolutionary defensists” failed at its own brief effort at nation building, and why Lenin and the internationalists, tapping into the mobilizing energy of anti-imperialism in Russia and enraged by the human costs of imperial excess, gained throughout the empire an increasing political purchase.)
The issue of mobilization also lay at the heart of the problem of governance that empire was also intended to solve – and which indeed, one could argue it had “solved” reasonably well for some 200 years insofar as its multiple cultural, social, and political dimensions sustained a viable polity. Here again, empire as “solution” was broadly viewed by a variety of otherwise contending political and social elites, both resistant to and supportive of autocracy, as the set of superordinate relations necessary to keep a vast geopolitical entity whole.
An essential element of this solution, however, was the complementary generation and institutionalization of a transcendent concept of citizenship, one that could trump the centrifugal impulses of subordinated nationalities. By 1905, it was widely recognized, again inside the government and out, that governance by force and ideological domination could no longer sustain an imperial system appropriate to the needs of socio-economic well-being, economic expansion, and state security. Like everything else in Russia at this time, empire had to be “modernized.” But how to reform the patterns and practices of imperial governance while keeping the empire intact?
As Juliette Cadiot points out in a recent issue of the Russian Review, the moment serious efforts were made to organize even a limited form of national representative assembly in 1905, political factions began to define themselves on the basis of their nationality or confession. The “national question,” as it were, moved to the center of political discourse. Again, it preoccupied Russian liberals, whose literature in the period is filled with contentious discussion about the possibilities and implications of an imperial federalism; and it emerged along with “class” in local areas like the Volga regions as well as the Baltics as a primary point of political organization and activism.^[11] The resurgence after 1906 of demands that soslovie remain the primary claim to participatory political rights was closely linked to the worry that imperial governance could not be sustained if these rights were based on nationality.
In Foucauldian terms (and how could we avoid this obligatory nod in the great man’s direction in a discussion of governance?), disciplining and transforming go hand in hand in successfully managed processes of social and political change, whether this is accomplished by overt or more subtle forms of coercion. If the problems of governance on the vast Eurasian land mass could no longer be adequately met by the forcefully imposed practices of autocratic imperial rule, neither could they be met without the cultural transformations of religious and ethnic tolerance, the dissolution, in other words, of Russia’s imperial glue. Empire worked as a system of governance in part because sharp limitations on tolerance imbricated the practices of local control, as they were, incidentally, in a “democratic” United States at the time (and many would argue still are). National, ethnic, and racial identities in conditions of relative political freedom constitute, among other political and cultural practices, a discreet “claims discourse,” a means to frame grievances and a means to seek their resolution, however these identities are culturally or socially formed. Any system of governance even partly based on elected legislatures both precipitates and legitimizes the right to make these claims, if not the content of the claims themselves.
Empire worked as a solution to the problem of governance in this vast multiethnic region, in other words, so long as there was no need to recognize these claims in formal ways. The instituted practices of assimilation, accommodation, and perhaps especially political and cultural subjugation constituted an adequate, if sometimes problematic, system of imperial rule. Any move away from these practices required, among other dubious possibilities, the creation of a superordinate sense of imperial “citizenship,” one that would assign rights to a privileged shared identity and subordinate particularistic interests to all-national ones. Federalism based on the primacy of local concerns (the American solution) was generally rejected as unworkable before the end of the tsarist regime precisely for this reason, and because it raised the complex and multivariate problem of boundaries. These and most other challenges were left for the Bolsheviks to try and resolve, with all of the contradictions and fissures the subordination of nationality to a new, transcendent “Soviet” citizenship and personhood ultimately involved.
Charles Steinwedel’s interesting and informed examination of “Strategies for Incorporating Territory and People into the Empire’s East and their Results, 1700-1917” provides a focused examination of these problems in Bashkiria. As we know, one “solution” to the problem of electoral qualification in the 1906 Fundamental Laws was to inscribe privilege into property rights while also differentiating electoral authority by curia and soslovia. Steinwedel shows neatly, however, how the effort to base political prerogatives on tsenz in order to transcend national and confessional particularism still foundered on the shoals of nationality. Particularly interesting is that in a region like Bashkiria, without firmly charted boundaries, the issue of property and property qualifications quickly became through the idiom of nationality a set of claims associated with the historical loss of land, not the abrogation of an imagined state. In this context, rights legitimized grievances that could be positioned as legally undeniable. In turn, grievances demanded resolutions in ways that reinforced, rather than obviated, national particularism, although conceptions of the nation were not their primary impulse.
Steinwedel also makes the important argument that land itself in this context acquires a new cultural meaning, suggesting how imperial practices in the region produced particular kinds of knowledge and understanding. I would add only that the meaning of land became even more salient in the process as a means to political access, consolidating the linkage established elsewhere between socio-economic well-being and political control. We learn from this well-researched essay that what changes in Bashkiria is the role of land ownership in solving new problems of governance. Land grants were made to Bashkirs in the 18th and 19th century as a way of incorporating them into an imperial structure by linking rights to land. The governance problem was successfully resolved by creating an investment in the imperial system, paradoxically privileging nationality while denying the claims national identity could now make. As in the late Soviet case, Bashkiria after 1905 became a striking illustration not so much of the changing meaning of categories like nationality and confession, but the changing uses to which the claims based on these identities could be put in any even partly representative government system. Empire here is thus neatly positioned as an analytical matrix through which to analyze not only the unintended consequences of the practices and processes it created, but the relationship of these practices to the problems it also served to resolve.
Here we come to issue of soslovie that Alexander Kaplunovskii discusses in his paper from a perspective critical of the historiography, and the complex issue of the relationships between ascribed identities and the identities of self-representation addressed by Ilya Gerasimov.^[12] In his exploration of meshchanstvo, Kaplunovskii makes the important point that the relevance of soslovie and the soslovie system in the case of the meshchanstvo and the peasantry lies not in abstract discussion of whether soslovie appeared sooner or later, but in understanding tasks the soslovie system was designed to resolve within an imperial context. In this regard, he nicely calls attention to these concepts as discursive constructions that helped produce and reproduce the social formations they labeled, suggesting that the “mass language” of the epoch is a key to understanding their meaning. I would certainly agree, but add again that at this early 20th century moment of ascendant imperial practices, the mass language of global imperial systems was also under challenge by the strengthening languages of claims and rights. The re-ascription of soslovie identities and new efforts to reinvigorate soslovie as a source of political as well as socio-cultural identity had in large part to do with the ways the traditional constitution of soslovie rights and obligations stood against their erosion by the needs of a “modernizing” empire to assign rights and obligations in other ways.
As in the case of their conceptions of empire, one can see here the difficult struggles liberals had about the proper forms and meanings of representation. On one hand, any new system of legislative governance required that various social formations be literally represented by elected parliamentary delegates, however restrictive the franchise. On the other, the notions of parliamentary representation strengthened the categories of nationality, ethnic, and class difference that the imperial practices of governance worked to repress. Octobrists and Constitutional Democrats tried to argue, of course, that their new parties stood above classes and above social partisanship (nadklassnost’ and nadpartiinost’), but simply evoking the notion that they could impartially represent Bashkir, Ukrainian, worker, gentry, or any other interests reinforced the very social constructions whose discursive and mobilizing power they were trying to diminish.^[13]
This takes us to the important question raised by Ilya Gerasimov about when identities matter, and when which identities matter, a subject he explores in theoretical terms and by looking closely at Jews and Jewish criminals in Odessa. Gerasimov reminds us that both individual and collective identities are always multiple and always relational, even (or perhaps one should say especially) within the context of empire. They function culturally, socially, and politically in relations to variously constituted individual and collective “others,” that is, to objects and practices of communities, states, and empires as well as how individuals represent themselves. Gerasimov argues convincingly that for Jewish thieves in Odessa, the collective ascriptions of “Jewishness” did not demarcate other powerful self-representations in the criminal community, although we do not learn here what kinds of identities displaced them (class? gang? rebel?). In any event, Gerasimov’s essay nicely complements Kaplunovskii’s by showing that the established identities of empire, including soslovie, matter increasingly as discourses of self and collective representation at the end of the tsarist regime when their relationship to the system of imperial governance was increasingly challenged. Here, of course, there are strong parallels to the processes underlying the collapse not only of the Soviet empire, but of other modern imperial systems as well. In simplified terms, the answer to the question Gerasimov poses as to why Jewish gangsters, whether “Jewish” by ascription or self-representation, robbed Jewish enterprises is not so much because the social structure of late imperial Russia was rapidly disintegrating and that social categories of the epoch were all but meaningless, as he argues, but because these categories no longer served effectively as normative controls on social behavior. This does not mean they were “meaningless,” only that as categories of ascription or self-representation, they were increasingly detached from the governing relations and practices of the dominant social and political order.
Finally, a few final remarks on Gerasimov’s argument that Russian imperial history has to be viewed as an “open-ended process,” something that did not come to an end with the collapse of the tsarist imperial system. Gerasimov here takes issue with Leopold Haimson, suggesting that a growing body of studies has emerged that more or less explicitly departs from what is informally called the “Haimsonian orthodoxy,” which has dominated the historiography of late imperial Russia in the West for almost three decades. In Gerasimov’s view, Haimson’s paradigm retrospectively sealed the fate of the Russian Empire by advancing a structuralist formula of “dual polarization,” in contrast to the revisionist approach of the 1990s, which concentrated on social practices and intermediate groups that bridged this polarization.
I very much agree that imperial Russian history has to be viewed as a complex and open-ended process, not as a straight-forward vector culminating in 1917. But as a unregenerate structuralist, albeit of the mild variety, by which I mean a scholar who continues to try to understand and evaluate the historical role of various kinds of institutions, cultural forms, and the instituted practices of social and political interaction in tsarist Russian and Soviet history, I hardly regard the “complexity of social fabric in late imperial Russia” as a “weakness” of the late imperial regime, only as the source of a new set of tasks that an imperial political economy and culture had to address, something the particular regime of Nicholas the Last was unable to do adequately. In this regard, the Haimson paradigm does not suggest that the social conflicts and contradictions that preceded the war made revolution inevitable, only that they defined the real tasks of imperial Russian governance in the empire’s last decades. As we know, the war actually closed these conflicts down for a period of time, providing new opportunities for the regime, no less than for the Social Democrats, for political and social mobilization and reform. Far from sealing the fate of the empire, what Gerasimov calls the Haimson paradigm vastly increased imperial agency, especially that of the tsar himself. Social polarization in this context, as it was a short while later in 1917, can only be thought of as “alleged” (Gerasimov’s word) if one disassociates social relations in the period from the languages of estate and class that inscribed polarizing differences even as they served to construct them. As Haimson himself has recently suggested, this left Nicholas and Lenin, each in his own way bound by a distinct discursive repertoire neither ever managed to escape, as the two determinant personalities of the whole late tsarist epoch.^[14]
Let me conclude by saying again how much I admire the Ab Imperio collective – so well represented at this conference – for its many contributions to the study and understanding of empire. I would affirm, however, that imperial Russia, like imperial America and the imperial Soviet Union, has to be approached as a dynamic system, situated within the historical specificities of a changing global as well as domestic order. If the key words here include elasticity, ambiguity, practice, contradiction, and tension, as Ab Imperio has suggested, the key questions still have to center, in my view, on the relationships between the historically constituted tasks embedded in the practices and understandings of empire in this region, and the range of possibilities available for their resolution.