Comparison is a fundamental analytical operation, which allows singling out an object and legitimizing and grounding its specificity. Hence, an act of comparison is political by default: whoever compares has a right to do so, and, while comparing, creates hierarchies of objects and of their characteristics. This is why this issue of Ab Imperio, which develops our annual focus on the “Imperium of Knowledge and the Power of Silences,” concentrates on the problem of the politics of comparison, be it practical politics of historical actors and regimes or politics of production of knowledge. This problem is particularly acute in the context of the heterogeneous imperial space, and in an imperial situation in which one particular framework of comparison is superimposed upon another, and one logic of comparison that works perfectly well on one level of imperial space appears irrelevant on the other. For instance, the politics of comparison is, no doubt, present in the definition of western and eastern borderlands of the Russia Empire. In this case, the choice of a region on the West-East continuum results in a different image of the imperial experience. Comparison is written into the very act of choosing taxonomy in the descriptions of the imperial order: confession, region, or nationality. On the other hand, beyond the borders of specific empires, the politics of comparison can be found in juxtaposition with continental and colonial overseas empires, or in the languages of catching up development and of asserting uniqueness (the latter is particularly characteristic of the languages of self-description of the region of Eastern Europe, which generated a historiographic axiom of mimicking development).
However, the epistemological specifics of “comparison” (which also means its political significance) cannot be reduced to the question of who compares and what gets compared. The very object of comparison, which is perceived by many comparativists as given, is conditioned by the fundamental situation of comparison: “autocracy” appears as an unambiguous definition of a political regime only when it is explicitly or implicitly opposed to “republic,” and “empire” acquires much of its meaning in an opposition to “national state.” In fact, as we noted on several occasions, this very instance conditions a very specific understanding of the “imperial” in the framework of the new imperial history, when “empire” is viewed as an ideal type in opposition to an ideal type of “nation.” In the space defined by these two poles, in comparison to them (closer to one or another) one can find real historical sketch of a polity. In this sense, an object cannot exist outside of a permanent comparison and juxtaposition to other objects, which creates additional tensions since the recurrent comparison with changing referents undermines a stable self-same identification of the object. It is this aspect of the comparative approach that becomes a leitmotif of the articles published below: they focus on contestation of, or on the initial fluidity of the frameworks of comparison, on the struggle for the “right” choice of an object, and for the list of candidates for comparison with clearly “appropriate” parameters. This mechanism of the object’s definition through the position of the researcher and through the selection of comparable objects is discussed in the texts by Kristine Vitalich on the making of Vladimir Dal’’s Dictionary and by Steven Seegel on the politics of comparison in East-European cartography. The construction of the “body” of the Russian language in Dal’’s Dictionary, and the making of the space of a homogeneous nation with the help of ethnographic maps is made through the double operation of “comparative constructivism.” This operation provides for the external boundaries of the created object through a comparison with objects possessing a legitimate status (commonly recognized European language or territory of a national state). On the other hand, the internal homogeneity of the created entity is recast in categories of a vertical hierarchy: language versus dialect, minority versus titular nation.
The politics of selection, dismemberment, or silencing, and the politics of manipulating the language and organization of knowledge are the foci of the other articles published in the historical section. Overcoming the single-vectored analysis of a conventional post-colonial approach, the authors show how the politics of comparison equalize “colony” and “metropole”; or, alternatively, how discourses of superiority and domination in structurally equal “horizontal” elements of comparison are legitimized. In this sense the article by Tassadit Yacine on the intellectual evolution of Pierre Bourdieu as a complex and multi-vectored interaction of his “French” and “Algerian” cultural and social experiences, and Todd Sheppard’s article on the evolution of the semantics of the concept of “Frenchman” after Algerian independence and migration into France of its non-French citizens are especially interesting. Finally, Xavier Le Torrivelec explores group identities of “Tatars” and “Bashkirs” as dynamic phenomena shaped by a range of factors.
As a result, boundaries between seemingly obvious objects of comparison become so porous and situational that binary oppositions and structural clarity characteristic of comparative approaches give way to a complex and multifaceted view of the world. This constitutes the politics of comparison in an imperial situation, where the objects of comparison are not given, and where they change from context to context, and even aspire to pursue their own politics of comparison in competition with other contenders for the power in empire and with the power of social sciences.
This situation is theorized in our Methodology and Theory section, which opens with a large scale chart of “imperial comparative studies” by Andreas Kappeler. Kappeler’s article not only exhaustingly demonstrates analytical potential of this approach but also shows possibilities inherent in the comparative studies for criticism of the logic of segregation and authenticity of nationalizing approaches. Other articles in the section broaden the goals of comparative studies even more. The article by Michel Werner and Benedict Zimmerman, and the interview with Matthias Middel review the tasks and the role of comparative studies both from within the self-reflective tradition of komarativistik and from the perspective of critical post-colonial theory; and further reveal political stakes in the process of knowledge production, both in any act of comparison and in the rational organization and scholarly representation of the socio-political space. The article by Svetlana Gorshenina casts this problem in a sharp light by analyzing which regions are included or excluded from the “post-colonial” field, and on which grounds. Moreover, transferring historical methods, themes, and specific disciplinary approaches from one geographical and scholarly field into another becomes part of a politics of comparison. To this end, the article by Glennys Young raises a recurrent problem of scholarship: Young attempts to overcome the gap that exists between the traditional research agenda of Soviet historical studies dominated by social and political approaches (even in their new incarnations) and the history of emotions that emerged in the context of European and American historiographies. In this case, comparison reveals not just the gray zones of Soviet studies but also relativizes exclusive rights of a specific research tradition to interpret the Soviet past. Both the Soviet past itself and Soviet political history as objects of comparison change radically when, for instance, the emotional dimension enters the scene.
Evidently, one can also discern a certain “politics of comparison” in the selection and organization of materials that are published in this issue of AI. However, since much depends on the position of a specific observer (or in this case, reader), we leave it to the latter to decide what kind of object is being constructed and what kind of stakes are behind this construction.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

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