The idea to discuss the role of archives as loci of production and codification of knowledge about empire, archives as dynamic subjects of the multifaceted process of yielding power-knowledge in empires, had been initially suggested by Alessandro Stanziani and developed by the editors of AI and Cahiers du monde russe in the joint call for papers (published in AI 2/2007). There we posed questions that in our view define a new agenda for an “imperial turn” in archival studies. As always happen in the practice of AI, the participants of the forum not only responded to these questions, but broadened our agenda, redefined it in many interesting ways, and even took issue with some of the suggested approaches. Due to their creative contributions, our joint forum turn out to be so intellectually inspiring, reaching out to other imperial experiences besides the Russian and French, and provided a real comparative perspective beyond a schematic structural comparison.
Regardless of methodological differences and thematic foci of each contribution, all participants in the forum “The Empire of Archives” attempted to approach the archive as a dynamic and evolving subject of the imperial continuum of power rather than a result of it. Inevitably reducing to a single thesis the richness of all contributions (sometimes provocative and always substantiated by case studies of archival histories and personal archival explorations), we nevertheless endeavor to chart a map of the “empire of archives.” This map incorporates archives as imperial/colonial practices (Svetlana Gorshenina); archives as a dynamic site of communication between rival voices of different segments of imperial society, a site of speaking not just by and through conventions but also beyond and against them (Ann Stoler); archives as an institute of empire, the perception of which by the imperial subjects (and by extension, political functions) evolved with nationalization of these subjects’ consciousness (James Niessen); archives as powerful mechanisms of memory policies and the production of an “usable past” by authoritarian regimes (Sophie Coeuré); and finally, archives as a language of modern state bureaucracy, which revolutionary regimes tend to write off and make look archaic through the rearranging and reclassifying of documents of the old regimes (Igor’ Lukoyanov).
Interestingly enough, the map that we thus acquired demands explanations that neither of the forum’s contributions provides by itself. In what follows, the editors attempt to explicate the scholarly added value that results from the cross-examination of contributions in the forum and the implicit comparative logic of these different studies of archives. This is not an answer to the set of problems outlined in the invitation to the forum (published in the previous issue of Ab Imperio); it is rather an invitation to continue and expand this fruitful discussion on the pages of Ab Imperio and Cahiers du monde russe. Therefore it is worthwhile to start with new questions that can clarify the logic of each archival case-study and provide a framework for thinking about the “empire of archives” in general terms.
It seems that archives existed as long as the state – in fact, they are probably much older than the modern European state. Was there any correlation between the type of the state and the nature and function of archives? What is the difference between “feudal,” “imperial,” or “nation-state” archives? And what in fact is the meaning of the “imperial archive” – are archives of empires different from other archives as institutions and as dynamic political spaces?

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One has to be a real expert in the history of archives to address the question about special meaning and “subjectivity” of imperial archives. As James Niessen writes in his article, the original and most important function of medieval and early modern archives “was the assertion of rights of succession, ownership, and rule.” Most likely, this was the reason for keeping records a few thousand years ago as well. But in the context of eastern Europe and Eurasia this fact creates an important link between the institution of record and knowledge gathering, and the salient agency of continental and contiguous empires and their distinguishing characteristic – that of the monarchy or a comparable system of personalized rule. Through the history of archives in this region one is exposed to the problem of a historically blurred boundary between the modern bureaucratic and public state, and personalized regimes of imperial governance, exemplified by the persistence of monarchical rule and elite networks., This unevenness and blurred boundary between the two types of governance and their coexistence probably should be thought of as elements of the definition of empire as different historical phenomenon from that of colonialism and imperialism. The examination of the history of archives from the viewpoint of the history of continental empires uncovers another function, more obvious then than now. It was the ritual and symbolic function of archives as frameworks of traditional power: the written word codified reality and produced its most “authentic” (confined to a non-contradictory narrative) version. So if the archive-as-instrument-of-proof of royal privileges emerged out of the needs of the government, the archive-as-mythological-body in a way preceded the state to be formed in accordance with the legacy preserved in an archive.
Judging from the article of Igor Lukoianov, Russian imperial archives did not differ much from their Soviet successors, serving the interests of a particular political regime. Jim Niessen also sees little added value in qualifying the Habsburg archives as “imperial,” although he approaches the problem from an opposite direction: he writes that archives outside of Vienna were not supervised by imperial authorities, but rather by local political bodies. As such, they were regional phenomena and kept this status while empires came and went. If so, was there nothing special about “imperial” archives – or was there? Their specificity became more visible after the dissolution of the Habsburg and Russian empires, when successor states – or regimes – seriously reshaped the old archival system. From these articles we learn that the archives of the ancien regime were menacingly all-embracing, fixated on the principle of preserving the original structure and volume of documents without discriminating on the basis of “importance” or “theme.” It seems that the historical rupture and the founding mythology of the successor states (be it romantic nationalism or communist ideology) needed a major reconfiguration of the archival body that involved both censorship and varied emphasis added to certain collections of archival documents.
Indeed, revolution and collapse of an empire are important moments of the utter instrumentalization of the past. The inertia of the system of collecting and keeping imperial documents is challenged by the new opportunities to silence or even erase (“forget”) the past, or to keep and remember (“invent”) it. Anyone working in Russian archives with pre-revolutionary documents has an opportunity to see how that enhancement of some documents’ importance, sometimes a virtual “invention” of archival structures, was achieved in the USSR: the major collections (“fondy”) were rearranged and renumbered, to give priority to those dealing with the revolutionary movement (e.g., the records of police, courts, etc). This can be seen by comparing the initial call numbers on the files with those assigned by Soviet archivists. New inventories (opisi) prioritized politically relevant documents by putting these documents in the beginning of the call number sequence.
Silencing and forgetting implied different operations with the archives (as Sophie Coeurй shows): the system of special (secret) archival collections assured that certain documents could be accessed by trustworthy officials and even scholars, while mass hecatombs of old files erased the memory of the past completely. The proverbial history of all-mighty Lavrentii Beriia who kept the compromising documents on himself in his personal vault, is a case in point: some documents were thought to keep their secrets better while being physically intact. At the same time, scores of absolutely innocent documents (bookkeeping or records of criminal police) were burned, destroying whole layers of the past.
Documents would be taken out of their initial collection to be transferred to an appropriate regional or “specialty” archive (e.g., literary or economic). A similar logic of rationalization was applied to the collection of documents that were transferred to titular national republics in the Soviet Union. This system of transfer and the impact of this rationalization on nationalization of the imperial past remained rather underresearched.
Against this background, imperial archives look dominated by inertia. Following Jorge Luis Borges and his metaphor of a map that coincided with the actual terrain,1 we may see empire as a giant archival project, conserving some institutions, relationships and local peculiarities, while ignoring those considered “unimportant” or redundant. Ann Stoller shows how zones of silencing were reconfigured by marginalized voices of those whose stories were preserved in archives only as indirect retellings, as views ascribed to otherwise invisible opponents, as opposites to what mainstream narratives of imperial archives defined as a norm. However, can we not find the same techniques in the archives that can be called “imperial” or “colonial”?
As usual, the cross-examination of the historiography of the colonial empires and that of continental empires is capable of yielding unexpected results. Ann Stoler’s article demonstrates the possibility of a general interpretative framework for understanding the development of the function of archives in empire writ large, that is the empire as a system of governance of uneven and culturally divided territorial and social space. It shows how the prevailing view of empire and archives in the context of Eastern Europe and Eurasia may be modified to include not only the traditionally present focus on top-down governmental practices and perception, but horizontal relations and perceptions in the uneven space of empire.
Reading contributions to this forum, one might conclude that there was nothing specifically “imperial” in Russian archives, with the exception of those instances when the founders of archives were molded and driven by explicit imperialist considerations (cf. the article by Svetlana Gorshenina). Yet, one is struck by the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous if the story told by Gorshenina is juxtaposed to that of Lukoianov, i.e., the co-existence of archives of dynastic and patrimonial power with modern archives of the modern color-coded perception of territory and population and resultant mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.
To what extent imperial archives were imperial becomes clear when we compare them to the post-imperial period. And even in the case of the actual “colonial archive” studied by Ann Stoler: what in fact makes it unique – a special territorial focus and the persistent and all-penetrating trope of race or qualitatively different mechanisms of social and political thinking and practices reflected in its arrangement and management and in its documents? In other words, what – beyond the formal title – made this archive indeed “colonial” – the researcher’s perspective or some intrinsic qualify of this archive?