It is a strange feeling to live in a country of déjà vu. In Russia, for a number of years already, it has been the Groundhog’s Day of the year 1975: police provocations against a handful of dissidents, the omni-present ideological curtain of “sovereign democracy,” and the opportunism of the masses overwhelmed with the local version of consumerism, pampered by insane oil prices. The state – allegedly weak, even impotent throughout the 1990s – controls the economy and “re-asserts” itself internationally against the background of a setback of the international reputation of the US. Whether this development is part of the larger, global trend of autocratic consumerism or a peculiarity of Russia’s post-Communist development owed to her “undemocratic” genetic cultural code is largely irrelevant. The problem of the historian’s responsibility, or, to be more precise, of one’s need to be attuned to the political context, is not.
It is indeed uncomfortable, even disconcerting and disturbing, to realize that at least some responsibility for the Russian “revenge of the past” should be shared by many of us in the field of Russian history, both in Russia and outside it. Whatever happened to the “Weimar Russia” rhetoric of the 1990s, by the early 2000s, the past as it was presented in the profession came to haunt us.
One of the historiographic achievements of the 1990s was the ultimate discreditation of the “sacred cow” of Soviet historiography and the dominant American tradition of history-writing: the cult of radical intelligentsia and obshchestvennost’ as the embodiment of Modernity and progress in Russian history. A well-received study delivered a blow to the myth of sacred and sacrificial revolutionary terrorism, while another influential current revealed a Foucauldian strive for symbolical power behind the seemingly benign and virtuous service to the people by Russian professionals. These studies were followed by the deconstruction of the entire culture of “Underground Russia” and by attempts to reveal a darker side of Russian modernism, which had allegedly evolved directly to the early Stalinist utopia. Valerii Podoroga’s early calls “to use Foucault against the empire” appeared naпve at a time when deconstruction of modernity reigned in academia and Russian humanities amazingly quickly forgot what they knew of Marxist tradition. Various editions of “civilizational approach” dominated the scene, ranging from “politarism” to “Eastern modes of production.”
The best studies of the past are being written with a message for the present. We thought that the key for stability of the new post-1991 democratic Russia was to get rid of the century-old legacy of ideological dictate, to set its citizens free of any collective and collectivist patterns of behavior, to make them focus on their private lives and private property. In the wake of the turmoil of late perestroika and the early 1990s, this was seen as a sine qua non of political stability and economic prosperity. Somehow, the notorious year 1913 and the then recently rehabilitated epoch of bezvremenie came to be seen as an ideal of the future in the past. “Normalcy” of Russian history – its Europeanization under the Tsars or modernization under the Soviets – transferred from the sphere of academic debates on the Sonderweg to the political air of the country.
Well, we praised a large-scale political demobilization in the past, and we got one in the present. Even the Fourth State Duma with its Progressive bloc appears as a torch of parliamentarism in contemporary Russia. There are certainly many other causes for the present-day state of affairs, but we should focus on the one that directly concerns our profession. Regardless of the personal ideological preferences and biases of historians, there was a fundamentally flawed methodological assumption built into much of the historical studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. The realities of Russia’s (and other post-Soviet countries’) transition in the 1990s should have given us a hint to how a semi-modernized, under-institutionalized heterogenous society operates and evolves, and how it escapes the categorizing power of modern social sciences. The master-class delivered by history was largely ignored by participating historians as an instance of aberration of the norm, as a “transition period” viewed as an exception in the mainstream historical process.
The major problem in the otherwise successful “normalization” of Russian imperial/Soviet history over the past two decades was the unquestionable transfer of models and concepts of European history. The resulting deconstruction of the notorious Russian Sonderweg tradition was incomplete: the most attentive scholars began speaking about the “gradient of modernity,” with Russia being located on its lower slopes, or the erroneously perpetrated “telescoped development” that did not allow the “right” timing for the elements of modernity to develop correctly. Russia was re-admitted to the normative modernity of the “West,” but only as another “sick man of Europe,” taking strong or even brutal remedies to keep up with its more healthy peers. We may easily see the same attitude toward present-day Russia in the newspapers and TV coverage, but let us focus on history and historical writing. Besides a Saidian revolt against the very idea of the normative and homogenious “West” (which is as much a construct of Said himself), there was a more productive venue of inquiry, underexplored in the 1990s. The ongoing revisionism of the normative models of the nation-state and its creation in Western Europe, with its criticism of the simple recipes of turning “peasants into Frenchman,” was not matched by the reflection of the modus operandi of the Russian empire (although the turn of this century witnessed a new and exciting stage in the studies of the Soviet Union – call it an “affirmative action empire” or not). An attempt to replace an empire-wide reinterpretation by a range of isolated new “national” histories did not yield much. If the Russian empire was a proto-national state, or a temporary compound for would-be nation-states, it performed miserably. And so certainly does the Russian Federation (and some of its neighbors) that attempts to emulate the ideal nation-state, as it was known in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Russian ruling elite does little more than the most advanced historians would recommend it to do. Consider a recent article by a well-known Russian historian in the Moscow-based political think tank journal Pro et Contra: we know from history, or so this historian argues, that a stable democracy requires an inclusive political community of the nation. A democratic Russia needs the Russian nation. Historically, culturally, politically, this has to be a nation of the Russian cultural core and those able to assimilate. There may be a legitimate disagreement on the merits, drawbacks, and consequences of the model of the politically inclusive and culturally differentiated nation of the cultural core and ethnic minorities. The question is not about political disagreement in the present, but about how history is used to legitimate this position. There is a danger in the logic of historical operation that is tailored to derive lessons from the past and use them as a teleology for the model of political development in the present. This logic inadvertently strips the historical thinking of its most valuable function, i.e., the demonstrating of the anthropology of historical experience and the role of human agency in shaping the past. By reducing the history of the contestation between alternative models of organization of cultural and political community to one line of argument and a model (however logically coherent this model might be) historians transform the understanding of the present and the future. The upshot of this transformation is the closing of otherwise potentially multiple horizons for future development, and the evaporation of the critical agency of politics as continuing contestation about and redefinition of key assumptions about social and political life.
We are only now getting the very first studies of “imperial citizenship” based on different methodological premises. There are still no conventional all-embracing theoretical models of network participatory citizenship (like the type presented by the pan-imperial phenomenon of obshchestvennost’), or corporate citizenship, granting certain rights to its members as a “franchise” (be it a legal estate in imperial Russia, or the semi-legal bodies of “soviet women” or “soviet workers” in the USSR). A recent pioneering study demonstrated how even the most discriminated and alienated social group, the peasants, were included into the common (though not universal!) legal sphere of the Russian empire, and thus participated in the emerging consociational political community that may be called a “pan-imperial nation.” Yet, taking diversity as a norm rather than a deviation remains in itself a deviant mode of thought.
This is not to say that the Russian Federation is an empire, or should become one. But the unwritten history of the “pan-imperial nation” begets the non-existent real citizenship for the different ethnocultural groups of the heterogenous Russian Federation. In the meantime, every week brings news of murders on ethnic and racial grounds on the streets of Russian cities, while Russian intellectuals ponder the problem of the cultural core of the political nation.
Once again: this is no longer about political views. It is about the problem of representation of the past in the present, and the different logical modes in which it can be done. A hundred years ago a prominent liberal, Maksim Kovalevsky, anticipated the logic of normalizing historical judgment and political program:

“Let us imagine a Caucasian mountaineer who discusses some articles of the Criminal Code while being convinced that blood should be wiped away only by blood or compensated with cows and sheep. … When a circuit court sentences the murderer-Circassian to hard labor in Siberia, the closest relative of his victim follows him there to exercise the duty of revenge.”^[1]

Kovalevsky’s suggestion that certain groups of population (“Chukchees, Kamchadals and Yakuts” and other inorodtsy) could not become equal members of the all-Russia’s political nation was confronted by the anthropologist Dmitrii Anuchin, who demonstrated that this argument rested on incomplete knowledge (to put it academically).^[2] The heterogenous society in the imperial situation of structural inequalities experiences modernization differently than a nation-state, but with basically the same results. This was probably true a hundred years ago, and this should certainly be true today. Historians have reconstructed Russia’s past as a frustrated attempt to nationalize the undermodernized state of undereducated petite bourgeois, dominated by giant semi-nationalized monopolies, with unrealistic foreign policy ambitions. This is a textbook-quality self-fulfilling prophecy for triumphant fascism.
No, the Russian empire did not win the war with Japan, and its modern economic sector was indeed dominated by monopolies. The problem is not with the historical realities, but with our analytical language to describe them, and hence to reconstruct the historical dynamics. By describing the petite agriculturists as bourgeoisie, we logically arrive at the project of class struggle and collectivization as the way to modernize the countryside. By following the populist economic discourse of the “toiling peasantry,” we end up in the dark peasant utopias of Balkan-style agrarianism. Very few historical studies dare to admit that “peasants” were just an analytical construct, and in reality there existed a diverse conglomerate of economic and cultural patterns of land cultivation by small landholders. Such approaches would lead to the program of rationalization and intensification of agriculture advanced by the “extension system” in the US or by the public agronomy movement in inter-revolutionary Russia. A variety of analytical languages at the disposal of scholars leads to a variety of historical trajectories, to be interpreted afterwards by political scientists as “path dependency.” The future adjusts to its reflection in the past.
Getting back to the assault on Russia’s intelligentsia’s legacy on the scholarship of the 1990s, we can see how the main traits of the new regime were anticipated. Using outdated methodological premises, we thought that the main goal of political modernization (in the past and in the present) was the emancipation of the individual from all the collective bonds. This may be true in a city-state like Liechtenstein, but no individual can compete with the state in the situation of multiple cultural contexts and economic interests, with the state being the largest and the major locus of group solidarity. We thought that obshchestvennost’ was bad because of its intensive and informal networks of solidarity. Well, the stake on formally registered and well-financed NGOs failed, as social solidarity is not unlike an English lawn: it takes shape and strength after decades of sustained development. By delegating the status of the supreme modernizing force to the state, Russian society surrendered as a key social and historical actor. There is a moment when the urge to normalize converts into an intellectual stance that welcomes what emerges from the normalization: a new form of fascism with old fascist practices.
This thematic issue concludes the annual theme “The Imperium of Knowledge and the Power of Silences,” focused on the exploration of the functioning of knowledge in the culturally and politically heterogeneous space of empire. The texts included in this issue offer a closer look at the processes of producing knowledge about empire as a mechanism of conceiving future from the past – in the past. We, for our part, would like to draw attention to the political and social context of these historiographic discussions in the present. In Russia this context involves not only open assaults against the European University in St. Petersburg, most professional and state-independent academic institutions that influenced the social sciences and history writing in the country, not only an orchestrated divorce of memories and local interpretations of history from the emerging new official narrative of the past, but also an open request from the state for an “usable” version of Russian history for a futurist project of “sovereign democracy.” Obviously, these developments resulted from direct and very serious political pressure. And yet, historical writing – and thinking about history – requires exceptional responsibility in such historical moments as ours. One step away from individual rights and freedoms, one step towards tacitly approving of the new grand visions of “normal” national states with “cultural cores,” and we may find ourselves in accordance with the emerging culture of fascism in the early twenty-first century. We have in the present what we managed to recognize as a legitimate history. It is time to see a different future in our past. We hope that the study of empire will help in this venture.

Editors of Ab Imperio:
I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov