“Everybody thinks for some reason that Russia remains an empire and still treats it as an empire.”

Vladimir Putin
(ITAR-TASS, 9 October 1999)

The study of Russia’s imperial heritage began to garner renewed interest from a number of prominent social scientists in the early 1990s.^[1] In addressing the topic, I acknowledge the existence of a normative usage of “empire” that ranges from the reverential to the opprobrious, but I stress here instead that it functions principally as a set of structural and cultural categories shared – with significant variation – by the dynastic polity from Middle Muscovy to the socialist heir from the 1930s and onward, including present-day Russia. In agreement with such studies as Michael Doyle’s Empire^[2] and Anthony Pagden’s Lords of All the World,^[3] I would identify several key structural features of empire – its status as a composite polity; a core-periphery system with hierarchical access to goods and services; its inclination toward expansion and periodic collapse – as well as key cultural features that range from the pragmatic (such as the uneven availability of specialized higher education or the distinct distribution patterns of cultural texts), to the lofty (such as the state’s preoccupation with a mission civilisatrice).^[4]
I will resist the temptation of an extended account of what I take to be Russia’s distinct features of empire – briefly, its geographically contrasting models of colonization; a tendency toward centralized, state-driven modes of cultural production; a marked divide between elite and demotic identity systems; an historically subdued engagement with nation-formation; and a heartland bearing features of what has been described as internal colonization^[5] – in order to concentrate instead on the issue that interests me here, namely the challenges faced by scholars of culture who ask about Russia’s imperial legacy.^[6]

MATCHING LANGUAGE WITH EMPIRE

During the same decade as our social-science colleagues were rediscovering the productivity of imperial paradigms, Slavists working in culture, by contrast, were becoming more cognizant of a different, competing project, loosely referred to as cultural studies, originating at University of Birmingham.^[7] By 1991, cultural studies (as it came to be understood in the US academy) had been traversing the Atlantic Ocean for several years already to US departments of English, Communication, and foreign languages, but still had little circulation in US Slavic departments.^[8] US Slavists tended to construe theory somewhat insularly as a distinct institutional zigzag from the formalists to Bakhtin to the Prague School to Tartu, deftly skirting the signposts of Marxist theory. Under challenge, a gestural acknowledgement of Pereversev was sufficient to confirm the US academy as a free marketplace of ideas.
And while US scholars in Slavic studies (humanities and social sciences alike) still shared many vital research interests, those of us who had worked primarily in Soviet culture found ourselves adrift by 1991. On the one hand, our object of study had disappeared; on the other hand, we were acutely aware that the kind of cultural theory referenced in English departments and elsewhere had neither time for second-world modernity nor curiosity about the possibility of alternative postcolonial theorizing outside the rubric of the overseas empire. And so US Slavists, whether now struggling with Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams or with Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, did so without an adequate vocabulary for the ways in which our newly configured object of study – perhaps an empire, but not principally a maritime one – might produce profoundly different cultural articulations than those of the thalassocratic empires figured in much Western cultural-studies research.
As Slavists, therefore, we shared a potential interest in postcolonial studies, but had a different empire. And while we had a common empire with our social-science colleagues, we spoke a different analytic language. I wish, therefore, to focus here on three issues that complicate and enliven our work in examining the imperial legacy of Russian culture, linking it with cultural studies on the one hand and to some of the research of our social-science colleagues on the other.

MEDIATION: CULTURE’S ETERNAL PUZZLE

The principle challenge, large enough to require a lifetime’s answer, is mediation. The question here (and not only here) is the same as it always is: how does one claim to move between cultural text and social reality? The historical variant of the same question asks about the relationship between the artistic text and history – itself, after all, a text – where knowing bears a different cast than that of either the artistic text or contemporary social reality. The question of mediation does not presume an answer, but issues an implicit challenge to the most available and newly attractive solution, namely content analysis, operating in isolation from other issues.
Verifiable, grounded in image or narrative, conducive to supervision, content analysis alone falls short for several reasons, among them for this one: important, cultural information inevitably eludes the story line, expresses itself in explicit contradiction, insinuates itself with unexpected force because its features are not necessarily prominent as empirical evidence, but rely to a greater or lesser extent on conjecture. While we might be superficially interested, therefore, in the ways that the legacy of imperial culture is explicitly figured – let us say, in Rogozhkin’s Checkpoint [Blokpost], Bodrov’s Captive of the Caucasus [Kavkazskii plennik], Abdrashitov’s Time of the Dancer [Vremia tantsora], Balabanov’s War [Voina], Mikhalkov’s Barber of Siberia [Sibirskii tsiriul’nik], Sokurov’s Russian Ark [Russkii kovcheg] or Aleksandra – it is a more difficult task to ask about the same legacy where it may be most suggestive, operating instead at the margins of visibility, in less obviously pictorial ways.
Could it be argued, for example – in a more subdued fashion than the surface narrative – that Lebedev’s 2002 World War II film Star [Zvezda] may function as an effort to displace Russia’s recent military conflict onto the earlier, anti-fascist one, as if the glory of one conflict might restore the honor of the other? Right or wrong, on what basis would we claim to make this argument when the artistic treatment – precisely because of its contemporary relevance – is spectral and fleeting, interpolating today’s soldier into a mid-century war and vice-versa? And while this analytic act always risks being carried out in error, we surely know at the same time that artistic strategies do not restrict themselves to mimetic representation in the narrative line. In examining those features that the text may most powerfully invoke, scholars must rely on what micro-historian Carlo Ginzburg has productively referred to as conjectural knowledge,^[9] where the effort to read beneath the surface of the text requires, among other skills, a tolerance for contradictory phenomena.
Inseparable from this enterprise, as has been argued most extensively in such texts as Jameson’s Political Unconscious,^[10] as well as Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Orientialism,^[11] is an account of culture’s refractions that accommodates the text not only as the instrument of social legibility but also as constitutive of its conditions. Bearing in mind that Russia’s imperial preoccupations are not merely a representational matter, a costume drama, we are asking here about non-representation mediations – the ways in which the empire’s conditions of production, circulation, exhibition, review, regulation, and consumption inter-determine artistic elements of the text.
“We need not decide here whether... imaginative knowledge infuses history and geography,” suggests Said, “or whether in some way it overrides them. Let us just say for the time being that it is there as something more than what appears to be merely positive knowledge.”^[12] That “something more” than positive knowledge requires of its scholars a curiosity beyond the requirements of textual analysis, about how its imperial trace may reside in a formal style, a structural register, an infrastructural system that produces the artistic terms of the text itself.
As an example, on a less abstract level, let me mention the recent work of Vladimir Khotinenko, a talented filmmaker increasingly concerned with the imperial tradition, state-driven knowledge systems, and official narodnost’ in the television serial Death of the Empire [Gibel’ imperii] or his historical drama 1612.^[13] Little need be said of the content; in each case, the text analyzes itself. At a meta-textual level, however, one might see in both works an elaboration of content in the external features of its funding, production, distribution, and exhibition – elements that, like an exo-skeleton, ensure its survival. Its instruments of support (most evidently the five-year programs for Patriotic Education of Russian Federation Citizens and Channel One) provide a network that efficiently constrains debate of such sensitive topics as imperial collapse in a fashion familiar to us from the Stagnation period. As Chinghiz Aitmatov, for example, had been sanctioned to explore the stylistics of magical realism or the thematics of ethnic amnesia, so patriots of today are licensed to address, among other topics, Russia’s vulnerability to periodic collapse. A simulacrum of risk, this institutionalization of crisis strategically undergirds and strengthens precisely the myth of imperial continuity over the centuries, at the behest of a highly centralized, statist production structure.

DRESSING LIKE YOUR COUSIN: HABITS OF IMPERIAL APPROPRIATION

If the issue of mediation poses the greatest challenge to cultural analysts trying to make sense of Russia’s imperial legacy, a second challenge concerns our account of the imaginative realm in itself as that place where the text flaunts the rules of empirical realia, engaging instead in a series of lateral shifts, loan fantasies, cultural impersonation, or ludic appropriation. This cultural play is common to all times and all regions, but it has new and particular interest in the effort to understand the range of possibilities as one imperial culture draws upon, re-circulates, and creates a playful masquerade of a kin empire, provocatively suggesting their interchangeability or latent commonality. Their “sameness” must not, of course, be taken at face value – any more, let us say, than any artistic transvestitism – but is scripted so as to emphasize the tension between sameness and difference. To return briefly, therefore, to Khotinenko, the anglophile academicism in 1612, redolent of Lord of the Rings, is an inflection that is neither a random choice nor a mere set of artistic artifices, but rather exists as a structure of appropriation with a long production history – a renewed opportunity for identification with England that both cancels out and supersedes the thalassocratic cousin.
In a different medium altogether, Aivazovskii’s seascapes might be seen as a contrastive, but equally striking example of this libidinal engagement with the maritime empire, a painterly admiration of imaginative dominion at once British and not-British. Aivazovskii’s seascapes associatively embed Russian realia in a maritime drama, in evocative vistas that convey both social tumult and imperial, anglophilic mastery in the imaginary realm, as in his canvass The Mary Caught in a Storm (1892). Under the influence of English Romantic seascape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whom he met in 1842, Aivazovskii completed two canvasses remarkable in their similarities. A cursory examination of Aivazovskii’s 1846 View of Constantinople by Moonlight with his View of Odessa by Moonlight in the same year cannot overlook the painterly, thematic, and ideological compatibilities not only of these two imperial ports, but also more broadly of their participation in what Mark Beissinger (“Soviet Empire”) has productively described as an imperial family resemblance.^[14]
Here there is of course enormous variation. Aivazovskii’s work may engage in little more than visual contemplation (as in, for example, his placid Black Sea, 1881), but elsewhere – such as his anguished Ninth Wave (1850) – one might reasonably risk a political extrapolation that connects this canvass as a form of social commentary with earlier, Romantic renditions of imperial calamity, such as Karl Briulov’s Last Day of Pompeii (1830-1833), which collates the myths of Roman imperial catastrophe with the specter of a Russian one. Elsewhere, Aivazovskii’s mountain expanse – as in his 1869 Mountain Village Gunib in Dagestan – is so similar in palette and form to the expanse of sea cliffs in his later 1876 Shipwreck that landscape and seascape seem virtually substitutable for one another, blurring the distinction between land and ocean range.
A related cultural investigation in this regard concerns imperial travel and pilgrimage texts. It requires no detailed argument to suggest that the narratives of overseas and contiguous empires might, in a realistic register, offer distinctly different accounts of travel. Distinct practices of preparation, farewell, departure, return, and celebration may mark off the trope of the overland traveler from the figure crossing the third space of water between home and the empire’s edge. In contrast to the moment of shipboard embarkation, the overland journey may be structured in a realistic register as a kind of endless incrementalism, a protracted, undifferentiated middle space. Moreover, this geographic feature may also – as Dostoevskii, Goncharov, Nekrasov, and others have variously suggested – be extrapolated as a symbolic category, as in the Russian soul, “too broad” for its own good, the supine form as an implicitly geographical oblomovshchina, or the relentless, spiritual pilgrim who walks his feet bloody traversing the overland space.
But none of this is required of the imaginative text, which engages not only in the representation of reality, but forces upon us as well its own hermetic realities of a representational system. Moreover, these protocols of an imaginary realm are by no means limited to the artistic text. When historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii writes of the Russian imperial subject, dreaming of “the level, empty fields, which appear to curve around the horizon like the sea,”^[15] his Russian subject may have different loyalties than his English cousin, but their dreams, both nocturnal and textual, are deeply compatible with each other. This difference and sameness not only cannot be resolved, they must not be resolved if they are effectively to capture the latent sense of symbolic kinship that underlies the surface of the text.
And finally, of course, one must turn to the question of a different kind of polity altogether, when the cultural text engages in the loan fantasies of nationhood. Why should it not? Like any kind of masquerade or textual play, it does not contribute to the realm of proof, but exists in the realm of artistic imagination. In mulling through some of the examples one might cite, I am drawn to the famous lullaby scene towards the end of Grigorii Aleksandrov’s 1936 film Circus. It interests me for the following reason: one could argue (wrongly, in my view) that this scene magnificently figures as “evidence” of Russia’s nationhood, a microcosm of civic life, its citizens passing from hand to hand the mulatto child, bringing into the fold this outcast from rabid capitalism, this victim of foreign racism. We do, after all, have the topos of grand inclusivity, comprising not only Russian and also minority citizens, but also the Jewish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, whom the security police later would murder.
The sequence is familiar to any literate Russian or foreign film scholar: two Slavic women begin the lullaby. They are quickly enjoined by a disembodied, insistent male hand to turn the child over. And from then on the child is passed from hand to hand exclusively by the men, who are oddly empowered to nurturing in the symbolic realm of this sovereign, boundarized space. The camera passes from one man to the next, eventually settling on a Black man, conveniently present to receive little Jimmy and continue the multi-ethnic lullaby. “National identity” in the Soviet state film industry? Hardly. The nice man is there as a state placeholder, Mosfil’m’s improvisation of a place had “always already” been prepared for Jimmy to fall into, official narodnost’ at its most decorous, with all the fine points – nails, hair, and ethnic costumes – attended to. The sequence offers us state symptoms that mimic nationhood, as if taking on the behavior of another mammal for predatory purposes.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the film’s climax leads to the moment when the state industry can sustain the masque no longer. Its heroine, the demonically cheerful actress Liubov’ Orlova, is transformed from Mary (American girl outcast) to monad of state desire. Unable to remain clothed in the civvies of private life, she arrives at the stage when she must expose the substance that has inhabited her. Her eyes take on a bureaucratic glaze; her face acquires the state grimace. Throwing off everyday attire, she is not merely transformed into a woman in white. She is raptured to Red Square, the imperial epicenter of Soviet power, where she joins other monads in the state parade, surrounded by the symbols of its legitimacy and coercion. Words fail; there must be singing. Shoulder to shoulder, they march forward and – as if continuing a previous conversation, but in fact in reference only to the supreme acquisition of state knowledge itself – her friend turns to her with the only question left: “Now do you understand?” [“A teper’ –ponimaesh’?”] her friend asks. “Yes,” replies Mary with the confidence of a life-form indiscernible from imperial knowledge itself, “now I understand.”

IMPERIAL TIME

It may seem an obvious point, but we are accustomed to thinking of the long historical trajectory of imperialism as one of accumulated splendor, overreach, collapse, and postcolonial aftermath. My third and final argument suggests that perhaps a more accurate account of a Russian historical variant, at least as far as its cultural legacy is concerned, would describe a double existence: on the one hand, this ordinary, linear history; on the other hand, an oddly reconstituting circulation of several sets of colonial relationships – new, continued, regenerated in near-simultaneous, contingent presence.
That these regenerated relationships do not exist as a stable or coherent colonial state is not surprising. Russian colonialist patterns have historically been kaleidoscopic and improvisational: unless my social-science colleagues correct me, I would argue that, while the nineteenth-century Ukrainian metropolitan elite, for example, might intermingle with the ethnically Russian imperial elite, the Belarus local elite was more subject to what might be described as a French pattern of suppression in favor of the Russian metropole. If the imperial drive in the Far East was marked by the interests of financial and missionary expansion – resembling a Spanish model – then the imperial pattern in the Baltics, at least prior to the 1917 revolution, was more recognizably British in its appropriation of an already existing German elite. Russian culture today, both postcolonial (with respect to the former Soviet republics) and colonialist (most evidently in the northern Caucasus) counterposes to the Atlantic linear narrative a virtual co-presence of different imperial temporalities, a variant of imperial time with a strongly regenerative and cyclical dimension to its structure for which collapse has served the inadvertent function of producing a modernity with substantially different features than that produced by the nation-state. A regenerative and cyclical model of imperial time – collapse, reconstitution, expansion, then again the early signs of volatility – survives without the modernizing story of nation-state in part because collapse may contain its own modernizing functions that we, in culture at least, are still ill-equipped to describe.
In this respect, theorists of nation-formation offer unintentionally useful lessons. If we have learned nothing else from Gellner, it is this: once one says that the nation is modern, one is constrained to say what kind of modernity it is. This task turns out to be a daunting one if one proceeds from the position, put forth by Hosking, Lieven, and others (and with which I would agree) that Russia has historically resisted nation-formation and that the empire nevertheless managed to modernize itself without this feature that – in Western theorizing – has often placed the nation-state as a key dimension of its identity, no less central, incidentally, than capitalism. No matter how much, therefore, a certain anglophilia may permeate elite Russo-Soviet culture, it is a relationship that is textually reproduced in the absence of the nation-state, a condition that imparts to the task of empire-building by the educated, metropolitan elite a profoundly different valence.
The contribution of the constructivist turn in the early 1980s proved to be a critical point in the theorizing of nation, one that facilitated a sharper distinction between “nation” and narod. Such key texts of 1982-1983 as John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State (1982), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s edited Invention of Tradition (1983) marked a new stage in debates of nationhood. At one level, I acknowledge, these texts were profoundly different from one another, not only in their disciplinary origins (political science, cultural analysis, sociology, cultural history, and so forth), but also in their location of modernity’s site – in Gellner, science and industry;^[16] in Anderson, print capitalism, and so forth.^[17] At another level, however, these diverse texts shared a sharper, more delineated argument about nationhood than their predecessors, in particular than the so-called ethno-symbolists. The anodyne vagueness, for example, of Anthony Smith’s definition of “nation” as “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture, a single economy and common rights and duties for all members”^[18] falls short, first, because of its inclusivity: the definition might functionally serve, for example, as the description of a rural village, a tribe, or indeed our own universities. Beyond this, however, Smith’s definition falls short because of (in a different sense) its exclusivity: it does not adequately account for the circulation of fantasy, imagination, ideological invention that is very much a part of the core institutions of nationhood, gestured at rhetorically in a number of contructivist titles (The Invention of Tradition, Imagined Communities, etc.).
The constructivists have tended to put greater emphasis not only on the invented (Gellner, Hobsbawm) or imagined (Anderson) dimension of nation construction, but also on its distinctly modern aspects; its intrication with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state; and its inclination to primordialize its own existence backwards in unacknowledged ways. In particular, the last of these – the impulse to project the putative nation’s existence retrospectively so as render it eternal, natural, and immune to analysis – permitted constructivist theorists to examine myths of equality, answerability, and autonomous civic association without requiring that the nation’s story about itself be an empirically grounded one.
The inadvertent value of the constructivist contribution – with its greater emphasis on the active autonomy from the state of a collective subjectivity – is its helpfulness in underscoring the non-identity of “nation” and “narod.” If we accept the constructivist notion that “nation” is not just any collective subjectivity (as Smith’s more generous definition would encourage), but one marked by independent, self-affirming and internally conflictual, modern practices distinct from the state, then this would suggest a different cultural disposition than that which is historically ascribed to narod. While the topic is a larger one than can adequately be addressed here, let us briefly assert that a primary myth of the nation concerns its embodiment as a set of common rights, created and re-created through civil practices. The nation’s myths of political autonomy, answerability, equality, participatory democracy exert a modernizing function very different from many of the core myths of narod, textually unconcerned with (if not resistant to) modernization, but also grounded instead in myths of harmony, collectivity, and obedience. The possible differences between “nation” and narod (with its abstract corollary, narodnost’) was agonizingly examined in the aftermath of the Chaadaev affair, as editor Nikolai Nadezhdin commented on European civic practices:

“I spoke of narodnost’, contrasting it to a false Europeanism.… There [in Europe] narodnost’ means some kind of separate autonomy [samobytnost’]… [I]s it not in the name of this [European-style] narodnost’, this senseless pride, this dreaming of some kind of autonomy of the people that the constant upheavals there are committed?”^[19]

The historical tendency toward a muted articulation of nationhood (whether one locates an explanation in geography, ideology, path dependency, or elsewhere) does not therefore imply that nationalism would not emerge as an evident strain in Russia’s political culture. We can see empirically that such a conclusion would make no sense.^[20] In fact, the opposite could more convincingly be argued: that the urgings of contemporary Russian nationalism are symptomatic precisely of the frustrations and overwhelming challenges of nation formation. As Gellner has suggested in another context, “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.”^[21] On this apparent paradox of nationalism – that it may be read as a symptom of absence of nationhood – one finds surprising consensus among disparate theorists.^[22] It is an argument that would suggest that the intensity and commitment of Russia’s disparate nationalist movements may be measured by the degree of their disempowerment (as autonomous movements) and the impossibility of their goals.
But there is another interpretation as well, one grounded in what Seton-Watson has – with some terminological inaccuracy – called official nationalism.^[23] One would note that Sergei Uvarov’s original term, from which Seton-Watson’s analysis is derived, had been narodnost’ (not natsional’nost’), a difference that now takes on greater significance in the context of an argument about the political expectations of “nation” and narod. One might reasonably argue, it seems to me, that official “nationalism” (in fact, official narodnost’) bears little relationship to nationalism, and is indeed its opposite, despite the convenient nomenclatural similarity. The primary function of official “nationalism” has historically been the retardation and control of those nationalisms that, occupying that space where civic or ethnic autonomy might seek linkages, would otherwise speak publicly back to the state unless sufficiently restricted. Official narodnost’ provides the most historically familiar instrument to ensure that the volatile and unmanageable business of nation-formation is frustrated, but more importantly that its frustration is naturalized as the workings of Fate, Essence, Geography, and Mission.
Is it, therefore, exactly “nationalism” that we see in the recent cinema of Nikita Mikhalkov, often characterized as the “nationalist” director of such films as Barber of Siberia or 12? Bracketing the question of the artistic value of the texts, I would argue that it is not nationalism (in the sense of an advocacy of civic society independent of statehood), but nationalism’s opposite, the now routinized production of official narodnost’. To identify Mikhalkov’s work as “nation-alist,” we would require a model of nationhood stripped of autonomy, independently constituted conflict practices, and the institutionalized expectation of rights – that is to say, stripped of itself.
It can only be anticipated that Russian culture will not soon leave behind its imperial legacy in all its magnificent, uneven richness, but will retain patterns that reveal in and through its artistic texts diverse habits of this articulation. Our analysis of these habits would be sorely impoverished if we restricted our interest to the topical, the costume drama. To venture beyond this realm is to risk interpretive error or worse, speculative conjecture. Perhaps, however, it is by means of speculative conjecture that we get glimpses of a different kind of knowledge that deepens our understanding of the complex cultural practices of Russia’s imaginative life.