The present issue of Ab Imperio is focused on practices and discourses of “nurturing” the political, cultural, and social subject of the empire. It has proven to be one of the most difficult for the editors in all the years of AI’s existence. We invited scholars who work on de- or reconstruction of individual and collective codes of subjectivation as well as those who study practices of production and description of the modern subject in heterogeneous imperial space to participate in this discussion. One of our tasks was not just to consider Russian imperial history in light of the main tenets of postcolonial theory, but also to conduct a critical analysis of postcolonial approaches in the context of Russian history. Here one recognizes the need to overcome binary oppositions like “colonizer vs. colonized,” “metropole vs. colony,” “Orientalism vs. Euro-centrism,” and “Self vs. the Other” in which the latter part of each opposition was proclaimed by postcolonial theorists to be an outcome of false representation by the hegemonic discourse of the former. The editors are grateful to all the authors of the present issue – both to those who submitted their materials independently and to those invited by the editors – for their willingness to take part in this collective experiment. We hope the results will contribute to a fruitful discussion on the prospects for a postcolonial reading of Russian and Soviet history at the present historiographic stage.
As the authors of the articles in this issue and, above all, the participants in the round table on the applicability of postcolonial approaches to the legacy of the Russian Empire demonstrate, Russian history “naturally” resists the Manichean interpretations of early postcolonial theory. Russia and the USSR were contiguous states and the boundaries between the metropole and the colony were flexible, dynamic, and porous. At different times in their histories, these states described themselves both in imperial and in national terms; they practiced segregation and cultivated major and minor differences and various sorts of “fusions,” “approximations,” etc. This is why we believe that the present stage of postcolonial discourse, which is increasingly blurring the boundaries between the metropole and the colony and focusing more and more on the practices of domination in pan-imperial contexts, is capable of inspiring scholars of the Russian empire and the USSR. Unlike representatives of “subaltern” historiography, for whom the postcolonial turn was inseparable from intellectual and political emancipation, scholars of Russia and the USSR do not need to leave behind the achievements of politics of identity when reconsidering old methodological approaches. Rather, in the conditions of post-Soviet historiography, one can speak of the need to overcome nation- and ethno-centric approaches, both those of the dominant and the dominated. Our discipline also does not face the problems encountered by historians of the British Empire, who had traditionally viewed British colonies as a sphere of the colonial “Other” with no access, either historically or in academic discourse, to the interior of British society so as to have any possibility of influencing or ordering the life and political structure of the metropole. This view has recently been revised within the framework of a new imperial history of Great Britain. Its adherents are interested in how the bourgeois culture of the metropole attempted to structure social relations in the colony and inside the metropole itself by means of intervention into the intimate sphere of human life including regulation of the family, child-rearing practices, education, politics of the body, and medical and hygienic knowledge. In this sense, it is in some ways advantageous that Russian and post-Soviet historiography needs to “catch up” with British imperial historiography.
It is very important that rejection of binary models by postcolonial theory occurs simultaneously with increased attention to the problems of cultural contacts, heterogeneity, contextuality of historical experience and narratives produced by it, liminal situations and identities, and multi-vectored interactions between the “colonizers” and the “colonized.” These very categories lose their earlier monolithic nature and break down along social, economic, gender, cultural and regional criteria. Such a revision cannot but attract specialists in the history of continental empires and polyethnic states as they search for models of “new imperial history,” which would take into account plurality of local experiences of the past and flexibility and heterogeneity of political, social and cultural boundaries in the regions, societies and state formations that they study. The heterogeneity of continental empires presupposes the possibility and necessity of selectively addressing some innovative approaches of postcolonial studies without leaving behind other promising models developed in the historiographies of continental empires (for instance, histories of governance and administration, national movements or political groups).
It seems one can speak of two sources of methodological revitalization of postcolonial studies, to which scholars of Russia/USSR demonstrate different degrees of sensitivity and receptiveness. The first source is social linguistics, the study of language in its social realm, which was the inspiration behind the version of “new imperial history” developed by Ab Imperio (namely, the history of “languages of self-description of empire and nation”). On the one hand, this method allows us to overcome limitations of the research language and views shaped by the normative vision of the nation and switch our attention to the genealogy of categories and practices that shaped perceptions and attached meaning to personal actions in a synchronic perspective. On the other hand, “languages of self-description” require the researcher to interpret instances of dialog, translation, hybridization, shifting of meaning, or inability to secure communication. In that light the most productive paradigms are the “creolized” languages of postcolonial studies, pigeon, or, closer to home, “surzhik.” To cite Robert Young,

“Pidgin and creolized languages constitute powerful models because they preserve the real historical forms of cultural contact. The structure of pidgin – crudely, the vocabulary of one language superimposed on the grammar of another – suggests a different model from that of a straightforward power relation of dominance of colonizer over colonized.”^[1]

Transposing the linguistic paradigm understood in this way onto the matter of imperial reality has not appeared to generate resistance from specialists in Russian imperial history. Many articles published in Ab Imperio (particularly in the issues under the annual themes of “languages of self-description of empire and multinational state” and “anthropology of languages of self-description of empire and nation” in 2005 and 2006) could prove to be valuable contributions to postcolonial discussions of specialists in European imperialism, North American colonialism, etc. Another important source for revitalizing postcolonial studies is gender theory, the sphere of intimate experiences, sexual contacts, and bodily knowledge. For a number of reasons (which can be treated only superficially in an editorial note but which certainly deserve a discussion of their own) these problems, which at some point enriched discussions of Russian modernization, bourgeois culture, and professionalization, remain marginalized in the historiography of the Russian Empire. Here, however, one can see a direct analogy with the linguistic paradigm, since intimate contacts, like languages in the broadest sense of the term, gave birth to hybrid and transitional social forms such as mixed races and ethnicities, socially and politically illegitimate relations and children, or, on the contrary, more desirable offspring from biological or political points of view. In other words, self-organization on the intimate level, like the open politicization and state control of the intimate sphere, shaped subjectivity in empire.
Two articles published in the methodological section of this issue demonstrate how nuanced and contextualized research into the intimate sphere of imperial experience allows for reconstruction of different “imperial situations” in the framework of postcolonial studies. The article by Elizabeth Buettner on “imperial families” in British India of the Raj period and the article by Adrienne Edgar on the interpretations and real politics of interethnic marriages in Soviet Central Asia, apart from reconstructing interesting histories of “people in time,” depict empires in their supra-individual dimension: in these empires, in their policies and self-perceptions, in their routine functioning and even survival, marking or deleting certain gender or social boundaries was profoundly important. The very category of “empire,” as well as the opposition between the colonizer and the colonized, do not appear as self-evident in either of the two texts; rather, these categories are dynamic and mutually defining. The tension that emerges between these two articles, which can be viewed as an experiment in applying the most recent postcolonial approaches of Western imperial history to Russian and Soviet material, is problematized in the round table, whose participants all have firsthand experience with such experiments. The article by Edward Grey brings an interesting perspective on the Russian Empire as a model to be both rejected and surpassed by the builders of the early American Empire. Here, by analyzing the writings of the American traveler John Ledyard in Siberia, Grey underscores both commonalities of the Russian and American empire-building and the profound differences in perceiving governance. The making of the “republican subject” in the mirror of the Russian empire casts light on the very core of the “intimate” domain as it highlights ambivalent and multiple connections between visions of human diversity and projects for political organization.
It seems to the editors that the articles of the following sections (touching on problems from “mechanics of modern power” at the regional level in the Ottoman Empire (Saracoglu), the agent of Russian colonization in the Russian Empire (Remnev and Suvorova), education as a practice of “nurturing” the imperial subject (Kusber), Soviet foreign policy “colonialism” through the subjectivating eye of the experience of the “colonized” (Vu), post-Soviet “cultural racism” (Shnirel’man), and translation of Edward Said’s work into Russian by post-Soviet intellectuals (Bobrovnikov)) can be read in the context of problems posited in the methodological section. This includes, first and foremost, the relationship between intimate experience and imperial and national ideologies in light of interaction of multiple languages in the imperial state and those political relations that they encode.
The present issue of Ab Imperio does not aspire to “close” discussion on the issue but, rather, it attempts to identify the most important questions related to the application of postcolonial theory by scholars of Russia and the USSR. Materials assembled in this issue sometimes acquire new meanings not necessarily intended by the authors. Such is the synergy of the intertextual space of the journal. We hope that problems raised in this issue will inspire further research and discussion.

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