In the 1968 “Postscript” to the English translation of his seminal study The Civilizing Process that had been virtually ignored for decades after its original publication in 1939 in German, Norbert Elias wrote:

“…the nation, organized as a state as it now is, appears emotionally and ideologically as… eternal, immutable in its essential features. …The “national ideal” draws attention away from what changes to the enduring and the immutable. …many twentieth-century sociologists, when speaking of “society,” no longer have in mind… a “bourgeois society” or a “human society” beyond the state, but increasingly the somewhat diluted ideal image of a nation-state. …all these factors contribute to the growth of nation-centered patterns of thought. …This is… the overall structural development which is reflected in the development of theories of society. …A mixture of “is” and “ought”, of factual analyses and normative postulates, relating primarily to a society of a very definite type, a nation-state conceived in broadly egalitarian fashion, thus presents itself as the centerpiece of a theory which claims to be capable of serving as a model for the scientific investigation of societies in all times and places. One need only to raise the question of whether and how far such sociological theories… are applicable to societies at different stages of development, and which are less centralized and democratized… with a high percentage of slaves or unfree subjects, or of feudal or hierarchical states – that is, societies in which not even the same laws, let alone the same norms and values, apply to all people – it is quickly seen how present-centered these sociological models of systems conceived as states actually are.”^[1]

To a significant degree, this criticism of the nation-centered approach of the post–World War II social sciences by Elias looks like an attempt to explain the decades of undeserved marginalization of his theory. Not least because of his approach to the premodern society as a phenomenon sui generis, his analytical language was alienated by the mainstream methodology of the field. Elias offered a dynamic model of the development of the modern society as a process of societal self-organization, along the lines of gradual monopolization and regularization of violence by the state, and the substitution of open confrontation of the “many against many” by the culture of personal self-constraint by the individuals:

“Through the interdependence of larger groups of people and the exclusion of physical violence from them, a social apparatus is established in which the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints.”^[2]

The routes of this model are easily traced back to the sociology of the turn of the twentieth century (including the theories of legitimate violence by Max Weber and Émile Durkheim), while the idea of personal self-constraint as the foundation of culture seems to be in the air of pre–World War II Europe.^[3] What was truly unusual in Elias’s theory was his focus on the aristocracy of feudal Europe as the key actor in the “civilizing process” (i.e., the emergence of the modern practices of social interaction), rather than on the “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” or “intellectuals” of modernity.
Interestingly, when Elias finally became famous, his views began to influence leading historians and sociologists, who critically developed many aspects of his theory. For instance, Michel Foucault deconstructed the very mechanisms of self-constraint of the “civilized” subject, not sustained directly and explicitly by the state apparatus of coercion; and Zygmunt Bauman analyzed the logic of the state that monopolized legitimate violence and the right to determine the limits of “civilization.” Yet both Foucault and Bauman, as well as modern theories of “habitus,” histories of “everyday life,” and other research paradigms that have been influenced by the ideas of Norbert Elias, have taken over just one aspect of his criticism of a nation-centered logic of social sciences: it is erroneous to mechanically apply to pre-modern epochs theories that were devised to explain contemporary society. By sharply segregating modernity from earlier periods, this approach ignores another key thesis of Elias: the foundation of contemporary society is formed by and within the elite culture of the pre-modern epoch. This means that social scientists still have difficulty in seeing exactly how the practices of modern personal self-constraint and indirect violence can emerge within a pre-modern or non-national society.
The annual theme “Gardening Empire” was proposed by Ab Imperio, in part, precisely as an attempt to overcome not just the nation-centered but also the “modernity-centered” logic of contemporary theoretical models (including that of Zygmunt Bauman’s “gardening state”) and to discuss their applicability to a very different type of heterogeneous and “sedimentary” imperial society. The special urgency of this task was established in the thematic issue dedicated to the multiple forms of violence in the imperial space. Regardless of the ideological biases of individual theories, the social science of the second half of the twentieth century has conceptualized violence and methods of its application as a key marker of modernity. In a nutshell, medieval violence (or violence in societies without a common cultural sphere) was seen as direct, discriminating, and symbolically overburdened, while the modern type of legitimate violence is expected to be concealed by the routine operation of the state apparatus, it is almost automatically regulated by laws and instructions and acts rather as a potential threat, through self-constraint of individuals. In the present issue of Ab Imperio this dual scheme is replaced by the initial model of Norbert Elias: the authors of AI focus on the longue durée process of the gradual transformation of open violence into practices of individuals’ self-regulation (and, in some periods of history, in the opposite direction). Reconstructing this process in the context of Russian history, we discover that it does not exactly correlate with the conventional periodization of the Russian Empire’s “modernization.”
Opening the “Methodology” section, the article by Daniel Chirot revisits the debate between “constructivists” and “essentialists” in nationalities studies by conceptualizing the epoch of composite empires as a rupture in the historical trend of forming closed political communities on the basis of common language, culture, and confession. In a sense, this “natural” trend of the persistence of nations was suppressed and reshaped by the “gardening empire,” which aspired to cultivate complex and heterogeneous sociopolitical “landscapes.” Simon Werrett tells the history of the Russian (to be precise, Byelorussian) origins of the Panopticon as a technology of control over and discipline of the population. This famous concept of Jeremy (in fact, of his brother Samuel) Bentham has become a symbol of the modern practices of indirect violence and discipline, thanks to the influential writings of Michel Foucault. The fact that this idea was born out of the concrete needs of the gentry economy on the outskirts of the absolutist Catherinian empire only confirms the fruitfulness of Elias’s hypothesis: the basics of the modern “civilization” were not formed in opposition to the social order of the ancien régime, but quite organically developed within the context of rationalizing the practices of imperial “gardening.”
On the other hand, as Jörg Baberowski shows in his article on the practices of authority in late imperial Russia, the inertia of the pre-modern culture of perception and the exercise of authority persisted in Russia until the early twentieth century. The utter personalization of domination/subordination relationships, the opposition to bureaucratic culture and to the bureaucracy itself in Russian society, all testify to the absence of a clear boundary between “modernity” and “pre-modernity.” By the same token, the findings of Baberowski invite a new take on the old scheme of “civilizing as the internalization of violence” by Elias, which consequently allows for a reinterpretation of the Russian case. It appears that the absolutist “gardening empire” was so successful in the monopolization and regulation of legitimate violence and in the creation of a new culture of “civilized” self-constraint that it neglected the development of practices of efficient direct coercion and control. If so, this suggests that in his model Elias underappreciated the role of institutionalized coercion in “civilized” society (the topic later developed by Foucault, among others), and also that the very criteria of “modernity” in Baberowski’s scheme are quite ambiguous.
As contributions to the “History” section attest, institutionally, the Russian Empire had mastered both archaic the most advanced disciplinary practices. Moreover, even in the medieval past of that empire, some scholars discover the roots of modern practices (see Galina Zelenina on the sect of “Judaizers”), or reevaluate the degree of traditionalism in the seemingly archaic forms of Jewish political representation in the early nineteenth century (Ol’ga Minkina). As Christoph Gumb has convincingly demonstrated in his study of Warsaw as a locus of administration through coercion, in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 the Russian empire eventually had to retreat from rule by symbolic violence and policy of threats to direct violence. The alternative was presented by a different “culture of modernization” that prioritized the cultivation of a new conscious subject over the mechanical suppression of the backward population.
Felix Schnell discusses the role of direct violence as a universal practice of sociopolitical self-organization during the Russian civil war, thus demonstrating that the “civilizing” process as described by Elias is by no means a one-way vector. The phenomenon of local warlords (atamanshchina) vividly illustrates how quickly this process can be turned in the opposite direction, destroying the culture of self-constraint in individuals and restoring the Hobbesian state of the war of all against all.
On the other hand, the study of gender roles in Soviet Armenia and Tajikistan by Anna Temkina demonstrates that direct and indirect institutional coercion and the self-constraint of social actors can be elements of both revolutionary constructivist and conservative traditionalist scenarios. The author replaces a teleological perspective “from tradition to modernity” (i.e., from direct violence and patriarchal pressure to indirect coercion and acknowledgment of women’s subjectivity) with a complex, multivector process, where violence does not mark a particular type of sexual and social order.
The “ABC” section features the discussion of an article by Ben Eklof that raises the question of hegemony and the relations of power and knowledge in contemporary Russian studies. Contributors to the forum from the United States, Western Europe, and Russia debate the distribution of symbolic power within the field precisely in these categories of postcolonial studies, and they describe an unusual historiographic situation. Historical area studies are usually dominated by local national historiographies: French historians play the leading role among the historians of France, the most prominent specialists in American history reside in the United States, and so on. The organization of historical studies of Russia differ from other studies because post-Soviet/Russian scholarship not only found itself in the situation of catch-up development but also faced the challenge of integration into a foreign academic canon. Contributors to the forum discuss this canon and the possible strategies of integration, as well as the contemporary state of social sciences and humanities in Russia and the attitude of Western colleagues toward the Russian academic community.
In the “Newest Mythologies,” Ilya Gerasimov analyzes the novel by Vladimir Sorokin Den’oprichnika as a successful attempt to model the political situation of the accomplished “Russian national body.” In terms of Elias, the society described by Sorokin may be characterized as a totalitarian unity of practices of personal self-constraint and self-censorship with direct state terror. Such a utopian project, a product of the triumphant nation-centered imagination, is doomed for reasons both external and internal.
The “Historiography” section returns us to the problem of localizing the mainstream historiography that was raised in “ABC.” This section features three review essays discussing a recent book by Darius Staliūnas on the history of the politics of Russification in the “Western region” of the Russian empire after 1863. Besides the importance of the book’s topic, the discussion is also indicative of the modern historiographic situation: a book by a Lithuanian historian on Russian empire, written in English and published by a Dutch press, attracts the attention of specialists in the history of the Habsburg Empire and of historians of Russia from the United States and France alike. The review essays and the author’s response to the reviewers show that the success of the book should not be attributed to its unique “local knowledge” and origin, but to its real dialogue with international scholarship. As the reviewers have noted, Staliūnas has succeeded in incorporating the still largely marginalized community of Lithuanian historians into this global historiographic context.
The editors of Ab Imperio hope that the latest issue of the journal portrays exactly this scenario of global historiographic cooperation and integration. By exposing the ambivalent relationship between the “gardening empire” and modernity, the reversibility of the “civilizing process” as a transformation of direct coercion into self-constraint, the contributors to this issue reveal new knowledge and a new understanding of the process of professional dialogue.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

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