Twenty years ago Lawrence Stone described the most promising developments in world historiography:

“One of the most striking recent changes in the content of history has been a quite sudden growth of interest in feelings, emotions, behaviour patterns, values, and states of mind. ...The first cause of the revival of narrative among some of the “new historians” has therefore been the replacement of sociology and economics by anthropology as the most influential of the social sciences. Although psychohistory is so far largely disaster area – a desert strewn with the wreckage of elaborate, chromium-plated vehicles which broke down soon after departure – psychology itself has also had its effect on a generation now turning its attention to sexual desire, family relations and emotional bonding as they affect the individual, and to ideas, beliefs and customs as they affect the group.”^[1]

With a usual lag of 15 – 20 years these new tendencies came to play a role in Russia, or, to be more precise, in the historiography of Russia. Significant in this respect is a thematic forum “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture,” which takes up most of the summer 2009 issue of the leading professional periodical, Slavic Review. No less notable is the focus of the upcoming convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies: “Reading and Writing Lives.” In St. Petersburg, a conference on biographic research in memory of V. V. Ioffe is held regularly and positioned as “the only interdisciplinary seminar in Russia dedicated to biographic studies of the twentieth century.”^[2] It seems that we find ourselves in the situation described above by Stone: there is a growing interest in the inner world of people of the past that is paralleled by common mistrust of both traditional psychohistory and structuralist approaches. As Ronald Suny perceptively notes in the “Theory and Methodology” section of this issue (which carries his review of research literature on Stalin), regardless of our attitude to psychohistory, historians critique it as often as they use its methods. Indeed, the most worn-out clichés of historians (who write that their subjects “thought about” something, “decided not to allow” something to happen…, “felt” something) presuppose a reconstruction of the inner world and motivations of the protagonist, and these speculations are of a psychohistorical nature. Therefore historians would be in a much better position to recognize this fact than to use these tropes thoughtlessly and therefore unprofessionally. In this respect, the figure of Stalin, under discussion by Suny, is an archetypical example.
Nonetheless, it seems to us that the Russian and Eurasian case is not just about a belated reaction to the anthropological and biographical turns in world historiography. New imperial history, developing within the field of reframed Russian and Eurasian studies, takes empire as a “context-setting category”^[3] and creates a special space for biographical and psychological reconstructions. This new research perspective suggests replacing the question “what is empire?” with the question of how the imperial space is populated, lived, experienced, and conceived of. The frame of empire’s “languages of self-description” necessarily presupposes the reconstruction of both collective and individual experience and perception and raises the question of how for a specific individual or a group life in an empire is different from life in nonimperial societies.
Since imperial history describes a diverse geographic, social, cultural, and political space that cannot be reduced to taxonomy and a hierarchy of noncontradictory categories, each taxonomic category in empire becomes a context. Therefore, it is natural for historians to try to find an agent that allows them to bring together the rapidly disintegrating fabrics of imperial society. Biography becomes a convenient framework for the mutual overlap of different contexts because a given individual brings in previous experiences to new imperial loci. On the other hand, national, social, confessional, and professional identities, which seemed so clearly defined just a little while ago, acquire many dimensions and an inner dynamism when treated from the point of view of “imperial biographies:” to use Boris Eikhenbaum’s expression, each of these identities becomes a mirror of another.
Biographies written in this framework become simultaneously biographies of a person and of the empire in which s/he lived. As Yaroslav Hrytsak demonstrates in his work on Ivan Franko in the “Theory and Methodology” section, the irreducible diversity of the imperial space does not allow for an adequate description of a person’s life within the limits of one monological metanarrative. By overcoming the canonical depiction of Franko as a leader of the Ukrainian national movement, Hrytsak reconstructs multiple social and cultural contexts important for Franko, which in turn leads to a more complex interpretation of his behavior. For Franko himself, the “imperial situation” created possibilities of choice of political, cultural, and national alliances, which, at the end of the day, shaped his self-identification. This model of a subject (whose freedom of choice in imperial contexts might be limited but in other contexts is absent) is studied by the authors presented in the historical section of the journal. Pavel Tereshkovich addresses biographies of people of the Belarusian borderlands, who in structurally similar circumstances made choices in favor of Belarusian, Polish, or Lithuanian identities. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern tells the story of the shtetl Jew Moshko Blank (great-grandfather of Vladimir Lenin), who hated everything Jewish and loved everything Russian and imperial. This image of the “imperial Moshko” is created from the combination of his phobias and specific ideas about what imperial authority is and what kinds of subjects it rewards. The subject of Boris Kornienko’s article, the Lutheran Fyodor Taube, a loyal campaigner of the Russian empire, followed a career fairly common for people of his background until he was appointed a Don Cossack ataman. The logic of circumstances turned this least likely candidate for a Cossack leader into an “icon of Cossack nationalism.” This transformation of Taube requires a review of our notions of how the system of administration of the Russian empire functioned and how the hierarchy of individual and group loyalties was constructed. In the article about Jewish deputies in the Russian empire of the late eighteenth – early nineteenth centuries Olga Minkina describes situation of the total absence of ready tropes of perception of these figures marking transition from the shtadlans to estate representatives. Imperial authorities strove to see in them representatives of all Jews, ascribing to their Jewish subjects collectivity and homogeneity that the latter simply did not have. In Jewish society the status of the deputy was not fixed either. This made it difficult to write their biographies (similar to the difficulty experienced by their contemporaries) as they could simultaneously be criminals and respectable citizens, impostors and representatives of their local communities or of all Russian Jews, or of just one confessional group. Michael Khodarkovsky and Scott Bailey tell the stories of specific people of the “frontier.” These people could be classified as “colonizers” (in the case of Khodarkovsky’s subject) and “colonized and integrated into the colonial elite subalterns” (as in the case of Scott Bailey’s subject). However, both biographies are about how imperial heterogeneity and the multifaceted nature of individual experience in empire created conditions for a conscious construction of one’s identity. In this sense, empire becomes a milieu that stimulates the formation of a modern subjectivity characterized by self-reflection and social constructivism. No doubt, empire equally limits this constructivism. If within a single personality, social, religious, cultural, or ethnic otherness can coexist with elite education and socialization beyond one’s own group, overcoming multiple boundaries on the level of collective experience and identity is extremely difficult. This contradiction between individual mobility and group closure, as many materials in this issue demonstrate, often constitutes the main collision of “imperial biography.”
This collision is also visible in the Archival section, which carries a previously unpublished manuscript by Lev Shternberg. In the manuscript, this well-known anthropologist describes the condition of material culture in Russia of the Civil War era, and demonstrates the ability of “non-historical” peoples of the former empire to take part in civil and political life. In his introduction to Shternberg’s text (which may well be the first attempt by a European anthropologist to explore contemporary European culture), Sergei Kan describes the different contexts of Shternberg’s biography: he was a revolutionary Populist, an activist of the Jewish cultural and national movement, a political exile, an organizer of museum scholarship in Russia, and an evolutionist ethnographer. Being a Jew, he integrated into the imperial scholarly milieu and shaped the ideology of one of the leading museums of empire focused on the studies of different peoples. In his personal, scholarly, and political socialization, Shternberg crossed boundaries of such seemingly stable collective identities as “Jews,” “Populists,” “Russian imperial scholars.” Here again we encounter a situation when the framework of imperial biography allows us to connect different imperial contexts and to see the dynamics of identities invisible on the level of collectivities. In order to understand Shternberg’s scholarly legacy, one has to take into account his complex “imperial biography,” his pathway to modern culture, his view of the objects of anthropological study as evolutionary units of some greater universal structural processes, his specifically Jewish marginality in imperial Russia and the circumstances of his scholarly life after the revolution.

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We also publish a selection of materials dedicated to the memory of Marc Raeff in this issue. He was the author of one of the best known biographies in Russian studies (of Mikhail Speransky), and a whole range of influential studies of the imperial Russian state and of the Russian intelligentsia as a sociocultural phenomenon. Marc Raeff often spoke of the importance of biographic studies in the history of the Russian empire, and noted the paradoxical lack of such studies. We think Marc Raeff would have been interested in our attempt to attract attention to biographic studies of Homo Imperii.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

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