Scholars of nationalism have long concluded that nation is an imagined community and a cognitive frame. Since empire, like nation, is also a form of political organization, can one speak of empire as an imagined community? If imperial societies are stable (and some of them had existed for historically long periods), then is their stability solely an outcome of power realized through political institutions and legalized violence? Does the empire’s longevity allow us to speak about support, neutrality, or loyalty on behalf of empire’s many subject groups? And if so, is this loyalty and support directed at pan-imperial institutions, such as the monarchy, or is it owed exclusively to local regimes and institutions included in the empire or created as a result of the imperial politics of producing difference? In what sense can we say that an imperial society, civitas imperii, did exist, and that it spread beyond local traditions, estates, ethnic, national, and confessional groups?
This problem leads us to the next questions. How was a constructive image of an “imagined empire” created, how was it shared up to a certain time, and how did it prevent society from disintegration? As Richard Pipes has formulated the problem in his own time, “historians may argue over why the Soviet Union collapsed so quickly, but the real question is how it survived so long.” In this case, we can replace “Soviet Union” with the “Russian Empire,” or, in fact, with any other empire.
Pipes’s question also raises the problem of the analytical description of empire as a whole, which consists of many elements, each of a different order. Indeed, from a researcher’s point of view, imperial society disintegrates into an almost infinite number of blocs. These blocs are national, ethnic, confessional, regional, linguistic, estate, and other kinds of communities, and each bloc acquires its own distinct historiography—although Ernest Gellner used to compare the nationalists’ perception of the world with Modigliani paintings. This metaphor is even more applicable to descriptions of the inner space of imperial society in today’s scholarship. Maybe, one can better illustrate the “specificity” of Russian imperial society through Gogol’s image of the ideal whole: “If I could only put Nikanor Ivanovich’s lips with Ivan Kuzmich’s nose, and mix in a bit of Baltazar Baltazarovich’s free-and-easyness, and then add to this Ivan Pavlovich’s fine figure…”^[1] Thus, the individual becomes “the point of assembly” for imperial space and the only medium through which we can understand today how some semantic unity of that space could be preserved in different contexts of the complex and disjointed social world of empire. Individual life experience thus emerges not just as a private biography but as a key to understanding social groups and loyalties.
This is why we conclude our series of issues dedicated to individual aspects of perceiving and living through the complex imperial situation with an issue of the journal that focuses on the experience of real and imagined imperial societies and on the problem of their historical exploration. How did people who demonstrated their loyalty to the empire in different ways imagine the imperial space beyond solidarity within their own estate, profession, or national group? Can we think of imperial space outside of the unifying framework of state and dynasty? In today’s historiography, which is still dominated by perceptions of empire as a political mechanism, these problems remain underreflected. While studying sociocultural and ethnic diversity, historians look at these problems through the prism of relations of domination and subjugation, which, as a rule, returns the state to the center of attention as an institution that establishes and regulates power regimes. Postcolonial interpretations of the political nature of power and of relations of inequality as dissolved in social interactions and cultural codes (in the spirit of Michel Foucault and Edward Said) have not yet led to revised approaches to the study of “imperial society” in Russian history. As the materials in this issue demonstrate, such a revision would allow us to reveal how “central administration,” “society in the metropole,” “titular nation,” and “imperial society as a whole” did not overlap, and to reveal tense relations of conflict and the mutual influence between them. In so doing, one would see how the two-dimensional vision of imperial society in the spirit of Modigliani acquired volume, how clear boundaries between constitutive blocs (nations, regions, confessions, etc.) disappeared, and how the very fundamental opposition between “empire” and “nation” lost its certainty. What is perceived in one imperial context as a culturally homogeneous national society appears in another one as a fragmented space of religious and class conflict. In this issue, the authors offer complex and dynamic social models to account for the tension between the idea and the experience of living in an imperial society, and to take into consideration the conflict between the “colonial” and “nationalizing” paradigms in today’s social sciences.
In this sense, George Steinmetz’s article in the methodological section is particularly important. His comparative study of the roots of modern sociology reminds us about the forgotten yet essential context of the emergence of this scholarly discipline in the context of empire and colonialism. Steinmetz’s work challenges our notion that the analytical language of new social sciences was originally designed to describe the emerging national states and closed, nation-like structures. While reconstructing the imperial roots of sociology in the United States, France, Great Britain, and Germany, Steinmetz addresses not only isolated ideas and methods but also the biographies of their authors and the contexts of their production. His work may be best described as a historical prosopography of sociological schools. In this way, Steinmetz transforms a narrow self-reflection of sociology as a discipline into an interdisciplinary conversation. This conversation will be especially appealing to historians of empire who study the past of imperial societies, and to sociologists who analyze open social systems and epistemologies of description of societies in globalizing modernity.
The article by David Sneath, an anthropologist, generates a lively discussion on the pages of this issue of AI. Sneath also raises the problem of analytical categories employed to describe societies that exist outside of the normative and Eurocentric understanding of state. Sneath’s focus is a critique of the categories “clan” and “tribe” used in studies of nomadic societies of the past in Eurasia. Sneath’s thesis is provocative: imprisoned by normative visions of state, nomadologists and ethnologists see state relations in the historical experience of nomadic societies. Scholars see among the nomads only pre-state tribal and clan unions who led more primitive political lives than did state peoples and societies. The contemporary language of anthropological analysis, according to Sneath, is permeated by orientalist and romanticizing connotations, while the use of categories such as “tribe” and “clan” inevitably triggers evolutionist visions in which these societies are located on a lower plane of development. Trying to break down this colonial logic of anthropological knowledge, Sneath refutes the normative Weberian model of state and offers an interpretation of the historical experience of the Chinggisid empire in terms of aristocratic nomadic statehood. Sneath’s revision of the language of contemporary scholarship of nomadic societies (which could be exported to all disciplines describing the premodern phenomena of social and political life) triggers various reactions from participants in the AI forum. Sneath’s article is discussed by nomadologists, specialists in Mongol studies, anthropologists, and historians of non-European societies, ancient Russia, and classic antiquity. While refuting some elements of Sneath’s conception and accepting others, almost all of the participants agree that the normative category of the state is in need of revision, including with respect to cases when this category is used as a framework for societal relations. This discussion also returns us to the problem of the lack of an adequate analytical language for studies of political societies beyond the normative model of the sovereign and national state. The article by Marina Vituhnovskaja in the history section develops this discussion on the basis of different historical materials. Vituhnovskaja reconstructs the biographies of representatives of the Finnish (Swedish by descent) Enckell family. If the older generation of Enckells integrated into the Russian Empire following the classic scenario of incorporating non-Russian elites through state service, in this case military service, the next generation was no longer satisfied with the combination of national and dynastic loyalty and imperial patriotism. The Enckells’ complex, multilayered identity and loyalty were realized in a milieu one could call a contemporary “imperial society.” The norm in that social milieu was to combine several cultural codes of personal and collective identification. While the article demonstrates the need to study the social and political dimensions of empire in close connection, it also shows the need to analyze those mechanisms by which social relations were translated into structures of political loyalty and vice versa. Vituhnovskaja illustrates how social interests (the desire to retain privileged status and to block the advance of new nonaristocratic elites) led a part of the elite of the Grand Duchy of Finland to identify with the dynastic regime of the Russian Empire. At the same time, incorporating this part of the Duchy’s elite into the political structure of the Empire created a new social group with a special multilayered self-identification, which combined cultural particularism with a sense of belonging to a larger political society and great power. A biographical approach allows one to see how the community of service elite of Finland entered into interaction with other open social structures of the changing society of imperial Russia.
Noam Pianko draws a no less complex picture in his article about Alfred Zimmern. By reconstructing Zimmern’s attitude toward cultural Zionism, Pianko discovers the second semantic layer behind his subject’s seemingly certain critique of nationalism and celebration of the British Empire. What appeared as an attempt to ideologically defend the British Empire in the face of the challenge of nationalism was motivated by a sense of social incompleteness outside of the complex imperial society, by a need to find ways to normalize the situation of European Jewry as Diaspora. Pianko demonstrates how the growing identification of state with the closed national community in the early 20th century forced people to seek other modes of imagining and describing forms of political solidarity and social interaction. These attempts did not offer a convincing alternative to the discourse of the national state and society in the 20th century. Yet, they left interesting semantic traces in the form of concepts such as “imitation” and “commonwealth,” which were utilized to imagine imperial societies.
The archive section offers yet another version of “imperial society,” in Andreas Frings’s article on the protocol of the meeting of the Communist Party fraction at the Turkological Congress in Baku in 1926. This was a communication society and an institutionally organized group of people who were unlikely to engage in the active production of political discourse and linguistic discussions if not for the context of the Revolution and Soviet socialization. It is possible that they would have utilized their societal energies by joining local or pan-imperial political movements and organizations but it was the early Soviet imperial situation that created the institutional framework for their supranational communication and possibility of understanding each other (in part, due to the unifying medium of Russian). This society spoke the language of revolutionary modernity and progressive universalism, which resolved divisive ethnoconfessional contradictions and differences in evaluations of reality.
Finally, this issue features an article that attempts to clarify the concept of “state” (which is often used as a self-evident category) or, at the very least, to delimit its sphere of application when analyzing such complex polities as empire or federation. The article by French scholar of law Olivier Beaud is presented in the sociology, anthropology, and political science section together with a commentary by the Russian scholar of federalism Andrei Zakharov. Based on formal legal analysis and a reconstruction of West European political thought, Beaud demonstrates that contemporary studies of federation and federalism find themselves in a circle of logical contradictions by representing federation as one of the forms of state organization or as an attempt at state centralization. This happens because contemporary legal and political notions of federation are influenced by the concept of undivided state sovereignty. Beaud suggests a departure from such an asymmetrical notion of federation (and, consequently, from the normative element in the model of the modern sovereign and national state) and to see federation and federalism from the point of view of horizontal political relations of union and community rather than in terms of state form. Beaud’s conception relies on theoretical works by Carl Schmidt and Charles Montesquieu, and continues the line of critical reception of ahistorical notions of state that is present in the forum on the political experience of nomadic societies and in the materials of the historical section. Although Beaud does not leave behind the modern and Eurocentric concept of sovereignty, as Andrei Zakharov urges him to do, and denies the possibility of a fruitful dialog between the sociological analysis of open social structures and the politico-juridical analysis of federation as society, his idea of federation as a historically alternative type of heterogeneous political society can become a point of departure for studies of pluralistic or imperial societies. By defining empire as an unauthentic federation, Beaud opens new perspectives in the study of composite polities.

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