SUMMARY:

This is a Russian [and slightly edited] translation of the introduction to the volume Empire Speaks Out: Language of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2009). The text traces the development of historical studies that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, attempted to conceptualize the history of the Russian Empire as a space of domination, connexity, and diversity, and takes stock of the most recent attempts to theorize the problem of imperial government and the imperial space of social, religious, and cultural differences. The most recent trends under scrutiny include the rethinking of the history of the Russian Empire from the vantage point of borderland studies, confessional turn, and the comparative history of dynastic and composite imperial polities. Referencing the trends of historical study of empire outside of the Russian field and the revisionist of postcolonial studies in particular, the authors devise an approach from the vantage point of the cognitive turn. They suggest that the cognitive turn in nationalism studies advocated by Rogers Brubaker offers numerous insights for the field of studies of the Russian Empire. In particular, they note that the most popular historiographic models for understanding the Russian Empire (such as multinational empire) borrow the categories of imperial practice of the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as categories of analysis. With reference to Ann Stoler’s critique of the comparative history of imperial forms based on the idea of discreet ideal types, the authors devise perspectives that can place the history of Russian imperial rule and the experience of diversity in multiple comparative contexts, bridging the gap between studies of coloniality and studies of multinational polities and nationalism. The published text is not a standalone piece. It references the main outcomes of the collaborative research project that takes the cognitive turn in studies of the Russian Empire further to the exploration of languages of self-description and the rationalization of imperial rule and experience of diversity. This project highlights the moments of rupture and crisis in the history of the Russian Empire as productive contexts for rethinking the imperial strategy and reframing the space of difference, and thus introduces an important counterpoint to the thinking about crises of empire in the teleology of “decline and fall.” The text of the introduction summarizes the studies of languages of rationalization of empire from the impact of modern instrumental knowledge and paradigm of human sciences to the practice of socioeconomic modernization in the context of imperial diversity. It suggests an interpretative model for understanding tensions and hybridity of the Russian Empire since the reforms of Peter the Great, and especially in the postreform period, as constitutive of an imperial strategy of domination and experience of diversity.