In 1885, a band of Apaches fled confinement on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona and crossed the United States–Mexico border onto Mexican territory. For many, this was at least their third escape to the open desert and mountain terrain of these unsettled borderlands. American and Mexican forces collaborated in their pursuit, having recently agreed to join forces in policing mobile populations of Indians, smugglers, and horse thieves, essentially, all “bandits & outlaws” who traversed this fluid boundary. In this case, the target of their hunt was none other than Geronimo, the famed warrior who had defied repeated efforts by the American and Mexican states to extend their reach into Apache territory. His capture in May 1886 marked a turning point in the history of the expansion of the United States and Mexico and marked one of the final moments of the autonomous politics of the Apache and other Indian peoples in the region.
This story of the flow of power across borders is also notable in that the head of the Mexican authorities who assisted in the capture of Geronimo was himself a border-crosser and the creature of transnational – and global – forces. Emilio Kosterlitzky had been born in 1853 in Moscow, a subject of Tsar Nicholas I. Service in the Russian imperial navy brought him to foreign ports around the world and, ultimately, to Venezuela, where the young officer deserted his post. After making his way to New York and San Francisco, he turned to Mexico. There, in 1873, he enlisted in the army and quickly rose through the ranks. Kosterlitzky became a Mexican patriot and famed fighter of “los indios barbaros” along Mexico’s northern frontier. After a lengthy career fighting restive indigenous groups on behalf of the Mexican government and American mining corporations in Arizona, in 1913 Kosterlitzky escaped the revolution in Mexico for the United States. On the American side of the border he used his transnational ties to secure a job in law enforcement with the U.S. government, his third imperial patron in a single lifetime. In 1928 he died and was buried in East Los Angeles.^[1]
Kosterlitzky’s life story reflects more than the entangled histories of the borderlands joining the United States and Mexico. His biography connects to the history of the Russian empire, where his voyage began, and whose institutions formed his early worldview. In the drama of this adventurer’s confrontation with Geronimo in the mountains of Sonora we see the intersection of the overlapping histories of imperial power, global migration, indigenous politics, nationalizing institutions, and the cross-border movement of people, commodities, and ideas.
The tale of Kosterlitzky and Geronimo also raises questions about the limits of Russia and about our framing of its past within borders defined, and contained, by nations and states. The journey that took Kosterlitzky to Mexico, Arizona, and East LA was an unusual one. Yet he was not unique among the many tsarist subjects whose cosmopolitan lives were reshaped by the dramatic acceleration of change and the emergence of dense networks of communication, movement, and exchange that made the nineteenth century a momentous era of globalization.^[2] These themes have in recent years become the focus of global and regional histories. They have even begun to transform American history, as stories such as Kosterlitzky’s feature in efforts to consider the United States as but one element in transnational stories that employ different kinds of scale beyond the nation-state.^[3]
Historians of modern Russia, by contrast, have largely allowed state borders – and the institutions that maintained them – to circumscribe their subject of study. The global turn in historical thinking that swept across various national fields and that constituted new ones in the 1990s mostly bypassed Russia. To be sure, a few exceptional studies have in recent years established links to global processes.^[4] Still, the field of Russian history as whole remains marginal to the discipline of history outside of Russia. It is relatively rare for works of Russian history in any period to be read outside the field.^[5]
Confronted with the challenge of explaining the sudden collapse of a superpower and the appearance of new states in 1991, most historians of modern Russia remained squarely focused on the space delimited by the borders of the USSR and the newly independent states. The themes of nationhood and empire dominated much of this new literature, which revealed for the first time the “ethnophilia” (to use Yuri Slezkine’s term) of the Soviet system.^[6] At the same time, a focus on violence intersected with debates about nationality in a Soviet field whose chronological parameters advanced further into the second half of the twentieth century. In the United States, excitement about new problems and newly accessible sources translated into a steady stream of graduate students seeking the intensive professionalization and specialization that the Soviet field cultivated. Despite the decline in funding and public interest, a robust Area Studies apparatus buttressed this shift, and universities and history departments mostly validated these choices in their hiring and funding preferences.
Thus, as the turbulent post-Soviet politics of the 1990s buffered most historians of Russia from the tides that were changing much of the discipline, the tsarist and Soviet subfields steadily diverged. The issue was not simply that the imperial field contracted, and the Soviet field expanded. More striking still (but little-noticed) was their contrasting relationship with the state of historical inquiry beyond Russia. At the risk of excessive generalization about two variegated fields of talented historians, a distinctive pattern seems to have emerged: historians of the tsarist period, including scholars from Russia, Europe, and Japan, began to situate their work in wider historiographical contexts and to engage with debates in other geographic areas.^[7] For historians of imperial Russia, the discovery of empire offered entrée to a world rich with comparative and transimperial possibilities. Andreas Kappeler and Dominic Lieven wrote pioneering studies that treated Russia not in traditional fashion as a timeless nation-state, but as a multinational entity and an empire, while also exploring the possibility of comparing it to other imperial polities.^[8] The historiography of the British, French, Chinese, Roman, Mongol, Habsburg, Ottoman, and even, on occasion, American empires offered historians of imperial Russia new ways of thinking about their subject. Often based on research in local and regional archives, specialized studies examined Russian representations of imperial peoples and spaces, practices of imperial governance and colonization, geopolitical struggles, religious identities and institutions, nationalist mobilization, and various types of interactions between rulers and ruled.^[9] Anchored by Richard Wortman’s pathbreaking study of the monarchy, this field identified structural and ideological commonalities between the Russian empire and imperial polities in other times and places, even as its practitioners highlighted, particularly in more specialized monographs, the many features that made the tsarist empire distinctive.^[10] This is not to say that this field has been uniform in its approaches or in its assessments of the empire. In some of the most innovative studies, Peter Holquist showed how Russian revolutionary practices belong to a wider history of “Pan-European” developments, while Michael Kemper and Stéphane Dudoignon situated Muslim thought in the empire in the context of societies in the Middle East and South Asia.^[11] The tsarist empire thus emerged not simply as a stagnant antecedent to Soviet rule or the blank slate from which the story of Soviet nation-making (and -breaking) would emerge, but as a complex and dynamic set of political and cultural relationships with their own distinctive trajectory.^[12]
Empire as an interpretive problem linked Russia to a global past and, for some in the post–9/11 era, directly to an imperial present. Given the intensification of debates about the ethics and meaning of empire and renewed attention to the analysis of globalized forms of power since September 11, 2001, the study of imperial Russia proved far from an antiquarian exercise. Thus it was not without risks. Motivated by American security and energy concerns, a relative shift in U.S. government funding toward the study of Central Asia and the Caucasus created incentives for scholars to collude with nationalizing projects, for example, in commemorating secularizing Muslim “reform” movements, in states whose sovereignty Washington supported (at least vis-à-vis Moscow). Even in the face of this danger, however, the field still has retained the potential to educate a broader public in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere about the costs of imperial thinking.
Although areas of overlap between the imperial and Soviet fields remained, and influential studies crossed the revolutionary divide, historians of the USSR, though often attentive to methodologies from other disciplines, pursued a more insular path, buoyed by a fresh archival base and a critical mass of scholars and students, but also by the endurance of older ideological paradigms. Soviet historians, too, developed new themes related to empire, mostly concentrating on problems of nationhood and violence. But in this shift, as with other thematic innovations in Soviet historiography, the tendency among most historians has been to treat this polity as a closed system, largely sealed off from the rest of the world.^[13] While some historians were inclined to view the Soviet experience as ultimately incommensurable with any other political entity, others have made Nazi Germany alone a central frame of reference and comparison.^[14]
Despite these many successes, the Soviet field – if one can be forgiven for employing this generic label to a heterogeneous body of historians – confronts a paradox. Soviet history now dominates the Russian field, even as its central concerns are, in the main, more isolated than ever from wider problems of historical conceptualization and the shifting temporal and spatial imagination of the discipline as a whole. Like many European empires, the Soviet Union is long dead. And, yet, like these empires, its many legacies persist, not least in how we write its history. At a time when historians of tsarist Russia have become integrated in multiple conversations with colleagues in the discipline through the study of empire, a predominant current of Soviet history writing, with only a few exceptions, insists on seeing the Soviet experience as sui generis; and judging by research agendas, only a very few scholars have entertained the prospect that the USSR was somehow affected by broader global phenomena that merit our attention.
But now that the Soviet project has lost its appeal among all but the most delusional among the left (and these are mostly phantom strawmen), it is difficult to know what to make of analytical frameworks that remain so narrow and parochial. This is not to deny that one can learn from comparing Soviets and Nazis or that these are essential subjects of research, teaching, and public engagement, especially in today’s Russia, where the government contests critical views of the past. On the subject of violence, though, should we really limit ourselves to comparing Nazis and Bolsheviks, and if so, why?^[15] Students of Soviet terror and other themes might learn from framing these questions in more expansive comparative contexts. Indeed comparisons drawn from American history might be particularly instructive because they unsettle many of the unexamined ideas about citizenship, difference, and violence that implicitly color liberal representations of the Soviet past. Scholars might find useful, for example, studies of American lynching – a practice that extended from North Carolina to Northern California – and other scenarios of racial strife in the United States.^[16] While the American South offers fertile terrain for the investigation of racialized terror, the West, with its forcible relocations of tens of thousands of Indians and Japanese and deportations of Mexicans (over 138,000 of whom were deported in 1931 alone), also has a sobering history that might complicate how we talk about the role of state violence in Russian history.^[17] The case for treating “liberal” and “illiberal” ideologies or regimes as incommensurable objects only makes sense, it seems, if one does not critically probe the historical character of the former. It is a startling irony that this narrow approach to violence in Soviet studies flourishes in particular in American universities and colleges, many of which have been direct or indirect beneficiaries of slavery, the expropriation and massacre of indigenous peoples, repeated colonial adventures overseas, and decades of racial and ethnic (not to mention gender) discrimination.^[18] In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, with a population of over 7.3 million adults in prison, jail, or on parole (2% of the white population, but 9% of the black population), and with detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Bagram, Afghanistan (with unknown numbers of secret sites elsewhere) beyond the reach of the law, one might expect a bit more curiosity about the possibilities of thinking across the liberal/illiberal divide and arriving at more complicated ways of framing the past.^[19]
One of the most pressing challenges, then, for historians of modern Russia, whether of the tsarist or Soviet periods, is to rethink the boundaries – temporal, spatial, and imaginative – of our object of study.^[20] To remain relevant in our own globalizing era and to illuminate the past as well as the present, historians of Russia are well-positioned to connect their investigations of empire to wider narratives of global flows, to the examination of nonterritorial modes of power – and to what Ann Laura Stoler has called “the opacities of rule.”^[21] Imperial power did not stop at the shores of the Pacific – or at the borders of China, Afghanistan, Iran, the Ottoman empire, the Balkans, or Eastern Europe. But much of what we know about the effects – ecological, political, economic – of Russian power in the world still comes indirectly from scholars whose focus is not Russia.^[22]
Building on the innovative conceptual work of the past two decades, a shift toward understanding Russia in a more global and cosmopolitan frame will mean undertaking more cross-national and comparative research (and teaching), loosening our commitment (outside of Russia) to triumphalist narratives, and abandoning our resort to the convenience of bounded states, ethnic groups, and politics.^[23] Tracing the circulation of pilgrims, merchants, scholars, diaspora activists, media, commodities, and ideas is but one way of linking the Russian past to these larger narratives – and of understanding the heterogeneous forces that crossed borders to shape Russia and the Soviet Union.^[24] Imagining alternative geographies and circulations that circumscribe, and integrate, our subject in different ways is another.^[25] The porous borders, mobile communities, and imperial ambitions of the Russian empire connect it to other histories of a regional and global scale, especially during the intense period of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In thinking about the future of Russian history, one of our tasks is to understand these global processes – and their fluid temporality, a fact that makes this new direction not simply a tsarist-era question, but one for all historians of Russia.