New imperial history is defined more by its approach (which consists in the recognition of the fundamental heterogeneity of society in the “imperial situation” and in accepting “strategic relativism” in ordering this heterogeneity) than by its object (“empire”). Yet the question of its applicability to the history of the twentieth century remains open. On the one hand, in the past decade, studies in new imperial history have proved the applicability of this approach to research on modern societies such as late imperial Russia (not to mention the British Empire). It was exactly within the framework of new imperial history that successful explanations were offered as to how modern institutions and culture developed within the relatively “archaic” Russian empire, and it was shown how the logic of the imperial situation allowed, for a while, an expansion of the zone of modernity without generating massive social upheavals. On the other hand, Russian (already Soviet) society after 1917 differed essentially from the Old Regime in the sense of a much greater degree of ordering, homogenization, and rationalization of social space. As Soviet-focused articles in Ab Imperio show, the imperial situation did not disappear altogether in the Soviet period, when multiple hierarchies based on nationality, class, region, or politics, in their different combinations, produced social personae and roles that did not fit in neatly with some universal single scale of differences and privileges. Still, the imperial situation is seen by the dominant explanatory models of Soviet history – whether the totalitarian model or the model of modern experts/triumph of Soviet subjectivity – as playing only a marginal role. Hence our theoretical question: Is there a method of and need for a broader application of the methodology of new imperial history to the Soviet period, an application that would not be reduced to demonstrations of specific cases of the imperial situation?
There is clearly a need for it because the meaning of new imperial history is not reducible to new interpretations of the past of historical empires. Rather, the main goal of new imperial history is to restore the historical subjectivity of people and societies (and of their experiences) that are ignored by traditional historical narratives. “Old” imperial history is associated with the central authority and the view from the capitals. Emerging in opposition to this colonial and colonizing perspective, the new national histories retrospectively homogenize “nations” and “regions” and ignore the multifaceted and multilayered character of past societies. New imperial history restores the very role of empire as a “context-setting category” (not as an all powerful demiurge) in order to create structural preconditions for reconstructing composite subjectivities in complex societies. Such an approach allows historians to view Volga Tatars or Russian peasants not only in their roles as confessional or social “subalterns” but also as colonizers and participants in the imperialist expansion in Central Asia. This approach allows scholars to describe Georgians or Poles in their participation in the national-liberation struggle against the empire as well as in their own oppression and assimilation of local “national minorities.” Ultimately, what is at stake here is the very agency of Russian history, which is no longer evaluated from the point of view of some normative “West–East cultural gradient” with respect to some imagined normative ideal of modernity and “Westernness.” What becomes essential then is the extent to which different loci of Russian society and different political institutions were capable of participating in the project of modernity as full-fledged subjects, rather than the extent to which the State Duma resembled the British parliament.
We arrive at an important intellectual collision here. It is a relatively uncomplicated task to show and evaluate the participation of the Russian empire in the global project of modernity despite the fundamental Eurocentrism of the very discourse of modernity and its self-legitimization through opposition to inferior Others such as “Asia,” “Eastern Europe,” the “Old regime,” and so on.^[1] We encounter the problem with the Soviet Union in its leaning toward autarchy and self-legitimization through the opposition to an inferior Other represented by the “West,” “capitalism,” or “imperialism.” How can we try to restore the contexts of values and meanings with respect to which we can meaningfully reconstruct subjectivities of different categories of Soviet people, whether they are party activists or oppositionists, Moscow industrial workers or national intelligentsia?
The new imperial history presupposes taking seriously the languages of self-description and self-representation of the historical actor. Even if these languages are used for manipulation or direct disinformation, their “grammar” betrays the fundamental mode of thought, and their “message” reveals the ideas and conceptions that are most meaningful for the author, those categories in which reality is made sense of. Richard Wortman’s pioneering study well illustrated this thesis: looking at the most a priori ideological and ostentatious genre of the court ritual of representing imperial power, Wortman nevertheless reconstructed the bases of political culture and the style of thought of the political elite of a particular era. Soviet society evaded any universal criteria of comparison by demonstratively refusing to partake in “common modernity,” while to evaluate it from the perspective of the normative ideal of Western democracy of its time (the mid-twentieth century) is meaningless. But what if we can address the language of self-representation and self-description accepted in the Soviet Union, and critically rethink its explanatory potential?
Formulating the focus of Ab Imperio’s annual program in 2011, the editors suggested that there were more than propagandist clichés in the conception of the three worlds that was called to ideologically serve the global ruptures of the Cold War. Besides the claim for control over certain parts of the globe, in its foundation was the demand for subjectivity and agency with respect to modernity and the politics of the future. This conception, almost universally accepted and interiorized at that time, betrayed a certain vision of the world, or, to be precise, of the worlds. The “First World” of the “West” was, at least from the Soviet point of view, “number one” chronologically but not in terms of value. It was a world that allegedly usurped the discourse of modernity and the definitions of who or what was “modern” or “backward,” a legitimate subject of history or not. Its subaltern alter ego was the Third World, either dominated by or rebelling against the First, but in any case defining itself through its relations to the First World and therefore fundamentally dependent on it. The claim to be a “Second World” was the claim for an alternative version of history, the claim for historical subjectivity and independence in articulating the discourse of modernity. Of course, this is a utopian claim and an ideologically motivated classification. Yet it gives a reason and provides the language for the discussion of a very important issue: how can one become a full-fledged subject of modernity without becoming, politically or discursively, a part of those who have a monopoly on modernity, a part of the imagined community of the “West,” “Europe,” “Atlantic world,” and so on. Given that it is crucial for these vague categories to assert themselves as coherent “non-Orient,” “non-Asia,” “non-Latin America” it would be interesting to understand what prospects “Asia” or “socialism” have for full-fledged modernity.
With our first issue in 2011 we open the annual program “Second World – Second Time? The Concept of the Second World at the Crossroads of Social Sciences and Imperial History.” Staying true to the principal differentiation between the categories of analysis and the categories of practice, we think of the “Second World” as a general frame without tying it to a specific territory or political entity. We are interested in those situations where we detect attempts to emerge as independent subjects of modernity without institutional or symbolic “assimilation” into recognized structures and cultures of “real modernity.” What interests us is the possibility of going beyond the postcolonial reading of the world through binary oppositions, and to focus not just on heterogeneous and subaltern phenomena and subjects (which, at the end of the day, are derivative of the binary oppositions) but also on rethinking the bidimensional perception of modern history. It is obvious that any attempts to claim oneself as a subject of the modern world are oriented toward the dominant political, cultural, and economic narratives and values, or at least strive to have a dialogue with them. This does not mean, however, that one cannot see behind these attempts some content, which reflects a third (a fourth, a fifth, etc.) version of the answer to the common challenges of political and sociocultural development.
The unit of historians’ speech is a case study, and not an abstract thesis, and therefore we count on developing the annual program through empirical studies of problems that pertain, but are not limited, to the historical “Second World.” The journal will not be limited to the twentieth century because the search for alternative (autochthonous) modernity was a process characteristic of Russian society at least from the era of Peter I.
Following the logic of “transplanting” new imperial history into the twentieth century as an attempt to rehabilitate multiple forgotten or ignored subjectivities, our issue opens with two essays by a leading scholar of British new imperial history, Stephen Howe. The very chronology of British imperial history makes its historians (both “old” and “new”) look to very recent events, often in the postwar period, and thus to describe imperial society as quite modern. This alone should compel scholars of Russia thinking about modernity in the late imperial period and especially the Soviet era to pay special attention to the experience of their British colleagues. Howe evaluates the decade of British new imperial history (or, as Howe puts it, “histories”) and offers his view of Russian new imperial history. This view from the outside, from another academic tradition and another research field is especially important for former “Russian Studies,” which is undergoing a deep crisis of identity.
The materials in our “History” section relativize the binary nature of the postcolonial model and offer their own vision of the “other colonialism” in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Alexander Etkind writes about inner colonization and shows how Russia and the USSR were recognized from the outside as a world beyond normative scenarios (not an empire and not a colony, not West and not East, not “civilization” and non “barbarity,” not the First and not the Third Worlds). Jan Kieniewicz considers the phenomenon of the silence of the Polish intelligentsia and explains it in the context of “civilizational pressure,” which cannot be described within the colonial model because this pressure discarded cultural hierarchies. Anatoly Remnev writes about the complexities of post-Soviet identity in Kazakhstan, an identity that is founded on multiple texts and complex imperial experience, for which contemporary political or historiographic languages offer no adequate formulae. Finally, Serguei Oushakine interprets post-Soviet “postcoloniality” in Belarus as yet another example outside of the normative scenario. Instead of what might be expected as a claim for restored agency, the historical discourse dominating in Belarus rejects any active participation of the Belarusians in Soviet history along with any moral responsibility for what happened in those years. Declaring oneself a victim of colonialism does not lead to a rethinking of the recent past from the newly acquired postcolonial perspective.
The specifics of the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet is discussed in the section “Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science,” where scholars discuss Serguei Oushakine’s book The Patriotism of Despair. This book is about the symbolic strategies of “communities of loss,” which build networks of solidarity on the basis of a commonly relived trauma. Can we presuppose that trauma is one of the codes of the other subjectivity of the “Second World,” which lacks positive content as a result of the nonnormative and marginal nature of people’s experience in the Second World? Participants in this book forum debate this question, among others.
In the “Newest Mythologies” section we publish Zaur Gasimov’s essay on the painful process of post-Soviet “flattening” of the complex and heterogeneous past of Baku. The image of Baku that Gasimov assembles from personal memories and literary texts cannot be unambiguously located on the flat scale of modernity and archaism, of East and West. The very form of narrating the past and present of the city reflects the search for language and format not determined by postcolonial binary oppositions and the poses of the First and the Third Worlds.
We hope that this conversation about the “Second World” as a subject of history and modernity, so interestingly begun in the current issue, will continue in the following issues of the journal and will preserve a comparative approach, interdisciplinary method, and chronological breadth. We would also like to see sustained the focus on the interaction of “new imperial history” as a field of study of complex composite societies with the field of the “Second World” characterized by its attention to nonnormative paths of development of the “European periphery.”

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