In 2012 Ab Imperio focused on the annual theme “Structures and Cultures of Imperial and Post-Imperial Diversity.” This focus is, essentially, on a key problem for our journal, whose concern is not with the holistic entities of social groups or chronological periods (nation, territory, confession, gender, Middle Ages, etc.) but with the situation of unstable balance in a composite society, and asynchronous historical development. What appears as a particular case or a marginal condition from the point of view of traditional historical approaches is for Ab Imperio the main mode of society’s existence both in the past and present. Social boundaries are conditional, fluid, and situational; the pace of time differs in various contexts, and different “historical eras” can exist simultaneously. Even early Soviet Marxists acknowledged the parallel coexistence of different historical “formations” in one society, while the limits of solidarity within a social group is evident for both scholars of contemporary societies and historians. And yet, today’s humanities and social sciences believe in the “realism of the group” and periodization. Marginal (if not completely imaginary) phenomena that cannot be observed anywhere except the bureaucratic questionnaires and statistical groupings are viewed as a normal and normative state of society.
Two polar views of “social norm” imply different understandings of the organization of diversity in society. Traditional social sciences are structured by a vision that Ernest Gellner called “Modigliani’s map:” multicolored blocks of different sizes and shapes (but with clear boundaries and internally homogeneous) form a giant mosaic of social diversity. These blocks are located on the same plane and are grouped according to clear departments. In the department of “peoples,” this diversity is represented by “Jews,” “Ukrainians,” “Tatars,” and “Russians;” in the department of “social structure,” it features “nobles,” “peasants,” “town dwellers,” and so on. This map of the world was the foundation for the European multiculturalism of the 1970s and 1980s, which was exploded by rebellions in Parisian banlieues and anti-Islamic panic. As it turned out, “poverty,” “Africanness,” “Islam,” and “youth” do not belong to four different and separate “planes of diversity” (thus forming isolated spaces of social differentiation and multiculturalism – e.g., “Africans–Asians−Europeans” or “unemployed–workers–middle class−wealthy”), but form universal hybrid social identities.
These hybrid identities formed in different times from different components with different characteristics are the main protagonists of new imperial history developed by Ab Imperio. Obviously, this research agenda makes scholars particularly sensitive to their terminology. The problem of the relationship between languages of self-description of past societies and the analytical languages of today’s scholars is one of the central foci for Ab Imperio, extensively discussed both in the journal’s pages as well as within research projects.^[1] Now it seems important to emphasize that two different approaches to the use of analytical languages and hence two modes of describing social reality (through static “status” or dynamic “situation”) produce two different “scans” of composite societies. In one case, the society consists of a priori assigned blocks (class/confession/gender/nationality, etc.). In the second case, society is differentiated into groups that are distinguished only when (or every time) certain criteria of otherness become relevant in the context of a specific situation, when these criteria are actually used for marking groupness. For instance, “nationality” is not a meaningful criterion in a monoethnic village but can become a key factor in a large city. As we can see, in the first case, the matrix of differences is imposed by the researcher, more or less sensitive to the nuances of the past, from the outside. In the second case, differences are recognized as such and registered only if they are actually manifested in practice, in a specific situation. Ideally, these differences should be described in the analytical language of contemporary social sciences and interpreted within the framework of a contemporary theoretical model, but it is equally important to avoid anachronistic ascriptions of today’s criteria of groupness to motivations of the actions of people in the past. (For instance, we should not be “ethnically blind” in the case of a Russian and a Tatar involved in a fistfight sometime in the early twentieth century, but we need to understand that those brawlers might have viewed − and used – their ethnoconfessional distance very differently from what we would expect.)
Thus, as we attempt to rationalize the internal diversity of a composite society, the key question becomes “who is speaking?” Who is the “objective observer,” who distinguishes and registers differences, who is the subject of the authoritative discourse on diversity that is recognized as such? This key question is behind the title of the first issue of this year: “Periphery as the Center.” As we leave behind the position of “objective” observer from “above” and from the “center,” we face the problem of how to bring multiple particular and “peripheral” perspectives into accord. In this case, the editors of Ab Imperio and our authors are less concerned with the Wallersteinian “core−periphery” model because it is founded on an a priori clear view of what qualifies some as “periphery,” and others as “core.” Those activists who criticize the core on behalf of the periphery do not fundamentally alter the essence of the model itself, as they dispute particularities of interpretations. Reading the forum “The Marginality of the ‘Center’ in Contemporary National Historical Narratives” (in the “Methodology and Theory” section) reveals how it can be done differently. The editors invited over twenty historians from the former countries of the Russian Empire/USSR to respond to the question on the role of “Russia” as the past imperial center in new narratives of national history. The question here is not whether “empire” actually exploited “Ukraine” in the late nineteenth century or, alternatively, whether it invested more than took. This approach is meaningful within the conventional Wallersteinian paradigm. Our question is both simpler and more complex. It is obvious that the “imperial center” has long become a marginal subject for many historians in the countries of Central Asia, in the Baltics, or in Ukraine. But does one need to know about the former “center” as one writes the history of the former “periphery?” What needs to be included in national history and what needs to be excluded? Curiously, if some responses continue to need the “center” as the synonym for the “empire” suppressing peripheral nationalism, the others radically depart from this mode because they are more oriented toward a state narrative or, more interestingly, toward reflecting postcolonial, postimperial structures of perception of one’s past. It is here that the “periphery” – both in geopolitical and scholarly senses – becomes a full-fledged subject of new narratives of the past.
The reverse situation is observable in the article by Birthe Kundrus, also published in the methodological section. Despite the insistence of Germans that Germany was the empire (with numerals in the name of the Reich stressing continuity), usually the united German state of 1870−1945 is viewed as a peripheral phenomenon in the universe of “classical” European colonial empires: too strong was the desire to establish Germany as a national state, relatively too few were the colonial possessions, and too short the period of possessing them (to 1919). Nevertheless, as Kundrus shows, an attempt to relate seriously to Germany’s imperial past and to apply to German history standard methods of new imperial history leads to new and utterly interesting conclusions. What was only recently considered a peripheral colonial experience of Germany, is now widely seen as central to discussions on its modern history and culture and even, as Kundrus shows, replaces the contemporary language of multiculturalism with postcolonial models of society. In connection with the latter, Kundrus warns about the new binary orthodoxy and about the potential absolutization of a once peripheral experience, which is now found everywhere – and hence nowhere.
Leaving behind the Wallersteinian binary model of core–periphery, contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio use more dynamic models in their research, such as the analytical model of semiosphere developed by Yuri Lotman. This model conceives of the periphery as the factor of innovation that is primarily responsible for dynamism and evolution of the system. That model is explored in the article by Mirja Lecke (in the “Newest Mythologies” section) devoted to a literary analysis of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s novel The Five. This analysis demonstrates how the rigid Zionist ideological architecture usually ascribed to this novel is subverted as a result of closer scrutiny of the novel’s poetics within the context of the Odessan myth that brings complexity and heterogeneity into the work of Jabotinsky.
The main cluster of materials in the “History” section of this issue is dedicated to the memory of our friend and colleague, Anatoly Remnev. Of course, we did not plan these materials for this thematic issue. However, Anatoly’s life and scholarly career engaged in remarkable ways many manifestations of unstable roles of the center and periphery in Russian imperial history and in the sphere of academia in postsocialist societies. In the Soviet centralized and Hegelian system there was a rigid division of labor between the capitals and the peripheral regions. Provincial historians were supposed to be concerned with local histories and minor historical issues. Historians from Moscow and Leningrad had the right to study the central government and produce general historical syntheses by virtue of their location. When admitted to the graduate school in Leningrad, a native of Siberia, Anatoly Remnev used this opportunity to explore a general subject reserved for historians from the capitals: “The Committee of Ministers in Postreform Russia (Composition, Competences, and Procedures).” He successfully defended his first dissertation in 1985, but could not remain in Leningrad. After finishing graduate school he returned to Omsk, which implied a change of research field to the study of regional history, as a result of which Anatoly began his long encounter with the history of Western Siberia. It seemed clear: here is the center of historical research (Leningrad), and here is a provincial historical school in Omsk; here are the leaders of the historical profession from the Academic Institute of History (its Leningrad branch), and here are the clients of the Leningrad Institute from the Siberian periphery. Notice, how all of that had changed over the next fifteen to twenty years! Or, rather, how Remnev could turn this hierarchy upside down! Peripheral and “regional” aspects of Russian history became the vanguard of innovative historical research, while the Soviet-era priorities became obsolete. Peripheral subjects from the history of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan studied by Remnev allowed him and his students and readers to make new and unexpected conclusions about the overall course of Russian history. At the same time, the earlier, narrow specialization in the central institutions of imperial bureaucracy was incapable of providing explanations of the overall space of Russia’s past, which involved western borderlands and the Caucasus, Turkestan and Siberia, and even Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod. It turned out that “centrality” is not a spatial category and it is not guaranteed by the mechanisms of the established academic discourse.
The best tribute to a historian from his peers is a publication of his or her study that can become a part of the ongoing historiographic process, an object of reference and criticism, as if its author were still among us. Therefore, the cluster of materials dedicated to the memory of Anatoly Remnev includes not only recollections about him by his colleagues, but also two of his own articles, embodying the best of “Remnev style”: a combination of brilliant archival study with middle-range theory. These articles continue the logic of Remnev’s work in that they consider regional aspects as central to understanding Russia’s history.
Two other research articles in the “History” section represent precisely the “living” historiographical process that was engaged in the works of the former “provincial” historian Anatoly Remnev, who turned into a leader of our field recognized worldwide. Using the biography of a Tatar spiritual leader in Northern Kazakhstan in the second third of the nineteenth century, Pavel Shablei analyzes the structure of the regional imperial context (the latter equals “imperial diversity”). The biography of a single man highlights complex relations between Tatarness and Kazakhness, popular Islam and officially institutionalized Islam, local administration and central governmental agencies. The story as told by Shablei reveals how little sense categories such as “Russians,” “Muslims,” or “authorities” can make. Real distinctions and boundaries between social groups appear as these groups interact and interrelate.
Ekaterina Melnikova’s article is devoted to the “golden age” of Soviet regional studies (kraevedenie) in the 1920s and 1930s. The article demonstrates that this field of knowledge, so provincial by definition, was aimed at a redescription of the “center.” Deliberately using an anational (territorial) language of description, kraevedenie essentially served different national projects by drawing their parameters and providing them with empirically grounded claims. It is interesting that instead of registering limitless local diversity and specificities, kraevedenie in fact was engaged in the synthesis of commonalities by overcoming or ignoring multiple differences. By its very nature a local field of knowledge, it was engaged in creating a generalizing picture of territory and groupness, ignoring or overcoming a myriad of local differences.
There is a link between the article by Melnikova and the ethnographic study by Ksenia Gavrilova published in the section “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science.” The article is based on the exploration of a local initiative – the festival of national Mari song-singing in the Kirov region of the Russian Federation. The author analyzes how this local initiative contributes to the formation of a diasporic self-understanding on the part of the local population and thus contributes to the imagining of the collective of the Mari people, even though some of them live outside of the titular republic of the Mari. This case demonstrates how an initiative from the periphery is capable of estranging the meaning of identity and influencing nation-formation processes in the core. We see again how the altering poles of “center” and “periphery” intervene with the structuring of social diversity and how the space of group solidarity expands beyond the boundaries of formally recognized borders of “nation” or “territory,” while acting as a locomotive for the institutionalized community.
The nature of social structuring premised on situational relatedness, ambivalence of identification, and fluidity of boundaries, which is found in contemporary research, makes us look anew at the concept of nation as a stable and primary form of social groupness. It makes it particularly relevant to return to the analysis of those who use the category of nation in a nonambiguous and self-referential manner and to better understand the political logic behind it. The “Archive” section of the present issue features the publication of two texts by Hans Kohn, the classical figure in the tradition of studies of nationalism in the twentieth century. The first text was read as a lecture in the makeshift university for POWs in Krasnoyarsk in 1919. The second text was a public address read in 1943, when Hans Kohn was a respected professor at Smith College, an elite U.S. institution in Massachusetts. Almost a quarter-century stands between these two texts. The time significantly influenced the Hans Kohn’s views, resulting in his parting with the belief that national movement is identical with democratization and the moral regeneration of society. Kohn’s now canonical typology of nationalisms (Eastern and ethnic vs. Western and political) grew out of his personal life experiences: in the Habsburg Empire, in captivity in Russia, engagement with Zionist politics in Palestine, and in an academic career in the United States. Somehow, the “bad” (Eastern) nationalism was to be found on the ruins of old composite empires (Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman) while the good (Western) nationalism was synonymous with democratic regimes in stable (and still imperial) countries with predominantly homogeneous metropoles. Reading the ideas of Hans Kohn against his personal experience and intellectual–political quests (rather than in the logic of abstract theorizing), reveals that the model of two types of nationalisms serves as an underreflected critique of national mobilization in a multiethnic society. How else can we explain the absence of instances of the “good” nationalism on the vast spaces of those different and unrelated territories and societies (personally observed by Kohn), whose single common feature was that they had once been parts of composite states? Kohn never expressed regret for the demise of old supranational empires (which would have been strange given his political views and the context of the epoch), yet it is significant that toward the end of his life he had no illusions about the prospects of “progressive” nationalism in the countries that succeeded them.
Almost a century after Kohn’s lecture in Krasnoyarsk, we see the dramatic legacy of “eastern nationalism” in the active polemics of historians regarding the “Volyn massacre” of 1943 (and, more broadly, regarding the conflict between Polish and Ukrainian nationalisms in the 1940s). A thorough historical exploration of the events of 1940s through oral history and intensive archival research nevertheless proceeds in the atmosphere of the “war of memories” that can be felt in the collection of reviews of the recently published book The Second Polish–Ukrainian War, 1942−1947 by Volodymyr V’iatrovych in the “Historiography” section, as well as in the author’s response and in the first reviews of the “Review” section. The participants in the debate, essentially, use Hans Kohn’s binary model of nationalism to delegitimize the opponent and to defend one’s own position. Defending “good” nationalism, participants in the debate stress its nonethnic, civic character. Attacking “bad” nationalism, they point out its xenophobic ideology, collaboration with totalitarian regimes (Nazi or Soviet), and lack of established civic institutions. Aspiring to serve as objective arbiters outside and above the conflict of Ukrainian and Polish historians, “Western” scholars focus on detailed counting of victims and on studying the sources as the grounds for delivering a historical and, indeed, legal verdict. Although this approach is impeccable from the standpoint of human rights logic, and indispensable for the restoration of justice for victims of war crimes, it nevertheless demonstrates a de facto identification with the paradigm of “good nationalism.” The politics of counting victims (more accurate in the case of one group of historians, and the object of manipulation in the case of another group) overshadows the properly historical task of reconstructing the logic of events and their explanation. A comparison between two collective actors in the war crimes finds it sufficient to proclaim as guilty the one who killed more and in a more barbarous way. The very principle of nationalism (of course, the “good,” “civic” nationalism) is not removed from the framework of research – to the contrary, it is legitimized as a “natural” frame of analysis. No one seems to disagree that in the contemporary war of memory – as in the horrific ethnic cleansings of the 1940s – “Ukrainians” and “Poles” are the participants. The nuances of real differentiation of groupness simply escape the view of many historians taking part in the discussion. The fact that fragments of former multiethnic and composite states (empires) at a certain point were proclaimed to be “nation states” is not posited and not recognized as a problem. The programs of ethnic cleansing by nation states are explained as legacies of “bad” nationalism, while the outcomes of such programs are by default (although with condolences) considered to be in accordance with the interests of the titular group. It is possible that one stimulus for leaving behind this static and structural approach could be a revision of our views of centrality and peripherality of that particular historical event, of the position of the observers as well as the categories of analysis they use.
This debate can also prompt questions of a different kind. They are best framed not in the logic of politics of history and the battle of historical memories, but in the comparative framework of research on imperial legacy, violence, nationalism, and war. The editors invite participants in this debate to consider the question and debate about Armenian genocide. To be sure, this question of historical interpretation is also woven into the politics of historical memory and legitimizing narratives of nationhood and sovereignty. Yet, the initial overly politicized phase of the dialogue between Turkish and Armenian historians was quickly superseded by another phase, in which historical inquiries were framed with theoretical and comparative perspectives in mind.^[2] The dialogue between Turkish and Armenian historians evolved into consideration of the context of the collapsing empire, the circumstances of World War I and the flight of radical imagination of the attainment of state sovereignty through the homogeneous body of the nation. Particularly relevant for the debate on the Volyn massacres are the conclusions of the dialogue of Turkish and Armenian historians on the principal tension between the inherited space of imperial diversity and the radicalized nationalist imagination and its paramilitary implementation that evolved into the “genocidal complex” (which is not equivalent to genocide per se as a singular phenomenon) under the external influence of war and great-power politics. The unmaking of primordialist categories of Turks and Armenians that explain the massacres of Armenians in the course of the debate between Turkish and Armenian historians and the historicization of the context of that human tragedy is an outstanding case of historically sensitive and morally responsible scholarship. Even though this case may be seen as peripheral to the debate on the “Volyn massacres” at first glance, it may also be deemed as central for scholarship concerned with conceptual and comparative interpretations of the past.
At the end of the day, the main factor here turns out to be not a political position but the quality of historical analysis: a good historian cannot ignore what s/he notices in “peripheral vision” when focused on the main subject of research. The participation of war heroes in crimes against humanity, genocide as an integral part of a patriotic program, recognition as legal the acquisition of territory granted by the occupants – all history of composite societies consists of “peripheral perspectives” and there is no place in it for a noncontroversial magisterial master narrative with a universal interpretation of history.

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