When the article “Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach” by French sociologist and anthropologist, Georges Balandier, came out back in 1951, the anticolonial liberation movement was gaining momentum, and heated political debates on the meaning of concepts such as freedom, democracy, and progress were spreading over the metropoles of European colonial empires. (Balandier’s article is published for the first time in Russian translation in the “Methodology” section of this issue of Ab Imperio.) Balandier’s article holds a special place among the numerous publications of politicians, philosophers, and social scientists of that epoch: for the first time, it conceptualized the “colonial situation” as a “totality” – a complex and dynamic hierarchical system of economic, cultural, racial, and political relationships set in a particular historical context. In French social theory of the mid-twentieth century, “totality” stood for the structuralist approach toward a problem, the most famous example being the project of “total history” by the Annales school. Balandier changed the focus of looking at the colonial world. Instead of juxtaposing directly clear homogeneous groups (tribes, nations, ethnicities) and subjects (the “state-colonizer,” the “subjugated tribe,” or the “people”), he identified less familiar and more heterogeneous subjects of domination (the colonizer) and subjugation (the colonized): local and urban communities, select subgroups within the imperial aristocracy, administration, commercial elites, and so on. Instead of “cultural clash” (à la Bronislaw Malinowski), Balandier suggested analyzing the different types of interaction of those groups and how power relationships and hierarchies are constructed in specific historical contexts. In this way, Balandier produced a complex analytical model of the “colonial situation,” which, as Frederick Cooper noted half a century later, was not fully comprehended and adequately read at that time. According to Cooper,

“analytically, Balandier may have won too easy a victory: once the colonial situation had been identified, it became something recognizable, compartmentalized, and − in not too many years − transcended. …At the height of decolonization struggles, notably during the Algerian war, intellectuals were most likely to see colonialism as a solid obstacle that should and could be removed. It was the process and consequences of the removal that was exciting, not the object blocking the path. Many students thought that all they needed to know about colonialism was its horrors, and a text from Frantz Fanon could be sufficient to convey that. Historians, by the 1960s, also started to look away from colonial history, for to study it too much, even critically, was to reinforce the old canard that real history meant the history of white people in Africa; the new history which new nations needed was either a history of the precolonial past or the anticolonial past; colonial history could be taken as a too-familiar given.”^[1]

This partly explains the constellation described and criticized by the next contributor to the “Methodology” section in this issue of the journal, the French philosopher and historian, Jean-François­ Bayart. According to Bayart, postcolonial theory, which owed its powerful rise in the 1980s and 1990s in America and Europe to the contribution of intellectuals from former colonial countries, had rediscovered the research field of the “colonial situation” virtually anew. The most influential postcolonial theoreticians redefined the analytical agenda according to their own interests and constructed intellectual genealogies of their own. In this context, the ideas of Balandier and other French (but not only French) intellectuals mentioned by Bayart were “dismissed” and reduced to the level of a binary opposition juxtaposing scholarly and political discourses of the “colonizer” (“Europe,” the “West”) to discourses and practices of the colonized. Bayart insists that the original French tradition, which was forced out by that new wave of scholarship, had emerged earlier and independently of postcolonial thought, was based on different epistemological foundations, had a liberating potential of its own, and therefore deserves revisiting and recognition, rather than politically motivated neglect. Essentially, Bayart describes the genesis of the critique of empire and colonialism in the logic of Jeremy Adelman’s concept of “imperial revolutions”: ^[2] postcolonial critical thought became a result of the modernization of social thinking and imagination in imperial societies. Opponents of Bayart insist on the principled incompatibility of anticolonial politics and theory with the intellectual milieu of the metropole society.
The third article in the “Methodology” section, “The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial,” places the dilemma outlined by Bayart into the Russian context. The aim here is not to claim the priority of Russian postcolonial thought (as Bayart does for the French tradition), but on the contrary, to relativize the very questions of intellectual precedence and of who has the “right” in empire to anticolonial rhetoric and the status of the colonized. Rather, the article argues for the necessity to deconstruct the content of “freedom” as the ultimate goal of “postcolonial” liberation from political and epistemological domination: in practice, this goal is often overwhelmed by national or newer imperial projects and overshadowed by the claims of various groups to the dominant role (on the grounds of their previous oppression in the past or their servicing of the liberation process in the present). The authors of this article – Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, and Marina Mogilner – critically analyze the concepts of the “colonial situation” (coupled with the postcolonial rhetoric that has become embedded in the postcolonial analytical apparatus) and postcolonial “freedom” and subjectivity, much the same way as it has become common to do in regard to intellectual constructs such as “nation” or “modernization”. Gerasimov, Glebov, and Mogilner turn to early (even compared to Bayart’s French genealogy) examples of postcolonial thinking in the Russian imperial and Soviet past as well as to post-Soviet postcoloniality. They use these cases to demonstrate that the colonial situation can be perceived as a relevant epistemological problem regardless of the actual presence of real colonial experience or the real figure of the colonized, and that postcolonial rhetoric can espouse conservative and reactionary potential. The authors argue that through the interaction of the postcolonial and “postimperial” approaches and a critical synthesis of the concepts of the “colonial” and “imperial” situations, it becomes possible to explain the observable variations of postcolonial intellectual traditions and postcolonial situations. This helps in comprehending the complex dynamics of the gradients of freedom and unfreedom, or why nationalism plays the leading role in some situations, while supra- or non-national solidarity does in others, both in the imperial past and the postimperial present.
Elements of this approach are evident in most of this issue’s articles. Julia Fein opens the “History” section with an article that reconstructs the de facto colonial situation, which, however, cannot be unquestionably described in terms of domination and subjugation. Rather, it requires a consistent application of Balandier’s complex and dynamic model. Better still, the story of the museum−Buddhist temple in the prerevolutionary Siberian city of Chita (which presented an exhibition of the Buddhist collections of the Russian Geographic Society) can be conceptualized in terms of the “imperial situation.” This concept implies the coexistence of different regimes of domination and the incompatible principles of the organization of groups and hierarchies of status, with unequal mutual “exchange rates.” Thus, the history of the museum in Fein’s study becomes a key to understanding the imperial order. Buddhist Buryats in this story appear as objects of colonial projections and patronization on the part of both officialdom of the imperial metropole and the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia, including political exiles. At the same time, Buryats themselves interpreted the meaning of the museum–temple exhibition in dialogue with various government and public agents. In doing so, they were perceived as a confessional group, as representatives of the “national intelligentsia,” and even as an authority defining the status of the decorated building (a museum in some situations, and a functioning temple in other instances). Fein analyzes discussions centered on the museum and involving the progressive press, political exiles, Buddhist lamas, and imperial administrators, as she reconstructs complex and multisubject schemes of domination and compliance. Neither of the parties involved possessed complete authority or absolute freedom of interpretation. In this case, the rules were set by a particular imperial situation, which is reconstructed in the article.
In this regard, Fein’s approach correlates with that of Moritz Deutschmann, whose article describes the participation of revolutionaries from the Russian Caucasus in the Iranian Constitutional Movement of the early twentieth century. He reveals suggestive differences in tactics and the understanding of anticolonial struggle between the Russian and Iranian revolutionaries, whose political cultures were formed in different imperial contexts. Deutschmann perceives the anticolonial struggle not as a universal opposition to imperial domination leading to liberation, but as a particular type of politics formed within the political culture of a certain empire, as an expression and continuation of the “imperial situation” (and the “imperial revolution” of Adelman).
Another contributor to the “History” section, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, turns to the Soviet experience of domination, subjugation, and the struggle for freedom by looking into the ways that Soviet republics in Central Asia raised their status by exploiting the need of the post-Stalin USSR to enhance its political influence in the Third World. Kalinovsky rejects the clear-cut categories of hegemony and subalternity, freedom and unfreedom as he reconstructs the urge of the Central Asian elites to secure for themselves the role of intermediaries and promoters of an alternative Soviet modernity in the former colonial countries. He arrives at the paradoxical conclusion that the wave of decolonization originating outside of the USSR contributed to the processes of “decolonization” in the Soviet Central Asian republics.
The historical section concludes with an article by Natalia Chernyaeva on the construction of normative motherhood during the post-Stalin period, from 1954 to 1970. Unlike Kalinovsky, she turns to the vector of modernity that brought the First and the Second Worlds closer, rather than amplifying their differences. Although differing in scale and form, the emergence of the “child-centered” family model and the concept of “intensive mothering” was under way in the USSR and in the West, accompanied by the rise of consumerist culture and the broadening sphere of private life. Chernyaeva illustrates this parallelism using the example of the high demand for and extreme popularity of the book Baby and Child Care in the USSR, by the American doctor, Benjamin Spock, whose theories were used to raise the whole generation of baby boomers in the United States. According to Chernyaeva, Spock’s book differed from similar Soviet books in its dialogical mode, its absence of references to state medicine and science as the supreme expert, and its delegation of decision making to the mother. Against the backdrop of even the most liberal and consumer-oriented Soviet discourses and practices of child care (compared to the previous Stalinist period), Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care looks like a magic mirror reflecting not radically different images but gradients of difference in understanding and practicing consumption, freedom, privacy, modern knowledge, and so on.
The theme raised by Chernyaeva continues in the material of Soviet modernist music in the contribution by Boris Belge in the section “The Newest Mythologies.” Belge rejects the rigid dichotomy “freedom−unfreedom” in the depiction of the First and Second Worlds as rooted in Cold War ideology and ignoring the heightened mutual interest and information exchange, at exactly the same time, between the USSR and Western countries, particularly in the field of culture. Presenting a case study of the “Moscow Troika” (a group of composers consisting of Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina), Belge strives to reconstruct the nonideological meaning of “freedom” that found expression in their music as well as in everyday social and professional life. Belge shows how this “freedom” was determined by various social and professional ties and contacts at different levels.
This relativist and historically and socially contextualized understanding of freedom is shared by Neringa Klumbytė in an article discussing the modern memory of the period of Lithuania’s struggle for secession from the USSR in connection with popular perceptions of freedom and “true Lithuanian-ness.” Published in the section “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science,” the article demonstrates that anticolonial mobilization has disintegrated into many versions of memory structured not by the moment of the anti-imperial uprising itself but by the attitudes to the Soviet past and post-Soviet present of the individuals and groups interviewed. According to the author, her respondents’ doubts regarding the reality of the achieved “liberation” do not indicate their betrayal of the ideals of “freedom” and the national state. In place of the dichotomies of freedom and unfreedom, or the colonial and postcolonial state, Klumbytė suggests the model of a multilateral conversation (or public negotiations) concerning the paths of social and political transformation, freedom, national solidarity, and inclusive citizenship.
A similar “negotiation” model of the historical narrative in post-Soviet Russia (the model of a “patchwork quilt” that accommodates diverse views on the historical process) is developed in the article by Ivan Kurilla in the “Historiography” section. He views the post-Soviet (postimperial) fragmentation of the historical narrative as an episode of the global fragmentation of modern historical consciousness, although in Russia the field of history has become overly politicized. The most active role in this field is played by “politicians’ history.” Kurilla sees the only way out of this predicament in the professional coordination of historians assuming the role of intermediaries between “politicians’ history” and different memory communities. Professional historians are expected to produce a “patchwork quilt” of historical knowledge based on the freedom of choice of perspectives on the past and present.
Thus, in one way or another, all the contributors to this issue approach the problem of freedom and those who interpret it from the vantage point of domination (political, cultural, and discursive) and resistance. However, their focus on the phenomenon of historical subjectivity in the imperial context relativizes the rigid binary oppositions and the still influential sociological “essentialism of groupness.” All of the authors attempt to overcome the Manichean version of postcolonial rhetoric in their own way, and advance analyses of the complex, uneven, and multisubject system of relationships. They look into the situation of mutual dependence and influence, domination and resistance that takes place within a common political culture, as well as communication that transcends cultural and social borders and institutions. Thus defined, the “imperial situation” actually allows scholars to overcome the structural limitations of modern postcolonial theory that have been outlined by Frederick Cooper, already mentioned in these pages:

“Even the most engaging of such texts, such as Homi Bhabha’s elegant short essay on mimicry, leaves the two stick figures of colonizer and colonized interacting with each other independent of anything except their mutual relationship.” ^[3]

Even when the chosen model of “imperial situation” was not a result of conscious theoretical reflection, the very specificity of the Russian and Soviet imperial/colonial/postcolonial contexts of individual case studies has made the authors’ approaches more nuanced and dialectical. However, the role of the Russian Empire here was just that of a historical context: as the article by Neringa Klumbytė demonstrates, an “imperial situation” can be found not only in an empire but in an actively nationalizing state (Lithuania) as well, while postcolonial theory can emerge in the absence of colonialism (see the articles in “Methodology” section). The editors hope that this thesis will be further developed in subsequent issues within the annual theme of “Freedom and Empire”.