SUMMARY:

The brief editorial preface announces the beginning of publication of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia in the current and following issue of Ab Imperio. This is the result of a decade-long effort by the Ab Imperio team to develop a new approach to the history of the region of the former Russian Empire/USSR. The main objective of the new course is to deconstruct the dominant “grand scheme of Russian history” that was founded back in the early nineteenth century and has survived all the subsequent political and historiographic interventions. The editors of Ab Imperio argue that it is not so much the new facts or interpretations that are capable of dismantling this hegemonic scheme envisioning “Russian history” as the history of the “Russians.” Rather, this can be done only through a critical deconstruction of the very language used by historians to narrate (and thus, interpret) the past, an effort long overdue. This work has been central to the Ab Imperio project since its inception in 2000, and now the accumulated experience of discussing individual historical episodes and problems in the journal is applied to the entire course of “Russian” history. The production of the history course has been made possible thanks to a grant from the Institute of Modern Russia, a foundation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.