The first issue of Ab Imperio (AI) in 2015 opens with a Russian translation of the introduction and first chapter of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Over the four quarterly issues in 2015, the entire book will be published in Russian in the “Methodology and Theory” section of the journal. In the editors’ view, this is the most straightforward introduction to the annual theme of Ab Imperio: “Does the Past Have a Future?”^[1] Amid the global crisis of the politics of the future and Russia’s increasing surrender to the grotesquely reenacted past, historians have the special mission of providing new models of thinking about the future.
This idea is central to the book by Armitage and Guldi, and it is useful to think along their lines even if one does not necessarily agree with their argument on all counts. Specifically, in the material published in this issue, it seems that the authors place too much hope in the very format of longue durée historical inquiry. Blaming the reaction to a Braudelian type of history-telling (first of all, the turn toward microhistory) for the rise of what they call “short-termism” as the dominant mode of social thinking, Armitage and Guldi forget that the primary target of criticism was not the longtime scope per se, but the rigid structuralism of Fernand Braudel’s version of total history. Microhistory revolted against a teleological perception of the historical process as largely predetermined by fundamental structural preconditions, and was accompanied by a linguistic turn and an anthropological turn (to mention just the most important innovations in history-writing of the late 1970s and 1980s). The method of longue durée was by no means confined to a wide chronological scope, nor would a return to “long” histories by itself provide a viable alternative to “short-termism.” This can be vividly seen in the case of post-Soviet historiographies, where “long-termism” in the form of the romantic and positivist national history of the pre-Annales type (tracing the rise of the nation or the national state from ancient times to the present) still persists. Narratives of national histories spanning many centuries can be easily telescoped down to the literally timeless continuity of territory, statehood, and body of the nation. This version of long-termism combines structuralist assumptions about the historical process (not alien to Braudel) with a reactionary (anti-Braudelian) view of the main actors of that process: instead of the interplay of long-term structures and spontaneous conjunctures, nationalist history is driven by predestined collective bodies with shared subjectivities.
Historiographic methodological innovations of the past decades strove to find and reinsert human agency, and thus, besides revising longue durée history-writing, contributed to further critique of abstract and groupist national history narratives. Methodological innovations in the post-Soviet region combined the import of the critique of structuralist social history and the introduction of microhistory, the history of everyday experience, and cultural history with new ways of writing the history of hybrid social and political spaces, something that was called “New Imperial History” in the pages of this journal. Thus, a critical and comparative reading of The History Manifesto is as emancipating as it is thought-provoking: by revisiting the grand historiographic fashions of the past, it opens up new venues for the future of history-writing.
One important conclusion that can be drawn from reading Guldi and Armitage is that the return of the longue durée history narratives requires painstaking work on deconstructing and deessentializing the analytical language used to construct these narratives. No actor or structure can remain the same, even in name, from the start to the end of the story (something that Braudel did not really understand). Begriffsgeschichte – another contribution of post-Braudelian historiography – is sine qua non for any long-term history-telling. The “History” section of this issue illustrates the importance of this by featuring the forum “The Past and Future of the Promised Land: Lithuania, from a Historical Region to a National Territory.” Three thematically connected articles by Zita Medišauskienė, Darius Staliūnas, and Olga Mastianica fill in the existing void in the entire body of the history of the former Russian Empire / USSR. They meticulously reconstruct the process of the transformation of one type of spatial imagination into a very different newer type. Although it bears the same name, Lithuania as it emerged in the writings of nationalist activists of the turn of the twentieth century had little in common with Lithuania of the prenational, Early Modern epoch. We can expect that the same transformation occurred everywhere, but so far we have no comparable study of this crucial transformation: a historical land inhabited by multicultural and often multiconfessional populations was reimagined as a national territory of a single ethnoconfessional group. This process involved not just revisions of spatial boundaries, but a fundamental revolution of the social imagination, in which commoners (first of all, peasants) came to be seen as the core of a new nation and were included in the community of solidarity that until then was reserved exclusively for the elite. Through the combination of very different methods and practices discussed in the forum, formerly homogeneous social groups were differentiated into distinctive national ones, each ascribed with its own “national territory.” For national historiographies operating within the Braudelian-type longue durée context, this was the natural evolution of the very same nation and its ancestral territory – Lithuanian, in this particular case. The work by the historians published in this issue of Ab Imperio shows that this unproblematic longue durée narrative should be deconstructed and rejected in the sense of telling the story of the same people. Lithuanians were not “invented” by national activists of the nineteenth century, but the boundaries of the group and its territory, the principles of perceiving solidarity, inclusion and exclusion had changed dramatically by the early twentieth century. Being a Lithuanian meant very different things in 1569, 1655, 1792, and 1905. A longue durée history that is fully aware of this transformation of the meaning of the key concepts used to write this history, may have a great future.
A practical experiment in producing a true longue durée history of the entire region is the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia produced by the Ab Imperio team. In this issue, in the “ABC” section, readers will find two parts of the chapter “The Long Eighteenth Century and the Rise of Modernizing Empire.” Quite in line with the approach of Lithuanian historians, the authors problematize the perceived continuity of the key elements of the story throughout the eighteenth century: “Russia,” “empire,” and “the state.” The two parts of the chapter structure this transformation as having progressed from the type of “gunpowder empire” to the Cameralist ideal of the “modern state,” and then from the modern state to the construction of a modern empire. Unlike many regional and even some great powers of the Early Modern period (including the Ottoman Empire), Russia succeeded in adapting the ideal of the modern state well before it was capable of actually building one. Even the ideal helped to reconfigure social relations within the society and mobilize political elites on new principles, while those who failed to do this came to be seen later on in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as increasingly archaic, one or another “sick man of Europe.” The new imperial state was equally removed from the Muscovite tradition as it was from any of the other incorporated territories, so at some point the need to make sense of the new imperial condition became of paramount importance. In addition, the model of the Cameralist state did not fit well into the diverse and vast social reality of the empire, so Russian rulers had to design an all-new imperial regime, as an ideology and a working state machine. The main significance of this story, in the editors’ view, is the very approach to writing a true longue durée story that is devoid of teleological structuralism and aware of the historical nature of concepts employed to tell it.
In the “Archive” section, extracts from the diary of Ekaterina Sakharova (1886−1963) are published with an introduction by Ilya Gerasimov. This document is a great illustration of the dialectics of past and future (the main theme of this issue of AI). A typical Russian intelligent keeping a diary during the epoch when the intelligentsia dominated the Russian intellectual scene, Sakharova constantly referred to the future in her diary – and this is what we expect from a diarist following the influential tradition established by Irina Paperno and the entire Soviet Subjectivity school. Yet the future is utterly vague in Sakharova’s diary: all her energy and attention is focused on constantly rewriting the past. From 1905 to 1922, Ekaterina Sakharova had gone through at least five major transformations of her worldview, as dramatic as going from endorsing revolutionary terrorism to taking an explicitly counterrevolutionary political stance. All these transformations coincided with the well-documented sea changes of Russian intelligentsia social orientations, or rather somewhat anticipated them. The diarist tried to present her latest change of heart each time as an “objective” and “predetermined” consequence of her previous experiences and thoughts, explicitly claiming that it was a final life decision and that nothing could change it in the future. Thus, Sakharova’s diary reveals a different dynamics of individual subjectivity: rather than presenting the work on her “self“ for the future, the text shows the author’s attempts to interiorize a new hegemonic public discourse by rewriting herself (her emotions, values, aspirations) in the past. A new future becomes possible by revisiting one’s own past, and this holds true not only in the case of the personal diary of one exemplary intelligent.
The public function of historians as custodians of normal time flow (making the future possible by analyzing the past as distinctively different from the present) is revealed in the forum “Does the History of Ukraine Have a Future?” (in the “Historiography” section). Twenty years ago the Slavic Review published a seminal article by Mark von Hagen “Does Ukraine Have a Future?” that elaborated a program for developing the History of Ukraine as a field of studies in its own right.^[2] In 2015, five Ukrainian historians, who entered the profession after the publication of von Hagen’s article (four of them have even graduated from college after 1996) shared their views of the state of the field, in Ukraine and abroad, and its prospects of development in their areas of expertise. Theirs is not a particularly optimistic assessment of the situation, but the very presence of highly professional scholars in their thirties and early forties, capable of elaborating a clear program for the future development of the field, is the most encouraging testimony to its endurance and potential.
To quote from the chapter by Guldi and Armitage published in this issue of Ab Imperio, we are “going forward by looking back.” The quality of our future depends directly on the quality of our thinking about the past.

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