The annual thematic program of Ab Imperio (AI) “Does the Past Have a Future?” has reserved issue 3/2015 “Future No More: Fighting Novelty” for a discussion of factors and actors that are resisting change. It was expected that most submissions for this issue would be focused on conservative or neoconservative forces obsessed with preserving the status quo. Instead, the actual contributions have turned to the most progressive or, at least, dynamic social groups and ideas that, nevertheless, compromise the outlook for the future by their fixation on the past as the ultimate precedent or yardstick. This is an unexpected turn that provides a more complex take on reality: apparently, the pathological fear of the future is a relatively marginal factor compared to other forms of blocking or restraining attempts to bring about newer and better conditions. As the materials published in this issue of the journal demonstrate, explicitly or indirectly, the most formidable threat to the future comes not from retrogrades but from those futurists who can envision it only in the image of the familiar past.
This becomes clear in the opening text – the Russian translation of Chapter 3 of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage published in the “Methodology and Theory” section (the Introduction and Chapters 1–2 have appeared in previous issues of AI). Developing their powerful argument about the dangers of “short-termism” as a horizon of societal imagination, in this chapter Guldi and Armitage set out on a mission to prove that history can be practically useful for what they identify as the most important social policies: the regulation of climate change, international governance, and inequality. The original promise of the book to show how the discipline of history is indispensable for the development of a more complex type of social thinking is replaced in this chapter with the idea of the utilitarian value of historical knowledge or applied history. Remarkably for their self-declared avant-garde historical theorizing, Guldi and Armitage essentially resort to the archaic moralist trope of “history that teaches lessons”. They insist that history “proves capable of … discerning which theories of the future are appropriate given the historical and present data that we have on hand” and that “historical data can provide not only models worthy of emulation but also warnings.”^[1] This ideal of history as a servant of politics is only too familiar to those of us who remember the role assigned to history by the Soviet regime (not unlike other authoritarian−ideological regimes of the twentieth century). Even greater threat of their reasoning is that it discards possibilities for a different future that is unbound by historical precedents (either positive or negative). Why should our future be conditioned by institutions or patterns of the past? What if these had been abandoned long ago for good reasons? Starting with a methodologically progressive (and politically left-leaning) critique of short-termism, Guldi and Armitage inevitably arrive at the most conservative conclusions simply because fixation on the past is reactionary by definition, regardless of one’s degree of personal revolutionarism. Suggesting the example of Paris during the Restoration or organic farming over “five centuries of the past” as proof of the claim that “Data mined over generations in the past can give us insight into the future of sustainability,”^[2] they successfully prove their “ecological” point but miserably fail on other counts (social equality and international justice). In their praise for early modern ecological models, Guldi and Armitage completely forget that no matter how “green” it was, this was the world of surviving at a mere subsistence level for the absolute majority of farmers and lower-class consumers of their products. The authors forget that European cities thrived thanks not only to the development of local horticulture but also to the exploitation of colonies, with essential food stock and cheap cotton fabrics produced by “Orientals” or even slaves. Of course, after changing gears and mechanically turning from sustainability to other topics on their agenda and using different sets of examples, they achieve equally convincing rhetorical victories, but only for the reader who has by then forgotten their prior arguments.
The fiery radical rhetoric cannot conceal the fundamental conservatism of flawed arguments. “A more sustainable agriculture of the past” is simply a historical fact. The real historical challenge to society is to achieve for the first time ever a high standard of living for the majority of the population at a minimal cost to the environment. No precedents can teach us how, in our postmodern mass society, to accomplish the task of giving to many what had been available only to the few. Even if historians volunteer to validate the most radical political plans (whether statist or anti-establishment), by locating seemingly suitable precedents in their annals, they will only block the search for novel paths to the future. The much more productive task of history is to cultivate sophisticated social analysis enjoying the luxury of verifying conclusions on the actual examples of the past. The skill can be productively applied in any unexpected circumstances, whereas the “lessons of history” are good only in structurally identical situations. Historical studies do not and cannot promise to provide more than they should – an informed, theoretically sophisticated colloquy on the complexity of human experiences in the past. How we use lessons drawn from these colloquies depends in part on our ability to avoid romanticization and simplification of the past for the sake of the future.
The “History” section features two articles united by a focus on the role of the past in shaping the imagination of the people who are deciding the future of Ukraine today. This role is very significant because it moves beyond historical memory and myth. Instead, it helps to consolidate the emerging social solidarities and make sense of new political experiences, while at the same time causing the prospects for a truly new future to be overcast by the shadows of a glorious and intolerably inhumane past. Christopher Gilley puts the phenomenon of field commanders in modern-day Ukraine into historical perspective, as a modern incarnation of the tradition of otamanshchina (warlordism) dating back to the post-1917 Civil War. Of course, this is as much an imagined tradition as otamanshchina of the early twentieth century was a reinvention of the Cossack traditions of early modern times. It has been preserved not by some mystical spiritual medium but by the work of entrepreneurs of culture such as historians and writers – another example of “historical precedents” that tend to obstruct the creation of a new future by publicizing certain “lessons of history” rather than facilitating it. The role of historical memory in the public sphere of modern Ukraine is discussed in the article by Serhy Yekelchyk, who reviews the quest to promote new national heroes in Ukrainian society over the past quarter-century. This has been a manifold and multilayered process involving competing and interacting influences of the Soviet cultural legacy, the myths cherished by the Ukrainian émigré diaspora, and the imagery promoted by modern mass culture. One can easily notice the correlation of the “historical precedent” (even if constructed by modern historical mythology) with the vector toward a predictably troublesome future. The cult of national heroes of the past leads to the conceptualization of Euromaidan as a “national revolution” that is bound to repeat all the “family traits” of the past: populist authoritarianism, ethnically exclusive nationalism, and holistic ideology. Euromaidan as a revolution of civic dignity, a manifestation of solidarity based on cultural hybridity and political pluralism has had no precedents in the past, and thus cannot be validated through “lessons of history.” This history-defying future of Ukraine is still possible, but it is at odds with the history-rooted and historicist future of the national revolution. These articles demonstrate how history dependence subsume human experience and agency by the seemingly more powerful cultural forces that shape the future of a community as a nation. They also remind us, contrary to Guldi and Armitage, that history can be a mighty enemy of diversity and subjectivity.
The elusiveness of historical reconstructions of “precedents” as self-fulfilling prophecies is demonstrated in the article by Sergey Krikh in the “Newest Mythologies” section. Kirkh tells the story of Soviet and early post-Soviet studies of the ancient Sumer “empire” that became trapped in mirroring projections of historical analogies and the uncritical use of terminology. Its rise in the early 1930s, in a public atmosphere of despotic statism, had informed the language and models used by the first Soviet historians of the Sumer kingdom. Sumer was interpreted as an ancient centralized state with a planned economy relying on extensive bureaucracy and forced labor – a subconscious self-portrait of a different epoch and land … Thus construed, after Stalin’s death, Sumer became an idiom for implicit criticism of the Soviet socioeconomic model – as an important “historical precedent.” The “lesson of history” drawn by that image of Sumer (which had already become obsolete in light of more recent scholarship) predicted a grim future for the Soviet Union. The collapse of the USSR was perceived as ultimate proof of the historical validity of conclusions drawn from the history of Sumer, even though the parallels between the two societies could not be logically substantiated, and the idiom embodied by Sumer no longer corresponded to the modern understanding of the Sumer kingdom. The story told by Krikh reminds historians that the past, which they expect to foretell the future, is but a mirror of their own worldview. The “mirror effect” is produced consciously (if unwillingly) in the attempt to recognize an outline of the future in past events. Paradoxically, by treating history as only history, narrated in the past perfect tense, historians make it not only more transparent (like a window rather than a looking glass) but also more suggestive about the future – equally unique and spontaneous.
A story of conservative futurism (shaping the future in accordance with the image of an imagined past) that blocks the prospects for creative and sustained development of society is told in the “ABC” section, featuring a new chapter of the history course “A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia.” Titled “Designing National Empire”, it covers the second half of the nineteenth century stressing the fundamental continuity between the regimes of Alexander II and Alexander III, while also highlighting the vital difference between them. The phenomenon of the “Great Reforms” is interpreted as a coordinated (albeit not fully self-conscious) attempt to rebuild the Russian Empire on the national principle – the most progressive at the time, that in Western Europe had proved its unrivaled efficiency in mobilizing the society in support of national political regimes. In the absence of any single normative understanding of what “nation” is, the reforms opened several possible historical paths for the Russian Empire. Implicitly, they laid the foundation for an “imperial nation” – still a nonexistent concept at the time (and one that remains strikingly underdeveloped), while institutionally contributing to the emergence of a civic nation, and rhetorically appealing mostly to the simpler and more familiar ethnoconfessional national principle. The regime of Alexander III continued this work and made a decisive step toward actually implementing in practice the project of national empire – only understood unequivocally as the Russian ethnonational empire. Accordingly, the regime censored or overrode all alternative readings of nation implicitly present in the program of the Great Reforms – something that has been branded “counterreforms” (a misleading term, given that the only element rejected in the policies of Alexander II was the multiethnic and civic thrust of some of the reforms but not the reforms themselves). In doing so, the regime of Alexander III relied on the culturally constructed understanding of Russian history and the meaning of Russianness. Using this historical image as the blueprint for politics, the regime sealed all the alternative versions of Russia’s future and effectively put the Russian Empire on the brink of collapse: it had been empirically proven that ethnonationalism was inconsistent with a polity embodying a delicate balance of the imperial situation. The proliferation of a social vision permeated with ethnonationalism symbolically decomposed and disintegrated the hitherto entangled imperial space, prompting all sorts of separatist movements, and it alienated the neighboring nations (including longtime strategic allies, Germany and Austria) by aggressively enforcing the national borders of Russia imagined as a homogeneous political and cultural entity. By the time of his death, all the undersirable ramifications of Alexander III’s policies had become evident: the ideal of autarky had led to Russia’s dependence on foreign capital and imports of machinery; the cult of international sovereignty resulted in the autocracy’s dependence on the alliance with republican France. It was up to the regime of his successor, Nicholas II, to explore new, untrodden paths to the future, or to continue implementing policies rooted in historical myths that had already proved to lead nowhere.
An important take on the problem of obstructing the view of the future by basing it on the past is offered in the article by Sergei Abashin in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section. His study of life scenarios of labor migrants from Uzbekistan to Russia presents a seemingly opposite perspective on time: migrants’ sojourn in Russia is structured by the ideal of returning home and restoring the wholeness of the past existence of undivided families. Yet, as Abashin argues, migration itself is an intrinsic element of the family cycle and domestic economy, and the dream of returning home is inseparable from the practices of migration that help to reproduce stable family structures and social functions. Variations in migration patterns and changing contexts of migrant and native “homes” can lead to a number of scenarios in the future. Thus, despite its normative rigidity, the public discourse that structures the experience of Uzbek migrants tacitly tolerates forms of the future that are not sanctioned by the discourse of eventually returning home – that is, if these futures are framed in terms of the myth of eventual homecoming.
If “the past is a foreign country” (and “they do things differently there”), then the future is possible only as a decisive emigration from the past and its practices, and especially from any futuristic plans rooted in that foreign past.

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