The concluding parts of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage published in Russian translation in the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue vividly illustrate the problems in the field of history that encouraged them to write their Manifesto in the first place. The most immediate problem is the decline of public demand for historical expertise, which has been translated over the past decade into increasing discrimination against the humanities disciplines (including history) by university administrations in America and Western Europe. The futuristic announcement of the “end of history” by Francis Fukuyama with the collapse of the Second World (in 1989−1991) seems to become common knowledge a generation later – just at the time when the rising demand for a politics of the future amid the global economic, social, political, and ecological crises has proved that the report of the death of history “was an exaggeration.” Many in the field of history felt the need for a new program for the humanities that would outline the role of historians in the postindustrial, information-era society, and explain their importance both to neoliberal university administrators who were cutting “redundant” programs and to students frustrated by the soaring costs of education and seeking more practical specialties. It is in this atmosphere of anxiety and anticipation that Guldi and Armitage launched their Manifesto.
In scholarship, a failure is almost as important as a success, allowing a rhetorical and conceptual experiment to be staged and then analyzing the reasons for an outcome that did not live up to initial expectations. In previous issues of Ab Imperio we have discussed methodological flaws, as we see them, in the assumptions of the authors of The History Manifesto. Chapter 4 and the Conclusion, which are published in this issue of the journal, contain practical recommendations for historians and universities that want to “win the world” “before it is too late.” The recipe is simple: historians should develop the skills of administrators of “big data sets” and interpret them to anyone interested in their presumably unique expertise over long time spans. They should also strive to balance the official data with “silenced voices” and sensitively account for specific contexts of the data’s origin. The beneficiaries and addressees of such longue duree historical interpretations of mass data will be politicians, businesspeople, administrators, and the general public.
A typical irony of history is, of course, that this ideal future is someone else’s past – specifically, that of the post-Soviet societies. Already a quarter-century ago they stumbled upon the famous question raised by a desperate French officer in 1940, as cited by Marc Bloch, “Are we to believe that history has betrayed us?” In the 1990s, historians attempted to prove their importance to the new society by trying to serve new ideological causes through applying their specific interpretative expertise and knowledge to solving the most pressing political and social issues at the time, as well as by developing practical skills they thought to be marketable – just as Guldi and Armitage recommend. In fanciless transitional societies of Russia, Ukraine, or Kazakhstan, the grand new ideological and public service causes were found not in environmentalism but in nationalism and statism, and the useful skills – during the pre-Internet era – were identified as record-keeping and office management (first of all, in historical and corporate archives). This turn to record-keeping and big data in general was also inspired by the opening of previously inaccessible state and secret service archives. Retrieval and publication of data in their totality (in fact, comparable to today’s belief in exhaustive databases) and their historical interpretation became a recipe for making history relevant for the future. History departments rushed to open “commercial” specializations for those wishing to study record-keeping and archival management, while history graduates began pursuing careers in the security forces and political party machines, joining nationalist movements, public commemorative projects, and the like. Many of those who remained in the profession turned to producing barely concealed celebrations of power-holders by writing biographical studies of great administrators of the empire and the USSR.
We can see the results of that early version of historians’ “manifest destiny.” The illusion that the archival revolution and the “emancipation” of large quantities of data can change the way people think about policy and society proved to be futile, just as did the belief in historians’ special expert position vis-à-vis the data of diverse origins, and their unique skills as interpreters of long structures and patterns determining the present and the future. On a more practical level, Russian security forces everywhere – in the Caucasus, in Ukraine, in Syria – have proved to be particularly good at interpreting the dead bodies they produce, invariably recognizing in the victims high-ranking terrorist leaders with horrifying résumés, always post factum. Russian progovernment political activists seem to be more concerned with the “long past” than with the present. At the same time, the pursuit of practical usefulness has led history departments, even in major Russian universities, to lose not only academic standards but even their names, as they turn into institutes of “international relations,” “service,” or “tourism.” Why should we think that serving (or at least wholeheartedly embracing) the hegemonic ideology of environmentalism will be less professionally debilitating to historians than serving nationalism, or that training to administer databases will become more rewarding than administering shelves containing paper files? The claims of intellectuals to special status as interpreters of knowledge have long been recognized by critical thinkers/historians as associated with some of the most terrorizing political regimes in history, from nineteenth-century colonialism to twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorships.
If history is about explaining contemporaneity by assembling exhaustive “big data” from the past (another version of the “total history” project) so that computers can establish long-term structures and patterns, and then develop policy recommendations for the present and the future on the basis of computer analysis, then university administrators everywhere are right: it is a waste of scarce resources to sustain the existing network of history departments. But if history is about sustaining the quality of social thinking and political imagination by (again, in the words of Marc Bloch) “telling stories” seemingly unrelated to our everyday concerns – and thus, much less censored by political considerations – then those administrators are dead wrong. The stakes are high in this seemingly abstract discussion, as the collapse of democratic institutions in Russia and several other post-Soviet countries has been justified using arguments very similar to those advanced in The Manifesto – of course, under specific post-Soviet conditions. The neoliberal technocratic utopia is as responsible for the phenomenon of Putinism, as are the systemic corruption and personal unscrupulousness and greed or historical legacies of authoritarianism. True, Guldi and Armitage imply that their longue duree vision of history for the future is transnational and global in nature. Still, their ethos of service to political, social, and economic concerns of the present and the provision of expert opinions for governments and political movements as the major justification for history’s relevance as a discipline will inevitably transform the profession into an expert bureau of national governments and national political movements. As studies of the modern Russian politics of history have shown, Putin’s ideologists believe, just as Guldi and Armitage do, that the main deficiencies of traditional history writing include

A lost sense of public purpose; a weakening grasp on the big picture; … a proliferation of “histories” rather than “history”; greater prestige for novelty and discovery rather than synthesis and theory.^[1]

When a multiplicity of histories, historical voices, and the very positions of storytellers (informed by their cultural, political, regional, gender, or any other identity) is replaced with one – even the most global, synthetic, objective – “history,” and when this takes place de facto within the context of a national academe and political system, the future loses its variability and open-endedness. Moreover, in this future of “big data,” there is little comfort even for politically loyal historians and their history departments. And this is for a good reason: a society with a broken history needs no professional historians.
In this issue, which concludes Ab Imperio’s 2015 annual theme “Does the Past Have a Future?” we have to admit that fixation on the past by itself badly serves the task of imagining a better future. Armitage and Guldi seem to suggest a path for the discipline of history that substitutes one set of narrative categories – those of a nation, civilization, confession, or class – with another, and thus again calls our attention to the way in which the future materializes into history through people whose social imagination has been shaped by reading about and listening to the past. Facts are important, but even more important are the language used in telling them and the abstract notions that structure the plot: “nation” and “ethnicity,” “religion” and “class,” “progress” and “Providence,” “ancestral lands” and “international law,” and so forth. Historical thinking is a double process of simultaneous use and rethinking of analytical categories, a continual questioning of the way history is articulated in today’s contexts. History is thus not just a way of thinking about the past but a mode of thinking that is articulated at the intersection of the past, the present, and the future.
This intersection is visible in the “Newest Mythologies” and “History” sections of this issue, which feature articles highlighting the moment of history making in the “present” as a kind of transmission belt of the perceived past into some definite future. One article focuses on the initial stage of this process (in the past); another looks at the intermediate moment of “recoding” the past into a new future; and the third article shows how the future itself modifies the intentions expressed “at present” and the meaning of the past envisioned at that present moment.
Maria Chernysheva revisits the story of the emergence of the aesthetic and ideological concept of “realism” in the 1870s and 1880s in Russia, which would become so powerful in the twentieth century. Traditionally, scholars focus on the populist, democratic, and revolutionary origins of realism, typically associated with the name of Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernysheva reminds us of the other side of realism, which, parallel to totalitarianism in the interpretation of Hannah Arendt, appears to have been rooted in colonialism, imperial officialdom, and the privileged classes. Realism as demonstrated by the famous painter of battle scenes, Vasilii Vereshchagin, was of this type. Vereshchagin’s art was unlike realist art in the more familiar interpretation – as art that seeks out the “archetypical” features of contemporary society to be subjected to critical depiction. Vereshchagin did not attempt to uncover some “real inner meaning” of events and objects, but instead meticulously documented Russia’s conquests in Central Asia. The importance of realism as a method was underscored by Vereshchagin’s production of commercially successful photocopied reproductions of his paintings: they were valued more highly than actual photographs of the same sites or events. This realism glorified the reality itself and did not call for any “better future” or criticize any “real problems” of the society. Given realism’s aspiration to provide blueprints for scenarios in politics and social or cultural life, Vereshchagin – who was Jean-Léon Gérôme’s student and one of the most prominent figures of Russian Orientalism – seemed to have striven to embed Orientalism and imperial contexts in the most “real” depictions of the world by means of the most modern technology. The alternative (“Vereshchagin”) line of realism in Russian artistic tradition sheds new light on the cult of Soviet realism in the twentieth century, including the meaning and the roots of socialist realism itself.
In the “History” section, Andrei Cusco, Oleg Grom, and Flavius Solomon look at the centennial celebrations in 1912, commemorating the incorporation of Bessarabia into the Russian Empire as a moment of truth of sorts. Nothing “real” happened in 1912: Bessarabia remained a backward province within the mighty Russian Empire, while the recently created Romanian Kingdom could not even dream of advancing any territorial claims in Russia. And yet, the arrival of a new nation-centered language for discussing the past of Bessarabia predetermined the future political and even military conflicts over the status of the region. It did not matter that as a self-fashioned nation-state Romania could not logically claim sovereignty over historical polities (including Bessarabia) that were established on nonethnocultural principles (dynastic, territorial, vassal to a common sovereign, etc.). It was also not important that after the devastating wars and epidemics of the early nineteenth century, less than 48 percent of the population of the province cited “Moldavian and Romanian” as their native tongue in 1897. What mattered was the failure of Russian propaganda to conceptualize the region in any nonnational way and to secure the effective economy of such a conceptualization, while Romanian propaganda forcefully advanced the vision of Bessarabia as a Romanian “national” territory. The imperial anniversary of 1912 proved the inability of the empire to check the challenge of nationalism. Since Bessarabia was an unlikely “Russian national” land, its “Romanian national” future was predetermined, disregarding any formal concerns about population statistics or international law.
In the article “Safeguarding ‘Negative Historical Values’ for the Future?” Julia Röttjer tells the story of an unlikely candidate for UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage list: the former concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. When the camp was granted this status in 1979, the authorities in communist Poland were thinking in categories of Polish national martyrdom, while museum specialists planned the preservation of authenticity of the site – from material objects to landscape. Today, it is clear that Auschwitz-Birkenau as a historical site has evolved in a direction that was not anticipated or even intended back in 1979. The meaning of authenticity has changed, and even the meaning of the historical monument itself: much to the dismay of Polish nationalists, it is a prominent reminder of the Holocaust more than of anything else. As Polish society came to face the unraveling story of the Poles’ participation in the Holocaust, it is even more striking to see the evolving memorial meanings of the site. This development could already be anticipated in 1979, when the place was ascribed the function of a site of memory: as a discursive object par excellence, rather than nontextual material evidence, it became open to reinterpretations following modifications of the public discourse.
The articles in the “Archive” section look at this story from another angle. The rubric features three interviews with Holocaust survivors, who were born in Poland, deported to the inner territories of the USSR after the Soviet occupation of 1939, and survived the war either in the Soviet rear, or fighting the Nazis in Polish army units on the Eastern or Western fronts. The introductory essay by Julia Bernstein and the concluding article by Oleg Budnitskii contextualize these life stories. The repressive Soviet regime spared tens of thousands deportees from the Holocaust, and although they survived repressions and malnutrition at the hands of the Soviets, they encountered deadly anti-Jewish violence in Poland when they returned there after the war. Traumatized by the Nazi genocide of Jews, those who made their way to Germany with the Soviet army brought with them indiscriminate vengeance and deadly violence to the local population. Thus we see that the most radical change in political circumstances cannot break the cycle of genocidal violence if the social imagery remains unchanged, focused on “nationalities” as closed ethnocultural communities characterized by collective responsibility. The imagery itself became prominent in the early 1930s or even before, in Poland, Germany, and the USSR alike, in relatively peaceful times. Jews, Poles, and Germans became hostages of this powerful mode of social imagination, with wars started and ended that changed the fates of individuals but not the general outlook for the “future.”
In the “ABC” section, a new chapter of the history course “A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia” covers the genesis and rise of the revolutionary tradition in the Russian Empire, until the early twentieth century. The chapter shows that revolutionarism represents a quite unique type of social thinking that is entirely concentrated on the image of an ideal future and is practically unaffected by the actual situation “at present.” Revolutionarism emerges out of the fundamental conflict of the imperial situation of manifold differences and conflicting interests, as the pure analytical pursuit of projects of ideal accommodation of that conflict. It grows strong only if official social institutions and structures fail to provide a more competitive arrangement. Then a new future starts after a literally revolutionary rupture with the past, and a “true history” begins.
Finally, the article by Vadim Osin in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section brings us back to the central theme of The History Manifesto by Guldi and Armitage: how to avoid “the end of history” as a discipline and professional occupation. Osin explores the development of the discipline of political science in post-Soviet Ukraine. In the past, there was a precedent − Soviet-type social sciences. There is also a clear vision of the ideal future of the discipline (exemplified by U.S. political science). The question is how to build a link between the two stages. As one can see from the article, post-Soviet social scientists took the wrong path in mimicking the style of a field they do not belong to, and proving their practical usefulness to anyone able to remunerate them – exactly what Armitage and Guldi propose to historians. This path has led them nowhere. Luckily, the article also suggests a more productive strategy: to understand the specificity of one’s historical situation, to thoroughly work out the unique material available only locally, and to communicate it professionally in a universally recognizable analytical language, within the framework of globally relevant concerns.
The impasse of past and future can be overcome by literally “making history,” which, for historians, means telling quality stories – short and long – about the past, but in a way that resonates with the passions and concerns of people today.

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