Thematic issues of Ab Imperio sometimes acquire a distinctive genre when most of the materials “click” with each other not only in content but also in the scope of approach or even tone. Naturally, this genre could resemble a “lecture,” but in our experience there also have been “variety shows,” “war chronicles,” and a few other types. Finishing the work on this issue of AI, the editors realized with surprise that here we have a thriller. Of course, this is an “academic” thriller, with almost no instances of open violence mentioned in the articles, which only enhances the suspense for those who can see how almost invisible structural transformations bring about the most dramatic consequences. These seminal changes are not merely invisible, they are masked by deceivingly familiar settings. The shock effect comes in when we realize how misleading the appearance was – indicating the direct opposite of the result. More than failed expectations, the thriller effect is produced by the realization that the basic conventions of the language we use to describe and analyze reality have failed us.
Consider, for instance, the title of the article by Oleg Budnitskii introducing the publication of documents in the “Archive” section: “‘It Seems That Soon Russians Could Be Found Only among the Jews’” (From the Correspondence between Vasily Maklakov and Oskar Gruzenberg).” This is a quote from the correspondence between two renowned lawyers and public figures of late imperial Russia, now émigrés in France, during the first year Hitler was in power (January 1933–January 1934). The newest political developments in Europe led Maklakov and Gruzenberg to discuss the problems of nation and dictatorships, reflecting on their own personal and professional experiences and the question of the “nature” of the Russian people and Russian revolution. The idea that in emigration, “Russians” in the old sense of the “imperial nation” (not just the narrow ethnoconfessional community) “could be found only among the Jews” would seem horrifying only to bigots. The real thriller begins with the very realization that neither Maklakov and Gruzenberg in 1933 (or 1913) nor we today have adequate means to express the simple idea of Russianness as a “transethnic” nation, not just political but also cultural. In this sense, even the dualism of russkii/rossiiskii is insufficient because it implies that russkie Russians are ethnoconfessionally and culturally homogeneous. This habitual assumption ignores the variety of russkie’s physical types and dialects, their essential “Russianness” despite belonging to communities of Old Believers or Baptists, or atheists. What is shocking is not that Jews can be as “Russian” as anybody else but that the familiar and self-evident Russianness appears to be a total stranger – a much more terrifying figure than any familiar enemy.
Speaking of enemies: just ten years later, in Germany, on the other side of the fundamental divide “us vs. them,” the ultimate foe of imperial and Soviet Russia, a leading Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, had his share of shock. In his diaries, analyzed by Yuri Radchenko in the “Newest Mythologies” section, Rosenberg sinks into despair trying to solve the conundrum of how to secure the support of East European nationalities in the fight against the Soviet regime without risking loss of control over the occupied territories. “Thus, the decisive problem is whether it is possible to keep [the loyalty of] Caucasians, Ukrainians, and so on while guaranteeing Russians the development of their nation between Moscow and the Urals, plus Siberia?”^[1] The Nazi ultranationalist regime could rely on local national movements to weaken its enemies, but it lacked the resources required to subdue diverse populations by crude force alone, while it did not know the secret of coordinating these populations by any other means. The Nazis could promote genocidal ethnic cleansings of horrific proportions, but this only emphasized the conspicuous inability to provide a foundation for sustained intersocietal cooperation. Perhaps the most horrible secret of the Third Reich (and the explanation for its insane destructiveness) was the principal inability of nationalism to build even a short-lived empire, even an evil one.
The historical Russian Empire almost collapsed in 1905 just after a decade of sustained attempts by the regime of Nicholas II to implement the project of a “Russian national empire.” A new chapter of the history course “A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia” published in the “ABC” section covers this period and argues that the Revolution of 1905 was directed not so much “against” the regime but “beyond” it. The imperial regime “forgot” the imperial practices of managing differences and imagined itself ruling a nation-state of “true Russian people.” Locked in the virtual reality of an “imagined community” in a nonexistent homogeneous and obedient Russian ethnoconfessional nation, the regime of Nicholas II completely ignored the real social revolution that had taken place by the early twentieth century: the rise of the urban mass society. Even modern forms of Russian nationalism were viewed by the regime with contempt because of their autonomous and unpredictable dynamics. Thus, Nicholas II made himself irrelevant to all dynamic social forces in the empire and brought the country to the disastrous war with Japan (1904–1905) by assuming a chimerical agenda: posing as a national leader while obstructing any forms of national self-organization. The Revolution of 1905 was just the peak of the “rising of the masses” as a social process that had found no accommodation by the regime. This explains its unusual character: the revolution had no clear political center as an alternative locus of authority and no organized armed forces struggling to overthrow the government, just a discrete continuum of manifestations by all kinds of social, political, and economic groups. Pursuing their distinctive, often mutually contradictory collective interests, these groups formed a mass rising not so much against Nicholas II as against the imperial order itself. Unable to offer a “new deal” to the diverse populations of North Eurasia, the emperor and empire lost relevance and hence any ability to mobilize resources in their defense. The 1905 October Manifesto introducing the constitutional regime became the game changer: it gave the Russian Empire a second chance, and returned the role of supreme arbiter to Nicholas II.
If the stubborn march of the regime toward its doom in 1894–1904 reminds one of a standard thriller featuring a determined psycho, the subsequent decade presents a much more dramatic story, with greatly enhanced suspense. The political part of the post-1905 thriller is better known: it seems that the emperor and his immediate circle did not quite understand what exactly had happened to them and how to avoid a repetition of the crisis. Changes that were much more unexpected took the stage behind the scenes, and these are the focus of the forum “‘Marred’ Hybridity: Archaeology of the Language of Diversity.” Four articles of the forum, followed by concluding comments by Michael Kunichika, discuss the development of new humanities and human sciences at the turn of the twentieth century: archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology. On the surface, they are united by the same protagonist: Academician Nikolai Marr (1865–1934). Before his linguistic theory was publicly denounced by Stalin in 1950, it enjoyed the status of “Marxist” orthodoxy in the Soviet Union for over two decades. But before turning to language theory, prior to the 1917 Revolution Marr was known as an archaeologist who made some very important findings in Transcaucasia. He became a member of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1912 for his studies of Oriental literatures and ethnography (including archaeology).
To professional philologists, Nikolai Marr the linguist embodies the ultimate villain: for many years, with the support of the Soviet political machine, Marrist “pseudoscience” had been suppressing comparative linguistics and destroying the lives of scores of linguists who opposed it. In the history of science and public memory, Marrism “rhymes” with Lysenkoism, another clique of pseudo-scientists supported by Stalin, who were responsible for the elimination of genetics and many geneticists in the USSR. At the same time, even Marr’s vehement opponents acknowledge his scholarly merit as an archaeologist. Only one has to take Marr at his word (his own publications) for it to assess the nature of his archaeological findings, as almost all the material evidence tragically and mysteriously disappeared in 1918. Thus, the story of Marr changes from mystery to horror to mystery again: Where are his archaeological artifacts? How did the maverick language theory of the old regime academician known for his rather conservative political views become the new Soviet orthodoxy? Why would Stalin publicly criticize his own pet “pseudoscience” (particularly since there was no change of heart toward the structurally similar Lysenkoism)? As the materials in the forum attempt to address some of these questions, it becomes clear that the story of Marr is just the tip of the iceberg of the real thriller.
Ekaterina Pravilova turns to the story of Marr the archaeologist. His excavations of Ani, the medieval capital of the ancient Armenian kingdom (ninth to eleventh century AD) made him famous, and turned the excavation site into a popular public attraction. Pravilova registers Marr’s resolute opposition to any attempts to “nationalize” Ani as “Armenian” in the modern national sense. To the dismay of nationalists and even his own nation-centered colleagues, Marr regarded Ani as an intercultural phenomenon that should be analyzed in the broad comparative perspective of Oriental Studies. This story is continued in the article by Louise McReynolds, who explains Marr’s methodological stance by his political preferences: a staunch antinationalist, Marr had a vision of an idealized imperial political entity, one that embraced the ethnoreligious equality of its subjects. McReynolds suggests that this ideological and methodological “imperialism” of Marr explains his support for the USSR as a union of republics.
Keeping the focus of previous articles on the pre-1917 period, Alexander Dmitriev shifts the attention from archaeology to philology, the future major occupation of Marr. By adding to the picture two other scholars of “non-Russian” ethnoconfessional background – a Pole, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, and a Ukrainian, Ahatanhel Кrymskii (born to a Tatar father and Polish mother), Dmitriev stages a mental experiment. He comes to the conclusion that political views did not precede and inform the methodological preferences of scholars, but, to the contrary, were developed in response to a more fundamental epistemological shift. This shift occurred in the late nineteenth century when philology departed from its classical Humboldtian model focused on clear forms and direct genealogies, and modern linguistics emerged, heavily borrowing from methodologies of the natural sciences. New philologists began studying the complex sphere of languages and cultures outside the framework of preset hierarchies (e.g., of pure “languages” and inferior “dialects”), which had very important implications for the conceptualization of social diversity. The three protagonists of Dmitriev’s article embodied three main paradigms of political response to the new epistemological situation. To use McReynolds’s formula, Marr stood for an idealized imperial political entity. It should be added only that this was a modernized empire, insofar as the historical Russian Empire was very far from this ideal, and even ideologically it could not provide any workable solution as to what this ideal should look like. Baudouin de Courtenay was a federalist, according to Dmitriev: unlike Marr, he recognized individual nations as self-contained entities, but insisted on their political coexistence because their complete separation was all but impossible in practice. Finally, Ahatanhel Кrymskii developed a position that in many ways anticipated the early postcolonial analysis of the 1950s.
The full implications of the Marrist “thriller” are elaborated in the article by Ilya Gerasimov, Marina Mogilner, and Sergey Glebov, who reconstruct the “plot” of a true suspense story behind the rise, transformation, and fall of Marrism during the first half of the twentieth century. Over the last decades of the old regime in Russia, fields of modern knowledge as diverse as soil studies, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology developed a methodological approach that would later be called “structuralism.” Early Russian structuralism was based on broad comparative analysis that identified “elemental parts” of any complex system and studied their mutual relationships, beyond any preexisting hierarchies of “supreme” and “subaltern” elements. To be sure, the imposition of a value-laden hierarchy over a reconstructed “structure” remained a possibility, and was used, for instance, in some racist, nationalist physical anthropology. But this possibility was a matter of political choice rather than an embedded condition of the episteme itself – as was the case with classical (Humboldtian) philology. Moreover, by acknowledging the principle absence of any “pure forms” and accepting the idea of the composite nature of all observable phenomena, Russian modern human sciences accepted the idea of hybridity as a norm (while for classical humanities “hybridity” was a synonym for the contamination and hence degradation of pure “high” cultural forms).
Gerasimov, Mogilner, and Glebov characterize this development as the “late imperial epistemological revolution,” with implications of enormous importance. This epistemological revolution became possible and had potential in the context of the imperial situation and in the ideologically pluralistic regime of the late empire. Yet a political language of hybridity that could develop and popularize ideological formulas on the basis of the new human sciences failed to emerge (although Dmitriev’s article shows that this was a practical possibility). Soviet constructivism of the 1920s became an offshoot of prerevolutionary methodological structuralism and the imperial epistemological revolution in general, and declined so soon (in the 1930s) precisely because social imagery based on the idea of hybridity became obsolete, as survivals of the unstable and limited pluralism of the NEP era. Marrism was a peculiar remnant of the late imperial epistemological revolution of hybridity, which became successful due to the political opportunism of its proponents and the fact that it was used as a metalanguage for describing social diversity until the new Marxist canon was fully developed by 1938. The upheaval of World War II delayed the official correction of the metalanguage of social hybridity based on the controversial Marrist linguistic theory of “crossing” until Stalin’s “linguistic turn” of 1950 formally stripped Marrism of official support as a metalanguage of human sciences (with potential as a political theory).
Thus, the political revolution of 1917 brought about the literally “counterrevolutionary” episteme of “simple things” and the project of an ideological state based on that episteme. What is usually perceived as revolutionary art of the 1920s appears to be largely censored inertia of the late imperial epistemological revolution that turned out to be far too avant-garde. As in a powerful thriller, we observe the somewhat illogical course of events but, until the very end, we remain blind to the hidden mechanism that put them in motion. Luckily, we were left a clue: “language.” Even though Marrist language theory is regarded by most linguists as an abomination, it opens a new perspective on a seemingly familiar story as a “metalanguage,” valuable not so much for communicating a certain content but for its approach to coding reality itself.
In this regard, silence or “illegible” language is no less terrifying, even if there is no greater drama hidden behind the “regular” story. Or, rather, the real suspense is produced by realizing that the traumatic inability to communicate one’s inner self results from the emptiness and lack of any distinctive content. The thriller becomes a parody (a sort of “Silence of the Hams”) and then turns back into a horror story in the article by Ilya Kukulin published under the rubric “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science”: “From ‘Basterds’ to ‘Patriots’: The Rise and Fall of One Internet Subculture in the ‘Force Field’ of the Modern Russian Political Regime.” During the first decade of this century, a new subculture emerged in the Runet (the Russian Internet). It promoted a version of deliberately distorted Russian language, first of all by systematically altering the orthographic and punctuation norms. This “padonkafskii” language (given the misspelled usage of the original word, it seems more accurate to translate it as “basterds,” as in Tarantino’s movie) was promoted by pro-Kremlin political entrepreneurs to develop new strategies of communication: performances of cynical transgression and symbolic violence through the humiliation of counterparts. Cyberbullying became a distinctive style of seemingly nonconformist subculture, and was already used by the regime in this capacity. Today, basterds’ language has gone out of style in the Runet. Instead, the role of transmitters of an ultra-cynical worldview and proponents of symbolic violence has been assumed by officialdom. The preponderance of basterds’ language during the previous decade cleared the ground for hate-speech and symbolic violence in the public sphere as an acceptable, attractive, and even necessary format of public communication. The transformation of the demonstratively nonconformist subculture in the official mainstream seems amazing, and the pidgin Russian of the basterds sounds as funny as the insane allegations uttered by Russia’s top politicians today. What is truly horrible is the fact that Russian society en masse enthusiastically accepts these allegations, the style of politics, and the politics of style of the regime.
It seems hard to believe that a century ago Russian culture was capable of producing the most avant-garde epistemological revolution of “hybridity,” while today it has to borrow the language to express its most mundane experiences from various basterds.

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This is the way we introduce Ab Imperio’s new annual theme for 2016: “Situating in Empire: Agencies and Subjectivities in Imperial Spaces.” The first issue of each annual volume usually tends to lean toward theory, and this issue 1/2016, “Subjects of Empire, Objects of Governance: Imperial Agencies and Agents,” is no different. One has to remember, however, that “theory” does not necessarily imply vague philosophical speculation and the use of obscure vocabularies by shrewd literary scholars. In the Ab Imperio project, theory is valued inasmuch as it opens new ways to see the familiar, and this “defamiliarization” (literally, “estrangement” in Shklovskii’s terms) can be quite shocking – a real thriller.