Contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio look at how the imperial situation is experienced “from within” – by ordinary people, politicians, and social scientists trying to make sense of the surrounding reality.
The asystemic diversity of the imperial situation reveals itself most visibly in a post-imperial or pre-imperial society. Indeed, when the irregularity and multidimensionality of diversity cannot be blamed on the “backwardness” of a formally imperial regime, the problem of their just and rational accommodation comes to the forefront of scholarly and political thought. The modern social imaginary classifies differences in universal categories organized according to a single logical approach: by social criteria, or by gender, ethnicity, religion, economic or political status, and so on. Whatever does not fit into this one-dimensional and precise grid of categories (for example, when an ethnic group cannot be identified with any domestic territory) produces an acute cognitive dissonance. It is mostly this dissonance that releases the genocidal potential of modernity – a much debated phenomenon – at least since the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman.^[1] To the modern mind, the recognition of the possibility of multiple regimes of diversity coexisting is seen as a surrender to the “irrational,” “archaic,” and “spontaneous.” In such cases, even the most peaceful, non-bloodthirsty scholars come to demand (in their strictly academic ways) a “final solution” to any ambiguity because every phenomenon has to fully fit into a most suitable category; otherwise it has no right to exist.
The thematic forum “Carnal Politics and Knowledge in the Imperial Situation” (in the “History” section) features articles that investigate attempts to evade the temptation of the “final solution” for the diversity problem by elaborating more sophisticated and rational ways to conceptualize it. It is not accidental that in all the articles corporeality appears as the main “vehicle” of diversity. Since bodily characteristics can be measured and classified, they produce the illusion of “naturalness” and one-dimensionality of the observed differences. However, as the scholars, whose research is surveyed in the articles of the forum came to realize, the human body as a subject of scholarly exploration is not something self-evident, or even a completely passive object of someone’s projections and generalizations.
The forum opens with Irina Roldugina’s study, which focuses, strictly speaking, on the imperial period of Russian history: the 1750s, the second decade of the empress Elizaveta Petrovna’s rule. But this is not yet the Russian Empire where the structural imperial situation had found an appropriate outlet and legitimation in the official institutions and legislation, thanks to the reforms of Catherine the Great. With the exception of the ruler’s imperial title, Elizabethan Russia was still essentially a pre-imperial polity – the one that Peter the Great constructed having in mind the ideal of a Northern European kingdom, such as Sweden or Prussia. Just a few years before the story told by Roldugina took place, Elizaveta had attempted to eradicate Islam in the Volga region and expel all the Jews from the country, and the myth of the malign domination by “Germans” under previous governments was broadly circulated. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that when the authorities discovered an elite “escort service” in St. Petersburg in June 1750 that employed primarily foreign nationals, the response was unequivocally repressive. The initial instruction given by the empress demanded a large-scale police roundup, the public flogging of all those arrested, and their deportation from the country. However, one month later, Elizaveta changed her mind. As the investigation unfolded, it began documenting, for the first time in Russian history, contemporary intimate relationships in minute detail. The authorities were surprised to discover behind the trite fornication (blud) a new cultural and discursive phenomenon, which today we identify as “sexuality.” This discovery turned around the traditional social order and compelled the government to take unorthodox measures.
On the one hand, the exchange of intimacy for pay had to be punished, but on the other hand, not to the extent of stigmatizing the very modern phenomenon of sexuality that was involved in these relationships (as opposed to mundane crude fornication). At the same time, the fact that the “discovery of sexuality” involved women of low social standing undermined the elite social status associated with sexual practices such as courtesy (courtly love) and libertinism. This complex conflict was resolved through the establishment of a whole new penitentiary institution, Kalinkin House, in which all the men and women arrested in 1750 were held, Russians and foreigners separately, under strikingly humane conditions compared to the standards of the epoch. This arrangement contradicted the modern ideal of regularity that implied that identical misdeeds were to receive similar punishments, and that people of the same social status should be treated equally (as the treatment of regular prostitutes drastically differed from that of the Kalinkin inmates). Yet, the Kalinkin House offered an efficient solution to the conflict of the imperial situation by combining the most avant-garde techniques with their archaic (selective) application. By admitting that certain female bodies deserved treatment different from that applied to other female bodies, the authorities took a step toward the establishment of the imperial regime of managing diversity.
The next article in the forum leaps forward to the post-imperial period of Russian history. In the mid-1920s, within the highly popular science of pedology in the USSR, which combined the study of social-psychological and biological aspects of children’s development, a special subfield had emerged that privileged ethnic and racial differences. The project of Soviet modernity aimed at forging a socially and culturally uniform mass of population, thus radically breaking with the legacy of imperial diversity and hybridity. Both official ideologues and expert-pedologists accepted the inevitability of cultural differences in Soviet society but, in the logic of modernity, they reduced these differences to one-dimensional variations within a single norm. This approach contradicted the observable reality, in which Soviet elites had to deal not with relative “variations” but with a variety of “deviations” from the accepted standards, especially among the non-Russified and “under-Europeanized” peoples whom they defined as “backward” or, more neutrally, as “national minorities.”
The article by Andy Byford studies the Soviet “pedology of national minorities” based on examples of psychometric research done on Uzbek children in Tashkent, Tatar children in Moscow, and some native peoples of Siberia. Byford details how the recognition of ethnic and racial differences by pedologists gradually clashed with the normative universalism of the official ideology (and the modernity worldview in general). This contradiction was fundamental to the pedological project as such because it discovered profound differences where they were not allowed politically – for example, among representatives of the same social class, or worse still among adherents of the same ideology. The conflict between the structural imperial situation and the political regime that denied its existence was radically resolved in 1936, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed the resolution “On pedological perversions in the Narkompros system,” which outlawed pedology altogether. This decision did not abolish the human diversity of Soviet society itself, but merely attempted to ignore it, insofar as the political course was set on imposing the final standardization and eventual Russification of the population.
Parallel to the early Soviet post-imperial universalizing project, post-imperial nationalizing projects flourished in Eastern Europe. In Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries of the region, the structural imperial situation was also regarded as an unwanted remnant of the imperial past. However, whereas the USSR aspired to bring all groups of the “toiling people” to some common level of development, Eastern European nationalizing regimes accepted full rights only of their respective titular nations. Politicians and social scientists disagreed about what to do with “minorities”: whether to encourage them to assimilate or to isolate them as an unwanted element.
In her article, Katrin Steffen shows how the study of blood serum (serology) came to be regarded in the region as one of the most advanced and precise methods of rationalizing human differences. The serologist Ludwik Hirszfeld and his wife Hanna Hirszfeld took thousands of blood samples from soldiers of different nationalities from all over the world during World War I and selected a few main blood groups. They suggested that blood groups could serve as the most precise and objective marker of racial belonging. In the 1920s, a new scholarly discipline – seroanthropology – was established and taken up eagerly by scientists everywhere. The Hirszfelds and many of their colleagues believed that seroanthropology was undermining racial hierarchies, for it eroded what many saw as stable and solid boundaries between humans. According to the Hirszfelds, blood groups varied between regions, not between ethnocultural groups. Some scholars, however, applied seroanthropology differently, trying to prevent the assimilation of “foreign elements.” Even when indistinguishable in physical appearance and culture, those “internal foreigners” could not conceal the literal “otherness” of their blood.
Physical anthropology performed the same practical function of standardization of diversity in post-imperial Eastern Europe (particularly, in Poland). Olga Linkiewicz’s article examines the most influential trend in interwar Polish anthropology, the representatives of which aspired to put their expertise into serving the nationalizing state. It is important to note that the authorities of the Second Polish Republic did not hasten to embrace anthropologists’ recommendations (just as Nazi ideologists in Germany did not employ seroanthropology as the main method of determining racial purity). It seems that unlike scientists, the rulers of the USSR, Germany, and Poland preferred not to completely formalize their methods of managing diversity. The implementation of “body politics” (whether the body of a class, a race, or a nation) clashed with the reality of the structural imperial situation, which required compromising the scientific rigor of classificatory discourse for the sake of practicality. Even when opting for the open genocide of “internal foreigners” (in Germany or in the USSR), politicians tried to maintain discretion in decision-making. Otherwise, it would be possible to discover that an important party apparatchik had the “wrong” blood group or scored low on an “intellectual development” test.
Thus, the role of scholars consisted in forming and sustaining the public demand for rationalization and standardization of diversity, which in turn was exploited by political regimes pursuing their specific goals. Modern methods of understanding diversity advanced by cutting-edge scholarship could bolster diametrically opposed political decisions, since all these methods ultimately revealed the impossibility of fitting observable multifaceted diversity into any two-dimensional schemes. Classificatory efforts met with the “resistance of material” even in a seemingly strict material sphere of corporeality, which made modern scientists and politicians contemplate a difficult choice. Agreeing that any type of “otherness” had the right to exist not only implied the need for radical democratization of the political sphere but also undermined the very ideal of the mono-national state – the pinnacle of post-imperial order in Europe. The dominance of a titular nation or a hegemonic class was compromised by the readiness to accept full rights for any relative “differences” and qualitative “deviations.”
This dilemma is revealed in the “Archive” section, which presents a selection of letters from the mid-1920s, prepared for Ab Imperio by Irina Roldugina. These letters were written by Soviet homosexuals to Vladimir Bekhterev and other psychiatrists and psychologists of his circle. The archival documents located by Roldugina capture direct expressions of subjectivity of nonheterosexual people who turned to physicians for expert advice or just in order to share with experts their own understanding of the nature of homosexuality. Legally, homosexuality was decriminalized after 1917, and although physicians customarily continued labeling it a “perversion” (this is how Bekhterev himself marked the letters he received), de facto they normalized homosexuality as one of multiple medical “special conditions.” Police persecutions of homosexuals in provincial centers were considered excesses and survivals of the past. This situation radically changed in the early 1930s, when homosexuals became victims of systematic repressions. The arrests of 1933 reflected in the publication by Roldugina had little to do with any preceding turnaround in professional medical discourse. Moreover, they took place even before the formal recriminalization of “sodomy” by the Soviet Criminal Code (which followed on March 7, 1934), hence people were tried and sentenced on charges of political treason (under the infamous article 58). Why did homosexuality suddenly become a counterrevolutionary act? How can the almost simultaneous assault on pedology (which had been formerly promoted enthusiastically by the same Vladimir Bekhterev) be explained?
These processes have to be put into the broad context of the late imperial epistemological revolution of hybridity, which laid the foundation for the modern social imaginary of asystematic diversity.^[2] The Soviet regime of the proletarian dictatorship was profoundly counterrevolutionary in terms of its dominant style of social imagination, not unlike all other projects of mono-national states of the interwar period. It was the powerful influence of the late imperial intellectual breakthrough that for about ten years resisted the constantly increasing pressure of Bolshevik ideological censorship. The task of censorship was further complicated by the fact that some of the mainstream Soviet discourses were themselves products of late imperial intellectual developments, such as the imperative of protecting any ethnocultural minorities, or internationalism and anticolonialism. However, by the early 1930s, toleration of any form of hybridity was abandoned in most social spheres (whether a mixed economy, a political or psychological deviation). The process that began in the late 1920s in the most sensitive (political) sphere as a struggle against party factionalism, spread into all other spheres, from the aforementioned pedology to genetics and even (eventually) linguistics. Viktor Shklovsky’s line from a 1932 article, “One needs to take a simple thing or any thing as simple,”^[3] expressed the essence of the “Stalinist turn” in the perception of the social, now becoming profoundly incompatible with all forms of asystemic diversity.
The Stalinist as well as the Hitlerite worldview released the genocidal potential of modernity, but not because it was its most comprehensive embodiment. Quite to the contrary, these were the most primitive and limited versions of modern social thinking. Resorting to genocide testifies to the society’s failure to accommodate “internal foreigners” into the picture of the world without damaging it. As such, genocide implies a deficiency of intellectual effort. Therefore, it is only logical that the perception of “any thing as simple” (so profoundly counterrevolutionary compared to the late imperial revolution of hybridity) led directly to the politicization of homosexuality or pedology. Any complexity that did not fit into the rigid two-dimensional vision of the world was perceived as subversive. Homosexuals were among the first enemies and victims of Stalin’s regime in the 1930s precisely because attitudes toward them were formed at the elementary level of body politics, as an instinctive reaction of the new type of social imagination, before the regime had fully rationalized and explicated its new ideological principles.
Experiencing the imperial situation in today’s post-Soviet (post–post-imperial) space presents a similar conceptual challenge. It is just that the political norm now seems to be turned upside down compared to the interwar period: the pursuit of homogeneity of the national body has been replaced with the recognition of minority rights and multicultural tolerance as progressive and normative values. Still, just as ninety years ago, the contemporary political rationale only indirectly reflects the scholarly understanding of the phenomenon of diversity. Only now it is not scholarship that outpaces politics (by offering more nuanced and complex models of diversity, grossly exceeding the crude needs of ideologists of nationalizing regimes). In direct contrast, it is politics that requires the accommodation of any forms of groupness, while mainstream social sciences keep reproducing binary organicist taxonomies of difference – whether ethnocultural nations (with static boundaries and criteria of belonging), unambiguous gender roles (even when including nonheterosexual forms on equal terms), or political and religious groups, among others.
First, during the two interwar decades, the nationalizing political regimes were highly selective in their use of the most modern scientific approaches in diversity studies (including seroanthropology, eugenics, or the sociology of social classes). Then, after World War II, having witnessed the terrible outcomes of the implementation of modern social engineering, social sciences came to concentrate not so much on elaborating new models of understanding diversity as on rehabilitating and purifying the old ones – which had been promoted by political regimes of the past and suffered from “ideological distortions.” The idea of “race” was compromised, but the new concept of “ethnicity” came into use communicating a very similar meaning; genetics replaced seroanthropology, and so on. Modern scholarly concepts are more politically sensitive, but hardly any more analytically sophisticated than their officially endorsed predecessors of the 1930s. As a result, a great deal of social experience of diversity is again relegated to a shadowy zone and remains underreflected, while political institutions have no other choice but to enforce intellectually outdated forms of groupness.
This state of conceptual confusion is most evident in modern fiction, which in Russia has always performed the function of social analysis. The article by Lilia Boliachevets and Ivan Sablin in the “Newest Mythologies” section considers fiction by Buryat, Khanty, Evenki, Itelmen, and Koryak writers published over the past quarter century. The authors analyze these texts within the postcolonial framework, which – as productive as it may be – only underlines the absence of any conventional understanding of their “difference” by the non-Russian peoples of Siberia. Some writers regard the USSR as the ideal form of multiethnic accommodation, and Soviet modernization as genuine decolonization. Others condemn the Soviet regime for inflicting devastating effects on national communities and individuals. Still others see the current state of indigenous peoples of Siberia as the most extreme form of colonial oppression. What remains unclear is the very meaning of “the people” in the contemporary epoch of globalization, after almost a century of intensive assimilation and Russification. The semantic uncertainty of “the people” complicates the search for political solutions to the problems described by Siberian writers. Following the logic of postcolonial social thinking, should their political sovereignty be sought (on the example of the decolonization of the 1960s)? Or would the ethnic cleansing of their former “colonizers” from the “national territory” be sufficient? Or just a ban on intermarriage?
The critical importance of the radical disconnect between the actual political needs of the day and the available forms of social imagination is demonstrated by Ekaterina Boltunova in her article in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section. There is abundant literature on the politics of memory and reinvention of the past in postsocialist societies. Boltunova takes a further step forward by showing what happens after the newly invented version of the past is established and appropriated. The article tells the story of how, after having restored historical sites of power (such as the Kremlin Palace or palaces in St. Petersburg) – according to modern ideas and tastes – the Russian authorities that began using them for ceremonial purposes gradually began falling under the sway of the symbolism that they themselves invented. Due to the lack of an adequate conceptual understanding of the modern Russian sociopolitical order, historical symbolism provides the highest Russian officials with the only viable political language. As a result, the ceremonial hall in the newly built presidential residence Gorki-9 received decor elements that include the placement of a throne. This seems totally absurd from the vantage point of a direct reading of political symbolism, but it is quite understandable within the context of modern Russia’s conceptually underdeveloped social imagination. This also explains the “functional” division in the process of claiming and experiencing the reimagined historical heritage by politicians: while the civic authorities respond more eagerly to the symbolism of the imperial period, the leadership of the Orthodox Church prefers to cultivate the symbolism of the pre-Petrine Moscow Tsardom. In both cases, instead of elaborating a positive political agenda, quite dubious historical allusions are employed.
Obviously, such a conceptual misery does not help to rationalize the perception of diversity in contemporary Russian society. Moreover, it is outright menacing. By relying on historical symbolism instead of analytical categories, politicians, social scientists, and ordinary citizens become hostages of the social imagination embedded in these symbols (or ascribed to them retrospectively). When the idea of the supreme executive power is expressed through the symbol of a throne, and that of state sovereignty through the symbolism of the “patriotic war,” it is only too easy to begin playing the role of the tsar, or to support a “war against fascists.” The concept of nation that reproduces the tropes of social imaginary of the 1930s (but cleansed of its openly genocidal connotations) inevitably leads into the same political deadlock it had reached at that time. Therefore, the task of developing new – postimperial and postnational – analytical instruments for describing and understanding diversity is more acute today than ever. For this, social sciences may want to revisit the late imperial epistemological revolution that took place in Russia in the late 1910s.