The comprehensive political economy of an empire is, arguably, a utopian project, aspiring to no less than creating a single all-embracing formula of the imperial balance of power. As much as we would all love to see it, from the vantage point of new imperial history finding such a formula is as elusive as developing a unified field theory in physics (or any other “theory of everything”). Speaking of the imperial situation as the phenomenon of an open-ended dynamic system, which is construed as a whole by a combination of several logics and observer’s vantage points, we just lack the intellectual and linguistic resources to compress this complexity into any monological scheme in any meaningful way.
Even those who believe in the reality of empires as political systems with distinctive cores and peripheries have not delivered a definitive appraisal of modern imperial societies that answers the basic question: who owed whom? Was it the colony that gave the most in the form of its natural and human resources (that had no value or were not even recognized as such before and beyond the imperial global market)? Was it the metropole that sacrificed its men and women, technology, and enormous finances to develop the former backwaters (which nobody had asked to have done in the first place)? This “technical” analysis is further complicated within new imperial history, which relativizes the very clear-cut distinction between the metropole and the periphery. It is not only that in our historical narratives, more often than not, the tail was wagging the dog, but the question of where the “dog” ends and its “tail” begins seems too speculative – especially in the multifaceted imperial situation, when all the alternative perspectives appear to be equally correct depending on the context: “It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman.”
The very nature of “empire as a context-setting category” predetermined the content of this issue of Ab Imperio, “The Political Economy of Empire: Balancing Power, Resources, and Diversity.” Instead of the balance sheets of imperial actors’ gains and losses, the contributors to this issue focus on struggles over reconfiguring contexts and advancing alternative interpretations – the true substance of the political economy of the imperial situation.
Elena Vishlenkova opens the “History” section with a study that makes sense of the administrative odyssey that would seem completely senseless from the vantage point of the traditional “political economy” of empire. The former Medical Collegium, the sole government agency supervising health care in the Russian Empire, was disbanded in 1804 with the start of the ministerial reform of Alexander I. Over the next three decades it would be reshuffled endlessly: split into different offices, distributed among as many as four ministries, partially subordinated to provincial authorities, and so on. Eventually, it would be reintegrated into a single agency under Nicholas I, thus seemingly defying all the transformations since 1804. Behind the chaotic fluctuations, Vishlenkova discovers a complex process of balancing power, financial and human resources, and expertise that was so essential for the transformation of the baroque Russian society and polity. State building went hand in hand with the professionalization of physicians, and they enhanced each other along the way. Any new step toward the formalization of governance had a direct impact on structuring the medical profession, and vice versa. In the process, they developed the very discourse of modern governance based on expert knowledge and discipline, which was not exclusively “statist” or “professional” in nature. Eventually, the medicalization of public discourse resulted in producing a new concept of authority based not on political sovereignty (of the emperor) and not on the seniority of status (of the elite circle of physicians) but on the expertise provided by a qualified professional.
Gulchachak Nugmanova presents another case of rearranging power, resources, and diversity during the long nineteenth century. This story also began with Alexander I’s drive to modernize the Russian Empire by enhancing its inner cohesion through standardizing the social landscape. To this end, the government elaborated sample architectural projects that developers were required to emulate. First, the collection of projects for provincial public buildings was confirmed in 1803, and for private houses in 1809 and 1812. For the next half century, every new private house in Russian towns had to be built following one of the available sample projects. Besides the problem of individual tastes and financial means (which St. Petersburg architects often ignored), this utopia of compulsory unification produced an even greater conflict with local enthnocultural traditions of housebuilding. By focusing on the case of the Kazan Tatar community, Nugmanova reconstructs the complex imperial political economy of the mirrored relationships of domination and dependency. Thus, when the government required the houses on each plot to be aligned along the street, Tatar homeowners would build barns and stores facing the street while keeping their residences inside the plot, away from prying eyes. The government published and distributed collections of mandatory architectural designs, which Tatar developers applied to the facades of those barns along the streets, leaving the interior planning unchanged. Moreover, they eagerly borrowed the floor plans of Russian gentry mansions but adapted them to the Muslim norm of segregated “male” and “female” quarters with separate entrances. Tatar developers began commissioning “individual projects” that fit their needs. Each project had to be confirmed by the government in St. Petersburg, but upon confirmation it became another “sample project” available to everyone. Eventually, when the system of compulsory architectural projects was abolished in 1858, Tatar homeowners continued to rely heavily on the old official manuals, which now contained many locally produced designs and helped to save on commissioning new projects. In the end, the imperial government enforced the norms developed by local Tatar developers.
Ulfat Abdurasulov and Paolo Sartori scrutinize the same situation of renegotiating the relationships of domination through the entangled arrangement of economic resources and political power, in the case of attempted reforms in the Russian protectorate of Khiva after 1910. They identify the imperial policy toward Khiva as purposeful “strategic ambiguity”: to begin with, even the formal status of the Khanate of Khiva was never legally defined after its conquest by the Russian Empire in 1873 (so it was never recognized as a “protectorate” officially). The local colonial authorities in Turkestan pushed for the transformation of the khanate into a “regular Russian province” and saw a complex of structural reforms as the first step in this direction. Otherwise, they just did not see a way to effectively control this territory, particularly in a crisis situation. These efforts were successfully sabotaged by both the Khiva ruling elite and the imperial government in St. Petersburg. Naturally, the khan of Khiva and his subordinates did not want to give up their autonomy, and they were willing to create multiple “economic incentives” for St. Petersburg administrators to keep the situation suspended for as long as possible. Yet, the imperial government was even more determined to sustain the ambiguous status of Khiva. One reason explicitly admitted in the correspondence with colonial administrators was that the government feared facing a mass-scale insurrection if the khanate’s autonomy were liquidated and thus felt the need to suppress it by crude force. The anticipated high toll of casualties was seen in 1910 as a blow to the imperial reputation. Probably an even more important concern was never admitted publicly but it followed logically from the Russian nationalist beliefs of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and his associates. Perceiving Russia as a Russian national state, they were unhappy about the prospect of formally incorporating an all-Muslim “regular province” and granting its inhabitants standard legal rights. Abdurasulov and Sartori’s study in the political economy of empire demonstrates that “strategic ambiguity” as a conceptual context for political relationships and economic transactions remapped the conventional scheme (and the very meaning) of imperial domination in the region.
The article by Moritz Florin problematizes the meaning of decolonization in Central Asia, just as the article by Abdurasulov and Sartori questions the conventional idea of imperial hegemony there. Florin discusses the polemic among Kyrgyz writers in the wake of Stalin’s death and discovers that to Kyrgyz intellectuals de-Stalinization amounted to the act of decolonization. Besides the influence of the global decolonization movement that peaked at exactly this time, it was the association of Stalinism (terror and collectivization) with foreign, quasi-colonial phenomena imposed upon the Kyrgyz society that promoted the essentially anticolonial thinking. This approach to de-Stalinization questioned the Soviet foundational myth of the “national liberation” of Central Asian societies in the past as a result of the October Revolution, thus making it an acute task for the present. The purely political act of denouncing Stalinism transformed the entire conceptual context that informed the perception of the status of the Kyrgyz. All the economic investments and political institutional building notwithstanding, the project of Soviet modernity began to acquire distinctive connotations of colonialism – which conventional political economy analysis would be unable to explain.
In the “Newest Mythologies” section, Maria Maiofis talks about another group of Soviet writers at about the same time. To control the overly “liberal” organization of Moscow writers, in 1957–1958 Khrushchev initiated the creation of the Union of Russian Writers (RSFSR Writers’ Union) led by Russian ethnonationalists. This move forced them into strategic alliance with Stalinists of the old establishment, and thus turned the potentially dangerous collision between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists into a polemic between pro-imperial nationalists and “liberals.” This case demonstrates the futility of conceptualizing “metropole” as a stable entity with clear boundaries and shared qualities. Moreover, in order to produce a coherent group with claims to hegemony, it became necessary to institutionalize it in the form of a “national liberation movement”: Khrushchev argued that “Russians” should be fighting for the same “national rights” as “Ukrainians, Belarusians, or Uzbeks.” Once again, the balance of economic and political resources was predetermined by changing the conceptual framework for identifying and assessing these categories.
Still closer to our time, we see how the very act of scholarship acquires the character of struggle over context setting and interpretations, which makes it part of the imperial situation. This can be vividly seen in the “Methodology and Theory” section, which features the Russian translation of an interview with Ann Laura Stoler “History as Renegade Politics.” Reviewing her intellectual trajectory as an entanglement of academic interests, political activism, and personal circumstances, Stoler insists on the priority of the very act of outlining the agenda for an individual inquiry. This claim for the right of sovereign inquiry almost cost her tenure due to opposition from established leaders in the field, and has brought her to some very unusual places in pursuing political causes. What made her choice “political” was an epistemological stance as the prerequisite for any scholarship, rather than any ideological partisanship.
The same collision is revealed in the “Historiography” secion, in the discussion of the new History of Ukraine produced by Russian scholars in 2015. The actual idea of pursuing this project amid raging anti-Ukrainian propaganda and public opinion in Russia during Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine testifies to the outstanding civic courage and professional integrity of Tatiana Tairova-Iakovleva, the driving force behind this book. In her interview to Vladyslav Iatsenko, she told about the difficult road to making the scholarly presentation of Ukraine’s history a reality. These best intentions notwithstanding, the Ukrainian historians who participated in discussing this book took an extremely critical stance, particularly concerning the chapters covering the twentieth century written by Tairova’s coauthors, Alexander Shubin and Viktor Mironenko. The contributors explicitly accused Russian scholars (especially Shubin) of imperialist bias toward Ukraine and manipulations with facts. What makes these chapters imperialist in their eyes is not the historical assertions as such but the very language of analysis and the logic of mapping historical contexts – something that is integral to the imperial situation, as was discussed above. In a nutshell, it is not the claim that Ukraine should never be allowed independence, but how Russian historians call it “the” Ukraine in seemingly neutral academic context. The “imperialist” mental mapping as it is revealed in the discussion lead to selectivity in arranging empirical evidences and conclusions, turning the scholarly work (whole chapters in the History of Ukraine) into a biased politicized statement weapon for the Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda.
Aspiring to ultimate “objectivity” is hardly a workable solution, as the primary liability is not one’s preexisting political biases but the very act of taking a distinctive epistemological position – or, rather, the lack of critical reflection over that position. This is why the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia developed by the Ab Imperio team focuses mainly on the complex imperial situation as the context that informed the meaning of historical facts and actors. This epistemological self-awareness defies any attempt to impose a monological (“imperial”) interpretation of the past by pointing to the very mechanism of producing and ascribing meaning in complex heterogeneous societies. This issue of Ab Imperio features the concluding chapter of the course, which covers World War I, the Revolution of 1917, and the disintegration of the historical Russian Empire.