The idea that nation-states should inevitably supersede empires became predominant in social sciences a hundred years ago (in the wake of the “Wilsonian moment” and Leninist revolution). Seen as a law of history for many decades, it recently became subject to serious revision. The expected linear evolution toward nation as the sole modern form of social arrangement simply has not been substantiated by growing empirical evidence in historical studies of the twentieth century. The history of Russia and the USSR is a good case in point in this regard. While studying various scenarios of imperial and postimperial transformation, historians have discovered the insufficiency of explanatory models and terminology at their disposal to describe the nuances of postimperial processes and social structures. How do we talk about the postimperial political and cultural realities outside the normative nation-centered framework, and what is the added value of analyzing the postimperial as a phenomenon in its own right (rather than an iteration of the ideal nation)? Can we speak of any universal postimperial temporality at all if there is no agreement on the nature of the imperial phenomenon – does each historical empire beget its own particular future?
Answering the last question, it is necessary to stress that debates about the classification of historical empires are all but irrelevant for the logic of new imperial history as developed by Ab Imperio. Here, the object of study is not certain regimes of domination as such, but the structural imperial situation of simultaneous coexistence of multiple semantic contexts, which are used to produce conflicting visions of reality (and principles of its organization). But even from the vantage point of traditional “imperiology” one can identify territories and situations that look almost identical in all empires. For example, nowhere else did the Russian Empire resemble modern European colonial empires as much as in Central Asia. The popular (albeit outdated) differentiation of empires into the categories of “overseas” and “contiguous” completely fails in the case of Russian Turkestan, which became a case of classical colonial domination distinguished by the preservation of spatial and cultural distance, racism, and barring of aborigines from integrating into the metropolitan society or even the service hierarchy. This makes the case of postimperial transition in Central Asia all the more telling. There the relations of domination and dependence (and the contrast between “western modernity” and “indigenous tradition”) revealed themselves most explicitly. This is why all the materials of the current issue of Ab Imperio, “Imperial Alternatives: Imagery of the Post-Imperial Order,” discuss the history of Central Asian societies in the twentieth century. This issue concludes the journal’s annual theme, “Situating in Empire: Agencies and Subjectivities in Imperial Spaces,” which focuses on the problem of historical agency in the multidimensional imperial situation. Who decides how to organize life after the demise of the imperial regime and where the visions of the new life come from, particularly given that previously this regime claimed to control not only the political sphere but also the intellectual one?
The immediate answer to this question that can be derived from each of the published articles is that no simple and unequivocal formula can describe this process. Rather, we still have to elaborate an analytical model capable of adequately representing the phenomenon of multifactor and dynamic transformation of social imagination. The task is complicated by people’s tendency to depict the emerging new reality in the familiar but outdated language of the past, and also by the absence even today of a clear idea of how to reconcile real decolonization and success in the global world. The problem of the absence of an analytical language to comprehend the postimperial condition is central to the publication in the “Methodology and Theory” section. It features the Russian translation of a chapter from Adi Gordon’s intellectual biography of the classic theorist of nationalism theory, Hans Kohn (1891–1971), forthcoming in the summer of 2017. The translated section of the book covers the five years spent by Kohn in Russia as a prisoner of war (POW) beginning in 1915. Gordon argues that this period played a decisive role in Kohn’s intellectual and political formation. His initial nationalism (Zionism) and Habsburg loyalism underwent transformation under the influence of captivity, revolution, and the experience of a radically different sociocultural environment. Kohn’s sojourn in Samarkand during the first months of internment gave him the initial impulse to revise his previous views. His encounter with Bukharan Jews and Sarts (local Muslims) radically transformed his views on the scale of diversity even within the same “nationality” and provided firsthand experience of colonialism.
It is important to note that eventually Kohn failed to elaborate a radically new concept of a postimperial and postnationalist society – despite his extensive erudition and unique new personal experience acquired in captivity and afterward, and regardless of his deep disdain for exclusive nationalism and his conscious attempts to find a supranational conceptual framework. Today he is best known for his classic theory of “good” civic (“western”) and “bad” ethnic (“eastern”) nationalisms. His theorizing of federalism was still restricted by a reliance on nation-centric analytical language and social imaginary, which testifies to the enormous complexity of the task of developing a new language of social analysis. Yet it is equally important that Gordon titled this section of his book “Captivity and Growth.” Even as a POW who spent many months in the camp’s penal unit, Kohn was capable of creative reflection on his experiences and powerful intellectual growth. Moreover, it was his direct experience of oppression that served as his main intellectual stimuli: colonial (in Samarkand), social, national (after the encounter with Czechoslovak legionnaires in 1918), as well as military defeat. Kohn’s biography presents the case of an early postcolonial critique formulated in response to manifold oppression. His example demonstrates both the reality of elaborating a new political program aimed at liberation from foreign hegemony, and the constraints of such a program even when penned by one of the most sophisticated social scientists of his time.
The story of Hans Kohn, in a way, supports the case Adeeb Khalid makes in his recent book – that the postrevolutionary national delimitation of Turkestan (and, it should be added, Kazakh lands) was primarily the result of national projects developed by local intellectual elites, rather than the project of social engineering by rules or experts from the “metropole.”^[1] Subordinated status and even captivity do not preclude intellectual growth and elaboration of a new view of the community (although, as Kohn’s case testifies, the imaginary of the new social order is restricted by the available analytical language). To prove his point, in the “Archive” section of the journal, Khalid publishes the first document to mention “Uzbekistan” – in Russian and in the English translation. “Theses: Fundamental Propositions on the Question of the Formation of Uzbekistan” were endorsed by the Central Committee of the Bukhara Communist Party in early 1924. This text vividly demonstrates how Soviet ideological rhetoric was adapted to the task of promoting the local “Chaghatay” national project, which Turkestan’s modernizers–Jadids had been developing since before the revolution. It was they, rather than Moscow’s emissaries or scholars–Orientalists, who proposed the new formula to reconsider legal, linguistic, and confessional solidarities as a single national entity, embedded into the political process of decolonization and national revival:

“The nation of the Uzbeks, earlier united in the state of Timur and his successors, disintegrated in recent centuries into separate parts. Over the course of centuries, this disintegration took the form of the weakening of economic forces and political structures, the final stage of which was economic degradation, the loss of state unity, [and] the physical destruction of the people under the domination of khanates, emirates, [and] tsarism.”

Still, the recognition of the full political subjectivity of anticolonial movement activists does not resolve the question of the nature of their social imagination and the language they used to articulate their ideas. The very concept of national unity (bridging legal estates and indifferent to political regimes and territorial borders) and the trope of collective “degeneration” under the pressure of the hostile rule and social environment expressed in the quote above are products of a particular intellectual tradition. This tradition is clearly localized in West European culture during the final decades of the nineteenth century. To be more specific, these concepts – along with the idea of revolution, social reforms, popular sovereignty, and the like – had been elaborated by the educated elite of colonial empires, and only then appropriated as a weapon by subaltern social groups. Hence the question: to what extent were the postimperial imaginary and the postimperial society that was built in accordance with this vision hostages to the imperial discursive hegemony (as many modern postcolonial theoreticians suggest)?
The claim for complete autonomy of the postimperial order from the colonial past, and the opposite concern over the hidden persistence of the imperial worldview (even many decades after the political emancipation) both derive from the same belief in the singularity and purity of social groups. Quite in line with the perception of nation from the turn of the twentieth century, which was the target of Hans Kohn’s vehement criticism, it is assumed that a community shares the same spiritual and intellectual outlook. Borrowings of foreign ideas and concepts change the “true” nature of the individual and the community and turn them into slaves of foreign ideas or even into foreigners themselves. This Manichean worldview leaves no place for a truly postimperial (postcolonial) future indifferent to the imperial legacy: even a most radical anticolonial position is predetermined by the imperial worldview, albeit negatively, through its constant negation. The only way to avoid the fatal imperial influence in this logic is to retreat to the preimperial (precolonial) past. But even the popular nativist utopia of reviving some “authentic knowledge” does not mitigate the necessity to translate that knowledge into the language of the modern world and adapt it to the tasks of the day. The translation still has to be done in the language of the hegemonic modern “Western” (“imperial”) episteme, thus leaving a decolonizing community just two options: either to develop its own version of a postimperial (not simply an anti-imperial) future, or to isolate itself from the modern world in its artificially restored archaic culture.
This dilemma is explicated in the article of Alima Bisenova and Kulshat Medeuova, which reviews three recurrent cycles of wholesale modernization of Kazakh culture in the twentieth century (in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section). The noticeable incongruity between the historical narrative and the interpretative framework of the article points to the possible resolution of this impasse.
Telling the stories of the conflict between the domestic modernizer–Jadids with Kazakh traditional Islamic culture in the early twentieth century, of the Soviet cultural revolution that targeted Jadids as reactionary nationalists in the 1930s, and of the post-1991 neoliberal reform that strove to replace the Soviet cultural canon with Western standards, the authors persistently stress how counterproductive all the attempts to radically change culture were. First of all, by importing ready cultural models from the outside, Kazakhstan locked itself in the constant role of a periphery in relation to one or another center of “true knowledge” (even when the borrowed culture was fundamentally anticolonial). Second, under cover of the most fervent rhetoric on breaking up with tradition, the authors discover the fundamental persistence of cultural practices. These practices alone were capable of accommodating new cultural standards very rapidly and on such a grand scale. Calling them “the quiet nationalism of academic practices,” Bisenova and Medeuova suggest that we see here the expression of the true national ancient spiritual tradition, which should become the foundation of a postimperial Kazakhstan’s future, finally free of any foreign influences.
At the same time, the life stories of Kazakh modernizers of different epochs presented in the article have one common trait: the most influential Jadids and Soviet academics (and, apparently, post-Soviet reformers) were not merely comprador enthusiasts of foreign culture. They relied on the borrowed cultural idiom to creatively reexamine domestic Kazakh problems and translate Kazakh cultural tradition into the language of modern global culture. In doing so, they acted as full subjects of the ongoing cultural (and historical) process, using the borrowed ideas and concepts in the interests of their community. The Turkestan Jadids in the document published by Khalid used the same logic to put their “Chaghatay” national project into practice by packaging it into the Soviet form of the Uzbek SSR. This scenario potentially led to liberation from any foreign domination (direct or discursive) and historical self-fulfillment of the community. Its success was conditioned by developing a bilingualism of sorts that allowed for the mutual translation of all things “native” and “foreign” but, most important, by producing a radically new – postimperial – hybrid social space. To be really new, the new society has to be structured not by local tradition, and not by borrowed knowledge, and not even by a mechanical agglomeration of these two “pure” entities but by something unprecedented. Paradoxically, hybridity overcomes imperial dependency in a more profound way than most radical anticolonial uprisings, while at the same time better integrating a community into global modernity than the reactionary utopia of “the quiet nationalism of academic practices.”
As a victim of the social imagination centered on the cult of “pure forms,” hybridity remains a surprisingly understudied phenomenon. Nationalist discourse marginalizes hybridity as culturally inferior and politically subversive to the goal of national homogenization. It is not by accident that, bound by “nation” as the fundamental category of social thinking, Hans Kohn failed to convey his idea of a politically and culturally pluralist community in a coherent positive theory, while his compatriot, Franz Kafka, resorted to the language of the absurd to describe the clash between the observable diversity and the normative ideal of nation-state. Anticolonial discourse equally distrusts hybridity as potentially leading to reconciliation with imperial domination.^[2] Even Peter Burke, although a very subtle historian who has routinely dealt with hybridity in his own studies, tends to understand hybridity somewhat mechanically, as an amalgamation of some independent pure forms rather than a distinctive phenomenon in its own right (correctly noting that such a mechanical “mix is unstable”).^[3] Meanwhile, only hybridity enables the type of subjectivity capable of actually embracing the anticolonial utopia – the preservation of cultural legacy and radical overcoming of dependence on foreign hegemonic discourses. Hybridity means selecting foreign forms that best suit one’s own interests in the modern world.
Naturally, form and language affect the “content,” and this is exactly why hybrid subjectivity and culture represent new independent phenomena that are not reducible to a collage of some original elements. In the multidimensional imperial situation – the fundamental condition of any complex society – the constant adaptation to altering contexts through hybridity helps to preserve historical continuity better than attempts to arrest the past “as it actually happened.” One can see this paradox as central to the three articles published in the “History” section. They all discuss the problem of negotiating the past in the process of constructing a postimperial future in Central Asia. Revealing the fundamentally nonlinear character of this process, they also show the centrality of the hybrid subject for its success.
The article by Svetlana Gorshenina and Vera Tolz focuses on historical monument preservation in Turkestan (as a discourse, and then as an actual policy). When it comes to analysis of discourses, the argument of Gorshenina and Tolz seems to contradict Adeeb Khalid’s approach: they insist that this was a wholesale import of Russian (and, more broadly, European) ideas that had no local precedents. The Soviet regime used the program of preservation of monuments of Islamic architecture to mobilize the population in the region. In doing so, the Soviets relied on the cadres of administrators and experts from the imperial period. Thus, concern over cultural tradition not only was imposed over the local society from the outside, but also was used in the interests of securing Moscow’s political “imperial” control. At the same time, the authors note that architectural preservation gained momentum in Central Asia only after national delimitation of the region began in 1924 and special government agencies were established in the newly formed national republics. In other words, this happened after the Soviet cultural and political “idiom” borrowed from the outside had become accommodated and appropriated by local activists and put into the service of their interests, toward the goal of realizing and strengthening their national projects. Like the project of Uzbekistan outlined in the document published by Adeeb Khalid, the new reality was hybrid – uniquely new and postimperial. At the same time, at its core, it was about reformulating local interests in a new language. In this case, it meant the task of preserving their own ancient cultural monuments, of which the local culture itself previously had no idea until this task was framed in the categories of the national Uzbek (rather than religious or Sart) past.
Thus, in the logic of the imperial situation, the imported foreign knowledge was reconsidered as a local tradition, while the instrument of the metropole’s domination turned into a most important mechanism of national subjectivity’s anti-imperial consolidation and mobilization. This logic is explicitly revealed in Matthias Battis’s article “The Aryan Myth and Tajikistan: From a Myth of Empire to One National Identity.” “Aryanism” was an exclusively West European notion, its genesis and transformation throughout the nineteenth century are well-explored. Yet its provenance did not prevent Aryanism from becoming a cornerstone of Tajik national (cultural-political) identity when it was rendered in the categories of “tradition” and “cultural heritage.” An Orientalist with prerevolutionary experience as a scholar and colonial administrator, Aleksandr Semenov (1873–1958) played a central role in importing that western concept. Fascinated by the Aryan myth, after the revolution Semenov was concerned with the prospects of financing his studies of “Aryan” populations in Central Asia, including a group of mountaineer Tajiks, whom he identified with ancient Aryans. Lobbying his own research interests (studies of “Aryan” culture) in the situation of national delimitation of Central Asia, Semenov unexpectedly exercised decisive influence over its outcome. Local Persian-speaking activists used the identification of Aryans with a group of Tajiks that Semenov authoritatively promoted in order to resist surrendering all of Turkestan to the Turkist project of Uzbekistan. The Aryan myth helped them to advocate the separate political claims of Persian-speaking Sarts as the ancient autochthonous population entitled to national territory. Of course, this strategy became possible only under the Soviet national policy (which was promoted in the region by Semenov) and in the context of the new postimperial national imagination. It alone, for the first time, allowed some Sarts of the oases and the mountain Tajiks to be grouped into a single – national – category of population.
One should be surprised not by the fact that a “national tradition” emerges as a result of forging a new hybrid collective subjectivity, but by how fast that initial hybridity is forgotten. In this regard, Burke is gravely wrong when claiming that such a “mix is unstable.” In the multidimensional and dynamic imperial situation, only a “mixture” allows a tradition to be sustained – or, rather, to be recognized in constantly changing circumstances and cultural contexts. But indeed, hybridity loses its dynamism and stability when people forget about its nature and become accustomed to thinking of it as an old tradition. This is shown in the article of Boris Chukhovich, who also bridges the 1920s and post-Soviet times. A native of Voronezh, Alexander Nikolaev (1857–1957) was a modernist artist, pupil of Kazemir Malevich. In the early 1920s he moved to Samarkand, converted to Islam and took a new name: Usto Mumin. By this name he became famous for his paintings on Central Asian themes that creatively assemble European and Oriental artistic styles. Usto Mumin’s homosexuality played an important role in his art, contributing to his image of a perfect “hybrid” in all possible aspects. The profound hybridity of Usto Mumin did not hurt his reputation as a highly original artist and innovator. Moreover, during the Soviet period he was already recognized as the founding figure of the Uzbek national artistic canon, and this reputation has only been solidified in independent Uzbekistan.
Yet another case of transformation of hybridity into a postimperial national tradition would hardly come as a surprise to the reader now. The true irony of the imperial situation is revealed in a different episode: as soon as Uzbek political and cultural authorities officially recognized the art of Usto Mumin as part of the Uzbek “national canon,” his artistic influence lost its liberating potential. The forgotten hybridity turned into an aesthetic commonplace, material for imitation by modern Uzbek artists catering to the Western art market. The postimperial emancipation of local subjectivity in Usto Mumin’s paintings gave way to the cultivation of Oriental exoticism by his epigones; discovery (and concealment) of new meanings was replaced with the reproduction of familiar clichés about the “mysterious East.” Alexander Nikolaev’s contribution to the creation of the postimperial Uzbek future was compromised by Uzbek artists a half century later, when they began imitating Usto Mumin.
Apparently, this is an important lesson of the imperial situation: no “pure forms” can survive multifaceted and ever-changing cultural contexts that constantly require the “translation” of previous ideas and phenomena into the language familiar to the new society in new circumstances. As is well-known, any tradition is a recent invention, but it should be added that this “invention” in practical terms was nothing but creative hybridization (as any truly new phenomenon). Hybridity itself cannot survive unchanged for a long time. Contrary to expectations, the main threat to hybrid forms comes not from disintegration into initial “components” (because real hybridity is produced not mechanically but in the process of interaction and mutual projections, and not from any ready components but from collaborative production of new, previously unknown meaning). The main danger for hybridity stems from its turning into tradition and losing the initial interest in the world outside, from self-isolation. Today, hybridity remains the only known recipe for integrating local knowledge into the global modernity on one’s own terms, not surrendering to some external centers of “true knowledge” but putting them in the service of one’s own interests.