SUMMARY:

This is the Russian translation of a section of Chapter 2, “The Decisive Years” (1914–1920): The Great War and the Waning of the Imperial World Order,” from Adi Gordon’s forthcoming book, Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn (1891–1971) (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017). The five years that Hans Kohn spent in Russia as a prisoner of war (1915–1920) played a decisive role in his intellectual and political formation. The abundance of free time that he involuntarily enjoyed in captivity allowed him to focus on self-education through extensive reading and learning of foreign languages. Kohn’s firsthand experience of solidarity and oppression, as well as the dramatic sociopolitical developments of the Russian Revolution and civil war predetermined the content of this learning and the interpretation of the new knowledge. Kohn not only grew more politicized and left-leaning in his social views but also became highly critical of any exclusive forms of nationalism based on the ideal of “blood and soil.” Specifically, his firsthand experience in Central Asia dominated by a Russian imperial minority allowed Kohn to contextualize the utopia of Zionism as structurally similar to Russian Turkestan: a settler national project in the predominantly Muslim region. Another factor that must have influenced Kohn’s critique of nationalism and mainstream Zionism in particular was his own Habsburg patriotism that evolved into a vision of broad nonterritorial federalism. The themes and conceptual language that were developed by Kohn in his writings during the “Russian” period would become central to his subsequent scholarly and political works.