The articles published in this issue of Ab Imperio offer an unusual take on revolution by focusing mostly on processes and events beyond the spectacular culmination of crisis that is usually associated with the term “revolution.” Traditionally defined in categories of radical “change” (of a government, a political regime, an economic order, moral conventions, knowledge, etc.), revolution itself appears ephemeral: lacking any content of its own and entirely defined conceptually by real substances of old and new realities. Revolution is but a transition period from an old regime to a better future. It can last for weeks, months, and even years while still preserving its limbo status. As a process of change, it can be characterized by the broadest array of predicates (from “velvet” to “violent”), which does not make it any less processual and more substantial. The theme of this issue of Ab Imperio implies a different approach to revolution: “Dynamics of Self-Organization and Revolution: Order out of Chaos and the Collapse of the Old Order.” Rather than focusing on a fixed itinerary from A to B (from the old order to modernity, whatever the chosen mode of transit is), the proposed theme prioritizes self-organization as a phenomenon in its own right. As the most fundamental process, it does not serve the goal of changing one stable condition to another – even the most seemingly solid structures are stable only for as long as they manage to sustain a delicate balance among the ever-changing actors and institutions, big and small. This is another definition of the imperial situation as a multidimensional open-ended system. It is not “a thing” but rather a way of seeing things, an epistemological stance that provides scholars with an alternative strategy for differentiating reality into “facts” and classifying them. From this viewpoint, the real revolution occurs before the “old order” crumbles under the push of insurgents: the process of self-organization must upset the complex balance of structures and interests in the system before a straw can break the camel’s back. Tracing the moment when the change becomes highly possible (if not inevitable), we may find ourselves in times and settings of seemingly routine existence. This situation was famously described by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire:

“But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had completed half of its preparatory work; now it is completing the other half. … And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!”^[1]

But contrary to the Hegelian teleology underlying Marx’s historical thinking, there is no predetermined itinerary from point A to B, and the stochastic evolution of the open-ended social system is so complex that predictions of revolutions never have been accurate (at least by leading theorists of revolution themselves). This predicament is of little concern to historians, who are interested in the process of the “old mole’s” invisible work, rather than in any desired results of it. Some periods of routine existence are nothing more than islands of stability in the sea of spontaneous history-making.
The historical model that is closest to this approach is the concept of “imperial revolution” advanced by the historian of Iberian empires, Jeremy Adelman. According to Adelman, political revolutions emerge as a response to the radically upset status quo in the old imperial systems, and start in an attempt to restore the original universalist promise of empire rather than to completely dismantle the imperial space. In the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue, Ilya Gerasimov picks up Adelman’s model and applies it to the 1917 Russian Revolution. The sociopolitical explosion of 1917 thus appears as the culmination of several mutually enhancing processes, which began shifting course at various earlier moments – months or even years before. At some point, these processes became superposed and formed a broad coalition of national and political groups that protested against attempts by powerful minorities (Russian nationalists or the upper classes) to usurp the entire Russian Empire. The imperial revolution was staged by people seeking new, just forms of accommodation of differences on a pan-imperial scale and perceiving reality in categories of homogeneous groups of horizontal solidarity (nations). This explains the paradox of the Revolution, when the variety of national projects developed in Russia after February 1917 virtually all perceived the former imperial space as a natural context for self-implementation. The combination of nation-centered social thinking and the structural imperial situation must have contributed to the severity and complexity of the civil war that ensued.
Jeremy Adelman, who coined the concept and the model of “imperial revolution,” reflects on Ilya Gerasimov’s rendering of the 1917 Russian Revolution as an imperial revolution. He draws important parallels between revolutionary events in Russia and the crisis of the overseas Iberian empires a century earlier. Adelman suggests that seeing empire as a type of social imagery that sustains a particular mode of legitimacy, rather than a rigid structure, allows us to transcend the structuralist dichotomy between nation and empire. He also proposes approaching the phenomenon of global revolutions as part of a wider system of the interimperial regime.
The “History” section takes a different route around the conventional revolutionary moment, looking into its aftermath rather than its preparation. If a revolution is but a tip of the iceberg of societal self-organization, how can it end or turn into a counterrevolution? Alla Salnikova and Dilyara Galiullina take literally Stephen Kotkin’s famous metaphor of “learning to speak Bolshevik” as the essence of Sovietization and study what, if any, role Tatar alphabet books played in this process from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. As it turned out, successive editions of Alifbas implied very different scenarios of Tatarness, while invariably remaining equally Soviet. All these scenarios were aimed at developing the Tatar culture – at least teaching children to read and write in their native language – but the context informing the meaning of the categories “Tatar culture” or “Soviet” was changing over time. The policy of promotion of national culture in the late 1920s, the standardized Sovietization of the 1930s, or the marginalization of Tatarness as backward and rustic in the 1950s taught children and adults “to speak Bolshevik,” but these were very different “languages,” serving different societies. It makes sense then to speak of multiple languages of Bolshevism, just as there were different successive versions of the Tatar nation and even the Tatar language, which had changed its alphabet twice in the course of just over a decade (in 1927 and 1939). Possibly, this is how “stability” was sustained in the unstable Soviet system, when the surge of Russian nationalism and centralization threatened the very institution of national schooling.
Dmitry Kozlov focuses on a shorter period (1956–1957) to show how self-organization halted change under the rigid Soviet regime. In the wake of another “revolutionary moment” – Khrushchev’s report at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, the highest-ranking historian in the country, academician Anna Pankratova, announced the policy of overcoming Stalinism in the fields of history writing and teaching. This implied not only tolerating discussions, but allowing them to replace political directives as the source of historical judgment. This attitude corresponded to the general atmosphere of the Thaw, and did not imply any deviation from the Party line. However, when it came to the centralized system of school instruction, any academic ambivalence and open-mindedness had to be boiled down to unequivocal theses and interpretations, which were compulsory in classrooms all over the Soviet Union. Consequently, the revision sponsored by Pankratova unintentionally proved to be politically much more pronounced and subversive than Khrushchev’s initial critique of Stalinism. No less than Stalinists in the Soviet establishment, most teachers were concerned with the proposed changes, which shifted onto their shoulders the whole burden of intellectual and political responsibility for “interpretations.” Coupled with the rising political reaction in response to the crushed Hungarian Revolution, the first results of the history curriculum revision prompted the authorities to crack down on the reform. This case demonstrated the limits of reforming the Soviet system even when the highest authorities themselves encouraged distancing from the most odious legacies of Stalinism. The logic of self-organization (here, of Soviet schoolteachers) undercut any partial reforms that did not alter the fundamentally rigid (centralized and repressive) nature of the Soviet regime. The attempted change was not yet revolutionary enough.
The articles of Oksana Nagornaia and Natalia Tsvetkova discuss the Soviet regime’s response to the prospects of change after World War II. Nagornaia surveys the application of instruments of cultural diplomacy in response to the 1956 Hungarian and 1968 Czechoslovak crises in the Eastern bloc. The objectively counterrevolutionary goals were pursued by mobilizing the most dynamic Soviet cultural forces. While the charm of Soviet/Russian culture alone could hardly outweigh the shock from military interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Soviet cultural diplomacy seemed to reach its goals at home. Formed in the 1950s and 1960s, popular beliefs in the common history of the USSR and East European countries, the beneficial role of Soviet military interventions, and the generosity of brotherly economic aid persist in post-Soviet Russia. Tsvetkova places these Soviet policies in a broader global perspective and compares parallel efforts of the Soviet and American occupation administrations in Germany in the wake of World War II to reform the university system. After the formation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), both superpowers strove to impose their academic institutions and standards on universities in their client German states and indoctrinate professors and students. Tsvetkova claims that Americanization and Sovietization were structurally analogous attempts at “cultural colonialism,” and that both strategies failed due to the stubborn resistance to change mounted by German academic circles. While the actual state of GDR and FRG university systems by the late 1980s may challenge the author’s conclusion that equates the two cases, the centrality of the factor of unintended consequences in any historical processes cannot be denied. It is more than a historical irony that German universities under American patronage turned into hotbeds of radical leftist ideologies (including Marxism), while the “first revolutionary state,” the Soviet Union, avoided radical denazification in the GDR by all means.
The everlasting process of self-organization leads to different outcomes even in structurally similar situations, which can be explained by the key role of human actors who respond differently to concrete circumstances. Subjectivity is not just a historical “factor” but an integral part of the self-organization process itself, which defines the parameters of its realization. This is demonstrated in the “Archive” section of the issue that features the concluding, second part of the recollections of Mark Miller (1916–1999), translated into English (the first part was published in Ab Imperio 1/2017). This historical source was introduced by Ilya Gerasimov as rare authentic evidence of the distinctive “Soviet plebeian subjectivity.” The plebeian Soviet subjectivity revealed itself in conscious attempts to navigate the stormy waters of high Stalinism, steering clear of the two extremes (discursively well-articulated and interiorized as the only legitimate script of the Soviet Self) – collaboration with the regime and passive victimhood. The preponderance of plebeian subjectivity from the 1920s to the 1950s explains the survival of the Soviet system despite the catastrophic mismanagement of economic and military spheres under Stalinism: the spontaneous self-coordination of the plebeian society through social practices compensated for the failures of institutions. The second part of Miller’s recollections covers the period of high Stalinism (ca. 1937–1947), and presents a rather unorthodox perspective on the nominally socialist economy, as well as culture and practices of Stalinist militarism.
Commenting on events practically in real time (a rare format for a quarterly periodical), in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section, Ilya Kukulin reflects on the clash of processes of self-organization with regimes’ attempts to preserve the status quo by breaking all former conventions and contracts in today’s Russia. Kukulin sees the way to compensate for the rapidly shrinking legal sphere of self-organization in bringing to the fore of public discussions the achievements of the modern art. They vividly uncover the tautological character of the authoritative discourse and undermine its claims for hegemony.
Continuing the focus on historical subjectivity, Marco Puleri surveys contemporary literary processes in Ukraine in his article published in the “Newest Mythologies” section. He registers the proliferation of hybrid cultural forms, which has not yet found adequate recognition in the political sphere. Based on an analysis of bilingual modern Ukrainian literatures the author concludes that the rise of hybrid subjectivities in Ukrainian society can become the only way to a truly postcolonial and independent future. Thus, the public recognition and acceptance of a new type, or rather a new, hybrid language of subjectivity can decide whether a change will turn into a revolution. We have a chance to observe this historical process of societal self-organization in real time.