From the vantage point of historical sociology, the theme of Ab Imperio’s current issue, “Making Sense of Imperial and Post-Imperial Conditions in a Global Context,” sounds quite logical. It develops the journal’s 2017 annual theme dedicated to the phenomenon of globality as an attempt to create and expand a universalist worldview, institutions, and living environment. According to this logic, the “age of empires” (Eric Hobsbawm) is naturally superseded by some post-imperial condition as an equally global phenomenon. Despite its seemingly obvious sociological clarity, the proposed scheme proved to be surprisingly difficult to substantiate in the articles intended for this issue. Of course, individual authors writes about their own research, and it is the task of the editors to select contributions for a thematic issue in such a way so that they resonate with each other and the theme of the issue. But when we discovered that out of so many submissions currently in the works, few were compatible with the suggested conceptual framework, we realized that something was wrong with that framework. The abstract scheme failed the test of empirical studies, which, given their topics and research design, should have benefited from the explanatory potential of this general model (by being able to transcend the narrow confines of individual case studies in formulating research questions and interpreting the results). One thing that did not work as expected was the very clear-cut differentiation between imperial and post-imperial, which most research articles cannot unequivocally identify and substantiate. Another shortcoming of the post-imperial approach was the totalizing binary “the age of empires vs. the age of decolonization,” which did not help to explain the phenomenon of non-imperial (or pre-imperial) societies with their own globalizing projects. In addition, we had to remind ourselves that sociological models of historical process themselves need to be deconstructed as retrospective attempts to structure the past through periodization and conceptualization. What we identify as an “empire” (or its post-imperial successor) depends only partially on historical facts and circumstances and to a much greater degree – on contemporary and nonhistorical considerations.
In scholarship, a negative result is still meaningful, as it allows a more complex view of the articles that finally made it to this issue of the journal. Keeping in mind the important reservations mentioned above, we can better appreciate what is explicitly reflected in these articles and what can be discerned from them only if readers have a certain set of research questions in mind.
The “History” section features an article by Aleksandr Korobeinikov that narrates the story of the founding of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922, at the beginning of the Soviet policy of “indigenization” (korenizatsiia). We can fully appreciate the significance of this research by refusing to take for granted the meaning of categories such as “empire” or “national autonomy,” or the established periodizations of the Sovietization of Yakutia or Bolshevik national policy. The problematics of global, imperial, and post-imperial are central for the article, but the story told by Korobeinikov is not confined to the conventional understanding of these terms. The story begins in the early nineteenth century, when the regime of Alexander I was trying to extend its universalist imperial project to Siberia (all lands east of the Urals, including Yakut lands). By the advance of the twentieth century, the imperial government had already shown very little interest in integrating Yakuts, and the mission of spreading the universalist project of societal integration was monopolized by the cultural-political community of the Russian educated public (obshchestvennost’). Different motives encouraged the Yakut elites to seek integration with the imperial society in the nineteenth century, and since obshchestvennost’ became the main vehicle of integration. By the late nineteenth century these traditional elites were turning into a national intelligentsia, which was simultaneously Yakut and all-Russian (or rather all-Siberian). The Yakut intelligentsia formulated their visions of the Yakut future in a dialogue with the exiled revolutionaries and Siberian regionalists, borrowing a social language that helped to articulate their own original concerns. The Yakut Autonomous Republic was created only after the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War, as part of the Soviet project and due to the efforts of a new, Bolshevized generation of Yakut intelligentsia. However, under the rhetoric of a Soviet national republic, Korobeinikov discovers the old Siberian regionalist (Autonomist) project. He also shows that the leaders of the Soviet Yakut Republic revealed a profound sense of continuity with their Autonomist (and often anti-Soviet) predecessors and loyalty to them.
Korobeinikov’s article transcends the binary opposition of the two main interpretations of early Soviet nation-building: was it entirely the initiative of the Bolshevik center (as Terry Martin and Francine Hirsch would think) or the product of the indigenous educated elite’s plans for nation-building that had been developed long before the Revolution and were merely endorsed by the new regime (as Adeeb Khalid has recently argued)? The Yakut case highlights the exceptional role played by Yakut intellectuals, who had brought the project of establishing the national republic to fruition despite opposition from the Soviet central authorities. At the same time, Korobeinikov vividly shows that both old and young generations of Yakut intelligentsia were an integral part of the all-Siberian and all-Russian public (obshchestvennost’) and the products of a long historical process of integration into the imperial society. They appropriated ideology and discourse that allowed them to play active roles as autonomous actors and to exercise influence over metropolitan ideologues, experts, and politicians. In this dynamic and complex model, is it possible to draw a clear line between imperial and post-imperial (and non-imperial)? By the mid-nineteenth century, the rulers of the Russian Empire had de facto renounced the old integrationist and universalist mission, and the role of the main “globalizer” was assumed by the all-Russian obshchestvennost’ as a coalition of the intelligentsia. On the other hand, after the Bolsheviks toppled the imperial regime, only a dire political crisis of legitimacy forced them to yield to the demands of national elites, expressed in the language of all-imperial obshchestvennost’. So, who or what embodied empireness in this story? Who can take credit for carrying on the mission of expanding global modernity?
Fedor Korandei in the same journal section tells a story that mirrors Korobeinikov’s: it also spans from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1920s, takes place in Siberia (only in Western, not Eastern), and focuses on inorodtsy (non-Russians) undergoing integration into the Russian society, with special attention to books as the main medium of globalization. This is the story of the Scottish Wardropper family, three generations of which called Tyumen their home. The first generation of Wardroppers arrived in Russia soon after the Crimean War. Shipbuilding engineers, they acted as Kulturträgers, transmitting advanced European knowledge to the remote periphery of a country that had proved its underdevelopment during the war. Subsequently, they turned to entrepreneurship and competed on equal terms with local merchants, and by the end of the nineteenth century they had developed a solid reputation as exporters of local expertise to the West. (Younger generations of Wardroppers became renowned experts on the geography and logistics of the rapidly developing Northern Sea Route.) After settling down in Tyumen, the Wardroppers quickly embraced local Siberian patriotism, and the second and third generations of the family, born in Siberia, were thoroughly Russified in habits and habitus and were accepted as locals even by Russian nationalists. At the same time, numerous foreign travelers to Siberia, who invariably visited the Wardroppers, perceived these Siberian Scotts as typical British representatives of England in this remote land. Indeed, all their Siberian patriotism and Russianness notwithstanding, the Wardroppers did not naturalize in the Russian Empire. Even the third, Russian-born generation retained their British passports.
Korandei’s article tells a story of the first globalization of the mass society that was ultimately interrupted by World War I. This story is reconstructed through travelogues assembled in the Wardroppers’ home library, which document their attempt to sustain a window on a globalized world characterized by the circulation of people, goods, and knowledge. With the intensification of this exchange, initial inequalities tended to level out and the direction of export of knowledge changed. In this context, once again the question of imperial and post-imperial arises. British subjects, the Wardroppers settled in Russian Siberia; they saw themselves as local colonists, not really accepting the sovereignty of the Russian metropole. At the same time, they adopted Russified names, Russian language, and the local way of life. So, what is “imperial” and “post-imperial” in their story? When colonists in Siberia refuse to become Russian subjects, do they not express a clear post- or anti-imperial stance? If several generations of British subjects live thousands of miles away from England, assimilate into a local culture, and serve as international agents on behalf of this culture (Siberian merchants and explorers of Siberia), can they still be regarded as representing the interests of the British Empire? The clearly global context of the Wardroppers’ activities acquires significance far exceeding the spatial dimension and becomes an independent or even decisive factor in this story, because the complex subjectivity of these people fully revealed itself only at the intersection of several planes of their belonging. They were simultaneously colonists, representatives of the metropoles of two empires, Siberian patriots, and citizens of the universalist European culture. Is this an imperial or a post-imperial position?
The article by Sergey Sergeev in the “History” section refers to a different time and place. It suggests that a founding father of Soviet science fiction, Ivan Efremov, in his books written during the two decades after Stalin’s death elaborated a non-Soviet version of the universalist future. As did many of his contemporaries who survived the Great Terror, Efremov tried to avoid documenting his intimate thoughts in a diary and letters (in the late 1930s, he destroyed all his papers). Sergeev approaches the most famous and programmatic literary works by Efremov, such as The Andromeda Nebula and The Hour of the Bull, as unique historical sources that captured Efremov’s social thinking and personal experiences. What makes Efremov’s case especially interesting is the fact that it does not fit the normative political and cultural structure of the post-Stalin period with its clear-cut juxtaposition of Stalinists to liberals, and writers of village prose (derevenshchiki) to modernists. He tried to balance between the two camps because he did not identify fully with either. Sergeev shows how deeply Efremov’s worldview was entrenched in the hybrid social imaginary of the 1920s, and how his version of the future differed both from Soviet communism and liberal Westernism. Efremov unconditionally rejected the regime of imperial hegemony and insisted on the necessity of not just equality, but physical intermixing of all ethnic groups in the future. At the same time, he did not allow for any form of separate existence of any minority group. His universalism was as all-inclusive and total as it was totalitarian.
Sergeev characterizes Efremov’s social ideal as the “anti-empire,” because the writer evidently revealed his aversion to state, colonial, or any other form of coercion. However, as poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists remind us, hegemonic discourse can be as effective a mechanism of colonial domination as physical coercion. Efremov’s utopia turned out to be equally anticolonial and antipostcolonial because it did not recognize any personal or group autonomy outside the normative hegemonic discourse (however humanistic and benevolent it might be). Recognizing no independent subjectivity of the subalterns, Efremov was eager to see them embracing the subjectivity of a benevolent superior civilization. If this was the case, can we really describe Efremov’s “anti-empire” as a post-imperial phenomenon, and how post-imperial was the type of social thinking that he exhibited?
There is one more dimension to this story that the article does not consider. Deeply rooted in the 1920s, the consistently universalist (global) and hybrid worldview of Ivan Efremov was a product of the late imperial epistemological revolution of hybridity of the 1910s.^[1] Its key elements included the idea of the ontological primacy of “mixed forms” and relativization of inequality through a recognition of the coexistence of different principles of classifying differences. On the one hand, the case of Efremov is an example of this paradigmatic discourse (alongside the cases of Nikolai Marr or Mikhail Bakhtin). On the other, it problematizes it by exposing the challenges that awaited the epistemology of post-imperial hybridity had it not been curtailed by Stalin in the early 1930s. Overcoming the imperial legacy by embracing hybridity and rejecting the cult of “pure forms” by itself cannot resolve the problem of a minority group that insists on its homogeneous nature and the clarity of its borders. By the same token, the modern-day postcolonial and subaltern approach celebrating a group’s autonomy and self-sufficiency is unable to overcome the legacy of imperial hegemony, unless it also finds a way to normalize hybridity.
In a way, this discussion continues in Ilya Gerasimov’s article in the section “Newest Mythologies.” Gerasimov turns to Vasily Aksyonov’s novel The Island of Crimea (1979), treating it as a representative example of modern Russian Westernism and simultaneously an attempt to deconstruct it. Using aesthetic discourse as a vehicle for social analysis, Aksyonov has identified, perhaps not fully consciously, a key flaw of Russian Westernism (in this regard, the novel’s aesthetic tensions and failures are no less informative than its harmonious and well-balanced fragments). According to Gerasimov, this flaw is not so much the well-known dogmatic idealism of the Westernized intelligentsia and their progressivist messianism. Rather, it is the cult of “pure forms” shared by the progressive intelligentsia of the post-Stalin period, who had not experienced the impact of the late imperial revolution of hybridity.
Gerasimov suggests that the key to understanding the novel is the conflict between the obvious centrality of the new hybrid nation, “Yaki,” in the imagined free Crimean society, and Aksyonov’s attempts to diminish its importance despite the inner logic of the text. The occupation of post-Soviet Russia (the Island of Crimea) by the USSR in the book implies not a territorial annexation, but rather a capitulation to the society’s own past as the only imaginable version of the future. The author does not convincingly explain, however, why a bustling open society finds itself in such a predicament. Technically, this capitulation becomes possible and imminent only after the conscious refusal to accept the hybrid Yaki nation as a possible future of Crimea that embraces all ethnic and confessional groups of islanders. The main protagonist of the novel (and Aksyonov himself?) makes a choice in favor of a disgusting, yet authentically “native” past, which is familiar and recognizably “Russian” – unlike the still unknown and therefore twice as alien hybrid future-in-the-making of the Yaki. By refusing to accept self-sufficiency of the emerging hybrid society, Aksyonov made his own choice in favor of the purity of forms of Russianness that had developed and ossified as a cultural canon during the late Stalin and Brezhnev periods. It is this conflict that makes The Island of Crimea a tragedy rather than a melodrama, for the inability to embrace the unknown, global, and hybrid future still looms large over the Russian society. A truly postimperial condition remains unattainable not least because Russianness has lost its universalist hybridity and dynamism, open to the unknown future.
One example of the post-Soviet failure to overcome past-dependence is reviewed in the article by Ekaterina Boltunova in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section. Specifically, she looks into the case of the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, a memorial complex dedicated to the first president of Russia. The idea that was conceived after Boris Yeltsin’s death in 2007, seems to be an example of truly global thinking, modeled on American presidential memorials. The center was founded not in Moscow but in Yekaterinburg, where the political career of the future president began. An American company was hired to carry out the project according to the best world standards. However, this political scenario of public commemoration was in principle possible only in the context of the Yeltsin era’s inconsistent reforms (and the more time that passed after Yeltsin’s resignation, the more marginalized this legacy was becoming, politically and spatially). The perspectives of globality as inevitable hybridization were undercut by Putin’s regime, which opted for Aksyonov’s scenario of the consumption of the Island of Crimea by the USSR (a chimera of the former imperial grandeur). As Boltunova shows, even within the city of Yekaterinburg the scenario of historical memory identified with the Yeltsin Center has gradually been marginalized by a local, literally nativist, church-sponsored cult of Nicholas II. Today, plans to open even a modest branch of the center in Moscow have encountered strong resistance.
The article convincingly argues that the problem lies not with Putin’s regime as such, but to a great degree with the center’s own historical narrative (and Yeltsin’s regime of the 1990s). The conscious efforts of the center (and the regime) to overcome the Soviet imperial legacy drew on an archaic political scenario of the sacralization of supreme power, or rather, the personality of the ruler. As a result, the historical narrative of the Yeltsin Center has nothing to offset the memorial cult of Nicholas II, which exploits the same scenario but in a more organic and consistent way (just as Yeltsin’s regime was by definition unable to prevent the rise of Putinism, which relied much more consistently on authoritarianism and Soviet political culture). Similar to what happens in Aksyonov’s novel, the past wins out not because of the workings of some powerful “historical tradition,” but due to the conscious rejection of an open – hybrid and unpredictable – future.
The materials published in this issue of Ab Imperio suggest that globality is a true post-imperial condition that embraces the imperial ideals of universalism and managing diversity. The rejection of hybridity in the name of the cult of “pure forms,” just as the inculcation of hybridity through the forceful elimination of personal and group autonomy, makes a postimperial society (whether a “nation” or an “anti-empire”) even more repressive. The articles that made this issue do not offer a comprehensive recipe for how to successfully overcome the imperial condition. Still, we see as no small achievement the very attempt to rethink imperial and post-imperial in a global context, and provide a detailed outline of this problem using the material of specific case studies.