This issue of the journal concludes the 2017 annual thematic volume of Ab Imperio, “The Global Condition: Local Names for Universalism.” Make no mistake—this theme has nothing to do with any Wallersteinian world-systems analysis, focusing instead on something both more general and universal: the role of context in historical studies. True to its interest in the phenomenon of context, in four issues the journal published materials contextualizing this cornerstone professional category in different historiographic perspectives and approaches. Contextualization is not only the bread and butter of the historical craft, it is also a necessary requirement for transcending the stereotypical extreme views of the “general setting” as either an ornament of a main story or the overpowering force that predetermines its course. Context is a relational and relative category, it is always “universal” and “global” from the vantage point of a local situation: it is against the backdrop of bigger structures and processes that the meaning of a local phenomenon is reconstructed. The difference between the two extremes seems obvious, but the mechanism of their interdependence does not. While microhistory and other anthropologically driven approaches specialize in studying unique local conditions, and such fields as global history elaborate models of large-scale formations, natural questions arise: how does a local phenomenon become part of a larger context, and what if someone’s context is another’s own backyard?
Habitual separation of macro- and microperspectives legitimizes the view of the problem as merely one of scale. With the advance of global history, zooming out reaches truly post-historical – one might say, planetary, and deeper – prehuman and posthuman dimensions. Incommensurable with any human experience, such a context advances beyond ornamentalism, making the process of outlining “a bigger picture” merely an automatism of thought. Furthermore, there is a tradition, particularly strong in cultural studies, of treating the very notion of “context” with suspicion. It received a new boost following the erroneous translation of a Jacques Derrida dictum by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,^[1] which prompted heated debates: is there anything outside the text (an artistic text or a historical document), and how does context matter?^[2] Whereas for Derrida choosing one context over another is a political decision and “never a purely theoretical gesture,”^[3] for new imperial history it is a technical detail of a bigger analytical problem. What really sets apart new imperial history from postcolonial studies (and certainly from old imperial history) is its operating with a model of an open-ended system (without fixed boundaries and hence a preset “context”) and thus acceptance of the reality of coexisting narratives. “Empire” is just a codeword for this fundamental social condition and is meaningful only “as a context-setting category that frames the historical reconstruction of a historical context, and creates a critical perspective on boundaries and thematization of historical experience, thus ensuring that scholars do not fall prey to the discursive power of totalizing and one-dimensional categories of the modern mindset.”^[4]
Historical empires performed the function of switchboards of sorts that attempted to rationalize and regulate the regime of multiple contexts – themselves representing only a segment in the array of relevant contexts. Therefore, choosing a context is not an exclusive privilege of a scholar – an outside observer, but the standard operating procedure of any participant in that multifaceted system of the imperial situation:

“Imperial situation refers to the vision of society as an open system structured by coexisting and partially overlapping incongruent categories of difference, each capturing only one type of diversity. Together, these semi-isolated classifications (social status, culture, political leaning, economic function, etc.) produce a matrix of numerous multidimensional social niches, and provide one with opportunities to navigate the system by altering the “building blocks” of one’s social personae. All the structural relationships remain in place in the imperial situation: those of hegemony and exploitation, mimicry and dependence, emancipation and rebellion – except that they are disentangled from any clear-cut and essentialized human collectivities, whether these are ethnic or social groups. Imperial situation thus describes diversity as the fundamental and preexisting condition, the driving force of historical process – not a marginal social phenomenon, a by-product of incomplete rationalization by the legislator or scholar.” ^[5]

There is still a political value associated with any decision made by a scholar identifying relevant contexts for a case study, but it is less significant than the analytical value that is at stake here. We know that multidimensional regimes of difference (the imperial situation) produced partially incongruous contexts in complex societies. Some of these contexts were rationalized and even institutionalized, and others revealed themselves only in structural situations, or they can be envisioned solely as analytical constructs by modern scholars projected onto the past. All of them cannot be represented at once in a single study, because no narrative can embrace the “heterotopic” reality of the imperial situation. What must be done, however, is a reconstruction of the logic of the situation that determined the work of the context-setting “switchboard” at a particular historical conjunction. The political significance of this operation should never be ignored by scholars, but it seems an incomparably more mundane aspect (a technical chore of basic intellectual hygiene) when compared to the overall analytical challenge – deconstructing a historical context-setting mechanism.
This very brief survey underscores the significance of the very notion of “context” that seems to be treated as a self-evident and holistic phenomenon even by relativists (such as Derrida). Yet, from the vantage point of new imperial history, there is nothing self-evident about a “context,” which appears to be a function of a complex imperial situation. Furthermore, the idea of multiple and even arbitrarily identified contexts by itself does not explain what makes a series of circumstances a context. In 2017, Ab Imperio invited contributors and readers to scrutinize the logic behind the two processes: synthesizing an assortment of local conditions into a universally represented pattern of reality, and the opposite dynamics – translating global knowledge into local idioms.
Issue 4/2017 is titled “When Global Becomes Local: Modern Mobilities and the Reinvention of Locality.” It concludes the annual thematic volume, but also takes stock of a series of major synthetic works in the field of Russian imperial history. Besides Ab Imperio’s own two-volume New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia that was published in Moscow in June, two books were produced by Oxford University Press in 2017: The Russian Empire 1450–1801, by Nancy Shields Kollmann (reviewed by Mikhail Krom in this issue of AI), and Russia’s Empires, by Valerie Ann Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny (reviewed by Olga Tsapina). Of special importance for this thematic issue is the book by historical sociologist Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World also published in 2017, by Princeton University Press. An attempt at reconstructing the dialectics of the local and the global as the foundation of the context-setting process, Kumar’s book is the central feature of Alexander Semyonov’s article in the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue. Semyonov places the book in the broader context of ongoing historiographic debates on global and imperial history, suggesting that Kumar’s intervention redefines the very understanding of “global.” A comparative and entangled historical exploration of empires and their strategies of organizing social and political spaces offers more than just a context for “global history” (or vice versa). The individual case of Kumar’s imperial sociology has the potential to transform the field of global history by focusing on the logics and historical circumstances of context-shifting inside and especially outside “open systems” of imperial polities and societies. As revealed in the dialogue begun in the pages of this journal in 2017, there is a growing trend in the field of global history that counters its seemingly boundless expansion: an approach to the “world” through the processes of “world making” and its agencies and actors. This approach restores the central role of human agency in the historical process and the status of history-writing as the “science of people … in time,”^[6] regardless of the chosen scope and scale, and Kumar’s book furnishes historians with a working model for this effort.^[7] Krishan Kumar’s response follows Semyonov’s article, and concludes the cycle of mutual reflections and altering scale of analysis, by localizing some global generalizations in the researcher’s own perspective.
In the “History” section, three articles deconstruct the dialectics of the global and the local, and the indispensability of this dynamics to the very articulation of the idea of locality. A general context is required to identify a particular case as truly distinctive, but only those aspects of the global condition that are referenced as relevant in the course of shaping a local phenomenon can be conceptualized as context-setting. Thus, Elena Vishlenkova and Kira Il’ina describe repeated attempts by Russian authorities to establish a well-ordered administration of the imperial universities in the first half of the nineteenth century. There were several reasons for the government’s discontent with the state of affairs in education: the recently founded Russian universities were a far cry from the ultimate benchmark – the old German universities – in terms of teaching and research results, while being equally suspicious as breeding grounds for subversive ideas. Since Alexander I’s accession to the throne, his reformist government was busy trying to introduce firm state control over universities simultaneously with taking the very first steps in laying the grounds for a modern bureaucratic regime of governance. Vishlenkova and Il’ina show, essentially, how the modern state was created in Russia in the process of rationalizing the administration of universities. Clearly, a university (the authors focus on the case of Kazan University) is a local phenomenon and the state is a global structure, but the entangled process of state-building through university reform implies that both parties served as meaning-redefining contexts to each other.
Alexey Vdovin’s article continues this story chronologically but from a different angle. It reconstructs the history of the creation of Russia’s literary canon in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more specifically – the phenomenon of Russian classic literature as codified in the high school curriculum of the time. The fact that teaching Russian literature was not abandoned in schools in the 1870s and that the writings published before about 1842 had acquired the status of “classic” owed to a very specific political constellation. Vdovin argues that the turn toward classicism in education in the early 1870s by the newly appointed minister of public education, Dmitry Tolstoy, reflected the regime’s determination to embrace and promote Russian nationalism while curtailing its democratic potential. This both opened up an opportunity for Russian literature to be included in the school curriculum and mandated the format of this inclusion as rigid lists of compulsory reading. Teaching national literatures in high schools on such a significant scale was not common in European countries and America at that time, but the authorities were borrowing other elements from the global context (such as high school models). Little did they know that the canon of Russian classic literature that owed much to their administrative reforms would become a truly global phenomenon one day.
The article by Konstantin Zaikov and Tatiana Troshina focuses specifically on the process of shaping the idea of locality under the impact of global considerations. Territories on the Kola Peninsula had been under the control of the Russian Empire since the very beginning, and before that – under the control of Muscovy (and earlier still, at least since the thirteenth century – of Novgorod). It was a distinctive locality, but nobody knew its exact boundaries until the 1820s. For over half a millennium, there were no state borders in the region, so part of the local Saami population was recognized officially as subjects of two (or even three) states. This was normal by the universally upheld medieval standards of nonterritorial statehood enforced through the bonds of personal allegiance, but not by the standards of post-Napoleon Europe. The authors reconstruct a complex political and cultural dynamics after the formal border demarcation in 1826 that involved three main parties: the Saami, an indigenous population that did not recognize political borders and the concept of territorial sovereignty; Norway (then part of Sweden), which developed along the normative scenario of the nation-state on its “historical territory”; and the Russian Empire, whose political elite in the past had been willing to accommodate any regime of rule as long as it secured the local population’s loyalty to the sovereign. It is in this multifaceted context that the locus of Russia’s “Far North” was defined and redefined over the next ninety years, under the influence of mutual projections and misunderstandings.
In the “Archive” section Alexander Fokin publishes one of the “Notebooks from the Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator.” Thirty handwritten brochures composed in 1932–1933 by inmates of the special political prison of the NKVD in Verkhneuralsk (Cheliabinsk region) were discovered accidentally in early February 2018. It was known that the imprisoned Trotskyists produced a samizdat journal the Bolshevik-Leninist in Verkhneuralsk, but nobody had seen it before the thirty notebooks were found in February. At this preliminary stage, when some of the notebooks have not even been read due to their poor condition, it can be said that several of them represent issues of the journal Bolshevik-Leninist. The published document is titled “The Fascist Coup in Germany” and marked as Bolshevik-Leninist no. 2 (12), 1933. Among other things, this document is a stunning example of the totalizing (if not “totalitarian”) worldview. “Local” and “global” do not exist to the authors of the text, who seem to be insensitive to the context of their imprisonment and elaborated a general discourse that could have been produced with no alterations by a high-ranking party apparatchik in Moscow or a political émigré in France. Accordingly, this general discourse strikes one as being out of touch with reality – the result of its recognizing as valid context only the old works by the founding fathers of Marxism. Not only German National Socialism is identified as “Fascism” in the long text dedicated to the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in March 1933. (The last “true Leninist” leader, Trotsky, had written extensively only about Italian Fascism before.) There is not even any mention of racism as the foundation of Nazi ideology – because nothing meaningful had been written on the topic by Trotsky and Lenin (or Marx and Engels, for that matter). Thus, none of the contexts that could be expected to be important to the authors – their personal experience of the intraparty struggle with Stalinists, which they lost, or the up-to-date information from the outside world that they managed to receive in prison – had any significant impact on their thinking. Theoretically unlimited assortments of circumstances that can be identified as contexts (according to Derrida) are little more than stage decorations unless they are engaged consciously by historical actors in some way. A similar conclusion can be drawn from the article by Andrii Portnov and Tetiana Portnova in the “Historiography” section. Their discussion of the late Soviet phenomenon of Mykola Kovalsky’s school of Ukrainian history at the Dnipropetrovsk University reconstructs the multiple contexts that informed Kovalsky’s career choices and scholarship. These contacts are quite distinct and cannot be “naturally” implied from any normative vantage point, or in a purely structural analysis of Kovalsky’s academic career.
The section “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” features an article by Akbota Alisharieva, Zhanar Ibrayeva, and Ekaterina Protassova. They present preliminary evidence in support of the hypothesis that the Russian language in Kazakhstan has acquired autonomy from the “global” Russian language. The discussion of Russian as a pluricentric language has implications well beyond the sphere of linguistics, as it can provide a context that redefines the terms in which social scientists and even politicians contemplate the problem of the “Russian World” in post-Soviet countries. Linguistic approaches to pluricentrism vary: in its strong version, many scholars speak of “English languages” rather than variations of a single normative linguistic norm. It is possible that a thoroughly postcolonial process in post-Soviet countries will redefine the status of the Russian language, complementing political decentralization with acknowledging the existing of “Russian languages.” While this discussion has not even started, it is important to note that the local case of Kazakhstani Russian can alter the entire global context of perceiving the Russian language, with important scholarly and political implications for other local cases.
The very prospect of postcolonial emancipation of post-Soviet societies (including Russia) from a protracted identity crisis depends on their ability to embrace diversity, rather than castigating it as a remnant of the Soviet “imperial” past. The model of the imperial situation explains the nature of diversity as a multidimensional interplay of contexts, rather than a masquerade. It is thus fundamental to any social order, and not a result of indulging someone’s whims (either out of liberalism or underdeveloped disciplinary mechanisms). No subjectivity (which is the opposite to subalternity) is achievable without legitimizing the work of invisible context-setting “switchboards” as a norm. They are the ultimate test of this subjectivity’s coherence and hence validity in the ever-transforming force field between the local and the universal.