In 2018, Ab Imperio’s focus is on “Rethinking Hybridity and Purity in a Global Perspective” – a quintessential problem of social sciences and humanities. Explicitly or implicitly, every case study starts with mapping out the material and classifying the protagonists: are they representative of a particular group, and what are the criteria of groupness? The formulation of the “ideal type” concept in Weberian sociology and, in particular, the rise of constructivist methodologies after World War II have problematized the very notion of pure qualities of an object or a group. Yet, if our objects of study are all composite in nature, how do we define and analyze the building blocks from which they are “constructed?”
The materials published in issue 1/2018, “Hybridity and Pure Forms in the Sociopolitical Imagination,” permit an inquiry into this problem from various vantage points. The “Methodology and Theory” section features a preprint of the introductory chapter of the book A Theory for Empire Written on Its Margins: Life Histories of the Etnos Concept in Eurasia, currently in preparation by a British press. Sergei S. Alymov, David G. Anderson, and Dmitry V. Arzyutov present a fascinating account of the genealogy of the concept of “etnos” and its multiple interpretations and applications from the early twentieth century to this day. The concept itself was a product of “etnos-thinking” – a distinct mindset shared by Russian scholars who tried to solve the task of describing composite objects using some pure elemental blocks. Unlike “ethnicity,” the Greek neologism “etnos” reflected the hybridity of social objects by combining linguistic and biological kinship, cultural similarity, territorial proximity, and political affinity into a single all-embracing category. Defining etnos was like determining the integral for functions with several variables, thus ordering diversity and reducing it to a clear unambiguous formula. Driven by etnos-thinking, which acknowledged the fundamental diversity and hybridity of social groups, the practical application of the etnos concept has tended to essentialize human collectives. In the late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian social sciences and political thinking influenced by them, etnos was used as a synonym of race, an “objective” physical characteristic of a group. One could argue that this transformation was programmed by the very idea of deconstructing hybridity into pure elements (etnoses): the acceptance of pure forms defies the initial deconstructive impulse of etnos-thinking. The category that emerged as a reflection of diversity, in an act of refusal to accept nondifferentiated pure forms, was transformed into a pure form of its own. Repeating the fate of revolutionary categories like class or nation, etnos became a stultified expression of the drive to essentialize nationhood produced by the Soviet experience and exported globally. Even if some scholars suggested the death of etnos as a useful concept,^[1] few categories of sociopolitical imagination in the post-Soviet space continue to hold such sway over the minds of social sciences and political entrepreneurs alike.
The articles published in the “History” section of the issue resonate with each other despite their very different topics and the approaches taken by their authors. All of them focus on what can be defined as “a pure embodiment of a heterogeneous group,” and reveal the paradoxically marginal nature of what was perceived as normative symbols of national bodies. Zachary Hoffman studies the diaries of Aleksei Suvorin, a powerful press magnate in late imperial Russia, and the publications of his conservative and loyalist newspaper Novoe vremia during the first global conflict of the twentieth century, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Suvorin and the newspaper promoted jingoist Russian nationalism to the extent of openly attacking the government for its incompetent war effort. Suvorin’s political position was paradoxical in more ways than one. Not only was public bashing of the government during the war politically subversive and hence inconsistent with true loyalism. Suvorin placed all the blame for military losses not on the army command but on the top diplomats, who tried to avoid the war or end it. And while loudly promoting the war and praising the emperor, in private, Suvorin was hopeless about the prospects of winning the war and highly critical of Nicholas II and the royal family. Somehow, it took such a contradictory person with completely inconsistent political views to earn universal recognition as a leading Russian nationalist.
Korine Amacher studies a different, if equally contradictory, personality that posed as a normative paragon of the nation – a leading Marxist historian and social scientist of the 1920s, Mikhail N. Pokrovsky, the man who defined the boundaries and role of the Soviet proletarian nation in history. Pokrovsky, a fierce critic of Russian nationalism and imperialism, interpreted Russian history as a sequence of predatory conquests instigated by the class of bourgeoisie. Pokrovsky believed that this position proved his impeccable credentials as a Marxist social scientist and champion of anticolonialism, a local variation of the global anti-imperialist struggle. Therefore, it came as a shocking surprise to him when he was accused by Ukrainian Marxist historians of Great Russian chauvinism in 1928: his critique of Russian imperialism from the vantage point of anational, class-based universalism seemed halfhearted and restrictive to Ukrainians promoting a Marxist Ukrainian nation. And yet, several years later, after the launch of the devastating political campaign against “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism,” Ukrainian historians attempted to use Pokrovsky’s authority to defend the very idea of Ukrainian history’s autonomy: the revival of Russian centralism and statism in the 1930s made Pokrovsky’s national indifference attractive to non-Russian historians. This attempt ultimately failed because, in a matter of months, Pokrovsky would be (posthumously) officially stripped of his status as chief Marxist scholar, and his interpretation of Russian history was castigated as subversive and anti-Marxist. It is not just ironic but also suggestively paradoxical that Pokrovsky’s all-embracing Marxist nationalism of the 1920s alienated Ukrainian Marxists as “Russian chauvinist” but became acceptable to them when the official interpretation of Marxism began to change in the 1930s.
Benjamin Beresford argues that the “Soviet Sinatra,” the showman Leonid Utesov, acquired the reputation as the greatest socialist celebrity in the 1930s despite suspicious attitudes of the authorities. Fan mail to Utesov reveals his image in the eyes of the public as a normative Soviet, which is striking in its sharp contrast to Utesov’s ultimate nonconformity by the standards of High Stalinism: a Jew, who first became popular by performing criminal folklore songs in the late 1920s before turning to foreign and “bourgeois” jazz music, bringing elements of global culture to the isolated Soviet publics. To become accepted as a normative Soviet without the support of the state propaganda (or even against its efforts), one had to be a truly marginal figure.
Another historical paradox is addressed by Nari Shelekpayev, who discusses the phenomenon of Kazakhstan’s “wandering” capital city in the twentieth century. To be precise, in less than seventy-five years, four different localities gained the status of Kazakhstan’s capital – the symbol of the nation. Shelekpayev suggests reading each capital designation as part of a new scenario of Kazakh nationhood imposed by the central government – Soviet or post-Soviet Kazakhstani. Economic rationale and security considerations played an important part in making these decisions, which raises the question about the nature of the “national identity” that can receive such diverse interpretations through alternative scenarios of the capital city.
These four different historical cases underscore the impossibility of pure forms even as “construction blocks” of a larger heterogeneous group. The constituent elements either do not fit the harmonious image of the whole, or can be accurately represented only by a marginal figure, “typical of no one.” This marginality has different iterations and different connections to the global scale, yet in each case, paradoxically, the imagined homogeneity was epitomized by a character, a figure, or a process borne out by imperial diversity.
This problem is tackled from a different perspective in two articles published in the “ABC” section. The authors, Oksana Myshlovska and Olha Ostriitchouk, discuss the present-day attempts in Ukraine to overcome the censored memory of World War II–era ethnic conflicts. One can conclude that these noble attempts fail exactly because of the reemergence of the ethnically exclusive social imaginary in modern Central and Eastern Europe. Pure groups today are interested in pure (or purified) pasts, and so Ukrainian and Polish memory activists – professional historians or volunteers – are busy constructing their versions of the entangled past as exclusive and monological. They not only deny historical responsibility for war crimes of the past collectives with which they identify but also retrospectively purify them, complementing the ethnic cleansings of the past with symbolic ethnic cleansings of memory. The resulting conflict of historical interpretations and mutual accusations of manipulating facts reflect the fundamental fallacy of presenting hybrid social groups (in the past or at present) through narratives of purity.
When identity politics framed by the ideal of pure community escalates to the state of open war, the opponent is also depicted as a pure embodiment of otherness. In their article published in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section, Darya Radchenko and Alexandra Arkhipova scrutinize the mechanism and repertoire of mutual projections in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. They demonstrate the hybrid nature of the new hate speech that combines historical clichés, recent ethnic slurs, and situational memes to denote the ultimate Other. The article’s findings are based on statistical analysis of a broad sampling of Russian- and Ukrainian-language texts. Among the most important findings is a crucial discovery: the symbolic violence of hate speech escalates after physical aggression, and on the part of the aggressor (rather than by the side on the defensive). The goal is to legitimize the aggression by advancing a polarized worldview, which usually predates the outbreak of armed conflicts (but in this was achieved only post factum).
The impossibility (due to unrealism) of a society based on pure and absolute “truth” has been most famously demonstrated in Russian literature by Anton Chekhov. In an age of mobilized social groups that insist on the purity of their ranks (national, class, or religious), Chekhov pitted his worldview – dubbed “banality of life” – against the grand ideologies that promised to provide final answers to the main questions of life for everyone. In the “Newest Mythologies” section, the article by Riccardo Nicolosi presents Chekhov’s The Duel as a depiction of the world modeled on Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man. In the epilogue, the Darwinian universe implodes because no ideal types of social groups and processes are capable of embracing the actual diversity of the real world. Compared to the romantic ideal of pure forms and relationships, the heterogeneous and irregular social reality strikes one as the “banality of life.” It is a major challenge not only to a writer but also to a scholar to find a way to describe and analyze this reality as a phenomenon in its own right, rather than a deviation from some ideal type.
Studying very diverse historical cases, articles in this issue of Ab Imperio are focused on the conflict between pure forms and diverse reality. By opening the annual program of the journal with this issue, the editors underscore the critical edge of new imperial history as a mode of historical writing attentive to diversity as the constitutive reality of human societies.