Since ancient times, “purity” and “difference” have been the basic categories of social structuring. The very notion of difference implies a comparison of some clear types. Objects of comparison should be unambiguously “pure,” whether it is gender, kinship, religion, legal estate, social class, race, or ideology. Modern social sciences, in principle, acknowledge the artificial nature of functionally one-sided and internally homogeneous objects. Over a hundred years ago, Max Weber coined the term “ideal type” in order to differentiate between categories of practice and categories of analysis, reality, and abstraction “formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view… In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia.”^[1] Nevertheless, the cult of pure forms dominates not just in everyday life and politics, but in scholarship too. In many societies, deconstruction of the archaic ideals of sexual, caste, or racial purity is still perceived as subversive, while the archetypes of “pure food” or “sacral territory” get new life thanks to ultramodern dietary and environmental doctrines. In social sciences, even today scholars need to argue that categories such as “nation,” “empire,” “identity,” and “modernity” are but abstract ideal types, not real phenomena.^[2] What changes is the attitude to “mixture.” Whereas in the past this real state of things that is experienced and observed daily by everyone was perceived as a threat to the social order (“contamination” and “pollution”) and tabooed, in recent decades we have observed a cautious normalization of “hybridity.”^[3] Still, even among radical theoreticians and human rights activists the old cult of pure forms remains more popular. Today “pure forms” persist, for example, in simplified scenarios of emancipation, when gender or ethnocultural differences are perceived as a rigid (even if very broad) spectrum of identities.
This thematic issue of Ab Imperio, “The Cult of Pure Forms,” is not aimed at deconstructing or, moreover, discrediting this influential type of social thinking. The essentialization of empire, nation, gender, and other categories of groupness has become a matter of personal political choice and belief that is no longer predetermined by the current state of epistemology of social sciences. The editors have found it more productive to focus this issue within the annual theme, “Rethinking Hybridity and Purity in a Global Perspective,” on the problem of the various functions that the ideal of “pure forms” have performed over time.
The issue opens with Marina Mogilner’s article, “Three Roads to Modernity at the Turn of the ‘Jewish Century’: Boasian Revolution, Imperial Revolution, and Bolshevik Revolution,” which presents some key topics of her new book project. The title of the article refers to the main “ideal-typical” categories of chronology, groupness, and social processes: modernity (which is usually contrasted to the epoch of “traditional society”), Jews (clearly differentiating themselves from Gentiles), and revolution (as the direct opposite of evolution). Mogilner shows how these and related notions of “pure forms” are produced in the situation of the actual mixture and fragmentation (discreteness) of any society that imagines itself as a single community. At the turn of the twentieth century and especially during the interwar period, Jews served as an important litmus test for projects aimed at restoring pure forms (through unification and standardization) as part of modernizing mass societies. The “Boasian revolution” took place in the Progressive Era in the United States, in the context of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and panic about the “pollution” of American society by the influx of East Europeans. The study of Jewish immigrants by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911 relativized the notion of race in order to rehabilitate the idea of America as a melting pot and prove that Jews could assimilate into a modern society. In the language of racial anthropology that was shaping the academic discourse on group purity and hierarchical inequality at that time, Boas upheld the values of complexity and hybridity as cornerstones of American modernity. In Eastern Europe and particularly in the Russian Empire during the interrevolutionary period and in the early USSR, Boas’s ideas and methods were used to prove the reality of Jews as a particular race.
The rise of mass society as an intrinsic element of modernity presented a special challenge to continental multicultural empires. To them, “mass participation” was not just a question of the scale or even degree of democratization. At stake was their own “constitution”: how was simultaneous mass participation in the common public sphere, on the same territory possible for different population groups with different cultures and economic regimes? The postimperial situation in a region set rigid patterns of modernization and mass participation: nation-states, the legal status of nonterritorial minorities for stateless groups, a class-based society. In the 1920s, the USSR experimented with the metaphorically dubbed policy “the affirmative action empire” as a transitional stage to complete integration of the population to a single classless society. All the forms of postimperial modernity mentioned left the Jews just one scenario for successful integration in the future mass society – assimilation and thus negation of their Jewishness. In this situation, the only way to sustain cohesion of a spatially dispersed group lacking any single normative culture (or even “church)” was seen in Jewish self-racialization. Developed by Jewish anthropologists, ethnographers, and physicians in the 1910s and 1920s, the project of Jews as a single (homogeneous and stable) race allowed the actual diversity and discreteness of Jews in multinational or supranational societies to be preserved, which produced high social integration without full assimilation. The article reviews how this project fared in three different scenarios of transition to modernity (as revolutions of the “old regime”).
It can be added that the project of a territorial Jewish nation (Zionism) also became possible only after the reconceptualization of Jews as a modern nation in terms of a “pure race.” Equally racializing was Stalin’s project of Jews as a regular territorial nation (in Birobidzhan). In contrast, the initial project of Jewish self-racialization was aimed at forming an imagined community of “racially pure unity,” which allowed in reality a multitude of social and cultural forms, territorial mobility, and demographic openness. The acceptance or imposition from the outside of a typical European scenario of territorial nation in practice meant the isolation and discrimination of various categories of Jews as inferior members of the nation. Paradoxically, the cult of racial purity in this case contributed to sustaining the actual diversity of the community and its integration into supranational or multinational modernity.
Another paradoxical case is discussed in the “Historiography” section, in relation to the recent book by Klimenti I. and Klimenti K. Fedevitches about the Black Hundreds movement in the Ukrainian Volyn region after 1905. It was established long ago that two-thirds of the Black Hundred members resided in the provinces of the Pale of Jewish Settlement (far away from inner Russia), and that Russians constituted a minority among Russian nationalists.^[4] It was also known that hundreds of thousands of the Union of the Russian People members (and of other Black Hundred organizations) came from Ukrainian provinces and most of their leaders (not to mention the rank and file) were Ukrainians. Yet, until recently, Ukrainian historiography has tended to ignore this fact. At best, the scale of the Russian nationalist movement in Ukrainian lands was cited in connection with the problematic development of the Ukrainian national movement. Historians of Russian nationalism also did not go beyond mere acknowledgment of the curious preponderance of “non-Russians” among Russian nationalists-monarchists. The ideal of pure forms – the Ukrainian nation or Russian nationalism – did not leave room for the possibility of thinking about the phenomenon of the Ukrainian Black Hundreds other than in terms of “scandal” (a weird incident and corruption of the “norm”).
The Fedeviches propose a radically different take on the problem. They interpret the role of one of the most numerous – Volynia – chapters of the Union of the Russian People (URP) as, essentially, that of the rightist, monarchist wing of the Ukrainian national movement. They argue that it was thanks to the mass-scale activity of the URP in the countryside, officially endorsed by the government, that the political mobilization of Ukrainian peasantry could take off and develop after 1917 into the Ukrainian national movement. Ukrainian historians discussing the book in this issue – Denys Shatalov, Mykhaylo Gaukhman, and Andriy Zayarnyuk – acknowledge the productivity of this hypothesis but point to several important flaws in the Fedeviches’ argument. Apparently, local members of the Black Hundred movement had contributed to the formation of modern Ukrainian society (of mass participation in the common public sphere), but their direct identification as activists of the Ukrainian national movement seems to be an exaggeration and requires some additional proof.
One may suggest that pinpointing the Black Hundreds in terms of any pure ideal of groupness (whether the Russian or Ukrainian national movement) is futile in principle. Their historical reality was shaped by the broad political scene in the Russian Empire and the epistemological context of the imperial situation, both of which remain beyond the scope of the Fedeviches’ study. This means that the choice of collective loyalty was not restricted to one or another nationalism but could be composite, hybrid, or even anational: neither Russian, nor Ukrainian. It is possible that in the Black Hundreds’ monarchism some traditional local elites found the only way to follow the old imperial scenario of loyalty in exchange for integration in the new conditions of mass society. So, it was only the identification of Nicholas II’s regime with Russian nationalism that instilled this traditional loyalism with a nationalistic character.
Articles in the forum “From Industrialization to Extraction: Visions and Practices of Development in Central Asia,” put together by Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Marianne Kamp, cover the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Kalinovsky and Kamp turn to the notion of “development” as more general and possibly more neutral than “modernization.” From the vantage point of this thematic issue, of particular interest is the problem of how diversity interplays with modernity (both in the cases under examination and in the authors’ logic of analysis) or, put differently, the entanglement of the discourses of “purity” and “development.” In his article about the Great Famine of 1931–1933 in Kazakhstan, Niccolò Pianciola argues that the main reason for the disaster that claimed the lives of every third Kazakh was the incompetence and dogmatism of Stalin’s rapid modernization. More precisely, the forced integration of Kazakhs in mass society (in its version of total state control) wittingly ignored any specifics of nomadic lifestyle and economy, perceiving the accepted model of modernization as a practical plan rather than an “ideal type.” This explains the relatively higher rate of mortality among Kazakhs than among Ukrainians during the Holodomor.
This “purity” of Stalin’s politics in Kazakhstan, unmarred by any additional considerations (and not even, according to Pianciola, pursuing genocidal goals), makes one think about a problem that remained beyond the scope of the article. Western colonialism and its projects of modernization/development had undergone a complex evolution from the late eighteenth century to the postwar decolonization era. By the mid-nineteenth century, any political measures in the colonies regardless of their rationale (humanitarian or exploitative), increasingly relied on local expert knowledge, which, by the early decades of the twentieth century, had reached the status of full-scale academic disciplines. According to the orthodoxy of the “modernity school” in Russian studies, the early Soviet project was also based on expert knowledge, and the role of experts was decisive in the Sovietization of former Russian colonies in Central Asia.^[5] The fact that Stalin’s policies in Kazakhstan completely ignored the well-studied specificity of nomadic societies testifies not just to authoritarianism and dogmatism of the regime. Taken together with other factors identified by Pianciola – the dismissive attitude toward Kazakhs, who were identified with the lowest stage of the “Stalin hierarchy of consumption,” and preparedness for significant human losses among nomads during forced sedentarization – the principled ignorance of Stalinist modernizers allows one to speak of the colonial policy of the Soviet regime in the region. Moreover, it is not a political label but a very particular and recognizable type of colonialism that had very little in common with European colonialism of the same period – the predatory settler colonialism of the nineteenth century, truly genocidal in its indifference to the lives of “aborigines.” No Marxist orthodoxy (with its self-assigned progressor mission) could explain the ignoring of expert knowledge about the local population. The question of how and on what level the complex of settler colonialism was interiorized by the Soviet internationalist project and how much it influenced practical population politics in Soviet Eurasia remains a productive research field. The problem of Stalinism’s entanglement with colonialism (its rhetorical archenemy) does not imply rehabilitation of the old totalitarian school approach. On the contrary, the purity of a one-dimensional “totalitarian” worldview (just as that of neorevisionism, entirely focused on social progress) is problematized by a more complex and multidimensional analytical model.
Flora Roberts’s article tells the story of debates preceding the construction of the Kairakkum dam in Tajikistan in 1956. In the second half of the 1940s, Uzbek and Tajik party leaders competed over the location of the new hydropower plant. Neither side wanted it to be built in their own republic. Eventually, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic became the construction site, which could be viewed as an indirect indicator of its subordinated position in the late Stalinist Soviet hierarchy compared to the Uzbek Republic, which became industrialized after massive wartime evacuation of factories from the European part of the country. Roberts restores the historical subjectivity of republican elites, who, even during high Stalinism, could object to Moscow’s plans (with varying success) and advance their own visions of the region’s development.
In this story, the “dam” becomes a universal idiom for expressing a variety of different concerns (rather than any single “pure” message). As Roberts notes, nobody questioned the need to build the dam. This can be explained not only by the modernizing élan of local elites, but also by the dam’s representation of the Stalinist regime’s very presence in the region. As was the case during the Great Famine in the Kazakh steppe in the early 1930s, the cost of integration into the Soviet project was native land. With the dam, this land had to be sacrificed to the reservoir (about 130,000 acres). The objections of Tajik leaders to building the dam on their territory were driven by the higher value of land for the republic’s agricultural economy. But perhaps of equal importance is the fact that Isfisor, the native village of Bobojon Ghafurov, first secretary of the Tajik Communist Party, was located in the zone at risk of flooding (the water stopped barely two miles from it). Incidentally, Ghafurov quit his high party position and dedicated himself to historical studies (heading the academic Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow) just several weeks after the Kairakkum dam was inaugurated. Ghafurov’s last political decision demonstrates even more explicitly his hierarchy of priorities and the place of his native village in it. Three years before his death, in 1974, Ghafurov, the party apparatchik of the Stalin era, managed to get the Central Committee’s authorization for his hajj to Mecca. Allegedly, this is what he told his colleagues at the institute afterward:

“[The fact] that I was first secretary of the Tajik Communist Party’s Central Committee is poppycock [chepukha]. That I was a member of the CPSU Central Committee – is poppycock. That I was an academician is poppycock too. But that I have become a hajji – this is what will be appreciated in my village.”^[6]

One way or another, Soviet modernization required the giving up of pure forms of the traditional lifestyle (whether real or retrospectively constructed). Legitimization of purely nonideological “traditions” in the late Soviet Union (which most prominently acquired the form of campaigns for the pure environment) indicated the crisis of the Soviet project of forced development and the official version of tolerated diversity.
Two other articles in the forum – by Amanda E. Wooden (on gold extraction in modern Kyrgyzstan) and Morgan Y. Liu (on the role of oil in the economies of the Caspian region) – deal with the post-Soviet period. They also discuss the “development” of Central Asia – now driven, primarily, by private international corporations. And although industrialization has been replaced by extraction of natural resources as the main goal, still the price of integration into modernity (of the globalization era) is “purity” – of the environment and national cultures. Thus, it is all the more interesting to understand, what “development” means in the situation of postindustrialization and postmodernism, when “modernization” has lost its normative character and even vector. The articles support the validity of the question by pointing out that residents of mining towns in Central Asia still frame their expectations of social welfare in Soviet standards of the past. How then can we characterize development that is oriented toward achievements of the past, and shifts its priorities from industrial production to extensive extraction of raw materials? How can we conceptualize the changing asymmetrical relationships of the region’s countries with external centers of economic and political authority today – compared to the Soviet period? How do processes described in terms of “development” correlate with colonialism and neocolonialism? And what can we say of a postcolonial regime in which the idealized past is represented by an empire that created the social state? The articles of Wooden and Liu should be read through the prism of these larger questions concerning the problem of purity and persisting modernity.
“Pure forms” – just as a tabula rasa – can be used for opposite goals. Constructing homogeneous groupness (of Jewish race, monarchist Russian people, or the Soviet nation) can serve the task of integrating diverse populations into the forming mass society of modernity. By the same token, pure forms of lifestyle, culture, or nature had to be given up in the process of adjusting to the complex reality of modern and postmodern society. Real or constructed, “purity” acquires meaning only in a certain historical context. This is usually the multidimensional context of the imperial situation, in which the meaning depends on the observer’s position and changes with the relocation of the vantage point.