The field formerly known as Russian Studies rose to prominence or at least global relevance in the second half of the twentieth century, in the context of the Cold War. And yet, as one can see retrospectively, considerations of political pragmatism alone cannot explain the scope of themes and ideas that attracted the interest of scholars from other fields and various disciplines in Russian Studies. This interest had a more fundamental reason, namely, the decisive engagement of Russian Studies with structuralism as an episteme. The peak of popularity of structuralism in philology and history (through the third generation of the Annales school) coincided with the flourishing of Russian Studies as the source of important methodological insights.
Marxism was only one strain of this Russia-related structuralism. Another, less widely acknowledged “Russian trace” was just as important: the geographic and philological structuralism of Eurasianists of the 1920s, which directly influenced French luminaries such as Alexandre Kojève and particularly Claude Lévi-Strauss.^[1] The worldwide fame of Mikhail Bakhtin bridged the Marxist and formalist varieties of Russian structuralism. Curiously, the latest original rendering of structuralism – the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics – was also the last instance of innovative scholarship coming from “Russia.” The global multidirectional defection from structuralism since the 1970s – to postmodernism, poststructuralism, holism, and so on – marked the demise of the “Russian” intellectual role in global scholarship in humanities and social sciences. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 embodied in practice the end of structuralism as a particular way of envisioning and organizing reality.
Essentially, this was the ideal of a two-dimensional matrix capable of rationally arranging the whole observable diversity into autonomous but mutually compatible, internally homogeneous units, which privileged clearly bounded differences. The rationality of categorization excused the coercion needed to impose the chosen principle of classification and relied on coercion in sustaining its authority. This way, ethnocultural diversity was accommodated in the form of Soviet national republics and smaller territorial units, together comprising a single multinational state. This accommodation of diversity was decisively nonalternative: Soviet federalism acknowledged just one principle of nationality; only select nationalities were recognized as “titular” and hence deserving a republic of their own; only those fitting a certain cultural and political canon were accepted as members of Soviet nations (the rest being stigmatized as bourgeois nationalists). This discriminatory selectivity was a form of symbolic coercion that required political coercion for its implementation. Thus, the systematic coercion in the USSR stemmed as much from the political nature of the regime as from the nature of structuralist episteme embraced by it. Any criticism of the multinational USSR and socialism (as the project of reconstructing society and economy on certain rational principles) was congruent with the criticism of structuralism for its rigid normativity – a task extraordinarily difficult in the era of structuralism’s intellectual prominence and domination.^[2]
The demise of former Russian Studies’ global relevance was a consequence of the conceptual stagnation of a field that could not adjust to life after structuralism. The split of the single Russian/Soviet research domain into numerous post-Soviet national historiographies, closely modeled on the standards of European national history of the previous century, did not remedy the fundamental deficiency – the persistence of structuralist methodology (often dubbed as positivism or essentialism by its critics). Since the early 1990s, former Russian studies (now differentiated into many area studies still copying the main traits of the old common field) have been consistently lagging one generation behind mainstream Western intellectual trends. Michel Foucault was discovered only in the early 1990s, postcolonial critique – by the turn of the millennium. Today, the field seems ripe for discussing transnationalism – a topic broadly explored by historians in other fields back in the 1990s, as several contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio point out.
And yet, the ever-tempting Gershchenkronian hypothesis about the “advantages of backwardness” leaves hope that our decentralized field can restore its former positions. After all, the subject areas and theoretical currents that are generally seen today as trendsetters in the humanities are themselves falling short of the task of producing a workable poststructuralist model of society – or even a clear language that can conceptualize such a model. Thus, deconstruction is a necessary and useful instrument of analysis that, by definition, is incapable of any comprehensive “construction” task. Early instances of postcolonial theory had exposed the repressive mechanisms for sustaining social order in complex (imperial) societies only to celebrate equally structuralist, only “simple” and homogeneous, forms of national groupness. The repressive potential of this postcolonial ideal, with its cult of indigenous authenticity, has been criticized by the Subaltern Studies project. Subaltern Studies demonstrated that vernacular nationalisms represent no less repressive hegemonic force of double – direct and discursive – domination than that of colonial empires, which anticolonial nationalist movements sought to overthrow. The project was officially closed ten years ago, not least due to the conceptual deadlock in which its participants found themselves: anticolonial nationalism was discredited, Europe was provincialized, and the subalterns had been “heard.” But it was unclear what alternative form of groupness (and a language for describing social diversity in general) could replace nation and nationalism.
In general, reliance on the idiom of nation and nation-centered social analysis always serves as a clear marker of the persistence of the structuralist approach as an inevitably selective, normative, and hence coercive mode of thinking. It straitjackets observable multidimensional human diversity into a single plane of ethnocultural categorization, which insists on an internal homogeneity of nations and the “national minorities” recognized within them. Accordingly, when it comes to the key problem of modern social sciences and humanities – the conceptualization of human diversity as a fundamental social condition – even the most dynamic currents within European history or global history reveal the same old nation-centered and structuralist episteme. The popular concept of “national indifference” most lucidly demonstrates the constraints of the analytical language that cannot produce a positive description of reality beyond the normative concept of nation.^[3] In the same way, the notion of “transnationalism” that became popular beginning in the 1990s, spreading from American history globally, betrays the same structuralist and nation-centered logic of thinking about diversity as a mechanical assortment of individual simple homogeneous units (nations).^[4] Even when scholars aim at constructing a more nuanced and sophisticated model, their analytical language effectively undercuts the effort while retaining the nation as the measure against which social and political processes are evaluated.
Against this background, the state of former Russian studies (or should we now call them trans-Russian?) does not look so exceptional. The greatest resource of the discipline has always been its rich object – the sea of human diversity unbound by any “objective” (structuralist) divides. For several centuries, much of Northern Eurasia was politically united by fairly coercive imperial regimes, but there were no oceans to clearly separate a metropole from the colonies. Ethnocultural (national) differences were real, and “Ukrainians” were never “Russians” (as both categories can only be understood as projections back in time), but it remains unclear exactly how to draw a spatial boundary between the two groups (were there indeed only two groups?) and whether each of them had any homogeneous cultural or political profile. Political, class, and religious differences had led to large-scale social mobilizations in the region’s past, but none of these categories of groupness closely correlated with each other. If “Russian” history teaches us anything, it is that our structuralist theories of diversity are hopelessly inadequate (even though they were coined in the early twentieth century as an attempt to put the region’s social mixture in order). Moreover, the region attracts scholars who are most sensitive to the problem of one’s personal incongruity with any rigid and two-dimensional group identities. The editors of Ab Imperio had a chance to demonstrate this back in 2004 by collecting and publishing the responses of twenty historians from various countries to the question “Why choose ‘Russian’ history?” ^[5] When acute self-cognition overlaps with a genuine interest in the Other, we have every reason to expect a creative breakthrough in comprehending the phenomenon of diversity, particularly if individual inquiries are coordinated into a collective scholarly effort.^[6]
This point is best illustrated by the thematic forum that opens this issue of Ab Imperio – “Transnationalism as Lived Experience.” The issue concludes the annual program “Rethinking Hybridity and Purity in a Global Perspective,” which aspired to contribute to the development of a truly poststructuralist understanding of hybridity as a condition of integrated and layered (often hierarchically) diversity. The forum is organized around the “Autobiographical Manifesto” by the winner of the Ab Imperio 2017 Annual Prize Award for best article, Choi Chatterjee. The very title of her manifesto, “The Accidental Transnationalist,” suggests that in certain contexts, words are just words that can convey very different meanings depending on the research question. In the case of Chatterjee, the question is not how to bring together multiple national perspectives. To the contrary, her question is: How does a reflection on problems of diversity (cultural, social, gender, class, and so on) as a lived experience translate into a research agenda and mode of teaching, and how do all these issues then influence our analytical language and disciplinary conventions? The editors are grateful to Choi Chatterjee for offering her provocative and compelling programmatic statement to Ab Imperio. We invited representatives of different disciplines dealing with the region – historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars – to respond by sharing their ideas about the issues raised in the “Manifesto,” their understanding of poststructuralist, humanistic, post- and nonnational history writing and the possible sources of such methodological innovations. This discussion not only reestablishes the reflective subjectivity of a scholar as an element of her narrative, but questions the limitations of our analytical language in reflecting personal and collective experiences of inequality, domination and exclusion, shared experiences and globality, and the situational nature of identifications and belonging.
The theme is continued in the “History” section, in the forum “Urban Milieus, People’s Friendship, and the Late Soviet Transnational Experience” guest-edited by Moritz Florin and Manfred Zeller. The articles in the forum offer a vision of late Soviet society as essentially hybrid by transcending the structuralist paradigm of compartmentalization of a whole and preserving the reality of persisting differences within one complex entity. In his article, Moritz Florin problematizes any single normative understanding of Sovietness on the example of the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, Frunze (now Bishkek). This is a profoundly poststructuralist step, more consistent than the typical postcolonial repudiation of “empire” as an unambiguous mechanism of domination. Without trivializing the coercive nature of the Soviet regime, Florin shows that it could be understood and experienced differently, and hence produce incoherent social consequences. Stefan Guth tackles the same task from a somewhat different angle. He discusses industrial development in Kazakhstan’s Mangyshlak peninsula from the 1960s through the 1980s as a projection of multiple Sovietnesses, often mutually contradictory and stirring social conflicts in one sphere while attempting to neutralize them in other. Finally, Galina Zelenina offers a provocative reinterpretation of the late Soviet Jewish national movement (usually identified as the refuseniks) as a profoundly Soviet sociocultural phenomenon. Once again, very different societal “compartments” (with seemingly incompatible cultures, values, and practices) are conceptualized as coexisting within a common whole. This common Soviet “empire” emerges as a multifaceted context, rather than a coherent machine with a single persistent subjectivity.
There is no place in this space for Homi Bhabha’s dismissive interpretation of hybridity merely as mimicry.^[7] Even if the protagonists of Florin’s article, with their differing understandings of Sovietness, were mimicking some normative scenarios of the metropole, the result was the proliferation of diversity and “creative misunderstanding” (Richard White), that generated distinctive new subjectivities. Zelenina further clarifies the mechanism of hybridization at work: the result is a complex new social identity rather than a mechanical amalgamation of “donor” subjects in certain proportions. As she demonstrates, the Sovietness of Jewish activists did not make them any less nonconformist, just as their interest in Jewish socialization (and, ultimately, emigration from the USSR) did not turn the majority of them into dissidents. Zelenina speaks of the location of the community of Jewish activists as “the place of inside/outside-ness” (creatively reconditioning Alexei Yurchak’s model). This seems the best definition of hybridity as a new reality in its own right that is not reducible to some preexisting components of the never-stabilized synthesis.
Zelenina’s article resonates with the article by Edward Waysband in the “Newest Mythologies” section, which considers the prose of the Russian Israeli writer Alexander Goldstein as a case of consciously undermined and compromised hybridity. Goldstein represented those members of the group studied by Zelenina, who forsook the hybrid milieu “in the place of inside/outside-ness” and made a choice in favor of rigid and simple ethnonationalist groupness. Once in Israel, Goldstein exploited the powerful idiom of Levantine (transcultural Mediterranean) hybridity as a vehicle to promote the superiority of the newly arrived Soviet Jews in Israeli society. Essentially, he reproduced the late Soviet worldview, which was imperial in the sense of its imposing a rigid hierarchy of social statuses, and vehemently nationalist in its insisting on the ethnocultural constitution of this hierarchy. Whereas in the Soviet Union ethnic Russians were at the top of the social pyramid, and Jews at the bottom, Goldstein adapted it to Israeli reality so that Soviet Jews constituted the elite. For this, he needed to transcend the boundaries of the egalitarian Israeli nation-state by including it in the reinterpreted broader Levantine space, in which “imperial” Soviet Jews would have an advantage over the “parochial” aborigines.
Another attempt at hijacking living hybridity by the toxic fusion of nationalism and imperialism is studied by Heather J. Coleman in the “History” section. Her story concerns the celebration of the 900th Anniversary of the Christianization of Rus’ in Kiev in 1888, which the regime of Alexander III attempted to use to promote Russian nationalism. Not unlike the ambiguous Sovietness discussed in the forum guest-edited by Florin and Zeller, it turned out that no single and coherent Russianness existed as a hegemonic discourse at the time. Instead of cementing the regime and its political goals, the celebration in Kiev highlighted the mutually incompatible nature of various alternative “Russiannesses”: those understood in terms of ethnocultural nationalism and state interests, Slavophilism and Orthodox Christianity. Instead of imposing conformity, the jubilee campaign mobilized hybridity as a complex social sphere in its own right, and stimulated Ukrainian collective solidarity as part of this multifaceted sphere.
Yuri Radchenko’s review article in the “Historiography” section makes it painfully clear what happens when hybridity fails as a social practice and a language of analysis. He discusses the book by Rūta Vanagaitė and Efraim Zuroff, Our People: Journey with an Enemy, which has stirred quite a controversy in Lithuania, Russia, and other post-Soviet countries. As has become clear over the past two decades, while the Nazis established their murderous grip over the countries of Eastern Europe and created the conditions for the Holocaust, the main perpetrators of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe were local populations and collaborative administrations – “the neighbors.”^[8] Lithuania was no exception in this regard, as the extermination of its large Jewish population was conducted mostly by Lithuanian nationalists, raging mobs, and local police. The case of Lithuania is particularly striking since there was no prehistory of any significant anti-Jewish violence before World War I.^[9] What happened during the two decades of the interwar period was the dismantling of the remnants of the imperial hybrid social space by the aggressively nationalizing regimes (with Lithuanian nationalism further triggered by Soviet, class-based nationalism after the country’s occupation in 1940).^[10] Lithuanian journalist Rūta Vanagaitė and Israeli historian Efraim Zuroff addressed the problem of Lithuanians’ responsibility for the Holocaust in the book analyzed by Radchenko. He presents a list of inaccuracies and misinterpretations that have compromised the important and politically sensitive case made in the book. As can be seen from this analysis, the authors’ main problem was their fundamental inability to transcend the nationalist idiom that perceives both Jews and Lithuanians as distinctive homogeneous entities, isolated communities of shared moral virtues and responsibility. In this perspective, not only is it inconceivable to think of Jews as Lithuanians (as promptly noted by Radchenko), it is equally impossible to comprehend the differing attitudes of “ethnic Lithuanians” to the Jews and the Holocaust. The latter category is anything but self-evident, given the variety of religious affinities and language skills among the Aukštaitians and Samogitians, so only a firmly racialized approach – this time, on behalf of modern commentators – allows their differentiation from Lithuanian-speaking Jews.
Taking hybridity seriously – not as a parody mimicking “real” pure forms – means that what used to be called “Russian” history can exist today only as a history of multidimensional society characterized by entangled diversity. The editors of Ab Imperio prefer to speak of new imperial history, whereas many of our colleagues are more comfortable with the notion of transnational history. This terminological difference does not matter as long as we communicate through our case studies and reflection on our life experiences, which are often so dissimilar but share many ruptures, dislocations, and struggles. Understood in a thoroughly poststructuralist way, as a new principle of describing a whole as preserving the unresolved multidimensional diversity, hybridity emerges as a truly global condition. As the materials in this issue of Ab Imperio demonstrate, it is interesting and rewarding to study the vaguely defined Northern Eurasia from this vantage point, along the way producing valuable insights for colleagues in other fields.