In his famous Leviathan, published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes offered a pessimistic vision of the social condition:

“Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind … From Equality Proceeds Diffidence … From Diffidence Warre … Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man. For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known …. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.” ^[1]

Hobbesian belief in the fundamentality of the war of “each against all” has repeatedly been challenged by other social thinkers (first and most famously – by John Locke). However, his truly systematic framework of analysis remains relevant to this day, suggesting the existence of a structural interconnection between the inclinations of individuals and the general state of society. Hobbes also demonstrated a way of thinking about social processes without drawing a rigid divide between “domestic” and “international” contexts, thus allowing the study of civil discord and a war with foreigners as analogous and often interconnected phenomena. This makes the three-and-a-half-centuries-old treatise, Leviathan, look surprisingly relevant today, especially given the propensity of modern historians and social scientists to rigidly segregate the continuum of social self-organization and disorganization into distinct departments of domestic and foreign policies, of conflicts and social cohesion. The point is, of course, not to call for a return to Hobbesian abstract generalizations. Rather, we need to contextualize and historicize the broad categories of “men,” “power,” and the like that framed Hobbes’s philosophical thinking. Moreover, these categories need to acquire the same multifaceted and syncretic meaning as the concept of “war” that was so keenly understood by Hobbes, who was writing his treatise during the decade-long English Civil War and under its direct influence.
In 2019, Ab Imperio invites contributors and readers to think about the ambivalence of the phenomenon of social strife, which can precede the “civil state” (Hobbes) or result from its collapse, and can be regarded as an internal or an international conflict (depending on the scale of analysis). Every familiar notion becomes problematized when “society” stops being seen as a homogeneous entity with clear borders, and appears in a more realistic light – as a multilayered amalgamation of social networks and communities of solidarities of various sizes. If some of these are confined to a village while others are intercontinental in scale, some are based on common economic interests and others on shared culture, then how do we differentiate a civil war from a world war, and societal disintegration from the implementation of universal trends in a global society?
Peace and stability, as the opposite of war, are no less puzzling. Do those societies and historical periods that are described as “peaceful” or even “stagnant” find ways to resolve grave conflicts, or do they just “outsource” them beyond the limits of the officially recognized community (overseas or in the gray zones of domestic marginality)? Will the change in the scale of analysis – from the local to the global, and from the global to the microhistorical – help locate the fractures and breaches in the fabrics of states and societies that are camouflaged by the dominant narratives of social cohesion? How does the historical optics that takes into account multiple forms of diversity change our perception of the dynamism and internal conflict of those societies that appear to have achieved a Hobbesian state of peace? Whether it is the “reaction” in imperial Russia between 1907 and 1914, Stalinist “totalitarianism,” or Brezhnevite “stagnation,” how can historians understand these periods as containers of social conflicts articulated not just in political programs but in the production of agency in variegated ways, from national claims on multinational spaces to low-scale civil war? In other words, what appears to be the victory of a particular sociopolitical disposition may equally be seen as an ongoing conflict when viewed through a different set of theoretical lenses. These questions and ambivalences are reflected in the journal’s annual theme “Hybrid Conflicts in Diverse Societies: Civil Wars and Global Peace.”
Ab Imperio’s first issue for 2019, “Encounters and Disengagements in the Imperial Situation,” focuses on the problem of correspondence between the reality of multilevel diversity and the discursive mapping of social order. These dominant political and cultural narratives determine where and how the boundary is drawn in the society between “domestic” and “foreign” spaces, “native” and “alien” populations, and even between “social” and “natural” phenomena. The latter aspect is discussed in the thematic forum “The Green End to the Red Empire,” guest-edited by Melanie Arndt and Laurent Coumel, in the “History” section. The forum’s editors and contributors relativize the conventional demarcations between “environment” and “politics,” including the influential narrative of the environmental movement as merely a surrogate political mobilization in disguise (inevitable in an authoritarian society such as that of the late USSR). Just as historians of the Soviet society have recently been discarding the rigid opposition of dissident culture to official culture by revealing a range of intermediary forms between the two extremes, contributors to the forum question the simplified counterpoising of environmentally conscious public activists to government officials conducting ecologically harmful policies.
On the example of Soviet paper mills in the 1960s (primarily, the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill), Elena Kochetkova problematizes the view of environmental protection as a domain solely of an opposition-minded public, led by renowned scientists and writers and opposed to predatory state monopolies. She demonstrates that researchers affiliated with the industry’s flagship Institute of Pulp and Paper Manufacturing in Leningrad were quite enthusiastic about developing modern methods of cleaning wastewater discharges from mills and even borrowing American technologies. To them, the task of environmental protection was inseparable from the intensification of production, as elements of the same “optimist” perception of industrial modernity. In the end, filtration systems developed by the industry’s engineers were not implemented in full – due to their own miscalculations, scarcity of resources, and pressure from top management that was preoccupied with meeting the production plan. However, this failure should not obscure the fact that engineers working for the state monopoly as well as environmental activists were objectively on the same side of the barricades.
A similarly ambiguous story is discussed in Anna Olenenko’s study of the flooding of the lower Dnieper wetlands as a result of the construction of the Kakhovka dam and reservoir in the 1950s. Associated with the history of Zaporizhian Cossacks, the meadows of the Dnieper floodplain have been an important site of memory in the Ukrainian national narrative. They were also a valuable economic resource for local peasants, helping them to survive during the Holodomor and World War II. Therefore, the flooding of wetlands had detrimental environmental and psychological consequences and it is perceived today within the historical narrative of suppressing Ukrainianness under Stalinism. Unlike many other dams, however, the main purpose of the Kakhovka dam initially was not to produce electricity for Moscow-driven industrialization but to adjust the Dnieper’s river regime to provide irrigation of the arid steppe areas of Southern Ukraine and increase agricultural productivity. Judging by the evidence cited in the article, the initiative to build the dam came from Ukrainian regional administrators, and the expert evaluation of the project showed much more concern for its environmental consequences among Moscow-based specialists than the Ukrainian architects of the construction. It should be noted that none of the participants in the Stalinist socioeconomic system perceived “nature” in isolation from its economic value. Therefore, concern for the interests of the Ukrainian population could coexist well with a readiness to destroy the Dnieper wetlands for the sake of increasing grain production (particularly in the wake of the 1947 famine).
Scholars register the formation of a distinctive environmentalist discourse in the USSR by the early 1960s. Katja Doose uses the Armenian protest movement against environmental pollution during the last Soviet decades to demonstrate that ecological concerns were a self-sufficient factor of public mobilization. The political dynamics of the late 1980s proves that environmentalism was more than a surrogate of outlawed nationalism. The rise and legalization of the Armenian nationalist movement did not diminish environmental protests. Moreover, both the last Communist government of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and the new national government found it necessary to exploit the environmental agenda as an important resource of their legitimacy. Doubtless, “nature” was perceived now as an important idiom of “nation,” but the terrible ecological situation in the republic caused people to perceive environmental pollution as a problem in its own right, irreducible to politics.
Alan Roe’s article also traces the rise of environmentalism in the Soviet Union to the 1960s, its main focus is on the post-Soviet period, when the national park Iugyd Va was founded in the north of the Russian Federation (in the Komi Republic). Although set in a very different era and socioeconomic context, the story of Iugyd Va is reminiscent of the situation in the Dnieper wetlands described in Olenenko’s article. Initiatives of local environmentalists found more understanding and support in Moscow than among the leadership of the Komi Republic and local industrial lobby, dismayed by the fact that the vast territory of the national park became off limits for the extraction of the region’s rich natural resources. The commonly upheld identification of ecological and national “nativism” becomes problematized here: the boundary between proponents of protecting nature and those conducting predatory exploitation does not coincide with the opposition “center–periphery,” whereas national (or local) interests can imply diametrically different approaches to the environment.
A different aspect of forging “encounters and disengagements” as a result of forming a particular narrative is discussed in two other articles in the “History” section. Both focus on a visible divide – the state border of the Russian Empire. Alexander Turbin studies the regime of duty-free trade (porto franco) in the Russian Far East in the second half of the nineteenth century. The state border in the recently colonized Far East with its relatively insignificant Russian population was mostly a discursive phenomenon. This explains the paradox noted by Turbin: the discussion of free-port status was centered on the issue of political organization of the Russian Empire, and almost ignored the immediate economic significance of this measure. The rationalization and nationalization of politics had made the economy an integral part of discourses on citizenship and the integration of regions. To modern Russian nationalists, “porto franco” was an attribute of an imperial frontier, open to the free movement of goods and people, while they were dreaming about a nation-state with a homogeneous population insulated from foreigners by solid borders. Even locals in the Far East used this language of national homogeneity and separation while attempting to defend the free trade regime that was beneficial to them. This, once again, underscores the autonomous status of the discursive sphere capable of creating a solid border (and a conflict-prone situation) where, in practice, a common sphere of interaction and cooperation was present.
The article by Alisa Shablovskaia tackles the opposite situation. The existing state border between the Russian Empire and Iran was perceived in Russia as an open frontier, and Iran as a sort of semi-colony or protectorate, like the Khiva khanate. Indeed, the economic ties developed over centuries connected Russian Transcaucasia and the northern provinces of Iran in a single market, and the relatively recent borders were routinely crossed by nomadic pastoralists, merchants, and revolutionaries. The political stability of Russian Transcaucasia and Turkestan largely depended on the situation across the border, which went out of the Iranian government’s even nominal control during the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911. For St. Petersburg, the broad network of Russian consuls in various Iranian cities was the main source of information about events in the country. This information was not neutral, and the position of consuls was not impartial. They produced a certain narrative of the revolution imbued with crude colonialism. Russian diplomats in Iran also sustained an extensive clientele of assumed Russian agents of influence, ranging from members of the ruling dynasty to local merchants. Political clientelism neatly intertwined with corruption, so Russian consuls acted more as members of the Iranian political regime than as outside observers. This is the reason that they considered Muhammad Ali Shah’s forced abdication in 1909 a personal loss and succeeded in instigating the large-scale Russian military intervention (coordinated with the British effort) in 1911 that suppressed the revolution. It is difficult to clearly differentiate the elements of a civil war, police operations, and foreign aggression in the Russian intervention in Iran. Russian troops had been present in the nominally sovereign country well before the outbreak of the conflict, and the intervention was coordinated by administrators of Russia’s internal territories (first of all, by Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, the viceroy of the Caucasus).
This story demonstrates how the imperial situation of multilayered diversity becomes structured to a large degree by the “observer effect” (in the sense of the Copenhagen interpretation by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg). It is the dominant perception of reality (a worldview, a narrative) that decides whether existing differences will be interpreted as the foundation of conflict or cooperation (whether an insurmountable border will be envisioned in the deserted Far East or become practically invisible in the South Caucasus). The choice of one or another interpretation is not arbitrary at all, and the reality of the Lake Baikal pollution by the paper mill’s wastewater does not change depending on whether the problem is seen from the vantage point of Soviet socialism or Russian nationalism. But once made, a choice becomes a new factor of reality affecting the subsequent course of events. This dynamic nature of social reality needs to be addressed by historians who themselves participate in its formation as active observers. To quote Heisenberg:

“The reality varies, depending upon whether we observe it or not … and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. … As Bohr has put it, … when searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both players and spectators.” ^[2]

That is the reason such a significant place in this issue of the journal is devoted to discussing the stance of professional historians vis-à-vis the dynamic reality that we study. The “Archive” section features some unpublished texts of Richard Pipes – a classic of U.S. Russian Studies and one of few Western historians who applied an understanding of the past to change the present. As an expert on Soviet history, Pipes collaborated with the CIA and served as a member of the National Security Council. The introductory article by Jonathan Daly, who has put together the archival publication, elucidates Pipes’s philosophy of history and understanding of the historical profession. As Daly demonstrates using the materials he arranged for publication, Pipes’s worldview as a historian was connected to and influenced his political position. Pipes was an active player in Bohr’s “drama of existence,” and it is hard to tell what his primary motivation was in his case: his interpretation of Russia’s past (as alien to modernity), or his contempt for the contemporary USSR, which he personally helped to fight.
The figure of the historian as a participant observer is discussed in the “Methodology and Theory” section that opens this issue, in Alexander Semyonov’s interview with a historian of the Habsburg Empire, Pieter Judson. The interview reveals an interesting historiographic trend of the past quarter century: historians of the Habsburg Empire have felt the need to differentiate the empire’s experience from that of the Russian Empire, which they viewed as paradigmatic, whereas historians of the Russian Empire actively borrowed the model of the Habsburg multinational empire. The interview centers around Judson’s recently published revisionist book, which offers an original take on the imperial situation in Austria-Hungary. As a participating observer, Judson reconstructs the past of the Habsburg Empire as it is “exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg), approaching it from the particular context of the modern-day European situation. It is the understanding that any event and its conceptualization always exist in a broader context (or rather several different contexts), and that these contexts determine possible interpretations of the event that constitute the core of new imperial history.