In 2019, Ab Imperio invited contributors and readers to think about the ambivalence of the phenomenon of social strife in the context of the annual program “Hybrid Conflicts and Diverse Societies: Civil Wars and Global Peace.” In this issue 3/2019, “The Social Contract: In Theories and in Practices,” the focus is on the constructive effect of conflicts. A conflict resolution implies reaching a compromise, so there is nothing unusual in the idea that a stable social arrangement might be the result of a prior confrontation. But a conflict itself can testify to a high degree of social integration, whether it is contested politics or frequent litigations: systematic nonviolent tensions prove that individuals and groups share a common social space. The very idea of being in conflict with someone implies a common cultural frame of references and institutionalized channels of interaction. Contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio discuss both aspects of the problem.
The “Methodology and Theory” section offers excerpts from Mark Gamsa’s forthcoming book on the transcultural history of Harbin, a city that emerged as a result of Russia’s colonial expansion in Manchuria and the contemporaneous migration of Chinese to this sparsely populated and protected northern periphery of the Qing Empire. Like Odessa in the south of the European part of the Russian Empire, Harbin was “no-one’s-land”: neither the Russians nor the Chinese (or Japanese) could really claim the city as their “own” because all of them were newcomers to this part of Manchuria. Harbin was thus an ultimate site of contestation and negotiation of belonging, identity, power, and hierarchy. Essentially, it was yet another imperial middle ground where social conflict and social stability were not opposites but synchronic and overlapping states of existence. Mutual hostile cultural projections and social tensions often spoke in the language of confrontation while revealing a structural situation of spontaneous agglomeration of differences into a common hybrid social milieu. This hybridity did not negate inequality and diversity, as can be seen even in the local pidgin “tvoia-moia.” However, the manifold conflicts in “Russian” Harbin can be meaningfully discussed only within a common sociocultural context of the emerging hybrid society bound by a spontaneously elaborated social contract. Conflicts changed some of this social contract’s terms but did not undermine it as such. The rapidly changing social roles and mutual projections explored by Mark Gamsa demonstrate the mechanics of the social conflict and its main language of self-description – the hybrid pidgin replete with misplaced borrowings, mistranslations, and creative misunderstandings so characteristic of the middle ground.
In the “Historiography” section at the end of the issue, Sergey Glebov returns to topic of the Far Eastern region of the Russian Empire in a review essay discussing two recent books on the history of Russia’s Far East: Viktor Zatsepine’s Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters Between China and Russia, 1850–1930 (2017) and Alyssa M. Park’s Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of the Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945 (2019). Raising some of the themes evoked by Gamsa, Glebov discusses the challenges of writing the history of a middle ground such as the late imperial Far East. The ambivalences of the social composition and political status of the region’s inhabitants problematize the application of concepts and approaches of regular national-history narratives. While the story of the Russian Far East can be written as a story of the solidification of territorial state sovereignty, this narrative (as any other telelological one) tends to exclude important historical experiences and conflicts. As in Harbin, intergroup conflicts in the Far East often testified to the emergence of ad hoc practices of cohabitation and cooperation, while attempts by the Russian administration to rationalize its irregular diversity were fraught with confrontation and even the potential for genocidal violence. As elsewhere, the “imperialness” of this situation with its uneven regimes of diversity was never articulated as a clear, coherent ideology by those who sought to accommodate and cooperate, and it was overshadowed by the elaborate if misleading language of nationhood and state sovereignty.
In the “History” section, the article by Pavel Shabley explores a multifaceted conflict that, in the 1880s, involved various factions of the Muslim community of Semipalatinsk in the north of present-day Kazakhstan and different imperial administrators. The disagreement over candidates for a local mosque’s imam revealed the heterogeneous composition of the seemingly uniform Muslim society and the lack of any consistent “imperial” or “colonial” policy upheld by the Russian state. Common religion neutralized neither the tensions between the Semipalatinsk Kazakhs and Tatars nor the class rift between the rich and the poor. Likewise, the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Russian state and the lack of a clear separation of responsibilities by parallel administrative structures allowed individual administrators to perceive the conflict in different contexts depending on their position within the state system. At the same time, the petitions addressed by various Muslim factions to different imperial authorities demonstrate their ability to manipulate the imperial state in the colonial situation of strategic relativism, changing their rhetoric depending on the addressee. This tactic presents Semipalatinsk Muslims as political actors rather than powerless victims of colonial rule and reveals their significant degree of integration into the Russian imperial polity and society. Once again, a conflict serves as proof of a profound social cohesion.
Jonathan Brunstedt’s article discusses another connection between a social contract and conflict. Through the lens of the fledgling myth of the Great Patriotic War, it explores ideological production in the late Stalinist USSR leading to a new, more universal and inclusive understanding of Sovietness. Brunstedt contends that the war myth coalesced as an alternative, more flexible model of patriotic identity. While Russocentric historical narratives of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet eras continued to stress Russian leadership and guidance, the story of the war provided a parallel but countervailing ideological current, which aimed to flatten hierarchical configurations. Using postwar Kazakhstan as a case study, the article also examines how the center’s message of pan-Soviet friendship was by turns embraced and subverted at the republic level.
The latter theme becomes the focus of the “Archive” section in this issue of Ab Imperio. Zukhra Kasimova introduces seventy-two documents from several archival collections in Uzbekistan and Russia, shedding light on the first two decades of existence of the Nukus Museum of Art. Situated in the midst of a desert, Nukus, the capital of the Karakalpak autonomous republic within the Uzbek SSR, became home to the art collection that is considered the second largest collection of Russian modernist art in the world today. The museum was created in 1966 on the initiative of Igor Savitsky – an artist and art collector, who moved from Moscow to Uzbekistan after World War II. The figure of Savitsky and the history of the museum that bears his name today are surrounded by myths, because of the uniqueness of the collection of Russian avant-garde art procured by a Soviet state museum and the scarcity of information about this initiative that was available to scholars until now. These documents, to date mostly unknown to scholars, make it possible for the first time to discuss the substance of Savitsky’s life story and the Nukus museum’s history rather than the myths surrounding them. In her introduction to the documents, Kasimova maps the available sources and identifies additional contexts and stories in need of further research. She offers her interpretation of Savitsky’s mystery by reconstructing the multifaceted historical context involving Karakalpak national autonomy, the Uzbek union republic, and Moscow as both the ultimate arbiter and mediator of regional conflicts. To understand the phenomenon of Savitsky’s museum, Kasimova argues, one needs to see him not as a lonely romantic figure but as a participant simultaneously in several social and cultural networks. A man of hybrid loyalties and identity, he was assisted by people who perceived him as “one of them” – whether a Karakalpak party apparatchik or a Moscow-based artist.
As the story of Savitsky shows, in the imperial situation of overlapping sociocultural contexts, composite identities, and multiple loyalties, conflicts can be converted into a socially constructive force, and the subaltern status – into symbolic (and even financial) capital. Conceptualizing this phenomenon beyond historical observations should be a task of social theory, but this question has not even been formulated so far.
The issue also pays tribute to Mark von Hagen (1954–2019), who was a member of Ab Imperio’s Editorial Board. Sergey Glebov, Alexander Semyonov, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Andrii Portnov, and Glennys Young share their recollections of Mark. His professional trajectory – from a historian of war to a participant in the creation of a new modern field of Ukrainian History – adds an additional shade to a complex picture emerging in the pages of this issue of the journal.