“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”
Attributed to Michel Foucault by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow.^[1]

Light refracts when it passes from one medium to another: this is the most vivid metaphor for how the direction of human action alters every time it passes through various factions of complex society, particularly one in the imperial situation of uncoordinated diversity. In this sense, empire is a context-setting category: each of its social milieus–mediums ascribes a different meaning to the same act or fact, in accordance with its own perspective.^[2] As a result, “things” bear so little resemblance to the “words” that have anticipated and envisioned them.
Thus, globally, a multipolar world emerges not in the fashion many of its proponents expected – by former superpowers graciously admitting to their elite club contenders that have proved themselves by responsible politics and strong economic performance. The emerging multipolarity as we observe it stems from the dramatic void left after the demise or withdrawal of former superpowers that had global visions and accepted global responsibilities, even if mutually conflicting. Domestically, the exposure of the hidden discursive power of intellectuals and experts by Michel Foucault and his followers has had an effect few would find comforting: experts and science have been discarded altogether as usurpers of the power rightfully belonging to politicians only, and Donald Trump is just the most vocal embodiment of this growing public consensus. (In Russia, science and experts have already been turned into servitors of the authoritarian regime.) And closer to our profession, the end of history announced by Francis Fukuyama has brought about the demise of historical thinking as a faculty of experiencing the fourth dimension of the physical world – time. History as an autonomous domain, even if sustained by our imagination, has collapsed into a two-dimensional projection of various events of the past on the presentist plane of our modern judgment, moral and political. The past has lost any autonomy, and the old positivist principle of historism has lost any meaning. The Orwellian plasticity of the past, open to radical reshaping every time the needs of the day require it, used to be seen as a fundamental characteristic of totalitarian regimes, while now it is expected in democratic societies.
To be sure, all the criticism of the old status quo has been absolutely legitimate and to the point. Any conceptual deconstruction is part of the central element of modernity, famously identified by Max Weber a century ago as “disenchantment of the World” (originally applied mostly to the sphere of religious beliefs and subsequently discussed predominantly in this context).^[3] And it is not that “disenchantment” has to be compensated, willingly or unwillingly, by a new “re-enchantment.”^[4] Of critical importance is that the “things,” deconstructed and rationalized by “words,” need to be rationally reassembled as new, thoroughly thought-out “things” – more just and inclusive. This necessary work has not been sufficient or even sufficiently recognized as urgent. Thus, the critique of experts as a political force has not resulted in the institutionalization of knowledge as an element of modern democracy with its system of checks and balances (as a “fifth branch of the government” of sorts). Without formalizing their status, the exposure of the power of public discourses has led to the denunciation of their main platform – the “mainstream media” – by the Left and the Right alike, only to clear the ground to other, marginal, discourses, mainly in the format of conspiracy theories. As a result, deconstruction limits itself to the substitution of the “order of things” by the “order of words” – a far cry from the truly revolutionary constructivist imperative of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.
Moreover, dominant modes of social thinking perceive the realm of words as a perfectly neutral medium. Particularly in the sphere of mass politics, a concept’s semantics are expected to be equally applicable across individual contexts, and various concepts to be clearly differentiated from one another. From this vantage point, the act of critical deconstruction (“disenchantment”) of complex reality gets reduced mostly to the rationalization of reality’s representation in a lest contradictory and complex way. The ensuing double “flattening” of multidimensional disordered “things” into the order of neatly delineated “words” is responsible for the observable failure of such deconstructions to reach the intended effect. The practical consequences of these intellectual efforts invariably turn out to be “unintended” because mental maps bear little resemblance to the practical terrain of “things.”
History-writing is not immune to the political agenda of the day, even when practiced “ars gratia artis.” From the very beginning, studying history and teaching history were very much about drawing lessons and establishing and deposing moral authorities, and in this respect historiography is liable to critical deconstruction by public opinion. But even archaically moralistic history-writing was also about the appreciation of time spans, in just the same way that a traveler is fascinated by the boundless sea or monumental mountains. Historical thinking implies a dialectical combination of constant reevaluation of the past as part of its appropriation and its estrangement as a truly “foreign country” (L. P. Hartley). It is in this sense of irreducible historical distance that the physical materiality of time is lacking in modern debates about monuments in America, glorification of the OUN in Ukraine, or the Patriotic War cult in Russia: the “flattened” order of new words is substituting for the irreconcilable disorder of original “things.”
As with other instances of deconstruction, a politically motivated critique of the past usually falls short of reaching its intended goals and is prone to unintended consequences because it misses the practical element of the enterprise. The practical aspect of deconstructing history is not about purging some names and events from textbooks and replacing them with others (although this can still be productive with certain utterly distorted representations of the past). For one, this is the most impractical exercise in the long run, as demonstrated by the Soviet historical profession in the twentieth century. Neither can it be identified with the search for a usable past (a term coined by Van Wyck Brooks in the 1910s), which contradicts the very idea of deconstructing the established historical canon,^[5] while a more recent quest for a “livable past” underscores the essence of history’s mistreatment in recent decades.^[6] The past is “unlivable” in principle today, because nobody can return to the bygone era and live it “the right way” in the old scenery and also because the very idea of historical progress is about hoping for a better future. But this should not obscure the fundamental fact that the past was perfectly “livable” at that time, and its problems that seem aggravated today had often resulted from attempts to resolve some other preexisting faults, in some other spheres. In this sense, the past is not unlike our present: there are so many things that we find wrong and work toward fixing them, but rarely does the majority of society find it totally irredeemable; such moments are called “revolutions.” It should be added that even these comprehensive deconstructions and destructions of the existing social order are not universally endorsed and are rather severely criticized by later generations, be it the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution or, recently, the American Revolution. Thus, there is no way to forge a past livable by future standards, even if work on it is begun early by eliminating everything that seems imperfect today.
When left incomplete, deconstruction a la Foucault of social reality, past or present, inevitably leads to Trump-like nihilism toward social institutions as such. In the venerable tradition of French political bon mots, already in 1840 it was said that property is a theft.^[7] So the later assertions that knowledge is power (literally a vehicle for exercising political hegemony) or that social and psychological norms are essentially a conspiracy by invisible experts or governmentality (stopping short of contemplating the idea of the deep state) were not treated as paradoxical. These Foucauldian insights are important and highly productive in the context of academic inquiry, but generations of college students and scores of politicking professors have brought their superficial reading from the classroom into the lay public sphere, where they feed a cynical mistrust of the mechanisms of societal cohesion. The Russian mainstream tradition of interpreting social deconstruction in the interests of an authoritarian oligarchic regime, most notably represented by Alexander Dugin, is a good case in point.[8] In the context of nation-state and even more so, a nation-centered episteme, the incomplete work of social deconstruction is a sure prerequisite for partisanship and schism. The broadening mistrust of mechanisms of societal cohesion and coordination makes identity politics the sole trusted form of social solidarity. A vehicle of temporary unification for a time of crisis and social disintegration that relies on a single essentialized quality – be it gender, race, class, language, urban block, or age – becomes normalized as the foundation of a regular social arrangement. As with any partisanship, the only alternative to a one-party state is a formalized competitive multiparty democracy, which assumes that some parties win and others lose in the election cycle: obviously, this is not how proponents of identity politics envision their ideal social order.
With stakes so high, it is the responsibility of professional historians to contemplate a practical resolution to the critical deconstruction of the past they produce or at least to render their interpretations in such a way as to avoid reductionism and the flattening of multidimensional “things” into smooth words. The former task implies envisioning a new inclusive community on principles that preclude the resurgence of old evils – this will be the topic of issue 4/2020 as planned by the annual thematic program “When Postimperial Meets Postnational: Envisioning New Forms of Groupness in Historical Perspective.” The latter task is tackled in the present issue 2/2020 “‘We the People’: The ‘Nation’ between Tribe and Republic.”
The journal opens with the “Methodology and Theory” section centered on the problem of enhancing the accuracy of historical reconstructions of the past by integrating the new imperial history approach into economic history. The editorial essay, “Speaking Economic in the Imperial Situation,” provides a general outline of this research agenda. It also introduces four position papers published in the section and written in the aftermath of the conference “Trade and Empire: Productivity, Economic Exchange, and Differences in Eurasia,” jointly organized by Ab Imperio and Tyumen State University in Russia. Arguably, economic history is the most materiality-oriented branch of historiography, which, paradoxically, tends to constrain the richness of “things” by the normative order of “words” or, rather, numbers. Contributors to this section offer their takes on the ways that economic history problematics can be productively engaged by new imperial history as a mode of analytical deconstruction of reality conditioned by its subsequent reconstruction in a complex explanatory model.
Articles published in the “History” section of this issue demonstrate the dynamic nature of the community, which can be productively analyzed as a nation. It is sustained in a state of delicate equilibrium through the constant internal communication and realignment of the collective worldview it produces, and it can collapse whenever alternative visions of the community or the world around it fail to integrate into the hegemonic narrative of communal self-perception and self-representation. Gennadii Kazakevych and Olga Kazakevych discuss how, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the rising Ukrainian national movement was shaped by references to the Irish and, later, Finnish national causes. The identification of kindred scenarios of national mobilization and their specific interpretation by Ukrainian intellectuals created images of the normative scenario to follow. It did not matter that Irish public opinion of the 1840s aligned itself with the Polish cause and identified “Ukrainian hordes” with Muscovy – by constructing the Irish and the Finns as “relatable Others,” the Ukrainian community structured itself as a nation.
Konstantin Tarasov problematizes Eugene Weber’s normative model of nation-building through standard schooling and universal military conscription by looking at the case of the Russian imperial army during World War I. The army’s disintegration during the revolutionary months of 1917 and the subsequent collapse of Russia’s war effort can be interpreted as a failure to forge a Russian political nation, despite the massive socialization of the male population in the army ranks. Tarasov argues that both schooling and army played the role that Weber assigned to them, only with unintended consequences. The absence of truly universal standardized schooling in late imperial Russia resulted in the emergence of semi-isolated circuits of solidarity when mass conscriptions and war experiences generated mass-scale political mobilization in 1917. Instead of a single inclusive imperial political nation, the revolution facilitated the crystallization of a number of more rigid and exclusive political nations. Various versions of local patriotic citizenship prevailed, tearing apart the army and the society at large.
In the “Newest Mythologies” section, the article by Sergey Sergeev and Svetlana Kuzmina looks at science fiction by the Soviet paleontologist Ivan Efremov as a key to the riddle of the rise of a radically new social imaginary after Stalin’s death. Decades of mass terror and severe censorship along with the Iron Curtain must have made the Soviet intellectual sphere an arid desert isolated even from domestic pre-1917 intellectual traditions. And yet, in the 1960s, the Soviet cultural sphere was already capable of participating on equal footing in the international sphere of modern art, and the academician Andrei Sakharov offered his authoritative contribution to the international conversation about the prospective convergence of opposing political systems.^[8] Curiously, by his own admission, beyond occasional bits and pieces, Sakharov had little knowledge of the foreign social sciences and the discussion of convergence initiated by Pitirim Sorokin, who in 1960 expressed hope for a future “unified Integral – social, cultural, and personal – order in the human universe.”^[9] Sakharov relied mostly on domestic intellectual influences that apparently included Efremov’s novels. Efremov shared much of Sorokin’s prerevolutionary cultural background, which he combined with a profound interest in Theosophy and New Age spirituality. Sergeev and Kuzmina show how Efremov filled the post-totalitarian cultural void by handpicking the various cultural strands available to him and synthesizing a coherent vision of ideal society. Neither totalitarian nor liberal, his version of the “integral universe” was decidedly Soviet with a graft of spiritual humanism. Though set in a Communist future, Efremov perceived it as a “relatable Other” for the Soviet nation, providing the latter with normative values.
The lack of such a readily available social ideal after the USSR’s disintegration resulted in problems with formulating a coherent vision of the national community in many post-Soviet countries. Nominally, former Soviet national republics converted into sovereign nation-states, but formal national status by itself was of little help for social cohesion. The section “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” features Liudmila Novikova’s article dealing with attempts to de-Sovetize Arkhangelsk street names in the 1990s. Ideologically, the task met with little opposition, and local patriotism was strong but apparently insufficient to substitute for lacking consensus regarding national political and cultural symbols that, since the early twentieth century, had been the main source of names for public places. As a result, with a few exceptions, Soviet-era names survived on the map of Arkhangelsk.
The most recent stage of contemplating national unity is discussed in the “Historiography” section on seemingly unrelated material of a book on the eighteenth century. Svitlana Potapenko, Anna Vozna, Denis Shatalov, and Volodymyr Masliychuk share their ideas regarding Volodymyr Sklokin’s recent study of Sloboda Ukraine’s incorporation into the Russian Empire under Catherine II. This northeastern region of Ukraine once was part of the “Wild Field” – the object of Muscovy’s coordinated policy of colonization that attracted settlers from all over the region, including the Hetmanate. The seemingly obscure and purely academic topic has acquired special significance and political sensibility since Russia’s 2014 aggression against Ukraine on the pretext of claiming “Russian national” territories. In this political context, discussing the region’s integration into the Russian Empire and tackling the problematics of nation and empire resemble walking through a minefield. Fully aware of these implications of his enterprise, Sklokin refutes the powerful and politically correct historical narratives and presents a nuanced and dynamic picture. His is a story of hybrid identities and unintended consequences, of ideals and rational calculations that produced some unexpected results in the imperial situation. It is a story of establishing political hegemony and resistance to it, which at the same time carefully deconstructs the entities involved in this confrontation. Sklokin presents the ideology of the Enlightenment as a factor that was driving the imperial policies and providing the foundations for the future Ukrainian national community.
Of no less importance is the discussion of the book by Sklokin’s Ukrainian colleagues, who argue about its research design in the logic proposed by him, that is, with little regard to its politically subversive potential. This is because Sklokin’s study and historiographic conversation about it perform the function of synthesis, completing the analytical cycle started by the deconstruction of nationalist historical myths. It is not enough to demonstrate that the modern Ukrainian nation did not exist in the eighteenth century and the Russian imperial regime did not pursue the goal of colonial suppression of Ukraine at the time. A consistent, nonfragmentary and nonselective historical deconstruction is impossible without the subsequent reconstruction of the entire historical horizon, on new principles – which is exactly the task of new imperial history. In this post-deconstruction perspective, the Russian Empire retains its oppressive role and Cossack protests against the region’s incorporation are recognized as valid, but the entire conflict is completely reconsidered. Instead of “Ukrainian nation” as well as “Russian nation” and autonomous homogeneous “empire,” the scene is populated by two layers of historical actors: one composed on the basis of historical categories of the period, the other – by modern analytical categories, and the two principles of grouping do not coincide. The dynamic tension between them acknowledges and accommodates the autonomous physical materiality of historical distance, preventing arbitrary conflations of the past and the present. This perspective restores subjectivity to multiple historical actors who were not only victims but also agents of change, so that the Russian Empire itself was formed by Ukrainians as much as by the St. Petersburg elite. The Enlightenment, much discredited by generations of its “deconstructors,” was driving the imperial urge to rationalize and dominate but also promoted intellectual freedom and cultural creativity. This new complex vision of the past as thoroughly demarcated from the present cannot be exploited for political purposes: it says nothing about the viability of the modern Ukrainian nation and the inviolability of the country’s territory regardless of the historical roots of Sloboda Ukraine or Novorossia. The more autonomous the past, the more “unlivable” it is for the present, having no say in matters regulated by modern international treaties and laws.
A society capable of embracing this culture of historical thinking is beyond nationalism in its twentieth-century form, as based on groupist ontologies akin to identity politics that ignore the transformative influence of social contacts and cultural dialogue on any preexisting collective entities. Recognizing the autonomy of the past and the irreducible continuance of history makes personal choice matter and subjectivity real and consequential, regardless of subsequent moral and political judgments. This kind of social imaginary makes a society truly postimperial and postcolonial. The question is whether modern scholars are up to the task of adjusting familiar words to the new state of things.