This issue of Ab Imperio concludes the 2020 annual volume “When Postimperial Meets Postnational: Envisioning New Forms of Groupness in Historical Perspective.” Previous issues have featured articles discussing the largely spontaneous formation of complex imperial societies (1/2020), the carving out of rationally organized nations from multifaceted imperial entities (2/2020), and the persistence of confusingly hybrid forms (3/2020). Issue 4/2020 follows this obvious chronological order and raises the question of the possibility of envisioning some future new forms of groupness during various historical periods.
It comes as no surprise that images of the future are framed by familiar idioms of the past. Sometimes it is deliberately the very old past, bearing just a tiny symbolical connection to the present and thus ideally suited to communicating some new meaning. In the “History” section, Ismael Biyashev tackles precisely this situation by analyzing the discourses surrounding the Mongolo-Szechuan Expedition of Colonel Petr Kozlov and the “dead city” of Khara Khoto it discovered in 1909. At the time, Khara Khoto was an abandoned city in Northern Mongolia, built in the thirteenth century by Tanguts of the polity Western Xia (the Great Xia State of the White and the Lofty) in what is now northwestern China. Like its neighbor and rival to the east, the Great Jin, Western Xia was a hybrid polity, managing to sustain its rule over a multicultural population, nomadic and sedentary. The fact that Khara Khoto was identified by Kozlov’s expedition and popularized in Russian mass culture of the time as the embodiment of a nomadic civilization speaks volumes about the social imagination of the early 1910s in Russia. The academic and popular myths of a nomadic civilization were not simply incorrect but displayed a fundamental inability to conceive of a hybrid socioeconomic and cultural order. Khara Khoto was located far away from Russia’s borders during any period of its history, so identifying it as relevant for the Russian Empire’s past, present, and future was a form of stating Russia’s inability to accommodate complexity and hybridity any longer, using the foreign “dead city” as a metaphor. The long-standing pressure of nationalization and modernization of the “archaic” imperial order had finally prevailed, and the typical imperial condition of human diversity and asynchronous development of imperial subjects now became associated with the geographical periphery, a primitive social order, and a bygone era.
The process that led to this transformation is elucidated in the “ABC” section of this issue, which continues the publication of Seymour Becker’s unfinished book, “The Borderlands in the Mind of Russia: Russian National Consciousness and the Empire’s Non-Russians in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” (chapters 4 and 5 were published in Ab Imperio 3/2020). Becker’s study might be more concisely and precisely titled “A Genealogy of the Nationalizing Empire”: he meticulously reconstructs the development of modern Russian nationalism under the auspices of the imperial regime from the turn of the nineteenth century, synchronously with similar processes in Western Europe or even preceding them in some important respects. Published in this issue, chapter 6 of the book covers the period of the Great Reforms (1860s–1870s) as the moment of radical reconceptualization of the Russian Empire in categories of the modern state, now understood as a political organization of nation, in various interpretations. Becker transcends the traditional history-of-ideas delimitation of the period’s Russian intellectual landscape into Slavophiles and Westernizers, progressives and conservators, liberals and socialists by demonstrating their fundamental consensus on the primacy of nation in reforming Russia. Despite the acute political and intellectual disagreements among the chapter’s protagonists, the old imperial anational constitution of Russia was forsaken and consciously rejected by them all. Moreover, Russian liberals in particular were susceptible to the new discourse of colonialism, which they enthusiastically borrowed from luminaries such as J. S. Mill as part of the general liberal agenda. They unproblematically accepted Mill’s thesis that a “weaker” nationality might be absorbed by a “stronger” one, and that “civilized” nations have the right to rule “barbarous” peoples as yet unprepared for political sovereignty. By the time of Colonel Kozlov’s discovery of Khara Khoto, this elite reasoning had become a popular mindset, as reflected in public discourses analyzed by Biyashev.
Biyashev’s article in the “History” section is followed by Kathryn David’s study of religious ceremonies in Western Ukraine by Ukrainian national activists, the Nazi authorities, and the Soviet state during and immediately after World War II. Once again, the ancient, or at least traditional, religious idiom was exploited by modern political regimes based on mass mobilization as a means of communicating a new social arrangement to the masses. For various Ukrainian national organizations and later the Nazi occupying regime, commemorating the dead using familiar symbolic funeral ceremonies could render the victims of Soviet state violence as martyrs for the Ukrainian nation and characterize Soviet power as a foreign occupation. For the Soviet authorities, emphasizing the connections between local religious authority and an Orthodox ancestral tradition could tie people and territory that had historically been part of Polish and Habsburg lands to Russia and the Soviet Union. Unlike the “dead city” of Khara Khoto, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was a live institution with moral standards and political interests of its own, therefore limiting the degree to which it could be appropriated not only by the atheist Soviet regime but even by Ukrainian nationalists.
Thus, visions of the “post” order are framed by imagery and idioms of the past and are conditioned by them to some extent. What is more, historians’ very ability to offer innovative interpretation of the past – as an element asserting a novel social imagination of a modern, new society – is restricted by the historical legacy to an even greater degree. This legacy is not so much political or conceptual as linguistic in the broad sense of sustaining certain modes of narration and persistence of authoritative narratives. Historians were aware of this problem long ago, and it became common knowledge after the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory, which demonstrated how historical prose shapes historical scholarship.^[1] But what are the narratives that structure modern studies of former “Russian” history (related to the societies of the Russian Empire and the USSR), and how do they accommodate the agenda of postimperial, postcolonial, and post–narrowly defined national history? These questions are addressed in the “Methodology and Theory” section by the articles in the thematic forum “Whither Postimperial and Postnational Narratives of History.”
In the forum, Ilya Gerasimov reconstructs the so-called scheme of Russian history as a master narrative, whose origins date back to the 1760s, and which still, to a large degree, predetermines the interpretations and scope of studies of Russia’s past. He develops this analysis further by exposing and exploring the dominant interpretative scheme for the Soviet period. Paradoxically, while even traditional imperial histories rarely completely correspond to any of White’s narrative strategies, the most popular and influential works in the Soviet field quite consciously embrace explicit narrativization. Gerasimov suggests studies by well-known scholars such as Yuri Slezkine, Mark Lipovetsky, Serguei Oushakine, and Alexei Yurchak as perfect embodiments of the four modes of emplotment identified by White (Romance, Satire, Tragedy, and Comedy). He traces the master narrative of Soviet history to the mythmaking of the Thaw period. It was the Russian-speaking liberal intelligentsia of the 1960s, Gerasimov argues, who created the familiar popular myth of the interwar period and the rhetorical paradigm framing the perception of the postwar decades. Essentially, the bulk of Soviet studies follows the surreal master narrative that Salvador Dali might have visualized as “The Dream of a Shestidesiatnik about the Revolution with a Human Face.”
In his contribution to the forum, Mark Lipovetsky revisits his model of the Soviet trickster, both as a literary narrative and a social type, which he elaborated ten years ago. ^[2] Most importantly, Lipovetsky contends that Soviet trickster narratives communicated not marginal social status and experience in the USSR, but rather a very typical if not mainstream positionality. These narratives served as the main source for a distinctive type of Soviet subjectivity, which presented an alternative to the normative ideological subjectivity that has been exclusively studied by historians of Soviet society. By embracing the trickster narrative, a person was transformed from a slave of circumstances into an active and autonomous actor of the social drama and even an embodiment of artistry and freedom. Thus, the trickster narrative performed the crucial function of returning social agency to people – not only to actual subalterns but also to various marginalized and stigmatized categories of Soviet citizens. It is this function of the Soviet trickster narrative as endowed with a sense of agency in an objectively constrained situation that was primarily responsible for the incredible popular appeal of tricksters.
The article collectively written by Andrii Portnov, Tetiana Portnova, Serhii Savchenko, and Viktoriia Serhiienko offers an ambitious map of the master narrative of Ukrainian history, from its inception in the late nineteenth century to the present. They identify several key elements of this narrative: its populism and insistence on the primordial democratism of Ukrainian social institutions; the cult of revolution as a culmination of the teleological process of nation-building; the idea of the fundamental unity of all “ethnographically Ukrainian” territories (sobornist’); and a belief in Ukraine’s historical mission as an intermediary between the civilizations of the West and the East. Drawing on a broad survey of Ukrainian historiography, the authors demonstrate that, at various times, individual elements of this narrative have been deconstructed and criticized by Ukrainian historians. However, these partial revisions were always marginalized and rebuffed by the very fact that they did not fit the established, coherent, all-embracing master narrative, but also did not offer an equally comprehensive alternative story. The authors conclude that the main reason for the remarkable endurance of the master narrative of Ukrainian history was the persistence of circumstances that are usually regarded as the most hostile and damaging to the Ukrainian national project. Abandoning the nation-centered historical paradigm did not seem appropriate in the situation of the unresolved or jeopardized nation-building project. Another reason is the global prevalence of a national model of history writing, with partial methodological innovations unable to undermine the archetypal national master narratives. The available approaches to postnational historiography have not yet gained universal acceptance, so all that historians can do at present to keep the power of narrative in check is to sustain a more conscious and self-critical attitude to the language of their own texts.
Little can be added to this advice when it comes to professional recommendations to individual scholars. In considering potential alternatives to the established master narratives of national histories, one of the candidates for the job is the metanarrative of the imperial situation that describes diversity and hierarchy as dynamic systems rather than fixed structures and characteristics, and as a fundamental human condition rather than a marginal quality. This issue of Ab Imperio and the journal’s project of new imperial history in general attests to the productivity and possible limitations of this metanarrative.