SUMMARY:

Based on a close analysis of the discourses surrounding the Mongolo-Szechuan Expedition of Petr Kuz’mich Kozlov and the “dead city” of Khara Khoto it discovered, this article demonstrates the potential, as well as the limits, of archaeology as a language of modernity in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. The author argues that the attribution of the Khara Khoto site, an abandoned city in Northern Mongolia, to a seminomadic civilization (the thirteenth-century Xia Tanguts) precipitated a crisis of analytical language in both academic and nonacademic circles. The article demonstrates that there was no universal language to convey the cultural and political hybridity represented by Khara Khoto.
The article probes various languages describing this archaeological site as “nomadic” and claiming its relevance for the Russian Empire’s past, present, and future. This methodology affords a view on late imperial Russia’s academic and popular culture as it was tackling the problems of imperial human diversity and asynchronous development of imperial subjects, on the one hand, and the pressure of nationalization and modernization of the “archaic” imperial order, on the other.