According to dictionaries, the English word “diversity” dates back to the mid-fourteenth century and originates in medieval Latin forms that had rather negative connotations, from the more benign “turning aside” to the more troublesome “contradiction, disagreement.” Its modern Russian equivalent, raznoobrazie, was not yet included in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy (Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, 1789–1794) but was first used in print around 1785, according to Google Books Ngram and the Russian National Corpus. By this time, “diversity” was seen in European political thought more as a challenge and a potential resource than a negative. For example, it was recognized early on as an opportunity for sustaining political representation. In February 1788, in the Federalist Papers no. 60, Publius (Alexander Hamilton) argued:

There is sufficient diversity in the state of property, in the genius, manners, and habits of the people of the different parts of the Union, to occasion a material diversity of disposition in their representatives towards the different ranks and conditions in society. And though an intimate intercourse under the same government will promote a gradual assimilation in some of these respects, yet there are causes, as well physical as moral, which may, in a greater or less degree, permanently nourish different propensities and inclinations in this respect. ^[1]

Regardless of whether the concept of diversity emerged in the fourteenth or eighteenth century, or whether the early American usage indeed reflected the inclusion of all types of human diversity (which was obviously not the case), most of human history had been permeated by diversity that did not yet have a special name, but this did not mean that the condition itself was never noticed and problematized. And when the special word was coined, its semantics varied dramatically depending on the historical context; in general, it has evolved from undertones of suspicion in the early modern period to the hierarchical renderings of modernity, and to the celebration and recognition of diversity’s productive potential nowadays. Diversity is a useful analytical concept, but without proper historical contextualization, it can mean very different things or nothing in particular. Hence Ab Imperio’s annual theme in 2021: “Historicizing Diversity.”
In 2021 the editors of Ab Imperio invite contributors and readers to historicize diversity in thematic issues of the journal organized along four possible modes of dealing with the concept and different genres of historical inquiry into it. As recent scholarship shows, the history of dealing with diversity and the modes of approaching it did not evolve in a steady linear way. So it seems more productive to identify four ideal types of tackling diversity that can, arguably, be discovered in any historical period and in virtually any society: (1) the stage before diversity is identified as a distinctive problem and therefore must have been taken as given; (2) the situation in which diversity is viewed primarily as an avoidable hindrance; (3) the moment of social anomie that deems any system of groupness conditional and limited in application; and (4) the generally positive and constructive approach to diversity. These four approaches to handling diversity will be addressed in four issues of Ab Imperio in 2021.
Accordingly, the current issue 1/2021 is centered on the topic “Norm: Diversity as an Order of Things and Lived Experience.” It opens with materials pertaining to the six-volume series A Cultural History of Race to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021. The introduction by the series’ general editor, Marius Turda is followed by his conversation with Marina Mogilner, the editor of volume 5 of the series, A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and Nation State (1760–1920). Turda and Mogilner discuss the challenges of addressing the problem of diversity by means of the very ambivalent category of “race.” On the one hand, the basic somatic differences have been identified by people and addressed by human cultures from prehistoric times. On the other hand, the modern concept of race is relatively new and has radically evolved along several distinct trajectories over the past two–three centuries. Contemporary scholarly consensus views “race” as being located in culture rather than in nature. Whereas it would be simplistic to conclude that racial thinking was equally immanent to various cultures in different historical periods, racializing as a form of essentializing difference seems to be a universal cultural mechanism. This recognition that “race” has a history rather than a universal definition, which Turda and Mogilner present as the methodology of the “cultural history of race” series, shifts the focus of historical analysis to the very object of essentialization, and its implications. One of the challenges of this approach is to maintain a delicate balance between keeping a coherent focus on what is identified as “race” in the past and avoiding the past’s retrospective racialization from a modern Eurocentric vantage point. The task is further complicated by the profound Eurocentrism of longue durée historical narratives. The conversation between Turda and Mogilner explores these and other challenges of the cognitive and historically specific approach that the volumes embrace. They also consider reasons that cause historians of East-Central Europe and Northern Eurasia to question the applicability of “race” to their fields and area studies, and the implications of this “racial indifference” for the perpetuation of uncritical racializing and even blunt racism in popular cultures and ideological perceptions of groupness in the region, past and present. By drawing on the emerging field of race studies, this conversation provides a possible angle from which to problematize the notion of norm both as a lived experience and a scholarly concept.
This theoretical agenda is further developed in the “History” section. In Eastern Europe, the Roma have been the objects of racializing and explicitly racist discursive projections more than any other group, or, at least, more unambiguously than have the Jews and various Muslim communities, who, unlike the Roma, have played a more visible role in the production of modern knowledge and hegemonic discourses. However, as Marianna Smirnova-Seslavinskaya demonstrates in her article on the history of Roma integration in the Russian Empire, the conceptualization of Romas’ difference did not use the available “racial” concepts, such as inorodtsy (those of alien origin). She reconstructs a long and conflicting story of mutual adjustment between various Roma communities practicing “service nomadism” as an economic model and lifestyle, on the one hand, and the evolving Russian imperial regime, on the other. Different groups of Roma who made their way to Russia at various times and under various circumstances, specialized in providing particular services to the immobile local populations, and in order to make their business economically sustainable, they had to move around in search of new customers. In turn, the Russian government was motivated by concerns about enforcing social control and, even more so, securing fiscal revenues from the population. Given the underdeveloped and minuscule scale of the government apparatus, even by the turn of the twentieth century, taxes could be collected only from communities of permanently settled residents, who themselves raised the required amount of dues from their members through mutual guarantee. This explains the persistent attempts of the government since the 1760s to ascribe Roma to regular social estates and then to make them register as permanent residents with urban or rural communes. Furthermore, taking upon itself mission civilisatrice, the imperial regime perceived sedentarization as a necessary precondition for the primitive “nomads” to advance to a higher civilization stage as settled agriculturists or artisans. Roma were ready to pay taxes but not to give up their mobility. They would even obtain the formal status of private serfs, paying the landowners the required dues in exchange for travel permits that allowed them to migrate legally. The government persistently closed one loophole after another trying to make Roma settle permanently, which led to the destruction of Roma economic practices and made them paupers, which eventually contributed to rising criminality and social tensions. There was a legal way of accommodating nomads in the Russian Empire by granting them the status of inorodtsy. However, the imperial regime did not pursue this option, in contrast to its treatment of Siberian indigenous peoples or the Jews. This must explain in part, why the Roma were not consistently racialized in imperial Russia despite their exoticization in popular culture.
Siberian indigenous peoples enjoyed the status of inorodtsy under the imperial regime, which protected them from political and economic mobilization but also reinforced their quite racial otherness in Russian society. As Igor Stas’s article on the early Soviet colonization of the Arctic shows, initially, the Soviet regime continued and even expanded this policy. Advised by populist ethnographers, many of whom had lived among the Northern peoples as political exiles, the Soviet authorities agreed to secure special status for the indigenous peoples of the North. Inspired by the example of American Indian reservations, Soviet ethnographers essentially advanced a benevolent racializing approach within the model of “affirmative action empire.” They envisioned isolated territories preserving a complex of distinct nature and culture, subsidized by the government and inaccessible to outsiders. Paradoxically, it was the predatory industrialization of the first five-year plans accompanied by cultural intervention and the economic exploitation of local peoples that became the main factors countering their racialization. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the task of developing the “indigenous proletariat” in the Far North became the ultimate political priority. Turning inorodtsy into indigenous proletarians involved some institutional experimentation and the rearrangement of local power relations, which Stas carefully reconstructs in the article. The practical results of this bold social engineering were more visible in the transformation of the discursive sphere and the language of otherness regarding the indigenous population of the Far North, than in genuine socioeconomic transformation. Regardless of the actual colonial policies on the ground, the normalization of the Northern peoples as proletarians became a necessary step for proclaiming them members of socialist nations and in this respect no different from other Soviet citizens.
This did not mean that, by itself, Sovietness excluded racism or the perpetuation of imperial practices of discriminatory management of diversity. In her study of Soviet policies in Manchuria after the USSR took over the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) in 1924, Maria Krotova argues that technical specialists and top managers arriving from the USSR emulated the old imperial lifestyle and dismissive attitude toward Chinese coworkers and the general population. While one can certainly see in this case an example of translatio imperii, the radically changed sociopolitical context of the 1920s and early 1930s problematizes any direct equation of Soviet patterns with the imperial period. In the 1920s, the Republic of China was effectively divided into regional polities ruled by rival warlords, with the central government in Beijing or Nanjing holding nominal power and depending on relationships with one or another group of warlords. The Soviet Union sustained close ties and cooperation with the republican government, which implied hostile relationships with the supreme ruler of Manchuria, Marshal Zhang Zuolin. In other words, the Soviets of the CER in Northern Manchuria were dealing not with some generic “Chinese” but with the Manchurian political elite. Even if categories such as imperialism or racism can accurately characterize Soviet personnel’s attitudes toward local Chinese citizens, their applicability to the Soviet treatment of Chinese Communists or Sun Yat-sen’s supporters in the south is more problematic. Moreover, newcomers to Manchuria from the USSR in many respects radically differed from Russian old-timers in the region, suggesting another line of division within the presumed community of “Russian imperialists.” Krotova reconstructs the Soviet “political economy” at the CER, which was typical of timeservers: management pursued the economic and political interests of the USSR at the cost of ruining the railroad, while ordinary employees arriving from the devastated Soviet Union used their temporary assignment to the CER for personal profit. The management tried to marginalize the authority of their Chinese peers in order to conceal the Soviet mismanagement of the company; the ordinary employees indulged their orientalist prejudices that had been formed before coming to Manchuria and were revealed there due to limited collaboration with Chinese citizens. Unlike the Soviets, who arrived to an already formed society, Russian old-timers colonized the sparsely populated region in cooperation with various categories of Chinese migrants to Northern Manchuria. These Russians might have been exposing colonial attitudes or racial prejudices, but those had formed as part of mutual cultural projections in the middle ground and evolved as their life experiences changed. Russian settlers viewed the CER as a source of their collective well-being and were interested in sustaining cooperation with their Chinese neighbors and coworkers. Both “old” and “new” Russians in Manchuria could share the language of imperialism and race, but they used it to communicate different cultural meanings and economic interests.
So, whereas the otherness of Roma, the indigenous peoples of the North, or various categories of Chinese was always perceived as a natural order of things, its representations, meanings, and even its experiential aspects had been undergoing constant changes. Diversity could be handled by means of acculturation (Roma), segregation (Northern peoples), or colonization (in Northern Manchuria), but none of these scenarios aimed at eliminating diversity altogether – or, alternatively, each of these scenarios triggered the reconstitution of the imperial situation of diversity. The language and policies of diversity management could change, but diversity itself continued to be reproduced by all sides involved, simultaneously on various levels.
This makes truly formidable any attempts to rationalize the politics of diversity as a coherent government policy or, even more so, a country’s constitution, especially when this country is envisioned as a model nation-state. Concluding the publication of Seymour Becker’s unfinished book, which can be concisely and precisely titled “A Genealogy of the Nationalizing Empire,” the “ABC” section of this issue features the manuscript’s chapter 7, “The Era of the Great Reforms (II): Constitutional Projects; Poland and Finland.” This is the last portion of Becker’s comprehensive survey of modern Russian nationalism as it developed from the turn of the nineteenth century to the time of Alexander III’s nationalizing empire regime. The Great Reforms of Alexander II were a decisive turning point from the original project of empire as an anational polity to a nation-centered political imagination. Still, the reforms were ambivalent enough to preserve the possibility of an alternative development: expanding the elite inclusiveness of the original imperial project through popular representation, rather than promoting authoritarianism and exclusive Russian nationalism. Becker’s chapter considers émigré dissidents (Prince Peter Dolgorukov), Alexander II’s reformers (Peter A. Valuev), and legal theorists (Alexander Lokhvitskii, Boris Chicherin), all of whom contemplated constitutional rearrangements of the empire, even discussing federative scenarios. Contrary to the conventional view of nineteenth-century nationalists as the ultimate champions of democratization, the renowned Russian nationalist Mikhail Katkov opposed the very idea of constitutional reform, not to mention the possibility of Russia’s federalization. He was an early champion of nationalizing empire as the nation-state of ethnoconfessional Russians, who would appropriate the autocratic regime to dominate the “non-Russians.”
The January Uprising of 1863 in the former lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was both a result of these intellectual and political developments and a major reason that the Great Reforms took a course toward Russian authoritarian nationalism (making Katkov the most prominent ideologist of the nationalizing empire). For Becker, “the Polish Question” is a litmus test highlighting the main contradictions of the modernizing and nationalizing Russian Empire, caught between considerations of international prestige and domestic security, and choosing among various versions of national mobilization (along popular representation, Slavic solidarity, or exclusive ethnoconfessional Russianness). The case of Finland, also discussed in the chapter, presented a purer constitutional problem, not complicated by past imperial rivalries over contested territories or Slavophilism. The Grand Duchy of Finland’s cultural and political distinctiveness could have justified the need for constitutional reform in the empire and even for its federalization. However, and quite counterintuitively, the triumphant ideology of the Russian nationalizing empire proclaimed as its goal the Finns’ cultural assimilation. Of the possible scenarios for managing human diversity, the Russian nationalizing empire picked the least productive one for a multicultural heterogeneous society.
Historical explorations of past practices for managing diversity have important contemporary implications. Central to the project of new imperial history, such studies are essential for contemplating a modern analytical language of diversity that would enable informed public conversation about it. This academic and public work is being carried out in forums such as international journals, including Ab Imperio, professional scholarly associations, and academic centers, especially a handful of centers supported by endowments, such as the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University. They make systematic discussion of diversity, past and present, a central concern of participating scholars and a matter of serving the profession and community. An essential part of this service involves workshopping and discussing papers, attending talks and presentations that raise pertinent questions, thus pushing this common intellectual endeavor forward. This service often remains invisible, as the after-talk Q&A sessions usually leave no record. Building on the rich archive of academic life of the Havighurst Center, Ab Imperio’s editors are launching a new genre of academic journalism: reports from the Q&A sessions at the Havighurst Center. In addition to reflecting the collective contribution of Miami University professors – and no less importantly, students – to sustaining the center as an academic institution, these reports highlight the creative nature of live academic exchange and serve as the best invitation to potential donors and university administrators to create more centers such as Havighurst.
Among its various activities, the Havighurst Center holds a weekly Colloquia Series, in which invited speakers present formal papers on themes chosen for that year. In spring 2021, the topic of the series, coordinated by Neringa Klumbytė (an associate professor of anthropology), is “Authoritarian Laughter: From a Joke to a Revolution.” On March 15, the Lithuanian artist, caricaturist, watercolor painter, and educator Kęstutis K. Šiaulytis spoke at the colloquium about the Soviet Lithuanian satire and humor magazine Broom (Šluota). The Q&A session from the event is published in this issue of Ab Imperio. The questions pertain to Šiaulytis’s experience of working for a Soviet humor magazine, the boundaries of legal humor and satire during the late Soviet period, and the specifics of Lithuanian national humor at the time.
The materials published in the current issue of Ab Imperio underscore the inherent tension between diversity, structurally speaking, as the fundamental norm of Russian imperial and Soviet societies, and ever-changing attempts to rationalize it. In the next issue, the journal will explore one way of resolving that tension: perceiving diversity as a transgression of the desired ideal state of homogeneity or rigid segregation.