In developing the journal’s annual theme “Historicizing Diversity,” issue 3/2021 examines a third possible approach to contemplating this phenomenon: “Anomie: Everything Is So Confusing.” Arguably, anomie can be regarded as the initial, fundamental perception of diversity as an unstructured reality. Even if one attempts to rely on some familiar preexisting stereotypes to navigate an unfamiliar social terrain, their impracticality quickly becomes apparent. A novel situation, characterized by confusion, almost limitless possibilities, and the absence of familiar strategies with which to cope, renders any attempt to make sense of reality simultaneously also the first step toward constructing differences.
A good example of this mechanism at work can be found in the article by Rainer Matos Franco in the “History” section, focused on the Comintern international schools (“communist universities”). The Communist International, including its large-scale educational project in the USSR, was in many ways unprecedented. Thousands of grassroots activists from dozens of countries were brought to Moscow to study at communist universities for several months and sometimes for years. The ultimate goal of this political schooling was to cultivate proletarian internationalism, but the curriculum and the social imagination it shaped remained fundamentally nation-centered. Paradoxically, in order to forge internationalism, the Comintern instructors first strove to develop a deep sense of national belonging in students, especially those from colonial and postimperial countries. The very concept of the “national” in the Comintern schools had evolved over the two decades of their existence following the transformation of Soviet domestic nationality policy: from an attempt to institutionalize the “national identity” of all ethnic groups to the prioritization of territorial “titular nationalities,” to the adoption of essentially classless, folkloristic, and volkish nationalism. At each stage, internationalism remained the ideological goal, and methodological nationalism provided the conceptual framework for the perception and comprehension of reality. The cataloging of differences helped conceive a future society of universal equality.
The methodological and epistemological nationalism of Soviet instructors in the Comintern schools was quite typical of the anti-imperial and postimperial political imagination that was insensitive to multidimensional differences and hybridity. Another aspect of the fundamentally anomic situation during the early Soviet period was the impossibility of framing political criticism of the Soviet leader without borrowing the rhetoric of the “Whites” or Bolshevik inner opposition. This was the predicament of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who opted to attack Stalin in a merciless 1933 epigram in the language of national difference. In the section “Newest Mythologies,” Ilya Vinitsky reconstructs the genealogy of the epigram’s punchline, “And the broad chest of the Ossete.” This was by no means a naive attempt, out of confusion, to resort to some self-evident basic marker of differences and use ethnic otherness as an insult – as Boris Pasternak thought (“How could he write those lines – after all, he’s a Jew!”). There was nothing self-evident and insulting in ethnic otherness, and Vinitsky shows that Mandelstam performed a conscious transfer and translation of one modern idea into the semantic field of other. Inspired by a mid-1920s novel Dzhako’s Fugitives by the Georgian writer Mikhail Dzhavakhishvili, Mandelstam used the “Ossetian myth” of Georgian anti-Soviet nationalism for the double disparagement of Stalin: as an Untermensch and a tyrant.
The act of registering differences and distancing from the “others” can stem from a sense of one’s own firm belonging to a certain homogeneous community and can serve as its justification, as in the case of Georgian anti-Ossetianism. Or it can be completely unrelated to one’s self-perception: it is unlikely that Mandelstam affirmed his Russianness or Jewishness by calling Stalin an Ossetian. Proving this point, in the “History” section, James Meador’s article tells the story of transborder intermediaries between the early Qing Empire and Muscovy in the mid-seventeenth century. These people were very well versed in diversity, which only relativized their own sociocultural identification. The article’s main protagonist, Ananii Uruslanov (Ulanggeri of Chinese sources), was sent by the Yakut governor, D. A. Frantsbekov (Fahrensbach), to the Amur River region as part of the reinforcements to the Cossack expedition headed by Yerofey Khabarov, and ended up in Beijing. He joined Qing service as commander of the Russian Company formed by the prisoners of war and defectors and was included in the service hierarchy in the elite Manchu status. Before arriving in Yakutsk, Uruslanov had already gone through a similar transformation: it is known that he was a Crimean Tatar who baptized and joined the Moscow service, either voluntarily or as a war prisoner. Uruslanov’s transcontinental biography presents him as a man who skillfully navigated new contexts of “otherness,” in effect becoming a new person every time he crossed to another social milieu. If this is so, how productive are historians’ attempts to ascribe to Uruslanov some kind of collective identification as a representative of “Tatars,” “Russians,” or even “Muscovy” or “Manchus”?
Following Meador’s article, the article by Niccolò Pianciola studies how the Russian imperial government during World War I and various governments in the Far East during the Civil War regulated the cultivation of opium poppy and the extraction of opium. Before the global “war on drugs” and moral panic of the late twentieth century, the attitude toward opium was quite anomic if not cynical. In 1915, the Russian government banned the cultivation of poppy and the import and use of opium in the Far East, but not in Turkestan. In 1916, a state monopoly on opium was introduced to restrict the cultivation of poppy and its processing. However, compared to the almost complete ban on alcohol, this measure can hardly be considered radical. Despite the ban, opium production continued in the Far East, as resources were insufficient to implement effective control or the motivation to do so, as most drug users resided across the border with China. The Civil War brought about the erosion of economic ties, growing economic crisis, and hyperinflation, so that opium production and its export abroad became an important economic resource in borderlands. Poppy straw was stored in the vaults of the state bank, and opium reserves were used as the base for monetary emission. Such a lenient attitude toward opium revealed not just pragmatism and cynicism but also a principled refusal to “tell the difference” (in particular, between “good and evil”). In contrast to the wholesale prohibition of alcohol, there was no similar stigmatization of opium as a drug, largely due to its perception through the lens of colonial optics. The main producers and consumers of opium were “aliens,” both in Turkestan and the Far East, where it was the business of Chinese and Koreans. Very conveniently, those recognized as “Russians” took advantage of the cross-border opium economy, while “outsiders” took the main risks.
Cynicism and ignorance as factors of manipulating differences are addressed in Ilya Gerasimov’s article, in the “Methodology and Theory” section. He discusses them not as moral or epistemological categories, but primarily as markers of a certain perception of time, directly affecting social cohesion. Using the example of the humorous science fiction novel Monday Begins on Saturday by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (1964), Gerasimov discusses how intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain, almost simultaneously, identified a crisis of faith in a fundamentally different future. Later called “postmodern” and the period of “cynical reason” (Peter Sloterdijk), a new era was characterized by a radically different perception of historical temporality. For several reasons, postwar mass culture and social sciences were isolated from theoretical physics that developed novel hypotheses, relying instead on outdated concepts of time. As a result, the popular and academic discussions of society promoted a cynical disbelief in the possibility of a truly unprecedented future and a fixation on the past and present as the only reality. According to the old worldview of modernist progressivism, the inequality of the best and the worst, the advanced and the backward was projected on the ascending timeline of historical evolution, common to all and giving everyone a chance for improvement in the future. This changed when the prevailing “cynical reason” articulated a different vision of historical time devoid of a future that substantially differed from the present or even the somewhat improved past. In this presentist view, all social discrepancies appear synchronous and persistent, unable to transform no matter what. Any errors of the past remain an indelible stigma forever, and the sociocultural transformation similar to Uruslanov’s is no longer imaginable. The sociocultural context alongside the meaning it produces and ascribes to historical actors might change and evolve, but from the vantage point of the presentist perception of time, Uruslanov only moved away from his original and fixed “true self” rather than becoming a new man.
Thus, temporality appears to be a key autonomous factor of diversity. It is important not only in the sense of “historicism” that requires assessing phenomena by the standards of their time. Modern physical concepts of time can be viewed as an example of how the normative concept of historical temporality can be revised, challenging the hegemony of presentism and, in general, approaching time as a context capable of modifying and producing new meaning. The variegating duration of a time period and its relative perception from different points, synchronicity and asynchrony, as well as the ability to produce alternative genealogies of the past and alternative projections of the future at each new moment, make time an important factor in ascribing characteristics to people and institutions. Diversity turns out to be a function of a certain temporality to the same degree as it is of any other material and cultural factors.