This issue concludes Ab Imperio’s twenty-second volume structured around the annual theme “Historicizing Diversity.” Four issues of the journal in 2021 have addressed four main approaches to handling diversity – four ideal types that, arguably, can be discovered in any historical period and in virtually any society. Issue 1/2021 was about perceiving diversity as a matter of fact rather than a distinctive problem. The 2/2021 issue discussed diversity when viewed primarily as an avoidable hindrance. Anomic frustration over the inability to clearly articulate and classify empirically observable diversity was the focus of AI 3/2021. The current issue, 4/2021, is themed “Projects: Designing a Rational Arrangement of Diversity.”
Any rational planning involves contemplating the future, which has become an exceptionally pertinent issue now, at the time when the editors are putting together this journal issue and sending it to printers. The very future of our field, habitually shorthanded as “Russian studies,” hangs in the balance. Russia’a aggression against Ukraine makes it virtually impossible for scholars from these countries to participate in joint academic events and publications without everyone’s unequivocal condemnation of the war on Ukraine unleashed by Putin’s regime. There can be no “Russian studies” without their Ukrainian segment, but also without a clear differentiation between Russia and Putinism, first of all by Russian scholars themselves. The task of the day is therefore more challenging than just the formal condemnation of war atrocities and more challenging than offering support to the suffering population of Ukraine: in the academic sphere, it involves methodological reorientation of the discipline and a rejection of the analytical language of methodological nationalism that substantiates the war. The issue opens with Marina Mogilner’s call to our main professional organization, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), to reassess its positionality and undertake a true decolonization of the field by deconstructing hegemonic Russia-centrist narratives and methodological nationalism in general.
Her text is followed by Ilya Gerasimov’s article discussing the parameters of a new Soviet history that would critically deconstruct the prevalent historical master narrative, which still bears traces of late twentieth-century Soviet and Western conceptualizations. Rather than advancing some normative theory or a particular conceptual model, Gerasimov outlines six general propositions that open up new research perspectives and pose new research questions without predicting any actual answers. First, he calls for the deconstruction and differentiation of key historical terms that are perceived as self-explanatory and self-evident. This includes a radical separation of the Soviet from the Bolshevik (communist), and Bolshevism from socialism. Second, he insists on readjusting temporality and revising historical periodization by explicating the origins of the Soviet project in the post-1905 political visions of national elites or clarifying the USSR’s role in World War II between September 1, 1939, and June 22, 1941. Gerasimov’s third point concerns decoupling historical processes from traditional explanatory schemes and labels. Thus, the familiar umbrella term “the civil war and foreign intervention” accurately accounts for only some of the manifold historical developments on the ruins of the Russian Empire in 1918–1922. Conversely, the concept of Holodomor, which has been squarely applied and studied only in the context of the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s, invites comparisons with an even more horrible synchronous famine in Kazakhstan and also with the Kremlin-aggravated famine in besieged Leningrad. Such a comparison can expand our understanding of these phenomena and the logic of biopolitics and governmentality behind them. Gerasimov also argues that taking seriously the old Soviet preference for political economy over economics can offer a path toward a more perceptive Soviet economic history. Fourth, he calls for critically disentangling groupness and individual subjectivity: whatever the actual success of the regime in forging new groups or a historian’s belief in their reality, there is no methodologically grounded reason for identifying a person’s motivation with their belonging to a particular group. The fifth suggestion concerns acknowledging the incongruence of the centers of power and the centers of knowledge until their conjunction is proved empirically. This is not an idiosyncratic Soviet condition; it can be observed in any rapidly nationalizing multicultural society, just as in a deeply politically fractured one. Finally, Gerasimov proposes that the critical theory approach be integrated into a new Soviet history. He concludes that a critical theory is the most productive when it recovers human agency and subjectivities, particularly those of the oppressed, while avoiding direct identification with any hegemonic discourse, past and present. It helps to counter the para-academic extremes in assessing the Soviet period that deny the Soviets their subjectivity as simultaneously victims and perpetrators.
A recent book by Galina Babak and Alexander Dmitriev, The Atlantis of Soviet National Modernism: The Formal Method in Ukraine (1920s–Early 1930s) (Moscow: NLO, 2021), can be seen as an example of a possible new Soviet history. It aspires to decenter the prevalent, Russo-centric master narrative that identifies the modernist formal method in literary criticism solely with Moscow and Leningrad scholars and reconstructs the forgotten original Ukrainian formalist tradition. The forum “Conceptualizing National Modernism” in this issue of AI discusses the authors’ conceptual model and empirical findings, as well as the phenomenon of modernism in diverse sociocultural formations in general. The book and the forum directly resonate with the issue’s theme by looking into how projects of a future modernized culture accommodated diversity, and how their fate was shaped by the fundamental situation of multidimensional diversity.
A central problem tackled in the forum is the predicament of universalism as the foundation of modernity and the question of the very viability of “national modernism.” True, nationalism is a major product and driving force of modernity, but it is the universality of nation – its standardization on the inside and almost compulsory ubiquity on the outside – that is making nation and nationalism epitomes of modernity. As several forum participants noted, it must have been difficult for formalism – with its absolute prioritization of the universal form – to reconcile it with a local national idiom. In other words, a formalism-inspired modernism seems to be the least suitable vehicle for developing a national culture, whether Ukrainian or any other, and no national particularism can be regarded as a sufficient cultural context for a formalist project. The forum participants outline several historical scenarios of resolving this predicament.
Formalist scholars in Moscow and Leningrad, affiliated with OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language), identified with an “imperial” cultural space. They embraced the Russian language and a mostly pre-1917 cultural sphere as a form of universalism, being disinterested in developing an ethnoculturally Russian national culture and showing little Bolshevik zeal. Despite severe ideological pressure, these people avoided the harshest repressions and survived Stalinist terror – perhaps because their imperial cultural universalism resonated on some level with Stalin’s imperialism.
Ukrainian writers – the protagonists of the book by Babak and Dmitriev – chose a different form of universalism. The book shows that Ukrainian formalists were more interested in a dialogue with their peers from Moscow and Leningrad than with the peasant mass as the emerging nation’s foundation. But most importantly, they also forcefully embraced Bolshevism and insisted on developing a distinctive – Ukrainian – version of national communism. This was another form of universalism, anti-imperial and class-based, and in this sense international. Most of these intellectuals perished during the purges of the 1930s, and, given the strikingly different fate of their “Russian” colleagues, it must have been their national communism rather than cultural modernism that sealed their fate. As recent scholarship shows, Stalin’s regime did not really abandon the indigenization “affirmative action” policies of the 1920s until the 1950s – as long as they did not allow the rise of national communisms.^[1] Identified as a major threat to the regime already in the late 1920s, national communisms were ruthlessly annihilated in national republics, so Ukrainian modernists fell victim to their zealous Bolshevism rather than Ukrainianness.
Finally, a third form of universalism was chosen by Jewish intellectuals, who relied on the truly global, if discrete, space of Yiddish culture. It was both national and imperial of sorts, but also enthusiastically Bolshevist – during the interwar period, Stalin’s regime was seen as the main protection against pervasive antisemitism. Many Jewish writers fell victim to the assault on Ukrainian and Belarusian national communists, being deeply integrated into local cultural milieus. Still, the main blow against them was delivered after World War II when their version of globalist – “cosmopolitan” – universalism clashed with Stalin’s autarkic Cold War policy. This was not simply a result of “geopolitics”: Jewish formalism allowed one to distance from the Soviet content and even mute it completely, if one was not a wholehearted communist. The universalism of Jewish modernism was based on a different foundation from Ukrainian modernism and was not preconditioned by Bolshevism.
One way or another, modernism implied strategic universalism, even if it operated with particularist idioms of ethnic authenticity – for example, in neoarchaic and primitivist aesthetic formats. This authenticity and peculiarity still needed to be rendered in forms easily comprehensible to readers and spectators across the globe, which returns us to the central question: Is a substantially – not ornamentally – “national” modernism possible?
In his article focused on the Swedish-speaking political elite of the Grand Duchy of Finland in the 1830s–1840s, Evgenii Egorov studies the discourse of national authentic traditions – cultural, legal, and political – as a mechanism for constructing a new national collective identification. Finland’s administrators – mostly Swedish aristocrats with close family connections and cultural ties with the Kingdom of Sweden – pursued a two-prong task. They strove to substantiate Finland’s autonomy within the Russian Empire by appealing to the ancient Swedish legal and political tradition while at the same time distancing themselves and the Grand Duchy from modern Sweden. Appalled by what they perceived as the revolutionary and democratizing Swedish society of the time and sympathetic to the old-regime aristocratic Swedish political culture of the eighteenth century, Finland’s elite were quite content with the order of things in the Russian Empire under Nicholas I as long as the Grand Duchy enjoyed its old privileges. Their counterparts in St. Petersburg, most immediately the nominal governor-general of Finland, prince Alexander Menshikov, were only too happy to sustain this arrangement. Menshikov, who was also the naval minister and a close associate of Nicholas I, resisted any projects aimed at the empire’s modernization if they envisioned the elimination of special arrangements for regions, such as Finland, and the streamlining of the administrative system. Close solidarity between Russia’s imperial elites and Swedish elites in Finland contrasted with the latter’s disapproval of modern Sweden and attempts to severe ties with the former metropole.
A logical next step was to promote Finnish-language culture to broaden the breach between Finlanders and the Swedes of Sweden, thus inadvertently undermining the initial plan to make the Grand Duchy of Finland a safe haven for the old Swedish elite. This story also demonstrates that nation and empire were perfectly compatible in a mutually beneficial arrangement until the arrival of epistemological (methodological) nationalism. That is, as long as the Russian Empire remained a political formation that coordinated otherness, and Finland remained a distinctively “foreign” province that required a system of mutual translation – linguistic and juridical – for daily administration, their interests did not clash because they were not positioned on the same plane. The universal condition making the preservation of otherness possible was the availability of a common form accommodating any nationally specific content within a certain horizon of universal modernity. It was the rising nationalization of the empire since the 1860s along the lines of standardization of local “content” across the country that made the imperial form redundant. If mutual “translation” among various loci of the empire was no longer needed (to use Egorov’s central concept), there was no need for an imperial formation. Nation clashes with empire when both of them claim the same type of social imagination and social arrangement. Then, an empire’s insistence on keeping several nations under its sway appears unsubstantiated at best, if not outright repressive.
A somewhat similar project of the future as a universal sphere of diversity was promoted in the postwar Soviet Union. Moreover, this imperial formation was even praised as progressive, at least when the Soviet Central Asian republics were considered part of the rising Third World, protected from imperialists by their membership in the USSR. Marek Eby’s article studies the case of the Soviet city of Tashkent in the 1950s and 1960s, which emerged as a showcase of socialism for the Third World. Scores of visitors traveled to the city from decolonizing countries, encountering Soviet presentations of the city’s advanced modernity and authentic Asian culture. Examining the travelogues of Indian observers in the 1950s, as well as accounts of the Afro-Asian Writers Conference of 1958 and the Indo-Pakistani Peace Conference of 1966, Eby argues that Tashkent served as a site to engage with the project of the Third World, especially the problems of non-European modernity and postcolonial solidarity therein. As part of the global historical context, Tashkent was no longer perceived as “Russia’s colony.” As a “foreign” part of the Soviet imperial formation – not only Uzbek but also Third Worldish – Tashkent found itself on different planes vis-à-vis the USSR. It was thus able to avoid many conflicts with the metropole, just as the Grand Duchy of Finland had done in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Universalism can take many forms, from globalization to a globally embraced cult of political isolationism and cultural authenticity. Anational empire, communist internationalism, or cosmopolitanism can equally frame modern projects of rationally arranged diversity. By the same token, parochialism is not about a place or status, but about one’s positionality. For Russian imperial high culture and its Soviet and post-Soviet incarnations, the main symbol of parochialism has been Ukraine with its rustic aesthetics and persistent hybridity. In the emerging truly postimperial and postcolonial world, Ukraine appears increasingly avant-garde with its spontaneous hybridity and its ability to unite despite diversity, while Russia risks becoming the epitome of new nationalist parochialism. This dynamic became particularly clear after the Euromaidan, so Russian aggression and international sanctions have simply solidified this transformation. The only chance for Russia and Russian studies to regain their former global relevance is for them to actively develop projects of post-postmodern rational arrangements of diversity.