Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has dealt a heavy blow to the entire international discipline formerly known as Russian studies. Not only have dialogue and cooperation between Russian and Ukrainian scholars been all but terminated but also the main archives and libraries in the two countries have become inaccessible to researchers, albeit for different reasons. The war seems to have had an archaization effect on the field, pushing it back methodologically by several decades to its state of the early 1990s and putting into question all its accomplishments over the past three decades. This response is understandable, given the firm rooting of Russia’s aggression in historical arguments: formulated by President Putin, they apparently enjoy support among a certain segment of Russian society and professional historians. There must have been some deficiencies in global Russian studies if the politics of history promoted by Putin’s regime and discussed as a legitimate theory was not outright discarded as outlandish when it began taking shape at the turn of this century. Therefore, it is appropriate to raise the question of whether the imperial turn of the 1990s contributed to the legitimation of Russian imperial claims, or whether the methodological normalization of the Soviet period in post–Cold War historiography directly converted into the political rehabilitation of the Soviet regime. By the same token, getting back to the origins of our modern field in the era of perestroika and East European 1989 momentum gives us a second chance to revisit those formative influences. Were the German Historikerstreit’s lessons learned well, and can we see them today in a different light? Was political de-Sovietization in postsocialist countries matched by an analytical deconstruction that demonstrated the extent to which social and cultural arrangements that were taken for granted had in fact been part and parcel of communist social engineering or nationalist agendas? Was it possible to build new nation-states without legitimizing methodological nationalism embedded in the social imagination and hence in the dominant political culture?
These questions are addressed in the forum “Has History Betrayed Us? Debating Historical Narratives through the Prism of Russia’s War against Ukraine” in the “Methodology and Theory” section of the issue. The introduction to the forum quotes the question documented by the French historian Marc Bloch in the wake of France’s disastrous war with Germany in 1940: “Are we to believe that history has betrayed us?”^[1] Forum participants – historians from Britain, Germany, Japan, Kazakhstan, and the United States, – discuss the related question of whether Russia’s past and the discipline of Russian history have predetermined the war with Ukraine. They also offer their views on the prospects of our field and the course of its possible reformation, occasionally contradicting each other. Despite overall solidarity in assessing the current political situation, a divergent stance regarding methodological nationalism becomes a major bone of contention.
In this regard, the war has had a major polarizing effect, rearranging a broad gradient of conceptual approaches in the field of Russian history into two uneven clusters opposing each other. Most historians tend to consolidate along the paradigm of national history – often underscoring that it should be a “good” national history or some “new” one – regardless of their prior methodological creed. The much-trumpeted “imperial turn” of the late 1990s or avant-garde disciplines such as memory studies and comparative history have ended up conceptually indistinguishable from traditionalist national histories, inasmuch as historians have essentialized the groupness of imperial hegemons and subjects as preserving some stable characteristics through time. The mere recognition that Russia was an empire before 1917 did not change the historical narrative about “Russians” a bit. Even admitting that Russia was a “multiethnic empire,” historians still identified “Russians” and “national minorities” throughout centuries. These stable groups effortlessly transcended the 1917 divide to be incorporated into the Soviet system of national territorial republics, only to disintegrate into independent nation-states in 1991. This is what much of the “imperial turn” turned out to be about, at least at the level of more general narratives. Mainstream Soviet history has been even less nuanced: most of it, written solely based on Russian-language sources, implied ethnocultural Russians when discussing the Soviets. There were also special studies of national regions and groups, positioned as purely Ukrainian or Kazakh or Georgian area studies. The history of transfers and comparative history that use this optics take their units of comparison for granted, thus solidifying the boundaries and stability of nations, cultures, and regions.
The war, and the horrendous crimes committed by the Russian army with the consent of a substantial part of Russia’s population, made the danger of ascribing certain stable qualities to a group, such as “Russians” or “Ukrainians,” even more painfully obvious. If anything, new imperial history and a loose but extensive network of scholars who are in dialogue with this methodology, have been offering effective alternatives to methodological nationalism. Some of these scholars have contributed to the forum. Without delving into theoretical nuances, it is necessary to underscore that new imperial history deconstructs both imperial and national forms of hegemony. It conceptualizes groupness as a function of the imperial situation of strategic multidimensional diversity, rather than an ontological reality. New imperial history sees no “imperial turn” in historiography as a methodological paradigm shift, and regards it only as a decade-long fad that had lost much of its popularity by 2010. Therefore, the recent retreat to national history and nation-centered historical narratives and methodologies has been massive and instantaneous.
This is not the right time or place for a methodological debate, particularly since many colleagues apparently do not see a connection between epistemological and political positions. For those who prefer to identify good and evil with particular societies rather than historical conjunctures, it seems more appropriate to recall another dialogue about history that turned out to be prophetic. It took place not at the beginning of World War II but the very next day after its end. On May 11, 1945, the Zurich newspaper Die Weltwoche published an interview with the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who is relevant for modern historians at least as one of the first semioticians and as a theorist of mass culture. As if continuing the conversation dated June 14, 1940 by Marc Bloch, about history betraying the French, Jung told his interviewer Peter Schmid:

“Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that won’t be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey. ... The Germans will recover when they admit their guilt and accept it; but the others will become victims of possession if, in their horror at the German guilt, they forget their own moral shortcomings. We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious nations as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers. … And how much the Russians already fascinated by the devil of power can easily be seen from the latest events, which must dampen our peace jubilations a bit. … I have already suggested that the only salvation lies in the piecemeal work of educating the individual.”^[2]

In somewhat archaic metaphorical language, Jung described an important cultural mechanism at work. “Demons” of suppressed frustration possess any group that indulges itself in the self-glorification of its absolute historical righteousness, as has been the case of Putin’s Russia. The Jungian concept of “shadow” and the recipe for its integration through acknowledging its reality and elaborating one’s conscious attitude toward it opposes the method of projecting any negative content onto others. Albeit inconclusive, there have been Ukrainian public discussions of the Ukrainian role in the Holocaust and the Volhyanian massacre. By contrast, insisting on Russia’s infallibility, Putin’s regime systematically projects on Ukraine and the “West” allegations of Nazism and ethnic cleansings, nationalism, and imperialism, thus mirroring and manifesting the regime’s own goals and preferences. But this is also what methodological nationalists do by projecting all the negative content onto a particular group as the Other, while preferring to cast another group in terms of pure victimhood and a lack of historical responsibility of its own. Criticism of this approach is not about claiming a “shared responsibility” or moral equation of victims and perpetrators: from a non-groupist perspective, everyone bear full responsibility for their actions, but the systemic reasons making those actions possible are always complex and they transcend any group boundaries. “The fatal tendency to collectivization” (Jung), in scholarly analysis and politics, obscures the key mechanism of overcoming any historical legacy: the individual’s resolution to “own” the problematic past and preserve its memory as deeply traumatic. This approach is incompatible with methodological nationalism because it undermines the very idea of nation as a stable social body with embedded qualities. Rather, it underscores the processual and situational quality of a group, which finds itself in very different places depending on the choices made by its members in certain circumstances (in the imperial situation).
In his essay in the “Methodology and Theory” section, “The Trickster and Rashism,” Mark Lipovetsky takes a step toward accepting and analyzing Russia’s long shadow. He reconstructs the transformation of the trickster – the central cultural figure of Soviet-era nonconformism and resistance – into the cynic in modern Russia. After becoming a normative social type in the 1990s, by the 2010s the cynic had made cynicism the main ideology of Putin’s political system. The conflation of the cynicism of the powerful and the powerless after 2012 has produced a “cynical consensus” according to Lipovetsky, who illustrates this transformation using the example of the most prominent mass culture artifacts in modern Russia. In the absence of a rigid system of political and moral values, the trickster loses its emancipatory potential and becomes purely performative and strategically immoral. Russian Nazism – “Rashism” – is a product of the rise to power of the societal cynical consensus and the immoral tricksters. The only way to counter them is to oppose economic, political, and intellectual corruption. In the latter case, this means that toxic cynicism should be replaced with the analytically responsible deconstruction of holistic and hence arbitrarily manipulative entities such as “people,” “historical fate/mission,” and “civilization.”
As if responding to Lipovetsky, Yaroslav Hrytsak’s essay “What Do We Write about When We Write about Ukraine?” underscores the main distinction of modern Ukraine from Russia as that of a society united around values. Unlike Russia’s cynicism and performative cargo cult of fixed characteristics, such as ethnicity or a particular historical narrative, Ukraine is capable of mobilizing its hybridity. Hrytsak suggests that nineteenth-century liberal nationalism can serve as the ideal political form for this new type of societal mobilization. This implicitly raises a fundamentally challenging question of how we deal with the centrality of nationalism when the national paradigm underlies both the defensive struggle of Ukrainians for survival as a hybrid political community and the aggressive nationalist imperialism of Putin’s Russia.
It is the hollow and unproductive nature of cynicism and the sheer performativity of Putin-era tricksters that explain the paradox of modern Russia – the alleged Leviathan and the omnipresent police state – it demonstrates the spectacular absence of state institutions. Tightly connected to the task of conducting massive warfare, historically, the modern state has manifested itself the most in wartime. Mass mobilization, redistribution of resources and the formalized chain of command and systemic biopolitics were originally employed for the war effort. The war with Ukraine has vividly confirmed the diagnosis of the Russian Federation as a failed state: it is impotent as a mechanism facilitating complex societal cooperation, even concerning combined arms – coordinating infantry, armor, artillery, airforce, and supplies. Only performative aspects and trickster activities are carried out with enthusiasm and some success – rabid propaganda and all sorts of false-flag operations by small groups of terrorists in disguise. Armed people in uniforms commit numerous murders but themselves are routinely left for dead by their superiors and not even recognized as combatants deserving state benefits. Russia is a failed state, as was already demonstrated by the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: state institutions have been completely dismantled in Russia and replaced by informal networks of private interests.
In this respect, Russia is hardly unique and perhaps emblematic of a more general trend, but taken to extremes. The modern state with its robust institutions as envisioned by normative social theories seems either no longer to exist or to be undergoing a deep crisis even in such advanced countries as the United States. Given the virtual paralysis of the American political system, the popularity of deep-state conspiracy theories in society, and the low quality of government expertise in all spheres – from foreign policy to domestic affairs – this does not seem merely a partisan exaggeration. A few notable exceptions only support this conclusion: China, Israel, and some northern European countries with homogeneous populations can still boast of having interventionist and efficient states in the mid-twentieth-century mode. These cases highlight that the main condition of the modern state’s functionality is the need to be a nation-state or an aggressively nationalizing state. It is a separate question whether nation or the shared political enthusiasm that could accompany nationalism are key here. Either way, it turns out that it is not some mysteriously self-sufficient “developed institutions” that make the state work but the popular mandate to exercise coercion on behalf of the entire society, which is only possible in a political nation committed to self-censorship and the purging of individual members in the interests of the like-minded majority. If so, the perspective of a postnational society that prioritizes individual rights and multiple loyalties seems to undercut the foundations of the modern state and raises the question of the future political forms to replace them. Therefore, in 2022, the editors of Ab Imperio have invited contributors and readers to revisit the history of this elusive phenomenon along the annual theme “The Rise and Fall of the State as an Institution and an Analytical Concept.”
Issue 1/2022, “The Neverending Story of State-Building: Who Was Making the Power Work and How?” begins this collective investigation. The “History” section features four articles that cover the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Yusuf Ziya Karabıçak reconstructs the international context of the political crisis that led to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’s ultimate demise. In an attempt to make power work, the king of Poland, Stanisław II August, tried to strengthen the state institutions and consolidate his royal authority. His efforts were dwarfed by his opponents inside and outside the country, who pursued incompatible goals but used the same argument about preserving ancient liberties against the king’s tyranny. Karabıçak focuses on the role of the Ottoman Empire, whose diplomacy fully embraced the European Enlightenment’s discourse of liberty, going to war with Russia in 1768 under this pretext. Each party understood liberty as a group privilege rather than the universal and equal right of every citizen, and therefore it was incompatible with the modern state as the ultimate public space. The absolutist concept of supreme sovereignty envisioned the monarch as the authority accommodating all private interests and serving as the source of all private rights. Thus, it remained only a “technical” matter of revolution for a political nation to take over the monarchy and emancipate the modern state from the last vestiges of the private sphere – the monarch and the dynasty at the helm of an otherwise impersonal political system. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth failed to separate the nascent public space of state institutions from the private space of group interests and fell victim to foreign powers exploiting the domestic discord in the name of one or another party’s “liberty.”
This does not mean that, once consolidated, the modern state was insulated from the private domain, their occasional overlapping now recognized as “corruption.” State institutions are expensive to sustain and hard to staff with qualified and trusted cadres, particularly in the areas far away from the established centers of power. Throughout the nineteenth century, governments preferred to outsource some of their responsibilities and hence their authority to nonstate organizations, such as the church, or even to entrepreneurs. After the Russian Empire sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, for the next two decades the former Russian America on both sides of the Northern Pacific was practically governed by the private Alaska Commercial Company (ACC). Robert Kindler’s article studies this regime of governance and calls it “fragmented sovereignty.” The ACC exploited one of the most valuable maritime resources of the region, fur seals, along the way acting as the sole authority on Kamchatka and the Commander Islands, still under Russia’s nominal jurisdiction, and on the Pribilof Islands, now belonging to the United States. This arrangement ended in the late 1880s, as Alexander III’s nationalist and statist regime perceived the outsourced and fragmented sovereignty as a scandal.
In her article, Natalia Ryzhova analyzes the reasons that the “soybean revolution” never took place in the USSR, and she simultaneously explicates the inefficiency of the Stalinist state. By virtue of its colonial expansion in the Far East, by the turn of the twentieth century Russia had an advantage over any other country in studying, cultivating, and exporting Manchurian soybeans – soon to be recognized as a technical crop of major importance. The demand for soybeans skyrocketed through the twentieth century, driven by the need for cheap protein, fodder for intensive animal farming, and technical oils. Russian agronomists experimented with adapting Manchurian varieties of soybeans to various local natural conditions, and there were stories of successful commercial cultivation of this crop in different provinces. In the early 1930s these precedents encouraged Soviet planners and botanists to envision the large-scale implementation of soybeans in the collectivized agriculture. Manchurian varieties along with others imported from the United States were planted year after year in southern regions of the USSR, particularly in Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, with dismal results. Ryzhova demonstrates how the miscoordination between the overly centralized structures of knowledge production, economic planning, and plant cultivation undermined the prospects of the would-be soybean revolution. She also reveals that, under Stalinism, centers of knowledge production were radically dissociated from centers of power and had little means to control soybean production. The shrinking of the private sphere did not automatically strengthen the state: even when controlling most spheres of life and the economy, the Stalinist state did not perform efficiently. “Seeing like a state” (James C. Scott) does not necessarily entail “performing like state institutions”: both rationally and autonomously of individual decision makers.
This structural situation is highlighted in Elizaveta Khatanzeiskaia’s article, which returns us to the theme of war as the pinnacle and ultimate test of modern state performance. She studies the period of the Soviet “strange” or “phony” war – analogous to the French Phony War during the initial period of World War II, which was marked by relatively low-intensity hostilities until the decisive blitzkrieg by the German army. In the Soviet case, however, the period lasted not eight but almost twenty-two months and witnessed several large-scale campaigns, such as the occupation of Eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. The most dramatic was the Soviet–Finnish War that cost the Red Army almost 400,000 casualties, one-third of them fatalities – an equivalent to all Wehrmacht losses from 1939 far into 1941. Nominally staying away from the world war underway, the Red Army demonstrated all the characteristics of a military seeing severe action: it suffered high casualties and witnessed commanders’ rapid advancement in rank, both on the battlefield and as a result of the grand purge of 1937–1938. Junior officers occupied higher command posts but lacked the necessary experience and qualifications, which contributed to their overall frustration. Beginning in summer 1940, the entire country de facto lived under martial law, with draconian laws imposing harsh discipline and longer hours in the workplace and prohibiting job change without special authorization. This “cold war” turned into a hot war on June 22, 1941, but otherwise little changed for the Red Army, at least during the initial period of the Soviet–German War: the same people demonstrated the same moral qualities and attitudes toward the service and each other.
Khatanzeiskaia studies the Red Army’s moral climate mostly using the example of the Arkhangelsk military district during the period of “war without a war” after the end of the Soviet–Finnish War in March 1940 – so that the circumstances of military service cannot be attributed to or obscured by active combat. She discovers evidence of truly massive and often spectacular violations of military regulations and public order, from drunkenness to shoot-outs between officers. Characteristically, in historical sources that document the everyday life of the army during peacetime – which are mostly produced by the police, courts, and army command – criminal actions receive disproportionate attention and representation. While obviously too ubiquitous for a well-ordered force despite all the harsh measures taken to prevent them, these incidents do not represent the typical behavior of Soviet service members. They do, however, accurately capture the popular perception of the social norm as manifested in typical responses to delinquency. Drunkenness and insubordination seemed so widespread that they were not usually punished, but an important caveat is necessary: Khatanzeiskaia shows a rigid caste divide between officers and conscripts in the Red Army, which manifested itself in stark differences in punishment for the same offenses. This divide was institutionalized by the new Disciplinary Regulations of October 1940 that authorized the officers’ use of coercion to maintain good discipline and relieved them of any responsibility for such actions. The application of physical force including battery, even for minor violations and disobedience, was left completely to the discretion of commanders, who immediately seized the opportunity. At the same time, the new regulations placed all responsibility for executing orders on the officers personally, regardless of any objective hindrances. Their arbitrary power over subordinates matched equally arbitrary liability vis-à-vis their superiors, unmediated by any formal criteria and rules.
This made the state virtually invisible in the Red Army: armed people wearing uniforms were tied by interpersonal relations of absolute control and obedience, and it is this tremendous burden of personal responsibility that probably contributed to widespread alcoholism and abuse of power. The only systemic factor that provided institutionalized, rather than interpersonal, coercion consisted of the infamous NKVD officers embedded in military units. However, they too revealed double standards by ruthlessly prosecuting privates while tending to turn a blind eye on officers, and the higher the officer’s rank, the greater his impunity. Thus, the “specials” (osobisty) of the special departments (military counterintelligence) were acting at their discretion, not so much as agents of the state but rather as private operators on behalf of the state. The private sphere of individual discretion and abuse of power surprisingly emerged in the core of the completely public institution of the Red Army, negating its role as the core state institution.
This conclusion makes the phenomenon of the modern Russian army, with its cult of World War II, more understandable: as in the early 1940s, it is held together mostly by interpersonal relations including physical coercion and, to a smaller degree, ideology. By changing communism to Russian national imperialism it has not become any more motivated or less cynical, and certainly not more “statist.” This is not to say that the modern state had never been built in the twentieth-century Soviet Union and its successor countries but only to underscore the elusive nature of this phenomenon and the nonlinear vector of its development.