SUMMARY:

Andy Byford proposes considering “Russia” as an epistemic frame that predetermines certain master narratives for telling the region’s history and defining its boundaries. If not critically deconstructed, an assumed idea of what Russia is tacitly informs the spatial mapping and periodization of history, identifying groups and cultures and assigning them meaning and vested interests. As an epistemic frame, this axiomatic knowledge secures the reproduction of stable tropes and approaches in historiography and solidifies a broader cultural canon. Critical reflection on the main ways in which “Russia” has been functioning as an epistemic frame entails among other things a disconnection of the narrative from any fixed groupness. Where such groups constitute a “civilization” or a nation extending genealogically through time and claiming a certain territory and statehood as its own, they are merely projections by a certain version of “Russia” as an epistemic frame.