Today any historical inquiry begins with a clarification of one’s analytical language. This is especially imperative when discussing anything “Russian” in English. Like most other languages, English conflates several planes of reality into one word, rendering all of them as equally “Russian,” which is both uninformative and utterly misleading.
First of all, the label “Russian” is used to identify an epistemic frame for contemplating the entangled cultures and communities outside the invisible and blurred yet quite real boundary of ancient literate cultures – the various Chinese, Persian, and Greco-Roman (Byzantine) polities of antiquity and their more modern successors. Existing to the north and northeast of this dynamic boundary – roughly between the Carpathians and the Pacific, the White and Black Seas – was a highly heterogeneous social space that could be imagined as a whole only because it was not a part of any other “whole,” a mental map sustained by a universal culture through Chinese or Byzantine treatises. Over the course of many centuries, the diverse autonomous communities populating that vast territory gradually intertwined in the process of self-organization through conflict and cooperation. It is this space that has constituted the object of the international scholarly field that has traditionally and quite arbitrarily been called Russian studies. It is true that over the past three centuries this vast space has been almost entirely controlled by a single polity: first, the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union. But this does not make it “Russian” in any way, particularly when it comes to the period before the eighteenth century or if one dissociates it from the homogenizing language of diplomats speaking on behalf of a singular “great power.” In our international field, many scholars have not studied ethnically or politically defined Russians at all or focused on Russians’ determined opponents and sworn enemies. So the Russian field appears to be a formal designation missing substantive reflection on what is in the name. Consensus is still lacking on what to call this epistemic frame, except for “the post-Soviet space” or “Northern Eurasia.” Other than serving as an easily recognizable brand for those outside of the field, it does not have to be called “Russian” at all, particularly because the word has other very different connotations.
The second meaning of “Russian” is conveyed in the Russian language as rossiiskii, which means belonging to a polity called Russia: the Moscow tsardom, the Russian Empire, or the modern Russian Federation. Unfortunately, most languages, including the otherwise kindred Ukrainian language, make no distinction between this political term and the designation of an ethnocultural group of russkie. This third meaning of “Russian” is very ambiguous. Ethnocultural Russianness can be defined primarily by culture and language, which was quite variegated until the mid-twentieth century, or Orthodox Christianity, which is professed by many other ethnic groups. Conversely, sometimes Slavic paganism and pan-Slavism have been prioritized as markers of Russianness, whereas at other times Russianness has been based on racial traits.^[1] This confusion notwithstanding, it is understandable that in this third meaning, the term “Russians” implies the equivalent of French people or Germans as “ethnicities” (although these once normative concepts are also highly problematic today). Obviously, political Russians can be non-Russians in this ethnic sense and can even be rabidly anti-Russian. Yet in most languages and now increasingly in Russian public discourse as well, the two very different notions are conflated into a single term. Their linguistic differentiation is long overdue, so we will refer to ethnic Russianness as “Rusian” (with a single “s”), and reserve the old term “Russian” (with a double “s”) for the second, political meaning.^[2]
To sum up, we have no universally accepted term for the post-Soviet space that, as a site of history, had long preceded anything Soviet or even Russian. Tentatively, we can call it Northern Eurasia, with the important caveat that this is not a geographical concept.^[3] It is an epistemic frame that is required to accurately tell the story of the Tatars and Jews, Ukrainians and Poles, Lithuanians and Belarusians – in the Middle Ages or today – as part of global history and using the approaches of transnational and new imperial histories. Next, we have Russianness as denoting one’s belonging to the Russian polity that has never been a nation-state either juridically or in practice. Finally, there are contested visions of Rusians as a homogeneous ethnocultural group. These are the three different planes of reality and its analysis that have habitually been associated with Russianness.
So, what exactly is the target of the de-Russification and decolonization that, in the wake of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, have been almost unanimously hailed as the political, moral, and academic priority? Systematic terminological conflation and the prevalence of political urgency over analytical reflection make all three meanings of “Russian” equally susceptible to being canceled, with varying, often unintended implications.
Rusian nationalism is the driving force of Putin’s war against Ukraine and the main explanation for its purposefully genocidal character: unlike the imperial or Soviet policies of the past, in Putin’s regime, it is no longer sufficient to make Ukrainians politically loyal – they are required to stop being culturally Ukrainian and become thoroughly Rusian. The ideology of the “Russian World” is essentially that of a Rusian world – a dream of ethnocultural and even racial purity. For any post-Soviet society this is a clear and present danger that nevertheless provokes the wrong responses, given that Rusian nationalism is not so easy to localize at present, and its prehistory is one of systematic confusion.^[4] People identified as ethnic Rusians live in all post-Soviet countries and, as a rule, are loyal citizens. Since 2014, Ukrainian Rusians have proved their militant support for the Ukrainian cause and hostility to Putin’s regime and even to the Russian Federation itself. Fighting Putin’s “Rusian world” by censoring Rusian-language education and culture in post-Soviet countries – nation-states, where ethnic Rusians enjoy minority status – is just a typical nationalist policy of suppressing minorities. Having no effect on the Russian Federation, this policy mirrors hegemonic Rusian nationalism in Russia, but it is administered on behalf of local hegemonic nationalisms.
Historically, Rusians have always lived in anational or international polities, so Rusian nationalists routinely complain that there was no Rusian national republic in the Soviet Union of territorial nations.^[5] The nominally “Russian” Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) itself was a composite polity consisting of smaller territorial nations.^[6] This did not prevent the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union from bestowing on Rusians the status of a Herrenvolk. During its last decades, the Russian Empire had increasingly become a nationalizing empire that strove to differentiate its subjects as first-tier “true Rusians” and second-tier minorities.^[7] In the USSR, especially from the 1940s on, Rusians were prioritized as political cadres.^[8] But then again, there was more than one understanding of who Rusians were, and they were systematically confused with Russians. Thus, the historical ressentiment of Rusian nationalists, who are dreaming of a state of their own, as well as of their opponents, who are seeking revenge for past abuses, is both justified and misaddressed. Ethnically Rusian serfs in the nineteenth century or kolkhozniks under Stalin were not exactly the master race and the political regime’s beneficiaries as depicted by critics of Rusian oppression. But they, along with people of other ethnicities, were the ones massacring the highlanders in the Northern Caucasus and the Lithuanian and Ukrainian guerrillas in their capacity as imperial or Soviet soldiers. While historical relations of domination, colonialism, and exploitation are indisputably real, their direct identification with particular ethnic groups is a major epistemological fallacy. Blaming Rusians as a modern ethnic group for the injustices of the past, particularly during the pre-national period, might be gratifying psychologically, but analytically it is just an example of racial profiling. In practical terms, combating the true evil of Rusian nationalism by taking it out on ethnic Rusians can be regarded as an effective measure only if one believes that the preventive suppression of Polishness and Ukrainianness in late imperial Russia had reached its goal of neutralizing the Polish and Ukrainian national movements. Spoiler alert: it did not.
Next, there are Russians and Russia as shorthands for a polity that has been controlling most of Northern Eurasia’s territories and cultures over the past three centuries. The self-proclaimed legal and historical heir to the Russian Empire and the USSR, the Russian Federation (RF) has come to embody the imperialist component of their legacy. As the country that unleashed a brutal war against Ukraine, the Russian Federation should be dismantled as a political organization, the same way that the Third Reich was in the wake of its military defeat – not just because Putin’s regime has too deeply permeated the legal and socioeconomic framework of the state but also because of this state’s effective defederalization and nationalization. A political restructuring and reimagining of the country may or may not lead to the RF’s territorial dismemberment, and it is possible that any project seeking to frame such a vast sociocultural space as a single polity is utopian in principle and hence unsustainable. But the discourse of Russia as always having been an evil empire is even more misleading than explaining the Third Reich and national socialism by the “gloomy Teutonic genius” and German history. For one thing, every post-Soviet country is post-Russian in this sense. It is logically impossible for the same “historical legacy” to explain authoritarianism and nationalism in the RF and viable democracy and practical, if not conceptual, transnationalism in Ukraine.
Proponents of Ukraine’s existential difference from Russia have evoked the World Values Survey (WVS) project, initiated by the late Ronald Inglehart, as proof of the two countries’ diverse value orientations. According to Yaroslav Hrytsak:

“The survey’s research showed that Russia had been stuck in the so-called survival values during 2000–2010, while in Ukraine there had been a noticeable shift toward “self-expression values.” Ronald Inglehart, architect of the WVS, has formulated an important thesis based on the data analysis of his project: in societies leaning toward self-expression, authoritarian power fares much worse.”^[9]

This might be so, but the most recent “Inglehart–Welzel cultural map 2022” plots Russia as absolutely the closest to Ukraine in terms of the configuration of values in society, much closer than other countries included in the study. On the scale of “traditional vs. secular values” Ukraine is slightly ahead of Russia in the direction of secular values, although not as much as Mongolia; on the scale of “survival vs. self-expression values” Ukraine is skewed a bit more toward “self-expression,” although incomparably so to Belarus.^[10] Does this make Ukraine much more prone to authoritarianism than Belarus? Even more important for the argument of Russia’s historical legacy were the WVS data for the first post-1991 decade: the closer to the “totalitarian past,” the more pronounced its formative influence on society should be. According to the 2005 classical monograph by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, throughout the 1990s, the Russian Federation was the closest to Ukraine of the eighty societies included in the WVS database. By the twenty-first century, Ukraine was more supportive of traditional values and less economically modernized than Russia but also leaned more toward self-expression.^[11] As in 2022, the “Cultural map of the world around 2000” presented Russia as the closest to Ukraine of all other countries: the distance in values between them was about one-third of that between Ireland and Northern Ireland. At that time, however, Russia was less “traditional” and more “secular” in its values than Ukraine.^[12] Based on the observed trends, the authors “predicted locations on [the] cultural map of societies that may be surveyed in 2005–6.”^[13] On this hypothetical map, while Russia and Ukraine remained the closest societies overall, Russia occupied the same position relative to Ukraine that Ukraine occupies relative to Russia on the actual 2022 map (as more secular and self-expressive in its values). In 2000, Ukraine had the same index of civil society development and the same index of gender empowerment as Russia, and on these counts there was a higher degree of self-expression values in Russia than in Ukraine.^[14]
What do these numbers tell us about the two societies? Nothing, unless one subscribes to a theory that the variety of human values can be aggregated to a few stable indexes representative of the entire society and that there is a direct correlation between these indexes and politics. This skeptical epistemological position also negates a belief in path dependency and the historical preprogramming of the future on the scale of a whole country. For those who embrace Inglehart’s methodology, these numbers reveal everything: predictably, the two post-Soviet countries have shared many core values, and more “traditionalist” and less postindustrial Ukrainian society (according to the WVS) could be expected to become as authoritarian as its Russian counterpart, especially if it discovered substantial deposits of oil and natural gas that could be easily monopolized for export purposes. In this regard, a historical argument can explain certain characteristics of post-Soviet societies by their common past. History can even substantiate the high probability of their truly fratricidal wars – for example, along the lines of the Freudian theory of the narcissism of minor differences, which has been systematically applied to the Yugoslav civil wars.^[15] However, this argument cannot substantiate the systemic divergence of two polities that share the same past as objectively predetermined. According to path dependency theory, a common past should lead to a similar condition in the future. One way or another, it is analytically unsustainable to single out the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Empire as a self-sufficient historical explanation for Putin’s regime, the war, and Russian atrocities.
Finally, besides the Rusian people and the country of Russia, the adjective “Russian” labels the broad mental map of Northern Eurasia as a framework for our research field. The accusation of Russocentrism and calls for this field’s decolonization are well-justified. Generations of scholars have preferred to work solely with Russian-language sources in the libraries and archives of Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg. They have done this for various reasons – not just out of convenience and contempt for other lands and cultures or because of limitations on archival access during the Cold War years. The dominance of national history as the mode of conceptualizing and narrating the past has been more important. As a result, the mental frame of Northern Eurasia – “Russian history” – has too often been reduced to Russia’s history, and the slippage of Russian–Rusian has made many studies selectively focus on Rusians. The mode of Rusian or Russian national history has affected scholars’ positionality in such a way that political oppression and cultural hegemony have tended to remain in their blind spots. In this sense, a “de-Rusification” of Russian studies is long overdue.
Typical of decolonization movements, protests against Russocentric national history tend to promote other national histories as the alternative. As Botakoz Kassymbekova has put it, “National histories as platforms for self-reflective history writing present an opportunity for the development of the field in a more plural perspective.”^[16] Whether the hegemonic mode of writing the history of a country by local scholars can be anything other than national history is a topic for a separate discussion. Here we focus on the global field of Russian studies, and this is what its purposeful and systematic “plurinationalization” entails: strategic compartmentalization into distinct area studies, inevitably leading to demise and eventual collapse in the course of a decade or so.
Ab Imperio began using the term “the field formerly known as ‘Russian studies’” long ago: our field should be neither Rusian nor Russian in the literal sense.^[17] The outdated name, however, should not obscure the unique character of “Russian studies” as one of the first if not the first systematically transnational discipline. From its inception in the early twentieth century and particularly after World War II, the conceptual and institutional reality of the field made a dialogue between national histories (“conversations” in Kassymbekova’s terms) possible and necessary. Professors of “Russian history” can specialize on Kazakhstan or the Caucasus, Jews or Tatars. Moreover, the professional requirements of the field necessitate a discussion of particular national or territorial cases in a broader historical context and comparative perspective. Splitting the synthetic field formerly known as Russian studies into self-sufficient national histories will not liberate it, it will merely consolidate the locus of epistemic hegemony into a single national perspective. In terms of the politics of knowledge, bringing the hegemonic discourse to the level of national history – now autonomous and all-embracing – does not diminish its coercive potential. On the contrary, a fully legitimized nation-centered framework means that this new hegemony can no longer be challenged by any alternative visions from within a particular national history – unlike the situation in “Russian studies,” where criticism and revisionism of the master narrative are standard.
Conceptually, the triumph of national history means a retreat to the 1950s – that is, before the anthropological and linguistic turns and poststructuralist critique that, inter alia, exposed “nation” as a modern narrative and only one very recent form of groupness. Institutionalizing nation as the cornerstone of any historical inquiry within a national history canon practically discards methodological intersectionality, analytical constructivism, and the emancipatory potential of the subaltern studies approach. If nation is deemed a natural and necessary frame for conceptualizing reality, its critical deconstruction can be at best performative, if allowed at all.
Organizationally, “nationalization” of our global field will mean its differentiation into a dozen isolated area studies. Proponents of this move believe that a secession will automatically secure a proportional share of the former common resources for “their” national history – 10, 15, or even 20 percent of all the “Russianist” jobs, grants, and courses. The fatal effect of this misconception can be most vividly illustrated on the example of the American segment of our profession that has become its true center and locomotive precisely because it was not about Russia’s national history but about a truly global and uniquely transnational discipline. This is why hundreds of American colleges used to employ two “Russian” historians, while some schools had many more. In student-driven American higher education, it all eventually comes down to a professor’s ability to offer a variety of courses that can secure high student enrollment and meet the necessary teaching load requirement. “Russian history” has met these criteria and has been declining in recent years exactly for its inability to distance from Russia’s national history and Rusians and to offer students a more diversified and inclusive narrative. The disproportionate popularity of the Soviet period among college students and graduate students just joining the profession can be at least partially attributed to its nominal transnationality or even anationality. In the case of differentiation along national lines, no number of area studies will be able to fill the shoes of the former Russian studies, because even narrowly defined Russia’s history cannot generate the rate of steady student enrollment year after year required to sustain at least one professorship in most universities. The liquidation of the once mainstream field will be swift, particularly given increasing pressure on the humanities from neoliberal university administrations everywhere.
While variously understood Russianness bears its share of responsibility for many evils that we observe today, it is not the ethnic group, the country, or the academic field per se at the root of the problem. Likewise, Nazism was not a projection of some essential Germanness. Insisting that Nazism was exclusively a German sin made Russian society so vulnerable to its domestic version of national imperialism as an iteration of Nazism. A nation-centered episteme in general and national history in particular are the most inefficient tools for critical deconstruction and the prevention of threats like Russia’s current political condition – a direct result of Russia’s nationalization into a Rusian nation-state. Therefore, the key to success is to strengthen metanational or transnational arrangements in the Russian Federation and in the field formerly known as Russian studies. For analytical and practical purposes, our field needs to decolonize by obliterating the very structure of a privileged group’s hegemony altogether, rather than by replacing one beneficiary of privileged treatment with another whose monopoly will be legitimized by the specificity of a national history or area studies.

* * *
A systematic disentanglement of social relations from groupness lies at the core of the new imperial history approach. This does not mean that a group’s history and institutional inertia do not affect the present. History matters, particularly as a source of narratives and repertoires of practices that become readily available today. Focusing on one of the most important historical factors, Ab Imperio’s 2022 annual theme invited contributors and readers to contemplate “The Rise and Fall of the State as an Institution and an Analytical Concept” – a problem that has become especially pertinent with the outbreak of the war. It has become all too obvious in recent years that the state as an institution cannot exist without broad social belief in the very concept of the state. The proliferation of libertarian utopias and conspiracy theories about the “deep state” immediately translates into the paralysis of state institutions. As it turns out, these institutions are not mysteriously self-sufficient autonomous entities but merely projections of a popular consensus about their reality – or a lack thereof. The executive branch and the judiciary, the army and the police gain “stately appearance” only when citizens are educated to recognize them as the anonymous state machine, and state officials are trained to “see like a state” (as James C. Scott disapprovingly formulated it).^[18] Otherwise, the government merely becomes a corporation of powerholders exploiting public offices in their personal interests. Originally developed by political philosophers, the concept of the state had to be popularized by all forms of cultural production in order to establish itself society-wide and make the state possible as an institution. Of major historical importance, this cultural mechanism is the focus of the current issue of the journal (2/2022): “Imagining Leviathan in Myth, Religious Ideas, Literature, and Ideology.”
In the “History” section, Irina Paert, Catherine Gibson, and Liliya Berezhnaya guest-edit a thematic bloc on “Confession, Loyalty, and National Indifference.” It includes five articles that tackle the problem of the emerging collective identity through the entanglement of complementing and conflicting forms of groupness: religious, political, and ethnic. Thomas Marsden registers the rise of Rusian national or even proto-nationalist self-awareness on the material of Old Believers’ appeals to the authorities in 1825–1894. James M. White examines the peculiar case of the isle of Vormsi off the western coast of modern Estonia: its Protestant Swedish-speaking inhabitants first opted to convert to Russian Orthodoxy in the 1880s, only to switch back to Lutheranism after 1905. The islanders and the team of local Russo-Estonian Orthodox clergy viewed the conversion as a demonstration of political loyalty to the Russian Empire, while the notions of Rusian, Swedish, and Estonian ethnic groupness also played their role in the events, albeit a role of secondary importance. Darius Staliūnas revisits the “Kražiai Massacre” of 1893 that was provoked by organized communal opposition to the attempts of the imperial authorities to close one of the local catholic churches. Presented by the Russian imperial regime as an example of Catholic fanaticism and hailed by Lithuanian historiography as a feat of national resistance, the conflict in Kražiai is interpreted by Staliūnas as a result of the Russian imperial regime’s breach of the unwritten social contract.
Staliūnas’s story can be seen as the first act of the “imperial revolution” as conceptualized by Jeremy Adelman and others: contrary to mainstream historical narratives, imperial revolutions are provoked not by nationalists and separatists but by ruling regimes that radically alter the established “constitutions” of their composite polities. Ethnoconfessional and social groups that find themselves alienated by a new political arrangement attempt to restore the status quo – essentially, the old imperial order. The ensuing political crisis topples the imperial order altogether and can lead to the empire’s dissolution – all because the imperial regime has initiated the dismantlement of the existing imperial formation.^[19]
The articles by Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy and James A. Kapaló tackle interwar Romania, with a special focus on the former Russian province of Bessarabia that became Romanian in 1918. The modernizing and nationalizing Romanian nation-state considered the Moldavian majority of the region’s population to be ethnically Romanian and was taken aback by massive religious dissent among the local Orthodox population. The eschatological Inochentists (Kapaló) and Old Calendarists (Cindrea-Nagy) did not openly challenge their ethnic Romanianness but opposed the official Romanian Orthodox Church in the name of their pre-1918 religious ways. The Orthodox Church classified these dissidents as “sectarians,” while the Romanian state accused them of politically subversive, anti-national activity and subjected them to harsh repressions. Even at the height of World War II, which was framed by modern ideologies and the “scientific” concept of race, the Romanian police forces continued to sack whole villages on suspicion that their inhabitants did not hold fully Orthodox Christian beliefs.
In their introduction to the forum, Paert, Gibson, and Berezhnaya conceptually frame these studies in terms of national indifference and confessional ambiguity, underscoring the role of religious collective identities in forging other forms of groupness – ethnocultural and political. In the context of this thematic issue of AI, the forum also presents a remarkable opportunity to revisit the concept of a confessional state that Robert Crews introduced to “Russian studies” almost twenty years ago.^[20] Crews argued the centrality of religious solidarity for various forms of political mobilization in late imperial Russia, providing “a crucial – but long overlooked – source of cohesion for a diverse polity confronted by divisive secular ideologies.”^[21] Since Catherine II, the imperial “constitution” prescribed that the Russian imperial state govern “as patron and guardian of the faith … committed to backing the construction and implementation of ‘orthodoxy’ within each recognized religious community.”^[22]

“While nationalist teleologies have tended to reduce imperial politics to a struggle between empire and the “nation,” a closer examination of religious politics reveals a realm of imperial consciousness and state practice obscured by national frameworks and an anachronistic focus on “minorities.” … Where non-Russians may have on occasion resisted tsarist taxation and conscription, the struggle for true religion established common interests between pious activists and the police. The faithful remade their communities by advancing new visions of religious orthodoxy and by deepening their integration in, and subordination to, the expanding institutions of the empire.” ^[23]

In turn, the emerging modern state everywhere in Europe sought to engage religious communities as staples of uniformed and closely policed moral order. Religious hierarchies reaching to the lowest parish level also “facilitated the expansion of centralizing regimes into local life and their colonization of the disciplinary functions of religious institutions.”^[24]

“Religious institutions and personnel performed essential tasks on behalf of the local organs of government, administering justice, welfare, and education. In regulating the family and moral lives of the tsars’ subjects and linking religious rituals to imperial themes, state-sponsored clerics constructed the moral order that underpinned the empire. A supraconfessional elite cultivated an imperial consciousness that cannot be reduced to “some other history,” that of the “nation” or even of “ethnicity.” Imperial confessional identities were reshaped through the pursuit of religious goals within the framework of tsarist laws and institutions. By assuming the role of a confessional state and deploying police power on behalf of orthodoxy in each of the tolerated faiths, the regime deepened its regulatory and disciplinary reach into non-Orthodox communities. Religious controversies molded the local contours of the state, and pious activists succeeded in building the state from below.”^[25]

Crews has not conceptualized the confessional state beyond an important observation concerning the pragmatic alliance between the imperial administration and the religious leaders: the government helped enforce a religious orthodoxy and thus redefined communal boundaries, while the religious communities were increasingly functioning as citizens – the political base of imperial and, later, national projects. The potential of his application of the concept is even more significant.
First, contrary to the general historiographical tendency to locate a confessional state in the “old regime” or even in the early modern period,^[26] Crews finds confessional states’ rationale in a modern society. Vestiges of confessional states in the twentieth century, such as the keeping of vital records by parish priests or mullahs rather than civil magistrates, have been broadly viewed as indicators of the sociopolitical system’s underdevelopment. And certainly, the identification of religious heterodoxy with political subversion and an anti-national position in interwar Romania, like the appointment in 1938 of Patriarch Miron as the country’s prime minister, attest to Romania’s complete reliance on the confessional state model far into the 1940s. However, Crews’s approach suggests that the underdevelopment of a modern state should not be equated with archaism. Essentially, he argues that in the imperial situation of multidimensional diversity, which no modern nondemocratic nation-state could accommodate in principle, religious idiom was the best available “source of cohesion for a diverse polity confronted by divisive secular ideologies.”^[27]
Second, Crews underscores the role of religion in forging a moral community of civic belonging – of citizens and members of a nation. In a confessional state, one’s religion was a major factor predetermining their legal status: “Tsarist law never permitted its subjects to renounce confessional allegiance and declare themselves ‘without a confession’ [konfessionslos]. Obligatory enrollment in a religious community brought nearly all subjects under the bureaucratic supervision of an official hierarchy.”^[28] In the “imperial rights regime” (Jane Burbank),^[29] this practically meant the foundation of citizenship as legally bound mutual obligations of the state and its subjects:

“Under Nicholas I, new legal codes declared Orthodox Christianity the “preeminent and predominant” faith of the empire but also systematically backed other religions on the premise that “all peoples inhabiting Russia praise Almighty God in different languages according to the creed and confession of their forefathers, blessing the reign of the Russian Monarchs, and praying to the Creator of the universe for the increase of the prosperity and strengthening of the power of the Empire.” ”^[30]

Therefore, Kražiai residents had the right to perceive the government’s intention to close their church and, eventually, the brutal attack on the church defenders as a brazen violation of the social contract and the very foundations of the Russian imperial regime. It was they who were the defenders of the legal order and good citizens, while the nationalizing regime of Alexander III acted as the main subversive anti-imperial force. Likewise, the inhabitants of Vormsi demonstrated their active political loyalty by embracing the “tsar’s faith,” and felt free to return to Lutheranism after the confessional state had been largely dismantled in 1905. The Old Believers studied by Marsden were actively mobilized into a civic form of modern groupness, but less as a Russian imperial form than a Rusian national one. The Romanian “sectarians” did the same during the interwar period. They also revealed the adherence to the preexisting social contract and loyalty as imperial citizens did by rallying behind their religious ways: the Julian calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church and Inochentism as a religious movement practically tolerated by the Russian imperial regime. In doing so, they also articulated their distinctive sense of groupness – regional, as Bessarabians, and national, as Moldavians. For this, they did not have to embrace the elite discourse of nation: mostly illiterate peasants socialized into the confessional state, they used the idiom of religion for national or political mobilization the same way that the protagonists discussed in other articles in this forum did: Russian Old Believers, Lutherans of Vormsi island, or Catholics in Kražiai.^[31]
The forum vividly demonstrates the productivity of the confessional state model and the need for its further revision. This concept helps register active political mobilization into a modern form of groupness, imperial or national, behind the façades of movements that were seemingly purely religious in character. Even more importantly, it exposes the locus of practical citizenship in the political regimes that formally recognized no citizens’ rights, such as the Russian Empire, or recognized them in theory very differently, such as interwar Romania. The elements of a confessional state in the modern-day Russian Federation – which officially backs “orthodoxies” in legally recognized religions and criminally prosecutes Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Pussy Riot band, and obscure bloggers for “insulting the feelings of believers” – confirms the relevance of this political arrangement even today. Far from being merely a vestige of the past, a confessional state can be reinvented even in a fully postmodern and postsecular society – as long as there is no better “source of cohesion for a diverse polity confronted by divisive secular ideologies” (Crews). It is the absence of a modern political form capable of efficiently accommodating the imperial situation of unsystematic diversity that presents the real, formidable problem, rather than the outdated form of a confessional state itself.
The practical task of identifying a new “source of cohesion” in post-Soviet Russia has been failed by the regime, obsessed with “spiritual bonds,”^[32] but also largely ignored by the anti-Putin opposition. Coined in the mid-2010s, the slogan “beautiful Russia of the future” was used by Alexei Navalny as the battle cry of his 2018 presidential campaign.^[33] His presidential platform offered the most elaborated vision of that Russia of tomorrow compared to documents produced by other Putin opponents.^[34] Still, it remained too declarative. It was not followed by broad, pointed public discussion and it thus did not offer a clear road map to a new future that common Russians could easily embrace.^[35] Very soon, “beautiful Russia of the future” was transformed into a meme due to its vagueness, and it was used ironically even by its adherents. Seeking a source of societal cohesion without allowing true popular representation, Putin’s regime moved from the scenario of a confessional state to a much more radical program of nationalist imperialism – essentially, a form of Nazism. Mobilization without representation inevitably paves the way to a major war of aggression. Due to its territorial and cultural proximity, Ukraine happened to become the most convenient victim of Russia’s consolidation around nationalist imperialism. Only then – when the collapse of Putin’s regime and the Russian Federation as a polity became perceived as possible and even imminent – did a discussion about the country’s future acquire a truly practical character.
For this reason, the editors eagerly accepted for publication the English translation of a public debate, which was streamed online on June 26, 2022, between two leaders of the anti-Putin liberal opposition, Garry Kasparov and Leonid Volkov. Published in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section, this text is both a historical source and an attempt at political analysis and prognosis. Sergei Erofeev translated the exchange and wrote a brief introduction. Erofeev proposes characterizing Putin’s power with the Russian equivalent for the term: vlast. Regardless of whether this neologism is accepted by social scientists, its use underscores the problematic nature of the Russian state in the 2020s. Using many modern techniques of governance, Russia’s administration is very far from the normative model of a modern state as an anonymous machine of governance by universally applicable algorithms (laws) and situated entirely within the public domain. The Russian state presents an amalgamation of private interests with public resources, which encouraged Erofeev to give it a special name.
For Ab Imperio, two themes of the debate seem particularly relevant: the use of historical arguments by the participants and their discussion of collective responsibility. Kasparov’s politics of historical analogy is based on equating Putin’s Russia with the Third Reich. He draws parallels with Hitler’s coming to power and enjoyment of broad popular support, starting World War II, and making the Nuremberg trials and systemic de-Nazification necessary after Germany’s military defeat. Accordingly, he believes that “we can and should talk about the collective responsibility of all Russian citizens” the same way that all Germans allegedly bore collective responsibility for the Nazi regime.^[36] Volkov prefers to compare the contemporary political situation to the end of World War I when, as a result of growing antiwar sentiments, “the soldiers laid down their arms and engaged in fraternization. This time, too, soldiers’ morale can be affected because they are part of the Russian society.”^[37] This historical parallel correlates with Volkov’s vision of personal responsibility for Putin’s regime and the war as a broad gradient:

“Guilt and responsibility are always individual. Vladimir Putin’s degree of guilt in this case is incomparable to that of any other Russian citizen and any person in the world. … Then, of course, come the many people serving his propagandistic, military, repressive, electoral machine and acting as its cogs. Their responsibility is an order of magnitude less. As for ordinary people, it is several orders of magnitude less.”^[38]

The concept of collective responsibility is conditioned by individual moral judgment and has analytical value only as an indicator of one’s social imagination and a way to conceive of groupness. Kasparov’s approach is clearly nation-centered: he believes that every resident of the Russian Federation is no different from any other Russian in terms of their political rights, subjectivity, and hence responsibility (“undoubtedly, every Russian citizen is responsible, just like any German, including Marlene Dietrich and Thomas Mann, who left after 1933, feeling unconditional responsibility”).^[39] Russians are those who were born in Russia, and they are existentially different from equally homogeneous Germans or Ukrainians.
To the contrary, Volkov perceives groupness as a dynamic category – contextual and situational: “What does ‘in Russia’ mean in the twenty-first century? The internet makes people’s physical location much less significant.”^[40] Regardless of the accuracy of the invoked historical parallels, Volkov describes society, whether in 1917 or 2022, as one in an imperial situation. Political borders play little role in conditioning the bonds of social solidarity that can unite soldiers of belligerent armies but fail to merge Russian opposition and Russian political elites into the same political nation. This is why he groups Russian citizens together with Ukrainians as victims of Russia’s political regime: “For twenty-two years Vladimir Putin has built the regime that would make aggression against Ukraine possible. He has been forging it, first of all, by violating the rights of the Russian (rossiiskii) people, repressing them, and making them obedient, by wiping out any possibility of public disobedience.”^[41]
Kasparov reads this statement as an attempt to undermine ordinary Russians’ responsibility for the war, which is certainly the case from a moral point of view and in a nationalizing perspective. In this perspective, regardless of the political regime, in 1933, 1945, or 2022, society is organized according to the principle ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer! To sound less ambiguous, Volkov’s model needs to be further elaborated to explicate its implicit potential for an alternative social imagination. There are Russians who have the feeling of being compatriots of Ukrainians or Americans, just as there are Russians who feel solidarity with Putinism – but so do quite a few Ukrainian citizens branded as traitors, along with German Putinverstehers or American Trumpists. Before the twentieth century with its absolute cult of nation-state, people had multiple loyalties that were not necessarily confined to their country of residence. In the increasingly postnational world of the twenty-first century, elaborating a model of the postnational state becomes an urgent priority and a major intellectual and political challenge. The Kasparov–Volkov debate reveals both the reality of this political and conceptual bifurcation between the national and postnational and a very nascent stage of conceptualizing new political forms.
Quite predictably, historical allusions feature prominently in the two Russian public figures’ debate but play no substantial role in forging their arguments. History is merely a language used to frame and communicate propositions, often mutually contradictory ones. Regardless of whether World War I ended because of the social unrest engendered by the war of total mobilization or because of the arrival of fresh American troops, Russian aggression against Ukraine needs to be stopped today by any available means. Whether Hitler came to power in 1933 winning just 44 percent of the votes or enjoying overwhelming German support can be discussed, but Putin’s regime has had a political dynamic of its own. As Jan Kubik put it two decades ago, “Cultural legacies are ‘transmitted,’ not ‘received from,’” and the future is decided by cultural entrepreneurs “today,” not “yesterday.”^[42] It is not the legacy of Ukrainian anti-Jewish pogroms or Russian imperial domination that shapes the present of Ukraine and the Russian Federation but their modern societies’ attitude to this problematic legacy. What matters is not history itself, but our assessment of the past as a way of shaping the future.
Responding to this key civic duty of the history profession, Ab Imperio continues the conversation that began in the 1/2022 issue about the role of “Russian studies” in enabling Russia’s war against Ukraine and the program for reforming our field. The “Methodology and Theory” section features the forum “Russia’s War on Ukraine and Nineteenth-Century ‘Russian Studies’” put together by Anne Lounsbery. Along with Olga Maiorova, Taras Koznarsky, and Yuliya Ilchuk she tackles the problem of recovering Ukrainian literature in the Russian classical literary canon of the nineteenth century, and Susan Smith-Peter draws attention to the predicament of historians studying the period without access to Russian archives and libraries. The forum reveals the same dualism of social imagination as the Kasparov–Volkov debate: the undifferentiated reference to Russianness allows Russian literature to be presented intermittently as national Rusian – a counterpart of national Ukrainian – or as universal and hybrid (and internally conflicting) Russian, which included Ukrainian as an important component. Likewise, Ukrainian culture is understood either as primordial and homogeneous or dynamic and hybrid.
This returns us to the beginning of this essay: the institutional future of our profession depends directly on the outcome of the analytical revision of its conceptual foundations. A nationalizing approach that squarely assigns a historical function to a stable group inevitably leads to the dissolution of the field into individual area studies. Russian history will be about a Leviathan with distinctively Rusian traits, the rest will be histories of stateless nationalities suffering from “Russian” – in all possible senses – domination and resisting it. An alternative – postnational – approach will benefit from the uniquely transnational character of the field formerly known as Russian studies. Whether truly postcolonial, global, transnational, or new imperial, various versions of a postnational approach inevitably register the entangled character of history in broadly defined Northern Eurasia. Even the notorious Russian Leviathan appears as a hybrid creature, as much a modern bureaucratic fantasy about absolute Ordnung as an archaic confessional state.
National history and diaspora area studies all have a fixed object and vantage point that almost inevitably make it their primary social function to vindicate the present political interests of “their” nation at a given political moment: state borders, wars, or the political regime. Postnational history is about complex arguments and the variously carved out spatial or social configurations of its object. This systematic ambiguity and fluidity necessitate constant critical reevaluation of the established interpretations from all possible perspectives, which makes this approach rather impractical as a political instrument but intellectually innovative and open to conversation with various audiences. Ab Imperio is working in this latter paradigm.