In this issue of Ab Imperio (“The State of the Nation and Empire: Was There a Difference?”) the three articles published in the “History” section vividly outline the arc of the knowledge–power constellation’s transformation over the period of two centuries – from the 1750s to the 1940s. They show that the subject of knowledge production directly correlates with the political system and informs its character. It is not so much political institutions as such that neatly distinguish a nation-state from an empire and a monarchy, or a modern state from a premodern one, but the type of institutionalizing human agency as a conventional social identity.
Gulmira Sultangalieva and Ainura Suinova reconstruct the complex process of knowledge production about the Kazakh steppe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century and its nonlinear evolution. They identify several categories of “people in the know” who served as sources of information about the steppe society and Central Asian khanates for the Russian authorities. The complex vision of colonial knowledge production outlined in the article problematizes simple binaries between “local” and “metropole” knowledge or between imperial experts and colonial informants. Of people in the know, one type was employed by the regional administration in Orenburg. Military officers, civil officials, translators, and interpreters systematically collected geographical, economic, and political information, processed it, and submitted it to St. Petersburg. In their capacity as collectors and aggregators of information, they relied on the second category of knowledge producers – Tatar mullahs or scribes serving Kazakh sultans, as well as merchants crossing the steppe with caravans. Together, they formed networks of agents that systematically fulfilled information requests from the imperial officials. The third category of informants often did not even realize they were informants. Ordinary Kazakhs, such as caravan guides and camel drivers, were hired by Russian imperial or Kazakh officials for practical purposes, but the performance of their direct duties inevitably entailed shared knowledge about natural and social conditions on the ground.
Interacting with each other, these three categories of information accumulators and processors generated the body of “colonial knowledge” that eventually informed policy decisions in St. Petersburg. It is easier to reconstruct the phenomenon of colonial knowledge in its complexity than to differentiate it into “imperial” and “colonial” segments. The Orenburg administration was brimming with Kazakhs who made successful careers and reached senior positions – up to the equivalent of an army colonel in an office headed by a general. This did not make them part of the imperial metropole, but it also did not qualify them as “colonials.” The Orenburg regional administration was a department of the imperial government, yet its individual employees and the office as such had a distinctive identification with variously understood regional interests. Subordinated to St. Petersburg, the Orenburg administration controlled the information fed to the central government, indirectly manipulating its decisions. In turn, local Kazakh agent–informants provided their patrons in Orenburg with information interpreted in such a way as to serve their private or clan interests.
The rise of the system of colonial knowledge coincided with the finalization of Russia’s imperial formation under Catherine II. The subject of this knowledge was multifaceted or hybrid: both imperial and colonial, Rusian and Kazakh. Characteristically, when the new Orenburg governor-general, Vasily Perovsky, attempted to streamline this ambiguity in the 1830s along the formal power–knowledge nexus, he failed miserably. He changed the established practice of sending Kazakh employees of the Orenburg administration with reconnaissance missions to the steppe and Central Asian khanates. Instead, he dispatched officers transferred from European Russia, including the Chambéry-born orientalist Jean-Jacques Pierre Desmaisons (aka Petr Demezon). Not even a Russian subject at the time, Desmaisons traveled to Bukhara posing as a Tatar mullah named Jaffar. Apparently, Perovsky believed that the colonial authorities could rely only on the knowledge produced by members of the metropole society. He also famously disregarded the warning of Kazakh guides and camel drivers (the third category of people in the know) against conducting a military expedition through the winter steppe. The result was the debacle of the 1839 Khivan campaign. As it turned out, the nationalizing state and expert identity politics undermined the efficiency of knowledge, even colonial knowledge.
Louise McReynolds picks up the story where Sultangalieva and Suinova largely leave it: in the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia turned more and more into a nationalizing empire that increasingly attempted to purge any forms of hybridity and ambiguity in Perovsky’s style. A nation-centered social order is perfectly compatible with an imperial formation as long as an ideal of pure social forms can be sustained. Therefore, identity politics is key to a nation-centered social imagery and episteme and to their claims to modernity. Thus, much of the transformation into a nationalizing empire was about reconceptualizing its population as differentiated into rigid collective identities ranked along the power–knowledge nexus. This nexus was vividly coded in terms of symbolic geography as European or Western civilization opposing non-European backwardness, which, as McReynolds shows, made the white–black color contrast contextually visible and credible. Her focus is on Russia’s prehistorical archaeologists, whose modern Western scientific discourse introduced the symbolic color line into the nominally “white” imperial society. Various groups of Russian nationalists including Pan-Slavists preoccupied themselves with establishing a clear “biopolitical identity” by tracing genealogies of their group back to legendary prehistorical time. “Although linguistic connections offered a group identity, Slavs fell scattered across the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, in addition to having colonized each other, as in Russia’s annexation of Poland and absorption of Ukraine and Belarus. This failure to distinguish a ‘clear Slav’ underscored the political reality of differentiation.”^[1] The borrowed color-based racializing social imagery is deemed highly problematic when directly applied to contemporary Russian society, but it can be more easily projected onto the hypothetical prehistorical past with the help of archaeology, and onto Russia’s prospective future as a fully modern “European” polity and society. The spreading belief in pure sociobiological groups helped substantiate the speculative assertion of the “black” and “white” racial composition in the past as validating an ethnonational hierarchy in the present.
McReynolds shows how a fully color-less Russian society embraced the whole complex of racializing social discourses, including racism and the cult of Aryan origin. The model of knowledge production by experts guarding the purity of their social identity promoted the culture of identity politics. According to the majority of the country’s physical anthropologists, there were no “blacks” or even clearly color-marked “races” in Russia, and the Russian Empire was not formally a Rusian nation-state, but the prevailing mode of identity politics rendered late Russian imperial society profoundly nationalized. “Seeing like a state” (as per James Scott’s grammatically awkward catchy formula), some Russian experts at the turn of the twentieth century envisioned the Russian state as a nation-state, even though in terms of population politics it was not that different from the pre-Reform Russian state, which the hybrid “people in the know” used to serve and with which they were ready to identify.
Several decades later, racial expert-based identity politics culminated in Nazi Germany as the epitome of a nationalizing empire: an aggressive expansionist nation-state ruthlessly subjugating and eliminating “national minorities.” A key category of Nazi racial policy was “Artfremd,” which is usually translated cumbersomely as “alien-type” or “foreign to the species” and seems to be a direct borrowing from the Russian inorodets in its modern racialized meaning. According to Google Books Ngram and Collins Dictionary, the word was hardly ever used before 1900 and its popularity spiked between 1930 and 1947, culminating in 1936 (Google) or 1937 (Collins). Yuri Radchenko studies one case of Nazis operationalizing the language of race: the treatment of the Karaites as the Artfremd in occupied Ukraine, particularly in Kharkiv. As it turns out, even the most radical version of identity politics turned biopolitics did not change the operation of the German state machine as much as experts “seeing like a state” tried to convince the public at home and abroad. The Third Reich was the embodiment of a clockwork-like modern nation-state only in the eye of the nationalist beholder, while in practice allowing much discretion and special arrangements in carrying out state policies.
Historians tend to view the Holocaust as a model of modern genocide – the mass-scale and even mechanized destruction of people along ethnic lines. The older image of the Holocaust as a death factory analogous to an automated and impersonal Fordist conveyor belt was corrected when it was discovered that almost half of the Jews died in various ravines and forests on the territory of the occupied USSR, usually at the hands of their former neighbors. But even this correction acknowledging the decentralization of the Holocaust’s mechanism and multitude of perpetrators did not call into question the very binary division of the population into two categories: those doomed to destruction – first of all, Jews and Roma – and those who had the right and even the duty to seek out and kill these groups of pariahs. This binary opposition seems self-evident to the modern nation-centered social imagination and population politics in a nationalized society.
Radchenko describes a paradoxical situation when an ethnoconfessional group could enter into negotiations with the Nazis regarding its fate, while a political decision regarding this matter made at the highest level was not communicated down the line by the notorious “German bureaucracy.” This is exactly what happened to the small community of Karaites during the German occupation. Massacred in some locations along with Jews, in other places, or in other periods of time, they were granted the same rights as local gentile populations, so that Jews sought to procure certificates of their “Karaite” origins as a way to legalize themselves under the Nazis. Karaite community leaders composed memos for the Nazi authorities with references to studies by prerevolutionary Russian physical anthropologists who argued that Karaites were “racially different” from the Jews, as well as to the imperial practice of legal nondiscrimination against Karaites. It is amazing that these memos were accepted by the Nazis and spared Karaites’ lives, but equally surprising is the fact that the highest Nazi administrative organs followed the same logic in establishing the Karaites’ non-Jewish status – which still did not stop Einsatzgruppen from eliminating Karaites in multiple locations across Ukraine, including Kharkiv. The case of the Karaites offers a more nuanced view of modern population classification in the region and the limits to the effectiveness of a modern – Nazi – state. It also highlights the possible influence of Russian imperial identity politics on the formation of ultranationalist Nazi policies.
The anatomy of multidirectional transnational intellectual influences is vividly presented in the “Archive” section. Ivan Burmistrov has prepared and annotated extracts for publication from journals kept by the Russian navy officer Evgeny Ivanovich Alekseev (1843–1917). After several decades of active sea service, Vice Admiral Alekseev was appointed viceroy of the Russian Far East, and in this capacity he bears his share of responsibility for provoking the infamous Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The publication covers the period 1881–1898, when Alekseev commanded ships and whole squadrons, primarily in the Pacific, and traveled across the United States. Burmistrov argues that, despite the laconic and businesslike character of the journals, they register the process of “nationalizing” the imperial subject and the country, as well as the role of the navy in this process. Alekseev’s encounters with Russian peripheral regions and foreign countries were framed by the universalizing experience of commanding a modern, often foreign-built naval vessel. “People in the know” around Alekseev had truly cosmopolitan worldviews and fluently spoke several languages, but their military uniforms effectively helped compartmentalize a universal modern knowledge along national lines. Not unlike race scientists, Alekseev exchanged ideas and impressions with his foreign peers, but hegemonic identity politics mobilized the cosmopolitan and universalist ideas to buttress the national and even nationalist stance, not undermine it. Having spent several decades in the Far East and able to rely on his personal experience and contacts, Alekseev should have known better and steered away from a deadly confrontation with Japan. Yet, by choosing to “see like a nation-state,” he instead facilitated the outbreak of the war.
Opportunities taken and lost in the Far East are discussed in the “Historiography” section, which hosts a review forum dedicated to Mark Gamsa’s book Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Sergey Glebov, Laurie Manchester, and Kristin Stapleton comment on various aspects of this double biography of the city and one of its inhabitants: Roger von Budberg, a Russian medical doctor of Baltic German descent, who embraced much of Chinese culture or at least the Chinese way of life. As noted by Glebov, Gamsa’s study problematizes and destabilizes both Russianness and Chineseness, presenting them as composite and even internally conflicting entities. Yet, even being the epitome of a most tolerant intercultural encounter in a former no-man’s-land, Harbin remained a largely segregated colonial or frontier community. One of the pillars of segregation was racialized thinking (Glebov) and identity politics that did not envision a true middle-ground arrangement, despite the heterogeneity of the local Russian population and China’s formal status as “the republic of five races.” People “seeing like a nation-state” managed to impose, rather counterproductively, a nation-state model often coded in a local variation of the global racial language, even on the hybrid Harbin society.
In the modern, increasingly postnational world, grassroots identity claims and identity building can have a profound democratizing effect through destabilizing a single hegemonic form of groupness with its normatively nationalizing policy. However, itself the product of a nation-centered episteme, identity politics from below can empower marginalized groups only in the form of a nation-like groupness that insists on its conformity and homogeneity. As a result, the liberating aspect of identity politics from below goes hand in hand with its role in consolidating and enforcing the hegemonic discourse of homogeneous nation-like groupness in the actual context of a transnational economy and multicultural society. Just as Nazi Germany took modern racialized identity politics to its limit, the modern-day Russian Federation demonstrates a desperate attempt to force the diverse and politically demobilized population onto the procrustean bed of a rigidly outlined ethnoconfessional Rusian national identity. In his essay published in the “Newest Mythologies” section, Riccardo Nicolosi argues that Putin’s regime constructs normative Russianness by cultivating the paranoia, resentment, and reenactment of a mythologized past. Based on a common emotional regime and a politically controlled historical narrative, this identity discourse is fundamentally irrational and hence not falsifiable. Arbitrarily constructed tradition and values bear identity-forming significance and prompt a war on everyone who fails to comply with the normative identity – both inside and outside the country.
Identity politics is the key link connecting the politics of knowledge with state politics. The construction of rigid, hierarchically arranged group identities in the past – as remote as prehistorical time – directly translates into the imposition of a nation-centered social order in the present and nationalist policies of segregation and discrimination. With this course firmly embraced by the pro-Putin part of Russian society, the significance of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s aggression goes beyond military effort and the ideological countering of “Rusian World” mythology. The politics of knowledge and the positionality of Ukraine’s people in the know are equally important for combating the reactionary nationalism of Russia’s aggression. It thus comes as no surprise that, amid the ruthless war threatening the very existence of Ukraine and its peoples, Ukrainian historians have resumed discussion of the new metanarrative of Ukraine’s history that was put on hold after Russia’s 2014 covert aggression in the Donbas. In the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue, Mykhaylo Gaukhman surveys the history of development of a new historical canon in independent Ukraine from 1991 to summer 2022. It was June 2022 when a group of Ukrainian historians came up with the concept of a “multifrontier” as the best way to structure the narrative of Ukrainian history. Gaukhman characterizes this concept as metamodernist in the sense of its combining modernist nation-centrism with the postmodernist deconstruction of any rigid identity politics. The latter point seems to be shared by leading Ukrainian historians, who insist on prioritizing a commonality of values over a single normative cultural identity as the foundation of Ukrainian society. They criticize ethnoconfessional particularity as delegitimizing the modern Ukrainian state project that embraces a regionally and culturally diverse society. In this respect, a “multifrontier” perspective fits the bill by combining a multitude of situational arrangements with the singular and all-embracing mode of their interpretation. Following Serhii Plokhy, Gaukhman prefers to speak of a new metanarrative as a new national history “that would go beyond the ethnonational paradigm of the past and take advantage of opportunities presented by the global, transnational, multiethnic, and regional approaches to meet the growing demand by modern states, nations, and societies for common narratives and historical identities.”^[2]
Ukrainian historians’ concerted determination to transcend ethnonational identity politics stands in stark contrast to Russia’s predominant discourse of operationalized groupness. The discussion of the new historical metanarrative in Ukraine is still at a nascent stage and can be greatly complicated when it transcends the sphere of academic historiography. For one, identity politics is not the whim of political activists, but the function of a nation-centered episteme projected onto the spere of politics. Old or new, national history is the history of a nation: if imagined as a coherent group in the past, a nation implies preserving its coherence in the future, which necessitates an identity politics. Furthermore, a nation-centered social imagination can envision a polity only as a nation-state, which, as Russia’s case has demonstrated, today requires extraordinary repressive measures to sustain. And yet, the very open-mindedness of Ukrainian historians and their readiness to conceptualize diversity set them apart from modernist nation-centered experts. When people in the know embrace hybridity at least at the level of organizing knowledge production, they are more likely to come up with more complex and inclusive models and ideas.