A war is considered the ultimate test of a state’s efficiency – its ability to mobilize society and rationally coordinate human and material resources while sustaining social order and productivity. At the same time, going to war is the easiest way to emulate statehood. A modern state is judged by how successful its economic and foreign policies are, and whether its social policy is productive. These policies may have goals – usually contested by political parties and social factions – but never a clear benchmark. In 1820, when G. W. F. Hegel suggested that the Prussian kingdom was approaching his ideal of the state and, in 1989, when Francis Fukuyama proposed practically the same regarding western capitalist parliamentary democracies, both of them provoked, after a brief period of fascination, a powerful backlash and even mockery.^[1] There are always reasons for the state’s criticism and demonstration of its inefficiency. Things look very different during wartime: any country steering clear of military defeat and social collapse is credited with having a successful state policy, while military victory is claimed by the government as proof of its statehood’s superiority. As Charles Tilly argued long ago, war making is state making, hence the chicken-and-egg polemic about the priority of the military revolution or the rise of the early modern state.^[2] This equation seems fully plausible but ignores the “fog of war” effect that conceals some important factors and circumstances. Is any military power successful just because it has a more efficient, hence “modern” state? If fanaticism and the rule of terror, demographic patterns and adaptation to climate conditions, social stratification and ethnocultural composition are all factored in as important components of victory, why is it the state that receives all the credit?
At least in the dominant scheme of Russian history – the master narrative that frames the past of societies and cultures in much of Northern Eurasia – the equation of war and state have had far-reaching consequences. To begin with, unlike the rather neutral semantics of “state” in English, which refers to a current “state of affairs” pending further characterization, in the modern Russian language, “state” refers to a collective subject of politics (gosudarstvo), an equivalent to the “government” in modern English. Since political history has been a history of constant warfare, and warfare has habitually been equated with the state, the scheme of Russian history has become notoriously statist. And because “state” has had this important connotation as a supreme political subject, all political subjectivities and loci of power have become “nationalized” – appropriated by the central government but also attributed to a certain national culture. Contradicting the reality that was, according to special historical studies, politically polycentrist and culturally diverse, and the fact that modern cultural Russianness was nonexistent before the nineteenth century and never prevalent in the highest echelons of power until the turn of the twentieth century, the scheme of Russian history advances a totalizing vision of the “Russian state” as the main subject of history. A product of the hegemonic narrative, this imagined Russian Leviathan devoured and appropriated everything else – empire and networks of aristocratic solidarity, competing national projects (including many versions of Russian nationalism) and dynastic loyalty. It conflated political Russianness and ethnoconfessional Rusianness, along the way appropriating all forms of culturally non-Rusian loyalism.
Aimed at deconstructing this totalized ahistorical narrative, Ab Imperio’s 2022 annual program was titled “The Rise and Fall of the State as an Institution and an Analytical Concept.” Thematic issues in 2022 have pondered questions of multiple political subjectivities behind the cloak of the omnipotent state (1/2022), the role of culture and religion in producing this image of Leviathan (2/2022), and the function of the observer’s positionality in characterizing the state as either imperial or national (3/2022). The current issue, “The Role of the State in Projects of Social Improvement” (4/2022), differentiates the state from other forms of political groupness and agency by focusing on social engineering efforts.
The “History” section opens with Anastasiia Akulich’s study of the Russian Orthodox mission in China in the wake of the antiforeign Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). Although reporting to the Holy Synod as a ministry of state religion of sorts and acting in the context of Russian imperialist expansion on the territory of the Qing Empire, the Orthodox mission demonstrated the principal incongruency of the state, imperialism, Russianness, and Orthodoxy, even though all these phenomena were present simultaneously in the same place. As elsewhere, Orthodox missionaries conflicted with Russian government officials – diplomats and administrators along the Eastern Chinese Railroad – over differently understood goals of “Russian expansion.” Government officials were interested in extending political control and economic exploitation and, in the wake of the bloody Boxer Rebellion provoked in part by active Christian proselytism, were concerned that missionaries would compromise these strategic goals by provoking another bout of cultural resentment on the part of the Chinese. Formally representing another branch of the government, the missionaries were financed by state funds and also strove to establish Russian influence in China. The effect of their actions was somewhat different, however. As had happened earlier with the Ilminskii system of proselytizing in the Volga region, the missionaries achieved sudden success by “going native” – translating the religious books and service into Chinese and training local clergy, who became the locomotives of subsequent proselytizing. The central event of the local Orthodox religious calendar was not Easter but All Saint Martyrs Day, commemorating the Chinese Orthodox victims of the Boxer Rebellion. Its celebration attracted many non-Christian members of the local community and was neatly incorporated into the pattern of local Chinese festivities.
This incongruency of different circuits of power and influence was typical of the imperial situation that necessitates a principled distinction between the empire and the state as political phenomena and analytical concepts. Imperialism, Russification, and the Russian state/government were real, but never the same thing. Albeit unwillingly and contrary to government orders, Russian missionaries contributed to the promotion of a form of Chinese autonomous subjectivity. The projection of Russian state power across the border revealed the ambivalence of both the “state” and “Russianness.”
Oksana Ermolaeva’s article discusses the creation of the Soviet-Finnish border during the first postrevolutionary decade as well as sociopolitical processes in the Soviet borderland. Both the 1,246-kilometer-long part of this border stretching through the wilderness in the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (KASSR) and the short segment running across the Karelian Isthmus in close proximity to Leningrad and the densely populated countryside were more symbolic in importance. As late as March 1927, the entire border-guard force of the KASSR amounted to about 20 percent of the estimated personnel required to effectively control the Karelian section of the border and less than 10 percent of the border guards’ density on the Belarusian border in the late 1930s.^[3] In practical terms, this means that each border guard was responsible for several kilometers of the border in the dense forest, which was little deterrent to illegal cross-border traffic. This traffic was caused by the new state border cutting through the established economic ties and even more so by the flight of numerous borderland residents to Finland in the wake of the Civil War. Some of the refugees returned to the USSR under the terms of an amnesty that threatened to confiscate the land and property of those who stayed abroad. Families split up, delegating some of their members to return to the Soviet side to claim the family property. The separated families and whole borderland communities could sustain communication only through illegal transborder contacts. As locals, they knew how and where to cross the border while managing to avoid the border guards. Professional contrabandists, political activists, and spies relied on this local knowledge, and thus contributed to illegal transborder traffic.
This situation testified to the Soviet state’s failure to protect its perimeter and hence its sovereignty, and the eventual sealing of the border by the late 1930s should have indicated the consolidation of the modern state in its Stalinist version. So, whereas in the story of Chinese missionaries the state border serves as an optical prism dispersing the seemingly homogeneous projection of the “Russian state” abroad into a spectrum of political forces, in Ermolaeva’s article the state border functions more as a screen reflecting the evolving portrait of the Soviet state. Characterized by institutional confusion and inefficiency in the early 1920s, the Soviet border control eventually firmed up, but this success reflected the very asymmetrical composition of the Stalinist state. Although the Soviet government ultimately succeeded in allocating financial resources for the border’s physical protection and beefed up the numbers of border guards, the most sustained, truly decisive measures concerned the physical elimination of people interested in transborder contacts. From infiltrating informants and selective arrests in borderland areas during the 1920s, in 1935 the Soviet authorities moved to systemic deportations of entire borderland populations to the inner areas of the country, replacing them with settlers from other regions. These people had nobody to contact across the border and no local knowledge that would have challenged the border guards’ control of the frontier zone. It was therefore not so much about reaching the desired result given the existing constituency in the borderlands as it was the opposite – making the people themselves comply with the goal proclaimed by the government. Having the border locked tight was touted as proof of the Soviet state’s efficiency, which was another case of conflating various factors under the rubric of an omnipotent “state.” Mass-scale brutal deportations required a certain administrative capacity, but not a modern state: similar population exchanges from frontier zones had been routinely performed in early modern Muscovy since the late fifteenth century, and for exactly the same purpose.
Proponents of Stalinist “alternative modernity” theory usually point to this substitution for institutional solutions by manipulations with the population’s composition and self-disciplinary compliance as evidence of the modernity of Soviet population policies as the most sophisticated of all state policies. The Soviet state was allegedly efficient and modern because it managed to forge a new type of subjectivity and to make its citizens interiorize it. The document published by Klimentii Fedevich in the “Archive” section puts this theory into question. It is the diary thay was begun by a young Muscovite in October 1940 as he was drafted into the Red Army – incidentally, to serve in the border-guard force in southern Georgia, on the border with Turkey. Since this armed force was subordinated to the infamous Soviet security service – the NKVD – when the Soviet-German war started in 1941, he continued service in the NKVD troops, seeing combat for the last time in May 1944 in fighting Ukrainian resistance. This diary, published without revealing the author’s identity due to the sensitivity of its content, can be regarded as a Rosetta Stone for “Soviet subjectivity.” The text contains two intertwined narratives: one is sustained by a detailed record of actions and events, and the other by verbose discourses about personal relations and political ideals. The contrast between lyrical musing and practical actions suggests a similar disconnect between political declarations and actual motives.
Most of the “facts” recorded in the diary are real: they are verifiable based on other historical sources; they could not simply be made up by an outsider; or they so dangerously compromised the author that they could be recorded only as true “souvenirs of the past.” Some recorded events are obvious fakes. This concerns longer pieces of fiction, usually following brief notes mentioning boredom in the barracks or trenches, propaganda clichés “animated” in the style of personal recollections, and typical wartime panic-mongering rumors. For example, the author notes in the diary that two “Germans” in Soviet uniforms snuck into the mess hall where he was dining with his comrades and “yelled for more food,” but eventually the two were exposed and arrested. Clearly, the author knew what was fact and what was fantasy or hearsay, but he deemed this distinction irrelevant in the sphere of textuality that was foundational for the public sphere: things that corresponded to the official narrative were as good as reality. In his practical actions, however, the author reveals himself to be a rational maximizer who never compromised his interests even for basic scruples. The contrast is even more vivid between the lyrical musings that present a normative discourse of purity and love and an extended record of the author’s practice as a sexual predator, which seems quite authentic given the style of the records and numerous specific details. For example, at some point the author arranged a visit for two of his girlfriends to a family friend, who was the director of the Rostov-on-Don Medical Institute: the purpose of the visit was most likely to authorize abortions that could be performed officially only with a special medical referral. This would not stop him months later from writing in the diary: “Death [is near], while I’m so young [and] haven’t experienced a girl caressing me yet.”
It is not that this young man was a liar: he just clearly demarcated social practices from public discourses. In practice, he was very focused on the danger of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, as many of his comrades had, and he had numerous sexual affairs, sometimes in exchange for material rewards. In the discursive sphere, for many years he pledged his fidelity to his prewar love object, Eva. This differentiation has been identified as typical of Soviet plebeian subjects,^[4] but the protagonist of this publication was anything but “plebeian.” His father was a doctor in the Kremlin hospital, their family spent summers at a government resort by the Black Sea or a fancy summer vacation area near Moscow. The author loved to read fiction and considered becoming a writer. And yet he demonstrated the same rigid differentiation between practice and discourse as regular Soviet plebeians, which suggests that this was a fundamental characteristic of Soviet subjectivity. By clearly establishing this dualism in the material of personal relations, we can expect the same cognitive mechanism to be at work in the case of political discourse. The author was as sincere in his vows to the motherland and the Komsomol as to Eva, the love of his life: he had no other ideals, but this did not mean that these ideals played a decisive role in his life choices or informed his moral outlook.
Soviet population policy did not remedy the plight of borderland communities split by the border or make the border truly impenetrable to crossing: the above-mentioned diary testified that the Soviet border was quite porous as late as 1941, and even the border guards occasionally got lost on the territory of a neighboring country. Nor did normative Soviet subjectivity serve as a true moral compass preventing marauding, murder, or sex with minors (all recorded in the published diary). Hence, the profile of the Soviet state as seen by its projection on the “screen” of the border reveals mostly the power lines formed by the coercive apparatus, with the space in between “filled” by people acting on behalf of the coercive apparatus or avoiding a possible confrontation with this apparatus. This is not to say, as the totalitarian school would suggest, that the USSR ruled solely by terror. It is just that this was a fairly crude version of the modern state that could handle few political mechanisms other than various forms of direct coercion.
The article by Björn M. Felder that concludes the “History” section clarifies this thesis by focusing on Stalinist population politics and social engineering in the demographic sphere. It comes as no surprise that this state policy was repressive, culminating in the 1936 ban on abortion. However, there was nothing specifically Soviet or Stalinist in the ban, and the USSR was not unique in this respect during the interwar period. It is surprising, however, that the abortion ban had legal exemptions formalized in a special document analyzed by Felder, who concludes that most of them were motivated by eugenic principles. Eugenics had been barred in the USSR by the early 1930s and castigated as a “fascist science,” with genetics increasingly coming under political criticism before being officially outlawed in 1948. And yet, through the early 1950s, official documents and medical officials used explicitly eugenic rhetoric to characterize legal abortions.
This fact is easier to explain, first, by the rupture between normative discourse and everyday practice in Soviet society: until “the state,” which usually meant the coercive apparatus, identified a certain practice with a certain discursive element, people remained blind to the most obvious parallels. Amid a moral panic orchestrated by the authorities, they might find a swastika in a random newspaper photo (or in any other “Rorschach test” inadvertently produced by dismal Soviet printing),^[5] but otherwise would not connect the most obvious dots. Second, it appears that the truly sophisticated modern biopolitics practiced by the Stalinist regime had nothing to do with its ideology and was not original. Perhaps it was not even identified as eugenical by the people who introduced and enforced this policy. Felder suggests that the Soviet authorities copycatted the Nazi sterilization law of 1934, in letter and spirit. But their “conceptual aphasia” of sorts is equally possible: they simply reproduced the legal norms of the 1920s, believing that these norms could not be “eugenic” if they existed on the books and not in the publications of the dismantled Russian Eugenics Society.
This is yet another case that exposes the Stalinist state as a total discursive void beyond the very primitive compulsory script interiorized by its citizens. Various groups of Soviets performed the omnipresent totalitarian state as they understood it, through self-organization and self-policing, using bits and pieces of ideas and concepts that were not officially recognized as subversive. While this hypothesis requires a special discussion, it helps explain the futility of de-Stalinization in Russia: aimed at the superhuman tyrant and the mysterious “totalitarian state,” much of the criticism seeks to juxtapose “good” leaders and a “normal” state to past aberrations. Accordingly, outside Russia, this criticism is aimed at the apparent successors to the Stalinist Soviet Union – the Russian Federation and Russians – juxtaposing them to “normal” countries and “good” non-Russians. Naturally, the problem is not the criticism itself but the implicit quest for a new state- and nation-centered collective subjectivity, as homogeneous and unanimous, as the negated “Soviet state,” only better. The failure to produce a satisfactory result in the form of an ideal democratic state automatically weakens the criticism, casting the totalitarian Soviet state as more efficient and powerful than any of its more humane successors – and therefore historically viable if not vindicated.
This complex of idealistic statism was typical of post-Soviet Russian intellectuals, which explains their gradual surrender to Putinism with its official ideology of “normalized statehood.” Even those who politically opposed the ruling regime – such as the popular writer Grigori Chkhartishvili, better known under his pen name Boris Akunin – shared the dangerous illusion. In the “Newest Mythologies” section, Elena Baraban offers a parallel reading of Akunin’s detective novels set during the late imperial period and his historical nonfiction dedicated to the same period. Specifically, she focuses on the penultimate volume in the book series History of the Russian State and the novel A Path to the Promised Land (Doroga v Kitezh, 2021). Baraban demonstrates Akunin’s equal rejection of any ideology, whether conservatism, liberalism, or leftist revolutionarism. While dismissing past “Russian” states – from Muscovy to the USSR – as inherently authoritarian, Akunin puts his hope in a “normal state,” characterized as “modern” and “European.” Neither political reforms nor revolution can bring about this ideal wholesome state, which can result only from individual moral self-improvement in accordance with Confucian ethics, on the scale of an entire society.
Obviously, while critical of Putinism, this historical and political philosophy serves political demobilization, leaving a moral person with little choice between escapism and conformism. Akunin’s position is not only post-ideological, as can be expected of a postmodernist writer, but also “apolitically statist.” This formula sounds oxymoronic but it accurately captures the contempt for politics that so characterizes Russian elites and their naive belief in the omnipotent state, whether good or bad. Conflating different political forces, institutions, and social groups in the totality of “the state,” this belief discards party politics or any politics as inadequate due to their inevitably fragmented nature: a grand totality can be modified only by an equally total transformation – anything else falls short of the task.
This totalizing statism is a function of nation-centered social thinking, which, in turn, is a product of the episteme that Ilya Gerasimov identifies as Comtean “social physics.” In his contribution in the “Methodology and Theory” section, Gerasimov suggests that the type of social imagination and analysis that prevails today was formed in the seventeenth century in dialogue with the classical physics of Newton and Galilei and rationalized in the early 1800s by Auguste Comte. The development of physics from the seventeenth century to Einstein’s general theory of relativity and to quantum mechanics in the first half of the twentieth century was not only about the accumulation of knowledge but also represented a true epistemological revolution that changed the perception of reality and the role of its observer. Nothing of the kind happened in the social sciences and humanities, however. Since Thomas Hobbes, society has been viewed as an isolated system in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, and social processes are conceptualized as “bodies in motion” – homogeneous objects moving along clear trajectories. Hence the reduction of empirically observable social complexity to simple entities endowed with collective subjectivity and temporal longevity, such as the nation or the state. Gerasimov elaborates the concept of an “imperial situation” as an element of the new episteme, congruent with the language of complexity and relativity in modern natural sciences. This concept is not about empires but about the fundamental condition of unsystematic diversity that is observable in any society. Unsystematic diversity is a constant from the vantage point of social reality as an open system of multivalent actors in a state far from equilibrium and thus in asymmetrical relationships. Different perspectives on the same segment of historical reality may produce very different reconstructions of it that can never be accurately accommodated by any single narrative – unless this complexity is arbitrarily reduced to a simple, therefore fantastic entity, such as “the state.” Gerasimov offers his analytical model of truly modern history writing as a way to avoid the extremes of reductionism and relativism. Deconstructing “the state” is central to both modern history writing and a productive political process, delivering political subjects from the paralysis of absenteeism and fruitless dreams about the ideal state.