In this issue Ab Imperio continues the exploration of the umbrella theme of this year of paradoxes of modernization in the Russian empire and Soviet Union, turning to social and cultural dimensions of history of empire and nation. It is well known what a complex task it is to study the evolution of social structures if approached from the longue duree and societal perspective and to what extent illusory can be the self-manifested changes in culture if taken at face value. The relationship between these two modes of scholars’ encounter with the socio-cultural world stands at the core of the general historical epistemology: on the one hand historians have to deal with the self-description of social structures (institutes, groups and actors) couched in the language of the epoch, on the other hand, there is an ever present temptation to narrate the object of historical investigation (including the process of historical change) in terms of contemporary culture. The problem of reciprocal mental projections and substitutions in the encounter of scholars with the voiceless or outspoken social and cultural phenomena is a point of intersection for all the materials of the current issue.

Despite the inherent contradiction between the social (structural) and cultural (introspect) perspectives, the symbiosis of social and cultural approach have endured and proved fruitful in the past decade or so, in part due to the blurring of disciplinary boundaries as a result of which cultural and social histories have occupied areas that had long been the domain of political, diplomatic or intellectual history. The explicit dynamism of culture and “representativeness” of social structures allowed to narrate the profound changes in society (in particular, the process of modernization), charting the stages of cultural transformations in relation to the corresponding changes in constellations of social actors and factors.

The advance of both social and cultural histories and the fusion thereof influenced the theories of nationalism, which came to address the modern nation formation in the framework of historically emergent linguistic and cultural homogeneity of Western European nations. However, the challenge comes when the optics of social and cultural analysis is applied to history of Central and Eastern Europe. This application invites a reflection on theoretical assumptions of 20th century paradigms of social and cultural history, for it brings about the question of relationship of Central-Eastern European history to Western Europe-tied definition of modernity and the suitability of nation-centered narratives for capturing the history of interaction and encounters in what was the multinational society of a continental empire.

Indeed, the very notion of imperial society pleads for critical reflection. It is to be discussed if this category is legitimate given that the boundaries of this social formation are determined by the political frontiers. These frontiers create an ostensibly unitary space, which though includes the significant variation of the nature of social collectivities and relationship as well as different national-cultural areas. Alternatively, one may turn the critical scrutiny to the analytical categories of “society” and “culture” and pose a question to what extent the social and cultural reality behind those categories can be exhausted by the analysis of solidarity, groupness, and homogeneity.

The current issue of Ab Imperio is an attempt to take stock of certain new methodological approaches, which evolved in studies of social and cultural history of the Russian empire and Soviet and post-Soviet space, and to map possible directions of modification of conventional analytical concepts necessitated, respectively, by the specific contexts of multinational Russian empire and the Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The Theory and Methodology section of this issue features the sequential attempts at reflection of relationship between the categories of social sciences and the polyvalent social and cultural reality of social collectivities and cultural solidarity. The section opens by the first publication in Russian of the seminal text by Max Weber, which laid foundations for the modern debate about the formation of social groups and ethnic communities and stressed both cognitive and structural aspects of this process. The most recent attempt to amend the essentialist implications of social and cultural analysis comes from two prominent experts of the field – F. Cooper and R. Brubaker, who drew on the rich legacy of theoretical thinking partly inspired by M. Weber in their article “Beyond Identity.” It is not accidental that F. Cooper and R. Brubaker formulate a theoretical critique of “identitarian language” and the modern discourse of homologous societies and social formations for their research, respectively, on Africa and Eastern Europe provide them with a hindsight of the experience of non-Western parts of the world. One is inclined to see in this attempt to deconstruct the identity concept an impact of the cognitive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, whose influential article on identity and region is also published in this issue for the first time in Russian translation.

Ab Imperio solicited contributions, which represent the broad spectrum of approaches to the problem of translating the social process of past and present to the language of contemporary academic culture. They range from the subsiding of the cultural component for the sake of narrating the structure to the reduction of complex and multifaceted social texture to the cluster of symbolic practices and self-descriptions, produced by a single cultural group or even by select representatives of this group. Nonetheless, even the most radical turn appears to be relevant and to have a point as soon as it is included into the transparent space of historiographic process – the only form for a meaningful development of scholarship. This purpose is served by the traditional for our journal format of a forum discussion (this time devoted to the problem of practices of subjectivization in soviet society under early Stalinism) and by the publication in the archival section of a fragment of the diary by a contemporary of early Stalinism, S. A. Piontkovskii. The featured publication testifies to the specificity of the soviet context, in which the semantics of communication sometimes happens to be perverted, even if the author of the text is a professional historian.

One of the codes for reading the current issues of Ab Imperio is a thesis by P. Bourdieu on the necessity to differentiate between the categories of analysis and categories of practice (social, political, academic) and on the vital need of scholars to search for a third position of observation – located somewhere between the language of self-description of the object of analysis and the language of analytical traditions overloaded with apriori assumptions and projections. This thesis may be maintained irrespective of whether one studies a “group” or “nation,” imperial or local society. This theoretical point of depurate allowed to bring under one cover so diverse in and on themselves historical, sociological and cultural studies.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov