The materials in this issue of Ab Imperio tell stories that may seem meaningless or even absurd, and therefore remain little known. For example, in the “History” section, Klimentii Fedevich’s article reconstructs the process of creating national military units in the Russian army during World War I. It is common knowledge in Russian public culture and professional historiography that at the beginning of the war, the “Wild Division” was formed, staffed by Caucasian mountaineers. Equally well-known are Czechoslovak units, which are usually associated with prisoners of war from the Habsburg Empire. Specialists on the topic know many more examples of national military units formed by the Russian high command, but these units tend to be perceived as exceptional peculiarities – analogues of the “foreign legion,” standing apart from the regular army. Moreover, even professional historians do not hesitate to call this army the “Rusian [russkaia] Emperor’s Army” uncritically reproducing the language of historical sources and thus implying its homogeneous monoethnic composition. By contrast, Fedevich shows that, on the one hand, even the few better-known national units were a contradiction to the prewar policies of the high command, and on the other hand, that these units represented only the tiny tip of a giant iceberg.
After the disastrous 1904–1905 war with Japan, the Russian army was rapidly transforming its “imperial” ideology – which prioritized the most rational application of a heterogeneous contingent of conscripts – into a truly “Rusian national” one. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of World War I, the high command categorically rejected a government project to extend conscription to additional categories of the non-Rusian population. All conscripts were subjected to Russificatory indoctrination by means available to the army, and no separate “national units” were even conceivable.
However, World War I quickly forced Russian generals to abandon the ideology of ethnic purity while leaving intact their modern nation-centric social imagination. At first, volunteers who were not subject to conscription were rather reluctantly allowed to join national squads of State Militia intended for noncombat service. In parallel, the most volatile categories of the population from the Caucasus were encouraged to join the “Wild Division.” The initial period of the war decimated the cadre of the well-trained and ideologically indoctrinated prewar army. The reinforcements arriving from the ethnically Rusian provinces proved inferior in motivation to the few national squads recruited from the population of frontline areas. After the Russian army’s “Great Retreat” in 1915 and the change of the high command, a fundamental decision was made to recognize national units as part of the regular army and to staff them not only with volunteers but also with conscripts of corresponding ethnicity. In the fall of 1915, the “nationalization” of the Russian army became a rising trend despite the resistance of the civil authorities, who feared the inevitable federalization of the empire after the war under the pressure of new “national armies.” After the February Revolution, this process intensified, as national units proved more motivated and resistant to pacifist propaganda. After the abortive June offensive of 1917, nationalization reached the scale of the whole army corps. First, the Ukrainian Corps was created under the command of Pavel Skoropadskii (Pavlo Skoropadskyi), and then the 1st Chinggis Khan Army Muslim Corps was created. In mid-September, a political decision was made to reform the entire army along the nationality principle, and in mid-October, the General Regulations for the Nationalization of the Army on the Principles of Military Units’ Territorial and National Cohesion were adopted. Over the course of several war years, the “Rusian national army” was transformed into a “multinational Russian army,” making the federalization of the former empire inevitable – just as, simultaneously, the British Empire was transformed into the British Commonwealth of Nations.
Also in the “History” section, Yuri Radchenko’s article discusses the attitude of the Nazi occupation authorities toward the “Slavs of the Karaite religion” or Karaite Subbotniks – an extremely little-studied group. The Turkic-speaking Karaites in Crimea professed non-Talmudic, non-rabbinic Judaism and, as a rule, denied any connection to the Jews. Known at least since the late eighteenth century, “Judaizing” Subbotniks are Rusian followers of modern Judaism, oriented toward Jewish communities. However, in the nineteenth century, Rusians and Ukrainians began forming communities of Subbotniks who sought to join not the “chosen people” of the Old Testament, but the Karaites and their version of Judaism. They did not fit into the Soviet modern classification of diversity that ignored the confessional factor, so the Soviet authorities could only single them out from the surrounding population as “sectarians” – thus lumping them together with various Evangelists, Old Believers, and nonorthodox Muslims. In their attitude toward the Karaite Subbotniks, even more than toward the Karaites, the Nazis revealed the archaic core of their declaratively modern and “scientific” racial approach. The persecution of Subbotniks betrayed the anti-Judaic religious foundation of Nazi antisemitism, while the inconsistency in the politics of prosecution demonstrated that the Nazi state apparatus was modern only in appearance. In practice, it was not a “state,” but merely a conglomerate of semiautonomous organizations that were united only by a common genocidal policy toward a vaguely defined circle of legitimate victims.
The consistent nationalization of the imperial army, carried out with increasing persistence by the top military commanders including Generals Mikhail Alekseev and especially Lavr Kornilov, has been largely a nonsubject in historiography for the same reason that the Karaite Subbotniks have been. The “map of groupness” embraced by the scholarly community predetermined the scope and logic of the prevailing narratives. These narratives have taken for granted the idea that consistent formation of national military units began only by new national governments after the Bolshevik Revolution – on the ruins of the Russian Empire and overcoming the “old regime” commanders’ resistance. By the same token, Rusians and Ukrainians are “supposed” to be Orthodox Christians, and if they were to “Judaize,” it would not be through joining the Turkic-speaking Karaites. The nation-centric politics of naming and the logic of groupness predetermine what researchers are willing to see in historical material and how they structure their description of the past.
Even a modern phenomenon can remain in a blind spot unless the old approach to marking groupness is changed to a more nuanced and hence adequate one. In the “Newest Mythologies” section, Fabrizio Fenghi’s article reconstructs the evolution of the group of writers known as the Petersburg Fundamentalists, primarily on the example of the group’s leader, the postmodern imperialist writer Pavel Krusanov. A product of the late Soviet avant-garde artistic scene in St. Petersburg, closely collaborating with cult figures such as Sergei Kuryokhin, the Petersburg Fundamentalists glorified some imaginary idealized empire. By doing so, they simultaneously deconstructed Soviet grand narratives and reassembled them in a new synthesis. Gradually, their fascination with “empire” evolved from a quest for a new inclusive universalism to an exclusive nationalist and imperialist Rusianness, thereby reflecting the general evolution of Russia’s political culture in the 2000s.
On the one hand, the trajectory of Krusanov’s group is typical of the evolution of social imagination in post-Soviet Russia as a whole. Fenghi’s study corrects the widespread assumption about the purely ideological roots of late Putinism and “Rashism” in classical conservatism and neofascism. The nationalist imperialism of Krusanov and Co. grew out of punk aesthetics that have been quite avant-garde and subversive, but so apparently did Dugin’s Eurasianism and even, to a certain extent, Zhirinovsky’s show-fascism. On the other hand, this – usually ignored – logic of a stylistic rather than ideological embrace of fascism exposes the aesthetic post-Soviet “imperialism” as a failed attempt to find a new language of inclusive and universalist groupness, designed to replace the compromised language of Soviet universalism. Hence the irony toward the Soviet grand style, and the attempt to imitate it by other aesthetic and ideological means, choosing “empire” as the main idiom. Having failed to critically reflect on the motives for their obsession with this idiom as a search for a new supranational language of groupness and gradually succumbing to the dominant nation-centric episteme, the Petersburg Fundamentalists arrived at the particularly reactionary form of nationalist imperialism that has become the mainstream ideology in modern Russian society. It can be said that modern Russian fascism is a direct outcome of the erroneous “politics of naming” – the substitution of an aesthetic form for the conceptual essence. This aberration compromised the attempt to reconcile the demand for the inclusive universalism of mass society with the protest against the mass culture’s standardization and hence unoriginality. Instead of developing a new language of groupness, the Petersburg Fundamentalists became hostages of the chosen artistic form. The substantive emptiness of their intricate postmodern aesthetic experiments made them susceptible to the common modern perception of empire specifically as a “nationalizing empire” – genocidal and hostile to universalism and spontaneity.
A clash of the normative logic of groupness with reality was also revealed by the outstanding Oriental studies scholar Yuri Roerich (1902–1960) when he moved to the USSR in 1957. The elder son of the artist and mystic Nicholai Roerich and the even more influential esoteric author Elena Shaposhnikova (Roerich), he left Russia with his parents on the eve of the 1917 Revolution. Yuri Roerich received an excellent education at leading Western universities and mastered a dozen languages. He took part in expeditions to Mongolia, Tibet, and northern India, and probably reached a high rank in the Buddhist hierarchy. After World War II, Yuri Roerich repeatedly applied for permission to move to the USSR, which his family identified with Russia, or more precisely, with a certain mystical image of it. Permission was finally received only upon personal authorization by Nikita Khrushchev, who was instrumental in Roerich’s receiving a job at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences and an apartment in Moscow. Despite these favorable circumstances and, by Soviet standards, elite living conditions, Roerich was shocked by his encounter with the Soviet realities. Considered to be in good health, Roerich, died just three years after moving to Moscow having not even reached the age of fifty-eight.
Elena Semeka (1931–2022), who became Nicholas Roerich’s secretary at the institute, was a particularly valuable witness to the Moscow period of his life. In the “Archive” section, her son, the anthropologist Sergei Kan, presents his mother’s stories about Roerich and the way Roerich was perceived by her entourage of young Soviet intellectuals. Of course, the arrival of Roerich with his unique expertise elevated the Soviet studies of Southeast Asia to a new level. And yet, apparently, despite Roerich’s fixation on the Eastern “true knowledge” and his positioning himself as its bearer, young Muscovites perceived him, first of all, as the absolute “European” – a “true gentleman” and an exemplary Western scholar. Under his direct influence, they developed academic and political freethinking, despite the fact that Roerich himself was indifferent to politics and seemingly was quite content even with the Stalinist regime. Without realizing it, in the context of the early Thaw and the very limited repertoire of post-Stalin social action and thinking, Roerich offered his young Soviet colleagues not only knowledge but also a form and even a language for expressing their own, personal content. This language ultimately turned out to be not esoteric Orientalist, but universalist and modern.
Considered in this issue of Ab Imperio as a research problem, the inadequate logic of groupness to this day presents an existential threat to human life and freedom. Political nationalism and its enabler – the methodological nationalism of social scientists – are responsible both for the emergence of the most protracted and bloody conflicts and for their fundamental intractability within the framework of the still prevailing nation-centric perception and rationalization of reality. This is clearly demonstrated in the forum “Karabakh: A Mark on the Historical Map” featured in the “Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science” section. Stephen Badalyan Riegg, Arsène Saparov, and Sergey Rumyantsev trace the history of Nagorno-Karabak and reconstruct the circumstances that turned the problem of managing its heterogeneous multicultural society into an intractable conflict. The key role in this transformation was played by the homogenizing policy of naming and groupness, which discredits any political formats of coexistence and resolving contradictions other than through genocidal ethnic cleansing.
The dispute over exclusive rights to Karabakh became the main factor of national mobilization in both Armenia and Azerbaijan. This mobilization, in turn, provides legitimacy to the existing political regimes. The standard scenario of rising to power and holding it by exploiting old patterns of national mobilization necessitates keeping conflict with the neighboring country smoldering. Renouncement of mutual territorial claims would have meant the collapse of the existing political model in both countries. Therefore, a real resolution of the conflict in the sense of overcoming the foundational disagreements is impossible without a countrywide transformation of the social imagination and a deep restructuring of the political system. The same can be said of any other chronic border conflict: at least one side needs a perpetual confrontation as a means to solve its own domestic problems – to energize otherwise reluctant national mobilization and easily maintain power over a society mobilized for war. A new round of the Karabakh tragedy at the end of September 2023 immediately overlapped with a new aggravation of the Middle East crisis, all these against the backdrop of the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine and discussions of the likelihood of new large-scale upheavals in other flash points. Overcoming the nation-centric social imagination becomes a practical and even technical condition for restoring the internal balance of modern societies as a guarantee of their peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.