Fun fact: Peking Restaurant in one of the last Stalin-era high-rises, on Mayakovsky Square, was the most upscale and fashionable new restaurant in Moscow and the entire USSR during the Thaw period and well into the early 1970s. It is said that the Peking offered the most expensive dish available in any Soviet restaurant.
It is hard to find an equivalent to this phenomenon in modern American realities. Perhaps opening a Chinese buffet at Central Park Tower in Manhattan and awarding it three Michelin stars would be a fair parallel, or even opening it at the Capitol building in Washington, DC. With the ubiquity of Chinese restaurants in America, for the Peking to be properly “translated” into modern realities, a truly unique venue would be required to highlight the oddness of this phenomenon. For one thing, foreign visitors found that the “poor food” at this elite eatery matched its other features: “The lighting was too harsh, the music too loud, and the décor too gaudy.” ^[1] Another obvious incongruity was the fact that the restaurant was opened in the fall of 1957, just as Soviet-China relations began spiraling into bitter confrontation, which compromised the intended symbolic message of this enterprise.^[2] Finally, the fancy, expensive “foreign” venue was located in the building of the namesake hotel that was initially designed in the 1930s as Gulag headquarters. After being repurposed and rebranded as the Peking, the hotel and the restaurant served as a permanent KGB station, and their customers were under close surveillance.
An unbiased observer with a regular sense of humor would likely find these contrasts ironic or even funny. Consider the restaurant’s trademark feature as preserved in Moscow lore: the “sliced pork fillet with a procession” (vyrezka fri kusochkami s vykhodom). Although prestigious and expensive, the Peking’s menu prices were the same as those of other Soviet restaurants belonging to the same tariff category, with a single exception. One could order a regular dish – 5.3 ounces of chopped fried meat for 1.3 rubles or pay extra to have it served “with a show” for a total of 28 rubles (in post-1961 denomination) – almost half of a postman’s salary, the equivalent of paying some $1,500 today. For this money, affluent customers summoned a procession to deliver the dish: a mustachioed doorman dressed in livery and periodically clanging cymbals, two waiters carrying the dish, and three female staff dressed in “national” attire and making some odd dance moves.^[3] The instinctive reaction to this entire experience and its broader social and historical contexts might be laughter, but what exactly was so funny? Without an analytical explication of the intuitive sense of weirdness as the trigger for laughter, one is likely to assume a cynical and racist position: Chinese cuisine cannot be considered elite, and Soviets could not tell a delicacy from canned meat or an elite service from a circus act.
An observer overly involved with this historical reality – a provincial visiting Moscow in the 1960s or modern scholars identifying with their protagonists – would have found none of this funny at all. Some would insist on mentioning the restaurant as “Beijing” in the first place because this is how Chinese Communist nationalists have mandated their capital’s spelling, designating from a variety of local languages one dialect as a linguistic norm. This observer would point to the triumph of the Second World as a true alternative to the world dominated by capitalism and imperialism, which can be deduced from the naming of the hotel and restaurant: what seems impossible in America was only logical in the USSR, where the PRC capital gave the name to a most prestigious restaurant. Likewise, it did not matter how authentically Chinese the fried meat performance was: Soviet people exposed their inner internationalist selves by showing their willingness to pay big money not for a striptease but for the presentation of a foreign cuisine.
These arguments are a thought experiment, which is not the same as a straw-man argument: although not based on personal interviews, this experiment projects a certain discourse and a certain epistemic disposition – quite typical of modern Soviet historiography – on yet another typical Soviet phenomenon. While morally impeccable, these hypothetical responses are not very informative because a ready explanatory framework precedes interpretations of a specific case and predetermines these interpretations. A scholar’s agency is then limited to arranging primary sources to illustrate the chosen sociological scheme that anticipates any empirical findings. By the same token, the agency of historical protagonists is limited to comprehending the importance of joining the historical momentum of the majority of likeminded compatriots (thus making a trend mainstream) or actively resisting this mainstream trend along with variously defined “minorities.” According to this approach, the Soviet experience is framed by humanism, internationalism, and the tragic temptation to implement utopian goals by any means. Wars, domestic oppression, and backwardness are naturally to be expected from an empire, while national liberation or nationalist violence does not need additional explanations in a nation-state.
Aiming at an epistemological emancipation of scholarship from larger-than-life mental constructs – larger than historical reality and larger than its individual scholars – an alternative paradigm pursued by Ab Imperio reconstitutes human agency at the center of our profession. This thematic issue concludes the journal’s annual program “Toward a Postnational History of Eurasia: Deconstructing Empires, Denationalizing Groupness” by highlighting the central element of this historical paradigm. Thematic issue 4/2023 “Bringing Agencies Back: Ecosystems of Humanism and Posthumanism” presents the process of recovering personal agency in rationalizing human diversity, on several levels.
The “Methodology and Theory” section offers readers an opportunity to empirically verify the thought experiment outlined above. It features a discussion forum “Mainstream Narratives of Soviet History and the Laughter of Surprise,” structured as a discussion of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s essay “Soviet History as Black Comedy.” Fitzpatrick’s provocative essay proposes applying the mode of black comedy to the narration of Soviet history. The responses to her intervention by literary scholars, historians, and political scientists encourage readers to exercise their agency and clarify a position regarding key questions raised in the forum.
The protagonist of a Bertolt Brecht play written at the height of World War II – a physicist as the ultimate “observer” – mused: “It’s intolerable to live in a country where there’s no sense of humour, but it’s even more intolerable to live in a country where you need a sense of humour.” ^[4] Transgression lies at the core of any thinking outside the box, naturally producing laughter as a psychological response to an underrationalized novelty. Any innovation is about entering uncharted waters, but how much transgression is productive or even permissible? It is intolerable to observe a field as protective of its sacred cows – whole herds of them – as Soviet history, but it is no less intolerable to observe a field that substitutes political mockery for epistemic analysis, as happens only too often under the slogan of “self-decolonization.”
The “History” section features two articles that were prepared within the international research project “Post-Imperial Diversities – Majority-Minority Relations in the Transition from Empires to Nations-States (483-ImpDiv),” funded by the EraNet-RUS program. The project aimed to contextualize the constitution-framing experience of new national independent states emerging in the wake of World War I on the ruins of European continental empires and in the context of recent imperial politics of difference.
The innovative thematic scope of the project is framed by language that betrays a familiar teleological approach that prioritizes an authoritative sociological scheme, in this case assuming the naturalness of “majority-minority relations.” In the imperial situation underlying historical empires, this binary opposition is already problematic because of its limited explanatory potential. The ruling class composed of the nobility was certainly a minority in the country. In the Russian Empire, ethnic Rusians were hardly a majority, while a majority of Orthodox Christians also accounted for the absolute majority of serfs. Numerically small ethnoreligious groups were overrepresented among the nobility and government officers. The modern concept of minority rights’ protection just did not make much sense in this context. Things changed with the rise of nationalizing empires in the second half of the nineteenth century, when imperial ruling regimes sought to reconstitute their political base as a majoritarian nation defined in political and, increasingly, in ethnic categories. As soon as an imperial society becomes conceptualized in terms of the majority and minorities, it ceases to be an old empire even if the imperial regime persists. Postimperial transit begins long before the empire’s dissolution, which is only the culmination of a long process. Therefore, if we take as a starting point the expectation that “majority-minority relations” is at the core of transformation after the imperial collapse, it obscures the problem of this modern binary’s genesis within imperial societies. Likewise, the a priori assumption that there is a direct “transition from empires to nations-states” blocks an entire spectrum of alternative historical trajectories by imposing a normative sociological cliché.
The article by Timothy Blauvelt and Anton Vacharadze complicates this simplistic picture based on the example of the Democratic Republic of Georgia’s struggle to accommodate Abkhazians’ demands for autonomy in 1918–1921. It was only by proclaiming Georgia a nation-state and insisting that numerous local ethnocultural groups belonged to the single ethnically Georgian nation that some of the less assimilated groups were recognized as “minorities” relative to the new Georgian “majority.” The process of consolidation of multilingual populations into Georgians in the context of Russian imperial politics of diversity, which involved the dissolution of old political divides and sociocultural homogenization of local elites, remains beyond the scope of the article. However, the authors mention the critique of the Democratic Republic of Georgia by foreign observers who see it as an imperial polity – meaning a nationalizing empire, and not a nation-state. In turn, those groups that were not ready for cultural Georgianization, such as Abkhazians, supported federalist political arrangements and objected to a nation-state scenario.
Thus, neither the majority, nor the minority were confidently heading toward a nation-state. Blauvelt and Vacharadze argue that Georgia’s socialist leaders were idealists committed to principles of social justice and equality of rights, and their rejection of federalism was in agreement with the socialist mainstream in the 1910s. Besides this doctrinaire opposition to federalism, apparently a factor of Georgian nationalism was also at play, exacerbated by a sense of insecurity over the actual cohesion of the newly forged greater Georgian nation. A combination of these factors resulted in the eventual agreement to include provisions in the Georgians’ constitution for Abkhazia’s limited autonomy, thereby compromising the ideal of a unitary state. This happened shortly before the Red Army’s invasion and occupation of the country. Attentively following the back and forth between successive Abkhazian delegations and the Constitutional Committee of the Georgian Constituent Assembly, Blauvelt and Vacharadze reconstruct the human agency behind the abstraction of “a historical process.” It was a complex entanglement of variously configured group interests and solidarities – political, cultural, ideological, social, and so on – that determined the outcome of negotiations over Georgia’s statehood and the very meaning of collective designations such as “Abkhazians” and “Georgians.”
Wiktor Marzec’s article studies the process of drafting the Polish constitution adopted in 1921 in regard to the management of ethnocultural diversity in a highly heterogeneous and politically divided postimperial polity. The obvious parallels with and important differences from the case of Georgia only highlight the illusory character of the normative transition from empires to nation-states. Like their Georgian peers, the drafters of the Polish constitution were concerned with the indivisibility of the nation by any federalist provisions and had to deal with recent imperial legal and administrative legacies. Only, there were three different postimperial parts of Poland, each with its own imperial background and non-Polish populations now branded as minorities. What was seen as a possible solution in one part of the country was fraught with unintended and undesirable consequences if applied in other parts.
Unlike Georgia, the prevailing force in the Polish parliament was right-wing nationalism rather than socialist nationalism, and the accommodation of minorities in the constitution was imposed in the first place by foreign powers via a special treaty rather than by pragmatic considerations or goodwill. The result was similar, however: opposition to federalism and reliance on the old imperial practices of managing diversity through special legal provisions.
One can see how this “neoimperialism” undermined the ideal of a nation-state as a politically and culturally homogeneous community of equal rights and thus necessarily a democracy. The 1926 May Coup staged by Marshal Józef Piłsudski epitomized this ideal’s failure, just as the triumph of authoritarianism did in many other postimperial countries by the 1930s. This outcome was entirely the responsibility of Polish politicians and legal experts framing the constitution, because in a similar structural situation Czechoslovakia demonstrated a different political dynamic. Certainly not a federation, it was not a canonical nation-state either, thus offering yet another scenario of postimperial transformation. This officially binational state with effective provisions for national minorities’ protection proved to be a more robust democracy – as perhaps Georgia could have become had it not been occupied by the RSFSR.
The attitudes toward ethnocultural diversity prevailing in pre–World War II Poland are documented in the diaries of Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, aka Ivan L. Rudnytsky (1919–1984) – a historian who has had a profound influence on modern Ukrainian history writing. As a Ukrainian whose maternal grandmother was a Jew, Rudnytsky was a double minority in sanacja-era Poland. In the “Historiography” section, Yuri Radchenko analyzes the evolution of Rudnytsky’s commentaries in diaries about Jews and Jewishness from the mid-1930s through World War II and the Holocaust period to the 1950s. This personal document reveals Rudnystsky’s deeply embedded cultural and racial antisemitism, which could be explained in part by his traumatic realization that he belonged to a stigmatized minority that later became a potential target of genocide. With time, Rudnytsky developed a genuine interest in Judaism and Jewish culture. Still, even decades after the war, he never mentioned the Holocaust and the participation of different Ukrainian political groups in it.
The case of Rudnitsky is that of an observer, whether of current political events or history. Unlike Polish parliamentarians, he was not in a position to affect the regime of diversity management in the societies he lived in. However, as a professional historian he had exceptional agency – and responsibility – to work critically on his own biases and limits of knowledge. Rudnitsky owns any successes and failures in this respect, just as the implications of the enormous influence his scholarship has exercised upon modern Ukrainian intellectuals and the public sphere writ large. When interiorized by public intellectuals and politicians in charge of human diversity management in the 2020s, Rudnitsky’s political liberalism and methodological nationalism, mid-twentieth-century style, appear more consequential than many “structural prerequisites,” “political conjunctures,” and other anonymous forces that are habitually endowed with supreme historical agency.
One can either laugh at Rudnitsky’s antisemitic clichés or abhor them, having the same choice of responses in the case of Polish MPs’ casuistry aimed at both complying with the Minority Treaty imposed on Poland and avoiding any practical measures alleviating the situation of national minorities. What is important is not a particular emotional response but the reason we perceive historical reality emotionally: beyond grand sociological and ideological schemes, history is about a personal choice, which can seem funny at times but is never meaningless. New approaches to shaping historical narratives emerge only in the process of articulating new subjectivities of narrators who explicate their personal biases and academic priorities. Epistemological self-awareness, inevitably involving self-irony and perhaps even black humor, allows one to counter the hegemony of seemingly anonymous structures of thinking, be it discourses of nation, class, ideology, or race. Rigidly differentiating multifaceted human diversity – along with the diversity of approaches to its conceptualization – into a normative majority and subpar minorities, these structures of thinking exist nowhere but in the minds of people who embrace them. Their subversion brings a brief sense of relief and laughter; their critical deconstruction grants lasting empowerment but also the burden of agency.