The job of journal editors involves close readings of submissions’ footnotes, and this is what we have noticed over the past twenty-five years: there is a canon of standard references, which includes works published between approximately 1995 and 2005. Most of them were published in the United States because, due to the historical rupture of 1991, it was American academe that assumed the role of the organizational and intellectual “metropole” of the global field studying the region of Northern Eurasia. Thus, imperial studies invariably cited pathbreaking monographs, such as Richard Wortman’s Scenarios of Power (1995, 2000) or Robert Geraci’s Window on the East (2001), and great edited volumes, such as Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini’s Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (1997).^[1] Soviet history hinged on Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain (1995), Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire (2001), and Francine Hirsch’s Empire of Nations (2005).^[2] The actual list of core literature is broader and features a dozen or even two dozen titles for each period. The ones mentioned are just illustrations of a larger point: anything published before or after this golden decade, give or take a couple of years – to include Laura Engelstein’s The Keys to Happiness (1992) or Jane Burbank’s “An Imperial Rights Regime” (2006) – never acquired the same status as a mandatory reference, regardless of its scholarly merits.^[3]
There may be different explanations for this, but an apparent one is that the old common field of “Russian” history began to openly disintegrate sometime around 2005 – incidentally, the year with the lowest membership in our main professional association ASEEES (then AAASS) in the past forty years. From 3,797 in 1991 and about 3,700 in 1998, it dropped below 2,500 in 2005 – compared to 2,754 in 2009 and 3,489 in 2023.^[4] Splitting along the divergent trajectories of national histories, the field was no longer capable of sustaining a common historiographical canon, making the old one a monument to the old era. The reformed professional association managed to regrow, although it no longer represented a single field.
Whatever the actual cause might be, the standard corpus of references barely expanded beyond 2005 – just as it had dropped pre-1990s texts, apparently deemed irrelevant as too “ancient.” But from today’s perspective, the post-1991 historiographical canon could seem equally outdated. It includes studies that were published more than thirty years ago – before most current graduate students were even born. And indeed, recently we have noticed the waning of the established frame of references. Take the proverbial example of Terry Martin’s instant classic. In recent years, the editors of Ab Imperio have begun to encounter authors who have never heard of this book (even when it seemed foundational for their topics), or authors who have heard of it but never read it, claiming that it was about “Soviet imperialism.” While probably scandalous, these responses cannot be called outlandish: it has been almost a quarter of a century since the book’s publication, and the field had to move on.
But has it moved on? If anything, one can register a strong tendency to return to the methodological nationalism and nativism of the early post-1991 historiographies, with one caveat: what used to be a naive choice resulting from a lack of new methodologies is now often a self-conscious stance framed in fancy theoretical rhetoric. The old historiographical canon of the field’s golden decade built a solid foundation for a “great leap forward,” away from all Cold War–era essentialisms. However, no such leap followed, at least in conceptual terms. What followed was just the replacement of one essentialist scheme by another: the homogeneously totalitarian Soviet society was reconsidered as the equally homogeneous society of alternative Soviet modernity – the same in a village and in the Kremlin, in Moscow and in Tashkent; the narrative of the omnipotent autocratic state gave way to the “imageology of power” in the Russian Empire, which was still understood as the polity of ethnic Russians; and the strategic blindness to the largely “non-Russian” composition of the region’s polities was replaced by equally exclusive and essentialist national narratives. Numerous high-quality case studies have been produced within these changed interpretive paradigms, but no systemic epistemological revision followed. As a result, a changed political exigency, both in the region that we study and globally, prompted an effortless restoration of the old dogma: Russian history is that of a prison of nations and of imperialist expansion, including the Soviet period with only minor reservations about the 1920s. The old integral nationalism (from the 1930s) assumes the somewhat less dated attire of decolonization (from the 1950s) to compensate for the intellectually futile character of this new old history.
The younger generation of scholars entering our still interconnected profession may find the historiographical canon of 1995–2005 to be antiquated and thus to disregard it, but will they be able to avoid the predicament of the reactionary turn to neo-essentialism? They can start from square one, in the symbolical “1991,” and develop their own solution from scratch – if such a task is doable within the lifespan of one academic generation. Or they can use unresolved conversations from the turn of this century as a springboard for the much-needed leap forward by revisiting these discussions and exploring their intellectual potential. It will be as much about saving one’s own time and effort as about restoring academic continuity and interdisciplinary dialogue. Of course, going back to the year 2000 seems a long journey. Suffice it to recall its original designation as “Y2K” and ask yourself: When was the last time (if ever) you heard this abbreviation? Still, it is by far a closer trip down memory lane than going all the way back to the archaic speculations about some imperial mind contemplating, for centuries, “Russia’s expansionism” or anti-Polish (anti-Ukrainian, anti-Kazakh, etc.) policies, to be revived by the Bolsheviks under the disguise of communism.
One of the period’s milestones was David Chioni Moore’s article “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique” (2001). Usually, the adjective “seminal” is used to introduce such texts: according to Moore’s own assessment, the article has been cited in nearly five hundred subsequent publications. It became part of the historiographical canon, invariably cited by anthropologists and political scientists writing about the post-Soviet transition – for a while. And yet, here we are in 2024, with the presidential address at the recent ASEEES convention and a swarm of hot-off-the-presses publications discussing decolonization and postcoloniality in the post-Soviet context as if the year were 1992 (if not 1957), blatantly reinventing the wheel while also insisting that it should be square and preferably made of cast iron or a similarly hi-tech material. A mere awareness of Moore’s 2001 article – one among many references forgotten in the current decolonization debate – would have made the brave discoverers of *colonial (anti-, de-, and post-) problematics in the 2020s just a notch more sophisticated and informative.
After all, as the important Soviet literary figure Korney Chukovsky used to say around the time of Stalin’s death, “One has to live long in Russia.” He gave no special reasons for this imperative, but one can feel its vibe reading Moore’s new article “East, West, and South: Complex Asymmetries in Postcolonial / Post-Soviet Debates since 2001.” Published in the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue, the article revisits the 2001 piece from the vantage point of our modern intellectual and political situation. Written by the same author, who generously clarifies his positionality to the reader, this text is precisely an exercise in revisiting and rethinking an important insight from the Y2K era required for a truly substantial leap forward, finally. By reviving the old unfinished conversation now, this text helps explicate some reasons for the early insights to remain inconsequential. Whoever says A must say B, and if B never follows, one explanation could be that A has remained underarticulated or distorted.
Thus, Moore’s major contribution was his combining of two key conceptual paradigms – those of post-Soviet and postcolonial analysis – in a single conceptual framework, thereby offering a much more complex and nuanced optics. However, this broadening of analytical perspective stopped short of including other important epistemological developments of the time – namely, a critical theory of nations and nationalism, not to mention the then nascent deconstruction of empire as an analytical category. Today we are well positioned to do precisely this, thus complicating the possible association of this key intervention with methodological nationalism and making it more difficult for modern-day methodological nationalists to discard Moore’s nuanced approach and his entire pathbreaking intellectual intervention altogether.
At the end of the twentieth century, in the wake of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “The End of History?” which well captured the prevalent Zeitgeist at the time, “post-” became the universal idiom for contemplating the future. Moore acknowledged the influence on his article of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” (1991) and generally continued Appiah’s line of inquiry.^[5] It was assumed that “post-” conveyed a certain image of the future if only by negating the past, which turned out not to be the case. Postmodernism, postcolonialism, and post-Sovietness aspired to overcome some aspects of the past while effortlessly carrying into the future its other aspects, such as nationalism, authoritarianism, and contempt for human rights in the name of higher ideological goals. Empires and colonialism remained in the pre–World War II if not pre–World War I past but their phantoms are enthusiastically exploited today to conceal the persistence of the still very much alive and real hegemony of nationalism and nation-states.
A useful exercise to self-check for any embedded “imperial” habits of thought has become mandatory, but not a symmetrical test for one’s embedded nationalism. If “ethnonationalist exclusion” or domination alone are identified as a problem, but not the ethnonationalist principle of groupness as such, then we are embracing Hans Kohn’s World War II–era theory of “good” (Western and civic) and bad (Eastern and ethnic) nationalisms.^[6] How much “post-” is a social theory based on a 1944 concept of nationalism?
Finally, the question arises: If everything is postcolonial now, how is a meaningful analytical distinction possible? Moore’s essay explicates these questions and underscores their pertinence by projecting the postcolonial problematic – from its original historical context in studies of the global South – onto the post-Soviet field. In this respect, his intellectual intervention offers a vector that is diametrically opposite to the recent calls to reorient studies of the post-Soviet space to “internal and external Souths.” These calls just follow the Putinist rhetoric that inscribes the Russian Federation in the anticolonial realignment of the Global South.^[7] Susceptibility to this rhetoric and the essentialization of “internal and external Souths” are part of the general Ruso- and Russocentrism of our field – a direct result of its methodological nationalism as a product of the above-mentioned unresolved “Y2K problem.” Essentially, this is a validation of Orientalist symbolic geography, if under the most progressive and emancipating slogans. By contrast, Moore’s own primary field is the Black Atlantic World, which can be alternatively characterized in a variety of ways without imposing on it a certain rigid identity, groupist logic, or even fixed boundaries. His essay offers our field a globalizing perspective from the outside – different from the stance of those who envision globality merely as a diffusion of locality-centered normative worldviews. The editors invite colleagues to engage with Moore’s thought-provoking intervention in a more substantial way than was the case back in 2001, responding to the questions outlined above and raising new ones – to be published in a future issue of Ab Imperio.
Meanwhile, empirical studies by the new generation of historians demonstrate that a complex and non-essentializing study of the former Soviet region is not only possible but also capable of producing a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the past. This is all the more remarkable as the two studies published in the “History” section of this issue address subaltern groups struggling against oppression. As it turns out, it is possible to remain sympathetic to one’s oppressed protagonists without losing critical distance and identifying with their cause – something that very few scholars of the Y2K cohort were capable of.
Igor Kuziner studies the rise and fall of the Red Death legend as a modern media phenomenon during the last decades of the Russian Empire. From the very beginning, Nikonian anti-sectarian propaganda accused Russian Old Believers of fanatically inhumane practices, which translated into the urban legends of human sacrifices practiced by some heterodox religious communities. In the late nineteenth century, one such hitherto marginal legend – about the Old Believers-Wanderers’ allegedly suffocating their coreligionists using a red pillow – came to the fore of Russia’s public opinion under the name of “Red Death.” A small community of radical Old Believers seeking a catacomb existence in isolation from any established social institutions, the Wanderers found themselves at the center of a public scandal. There were several criminal trials and police investigations of Wanderers on charges of ritual murder; local and central newspapers and even academic journals published stories substantiating the legend. However, between the mid-1890s and the early 1910s, the public discourse on the Wanderers underwent a sea change. Sensationalist allegations of ritual murder were increasingly opposed by both left- and right-leaning commentators and experts. In the rapidly nationalizing Russian Empire in the age of mass politics, the Wanderers were recoded from religious marginals into members of the ethnically Russian (Rusian) majority. Against the backdrops of the Multan case against Udmurts who were allegedly practicing ritual murder and the Jewish blood libel of the Beilis case, the Red Death legend appeared to equate the Wanderers and thus Rusians with the ultimate “minorities.” Therefore, modern Rusian nationalists, regardless of their political views, preferred to discard the Red Death allegation altogether lest it compromise the claim of Rusians for hegemony as a modern nation. Kuziner’s case study problematizes seemingly self-evident and stable categories, such as Rusianness, religion, or millenarianism, reconstructing a complex social dynamic and ideological landscape of late imperial Russia.
Mirlan Bektursunov discusses the predicament of Kyrgyz society’s Sovietization in the 1920s. Predominantly nomadic, the Kyrgyz lacked a proletariat as the social base for the new regime. This is not to say that this was an egalitarian society: on the contrary, it had a very complex horizontal and hierarchical structure. The central category of groupness among the Kyrgyz was lineage: an imagined community of kin. Analyzing the history of Kyrgyz lineage relations from the imperial to the Soviet periods, Bektursunov characterizes the main power nexus as that between the disenfranchised and weak (bukara) lineages and the main, powerful (manap) lineages. The Soviet regime chose the bukara lineages as their class ally, aiming to create a sort of “lineage proletariat.” The principle of the clash between classes imposed on the Kyrgyz lineage society evolved into a confrontation between powerful and weak lineage groups, the latter officially supported by the state. In the long run, this policy had lasting effects on the Soviet project in Central Asia. The fact that a self-proclaimed socialist regime promoted lineage stratification by exploiting preexisting hierarchies to further its cause ultimately contributed to the conservation of lineage identities in the region until the post-Soviet period. This policy also explicates the predicament of de-Sovietization from the vantage point of interlineage relations and problematizes the conjunction of post-Sovietness with postcoloniality.
In accordance with the new format introduced by Ab Imperio’s Platform ’24, research articles are followed by flash interviews with their authors, so do not miss our conversations with Igor Kuziner and Mirlan Bektursunov! They talk about their personal paths to the profession and share their visions of the field.
The “ABC” section continues this conversation about the ways that emerging scholars address the Y2K problem of methodological nationalism and essentialism, this time in their teaching. Opening the series “New Curricula for New Histories of Northern Eurasia,” Ismael Biyashev publishes the syllabus of his course “Eurasian Nomads and Nomadism between Empire and Nation (A History of Managing Diversity).” Biyashev presents nomads as a complex and historically evolving phenomenon that cannot be conceptualized as a stable “thing” beyond specific historical circumstances and intergroup relations. Similar to Kuziner and Bektursunov, Biyashev decenters the established historical narrative, doing so not through further “positive exoticization” of regions and groups traditionally deemed marginal, but by normalizing them and telling a big story from their vantage point. These historians practice conceptual decolonization not by political declarations but by an analytical epistemological approach rooted in and verified by the meticulous analysis of primary sources. The editors expect to continue the presentation of novel course syllabuses on all aspects of the region’s past and present in subsequent issues of Ab Imperio.
In the “Newest Mythologies” section, Ilya Gerasimov provides a coda to the issue’s arc by returning to the topics of literature, post-Sovietness, and postcoloniality raised by Moore, framing them in the original – for the “post-” paradigm – concept of postmodernity. Gerasimov discusses the two latest novels by modern Russian classic writer Vladimir Sorokin: Legacy (2023) and especially Doctor Garin (2021). According to Gerasimov, Doctor Garin was planned as a postmodernist satire on the Russian intelligentsia, modernist literature, and the very society of modernity that produced them. Sorokin mocks the modernist belief in “certain schemes to improve the human condition” (to quote these schemes’ famous academic critic, James C. Scott) and Russian modernist literature, from Vladimir Mayakovsky to Vasily Aksenov, as well as modern governments’ failed political leadership. The main protagonist’s miraculous method of hypermodernism was an obvious parody of metamodernism, much anticipated in the late 2010s.
Gerasimov argues that Sorokin chose time as a central argument of his antimodernist criticism, vindicating postmodernism as a condition of multiple isolated chronotopes, with each subculture or identity group living in a unique temporality of its own – contrary to modernism’s belief in progress and the normative universality of time. (This view is congruent with the “multiple modernities” perspective adopted by the modernity school in Soviet history.) However, the spontaneous narrative of Doctor Garin models social reality as multidimensional and yet fundamentally interconnected. In any of the very distinctive chronotopes, social reality acquires its stable characteristics only situationally in the eyes of an active subject rather than by some preset, anonymous and objective factors, such as temporality or identity. Inadvertently, instead of affirming a postmodernist worldview – relativist but static – Sorokin outlined a program for a truly new, “post-postmodernist” modernism. It combines postmodernism’s multifaceted, multidimensional view of reality with modernism’s ability to produce a coherent narrative anchored in an unequivocal moral position. It embraces multiple temporalities, but also the idea of the future as a condition radically different from the past and present – which is opposite to the politics of the future as conditioned by the past in the “post-” paradigm. Gerasimov uses the difference in conceptualizing temporality as the main criterion differentiating the modernist and postmodernist epistemes, in any of their aesthetic versions, as well as the hypothetical new modernism as spontaneously outlined in Sorokin’s Doctor Garin.
It can be added that the Y2K momentum was decisive to Vladimir Sorokin’s aesthetic exploration of reality too, marked by the publication of Blue Lard (1999) and Ice (2002). We can still learn much from the intellectual production of the period and move forward only after continuing – rather than negating – the work that remained unfinished back then.