If the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union vividly demonstrates anything, it is the unsystematic character of human diversity that makes various categories of difference partially overlap or merge in any possible proportions. Class combines with religion, education, wealth, gender, age, social rank, political views, and so on, resulting in complex social personae. Moreover, the concrete proportion of these different principles of categorizing diversity and the resulting combinations are unique for particular historical circumstances – location, time period, and type of social interaction. It was advantageous to be a Russian Orthodox man in the early twentieth century, unless he happened to be a peasant living in close proximity to and comparing his situation with the Saha (Yakuts), who were legally defined as “alien people” (inorodtsy), enjoyed legal rights comparable to those of Russian peasants and were exempt from most of the obligations the Russian peasant had to carry out. Nor was it always good to be a nobleman in the Russian Empire, especially a Polish one after the suppression of the January Uprising (1863–1864). Membership in the Communist Party granted a more elite status or at least was a required precondition for upward social mobility in the USSR, although under Stalinism, communists were also more likely to be arrested than nonparty members – by at least a factor of five.^[1]
So consequential, these nuances raise the two-pronged problem of modern scholars’ historical positionality. On the one hand, historians need to fight their inclination to streamline the observable multifaceted complexity of the past, which inevitably gets flattened by homogenizing and simplifying analytical language. This inclination originates from the prevailing mode of national history and an even more fundamental factor of methodological nationalism that perceives reality as composed of stable homogeneous units with fixed characteristics. The unsystematic diversity and situational meaning of groupness cannot be described and analyzed by normative structuralist categories alone. On the other hand, the language of historical sources cannot serve as a ready remedy, capable of registering the nuances that modern sociological concepts tend to ignore. For one, the language of primary sources is also situational and semantically fluid and requires proper contextualization to be deciphered. This predicament can be resolved only by critical reflection on historians’ positionality: exactly what in the past draws their attention, how the topic is discussed today, how it was viewed back in the day by different participants in the events, and how to reconcile these multiple perspectives – past and present – in a coherent historical narrative.
A historian’s fully elaborated positionality implies that all the individual perspectives involved in the production of historical knowledge – the sensibilities and priorities of the modern historian, the worldview and interests of the protagonists who produced primary sources, the evolving semantics of their language, and the general historical context that determined that semantics – are completely accounted for and coordinated in a historical study. This procedure becomes central to a historical profession that no longer subscribes to the misconceived Rankean ideal of studying history “as it actually was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen) and acknowledges the influence of various “subjective factors” on one’s perception of reality. We know about the past what record-keeping contemporaries knew, but also something more because we reconstruct the factors that informed these observers’ perception and language. The archaeology of historical positionality becomes an integral part of reconstructing the past.
This is especially important when dealing with the phenomenon of unsystematic diversity, which can be recovered only by comparing mutually contradictory narratives, each conveying a systematic and even rigidly ordered take on reality. This issue of Ab Imperio addresses all the stages of reconstruction of historical positionality, from contextualizing the production of a historical language of diversity to its operationalization by historical actors and to the dilemmas of positionality faced by modern scholars.
Several materials in this issue center on the key historical term denoting otherness in the Russian language – “alien people” (inorodtsy) – along the way addressing the historical semantics of “aborigines” or “natives” (tuzemtsy). The “Methodology and Theory” section hosts a thematic block “Revisiting the Inorodtsy for A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia.” The second volume of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia was just published in English by Bloomsbury Academic. The volume presents a new historical narrative but space for a formal substantiation of some of its key elements was lacking. In the thematic block, two of the book’s authors, Ilya Gerasimov and Sergey Glebov, contribute investigations of the term “inorodtsy,” in which they discuss its historical evolution and how modern scholars can make sense of it.
The term is mostly understood today as pejorative and xenophobic, dating back to Muscovy’s expansion east of the Urals, and it is important that it was broadly used in this sense under the regime of the nationalizing empire in the 1880s–1910s. However, this was not the meaning and purpose of the term when it was analytically constructed at the turn of the nineteenth century – no earlier usage of “inorodtsy” is known. This neologism referred to “genus” as a taxonomic rank in modern classificatory systems, so its proper translation should be “representatives of a particular taxonomic group.” Its original purpose was to conceptualize the phenomenon of difference and diversity within a single – rationalized and standardized – social and legal structure of the Russian Empire. Specifically, the inorodtsy were conceived of as a special legal estate, one of many that composed the Russian social structure, such as the nobility, the merchants, the clergy, the Cossacks, and so on. It was in this sense that the term was used and propagated by the 1822 Statute concerning the Administration of the Alien Peoples (inorodtsy) prepared under the auspices of Mikhail Speransky for the native peoples of Siberia. The document provided for their integration into imperial statehood while generally preserving and protecting their ways of life.
For nearly the next one hundred years, one could observe two different trends. The attitude to human diversity and the prospects of its integration into the general norm dramatically changed in Russian society, and the term “inorodtsy” acquired negative connotations in common parlance and its original neutral meaning was substituted for by a slightly older neologism “aborigines” (tuzemtsy). However, as a legal category, the inorodtsy persisted without much change until the empire’s collapse, and even experienced a revival in the early 1910s. In the South Caucasus and even more so in the Far East, the legal estate of the inorodtsy was found useful for differentiating Russian subjects as “alien peoples” from those deemed “illegal aliens.” Quite in line with Speransky’s original conceptualization of this social category, the status of the inorodtsy implied a degree of protection and privileges unavailable to “regular” Russian subjects of comparable social standing. It seems that the inorodtsy legislation was one of the important sources of early Soviet indigenization policies under the “affirmative action empire” regime in the 1920s. Thus, the values and pragmatic goals of historical actors contemplating the inorodtsy at different times, from the 1820s to the 1910s, informed the meaning of this concept and, in turn, were largely predetermined by the available conceptual repertoire.
The “Archive” section features two documents marking the beginning and concluding stage of this process. One is a complete English translation of the 1822 Statute concerning the Administration of the Alien Peoples that makes it much more legible than the original document is for most modern Russian native speakers. Speransky’s text is written in archaic bureaucratese, but even the usage of regular and seemingly familiar words is often misleading, betraying their eighteenth-century meaning that can be very different from the modern one. The second document is the 1913 draft of the Regulations on the Alien Peoples (Inorodtsy) of the Amur Region. This archival publication proves the relevance of this legal category to administrators and politicians of the Russian Empire until the end of its existence, and the significant potential of proactive social policies embedded in the alien peoples’ legislation.
The “History” section explicates the positionality of historical actors and the historians writing about them – not least through the special flash interviews with the authors published as postscripts to their articles. Habib Saçmalı revisits the remarkable story of the near collapse of Safavid Iran after 1722, as most of its territory was divided by powerful neighbors, only to be resurrected by 1735 in its previous borders under the rule of the victorious Nader Shah. The conventional narrative ascribes the main role in this dramatic resurrection to the military genius of Nader Shah, but a closer reading of the actions and intentions of the main parties involved produces a more fascinating picture. The restoration of Iran’s sovereignty owed much to the asymmetrical relations between the mighty Ottoman Empire and the Russian Tsardom struggling to substantiate its claim for the imperial status. Peter I hastened to take advantage of the Iranian crisis in 1722 to boost his reputation in Europe, striking a deal with the Sublime Porte about dividing Iranian territories between the two powers. However, while the Ottoman army successfully and rapidly occupied the agreed-upon zone of control, Russian forces struggled to move beyond several footholds on the Caspian coast. Instead of demonstrating imperial grandeur on the cheap, Russia revealed its weakness compared to Ottoman military efficiency. Peter I’s successors opted to exploit this weakness and make the most of abandoning his adventurist foreign policy. The inevitable retreat from Iran was presented as a voluntary decolonization of sorts, conditioned by Iranian leaders’ success in expelling the Ottoman forces. This policy infuriated and demoralized Istanbul, not just because of the covert military aid provided by the Russian army to Iranians, but primarily because Russian retreat delegitimized the Ottoman occupation in the name of securing Iran from other foreign intruders. Unable to match the Ottoman Empire in its imperialist policy, the Russian government succeeded in achieving parity with the Porte by evacuating its expeditionary force from Iran. This voluntary “decolonization” better served the imperial ambitions and imperialist designs of the Russian rulers than did Peter I’s unsubstantiated expansionism. Only a reconstruction of their historical positionality fully explains the sharp turn in the Russian diplomatic course.
The article coauthored by David Chioni Moore and Taryn M. Valley can be characterized as a masterclass in historical positionality dealing with diversity. They write about two groups of Americans traveling across the Soviet Union in 1932, leaving diametrically opposite accounts of what they saw – essentially, these are primary sources produced by observers that would traditionally have been placed in the same category as left-leaning Americans of approximately the same age. One group included the Black American poet Langston Hughes. He was invited to the USSR by the Soviet authorities, who organized his guided tour, which included Central Asian republics officially barred to foreigners. The other group consisted of two upper-middle-class young white women, Alva Christensen and Mary de Give, who managed to enter the USSR in their automobile and, after reaching Moscow, travel unsupervised to the South Caucasus via Ukraine. They sold their car in Tbilisi, crossed the Caspian Sea onboard a freight ship, and got all the way to Ashkhabad, where they met Hughes. Christensen and de Give sent their rather acerbic travel accounts to American newspapers and were among the first Westerners to report the horrific famine in Ukraine and the Lower Volga. Hughes also saw much beyond the official façade of the Soviet regime but opted to publicly endorse the USSR, particularly its policies in Central Asia, which he perceived through a racialized lens as a contrast to the Jim Crow American South. How do we account for the differences in reporting on the Soviet Union – both in the sense of explaining these differences and finding a way to frame this explanation in such a way as to conform to our modern sensibilities and political conventions?
Langston Hughes was an African American who appreciated the Soviet regime for what he perceived as its overcoming of racism and was therefore ready to turn a blind eye on the USSR’s shortcomings. Unlike Hughes, Christensen and de Give were upper-tier American citizens with a different benchmark of social normalcy, whose critical view of Soviet life could already have been informed by their class status. However, even in American patriarchal society they were dismissed as women, which probably explains why their publications about the Soviet famine were not taken seriously and they have not been credited for exposing it. How do we rank the two types of historical witnesses: a poor African American man who idealized the USSR and two wealthy white women who had the means to travel the country unsupervised and realistically reported on it?
Moore and Valley avoid this false dilemma informed by methodological nationalism. They painstakingly reconstruct the positionalities of Hughes and the two brave women, in the process clarifying their own positionality as scholars. This is a sine qua non for recovering the subjectivities of their protagonists and thus presenting them as valuable eyewitnesses, regardless of the factual content of their written accounts. The old-school Soviet discipline of study of primary sources (istochnikovedenie) had its main insight in the recognition that there was no such thing as “false historical sources”: there is always an aspect of reality that is adequately registered by the most fantastic account, one just needs to ask the right question regarding that document. It is offensive but also epistemologically futile to ponder the relative credibility of the testimonies by Hughes and Christensen/de Give by comparing their race, gender, sexual orientation, wealth, class, and political views. However, together they are indispensable for reconstructing the positionality of these people, which alone can implicate the historical contexts that were relevant to each of them and thus explain how to read their testimonies – what legitimate questions to ask and which topics to ponder. As a result, rather than negating each other, the accounts by Hughes and Christensen/de Give emerge as important historical sources telling as much about the Soviet Union as about the United States in 1932. Each account has its own blind spots, which are almost as informative as the factual details conveyed, and which can be fully appreciated and interpreted only through comprehensive reconstruction of the authors’ positionality as demonstrated by Moore and Valley.
Positionality reconstruction can go wrong, as discussed in two brief essays, one by Mark Lipovetsky and the other by Anastasia de La Fortelle in the “Newest Mythologies” section. They respond to a recent book Putin’s Dark Ages: Political Neomedievalism and Re-Stalinization in Russia, by the scholar of culture Dina Khapaeva, specificially discussing one of its chapters dedicated to the prose of Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018).^[2] Khapaeva presents Sharov as a subtle promoter of the Putinist agenda in the sphere of culture, specifically in forging a reactionary historical memory. Lipovetsky and de La Fortelle argue that this is a misinterpretation resulting from a biographical fallacy – the interpretation of literary texts as direct equivalents of an author’s personal beliefs and ideas. Essentially, this is an exercise in positionality reconstruction that ignores the complexity of our reality, including its unsystematic diversity, not to mention the autonomous reality of literary texts.
The deduction of one’s positionality from several factors of vital statistics or tax returns has been misleading because these factors are accessed as self-evident against some normative scale. This scale is noncontextual, which means that it ignores the multiplicity of specific circumstances and the observer positions that set specific relative coordinates. The result is an epistemologically violent suppression of historical actors’ subjectivities by imposing some alien criteria of rationality and value judgment instead of recovering the subjectivities of unique individuals. The first step to avoiding this trap is to exercise critical self-positionality by explicating one’s own political, ethical, and academic agenda. The multifaceted social reality cannot be described exhaustively by any single narrative, so its partially accurate reconstruction is inevitable. A critical explanation of the incomplete reconstruction as structured by specific research questions and personal interests makes the text scholarly. An insistence on its exhaustive character in registering reality wie es eigentlich gewesen is typical of ideological texts.