In the 1/2024 issue of Ab Imperio, the editors suggested revisiting unresolved academic conversations from the turn of this century and proposed using these discussions as a springboard to develop new conceptual approaches.^[1] The broadening crisis of the “Concert of Europe” before our eyes brings to mind an early, likely intuitive attempt at “provincializing Europe” by Mark Mazower in his 1998 book Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century.^[2] The book offers many pertinent observations that have stood the test of time. Peculiarly, it is the book’s title that appears most problematic today. The author gave no particular reason for applying the old colonial term “dark continent,” which, at best, suggested Africa’s unexplored nature to Europe. Perhaps, in the context of European self-gratifying optimism of the mid-1990s – after the fall of the Berlin Wall and at the height of European unification momentum – the title was simply meant to épater les bourgeois. Since the book argued Europe’s ultimate failure to resolve the challenges of modernity without America’s help, the term “dark continent” must have been used pejoratively to suggest the former colonial metropole’s own backwardness. Ironically, to be efficient, this approach to “provincializing Europe” requires the objectification of Africa’s inferiority – otherwise the “dark continent” metaphor bears no derogative connotations.
This is a vivid illustration of how inherently flawed the mechanistic decolonial disposition is: it is bound to reproduce structures of hierarchical difference and oppression to deliver on its claim of intellectual or political deconstruction.^[3] This superficial decoloniality, seemingly made obsolete intellectually and politically by the rise of postcolonial theories at the end of the 1990s, was never properly scrutinized analytically, and has recently made a triumphant comeback, displacing more complex forms of social critique. Mazower’s book exposed this disposition implicitly, because it aimed to belittle the intellectual and political capacity of Europeans as the former self-proclaimed beacons of civilization. While well-deserved, this criticism solved none of the fundamental problems of the twentieth century identified in the book, such as the precarity of democracy, the genocidal potential of nationalism, and the threat to human diversity. Despite Mazower’s pragmatic approach to the “geographical conception of Europe and its limits,” throughout the book this abstract geographic notion eventually acquired the familiar connotations of a distinct civilization, and an even more fantastic entity – “Europeans” – came to designate a collective subject.^[4] It is to this essentialized entity that the author addressed his final recommendation to self-censor subjectivity and embrace political marginality: “If Europeans can give up their desperate desire to find a single workable definition of themselves and if they can accept a more modest place in the world, they may come to terms more easily with the diversity and dissension which will be as much their future as their past.”^[5]
It is unclear how this self-belittling would have prevented the new rise of nationalist populism and authoritarianism that we observe today across Europe, or secured “diversity and dissension.” Moreover, it is unclear why the constraints imposed on the former great powers are expected to restrain the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism in formerly peripheral or colonized societies. The reversal of power status and equally mechanistic adjustment of a polity’s scale instead of reinventing subjectivity and worldview have been decoloniality’s master key. Forged by the dream of well-deserved revenge, unfortunately, this instrument has been proved time and again to be analytically incapable and practically inefficient.
What is more interesting is how Mazower’s book highlights the need, still long overdue, for a comprehensive discussion of the former imperial metropoles’ transformatory trajectories in a comparative perspective. This problem goes beyond “Europe” or any other place or social group associated with privilege and domination. For one thing, privilege and domination are not spatially or socially bound but are unevenly and intersectionally distributed across the planes of class, gender, race, religion, and culture. Furthermore, even after losing political power, former metropoles remain centers of financial and cultural capital as driving forces of globalization (something that Mazower discusses under the moniker of “capitalism”). Accordingly, the demise of old imperial metropoles in the wake of decolonization does not necessarily cancel colonial domination but often reframes it as a function of abstract “globalization” with its asymmetrical distribution of resources. In the decolonial logic, fighting this hegemony amounts to undermining globalization and any forms of universalism – not only global economy but also universal knowledge, culture, and ethics. The universal categories of democracy and human rights are also canceled unless they are retooled as “sovereign democracy” and “locally traditional values.” This outcome is inevitable unless a different approach to dismantling the hegemony of former metropole societies is taken.
The post-1905 anti-colonial momentum in late imperial Russia witnessed a different take on “the dark continent.” This is how the Jewish historian and activist Simon Dubnow characterized the area populated by Jews. Unlike other candidates for the status of the colonized, Russia’s Jews were squarely oppressed by the imperial regime as an ethnoreligious group, and were denied the most basic rights such as freedom of movement beyond the ghetto of the Pale of Settlement. Yet, to Dubnow and a broad coalition of Jewish anti-colonial activists, this legal and political discrimination was not the primary condition of their coloniality. They believed it was key for Jewish emancipation to acquire knowledge about the divergent Jewish communities and use it to radically alter the Jewish collective self-positionality:

“We also have before us our own kind of dark continent – “the dark continent” as the English called the interior of Africa – that lies ahead to be explored and illuminated. …
In the area of historical research, the Jews in Russia have greatly lagged behind their Western conationals [soplemennikov]. As a result, the greatest center of the Diaspora after Babylonia and Spain – Poland-Russia – remains the least explored, a “dark continent” in our historiography. I am speaking here of history not so much as an academic discipline, but as a powerful factor in national culture. … After all, we are not calling for a dead science, not for a soporific history, but for one that ... raises self-awareness [samosoznanie], pushes toward active work.”^[6]

This drive toward a radically new collective self-awareness resulted in the launch of several ambitious initiatives including the large-scale ethnographic expedition of 1912–1914 to Right-Bank Ukraine led by Semion Akimovich An-sky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport).^[7] Published in the “Archive” section of this issue of Ab Imperio is Vladimir Levin’s English translation of part of the field diary of one of the An-sky expedition’s participants, Abraham Rechtman (1888 or 1890–1972). This document meticulously records Rechtman’s daily encounters with a broad range of people from all walks of life in the effort to collect Jewish cultural artifacts.
Rhetorically, Rechtman tends to frame his account in the familiar narrative of perpetuated Jewish oppression and deprivation. Implicit to this narrative are assumptions about Jews sharing a common fate rather than national solidarity, and the exodus overseas being the only chance to improve one’s situation. Many episodes seem to support this narrative: Rechtman witnessed the massive emigration from the Pale, including the family of the recently acquitted Mendel Beilis – the victim of the most infamous blood libel – whom he visited in Kyiv. Quite a few Jewish contacts of Rechtman showed no interest in the expedition’s grand cause, and someone even swindled the expedition organizers out of a hefty sum of money. Rechtman himself occasionally practiced methods of artifact collection that were not quite ethical. Yet the familiar rhetoric only partially reflects the reality registered in the diary. If the world of Russian Jewry ever existed as a homogeneous entity, it was already a thing of the past by the time the An-sky expedition set out to document it. At the turn of the twentieth century, novel social skills and arrangements were required to address new economic, political, and cultural challenges – it was not enough to simply have favorable conditions to restore the elusive status quo. Any scenario of Jewish success in modern society – whether staying in the Russian Empire, emigrating to America, or colonizing Palestine – was conditioned by the new self-awareness and active work along the lines suggested by Dubnow and other national activists. The acquittal of Beilis was a case in point – the result of a new type of Jewish public mobilization in coordination with the pan-imperial obshchestvennost’ that proved successful even under the politically repressive regime of the Russian Empire.
For over a century, historians have argued whether the revolutions of 1917 effectively dismantled the structures of Russian imperial hegemony or merely “Sovietized” them. In any case, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 met the main requirements of decolonizers: the former purported “colonies” acquired full sovereignty and the political potential of the Russian Federation as the self-proclaimed heir to the old imperial formation shrank dramatically. And yet these radical measures were apparently insufficient to neutralize the residual hegemonic structures and the ambition to use them – now associated with the cultural sphere more than with military might or economic potential.
The “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue features the forum “The Prospect of Studying World Russian Languages, Literatures, and Histories.” Its goal is to formulate a truly postcolonial approach to dismantling Russia’s hegemonic structures, at least in the cultural sphere. Opening the forum, instead of censoring Russian language and culture and discriminating against their practitioners in post-Soviet countries in response to the Putinist weaponization of the Russian-language sphere and in line with decolonial wisdom, Ilya Gerasimov proposes the liberating act of dissociating this sphere from Russia as a country and from the Russian state. Following the precedent of World Englishes, which recognizes local varieties of English languages as fully autonomous and equal, Gerasimov advances the concept of “World Russians.” Country-specific or differentiated by the type of language contact zone – for example, Ukrainian and Kazakhstani or Turkic and Baltic – these Russian languages are to be claimed by their local speakers as their own. Serving the needs of communication and expressing ideas relevant to their speakers, World Russians can differ in their vocabulary, grammar, and script. Instead of a single center in Moscow, their norms can be rationalized by Belarusian or Kyrgyz (Armenian or Latvian) Institutes of Russian Language. Dissociated from Russia, autonomous World Russians should also detach from ethnic Russianness as languages that, in their own renditions, equally belong to Tatars and Buryats, Mari and Saha, inside and outside the Russian Federation. Fully accommodated to the needs of the host societies yet mutually comprehensible, these languages will boost the proliferation of autonomous Russian-language literatures and divergent literary canons, as they cross-pollinate each other.
This is an example of postcolonial emancipation as a creative act of reclaimed subjectivity. It resolves the seemingly unresolvable dilemma of modernity – namely, the dialectics of universalism and hegemony. In the vast region of Northern Eurasia, Russian still plays the role of lingua franca and is the first or almost native second language to millions of people, who have every right to speak it. The existence of a shared language holds immense cultural and economic value but also carries an imminent threat of privileging the interests of the polity or culture that “owns” this language. The Russian language can be replaced in this capacity by Kipchak Turkic, Chinese, or English – the threat will remain, but its source will change. By disentangling World Russians from the ethnic and political Russianness of the Russian Federation, it becomes possible to preserve a valuable instrument of international communication without making it hostage to political manipulations, especially to national-imperialist aspirations. This example also demonstrates how a former imperial metropole can achieve a postcolonial condition – not through halfheartedly self-imposed restrictions, but by establishing genuine equality with formerly and currently subordinated societies.
Since the precedent of World Englishes is likely unfamiliar to many non-philologists, especially in post-Soviet countries, the forum features the Russian translation of an interview with a specialist in World Englishes, Mario Saraceni of the University of Portsmouth. This is followed by another interview, conducted by Alessandro Achilli, Miriam Finkelstein, Nina Friess, and Marco Puleri with Naomi Caffee. They discuss an alternative approach to disentangling Russian language and culture from ethnic Russianness and Russian statehood using the concept of “Russophonia.” The forum concludes with a Russian translation of the discussion of Sumit Guha’s article “Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World” originally posted on the website of Comparative Studies in Society and History.^[8] The history of languages in the Mughal Empire, the British Raj, and the Ottoman Empire may seem hardly relevant to the problem of the modern Russian language. However, the way that the discussion participants approach their topic – identifying different categories of native speakers, deconstructing language ideologies, and contextualizing various functions of language – is a good example of how the language problem in the post-Soviet region can be conceptualized and studied.
Explicitly or implicitly, this region has routinely been fashioned by historians as a “dark continent,” in either the colonial or very similar decolonial sense – as “the bloodlands” or “the evil empire.” Accordingly, the way to escape the stigma has been to distance oneself from the region by inventing new geographic configurations, historical genealogies, and cultural affinities. Meanwhile, treating the root cause requires the emancipation of everyone’s subjectivity from the hegemonic structures – political, social, and cultural. The plurality of Russian languages serves this goal, as does the plurality of historical narratives as long as they do not cancel each other. The “ABC” section continues the publication of materials in the series “New Curricula for New Histories of Northern Eurasia.” This time, it features Victoria Smolkin’s “Reflections on Teaching Ukraine and Its Histories,” which reminds us that no single narrative can account for a complex society without assuming a hegemonic role and violently censoring anything deemed inappropriate.