Anti-migrant discourse rarely circulates in the same political context simultaneously with anti-colonial discourse, which allows both to ignore their common background in political and epistemological nativism. This commonality enables cross-referencing; at least in the United States, contemporary anti-immigrant discourse systematically reproduces the rhetoric of anti-colonial liberation.^[1] Still, much more obvious moral and political differences between the anti-migrant and anti-colonial positions overshadow their nativist kinship. Even more important is the asymmetry of their relations to power: it is one thing to attack immigrants whose position is precarious, and a wholly different undertaking to challenge foreign hegemonic authority. The seemingly self-evident moral and emotional contrast between the two types of opposition to population movement and intermixing sidelines the interest in their more fundamental deconstruction.
For a structuralist observer, especially in the context of American identity politics, the distinction based on formally marked social roles might seem sufficient. However, sociological generalizations and systematic labeling in general can describe a phenomenon but not necessarily explain it. From a historian’s vantage point, there is always more than one way to classify empirical reality given the obvious similarities between comparable phenomena. Therefore, social status or function alone are insufficient for their comprehensive assessment, let alone judgment. For example, both the imperial metropole as a source of colonial hegemony and the modern structures of globalization and transnational capitalism are equally responsible for the migration of millions of people to other countries. The obvious political and moral contrast between settler-colonialists and illegal immigrants logically necessitates an equally clear-cut distinction between those abstract structural drivers of migration, for which it seems much more problematic to establish a consensus. Similarly, despite the principled difference between the categories of “settler-colonialists” and “illegal immigrants,” in practice they are represented by people who share too many traits resembling those of typical migrants. They are likely to be desperate and adventurous enough to seek a better life in a foreign land. Their migration does not necessarily have to be driven by a determination to destroy the livelihoods of Indigenous populations, seize their resources, and upend their socioeconomic order and cultural norms. To the contrary, migration might be induced by a vision of their own lives in their homeland that has become completely unbearable because of perceived “land hunger,” poverty, or ill-treatment by the state. Their perception of a host society as one that contains large voids capable of effortlessly accommodating newcomers is egoistically shortsighted but not necessarily sinister. The humanization of individual settlers does not make settler colonialism any more benign; rather, it challenges any simple and direct correlation between human agency and social structures.
Consider ethnically Russian (Rusian), Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, and other peasants from the European provinces of the Russian Empire migrating to Central Asia and the Far East during the late imperial period. This was the human face of settler colonialism that was real, inflicting a truly devastating impact on the Kazakh, Korean, and Chinese communities of the region: displacement, economic ruin, and, in the moment of crisis, ethnic cleansings. In their homeland, those Europan peasants were considered subalterns in economic, social, and cultural terms. They were not some latifundistas grabbing land overseas to set up plantations: these colonialists wanted to till the land themselves and usually did exactly that upon resettlement. Even the imperial regime that promoted settler colonialism did it in pursuing a progressive socioeconomic policy of the “amelioration of the peasant condition.” The imperialist (nationalist colonial) goal of imposing “the Rusian element” on the empire’s outskirts went hand in hand with the populist concern for peasants’ well-being, yet it never overshadowed this concern and did not enjoy the same degree of support in the imperial society.^[2]
At the individual level – and all human experiences are individual – the mass resettlement of European peasants beyond the Urals, which greatly intensified as part of Stolypin reforms, could be perceived as a wave of desperate migrants seeking a better life in a new place. It is the broader political context that made their status radically different from that of the illegal migrants of today: those peasants enjoyed preferential treatment by the imperial authorities in the new place. This is a very important difference that does not negate the fact that the practical power of these authorities was limited and hardly enforceable beyond the discursive and, to a lesser degree, legal spheres. Most conflicts with the hosting society had to be resolved by the colonists themselves, so in many primary sources these desperate subalterns appear as victims of hostile locals or as ruthless perpetrators unleashing indiscriminate force against the real or perceived danger posed by the Indigenous peoples.
Thus, any structuralist generalizations based on mechanical juxtapositions of longtime local residents and uninvited newcomers – without a detailed contextualization of specific circumstances – are uninformative and primarily framed by moralist and simplistic ideological projections. Even the nativist discourse has no stable political meaning: if the source of unjust hegemony is posited outside the local society, this discourse appears emancipatory and progressive, but if the hegemony is domestic, nativism becomes reactionary and oppressive. The distinction is in the eye of the beholder, and the key question is whose “coordinate system” is accepted as normative. Is there a golden rule determining when the position of the longtime local population and its structures of authority should be prioritized and when the new arrivals are the ones on the right side of history?
The point of these notes is not to relativize the evil of settler colonialism or trivialize the plight of migrants and the strain of any mass immigration on the recipient society. On the contrary, our goal is to prevent the selective denial of oppression and human suffering by using the rhetoric of a greater evil: those who are framed by stigmatizing sociological concepts are held to different standards than those who are categorized in terms of natural entitlement. If this mental mapping changes or just alters the roles ascribed to various groups, the entire interpretation of their members’ actions inevitably changes. Essentially, the external commentator’s political stance anticipates and substitutes for scholarly analysis.
It is probably unrealistic to expect any single perspective, however nuanced and balanced, to account for the full complexity of the encounter between the “locals” and the “newcomers.” Likewise, a hypothetical well-rounded verdict should not be the goal of academic analysis. To begin with, it seems essential to register the impact of the general structures of domination, just as the various roles individuals have played within these structures, on their personal encounters and actions. The identification and recording of the expressions of their subjectivity is a priority and the starting point for historical studies of the imperial situation of unsystematic diversity – one that is pluricentric and incommensurate in terms of its criteria of difference. The historical actors’ languages of self-description, both verbal and nonverbal – such as social practices – provide the immediate explanatory framework for their actions and motivations. These languages were not formed in a vacuum: they could be shaped by external pressure and incorporate borrowed rhetoric. Accounting for these complexities is what makes the recovered subjectivities of historical actors truly autonomous from modern-day scholars and their political agendas. Subjectivity becomes postcolonial when it demonstrates the language of self-description communicating a message autonomous from the hegemonic discourse, regardless of the immediate political content of that message.
This is demonstrated by the articles in the “History” section of this issue of Ab Imperio. Egor Antonov and Aleksandr Korobeinikov study the peculiar case of using the same pseudonym “Yakut” for several decades, from the 1880s to the 1910s, by different Sakha (Yakut) intellectuals. Collectively, they strategically pursued the same goal of formulating and asserting their political voice against imperial authority and settler colonialism. They responded to the discourses advanced by Russian pan-imperial educated society (obshchestvennost’) and imperial administrators, using their legal concepts and ethnographic categories. By doing so, the collective “Yakut” was still able to formulate an alternative interpretation of reality and a consistent narrative of self-description and self-representation of Sakha. Thus, Sakha intellectuals emerged as co-constructors of imperial discourses, able to authoritatively reshape the conceptual boundaries of the imperial society from a position of unequal, but active, participation.
The article coauthored by Ivan Sablin and Irina Sodnomova examines the formation of the Buryat modern national project during the Russian Empire’s transformative crisis of 1906–1907 through public discussions and political self-organization. While the previous article reconstructs the consolidated position of the collective “Yakut,” Sablin and Sodnomova differentiate several distinctive factions among Buryat national activists. Different groups articulated their interests through self-description, self-organization, and representation using the relative liberalization of the press and the emergence of the imperial parliament – the State Duma. They disagreed on the best form of self-governance, ranging from restoring traditional steppe councils (dumas) to introducing all-imperial local government institutions (zemstvos). Of central importance were internal discussions over the foundations of the Buryat community, particularly debating the role of Buddhism and Mongolian script in national consolidation. Thus, one can speak of the plurality and diversity of postcolonial subjectivities. Politically, they can be branded as more or less radical, engaging with different ideological and legal concepts. However, epistemologically they were equally original and autonomous, using the available social languages to articulate and communicate the interests of particular communities in specific circumstances.
The “Archive” section continues this analysis by focusing on the opposite party during the same period – the imperial and increasingly colonial state. Specifically, the section’s materials reconstruct attempts to rationalize the imperial peasant resettlement policies that framed the phenomenon of settler colonialism. Surprisingly, explicit plans of this sort, detailing the political implications of resettlement, are virtually nonexistent for the period before the Great Reforms, aside from existing legislation and departmental instructions. Based on his extensive research on the Russian imperial colonization of “borderlands,” Willard Sunderland staged a thought experiment. To visualize the real but unsystematized Russian colonization ideology of the 1840s, he synthesized a historical document – a fictitious guide to colonization management written by the imagined bureaucrat Andrei Ivanovich Korotich. Focused on peasant resettlement as a bureaucratic tool for rationalizing the relationship between land and people, this invented “Russian Guide to Colonization Management” highlights the chaos, corruption, and “unauthorized” movement of state peasants. Sunderland exposes the limitations of applying settler colonialism models based on clear binaries and homogenizing the “colonial mind” as suggested by settler colonial theorists. The complex and historically evolving semantics of settler colonization in the imperial context renders those binaries uninformative – whether these are empire versus subject or resettlement versus the state.
Sunderland’s reconstruction of the era’s governmentality, as represented by Nicholas I’s legislation and numerous instructions, is published alongside a real analytical memo on the agrarian question and resettlement policy penned in 1907 by the longtime colonization expert Fyodor Umnov. The memo challenges existing historical narratives regarding the Stolypin reforms and the colonization of the Steppe Region. Umnov, drawing on his practical experience, advocated for following the established legal norms for land allocation and implicitly objected to the hierarchy of national groups embedded in Stolypin’s colonization policy. He proposed a radical, systemic reform of land-use standards across the entire Empire, advocating for new, rational methods of land assessment. The goal of his memo was to ensure equitable and economically advantageous allotments for both European peasant settlers and local pastoralist populations, including the Kazakhs and Kalmyks. While not discarding the resettlement program in principle, as a colonization official, Umnov aimed at a complete overhaul of land distribution standards. He called for treating the Indigenous peoples not merely as subjects occupying territory to be opened up for resettlement, but as equal stakeholders whose reliance on pastoralism must be factored into the new, universally equitable land norms.
In his introduction to this archival publication, Alexander Semyonov argues that the document’s legal and “managerial” focus does not fit the technocratic or settler-colonial interpretations of colonization that prevail in modern historiography. He also points to the deliberate archaism of Umnov’s prose, which employed the clearly outdated discourse of imperial particularism to resist the rising nation-centric political language of the post-1905 era. This careful reconstruction of Umnov’s positionality underscores the substantial gap between the sociologically prescribed collective identity and the actual subjectivity of historical actors. There is a semantic and political tension between Umnov’s institutional role as an agent of settler colonialism and his conscious efforts to redefine the established structures of hegemony, which were fraught with discrimination and oppression. Without embracing nativism of either type and still accepting economic migration as an inevitable reality, Umnov potentially upends settler colonialism by refusing to mentally divide the space of empire into the metropole and periphery and embrace the hegemonic and homogenizing projection of Rusian peasants as a collective subject of resettlement.
This strategic differentiation between structures of domination and the globalizing and universalizing phenomena overlapping with these structures lies at the core of the continuing forum “The Prospect of Studying World Russian Languages, Literatures, and Histories.” It was launched in issue 2/2025 with a suggestion to use the precedent of the World Englishes approach, which recognizes local varieties of English languages as fully autonomous and equal, to reconceptualize Russian language as “World Russians.” In the situation of the Putin regime’s weaponization of Russian culture and the symmetrical response of many post-Soviet countries, which was to cancel the Russian language, this approach challenges traditional, nation-centered views of language, advocating for a postcolonial and denationalized understanding of the evolution and function of languages. This is a truly liberating act, dissociating the Russian-language cultural sphere from Russia as a country and its state, as well as from ethnic Russianness. Country-specific or differentiated by the type of language contact zone – for example, Ukrainian and Kazakhstani or Turkic and Baltic – the fully autonomous 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 vocabulary, grammar, and script. Without resorting to the nativist isolationism and exceptionalism promoted by both the Putinist regime and its fierce opponents in other countries, this is a postcolonial way of undermining structures of hegemony while preserving ties of transnational communication and cultural universalism.
The forum continues in this issue of Ab Imperio in the “Methodology and Theory” section, which features an interview with Eleonora Suleimenova, a prominent researcher on multilingualism in Kazakhstan. The interview examines the historical and contemporary status of the Russian language in Kazakhstan, with a particular focus on its shift from being the dominant “second native language” during the Soviet era to potentially evolving into a distinct “Kazakh Russian” variant. Based on the example of her family history, Suleimenova traces the history of Russian-language penetration into Kazakh society. Resonating with the materials in the “History” and “Archive” sections, in the interview, she details the linguistic and demographic impacts of colonization and Soviet policies, including forced collectivization and internal migration, which led to a massive language shift toward Russian among urban Kazakhs. She argues that the Russian language in Kazakhstan is undergoing a process of diversification and detachment from Russianness that exhibits unique lexical and usage features influenced by the Kazakh language, while the contemporary political landscape increasingly prioritizes Kazakh as the state language and promotes trilingualism.
This interview is followed by Mykhailo Minakov’s article discussing Ukraine’s institutional innovation – the office of the state language commissioner established in 2019. Minakov frames his analysis by the concept of post-transition society – suggesting that the prolonged postsocialist and post-Soviet transition had concluded quite some time ago. Accordingly, institutional innovations such as the state language commissioner represent not temporary crisis responses but permanent features of emerging governance structures that transcend traditional categories of authoritarianism and democracy. Minakov argues that post-transition states address institutional weaknesses by deploying intensive identity-management mechanisms that subordinate individual communicative rights to collective symbolic protection. Accordingly, transnational cultural phenomena, such as Russophonia, undergo systematic reconceptualization from flexible communicative practices into securitized categories governed by bureaucracy and law. It seems logical to discuss the dynamic reconstructed by Minakov in terms of resurgent nationalism and triumphant nativism. Therefore, even if one agrees with his diagnosis of the post-transition – post-post-Soviet – state as a fait accompli, this is hardly a substantially postcolonial state yet.
Thus, the burning political problems of our day are intrinsically entangled with the discussions initiated more than a century ago and the efforts of modern historians to find a new language to discuss them. Alfred Rieber (1931–2025) was part of the cohort of scholars who started this historical work. Uniquely for the Cold War period, Rieber was able to sidestep the dichotomy within US historiography between the totalitarian and revisionist schools. Critiquing the “teleological-dualist orthodoxies,” he provided lasting contributions to social and state history in the imperial period, particularly after the Great Reforms.^[3] Going against the grain of the “high social sciences moment” of the twentieth century, Rieber was cognizant of the role of the analytical language. He anticipated that his concept of “the sedimentary society” might become “highly effective in dramatically shifting perspective.”^[4] Indeed, this capacious analytical model proved fruitful for conceptualizing diversity in the entangled space of Northern Eurasia.
This issue of Ab Imperio pays tribute to Rieber not only as an editorial board member of the journal since its foundation but also as a prominent scholar who showed the way to sustained critical thinking about the past despite the growing entrenchment of ideological and identitarian positions. In his memorialization, Vsevolod Bashkuev shares his perspective on Rieber having been his former student at the Central European University; Ronald Grigor Suny pays tribute to Rieber as a junior member of the same cohort of US academics.
The arc of the conversation about acquiring postcolonial subjectivity continues in the “Book Reviews” section of this issue and will reemerge in the next issue (4/2025), which is already in preparation.