In his classical work of 1983, Ernst Gellner wrote that nationalism as a political doctrine presupposes the congruence of political and ethnic boundaries.^[1] Apparently, the imperial management of administrative-territorial space makes such congruence practically impossible in an empire and the project of empire-wide nation-building based on cultural and linguistic uniformity has always shown itself to be a utopian endeavor. Such congruence is unlikely to be found in the historical experience of non-dominant nationalities whose nation-building projects appear in this sense essentially similar to the nation-building projects of the dominant nationality, i.e. they all represent an attempt to straightjacket the palimpsestic layers of historical experiences and the complex texture of social, economic, and cultural relations in order to fit them into the imagined and clear cut social and territorial “body” of a nation-in-the-making. It is legitimate, however, to ponder if the problem of boundaries and frontiers in heterogeneous imperial societies can be reduced to the given and legally stipulated boundaries of territorial and estate units? Should scholars exclusively concentrate on historically evolving mental projections that strove to establish borders around political, social, and cultural spaces or should they take into account the experience of individuals and social groups who actually stumbled over the delimitation lines and border checkpoints? A dynamically developing society transgresses the old and creates new dividing lines quite independently of governmental regulations. Very often, these lines are observable only during “border crossings.”
Ab Imperio devotes the second issue of 2003 to the exploration of external borders in imperial society, one aspect of the 2003 annual theme investigating problems of frontiers and zones of liminality in the history of the Russian empire and Soviet Union. Editors and contributors to the present issue aspire to use border crossings to discover and verify the external borders of imperial society and to grasp the specificity of that society as it revealed therein. The present issues’ materials focus specifically on the function of frontiers and boundaries as indicators of the state of affairs and “assets” for the further development of society writ large. A “frontier” research perspective allows the discovery of new dimensions in the history of states and societies and overcomes the shortcomings of nation- and ethnocentric narratives:

Border is the zone of accelerated semiotic processes, which are more intense on the periphery of the civilized world and from where they stream to the core structures and depose them.^[2]

This issue explores political and economic migrations, and exile and emigration – “border crossings” that are perhaps more pronounced and more common than other examples. The history of migration, exile, and deportations has gained momentum with the rise of history “from below.” Traditional political history or the history of high culture traditionally overlooked the historical experiences of migration. The discovery of history of migration, exile, and displacement made these histories a source of methodological innovations in the context of post-modern critique of historically formed dominant narratives, with the help of which the obscure figure of migrant and refugee became a key for understanding the dynamics of modern society. The history of population movement in Western historiography is linked with the central problem of social and political history of the Modern Era – the migration of populations from former colonies to the Western metropoles. The noticeable presence of former colonial subjects in the centers of Western Europe’s dismantled empires, whose historical experience is usually rendered as classical nation-building, makes it necessary to reconsider the history of Western European national formation in a hitherto ignored imperial context, presenting itself as a pre-history of globalization, a phenomenon more familiar to the modern eye. At the same time, the history of population movement is at the center of debates on modern nationalism, to which scholars attribute an overlapping of categories of citizenship, ethnicity, and race. Migration history’s centrality to modern history is attested by American sociological studies of assimilation and acculturation, and European studies of the modern state’s regimes for identifying citizens via connections with nation-state boundaries.
The “Theory and Methodology” section of the present issue includes articles that reflect the dynamics of migration studies in a pan-European context. The article by Robert Williams, an expert on Russian history, focuses on the problem of political emigrations in Modern Europe. Williams ponders why the history of political emigrations was forced out of European master narratives and relegated to the status of a “lost subject.” Williams’ critique is implicitly directed against the teleology of historical thought focused on the residues of historical progress. On a different level, Gerard Noiriel turns to the problem of social representation of migrants and to a larger question of the role of migrants in the formation of modern interventionist and social welfare state, whose emergence is conditioned by the alleged necessity to protect the nation’s social “body,” noting the acute political interest in migrant issues in contemporary French society. Noiriel demonstrates the practices with which such a state draws its own social and political borders by introducing regimes of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, Rainer Ohliger suggests that pan-European history should be reconceived from the perspective of migration history, using American models of migration history as a point of departure. This approach allows Ohliger to eschew the perception of European history as a sum of histories of separate nations and states. Ohliger’s suggestion seems to lay out a viable framework for the comparative study of migrations that appears to be free of the normative presumption of the nation-state as the only historically potent agent.
Articles in the historical section focus on migration, exile, and emigration in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. They explore processes of the drawing, construction, displacement, and maintenance of boundaries that were historically aimed at mapping the outer limits and pioneering frontiers or excluding “alien” groups from a circumscribed territory. The authors problematize the overlapping of external and internal, mental and materialized borders of nation and empire. They highlight the ambiguous role of migrations – historically referred to as colonizations or resettlements – in the history of the Russian empire. Willard Sunderland’s article opens the historical section by problematizing all aforementioned processes and setting forth the heuristic task of using migration history as an experimental laboratory for the study of the imperial past. Sunderland demonstrates that the process of peasant mass movements bring contemporary discussions the problem of delineating the boundary between the imperial core and periphery, defining of the cultural mission of the Russian element and state policy on the imperial periphery, and the question of peasants’ awareness of and partaking in the imperial project of acculturation or the national project of nationalization of peripheral regions to the fore. Examining the process and perception of colonization as a “border crossing” situation, Sunderland contributes to the debate on the relationship between the imperial and national (Russian) dimensions in the history of the Russian empire. By demonstrating that the national prerogatives came to dominate the perception of colonization while observing that the imperialistic (i.e. colonial) discourse remained rather unarticulated, the author reaches a paradoxical conclusion – the Russian empire was an “empire without imperialism.”
Another contributor, Andrew Gentes, explores the overlapping of two borderland loci on the basis of his research of women and sexuality in Sakhalin’s forced labor settlement. Overcoming the widespread tendency toward a simplistic interpretation of M. Foucault, Gentes demonstrates how mechanisms of social self-organization grappled with tripartite geographic, legal, and gender alienation empowered the most marginalized group of Sakhalin settlers with influence, albeit an influence limited to local proximity. This case appears to be a graphic illustration of Lotman’s thesis on the transformation of a periphery into a powerful agent, capable of exercising influence over the “center.”
The lack of mechanisms of social and political delimitation of national borders – visibly present in Western Europe’s nation-states – and the all-too-often forced incorporation of new territories into the Russian empire led, on the one hand, to the exodus of whole nationalities from the empire (the case scrutinized by D. Cuthel) and, on the other hand, to the imperial center’s neglect of such population transfers. Paradoxically enough, the deportations of several Caucasian nationalities from the territory of the empire followed a relatively free border crossing regime among members of the Muslim elite of the Crimea and Caucasus. In the context of “top-down” modernization in the neighboring Ottoman empire and its transformation into a nation-state in the 1920s, the memory of the Caucasian and Crimean origins of a significant portion of Turkish republic’s population were obliterated. This important and neglected historical experience illustrates the necessity of devising an approach free of the limitations of nation-centered historical teleology in order to explore the history of borders and border crossings in the region dominated by continental empires – Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman. It is evident that historians’ understanding of the complex and often imperial pre-history of modern nation-states cannot be achieved without a historical archeology of borders and frontiers.
Tat’iana Teterevleva’s article continues the exploration of the phenomenon of border crossings on the basis of the history of Russian and early Soviet policy (across the 1917 divide) toward their “body politic.” This takes on a literal meaning in the context of state controlled population movements across borders.
A separate cluster of materials focus on the history of emigration in the 1920s and 1930s – the most intense border crossing experience from both a territorial and chronological point of view. The situation of emigration has led people to reflect on the imperial past and troubled present, and brought about divisions among the émigrés on the basis of their attitude to the “national” past (Wim Coudenys). It also conditioned an interest in various kinds of mental experiments, one of most interesting of which is the Eurasianist project. Eurasianists remapped the geographical and cultural space of Russia in a retrospective manner, making it compatible with Gellner’s formula and enabling it to serve as a point of departure for a new imperial nationalist project (M. Bassin). Thus, the history of 20th century political migrations turns out to be an alternative laboratory of modernity, whose relative freedom and cross-fertilization of national traditions allowed an intense production of political and social concepts of modernity.
Ab Imperio’s annual theme of “Imperial Borders and Liminalities” conveys a special significance to the intellectual history of Russian emigration in a European context – the history of the creation of boundaries by a group of people who found themselves outside of own country and at the same time in host countries experiencing the redrawing of boundaries in national academia and intellectual traditions (Alexander Dmitriev and Sergei Glebov). The very fact of the collapse of the Russian empire occurred not only along social but also along national and ethnic lines has lead to different interpretations that have already been the subjects of other publications in Ab Imperio. The archival section of the present issue returns to the history of the Eurasianist movement, which was the richest reaction to revolutionary transformations of Russia and changes of symbolic boundaries on the mental map of interwar Europe.
Finally, the editors specifically draw the reader’s attention to the “ABC of Empire and Nationalism Studies” section that focuses on Ukrainian historiography (to put it more adequately – historiographies) within the journal’s continuing The State of Art in History Writing on Empire and Nation Project. Contributors to the forum explore the problem of the “borderland” position of Ukraine as a trope of Ukrainian political and historical thought, which appears to be highly relevant in post-Soviet debates on the changes of symbolic boundaries on the mental map of Europe and in respect to independent Ukraine’s relations with neighbors that share the historical experience of empire. Articles in the forum also enter into dialogue with other publications in the present issue, namely on the basis of the discussion of intellectual production in emigration as they analyze the development of Ukrainian historiography among the Ukrainian diaspora in North America and the impact of that historiography on post-Soviet history writing in Ukraine.