Tunnel vision is a defining trait of methodological nationalism, a perspective that insists on the homogeneity of social groups and the teleology of their historical trajectories. The Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim argues that tunnel vision does not precede nationalism – as a political ideology and an episteme – but “follows” it as a device employed by nationalism to sustain the myth of a nation’s nativist legitimacy:

“The most common misunderstanding about nationalism is that it is, by nature, national. In reality, nationalism has been transnational. … Once we broke away from the tunnel vision of methodological nationalism, the transnational and global nature of nationalism appeared more pronounced. The widespread notion that a nation emerges endogenously over the course of domestic historical development was a delusion created by nationalism. Historically, the causal order was the opposite: transnational comparisons among nations were a prerequisite to the nationalist imagination of one’s own peculiarity. Nationalism could not have been formed and understood within the horizons of a single nation. The essentialist notion of national peculiarity was a nationalist mirage constructed only through transnational configuration and comparison.” ^[1]

According to this explanatory model, breaking the tunnel vision that obscures the heterogeneity of collective bodies and their entanglements with other groups suffices to undermine nationalism’s legitimacy and shatter its political hegemony. This is the main thrust 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.”
The Putin regime’s claim to political and cultural hegemony in the post-Soviet space rests on two myths: the homogeneity of the Russian language and the Russian Federation’s supposed monopoly on it. Recently, these myths were legitimized by the constitution. Between 1993 and 2020, the constitution of the Russian Federation defined the Russian language as “the official language of the Russian Federation throughout its territory.”^[2] Following the 2020 referendum, a constitutional amendment was added, defining Russian as “the language of the state-forming people, which is part of the multinational union of equal peoples of the Russian Federation.”^[3] For the first time the language was defined in the constitution in terms of its “ownership” by a national group or in terms of social ontology.
Forum contributors dissociate the Russian-language cultural sphere from the Russian state, as well as from ethnic Russianness. The tunnel vision of a single normative version of Russian controlled from Moscow is challenged by a broad perspective of multiple, fully autonomous Russian languages formed by various language contact zones – with Slavic, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic languages. Speakers of these Russian languages claim them as their legacy, rather than a cultural and political borrowing.
The forum in the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue of Ab Imperio features three essays. Zhanibek Akimbek explores the complex evolution of the Russian language in Kazakhstan by weaving together personal family history with broader sociolinguistic analysis. He traces how Russian transitioned from a tool of Soviet ideological enforcement and social mobility to a contemporary pragmatic instrument of socialization that coexists uneasily with a rising sense of Kazakh national identity. Akimbek registers the ongoing tension between Russian as a window to global information and a perceived existential threat to the native tongue. Interestingly, anecdotal observations of college students suggest a generational shift toward depoliticizing the language. Russian language is increasingly viewed less as a marker of external loyalty and more as a functional, localized medium – a local Kazakhstani Russian characterized by linguistic hybridity and grammatical shifts. If this is a sustained trend, it suggests the possibility of ending the seemingly endless post-Soviet transition – one long defined by historical trauma and resentment – to reach a truly postcolonial state of self-sufficient, hybrid subjectivity.
While thirty-five years of post-Soviet transition may have produced a possibility for depoliticizing language in Kazakhstan, the opposite is true in the Russian Federation. The political process, stalled two decades ago, ended discussions regarding the language question. Dismantling authoritarianism in Russia will unavoidably politicize language, but replacing Russian nationalist tunnel vision with rival nationalist, equally sectarian perspectives will only produce new versions of authoritarianism – just on a smaller scale. As a native speaker of the Izhem-Komi dialect and drawing on his recent life experience in Quebec, in the next essay, Nikolay Vokuev argues against the obsession with linguistic purity. He suggests that rigid standards of “clean” speech function as tools of colonial dominance and social exclusion. Vokuev proposes a shift toward viewing language as a “commons” – a shared resource enriched by hybridity and “xenophony.” He advocates for the pluralization of Russian languages to resist the static, dead norms imposed by the center. Vokuev concludes that embracing “dirty” language and peripheral dialects is essential for cultural dynamism and political decolonization, ensuring that Russian language remains a living tool belonging to a multitude of diverse voices.
Similarly, in his essay, Kevin M. F. Platt argues for a pluricentric understanding of Russian culture that moves beyond rigid, nationalist frameworks and imperial centers. He chronicles his own intellectual shift from viewing Russian-language communities as “peripheral” to recognizing them as autonomous, diverse, and fragmented entities that exist independently of the Russian Federation. By examining the lived experiences of Russian-speaking populations in places like Latvia and Ukraine, Platt demonstrates that the term “Russian” is a historically contingent label rather than a singular, bounded identity. Ultimately, he advocates for a “minor literature” approach that treats all cultural identities as deterritorialized and plural, challenging traditional academic structures to adopt a more decolonial and global perspective.
In historical studies, battling tunnel vision starts with abandoning monocausality, teleology, and the tendency to equate the historical process with a single “chosen” group’s journey. This is a more challenging task than a mere resolution to embrace complexity. Historical writing produces a narrative, and every narrative is subject to the structural patterns Hayden White identified half a century ago. The very basic task of telling a coherent story encourages the focus on a single protagonist and the classical unities of action, time, and place. Conveniently, tunnel vision also validates low-intensity research designs that ignore broader historical and historiographical contexts.
In the “History” section of this issue, Yuki Murata’s article problematizes two monological narratives: the view of the 1917 February Revolution as a Petrograd-centered state reform and the isolationist narrative of the Ukrainian Revolution. Specifically, Murata reexamines the 1917 Ukrainian autonomy agreement as a complex tripartite negotiation involving the Russian Provisional Government, the Ukrainian Central Rada, and local non-Ukrainian municipal bodies. Moving beyond a simple binary interaction between the agglomerated “Ukrainians” and “Russians,” the author compares this settlement to the Habsburg “Ausgleich” (compromise), where the imperial center brokered power-sharing deals to manage ethnic tensions. Local Kyivan elites across various nationalities sought to secure fair representation within a shifting regional hierarchy that eventually positioned Ukrainians as the dominant majority and others as official minorities. By institutionalizing these national categories, the agreement signaled a pivotal transformation of the Russian state into a structured multinational empire. Ultimately, the article highlights how mass politics and wartime administrative shifts necessitated a collaborative, though hierarchical, regional administration to prevent social collapse.
The historiography of the Soviet Union has been the epitome of tunnel vision, starting with the totalitarian school’s fixation on the omnipotent ideological ruling regime and ending with the Soviet subjectivity school’s fixation on the equally homogeneous and pervasive “true Sovietness.” This is a natural response to the Soviet propensity to monologism, be it political authoritarianism or the imposition of ideological orthodoxy. In 2025, a group of Russian historians coordinated by Igor Stas’ put together an edited volume addressing another aspect of Soviet “silo thinking”: the tendency of individual agencies to prioritize their corporate interests over broader social and economic concerns – a practice chastised by Soviet critics as “departmentalism” (vedomstvennost’).^[4] The “History” section features a book forum on this edited volume. This discussion is a major contribution to the critique of methodological nationalism and its protective tunnel vision, on Soviet material. While commending the volume authors for bringing the topic to the fore, the participants also point to the perils of essentializing and exoticizing yet another aspect of Soviet reality by embracing the language of historical sources as the analytical language of modern scholars. They underscore the value of pluricentric and multicontextual approaches to Soviet history.
In the “Newest Mythologies” section, Ilya Vinitsky demonstrates how even a single protagonist’s linear story can shatter tunnel vision by revealing shifting contexts and evolving semantics as the narrative unfolds. His article explores the cultural and political journey of a poetic “meme” originating from Gavrila Derzhavin’s 1794 ode on the capture of Warsaw. A rhetorical flourish – suggesting that Russia needs no allies to conquer the world – was stripped of its original literary context and weaponized by European thinkers like Adam Mickiewicz and Friedrich Engels to frame Russia as a global threat. Vinitsky demonstrates that this single linguistic formula has served as a versatile ideological tool for over two centuries, utilized by Marxists, Cold War anticommunists, and modern critics to analyze the allegedly archetypal conflict between Russian imperial ambitions and the international order.
The fact that a single poetic fragment from a second-tier poem can become a ghost text that shapes the geopolitical imagination across centuries of international conflict can have several explanations. One is the poem’s exceptional artistic power, which seems to be discarded by Vinitsky’s study. Another is a tunnel-vision argument about translatio imperii and the perpetual grand design of Russian imperialism inadvertently exposed by Derzhavin. Finally, there is a third explanation, based on Jie-Hyun Lim’s thesis about tunnel vision as a central device employed by nationalism to cement its legitimacy – specifically, of what he calls “victimhood nationalism”:

“Victimhood nationalism is a narrative template to grant moral superiority and political legitimacy to a present nation of “hereditary victimhood,” which inherited the legacy of ancestral victimhood in history and memory. The nation of hereditary victimhood is thought to be ontologically justified as its national suffering is sublimated into the universal cause of humanity in the global memory space. It requires a perpetrator nation as a matching collective. … The epistemological frame of “negative symbiosis” functions as a chain link, with which victims and perpetrators collectively constitute the global history and memory of victimhood nationalism.”^[5]

From this perspective, the enduring vitality of Derzhavin’s symbol reveals the persistence of “negative symbiosis” and the need for the “perpetrator” figure to legitimize European nationalist projects.
Lim goes out of his way to explain that this model does not negate or belittle the reality of the victim’s trauma in the past. It is the insistence on reproducing the original trauma as a source of collective subjectivity that signals the pragmatic operationalization of the past injustice and hence the systemic reproduction of the injustice situation itself. Everyone could see this mechanism at work in the Russian Federation: insistence on “hereditary victimhood” as the sole characteristic of the USSR/RSFSR’s involvement in World War II consolidated victimhood nationalism, which became the primary driver of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and now borders on Holocaust denial by pushing the discourse of the “genocide of the Soviet people.”