Geoffrey HOSKING

Von Hagen’s paper is erudite, lively and innovative. It clearly delineates controversies and attempts to show how contemporary scholarship is moving beyond them in new directions. All the same, I have my doubts about whether his “anti-paradigm” has much tangible content. There is no question that the concept of “Eurasia” is a provocative one, which enables us to take on board ideas analogous to those suggested by Edward Said, and to apply them to the whole former Soviet space, indeed more widely.
Unlike the Russia/Orient or the “modernisation” paradigms, however, the Eurasian one does not actually suggest models of society in a way that enables us to ask fruitful questions. If some journals are now using the term “Eurasia”, that is often because they need a term to replace the defunct Soviet Union, not because it actually suggests a new paradigm. “Eurasia” is a geopolitical concept, and it makes sense in terms of the rather abstract geo-political models of thinkers like McKinder and Haushofer, developed in the 1990s by Dugin and Panarin. There is no “Eurasian” model of society, the economy or culture. The Eurasianists of the 1920s and 1930s were in favour of authoritarian politics, but offered few practical suggestions about how it should work. In their views on culture and religion there was a contradiction: they extolled the religious tolerance and syncretism of the Mongols, but most of them professed Orthodoxy in a manner which did not suggest tolerance. They had particular difficulty in coping with Islam, which in theory they should have favoured.
Perhaps, though, the idea of Eurasia could be expanded to enable us to tackle what I believe to be one of the great unsolved problems facing historians of Russia/the USSR. That is the question of how social cohesion was generated. After all, we have before us the remarkable story of an empire which persisted in one form or another for four centuries or more – far longer than the British Empire in either of its hypostases – despite having a very difficult climate and minimal access to the world’s oceans. Its resources, of course, were abundant but they were very difficult to mobilise. Some effective model of social cohesion must have been at work to enable this empire to survive for so long.
In my Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 I explored the consequences of Russia becoming an empire rather than a nation. It could be argued that I gave too much attention to what Russia was not rather than to what it actually was. I tried to redress the balance somewhat in Russia and the Russians, which locates the sources of Russian social solidarity in (i) a strong state, with a powerful and effective symbolism, and (ii) strong local communities, organised on the basis of krugovaia poruka (joint responsibility). Mediation between them was conducted not by institutions on the basis of law, but rather by influential individuals on the basis of their capacity to exercise power and provide benefits for their subordinates. For some two and a half centuries one aspect of this system was known as “serfdom”; in recent years we have been learning more about serfdom as part of a political, social and economic system which provided benefits for its members as well as exacting burdens from them. We have also seen how aspects of it were reproduced in the Soviet system.
Such a system made it easy for the authorities to extract resources from local communities, notably taxes and recruits. Because the members of such communities were highly inter-dependent, it also encouraged close mutual observation and the denunciation of the lazy, improvident or eccentric. But all the same krugovaia poruka also provided appreciable benefits for the members of those communities: sociability, grass roots input into local decision-making, mutual aid at times of need (pomochi). Such a system also made it relatively easy to absorb non-Russian peoples, most of whom had some version of joint responsibility already, which could easily be plugged into the hierarchical network which was the Russian Empire.
Joint responsibility is far from being peculiar to Russia. In one form or another it was common in most European societies in the middle ages, where it was integrated into the socio-economic constellation we usually call feudalism, that is to say, a relatively decentralised system. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth century it gradually dissolved, in different ways in the various European countries.^[1] In China joint responsibility fitted into a more centralised and bureaucratic structure. In the li-chia system one hundred and ten households formed an administrative unit, broken down into sub-units of ten, jointly responsible for taxes, corvee and mutual agricultural assistance. Members of these units also supervised one another, and reported to the authorities on any untoward behaviour.^[2]
Krugovaia poruka deeply affected people’s attitudes to property, law, authority, the economy and personal morality. In Russia the basic concept was pravda, which means not only truth, but also justice, morality, God’s law, whatever is “right”. All decisions of a village community had to be taken in the light of its members” interdependence and the relative closeness of the margin of subsistence. The community was seen as permanently threatened by invasion, fire, flood, famine, disease and conflict between or within households, any of which could precipitate disaster. These factors dictated a severe personal moral code, submission to authority, a sense of property as shared and of the economy as a means to survival.
These beliefs and practices, which underpinned Russia’s imperial structure over the centuries, have left strong traces today. They underlie, for example, the fierce debates in the State Duma over whether land should become private property.
My remarks are not meant as a criticism of von Hagen’s think-paper. On the contrary, he himself called “Eurasia” an anti-paradigm rather than a paradigm. I am accepting his challenge to use that anti-paradigm as a jumping-off point for posing new questions. The most obvious and immediate one is: how does the socio-economic ethic I have outlined adjust – or not adjust – to the pressures of the global economy?

Martin W. LEWIS

The spatial categories through which history is investigated have emerged as a focal point of scholarly inquiry in recent years. Although national histories still predominate, alternative regional formations are being increasingly embraced by innovative scholars. At the same time, the so-called crisis of area studies has encouraged a rethinking of the supra-national agglomerations (South Asia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and so on) that have organized international scholarly inquiry since the end of the Second World War. Nowhere are such trends more pronounced than in the former Soviet Union and its one-time sphere of influence. As the USSR and its system of associated states vanished, scholars had no option but to reconceptualize this part of the world.
As Mark von Hagen deftly demonstrates, the initial results of such rethinking have been highly promising. A number of ground-breaking works, in a variety of historical subdisciplines and focusing on a large array of places, have emerged in “post-Soviet studies” over the past decade and a half. By eschewing the paradigms (or “metanarratives”) that formerly gave intellectual coherence to accounts of the Russian/Soviet past, such studies stake out new conceptual grounds in historical as well as geographical analysis. This new turn, argues von Hagen, is best represented by the term “Eurasia.”
While one can only applaud the opening of a Eurasian conceptual space as well as the post-paradigmatic turn, I am not convinced that “Eurasia” is the most appropriate label. As a blankly geographical category, “Eurasia” remains open to metanarrative inscription, as von Hagen himself clearly shows. I would suggest that the conceptual glue connecting studies examined by von Hagen is rather that of geography itself. (By “geography” I refer to the entire spatial dimension of human history, rather than narrow concerns with the physical landscape.) Von Hagen’s conceptualization of Eurasian history is profoundly geographical, offering a fresh and powerful understanding of the region’s development. Similar arguments, moreover, can be made in regard to Haupt’s examination of European comparative studies. In the remainder of this I response, I will outline some of the signal elements of the richly geographical approach of these authors, contrasting them with the anemic geography often found in the more conservative forms of history.
In a trivial sense, all history is necessarily geographical, inasmuch as it focuses on particular places. But most conventional history has relied on unexamined spatial categories, typically portraying political territories as uniform stages on which national dramas are enacted. In the deeply geographical history entailed by von Hagen’s approach, on the other hand, investigations of both differences and connections among places inform the larger stories, while key geographical concepts propel the analysis.
The first requirement of a geographically rich history is that it question how basic spatial categories are defined and bounded, exposing in the process the ideological baggage that toponyms may carry. In naпvely geographical accounts, such metageographically constructed categories as “Asia” and “the Orient” – like Europe and the Occident – are treated as timeless entities, unproblematic reflections of the physical landscape that mold the flow human history. In geographically sophisticated accounts, to the contrary, all such constructs are examined critically, historically, and contextually. Such an approach, evident in Haupt’s discussion of Europe and in von Hagen’s investigation of a variety of spatial labels, helps dissolve the ideological concretions that have long encumbered all stand-by spatial containers of historical development.
Comparative analysis demands a geographical framework, as it is specific places that must be compared. In most attempts, the typical unit of contrast remains at the level of the national state. Such a tactic is indeed often appropriate – but not always. Scale is often problematic; in comparing, for example, France to Russia, one must jump an order of magnitude in spatial extent. (World historians are thus careful not to juxtapose England to China in studies of proto-industrialization, for example, but rather to compare England to such a place as the greater Yangtze Delta.^[3]) For large areas, moreover, the common but never warranted assumption of spatial uniformity often thwarts analysis. But by carefully weighing scale when considering units of analysis, such problems can be avoided, as Haupt nicely demonstrates in his discussion of sub-national comparative case studies.
Perhaps the most salient feature of geographically complex history is the significance that it accords to sub-national regions. In conventional national history, regions located at some remove from the centers of political and economic power are accorded subsidiary roles at best, especially when their lines of development run at odds with those of the national core. The implicit geographical model is that of the core-periphery structure. National cores tend to be regarded as the sites of noteworthy events and the focal points of key historical processes, while peripheries tend to emerge only through their subordinate relationships with such cores. Geographically complex history, on the other hand, acknowledges the utility of the core-periphery model but deploys it in a much more subtle manner. Certain so-called peripheries, for example, may act as secondary cores interacting autonomously with important places both within and outside of the state in which they are situated. As a result, geographically aware historians often highlight regional studies, both to show how broader processes play out at a local scale and to reveal how national narratives often fail in specific places. Von Hagen’s essay in particular is shot through with illustrative examples of such regionally attuned scholarship.
The study of ethnic diversity is inseparable from that of regionalism. Geographically simple histories typically portray “minority nationalities” either as remnants of the past or as encapsulated societies that may occupy their own territories but that play insignificant roles in larger historical dramas. In the geographical complex history advocated by von Hagen, such peoples and their lands are granted significance in their own right, with their histories of interaction with other peoples and with state institutions emerging as critical issues. Here we find fascinating stories of ethnogenesis, ethnic exchange, ethnic merging, and ethnic disappearances – all of which by necessity play out in particular places and within specific geographical contexts.
Diasporas generate especially intricate spatial patterns of ethnic affiliation. As such, they tend to be lost to the more geographically myopic forms of history. Even in mapping exercises, such communities often disappear because they cannot be unambiguously assigned to discrete territories. Intricate cartography, however, can reveal the geographical dimensions of dispersed communities; in their own neighborhoods, diasporic peoples are not outsiders. But more to the point, geographically cognizant historians such as von Hagen are drawn to diasporas precisely because of such societies’ geographical role, their linking together of different places and their mediating between disparate peoples. Dealing seriously with diasporas forces one to think simultaneously in terms of networks (connections among places) and of regions (differences among places), tying together the two main dimensions of geographical analysis.
The issues discussed above by no means exhaust the repertoire of geographical concepts adroitly employed in the papers under consideration. Frontiers, for example, emerge in von Hagen’s paper as distinct and often dynamic regions in their own right, rather than as the mere outer limits of detached realms. Geopolitics, both conceptual and practical, also comes to the forefront of the post-paradigmatic approach. Here terms such as “empire” return to the table, as the spatial forms of different kinds of polities both reflect their underlying political structures and influence their further development. The ecological and demographic issues stressed by von Hagen, moreover, also call for geographically aware methods of investigation.
One additional avenue for geographically informed history that the authors might want to consider exploring is that of alternative, non-congruent regionalization schemes. While Eurasia makes a handy spatial category, it is hardly the only one apposite to the general area. Significant parts of the region are encompassed in the Black Sea world, a realm elegantly limned by Charles King,^[4] while other areas fit well into Robert Canfield’s Turko-Persia.^[5] Finally, I would hope for more engagement with the admittedly thin English-language literature on Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian geography. In addition to the cited works of Mark Bassin, the authors might also want to examine the writings of such geographers as Gail Fondahl,^[6] Robert Kaiser,^[7] and Ronald Wixman,^[8] as well as those in the journal Eurasian Economics and Geography.

Mark BASSIN

TRISTES TOPONYMIES: THE PROBLEM WITH EURASIA

Over the past decade the curious toponym Eurasia has enjoyed a rather spectacular trajectory. From its obscure early life in the eccentric geopolitical and geo-historical musings of a White-Russian йmigrй political movement – which dissipated well before the onset of the Second World War and whose manifestos remained unknown archival curiosities until the early 1990s – it has become something of an international fashion. Its conceptual and ideological elasticity, along with its utterly non-Soviet resonances, have made it a ubiquitous term of reference in public political discourses across the former Soviet Union. Along with this, and for not entirely different reasons, the term has been embraced by American academics as well. As Mark Von Hagen’s comments indicate, it offers a powerful appeal on an intellectual-analytical level as a sort of conceptual platform for the reexamination and rethinking of what might loosely be called the Russian experience. Beyond this, the term has demonstrated its positive utility for the more quotidian concerns of university and research administration, which found itself confronted after the demise of the USSR with a terminological crisis of existential dimensions. Without a Soviet Union, after all, “Soviet Studies” could no longer realistically call itself that, and some sort of new geographical designation had to be found. In the event, “Eurasia” seems to provide the most effective option, preferable to all alternatives, including even “Russian Studies” itself. The reasons for the latter preference are admittedly complex, but we may be forgiven for assuming that they have something to do with a mundane desire on the part of academic administrators to minimize organizational disruption by retaining as intact as possible under the new rubric the corpus what used to be called Soviet Studies. Avoiding a messy rethink as to where exactly Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Far East, and indeed Ukraine might be re-allocated in the area studies scheme of things, that is to say, “Eurasia” offers an apparently elegant solution.
But is it really so elegant? Despite what the clear and satisfyingly precise lines on a map seem to tell us, geographical regions are in fact notoriously ambiguous animals. We have long had to deal with this problem in such slippery geographical concepts such as “Eastern Europe,” and it would surely be futile to expect that any new regional terminology we might deploy now is going to be free from it. To the extent that we need to operate with these macro-geographical concepts – and we most certainly do, not only for administrative purposes – then we will have to learn to live with the ambivalence that invariably pervades them. At the same time, however, “Eurasia” occupies a class by itself, in terms both of the multiplicity of ways in which it is geographically delimited as well as the great variety of meanings and significances that are projected onto it. There can be a debate as to whether Eurasia is in fact the best conceptual-geographical platform for our post-Soviet purposes, but there can be no question that the term should be used only with a full appreciation and understanding of its many contrasting valences. In this spirit, I would point to three particular dimensions of Eurasia’s polysemicity that might give us pause for thought.
To begin with, exactly what and exactly where is Eurasia supposed to be? Mark Von Hagen refers to it as space that is “terminologically... contested,” but this does not really do justice to the enormity of the contrasts between the alternatives on offer. Indeed, compared with the global disjunctions of Eurasia’s alternative geographical contours, the more familiar differences between contending vision of “Eastern Europe” pale into something approaching insignificance. One possible configuration of Eurasia corresponds to the original sense of the term as it was coined by geologists in the 19th century as part of the development of plate tectonic theory. As a replacement for physiographical ideas handed down from the Greeks about the division of the earth’s land surface into maco-units or continents, this Eurasia comprises Europe in toto plus Asia in toto. The latter two entities – territorially contiguous in any event – simply combine in their entirety to form a single cohesive terrestrial and sub-terrestrial entity which as a super-continent replaces them both. An entirely different sense of the term refers to the much more specific and delimited space distinguished as the region where Europe and Asia combined over history to create a distinct cultural, ethnographic, and political amalgam. This Eurasia as well possesses a physical-geographical rationale and is said to be a continent with discernable boundaries, but one which is much more restricted and which moreover jealously guards its fundamental differences from Europe and Asia “proper.” Effectively, it is an in-between third world, with a history and ethos unto itself. This is the Eurasia of the Eurasians whom Von Hagen mentions, and they identified it as the geographical space of Russian civilization. A third sense of Eurasia abandons formal physiographical-continental preoccupations altogether, and identifies Eurasia very loosely as the interior portion of the combined European and Asiatic continents that provided an arena for development and interminglings of many civilizations across the ages. This is the perspective of so-called “big history,” developing among other things on Owen Lattimore’s sense of Inner Asia. In this configuration, Eurasia is deployed in a largely historical sense as a nebulous category without any clear geographical delimitations to speak of at all. It extends in all events very far beyond the realm of Russia, and – despite the name – Europe per se is not necessarily relevant to it.
It may be objected that, although all of these various senses of Eurasia remain in active use, that particular Eurasia which has been adopted by post-Soviet studies refers more-or-less consistently to the second alternative described above, that is to say the Eurasia of the Eurasians. While this is true, it merely leads in to a second cluster of problems, namely the fact that even in this particular geo-historical and geopolitical configuration, the term Eurasia still resonates in very different ways. An appreciation of this circumstance requires us to navigate the troubled waters of identity politics in the former Soviet Union. Thus, there is a sort of dominant “Russian” Eurasia, corresponding to the original йmigrй conception noted above, in which a singular synthesis of European-Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic-Tatar and Mongolian elements provides a foundational vision of Russian nationhood. Importantly, this civilizational Eurasia corresponds to the geopolitical corpus of the Russian empire and, yet more importantly, to that of its successor the Soviet Union. But there are other Eurasias, born out of the imperatives for national articulation and self-definition on the part of non-Russian nationalities in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. In Kazakhstan and Tatarstan, to name only two prominent examples, new and powerful ideologies of nationhood have been formulated which similarly depend upon a foundational vision of Eurasia. Like the Russian example, the essence of the vision is a unique synthesis of Europe and Asia, but unlike the former the critical geographical locus for the synthetic process is shifted to the respective non-Russian national territories, and the process itself is re-signified as uniquely distinctive for the respective nation. Across all of these examples, to be sure, Eurasia always implies some sort of “traditional” commonality with Russia. This sense of togetherness however sits in a rather uneasy balance with the exigency for the Eurasian vision to inspire an awareness of national distinctiveness that can provide a practical ideological meaning and rationale for independent statehood – a post-Soviet development that is anything but traditional. Eurasia, that is to say, establishes an implicit connection with Russia at the very same time that it legitimates a sense of autonomous national existence. Clearly, the ideological dynamics at play here are exquisitely complicated, and the political stakes are correspondingly high. Who is going to decide which of these Eurasias we want?
The question about political stakes leads to the final, and perhaps most substantial problem with our use of the term Eurasia today, a problem alluded to by Mark Von Hagen but not really explored in his essay. For all of its exotic novelty, the original doctrine of Eurasianism was one of many frantic responses to the collapse of Russian imperial power, and its goal accordingly was the resurrection and reintegration of the imperial state in its traditional geopolitical configuration. As Nicholas Riasanovsky noted many decades ago – and has been abundantly confirmed more recently in the research of Marlиne Laruelle and others – the original Eurasians “denied the Empire in order to rescue it.” The contemporary deployment of the term in the former Soviet Union is not in any way detached from this historical background. Very much to the contrary, the direct links and continuities are striking. The resurrection of Eurasia in our day has occurred in an essentially similar context of political collapse and geopolitical disintegration of the Russian-Soviet state, and has very much the same goal, namely the reversal of this process and reestablishment of Russia’s traditional status as a velikaia derzhava within its traditional geopolitical arena. The contemporary ideologues of “Russian” Eurasia could not be more explicit regarding this point, and moreover are vociferous in their insistence upon the direct continuity with the ideas and, by extension, with the imperial project of the founding fathers. Today this takes the form of a sort of neo-Soviet revanchism, which is however genuinely “traditional” in that it involves the prospect of de facto Russian domination across the political spaces of Eurasia. For understandable reasons, this prospect is not usually articulated as such, but it figures implicitly in Russian discourses of Eurasia nonetheless and is an important reason why the latter do not resonate across the former Soviet Union. Von Hagen identifies the leading contemporary Eurasians, notably Aleksandr Dugin and Lev Gumilev, but he might have gone on to note the extent to which their work acts as a conduit in Russia for the political extremism and ethnic paranoia of the crypto-fascist European New Right. In determining our own attitude to the term Eurasia, we would be well advised to note the apprehensions of such an insightful observer of the contemporary Russian scene as Dmitrii Trenin. Appreciating the extent to which the political tendentiousess just described is implicit in the very word, Trenin urges us not to embrace Eurasia but to abandon it altogether, in which spirit he gave his recent important book on the subject the hopeful title of The End of Eurasia.
The point made at the outset of this essay – that no geographical designation can possibly be free from ambivalence and thus entirely satisfactory – bears repeating in conclusion. Indeed, it is precisely this ambivalence which makes these terms broadly useful. But does this suffice to make “Eurasia” and “Eurasian” acceptable and appropriate replacements for “Soviet, “Russia” and “Russian”? I do not intend to pronounce a final judgment on this admittedly thorny issue, but will instead point to a curious external circumstance related to it which has more or less escaped notice. It is in North America, and specifically in the United States, that Eurasia as such exercises its greatest appeal. It is certainly far less popular in Western Europe, where Soviet studies has renamed and reconfigured itself largely via a different organizational terminology. The example of the Glasgow journal Soviet Studies is highly indicative in this regard, for while it similarly resorted to the trans-continental geographical vector in renaming itself, it demonstratively avoided the term Eurasia and opted instead for Europe-Asia Studies, which in an uncanny way is at once pretty much identical and yet entirely different. The point may be understood on two different levels. Most immediate is the simple fact that, for Europeans, “Eurasia” is portentous in ways that it is not for Americans. To appreciate this, we must for a moment forget about Russia altogether and think instead about the next phase of enlargement of the European Union, when the issue of membership for Turkey will top the agenda. In our age of civilizational clashes, this is obviously a problematic and distinctly uncomfortable political, social, and cultural issue – so uncomfortable, I would suggest, that even such an anodyne and ambivalent term as “Eurasia” takes on a palpable political significance and is inherently valorized in support of one particular direction of the debate. Perhaps for this reason, the term does not much figure in European public discourses. America is of course far removed from all of this, as from much else. Indeed, one is tempted to conclude that Eurasia can “work” there because the real geographical resonances with our world today are so extremely vague and weak. As an American geographer who has spent most of his life studying and teaching in the United States, I can perhaps claim to speak with a certain expertise on these matters, but then the extraordinarily tenuous appreciation of world geography on the part of even educated Americans is hardly a secret. Against this background, Eurasia may well appear as nothing much more than an exotic far-away place, a now-useful geographical category for organizing historical and cultural space which could not possibly be destabilized by the issues identified in this essay. In his stimulating essay, Mark Von Hagen has demonstrated his own highly sophisticated appreciation of the problematic ambivalences – geographical as well as ideological – that inhere in Eurasia. The generalized success of the term on the American arena, however, may well have more to do with precisely the opposite.

David McDONALD

Each of these essays offers a response to an interpretive challenge that has faced historians of Russia for more than two hundred years: where does Russia belong, in Europe, in Asia, or in Eurasia? In their separate ways, both von Hagen and Haupt remind us, as well, that all of these terms come laden with their own valences or moored in their respective visions of historical development. If Asia represents sensuality and stagnation – as Aristotle or Adam Smith suggested long before Edward Said made the same point – then Europe, especially the Europe that became “–centric” during the Enlightenment, represented a vision of “normal” and liberalizing historical development as much as it did any identifiable or stable place, a point Haupt presses. Finally, of course, von Hagen rehearses well and clearly two alternative understandings of “Eurasia” as a heuristic category: one, the alchemical brew of geopolitical theory and millenarianism that sprang up among йmigrйs fleeing the deluge of 1917-1920; the other, a more modest or neutral term designating a space in the interstices of post-Roman Europe and the great sedentarized, agrarian empires of Persia, India and China, south of the cordillera stretching from the Black Sea into Central Asia and on to the more porous frontiers of northern China.
Each essay also reminds us directly and implicitly that the problem of situating Russia in a geopolitical or cultural space reflects a complex intellectual history among “western” scholars and commentators who, since the reign of Peter the Great, have sought to understand the cultural or historical roots of the colossus on their eastern marches. Within Russia, the question of where the empire belonged also occasioned debate. Catherine II protested, perhaps too much, in her Nakaz that Russia was unquestionably European, or else Peter would not have been able to transform it so quickly as he did. The question acquired new urgency in the 1820’s and after, as German philosophies of history, geography and the nation fascinated successive generations of Russian intellectuals in search of explanations for the barbarity of their state and society, while also seeking a developmental path that would result in a for a self-determining “national” Russia. Both categories have come under critical reassessment due in part to the current indeterminacy that reigns in Russian historiography – itself a reflection of “objective” circumstances in the former Soviet space – as well as the incorporation of quondam “eastern” Europe into “Europe” proper – i. e. NATO and the EU.
Certainly, the “anti-paradigm” proposed by von Hagen has much to recommend it. Russian history cannot help but reflect its geographical position at the northeast end of the great steppe conduit linking the Black Sea basin to eastern Central Asia, bisected by the road through the “wild field” from the Varangians to the Greeks. Even a cursory reading of the chronicles that recount the first five centuries of “Russian” history illustrate time and again the intimate economic, cultural and political interactions between the inhabitants of Rus’ or Muscovy and the various military, political and economic organizations that arose along the southeastern frontier of the Rus’ lands. Unquestionably, the strategies and organizations that various east Slavic principalities and Muscovy evolved to deal with the Pechenegs, the Mongols or the successor khanates differed appreciably from those that developed among the nascent states of early modern Europe. In the contemporary world, no historian can ignore the fact that the space once occupied by the Soviet Union – and its imperial predecessor – continue to manifest in their state organizations and the composition of their societies, in terms of ethnicity and status, the experience of two hundred years and more of their shared ties to St. Petersburg and Moscow.
To state any of these postulates does not have to mean that one is asserting a Russian exceptionalism or that the roots of Russia’s political structures stem from Mongol tyranny. Indeed, the Eurasian perspective helps illuminate the exceptionality of “western” Europe in several ways. Von Hagen points to one example when he invokes the dystopic rereading of recent European history in such works as Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent. By the same token, one has to ask how “normal” in a worldwide context are such discourses as “rights” or the liberal autonomous subject distilled by Kant, or the lockstep evolution of market relations and liberal democracy celebrated by Adam Smith?
Indeed, to follow Haupt and others, it is difficult to figure out where exactly “Europe” lies. Does this Europe include Sicily and southern Italy? Spain? Greece? Romania? Does it even include East Prussia? Many of these areas present the historian with social, political and economic structures that those in Russia more than they do the social or economic organization of the Netherlands, the Rhine valley or central France. Indeed, even for Russians, the exact identity or location of Europe has long differed according to a variety of circumstances. If for many of them, Europe as a notion represented one or another future, officials and intellectuals in late imperial and Soviet Russia certainly differed over the future they sought; their Europes differed accordingly. A Witte, a Bunge or a Stolypin would have seen Europe in Wilhelmine/Bismarckian Germany, with its combination of industrial might, monarchical order and international prestige. Such thinkers as Struve and other liberals would have looked to France or Great Britain, states that combined wealth and might with the “rule of law state.”
Both historians, then, are right to suggest that we interrogate more closely than we have the old categories that have framed our discussions of Russian history. Both also make more or less implicitly a strong case for divesting our historiography of the commonplaces and teleologies that have shaped it since S. M. Solov’ev sought to apply the teaching of Hegel and Ranke to Russia’s own story. In this vein, Haupt and von Hagen are participating – as the latter recognizes – in a broader process of questioning the categories that seemed so unproblematic before 1991. The “state school” approach certainly demands reassessment, as does the questionable stability or impermeability of the thousands of kilometers of border that girded the Russian and Soviet states. Elise Wirtschafter and others have obliged us to reconceive our understanding of social structures and mobility in imperial Russia; histories of the black market and other means of distribution in the Soviet period have exerted the same effect.
And yet, to accept an argument in favour of situating Russia in a Eurasian setting runs the risk of drawing the same sorts of lines or borders that historians apparently find distressing in older invocations of state, nation, social category or other such categorical claims. In undeniable and manifold ways, one cannot understand the last three-odd centuries of Russian history without reference to its orientation toward Europe, however conceived. One does not have to stray into the minefields of “westernization” or “modernization” to state that, since the Time of Troubles, various Russian polities have found themselves under real or perceived threat from neighbours to their west – certainly much more so than on their eastern or southern peripheries after 1774. For much of the nineteenth century and the last half of the twentieth, Russian leaders acted as the arbiters of European politics. One can reasonably argue, as has David Schimmelpennick, that even when Russian armies were incorporating the Eurasian heartland into the empire, they did so as their version of the “civilizing mission” practiced by their French and British coevals in Africa and Asia. Similarly, as Peter Holquist’s recent book shows starkly, the collapse of the imperial order in Russia sprang directly from the larger devastation wrought by the Great War in Europe.
Since 1700, successive Russian regimes have sought to emulate practices of administration and mobilization that appeared to work for their western rivals. Russian high culture likewise followed similar lines of development as that in the rest of Europe. In none of these respects does Russia stand out as exceptional. Literary, musical and sartorial fashion moved back and forth across Europe, as did theories and practices of statecraft, economic activity or even sport. And even such avowed exceptionalists as Ivan Kireevskii read avidly in contemporary European thought, as he was the first to admit.
Two preliminary conclusions arise from these brief reflections. As a complement to the idea of Eurasia, it might make sense – in terms suggested by Haupt – to regard Europe, and Russia in it, as a set of zones based on comparative homologies in social composition or administrative-political structure: we already acknowledge Scandinavia or parts of the Mediterranean as such zones; one might also construct. Thus, one might consider Prussia, the Austrian lands and Russia – at least European Russia – as cognate states constituting some sort of eastern ambit. As Marc Raeff demonstrated in his his underappreciated work on the “well-ordered police state,” and as Dominic Lieven has more recently shown, whatever their differences, each of these empires shared a great many characteristics – ideologies of rule, social orders grounded in serfdom and deference, and aspirations to imperial status. In addition to their shared dominion over Poland, these three empires also exchanged large populations for economic and political regions. Each also pursued very different strategies to the problem of what used to be called modernization, as each faced highly varied challenges to problems of industrialization, the mobilization of new religious, class and ethnonational identities, and each sought to accommodate a monarcho-nobiliary order of status to the appearance of new elites. Certainly, for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and arguably, in different circumstances, for much of the twentieth – each empire recognized the other as similar. At certain junctures, one could also include the Ottoman Empire in this zone, as well as including it as a constituent element in an adjacent zone comprising the Caucasus, Persia/Iran and Russia..
While some might rightly protest that such a grouping of state-society clusters merely replicates the strategic reductionism of geopolitics, it also offers a certain interpretive flexibility. On one hand, the often neglected role of international relations – through trade and cultural exchange as well as via diplomacy and military conflict – can enter the field of analysis without being consigned to its usual marginal position in discussions of history. On the other, since one finds several sorts of borders separating and joining populations along the contact-points of the states included in one or another zone, one can gain a better comparative appreciation for issues such as the strength or weakness of state power. Finally, understanding social, political, economic and cultural history as processes radiating along and across borders throughout these zones and among them permits historians to achieve a proper “decentering” to counter the attraction still exerted by such concepts as “Euroe” and “Asia.”
The second conclusion springs both from reading von Hagen’s and Haupt’s pieces as well as the foregoing proposals: current events and their possible pasts demonstrate the ability of historical agents on the ground to defy even the most rigorously conceived analytic categories. Pace Adam Smith and Karl Marx, globalization in its successive forms as colonialism or multinational corporate capitalism has not acted as the solvent of cultural difference or particular identity that many have either sought or feared. Every four years, the World Cup and the Olympics demonstrate the pull of national and ethnic loyalties on millions of people who have not benefited from reading Benedict Anderson or The German Ideology. In like manner, the category of Eurasia as proposed by von Hagen and the decentering of “Europe” suggested by Haupt offer the opportunity to reconsider in critical fashion the very categories that have guided historians of Russia – that most abstract and intentional of historiographies.
These new categories bear promise because they allow historians to reorganize long-known information to reveal new insights about the workings of Russia and the Soviet Union, as empires, but also as the hosts of certain societies and webs of relationships. At the same time, conceived as they are in contrast to the regnant paradigms, they also run the real risk of becoming reified for their own sake, much like “state,” “nation,” “class,” and other categories that thirty years ago seemed as solid and stable as the Soviet Union itself. It would be ironic if these attempts to blur the traditional boundaries of Russian history became new boundaries themselves.