Ab Imperio

The idea that nation-states should inevitably supersede empires became predominant in social sciences a hundred years ago (in the wake of the “Wilsonian moment” and Leninist revolution). Seen as a law of history for many decades, it recently became subject to serious revision. The expected linear evolution toward nation as the sole modern form of social arrangement simply has not been substantiated by growing empirical evidence in historical studies of the twentieth century. The history of Russia and the USSR is a good case in point in this regard. While studying various scenarios of imperial and postimperial transformation, historians have discovered the insufficiency of explanatory models and terminology at their disposal to describe the nuances of postimperial processes and social structures. How do we talk about the postimperial political and cultural realities outside the normative nation-centered framework, and what is the added value of analyzing the postimperial as a phenomenon in its own right (rather than an iteration of the ideal nation)? Can we speak of any universal postimperial temporality at all if there is no agreement on the nature of the imperial phenomenon – does each historical empire beget its own particular future?

Answering the last question, it is necessary to stress that debates about the classification of historical empires are all but irrelevant for the logic of new [End Page 19] imperial history as developed by Ab Imperio. Here, the object of study is not certain regimes of domination as such, but the structural imperial situation of simultaneous coexistence of multiple semantic contexts, which are used to produce conflicting visions of reality (and principles of its organization). But even from the vantage point of traditional “imperiology” one can identify territories and situations that look almost identical in all empires. For example, nowhere else did the Russian Empire resemble modern European colonial empires as much as in Central Asia. The popular (albeit outdated) differentiation of empires into the categories of “overseas” and “contiguous” completely fails in the case of Russian Turkestan, which became a case of classical colonial domination distinguished by the preservation of spatial and cultural distance, racism, and barring of aborigines from integrating into the metropolitan society or even the service hierarchy. This makes the case of postimperial transition in Central Asia all the more telling. There the relations of domination and dependence (and the contrast between “western modernity” and “indigenous tradition”) revealed themselves most explicitly. This is why all the materials of the current issue of Ab Imperio, “Imperial Alternatives: Imagery of the Post-Imperial Order,” discuss the history of Central Asian societies in the twentieth century. This issue concludes the journal’s annual theme, “Situating in Empire: Agencies and Subjectivities in Imperial Spaces,” which focuses on the problem of historical agency in the multidimensional imperial situation. Who decides how to organize life after the demise of the imperial regime and where the visions of the new life come from, particularly given that previously this regime claimed to control not only the political sphere but also the intellectual one?

The immediate answer to this question that can be derived from each of the published articles is that no simple and unequivocal formula can describe this process. Rather, we still have to elaborate an analytical model capable of adequately representing the phenomenon of multifactor and dynamic transformation of social imagination. The task is complicated by people’s tendency to depict the emerging new reality in the familiar but outdated language of the past, and also by the absence even today of a clear idea of how to reconcile real decolonization and success in the global world. The problem of the absence of an analytical language to comprehend the postimperial condition is central to the publication in the “Methodology and Theory” section. It features the Russian translation of a chapter from Adi Gordon’s intellectual biography of the classic theorist of nationalism theory, Hans Kohn (1891–1971), forthcoming in the summer of 2017. The translated section of the book covers the five years spent by Kohn in Russia [End Page 20] as a prisoner of war (POW) beginning in 1915. Gordon...