From the Editors

“Designing the Future” (the theme of the current issue of Ab Imperio) is possible only by using the “building blocks” of the past. As the articles published in this issue demonstrate, this simple idea in no way implies a deterministic and teleological understanding of the historical process. Real stories do not support the popular assumption about the predestination of the future based on the social structures and ideas of the preceding epoch. To the contrary, despite the differences in their disciplinary and thematic focus, all the articles in this issue underline the decisive role of people and structures preoccupied with resolving everyday problems – with an eye toward the future. The future depends not on the past, but on perceptions of the past proliferated in society and the possibilities for broad discussions of these perceptions. This mechanism is revealed explicitly in the second chapter of the Russian translation of The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage published in the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue (the Introduction and Chapter 1 were published in the previous issue of AI). Guldi and Armitage argue that the sea change in the perception of the past (from the history of long-term processes to the history of short-term specific cases) that took place in the 1970s immediately resulted in a “recalibration” of the future. Public discussions that reassessed the experience of the previous decade led to the proliferation of a culture of “short-termism,” with forecasts and planning restricted to the immediate future and subordinated to pragmatic goals (e.g., victory in a political cycle, targeting of profits).

The key role of “cultural-political entrepreneurs” in designing the future based on the past was analyzed and described in the pages of AI many years ago by Jan Kubik, who concluded that “cultural legacies are ‘transmitted,’ not ‘received from.’”¹ The future is decided “today,” not “yesterday.” A good example of a “cultural-political entrepreneur” is the Polish historian of the first half of the twentieth century, Oskar Halecki, discussed in the article by Gennadii Korolov under the “Historiography” rubric of this issue. It was Halecki who called the territory between the German and Russian lands (once dominated by Rzech Pospolita) “East-Central Europe,” and in his historical studies aimed to prove its “Europeanness” and its belonging to Polish rather than Russian civilization. The main goal of that remapping of the past was political transformation in the future: the liberation of the region from Soviet and Russian domination.

Halecki represented the radical “retrospective futurist” – someone who rewrites the past in order to coordinate it with a desirable future (now inevitably predetermined by that past). Yet most contributions to this issue focus on commonly recognized realities, and various aspects of their selective appropriation by designers of the future. As we shall see, even the utter embodiment of “traditionalism” can be recognized as suitable building material for an ideal future (for example, the Russian peasant commune in populist projects), while the main threat to this future would be seen in the most modern project (capitalism, in this example).

The “History” section of this issue features two articles focusing on precisely this dialectic of archaism and futurism, but bringing its analysis to a new level that is far beyond any abstract theorizing. Paolo Sartori and Pavel Shablei tell the story of continuous attempts by the Russian imperial authorities to codify the customary law (adats) of Kazakhs and to insist on differentiating it from the closely linked norms of the Sharia. This story is remarkable for the doctrinaire persistence of authorities who were determined to implement in practice a very recent achievement of nascent Russian jurisprudence (the theoretical differentiation of components of customary law), and for the accomplishment of professional Orientalists collecting Kazakh legal norms in the steppe, who managed to transcend dogmatism and reconstructed Kazakh customary law as a hybrid phenomenon (merging adat and Sharia) that greatly varied from one region or tribal group to another. The article centers on the case of implicit confrontation between the Orientalist Efim (Iosif) Osmolovskii, who in the early 1850s composed the most fundamental compendium of Kazakh customary law, and...