From The Editors: Languages of Self-Description of Empire and Nation as a Research Problem and Political Dilemma

23 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 LANGUAGES OF SELF-DESCRIPTION OF EMPIRE AND NATION AS A RESEARCH PROBLEM AND POLITICAL DILEMMA From the EDITORS Ab Imperio’s first issue in 2005 introduces a new annual theme and sums up the journal’s contribution to recent debates on empire, nationalism, and history-writing in the post-Soviet space. It appears that the main result of the development of the journal as an intellectual project is the formulation of the problem of languages of self-description of empire and multinational state, which will be explored in the four interconnected thematic issues of the journal in 2005. The very logic of the journal’s development, which pursued a systematic and multidimensional discussion of imperial studies with contribution by almost five hundred scholars from more than thirty countries, led us to pose the current problem in a dialogue with what has been explored in our annual themes and with the contemporary state of research on empire and nationalism. Ab Imperio was initially conceived as a project for “translating” debates in the Western field of nationalism studies into the post-Soviet academic context. However, the first attempts to uncritically project methodological assumptions and historiographic models of nationalism studies onto the material of Russian imperial and Soviet history proved their relatively 24 From the Editors, Languages of Self-Description of Empire and Nation... limited interpretative and heuristic value. The Russian empire and even the Soviet Union were not merely political unions of nations or “proto-nations.” The post-Soviet national states do not have an unambiguous genealogy in the imperial and even pre-imperial past. The category of ethnicity, not to speak of confession, was only one source of articulation of social identity in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union among many others, which included but were not limited to rank, estate, occupation, profession, class, wealth, ascribed status, political affiliation, and gender. What is even more important, it is hardly possible to correlate all these elements of social identification into a single and universal hierarchy. However, a comparison between the historiographic discussion of imperial experiences in Eurasia and the well developed field of studies of Western overseas empires suggests that “empire” is not just a form of political organization but rather an open-ended system of social, political, and cultural entanglements. For that reason, the arguments related to the definition of “the essence of empire ” are of secondary significance, since empire appears to be a nexus of historical entanglements rather than a structure, a research situation rather than a historically given phenomenon. The field of scholarly inquiry that the editors of Ab Imperio aspired to popularize in the post-Soviet academic context turned to become in this new light a problem that required critical reflection and extensive research. From its very first issue, Ab Imperio has evolved as a collaborative research project, which at the same time mapped the contours of a new field of inquiry that might be called “new imperial history of Russia and the postSoviet space.” A combination of a consistent division of the contributions into regular journal’s sections with a principle of thematic issues was the first step taken by the editors to secure a sustainable critical reflection and discussion of new research. Various key problems of historical experiences of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union (nationalism and religion, nationalism and liberalism, empire and war) were explored in the same format: critical reflection of the problem on the basis of cross-fertilization of different theoretical canons, historical research, exploration of the problem from the vantage point of political science and sociology, illuminating archival documents, inquiry into the way the present problem is reflected in historical memory and recurrent popular mythologies. Work on thematic issues has led to an ad hoc tradition of holding virtual exchanges of commentaries and mini-forums on current trends in historiography and social sciences. As a result, each issue of Ab Imperio functioned as a virtual workshop with a defined thematic agenda and moderation of the discussion. In parallel to 25 Ab Imperio, 1/2005 and connected to the development of “virtual workshops,” the editorial team continued to regularly hold “real” international conferences and workshops.1...