From the Editors: Imperial Society as a Community Imagined by Homo Imperii

16 From the Editors, Imperial Society as a Community... From the EDITORS Scholars of nationalism have long concluded that nation is an imagined community and a cognitive frame. Since empire, like nation, is also a form of political organization, can one speak of empire as an imagined community? If imperial societies are stable (and some of them had existed for historically long periods), then is their stability solely an outcome of power realized through political institutions and legalized violence? Does the empire’s longevity allow us to speak about support, neutrality, or loyalty on behalf of empire’s many subject groups?And if so, is this loyalty and support directed at pan-imperial institutions, such as the monarchy, or is it owed exclusively to local regimes and institutions included in the empire or created as a result of the imperial politics of producing difference? In what sense can we say that an imperial society, civitas imperii, did exist, and that it spread beyond local traditions, estates, ethnic, national, and confessional groups? This problem leads us to the next questions. How was a constructive image of an “imagined empire” created, how was it shared up to a certain time, and how did it prevent society from disintegration? As Richard Pipes has formulated the problem in his own time, “historians may argue over why the Soviet Union collapsed so quickly, but the real question is how it survived so long.” In this case, we can replace “Soviet Union” with the “Russian Empire,” or, in fact, with any other empire. IMPERIAL SOCIETY AS A COMMUNITY IMAGINED BY HOMO IMPERII 17 Ab Imperio, 4/2009 Pipes’s question also raises the problem of the analytical description of empire as a whole, which consists of many elements, each of a different order . Indeed, from a researcher’s point of view, imperial society disintegrates into an almost infinite number of blocs. These blocs are national, ethnic, confessional, regional, linguistic, estate, and other kinds of communities, and each bloc acquires its own distinct historiography—although Ernest Gellner used to compare the nationalists’ perception of the world with Modigliani paintings. This metaphor is even more applicable to descriptions of the inner space of imperial society in today’s scholarship. Maybe, one can better illustrate the “specificity” of Russian imperial society through Gogol’s image of the ideal whole: “If I could only put Nikanor Ivanovich’s lips with Ivan Kuzmich’s nose, and mix in a bit of Baltazar Baltazarovich’s free-and-easyness, and then add to this Ivan Pavlovich’s fine figure…”1 Thus, the individual becomes “the point of assembly” for imperial space and the only medium through which we can understand today how some semantic unity of that space could be preserved in different contexts of the complex and disjointed social world of empire. Individual life experience thus emerges not just as a private biography but as a key to understanding social groups and loyalties. This is why we conclude our series of issues dedicated to individual aspects of perceiving and living through the complex imperial situation with an issue of the journal that focuses on the experience of real and imagined imperial societies and on the problem of their historical exploration. How did people who demonstrated their loyalty to the empire in different ways imagine the imperial space beyond solidarity within their own estate, profession , or national group? Can we think of imperial space outside of the unifying framework of state and dynasty? In today’s historiography, which is still dominated by perceptions of empire as a political mechanism, these problems remain underreflected. While studying sociocultural and ethnic diversity, historians look at these problems through the prism of relations of domination and subjugation, which, as a rule, returns the state to the center of attention as an institution that establishes and regulates power regimes. Postcolonial interpretations of the political nature of power and of relations of inequality as dissolved in social interactions and cultural codes (in the spirit of Michel Foucault and Edward Said) have not yet led to revised approaches to the study of “imperial society” in Russian history.As the materials in this issue demonstrate, such a revision would allow us...