Letter
As fellow editors of a scholarly journal we habitually take an exceptional pleasure in following Kritika's interesting and innovative publications, as well as its efforts to foster scholarly dialogue across the national and disciplinary divide. This is especially true of the issues where our interests overlap, such as inquiry into the history of empire, nation-building and nationalism, and the history of the Russian empire and the USSR as multinational states and societies. Undoubtedly, Kritika has contributed to the emerging and transforming field of imperial studies, and we look forward to engaging in exchanges and discussions in the future.
The editorial introduction to the recent issue of Kritika aspires, to use the editors' own term, to reflect on the field of imperial and national studies in the former USSR and to discuss how it combines with or affects historians' grand narratives of Russian history.1 Certainly, this is a very good question for reflection and a timely one. One can only welcome a discussion of how the burgeoning field of imperial studies may benefit from and enrich other approaches in the history of Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia, especially at a time when none of the "grand narratives" appear particularly attractive and when innovative approaches can translate into qualitative theoretical and empirical gain. At the same time, while pointing to some important elements of the emerging field of imperial studies in the context of Russian and Eurasian history, Kritika's editorial introduction seems to equate the "imperial turn" with explorations of nationalism and national (or nationalizing) identities and agendas, while "empire" appears in the editors' reflection as a synonym of multi-national state and society.
Might we point out that there exists another view in recent historiography that does not equate the imperial turn with nationalism studies? As editors of Ab Imperio we have sought to reflect on the dangers of over-emphasizing national identities over other forms of identity. Indeed, one of the starting points of the Ab Imperio project was to explore the gaps between normative visions of nationhood and the range of identifications and relations emerging within the imperial space. Similarly, we attempted to problematize the very idea of equating empire with the state and those cohesive forces that [End Page 222] held the imperial space together. Therefore, we encouraged a discussion of these issues in the pages of Ab Imperio and suggested exploring "empire" as an imperial situation, as a highly heterogeneous space of political, social, and cultural experiences, as a conflict of memories, or as the incongruence of languages of description and self-description. Ab Imperio's editorial team was even accused of imperialist aspirations because of the subtitle "New Imperial History" (instead of "New History for Empire"), the sole reason for which was to avoid the essentializing thrust of the notion of empire (as well as that of the nation).
We are plainly dismayed by the fact that Kritika, a journal we highly respect, slips into claims about "Russians" doing "good empirical work on particular regions and groups but without far-reaching historical interpretative questions." Such suggestions, when not supported by detailed historical critique and historiographic analysis, appear to project "national" categories on our increasingly international field in ways not unlike those in which, as we all agree, some scholars in the post-Soviet world "crudely project the nation upon the past." In the seven years of our journal's existence, despite our fairly modest "international aspirations," we have published more than 500 authors from virtually all major centers of Russian and Eurasian studies in the world. Of these, about 30 percent come from Russia (and another 30 percent from North America), and we are quite certain that these more than 150 authors do not fall into this trap. However, the editors of Kritika chose to simply brush aside what they called "the Russophone historiographical scene," dismissing en passant much of what has been done...
