From Past to Future: The Soviet Union and the Russian Empire in Discourses of Rupture and Continuity

ABSTRACT

In the still highly politicized question of rupture or continuity between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, elements of continuity are not hard to find, nor should this be a surprise, since a new state arose in the same geographical space and made use of the economic, intellectual, and demographic resources inherited from the Russian Empire. At the same time, the Soviet Union could not have been more different than the Russian Empire. It rejected a number of key elements of the sociopolitical project that underlay the nationalizing tsarist empire and introduced radically new political and social principles for organizing that space. In particular, the Bolsheviks purposefully engaged in dismantling the tsarist efforts to build a great ethnic-Russian nation to stand at the center of the Russian Empire’s nationalities policy. The irreversible disintegration of post-Soviet space into separate nationalizing states became possible only toward the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, the imperial nature of the modern post-Soviet Russian core permits us to say that the imperial logic has survived. This is where we can find an element of inescapable continuity. We present studies of “continuities” and “ruptures” in modern academic discourse and in an updated format, gravitating toward “empirically nuanced” tools for analyzing multiple historical temporalities.

KEYWORDS:

• continuities and ruptures
• Michel Foucault
• temporalities
• temporal plurality
• Soviet Union
• Russian Empire
• nationalities policy
• revolution
• post-Soviet space

Notes

1. M. Foucault, Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 36. (English translation: M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).—Trans.)

2. Ruptures. Anthropologies of Discontinuity in Times of Turmoil, ed. M. Holbraad, B. Kapferer, and J.F. Sauma (London: UCL Press, 2019), pp. 3–6.

3. Holbraad et al. (eds.), Ruptures, pp. 12–14.

4. D. Brandenberger and M.V. Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative. A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

5. A. Miller, “Revoliutsiia 1917 g.—istoriia, pamiat’, politika,” Valdaiskie zapiski, 2018, January 31 (available at https://ru.valdaiclub.com/a/valdai-papers/valdayskaya-zapiska-81).

6. “Putin nazval raspad SSSR tragediei i ‘raspadom istoricheskoi Rossii,’” RBK, 2021, December 12 (available at https://www.rbc.ru/politics/12/12/2021/61b5e7b79a7947689a33f5fe).

7. The Stolypin agrarian reforms (1906–1914) were an attempt to cultivate property rights and market capitalism by reforming land ownership and agriculture.—Trans.

8. See A. Miller and K. Solov’ev, Rossiia mezhdu reformami i revoliutsiiami, 1906–1916 (Moscow: Kvadriga, 2021); M.A. Davydov, Dvadtsat’ let do Velikoi voiny: Rossiiskaia modernizatsiia Vitte-Stolypina, 2nd edition (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2016).

9. That is, “Great,” “Little,” and “White” Rus’, or what roughly coincide with modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.—Trans.

10. P. Holquist, “Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History, 1997, no. 69 (September), pp. 415–450. See also P. Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate. Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in A State of Nations. Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald G. Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

11. The Empire and Nationalism at War, eds. Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014).

12. F. Hirsch, Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

13. M. Mol’giner, “Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). 367 pp., ill. Bibliography, Index. ISBN:-8014-8908-3 (paper),” Ab Imperio, 2005, no. 3, p. 545.

14. J. Cadiot, “Searching for Nationality: Statistics and National Categories at the End of the Russian Empire (1897–1917),” The Russian Review, 2005, no. 64 (July), pp. 440–455; V. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

15. Cadiot, “Searching for Nationality,” p. 441.

16. T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

17. R. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

18. T. Martin, “The Soviet Union as Empire: Salvaging a Dubious Analytical Category,” Ab Imperio, 2002, no. 2, pp. 91–105.

19. A. Miller, Imperiia Romanovykh i natsionalizm (Moscow: NLO, 2010).

20. J. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Nationalizing Empires, ed. S. Berger and A. Miller (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015).

21. Michael Doyle has written about this form of empire as domination without formal inclusion, using the role of Athens among ancient Greece polities as an example. See M.W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

22. A. Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. E. Clowes, S.D. Kassow, and J.L. West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 65–84.

23. For more, see A. Miller, Nasledie imperii i budushchee Rossii (Moscow: NLO, 2008).

24. M. Engman, “Consequences of Dissolving an Empire: The Habsburg and Romanov Cases,” Studia Baltica Stockholmiensia, 1994, no. 13, pp. 21–33.

25. J. Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).