«The Second World Beyond Geopolitics: Political Trajectories and Spatial Configurations»: No. 2-2011 of «Ab Imperio» Is Released

Ab Imperio Issue 2 (2011) has been just released.


Тема номера (Topic of the Issue):
"Второй мир вне геополитики: политические траектории и пространственные конфигурации / The Second World Beyond Geopolitics: Political Trajectories and Spatial Configurations"

Тема журнала в 2011 г. (Annual Theme for 2011):
"Второй мир – второй раз? Концепция Второго мира на перекрестке социальных наук и имперской истории / Second World – Second Time? The Concept of the Second World at the Crossroads of Social Sciences and Imperial History"

Access to this issue of the journal through subscription (TXT and PDF versions of the articles)

Editorial of this issue: "From the “Isolated Island-State” to the “Continent-Ocean”: The Second World beyond Geopolitics" (pp. 9-14):

In the fall of 1920, the organ of the Council for Labor and Defense of the RSFSR (the newspaper Economic Life personally controlled by V. Lenin) published several articles by Alexander Chaianov focused on the theory of socialist economy. Arguing against the leading Marxist economist, Stanislav Strumilin, Chaianov took part in formulating the basics of a theory of nonmarket economy. Judged by these publications, his contribution to the model of socialist economy remains underappreciated. Curiously, while formulating the principles that a decade later would be fully realized during Stalin’s industrialization, Chaianov was far from sharing in Bolshevik ideological doctrine or Marxist political economy. His theoretical constructions, although they were pregnant with practical consequences, were motivated by purely abstract and analytical interests:

In this article, we do not enter into discussions of the possibility of fully realizing the socialist economy and maintaining it in the long run. We take it as given, or, more precisely, as intellectually constructed, and pose the following question: What are the tasks of this economy and what are the possible criteria of its success?

At approximately the same time, Chaianov published a long theoretical article, “Studies of the Isolated State,” in which he analyzed different economic regimes in his model of a simplified “state-island:” a geometrically correct and limited space, with one city-market in the center and an agricultural periphery. It is obvious that Chaianov borrowed the classical mathematical model of the “isolated state” from the German economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783–1850), who had elaborated it in 1826. Von Thünen’s model acquired new popularity among Russian economists in the 1910s. Chaianov himself turned to the model back in 1915, during the increasing economic blockade of Russia, and insisted on comparing the abstract isolated state with an island. Chaianov utilized this model of the imagined “state-island,” which simplified economic modeling, among other things to analyze the as yet hypothetical system of a socialist economy. To think of the abstract world and to analyze the possible universe of alternative economic reality, it is not necessary to believe in their reality or to desire their materialization. Yet, these analytical operations create very real foundations for delimiting one “isolated island-state” from the external world.

Simultaneously with the “red professor” Chaianov, Von Thünen’s abstraction of the “isolated state” was recalled by the émigré and one of the founders of Eurasianism, Petr Savitskii. In his famous pamphlet “Continent-Ocean,” he used Von Thünen’s model directly and extended it to Russia’s scale. One can discuss the extent to which Savitskii was a more ideologically engaged thinker than Chaianov, but the logic of Savitskii’s text is remarkably similar to that of Chaianov. Optimization of the internal costs of resource distribution along with the commonality of situation of the peoples of Eurasia and the politics of comparison with other empires (especially with the oceanic empire of England) requires homogenization of the economic space of the continent. Savitskii’s major ideological assumption in this text was the very readiness (as in the case of Chaianov) to view Russia (or “Eurasia”) as the embodiment of the abstract isolated state, as a thing in itself. As in the case of Chaianov and his Bolshevik patrons, the expounded ideology of Eurasianism argued that Russia’s difference was a secondary construct called upon to prove the fundamental nature of analytically constructed boundaries.

For Chaianov’s and Savitskii’s visions of Russia as a special world (with some characteristics of the “second world”), geopolitical arguments were of secondary importance. However traumatic the experience of the world war and the revolution for these two thinkers, in the above-mentioned texts they departed first of all from the analytical model of the Prussian economist of the early nineteenth century and from their own analyses of Russian geographical and economic realities of the early twentieth century. Their seemingly politically neutral choice of Russia as a closed system led to far-reaching consequences, such as the definition of an analytically con¬structed entity through the objectivation and ontologization of the unique “differentiating” characteristics of that system. The subsequent perception of the Soviet Union as a second world emerged for a variety of reasons, but it is important to stress that the international confrontation and geopolitical fantasies were neither the primary nor the only factors. The idea of Russia as a separate holistic entity, an alternative subject of history and politics, inevitably objectifies boundaries between that holistic entity and the rest of the world (or “worlds”). The idea of the plurality of worlds inevitably leads to fixations on the external boundaries and internal homogeneities. Historically, this intellectual process underlies conceptions of wholeness.

This issue of Ab Imperio opens with Richard Wortman’s thoughts on the importance of the trope of wholeness and integrity in the imperial period (in the “Methodology and Theory” section). Connecting the semantically changing category of integrity with the main “scenarios of power” famously identified by Wortman in his magisterial two-volume work, the author shows the importance of that category in the imperial situation. In essence, the idea of integrity in that period is the limit that allows one to synthesize the proverbial imperial diversity within the framework of one, and therefore the whole, system. While any other European country was similarly concerned about its territorial or political integrity, it was in Russia that the rhetoric of integrity became one of the foundations for discourses legitimizing political power and defining political loyalty and goals. Thus, with all the normative orientation of the regime and educated society of the empire toward western (European, capitalist, and conservative) values, the elements of the “second world” were always implicitly present in perceptions of Russia at home and abroad. In different periods of Russian history the function of the differentiating element was performed by the semantically loaded conception of integrity, be it loyalty to the state, dynasty, or a certain linguistic and cultural community.

Different aspects of the essentializing effect of “integrity” are discussed in articles by Elena Vishlenkova and Marina Loskutova in the “History” section. The former reconstructs a unique history of the emergence in Russia of the corporation of “learned physicians” as agents of state policies focused on the realization in the empire in the first quarter of the nineteenth century of the modern ideal of integrity: the police state. However, these physicians, educated with state funds at state universities, performing state service and fulfilling the role of allies of the main enlightener and reformer of the empire, that is, of the state, gradually undermined the project entrusted to them, diminishing its state-centered nature and its pretense of self-sufficiency and dissolving them in the international context of ideas. Marina Loskutova’s article focuses on the emergence of kraevedenie, local studies, in the early Soviet period and it shows a reversal of the dynamics shown by Vishlenkova. It demonstrates how the logic of societally involved scholarship and multiple plural and independent landscape paradigms is appropriated by carriers of the new ideology of the “state-island.” The latter’s internal specificity and diversification was supposed to work for the strengthening of external self-sufficiency and to produce integrity.

The thematic forum, “Closed City, Closed Economy, Closed Society: The Utopian Normalization of Autarky,” is organized by the guest editor, Sergei I. Zhuk, and focuses on the “developed second world” constructed in opposition to the “West.” How viable or, at least, self-sufficient, was the Soviet version of modernity? Judged by the articles of Kate Brown, Natalya Chernyshova, Andrei Kozovoy, Ekaterina Emeliantseva, and Sergei Zhuk, no “objective” factors of the success of Soviet otherness ever existed. Isolated pockets of efficiency and relative prosperity restricted to a number of closed cities and social groups in the closed Soviet system had existed relatively successfully only against the general background of greater poverty and legal discrimination in the country. Privilege was produced extensively by reducing oppression locally, and not due to the rise in quality of the accessible resources. The “integrity” of the Soviet autarkic system was achieved through its rigid internal hierarchy and system of limitations. An attempt to actualize the initial democratic potential of the socialist revolution (the expansion of goods and privileges to the maximally broad stratum of working people) immediately led to the collapse of the system.

Kevin Platt and Benjamin Nathans continue this theme in the “Newest Mythologies” section. In the article “Socialist in Form, Indeterminate in Content: The Ins and Outs of Late Soviet Culture,” they review the accepted notions of Soviet culture that operate with oppositions such as “cooperation structure of the late Soviet private sphere, which was penetrated in depoliticized form by many ideologically laden behavioral strategies that came to the fore with the beginning of perestroika.

In the social sciences section of the journal, Mariia Safonova’s work re¬minds us about the discursive (or, at least, imagined) nature of dialectically connected “integrity” and “separateness.” Sociological studies of student migrations of the past decade demonstrate the actual persistence of the ties between “metropoles” and “colonies,” even decades after political decolonizations. Perceptions of the cultural space and ties appear more stable than institutionalized political or even economic contacts.

The historiographic section houses a discussion of the Russian edition of Michael Kemper’s book Sufis and Scholars in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, 1789–1889. The key question of the historiographic forum concerns the place of the “Islamic discourse” reconstructed by Kemper in the system of other imperial discourses: can we speak of the binary opposition between “empire” and “Islam,” or is it that, as Charles Steinwedel has suggested, “many different discourses existed in the empire,” and the empire provided both the language and the institutions for their existence in some “integrity?”

От редакции. От “изолированного государства-острова” до “континента-океана”: Второй мир вне геополитики (RUS)
From the Editors. From the “Isolated Island-State” to the “Continent-Ocean”: The Second World Beyond Geopolitics (ENG)

Richard Wortman. The “Integrity” (tselost’) of the State in Imperial Russian Representation (ENG)
Ричард Уортман. “Целостность” государства в репрезентации Российской империи

Елена Вишленкова. “Выполняя врачебные обязанности, я постиг дух народный”: самосознание врача как просветителя российского государства (первая половина XIX века) (RUS)
Elena Vishlenkova. “Carrying Out My Medical Responsibilities, I Have Grasped the Popular Spirit:” The Self-Identification of the Physician as an Enlightener of the Russian State (First Half of the Nineteenth Century)

Марина Лоскутова. “Наука областного масштаба”: идея естественных районов в российской географии и истоки краеведческого движения 1920-х гг. (RUS)
Marina Loskutova. “Science on a Regional Scale:” The Idea of Natural Regions in Russian Geography and the Origins of the Local Studies Movement in the 1920s

Sergei I. Zhuk. Closing and Opening Soviet Society (Introduction to the Forum) (ENG)
Сергей И. Жук Закрывая и открывая советское общество (Введение в форум)

Kate Brown. The Closed Nuclear City and Big Brother®: Made in America (ENG)
Кейт Браун. Закрытый атомный город и “Большой брат”®: сделано в Америке

Natalya Chernyshova. Consuming Technology in a Closed Society: Household Appliances in Soviet Urban Homes of the Brezhnev Era (ENG)
Наталья Чернышова. Потребление технологии в закрытом обществе: бытовые приборы в советских городских жилищах в брежневскую эру

Andrei Kozovoi. Eye to Eye with the “Main Enemy”: Soviet Youth Travel to the United States (ENG)
Андрей Козовой. С глазу на глаз с “главным врагом”: поездки советской молодежи в Соединенные Штаты

Ekaterina Emeliantseva. The Privilege of Seclusion: Consumption Strategies in the Closed City of Severodvinsk (ENG)
Екатерина Емельянцева. Привилегия изоляции: потребительские стратегии в закрытом городе Северодвинске

Мария Сафонова. Академическое наследие империй: куда текут потоки международной студенческой миграции? (RUS)
Mariia Safonova The Academic Legacy of Empires: Where Do the Currents of International Student Migration Flow To?

Kevin M. F. Platt and Benjamin Nathans. Socialist in Form, Indeterminate in Content: The Ins and Outs of Late Soviet Culture (ENG)
Кевин Платт и Бенджамин Натанс. Социалистическая по форме, невнятная по содержанию: советская культура, вне и внутри

Рафик Мухаметшин. Новые грани исламского дискурса (RUS)
Rafik Mukhametshin. New Aspects of Islamic Discourse

Александр Кныш. Размышления по поводу русского перевода книги Михаэля Кемпера (RUS)
Alexander Knysh. Reflections on the Russian Translation of the Book by Michael Kemper

Charles Steinwedel. On Sufis, Scholarship, and Many Different Discourses
that Existed in Russian Empire (ENG)
Чарльз Стейнведел. О суфиях, ученых и множестве различных дискурсов, существовавших в Российской империи

М. Д. Долбилов. Русский край, чужая вера: Этноконфессиональная политика империи в Литве и Белоруссии при Александре II. Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2010. 999 с., ил. Именной указатель. ISBN: 978-5-86793-804-8.
Eugene M. Avrutin (ENG)

Г. В. Касьянов. Danse macabre: Голод 1932 – 1933 років у політиці, масовій свідомості та історіографії (1980-ті – початок 2000-х). Київ: “Наш час”, 2010. 271 с. ISBN: 978-966-1530-47-7.
Александр Поляничев (RUS)

Г. В. Касьянов. Danse macabre: Голод 1932 – 1933 років у політиці, масовій свідомості та історіографії (1980-ті – початок 2000-х). Київ: “Наш час”, 2010. 271 с. ISBN: 978-966-1530-47-7.
Андрей Портнов (RUS)

Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa K. Stockdale (Eds.), Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia. Essays in the New Spatial History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). xi+268 pp. ISBN: 978-0-87580-425-5 (hardback edition).
Christine Bichsel (ENG)

“Быть русским по духу и европейцем по образованию”: Университеты Российской империи в образовательном пространстве Центральной и Восточной Европы XVIII – начала XX в. / Сост. А. Ю. Андреев. Москва: “РОССПЭН”, 2009. 336 с. (=Россия и Европа. Век за веком). ISBN: 978-5-8243-1167-9.
Kitty Lam (ENG)

Andrzej Gil and Witold Bobryk (Eds.), On the Border of the Worlds: Essays about the Orthodox and Uniate Churches in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and the Modern Period (Siedlce & Lublin: Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 2010). 186 pp. ISBN: 978-83-60695-38-8.
Станислав Алексеев (RUS)

Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). xvii+322 pp. ISBN: 978-069-114-306-4 (hardback edition).
Emilian Kavalski (ENG)

Дж. Александер. Россия глазами иностранца / Пер. с англ. А. Базилевич. Москва: “Аграф”, 2008. 304 с. ISBN-13: 978-5-7784-0352-9.
Никита Храпунов (RUS)

С. В. Любичанковский. Ремонтируемая вертикаль: Губернская реформа в планах правительства Николая II. Оренбург: Издательство ОГПУ, 2009. 404 с. ISBN: 978-5-85859-408-6.
Marlies Bilz-Leonhardt (ENG)

М. В. Кирчанов. Воображая и (де) конструируя Восток. Идентичность, лояльность и протест в политических модернизациях и трансформациях. Воронеж: “Научная книга”, 2008. 295 с. ISBN: 978-5-98222-365-4.
Геннадий Королев (RUS)


List of Contributors