After Empire

Nationalist Imagination and Symbolic Politics in Russia and Eurasia in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

Igor Torbakov

• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783838272177
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Igor Torbakov explores the nexus between various forms of Russian political imagination and the apparently cyclic process of the decline and fall of Russia's imperial polity over the last hundred years. While Russia's historical process is by no means unique, two features of its historical development stand out. First, the country's history is characterized by dramatic political discontinuity. In the past century, Russia changed its "historical skin" three times: following the disintegration of the Tsarist Empire accompanied by violent civil war, it was reconstituted as the communist USSR, whose breakup a quarter century ago led to the emergence of the present-day Russian Federation. Each of the dramatic transformations in the twentieth century powerfully affected the notion of what "Russia" is and what it means to be Russian. Second, alongside Russia's political instability, there is, paradoxically, a striking picture of geopolitical stability and of remarkable longevity as an imperial entity. At least since the beginning of the eighteenth century, "Russia" has been a permanent geopolitical fixture on Europe's northeastern margins with its persistent pretense to the status of a great power.

Against this backdrop, the book's three sections investigate (a) the emergence and development of Eurasianism as a form of (post-)imperial ideology, (b) the crucial role Ukraine has historically played for the Russians' self-understanding, and (c) contemporary Russian elites' exercises in historical legitimation.

I. THE VISION OF EURASIA

1. Becoming Eurasian:
The Intellectual Odyssey of
Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadsky

There is only one Russia, “Eurasian” Russia, or Eurasia.

—George Vernadsky, A History of Russia

It is very difficult for outsiders, Czeslaw Milosz famously noted, to under­stand the intractable national problems of Eastern Europe. In his beautifully written Native Realm, Milosz, himself a typical East European, accord­ing to his own self-description, paints a nuanced and colorful picture of the mind-boggling mosaic of the numerous peoples, religions, and cultures cohabitating in the East European marchlands that were incorporated in the Rus­sian Empire. In his childhood years in Wilno (now Vilnius), Milosz recalled, “Practically every person I met was different, not because of his own special self, but as a representative of some group, class, or nation. One lived in the twentieth century, another in the nineteenth, a third in the fourteenth.”1 To be sure, the interplay between all those sociocultural groups on the one hand, and the different relations that each one had with the central government on the other made the issue of local loyalties and identities extremely complex. But, as Milosz points out, the Romanov Empire’s disintegration and the rise of a number of national states in its former borderlands did not make matters any easier. In fact, he writes, the shift from the often loose imperial allegiance to a more rigid nation-based identity led to the most dramatic developments: sometimes it “severed even the closest ties and set brother against brother. One was forced to make a choice, the more emotional for being based on un­clear data, yet, like every decision, demanding proper motives.”2

The chaotic exit from the imperial order in 1917–1920 could not fail to trigger a quest, both inside and outside “historical Russia,” for new para­digms that would problematize the relations between center and periphery, cultural (and political) liberation and subjection. Intensive and heated debates created an intellectual atmosphere concerned with the problems of cultural relativity and emancipation. Out of this very atmosphere Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony or heteroglossia emerged in literary criticism that, some scholars argue, can be perceived as a latent theory of nation and nationalism.3 Within the Russian émigré milieu in Europe in the 1920s—1930s, the notion of polyphony, similar to Bakhtin’s, was upheld by the Eurasianists who were struggling with how to harmonize the “voice” of the imperial center with those of the multiple subimperial communities.4

Significantly, over the past decade, the body of scholarly literature on “classical” Eurasianism has been steadily growing.5 The broadest reason for this interest is obvious. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new geopolitical landscape in what has tellingly come to be designated as Eurasia, both scholars and general public alike have expe­rienced crises of identity—not unlike those that tormented the Eurasianists themselves in the wake of the unraveling of the Russian Empire—and are still grappling with how best to analyze the new reality. A 2004 essay by the historian Mark von Hagen is both a manifestation of those crises and a help­ful attempt to show the way out of them. Remarkably, not only did von Hagen invoke the iconoclastic spirit of classical Eurasianists, he also advanced Eur­asia as the antiparadigm for the post-Soviet era.6

The study of Eurasianism, however, has produced mixed results so far. As one contemporary student of this fascinating school of thought observes, “As a body of doctrine, Eurasianism has been much more frequently summa­rized than critically examined.”7 The Eurasianism-related archival materials, in particular the voluminous correspondence among the participants of the movement, still need to be studied. Moreover, interest in Eurasianism has traditionally been skewed toward the geopolitical (the “Exodus to the East”), the sociopolitical (Eurasianism’s authoritarian leanings toward “ideocracy”), and, to a lesser extent, the historiosophic. Since 2000, some useful studies of Eurasianist theory of culture have appeared.8 But the Eurasianists’ attempts at rethinking empire and nation and at crafting a new historical narrative in which Russia’s multiethnic character would find a more thorough treatment were not sufficiently explored.9

This brings me to the figure of Georgii (George) Vernadsky, who is rightly regarded as Eurasianism’s principal historian. There is, it would appear, a virtual flourishing of Vernadsky studies in today’s Russia. Most of the works of the émigré historian have been reprinted in his historical homeland and there is a seemingly endless stream of monographs and articles on his life and scholarship.10 Surprisingly, as the eminent Harvard historian Richard Pipes has remarked, since its emancipation from communism a kind of cult of Vernadsky has emerged in Russia.11 This atmosphere of adulation has also prompted the senior Russian historian Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, Vernadsky’s most recent biographer, to comment that, while in Soviet times G. V. Ver­nadsky was a popular “whipping boy,” mercilessly criticized for his non-Marxist understanding of the historical process, in postcommunist Russia, he has be­come the object of almost “limitless praise.”12

But despite the impressive range of scholarly research on Vernadsky, the question persists: How well do we understand his intellectual legacy—in par­ticular, the links between his own national identity (identities?), his choice of the Eurasianist paradigm, and his historical scholarship?

George Vernadsky is generally regarded as a historian of Russia.13 At first blush, this seems quite understandable: his multivolume magnum opus is titled A History of Russia, and his last big study, published posthumously, was Russian Historiography. Yet this traditional perception of the scholar obscures the fact that Vernadsky’s ambition was to write not the history of Russia as a nation-state but the history of Russia-Eurasia—the vast terri­tory, virtually a world unto itself, inhabited, to borrow his Eurasianist friend Petr Savitskii’s words, by an “assembly of peoples” (sobor narodov). Thus Ver­nadsky tried to create a master narrative that would incorporate the histories of all major peoples living on the Eurasian plains—both the eastern nomads (“the peoples of the steppe”) and the western neighbors of the Great Russians, first of all the Ukrainians. In doing this, he naturally drew heavily upon Rus­sian imperial historiography in whose tradition he was steeped in Moscow and St. Petersburg universities. But Vernadsky also introduced a new vision of Russian history obviously inspired by his Eurasianism. In 1933, in a letter to his father, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, he described his work on An Essay on the History of Eurasia: “In the general concept of Russian history I try to devote much more attention than has been given previously to Western Rus’ and Ukraine.”14 In the same vein, in his study of Russian historiography one finds the scholarly portraits of the leading Ukrainian historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Mykola Kostomarov, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Dmytro Bahalii.

Furthermore, Vernadsky appeared to view the history of Ukraine as a legitimate subject per se. He authored an English-language biography of Het­man Bohdan Hmelnytsky and wrote an introduction and did editorial work for a translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s one-volume history of Ukraine. Ver­nadsky seemed to be especially fascinated by the personality of Mykhailo Drahomanov. In the mid-1930s he urged a fellow émigré Aleksandra Gol’shtein, a family friend and long time acquaintance of Drahomanov, to write a memoir about him.15 Later Gol’shtein sent him a manuscript of her reminiscences, along with her copious correspondence with Drahomanov.16

Among Vernadsky’s works preserved in his archive are two typescripts underscoring his professional interest in the history of Ukraine—“The Kievan and Cossack Periods in Ukrainian History” and “Prince Trubetskoi and the Ukrainian Question.”17 This archival collection also contains two folders of materials titled “The Ukrainian Question before and during the Second World War.” It would be only proper to add that as early as 1941, in an interview with an English-language Ukrainian publication, Vernadsky spoke in favor of plans to establish a Ukrainian research institute in the United States that would publish a Ukrainian-language journal.18

Given all this, a strong case can be made for revisiting George Vernadsky’s understanding of what he himself called a “Russian history.” Particularly intriguing is the exploration of how Vernadsky’s Eurasianism relates both to his own struggles with identity issues and to his thinking on empire, nation, R...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Debating Russian Nationalism and Empire
• Acknowledgements
• I. The Vision of Eurasia
• II. Russia and Ukraine: Histoire Croisée
• III. Politics of History
• Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Copyright