The Attraction of the Second World

Ab Imperio. 2011. #2.

Review prepared by Aliaksei Lastouski, research fellow at the Political Sphere Institute and Candidate of Sociological Sciences.

________________________________________________________________________________________

A little earlier, in reviewing the first issue for 2011, we already presented the general concept of the journal Ab Imperio, which focuses on studies of new imperial history and nationalism.

Now we will discuss the next issue, which continues the main line for this year, defined by the editors of the publication as the study of the Second World. This symbolic designation refers to the alternative to the “civilized” world that took shape either alongside Belarus or with expansion into Belarusian territory, namely the Russian Empire-USSR-Russian Federation. Accordingly, understanding this space as the Second World requires studying strategies for the distinction and delimitation of a separate and self-sufficient geopolitical project, attempts at self-description, and the conceptualization of this specificity both from within and from outside. It should be noted that this issue also pays particular attention to cultural transfers, borrowings and parallels that call into question the complete isolation of the “island-state”.

The issue opens with an article by the American historian Richard Wortman, who turns to changes in the understanding of the concept of “integrity” (tselost’) in the political thought of the Russian Empire. Although the main content of the article concerns the evolution of this idea in imperial times, when the need to preserve the integration of this space was articulated, the fate of this concept is traced up to contemporary Russia, and thus it is inherited from Peter I to Putin. It is noteworthy that Wortman emphasizes the opposition and difference between Russian political thought and Western thought, which faced the same problems of preserving the integrity of the state but solved them in different ways, more legalistic than voluntaristic.

The next section of the journal contains two articles devoted to studying the formation of the ethos and values of two professional corporations, which, at a certain stage in the self-definition of their official duties, closely linked those duties to the enlightenment of the country. Elena Vishliankova writes about the development of the self-awareness of Russian physicians in the first half of the XIX century, when, under the influence of a combination of various factors (the creation of a system of professional higher education, the consolidation of the prestige of state service, general intellectual trends), aspirations arose within this milieu to go beyond their immediate duties and engage in the enlightenment of the population and in “social analysis” for the needs of the state. Marina Loskutova turns to another historical period, the 1920s and the beginnings of Soviet statehood, and analyzes discussions among local-studies scholars about the purpose and mission of their activity and its connection with other intellectual debates, including those rooted in the times of the Russian Empire. The result was ultimately the subordination of local initiatives to the needs of modernization and the development of the Soviet state.

The guest editor of this issue, Sergei Zhuk, professor of history at Ball State University (USA), assembled a thematic forum on the problem of the “closedness” of Soviet society. Was it really as closed, isolated and self-sufficient as propaganda claimed and as ordinary people perceived it? In his introduction, the creator of the forum provides a fairly detailed description of the main debates on the closedness/openness of Soviet society that have unfolded in recent years, primarily among American historians. Some of the problematic questions outlined by Zhuk are then developed on the pages of the issue into more concrete studies. Thus Kate Brown examines closed “atomic” towns, which were usually considered a product of the Stalinist totalitarian order, and constructs an entirely different line of genealogy for them: according to the American researcher, American models, above all the Manhattan Project, served as direct prototypes for such closed towns.

Natalia Chernyshova also questions the “closedness” of Soviet society and traces clear parallels between forms of consumption in late Soviet society and Western culture; she finds this proximity especially in practices of consuming technological goods. Andrei Kozovoi analyzes the history of tourist exchanges between the USSR and the United States, when the prescribed roles and tasks of Soviet tourists as propagandists of the socialist model of development proved ineffective and instead contributed to the spread of idealized notions of the “West”.

Finally, Ekaterina Emeliantseva turns in her study to another case of a “closed” city, Severodvinsk, where strategic submarines were produced. While total control by state bodies over social space was preserved, the author identifies special “grey zones” (for example, the black market) and the functioning of parallel informal social ties. Thus, through a Western lens (and all the authors mentioned above work within the Anglo-Saxon scholarly system), the problem of transfers, borrowings and parallels between Western and Soviet society becomes more significant and interesting.

The issue continues with a study of directions of international student migration carried out by Maria Safonova. Analyzing migration patterns, she reaches the conclusion that “deep migration channels” exist, determined not only by contemporary configurations of educational prestige but, to a significant extent, crystallized through historical relations. The most stable channels emerge when ties between a former metropolis and a colony are preserved; to a certain degree, this same model can be extrapolated to contemporary Belarusian-Russian educational relations. The Russian sociologist examines in greater detail student migration from Kazakhstan to Russia, describing the institutional mechanisms that arise to ensure such mobility.

The next text, by Kevin Platt and Benjamin Nathans, is rather a response to Alexei Yurchak’s monograph and offers an alternative path for conceptualizing late Soviet culture, shifting the emphasis from binary oppositions (activists-dissidents) to phenomena of being outside the system.

As usual, Ab Imperio devotes considerable attention to reviewing new books. A special block of three reviews is devoted to the recent Russian translation of the monograph by the German scholar Michael Kemper on Islamic discourse in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan under the Russian Empire. Among new publications, particular attention should be paid to Mikhail Dolbilov’s fundamental monograph Russian Krai, Alien Faith on the ethnoconfessional policy of the Russian Empire in Belarus and Lithuania under Alexander II. This work still awaits an appropriate response from the Belarusian historical community. Among the reviews, the most interesting seems to be the discussion of the latest book by the Ukrainian historian Georgiy Kasianov, Danse Macabre, on the Holodomor as a central topic of memory politics for our southern neighbours. While Aleksandr Polianichev’s review is written more in a referential mode and presents the main ideas and substantive innovations of Kasianov’s book, Andrii Portnov focuses more on the problematic points that do not find satisfactory resolution in the reviewed monograph: the historian’s civic engagement or intellectual impartiality, the limits of criticizing the national canon of historiography, and the relationship between memory politics and mass historical consciousness.

This issue illuminates and analyzes important aspects in the formation and stages of self-awareness of the civilizational environment into which our country has also been drawn. The important question is whether we will continue to be satisfied with the role of an outskirt of the Second World.