Aleksander Semyonov, Ilya Gerasimov:
“This project is our life's work”

The complexities of the Russian future require new approaches to the the nation's past. These can be found in the New Imperial History project, created by a group of leading Russian historians including Ilya Gerasimov, Aleksander Semyonov, Marina Mogilner and Sergei Glebov. This project explores the myths found in outdated historiography, recognizing the multiplicity of past with view to the pluralism of the future. Ilya Gerasomov and Aleksander Semyonov recently spoke to IMR's Caterina Innocente about their work and some fresh perspectives on Russian history and the post-Soviet space.

 

Caterina Innocente: As a historian, how would you characterize a healthy attitude toward the past?

Aleksander Semyonov: I would say that a healthy attitude toward history is critical. “Critical” in the broadest sense of the word. In the same way that we reflect on every passing year, thinking that one thing was successful and another wasn’t, that we’ve changed in one way, and in another way we’ve stayed the same… It is important to be critical of the past and not to be absorbed by it. There are many examples where the past may inhibit a person from branching out and doing something that wasn't done by those who came before. Especially when the predecessors are elevated to the status of mythical heroes—nation builders, vanquishers, founders of states. People who take such creation myths for granted begin to live in the past. This is especially characteristic of the mythology of nation-states, where the metaphor of foundation and persistence of the national community becomes the exclusive focus of the history-writing. Historians call this deterministic vision of history and historical teleology.

Another no less dangerous extreme is dismissing the past completely. Believing that it is simply behind you. Thinking that if something happened 10 or 20 years ago, it might as well have happened in the Stone Age. For the generation of young people born after 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union is akin to the Great Reforms of the middle of the 19th century. This is dangerous because the past, in the words of the renowned Russian historian Vasilly Osipovich Kluchevsky, leaves, but doesn’t cover its tracks.” When we speak of the post-Soviet period, about the post-Soviet landscape, we see that, for example, institutions don’t change as quickly as we would like.

CI: It’s hard to change your personal habits, and when it comes to changing an approach…

AS: Exactly. An entire approach is extremely difficult to change. Society often get fixated on certain things like the terms of public rhetoric or political discourse.

 

The possibility for a different future is directly related to the quality of historical thought in a society.

Aleksander Semyonov

To see an example of this, we only need to look at the idea of nationality. The majority of people take it for granted that this concept as a collective possession can be contingent on context. Sometimes the concept of citizenship overrides it. The idea of what is considered Russian in Kazan’ must have been very different from the idea of Russianness in Estonia or Belgorod.

CI: How so?

The history of the emergence of the concept of nationality in the 19th century is full of examples of very different definitions of the concept, ranging from aesthetic characteristics to race. It did change its meaning and its relevance. Nonetheless, official and academic rhetoric render this concept as fundamental and natural. As though every person, before they go to sleep at night, checks what nationality they are. The way the term is used in Russia makes people think that nationality is an obvious and internally homogenous group that exists outside of what people think about it and do with it. Very often, the concept of nation is linked to ethnicity, especially in the post-Soviet concept. In this rendition it becomes a natural thing, a fact of biology, not history or politics. This is the legacy of the Soviet nationality policy.

 

A woman is seated in a calm spot on the Sim River, part of the Volga watershed in 1910

Prokudin-Gorskii Collection/Library of Congress

 

CI: Cultural historian Vladimir Paperny once told me about a typical conversation between an American social worker and an immigrant from the Soviet Union:

“What’s your nationality?”
“I'm Jewish.”
“I don't mean your religion. What's your nationality?”
“I'm a Jew.”
“And your native language is...?”
“Russian.”
“Then you’re Russian.”
“No, I’m not.”

AS: That’s an interesting example, which illustrates the point. We should add, however, that in other situations, the same person may prefer a different way of describing themselves, as young or old, as an art lover or soccer fan, and so on. We should also keep in mind that the question “Are you Russian?” seems too obvious and forces people to think of more refined categories for defining themselves. Many prefer to say that they are “from Russia.” Over 100 years ago, [Vasilly Osipovich] Kluchevsky gave a fitting description for the ever-increasing nationalism we see in Russia today: “There is no more Russia now, there are only Russians.”

 

The Russian Empire 50 years before the beginning of its demise. The Russian Empire is considered to have collapsed between 1916 and 1923 (sometimes 1924). Over the course of these 7 (or 8) years, independent states were formed on the territory of the former empire, the former empire was dissolved, and the USSR was formed.

 

Returning to your original question about a “healthy” attitude toward the past, I would probably say that the space between the two extremes we have laid out is the critical landscape. This landscape allows a person to see themselves against the backdrop of history; one of the most important tasks of the historian is to be a medium for the past, creating a kind of mirror for his contemporaries in which they could see that they have already changed and stopped resembling what they looked like, say, 30 years ago. The historian’s objective is to make society look in the mirror often and contemplate itself constantly. For instance, we no longer debate whether or not women should vote. Those debates happened 100 years ago and were rather brutal. The accepted notion is that history is a kind of political science that will tell the story of how a country was run in the past so that this knowledge can make us smarter and allow us to draw some sort of conclusions and morals out of these stories, to modify our behavior. However, people often forget about the historian’s capacity as a mirror of the past. In reality, in the words of Leslie Hartley, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It is very important to keep this in mind.

CI: How often do or should historians reexamine their assessments of the past?

Ilya Gerasimov: History never rests, but ideas about it may ossify for years or even decades. The past simply has to change every ten or fifteen years, or at least once in a generation, which means that there are always new people who have new questions addressed to the past. Most importantly, when you have a healthy attitude toward the past, you start to see that it is just as unpredictable as the future.

CI: How can the past be unpredictable?

IG: The past is only relevant vis-a-vis the role that it plays in new challenges. Acknowledging the plurality of the past—not only the multiple interpretations of a single event but the many possible consequences of a given moment in history—opens up the plurality of the future. If people continue to believe that everything that came before led directly to the triumph of the Roman Empire, consumer capitalism, or the development of socialism, we are bound for a crisis. Changing this idea is the most important part of our new approach to the discipline of history.


CI: What characterizes your new approach?

IG: An important aspect of our approach has to do with thinking about history. We call it historical imagination.

CI: Could you explain what this means in layman’s terms?

IG: Historical imagination is a kind of social thinking that comes out of the attempt to understand the past. Past events are only relevant insofar as they are acknowledged to be by the current generation of historians and their readers. It’s not what happened that it is important, as much as how the phenomenon is analyzed and described in the present. I am not talking about some opportunistically contrived reconsideration of known facts, but about the ability to understand the complex social fabric and assess it not teleologically (i.e. according to a programmatic understanding of the progress of history), but as a number of options that happened to materialize as a matter of choice; to examine the logic behind a number of actors in the historical process. By actors, I mean anything from states and peoples to professional associations, women as a group, children, etc.

CI: You started working on your New Imperial History project in 2000. How has it developed since its inception?

AS: The New Imperial History project was tied to the (then new) publication of Ab Imperio, an international academic journal. The academic portion of the project includes a reevaluation of the Russian historical experience in a comparative context, and a dialogue on the implications of being a historian today. First of all, this project aims to rethink the role of national history as the basic framework for the analysis of past experience. We also seek to reflect on implications of using certain categories and terms to describe a heterogeneous, complex, and multi-directional past. This is a constantly developing project. Old questions recede and new ones emerge; I would say that this project in some sense is our life's work. This is a self-critical project and I admit that we had to get past certain misconceptions: at one point, we had taken nationality to be a fundamental factor in the post-Soviet space and its history, but later, we realized that things were a lot more complicated… In 2000, a certain group, let’s call it a collective of like-minded people, simply acknowledged that a critical mass of questions had accumulated which demanded new answers and new approaches for developing these answers. These were the origins of our project.

CI: What were these questions primarily concerned with?

AS: The history of the Russian Empire, the history of nationalism, the history of national identities, the past of historically constituted regions, as well as the issues associated with the history of various religions and denominations. To summarize, I would call these the questions related to differences and diversity in Russia's past.

CI: Why do you believe such questions to be essential to Russian history?

IG: It’s hard to imagine the pluralistic society of the future without learning more about the differences between the social and cultural patterns in a country through history, without having a clear idea of the defined ethnic, religious, and linguistic hierarchical structure. It's impossible to build a democratic society without understanding the elemental processes of how a society organizes itself, even in the context of an undemocratic, “sovereign” regime. It is impossible to learn to be tolerant toward the “other,” when you have no experience with thinking about the fact that two or three centuries ago, all people were the “other” for one another, that everyone existed outside of the “nation” concept that we are so used to today. The “Russian” peasant was a stranger to a “Russian” nobleman; a Pomor wouldn’t understand the language of someone who lived in Kursk; Old Believers couldn’t intermarry with Russian Orthodox, not to mention other religions; and so on.

 

Population breakdown by social class 1912

 

It is impossible to imagine the contemporary society that we know without asking ourselves how and why isolationist versions of the past emerged (ideas such as “Moscow is the Third Rome,” and “Eurasia”), and without seriously considering comparative and global perspectives on Russian history.

Moreover, the primary question for us used to be how to formulate our questions. Remember that in 1991, historians essentially had no name for what they studied.

CI: In the sense that they didn’t know what to call the country anymore?

AS: People wrote about the history of Russia, but oftentimes this would actually mean Russian history. Think of the funny dissertation titles, like “The History of Russian Central Government in the 1930s.” What Russia?! What are we talking about here? If we are talking about the history of Russia and imposing present borders on past conceptions of what Russia is, we are completely destroying the historical context—the economy, the political system—of a much more complex political and social landscape.

CI: Of course. And there is no way out of the generalizations that come with a historical context, even when they controversial. For example, with Georgia.

AS: Exactly. Especially when they are controversial. It is impossible to understand conflicts out of context. To get a sense of their acuteness, shape, and where they are headed is completely impossible without taking a broader perspective and keeping the entire context in mind. If we do not compare and contrast the elements of a given situation and instead, if we continue to believe that everyone lived happily in their little islands of nation-states with their national pasts, it will be impossible to understand how conflicts originated.


CI: The book you and your colleagues put together in the course of this project is called Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space. How would you define this space?

AS: The post-Soviet space covers all territories that have been under the control of the Russian Empire over the course of the past 17-18 centuries that all became part of the Soviet Union. They also all experienced the fall of the Soviet Union.

The question of what we should call the subject of our study was important. Would it be The history of Muscovy? The history of Russia? The history of the Russian Empire? We decided that it would be more appropriate to think about this space through the prism of empire and imperial society.

CI: Why did you pick “empire”? Why this particular wording?

AS: When it comes to the term, it is not important that the legal title of the state included the term ‘empire’. What’s important is the category of the empire as an historical term, which is defined by two dimensions:

1. The history of an empire is the history of sovereignty and conflict, of violence and conquest. An empire’s expansion could be peaceful or not. Conflicts arise as part of expansion or in its aftermath. We didn't want to write the history of the Empire in the propagandistic, Soviet model. We are not interested in using the "friendship of the nations" rhetoric.

2. An empire is always about difference and diversity. It always has many different religious groups, linguistic groups, ethnic groups, and others. It also has a complicated social structure, in part created by distinctive cultural features turned into the features signifying a citizens’ belonging to a social group—and vice versa.

 

Map of Russian Empire in 1895

 

CI: Empire isn’t solely a Russian phenomenon, the world has seen a number of colonial empires: the Holy Roman Empire, the German, the British, etc.

AS: Of course. And we are drawing parallels and looking at different historical empires. In the words of American sociologist Seymour Lipset, “He who only know only one country knows no country.” Which is to say that comparison is the basic analytical procedure for, including history. If you want to understand one country, to begin, you have to compare it with another. Then you can see and distinguish what is unique about it, or see what the two have in common. When it comes to the experience of the colonial empires, there has been a great deal of studies done by Western historians. They created the tradition of post-colonialism, which became an important innovation in the realm of the social sciences and the humanities in general. In studies of the Russian empire, we find either imitations of the post-colonialist model or that this model is completely ignored. We would like to find out what the experience of studying the Russian Empire can contribute to the overall theoretical understanding of empires.

We must remember that empires are a kind of social and political structure that has existed for much longer than the nation-state. The latter arose more like a beautiful and influential idea—for example, people in revolutionary France fell in love with it…The model of the ‘nationally’ homogenous state has always been an ideal and a political aim, but never an actual possibility. In Russia, historians study 19th century European nation-states, but often forget that there was no such thing as England at that time, only the British Empire. And it wasn’t only in Europe: it was in America, South East Asia, and so on.

CI: When it comes to the post-Soviet space, it seems that there are not only clear conflicts and instances of violence but other complicated and even paradoxical situations…

AS: Interestingly, the paradoxes and contradictions have not always appeared as they do from our contemporary perspective. For example, the 1830 and 1863 uprisings. From a contemporary perspective, these may appear to be ethnic conflicts between Russians and Poles. In the context of the time, it was more complicated: the logic of historical memory about Poland (not to be confused with the so-called “ethnic” Poland) coincides with the logic of imperial sovereignty (not to be confused with the logic of a Russian nation-state). This conflict was consistently played out along class lines (the Szlachta vs. the peasantry) and religions boundaries, not just ethnic ones. In order to describe this phenomenon, our project uses the term uneven diversity. Contemporary historiography tends to rely on the idea of an even-handed diversity: the Russians are on one side, the Poles are on the other, and these two ethnic groups have some kind of thing that they can’t share, thus the conflict. But what if you were to take into account the social factor? What if the Polish-ness and Russian-ness of the time were not how we understand them today? If we don’t look at these other things, we are looking at the past reductively.

CI: In the USSR, over-simplified narratives about the past prevailed.

AS: Those reductive narratives result from the nationalist discourse. Hence the idea of England exists only on the islands that essentially have nothing to do with the worldwide British Empire. Look at typical historical maps. Maps of Western Europe in the 19th century will show England, but not British India; France, but not Algeria.

You talk about a sober perspective on history. Yes, it’s sober. On the one hand, an empire always mean that there is expansion, violence, the exploitation of resources in order to attain what Niccolo Machiavelli called grandezza.

CI: Yes, grandezza. A pretty word. "Greatness" in English.

AS: Yes. And on the other hand, it is anachronistic to believe that inter-empire conflicts led to the ethnic tensions and conflicts of the 20th century. My colleagues and I support having a sober perspective on historical truth here, as well. This is why if the dynamic of the relationships in the imperial space are more complex, we will discuss them as such. This is another example of what you may refer to as a healthy attitude toward history: we are not trying to fit historical scenarios into the model that would be most convenient to use in light of contemporary political memory, i.e. to claim the past to a particular group and explain the logic of history through the reference to collective identities that exist today.

CI: Putting a group in a certain light is a favorite activity of politicians. Along with generalization and over-simplification.

AS: Indeed. Over-simplifying can be worse than stealing.


CI: Do you believe that a historian’s job is also to protect the layman from the historical demagoguery of modern politicians?

AS: Probably not. That is probably the job of the media.

CI: In that case, what are historians concerned about when it comes to their own work? You, for example.

AS: My colleagues and I are very concerned about the hegemony of certain categories in explaining the modern world and its genealogy. These ideas are based on misleading assumptions (and not always acknowledged assumptions, at that) that nations (nationalities, ethnic groups) are a natural form for collective social existence. The tendency to think this way is a universal phenomenon, characteristic not only for Russia and not only in the post-Soviet space. It’s the way people think around the world.

CI: How do historians fight this?

AS: As part of the New Imperial History project, we proposed a working category we call relativization.

CI: What is it?

AS: I would name two levels of relativization.

The first is the relativization of the hegemonic discourses, that is, of the dominant language or, as historians say, narrative. The dominant language always promotes its own portrait of the world and its own genealogy or past. By relativizing these hegemonies, we begin to take into account how our ideas about the world and society are formed. For example, we are used to thinking that in order to describe the peasantry we can use national categories, that we can say “the Russian peasantry.” If ‘Russian’ doesn’t apply, we can say ‘Ukranian.’ But what if the category of nationality itself is inadequate in order to describe this social group and account for how it understands itself? What if peasants exclusively understood themselves locally (“we here”) and never thought of the abstract categories of a national community or a greater historic region? By introducing the category of locality to our analysis we challenge the supposed self-evident and accepted relevance of the dominant language of nationality.

2. The renaissance in the study of history, like the renaissance in the study of man. The paradox here is that every person that is part of contemporary society is perfectly aware that he or she is simultaneously part of a number of different contexts in which he or she plays different roles. Each of us plays one or another role according to the logic of the situation.

CI: For example, right now I am a journalist interviewing you, but on a different plane I am a woman, a mother, a daughter, a consumer…is this what you mean?

AS: Yes. But the contradiction lies in the fact that when we look at history, we forget about this mosaic of situations and junctures. It is as though all historical actors are mere mannequins. Or mannequin/chameleons. Take Catherine II: she’s Great, then she’s a Jezebel; she’s a German, then she’s the Mother Empress. All of these are grave over-simplifications of her roles. Relativization means using history for its original purpose of talking about a person in the context of the past such that they retain their humanity—multi-faceted, paradoxical, complex, but always consistent with itself.

CI: This kind of thinking can alter our perspective on many historical figures.

AS: Naturally. Which doesn’t mean we eliminate judgment. But if we remember that all historical figures were human beings, we can make judgments more competently. We have better material with which we can acknowledge the many meanings of our past.

Acknowledging the plurality of the past—not only the multiple interpretations of a single event but the many possible consequences of a given moment in history—opens up the plurality of the future.

Ilya Gerasimov

CI: Who else participates in your project?

AS: Our group is a research collective that generally focuses on the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It includes Marina Mogilner, Sergey Glebov, Ilya Gerasimov, and myself. We are members of Ab Imperio editorial board. Each one of us has his or hers own research project, but we are also working on a joint project, which I have already described briefly. Publishing the journal and working on the research together has allowed us greater contact and more room for debate with our colleagues—the regular contributors and our readers. In the course of our work, we have identified many important issues related to the interpretation of the Russian past and have even begun to account for many of the troubling phenomena in Russian history. (Brief biographies of the main contributors can be found here—Ed.)

CI: Why did you begin to work collectively specifically on this period? Was there a special reason for this?

AS: This was a very interesting, dynamic period. Many changes were taking place, the old turning into the new. A diverse, even inconsistent context was characteristic for this phase in the development of the Russian empire. When we were launching our first book in 2000, it was very important for us to focus on such breaking points, radical changes, when a society tears forward and leaves certain things behind, i.e. behavioral models, outmoded institutions, and even certain kinds of thought and thought mechanisms.

CI: Do the other contributors of Ab Imperio think in the same way as you do?

AS: I would say that they ask questions in the same way. For example, when we talk about power in the 18th or 19th century, no one thinks that this can be studied simply in the archives of Moscow or St. Petersburg, that is, in the cities where most of the archives of the central government are concentrated. We all understand that in the Russian Empire existed a localizing logic of government that makes it crucial to also research in the archives of Kazan’, Vilnius, and Tbilisi. That way, we can get a very different picture (and a decentralized, paradoxical one at that) of the system of imperial government and the society in imperial times.

 

Old structure on a cliff on the left bank of the Kura River, ca. 1910

 

When we talk about power, we don’t just mean the bureaucracy. We know that there were a number of groups with different measures of influence. For example, the Szlachta were the carriers of high culture. Did the Szlachta have narrowly defined political power? Yes, but also no. However, they had influence over some sense of power, the power of social status and high culture.

CI: So it is like you are working on a complicated Impressionist painting of the state of the country at that time.

AS: Yes, but our goal isn’t to paint this picture and show it off in a museum for people to admire. The sketch is only the first part. In the next, analytic phase of our work, we create a model and attempt to account for it: how a place was governed, how conflicts developed, what made up the dynamics, what role was played by, for example, the powerful perception of nationalism.

CI: So first you make your own, essentially new platform for analysis. And it’s not that Soviet historians didn’t do this at all, but that they were working from a completely different foundation. And if you change the foundations, you come to very different conclusions.

AS: This is a good summary of what we do.


CI: Aleksander, you studied during Soviet times…

AS: To be precise, during late perestroika.

CI: Afterwards, in addition to completing a post-Soviet education, you also studied in America. Is this international experience serve as a prism through which you see the history of your own country differently?

AS: You know, we still get submissions that say, N — is a Russian historian, Z — is a foreign one. Separating historians according to their citizenship is an artificial and not very productive practice. We are talking about differences in schools and traditions. Historians should be assessed according to the school, tradition, and theoretical framework they prescribe to, not their citizenship.

CI: What I meant to ask about is the difference in schools. I wanted to know whether your assessment apparatus changed after you had the opportunity to study in a different tradition, with different approaches.

AS: The Western PhD. system is different from the way we do post-graduate studies in Russia. In the West, graduate school is a kind of training camp for independent research. It allows doctoral students to read in a broadly defined field of studies and familiarize themselves with various schools of thought and branches of scholarship. It is not typical for students to study the same narrow topic as their advisors or other instructors and follow them in their footsteps, focusing on a narrow aspect of a greater topic.

In addition, the Western system is characterized by being cross-disciplinary and using the methodology of comparative history. The cross-disciplinary aspect presents historiography as a part of the social sciences, positing that it is impossible to imagine contemporary historiography without, say, new approaches to sociology and anthropology. The Western school provides this kind of training while the Soviet system, for obvious reasons, missed out on certain key developments in the social sciences of the 20th century, when scholars were moving away from Essentialism and Primordialism, and mastering new methodologies… Comparative history destroys isolationism in perceptions of he past. It allows historians to learn what can and cannot be compared, what makes up a single context, and what separates contexts otherwise connected by influences or borrowed models.

He who knows only one country knows no country.

Seymour Lipset

It’s important to mention that in the West, there is also such a form of organization of knowledge as area-studies. This is when a group of specialists in the literature, history, and politics of a single region gather to discuss their research, bringing together various disciplines and approaches. Sometimes, the Russian or Eurasian area-studies field is called Kremlinology, not without reason. The best of the Western historians of Russian history understand that they aren’t just historians of Russia, they are also part of the historical profession. In this profession, you need to read the theoretical works and works related to other regions and constantly reflect on the identity of the discipline of history

CI: Is this why your magazine appears in Russian and in English?

AS: Yes, that is an important part of it. We want to facilitate communication between historians from different countries, and English happens to be the lingua franca of the international academic community.

CI: Do you find that today’s young Russians are more interested in their history and its reinterpretation?

AS: I would say that the return of relevance of history is due to the sense of dynamism and change in the present. Young people are less convinced that the path of development is predetermined and more convinced in that the future could be changed. This is an aspect of historicity and so yes, more students are signing up for history classes.

CI: Today’s students probably have some intuition of the plurality of the past?

AS: Yes, they probably intuitively understand that the plurality of the past is what history is made of. From Rurik to Putin, what we see aren’t predetermined narratives, but different ways of reading, different interpretations. I believe that the return of politics, not in the strict sense of the word, where one party wins and the other loses, but in the sense of civic engagement and the ability to effect change, also fosters a greater interest in history.

CI: As a journalist, I am convinced that these two things are related. When people begin to believe that their voice matters, that they can effect change, they begin to think about their civic duty, which includes its historical aspect. People began to feel the necessity of drawing their own conclusions about the state of their nation. It becomes clear to them that it’s impossible to analyze the present situation well without understanding history. Even people don’t usually think about history see this.

AS: Yes, of course.

CI: I would like to discuss the lessons we can learn from history. The lessons that could be of use to a society that is facing new challenges, that has come out this winter to protest the current state of affairs.

 

The USSR in 1950

 

AS: History and political subjectivity, that is, how people become subjects, how they act and shape the future. This is only indirectly related to current politics, but this is the fundamental lesson of history. If we were to approach lessons of history in a straightforward manner of looking for ready recipes, then we will end up with what Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, ended up, in his own words “No matter how you build it, you end up with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” And this is probably not something we need.

CI: But what do we need then? Here are the people, the so-called “new Decembrists,” that have taken to the streets and will continue to do so in Moscow and beyond. What lessons from history would you advise them to look at?

 

Boris Yeltsin on a tank during the putsch of August 1991. Moscow

 

AS: Very indirectly, I would recommend that they look at a few fundamental things. For example, to see the diverse historical experience that has to do with being a political subject. Look at how people created history, try to figure out what were the factors of actualization of human volition and human imagination. Sometimes, a look at the past can help to rethink the straight jacket of modern categories. For example, do we believe that the way to become subjects of history is to get to the Kremlin? If one believes in this, then one is bound to strive tomake his or her way into the Kremlin on the basis of truth and lies alike, and then change the country once  in power. But people can act and shape the future without necessarily being in the Kremlin. Despite what the history textbooks say, I think people are beginning to understand this.

That is another important function of history, in my opinion—to serve as a warning.

CI: So that people don’t get dizzy with their success?

AS: Yes. It’s crucial to understand that certain historical processes have inertia. It is impossible to just stop them or change their course once they have begun.

Here is one important warning: there aren’t simple solutions to our complex problems. Our problems are complex partially because the context of diversity continues to characterize the Russian Federation. It characterizes a number of other contemporary states that also debate the meaning of citizenship, political community, and are engaged in negotiating cultural boundaries, whether it be in Germany, France, or the United States. Until recently, our intellectual milieu searched for a national idea. The prevalent notion was that our history had gone wrong—there hadn’t been time to build a nation-state. That today, we need to catch up to other countries and also build ours. But this is a wrongheaded point of departure. What if the nation-state is an attractive but, considering historical experience, unattainable ideal?

CI:  To return to your project, where would you say you are with it today?

AS: When we began working on the project, we didn’t think that we could provide the answers to the questions we were raising. Now, things are changing. We are at the synthesis stage. Using the conclusions drawn in our research and the research of our colleagues—even if their interpretations don’t necessarily coincide with ours, but share a framework—we are beginning to feel that we can come up with a new interpretation of Russian history, especially considering the fact that more than ever, we see the inadequacy of the old narratives.

CI: Is the inadequacy simply apparent or has it been widely acknowledged? There is a difference.

AS: We can say that it is acknowledged. Right now is a very exciting time, and people are attempting to write new histories. They are writing them. And if they are writing them, this means that there is a common idea among historians that synthesis needs to be made anew. We are entering a new stage in our work, and we are very hopeful that the conclusions we draw from our analyses, our hypotheses, and the analytic models formulated in the context of our project, will all be interesting not only to experts in the field (since we are constantly publishing work intended for them in specialized journals), but for the reading public at large.

CI: And the book will presumably be written in the language that the layman, well, the well-read layman…

AS: Let’s say the reflective and concerned reader…(laughs)


CI: Yes, him. This reflective and concerned reader, who isn’t a historian, will he be able to read and understand everything you’d like him to?

AS: We are working very closely with language, seeking out certain compromises. On the one hand, we don’t want our book to be bogged down in specialized terminology, but, on the other hand, we don’t want to treat the past in a reductionist manner fitting it to the conceptual habits of the present day. Many of the prevalent or simply habitual formulas for describing reality or the contemporary situation don’t take the true nature of the past into account. We are being very careful with language.

CI: Your project attempts to influence the quality of historical thought in Russian society. And probably not just Russian society. Why are you concerned with the quality of historical thought?

AS: Because the possibility for a different future, as well as an active social orientation toward the present, are both directly related to the quality of historical thought in a society.

 

Aleksander Semyonov

Aleksander Semyonov received his MA and Ph.D in History at the Central European University in Budapest. He has the unique experience of having taught at the most progressive Russian learning institution: the Smolny College for Liberal Arts and Sciences (St. Petersburg State Universtiy). He has also taught at the University of Michigan and University of Chicago. Semyonov writes about the history of Russian liberalism and public policy in the late imperial period. Along with his teaching experience, Semyonov has participated in creating the Russian history curriculum for educational institutions in Islamic regions of the Russian Federation. In addition, he has worked on developing an instructional guide for studying Russia in the 1990s.

Ilya Gerasimov

Between 1995 and 2000, Ilya Gerasimov earned three graduate degrees: in Russia, Hungary, and the United States. He published a number of books in Russia and Great Britain; his articles have been appearing in Russian, Ukrainian, English, Italian, and Japanese. In 1992, together with Marina Mogilner, he participated in a competition to write a history textbook for middle school students co-sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Education and Cultural Initiative (Soros Foundation). Their project made it through two out of three rounds.

Marina Mogilner

Marina Mogilner holds an MA in History from Central European University in Budapest and a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University. Her most prominent studies are The Mythology of the Underground Man: The Radical Microcosm in Early 20th Century Russia as a Subject of Semiotic Analysis (Moscow: 1999) / Mifologiia “podpol’nogo cheloveka:” radikal’nyi mikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet semioticheskogo analiza and Homo Imperii: The History of Biological Antropology in Russia(Moscow: 1998) / Homo Imperii: Istoria fizicheskoj antropologii v Rossii. An American edition of her latest book is being prepared for publication. Mogliner has taught Russian and international college and graduate students at the Kazan' University for over a decade. She also has experience developing new approaches to social sciences education in Russia, work which has been supported by grants from the U.S. State Department.

Sergey Glebov

Sergey Glebov received his Master'ss degree in Nationalism Studies from the Central European University in Budapest and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Over the past ten years, he has been teaching Russian history in a number of American universities. In addition to articles that have appeared in Europe and the US, Glebov recently published a major study of Eurasianism in Russia: Eurasianism Between Empire and Modernity: A History in Documents (Moscow: 2009) / Evraziistvo mezhdu imperiei i modernom: Istoria v dokumentakh. Glebov's experience of teaching in American universities provides him with a fresh perspective on presenting history to his Russian students, for whom the Russian past is often as foreign as it is to their American counterparts.