Mark von Hagen

Review Essay

Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as Anti-Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era

The end of the Soviet Union and its extended European and Asian empire—together with the related, ongoing, and still uncertain transformation of the global rivalry known as the Cold War into a new geopolitical order—has provoked several crises of identity for historians of the region, as they try to relocate their subject in the broader intellectual contexts of a changing academic culture of historical writing. Thanks in part to the remarkable and welcome new levels of scholarly interaction among historians of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe—including indigenous historians and their counterparts in North America, Western Europe, and Japan—the identity crises and responses to them are shared in ways that would have been unthinkable even a dozen years ago. Many of the responses recall the familiar ones of assigning the region to either Europe or Asia, but one designation (by no means the only one) that has emerged in many corners is Eurasia. An exciting journal, Kritika,¹ was one of the first to appear with "Russian and Eurasian" in its subtitle; it has been followed by both The Slavic Review and The Russian Review. Recently, Harvard's Davis Center has been the latest institution to proclaim its adherence to this redesignation.² Because of the recent and relatively sudden character of the geopolitical and geo-imaginary transformations, the boundaries of Eurasia remain ill-defined and dynamic. This essay is an effort to determine what might and might not fit into this emerging new designation for much of the region.

Most immediately, historians (and other scholars and policymakers who seek to understand the region) need a name that offers a place for the histories of fifteen new states that were recognized after 1991 (and, therefore, is most definitely not "Russia") but that also rethinks the place of East-Central and southeastern Europe as they try to exit from state socialism and their former attachments to the Soviet bloc. The use of Eurasia signals a decentering of historical narratives from the powerful perspectives of the former capitals, whether imperial St. Petersburg or tsarist-Soviet Moscow. In ways that frequently mirror the strivings of post-Soviet states and societies to escape the isolation of decades of domestically and internationally reinforced division and containment, historians are seeking to overcome the isolation that many of us have felt from our colleagues in European and world history. In most American departments of history during the second half of the twentieth century, Russian (and to a lesser degree East European) history occupied an ambivalent place between Europe and "the world" (a common euphemism for East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African history). Russian history was characteristically perceived by many Americanist and Europeanist colleagues as little different from the Third World quasi-histories, with all the assumptions and consequences of that intellectual peripheralization. The search for a new "place" for historians of the Russian and Soviet empires also coincides with the resurgence of interest and burgeoning scholarship in the fields of global, world, and transnational history.³

In large part, the difficulty of locating Russia between Europe and the "world" was the recognition that Russia (and the Soviet Union) was not fully European because it did not conform to the criteria of the model nation-state. But what exactly it might have been was less clear to both outside observers and inside practitioners. While no serious historian would deny the importance of those national and state-centered narratives of the past, our recent experience has rendered us considerably more skeptical about the self-evident wisdom of organizing historical scholarship exclusively or primarily around national narratives.⁴ Historians on both sides of the former Iron Curtain have been eyewitnesses to (and occasionally participants in) the construction of "new" nations/states and their historical narratives out of the rubble of the Soviet empire. A rich social-science literature on nation-building appeared nearly simultaneously with the reappearance of new states across Eurasia and served to remind historians of their profession's origins in nineteenth-century German (Herderian and Hegelian) projects of national and state affirmation.⁵

Since the end of the 1980s, several themes have emerged in the new scholarship that suggest some exciting responses to these intellectual dilemmas and international geopolitical transformations—and possibly some content for the still-amorphous Eurasia. Besides the appearance of many new works, older works that had in many cases languished at the margins of the historiographical canon have been rediscovered and returned to a more central place in the current debates.⁶ First, despite the nomenclature of imperial Russia itself and the likely continuities connecting it to Muscovite Rus before it and the Soviet Union after it, most mainstream historians avoided referring to the object of their study as an empire. Lately, however, rather than trying to squeeze the histories of the region into the nation-state ideal type of modern Western Europe, historians have begun to recognize the crucial role of empires in central Eurasia and their important interactions with one another—beginning with the Russian and Soviet cases but also extending frequently to the Mongol, Byzantine, Iranian, Chinese, Ottoman, and Habsburg imperial states, to name the most obvious examples.⁷ (Of course, the British, French, and German empires in the nineteenth century and the American empire in the twentieth and twenty-first have also played crucial roles in Russian and Soviet history.)

Second, in place of the Cold War images of iron curtains and ideological containment, historians have begun to acknowledge the relative porousness of the boundaries between those empires in their attention to the borderlands that have taken shape historically at the outer limits of the empires' political and military control. In an era of multiple globalizations, such a perspective based in the borderlands draws attention to the myriad economic, cultural, and ecological interchanges that have been far more characteristic of the history of the region than the hermetically sealed state borders that one or another state projected from its imperial capital. People, goods, and ideas have moved across political boundaries with far greater ease historically than the ideal self-image of metropolitan control (and the documents generated by the metropolitan bureaucracies) would allow. The focusing of historians' gazes on the borderlands is also a response to the decentering of the imperial narratives and has allowed for a revival of regional history as well.⁸

Third, the new focus on diversity and mobility, reinforced by the new sense of skepticism of historians toward traditional national narratives of the past, has attracted historians' attention to the importance of diasporas in the history of the region. Here, diasporas refers primarily to those ethnic, confessional, and economic groups that moved about the empires and their borderlands and were not always or primarily members of the dominant Russian nationality.⁹ These groups' identities were often constructed as situational, hybrid ones of multiple loyalties.¹⁰ The new attention to diasporas also highlights the critical importance of cultural and intellectual communities whose members at various periods found themselves exiled from their erstwhile homelands and took on new roles as translators of their "native" historical cultures to their newly adopted cultures. With the end of the Soviet-era anathemas on these "traitors," their works are now being rapidly reintegrated into Russian, Ukrainian, Baltic, and other historical writings. The repatriation of exile or émigré historians and writers (and often their archives) has considerably enriched the historical imagination and helped construct a far more pluralist intellectual life in the new conditions of scholarship.¹¹ It has also emphasized the connections of the societies and states of Eurasia to the worlds beyond it.

"Eurasia," finally, signals a determined effort by historians to free themselves from some of the limitations of the former reigning paradigms in the field, and in this sense Eurasia today is deployed as an anti-paradigm. To explore how this anti-paradigm is shaping the production of new historical scholarship, a brief survey of the two dominant (and still remarkably tenacious) paradigms of the recent past follows. I summarize those two paradigms as Russia/Orient and Soviet Union/modernization. As is generally true of intellectual paradigms, voices of dissent often made themselves heard within one generation and were then taken up by subsequent generations of scholars in their challenges to their predecessors; cross-generational alliances of interpretation have not been uncommon. Moreover, even within the general outlines of one paradigm or another, influential historians have disagreed on serious matters of emphasis or omission. Following that review, I turn our attention to the attempts by the "classical" Eurasianists to address some of the intellectual blind alleys that historians faced as they chose Russia's place between Europe and Asia, and finally I describe an emerging reconquista of this part of the Eurasianist mission with new post-Soviet intellectual (and political) agendas.

Immediately after the end of World War II, even though historians outside the Soviet bloc framed Russia in various ways, the dominant trend was the "orientalization" of Russia and of Eastern Europe more generally.¹² Although Edward Said, in his classic Orientalism,¹³ had the Middle East at the foreground of his argument about the constitution of the West's self-image and self-representation (and the role of the United States in the Middle East as the legatee of the British and French empires before them), it is clear that the United States and Europe have similarly perceived Russia in ways that helped them define themselves against a radically different "Other" and construct a corresponding episteme of the "Occident" or "Occidentalism."¹⁴ During this period of greatest confrontation between Joseph Stalin's iron dictatorship over the Soviet bloc and the "West," the late 1940s and early 1950s, most historians of Russia wrote in a highly essentializing way about Russian traditions of despotism and imperial expansion, understanding despotism and expansion to be mutually reinforcing prerequisites of state survival. An emblematic text was Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism, which became required reading for all historians of Russia; Wittfogel advanced a theory of technological (hydraulic, in this case) determinism that tied Russia to China and ancient Egypt as political orders of a peculiar kind.¹⁵ Wittfogel's biography as a former Communist was representative of the origins of many of the intellectual leaders of this first postwar generation in Eastern and Central Europe. Many exiled and émigré scholars wrote with the zeal of converts to a new faith: anticommunism (often interlaced with anti-Russianism).¹⁶

Wittfogel's ideas intersected neatly with another version of comparative despotism, totalitarianism, which placed Stalin's tyranny in the same genus as Hitler's Third Reich but also with other Communist dictatorships around the world.¹⁷ Comparative communism looked for commonalities and differences in the Soviet bloc, but it generally assumed greater unity than diversity (and produced, incidentally, much solid research); major research universities and foundations established the first interdisciplinary centers for the study of the Soviet bloc and Communist China.¹⁸

In the climate of mutual isolationism and hardening of bloc boundaries that was characteristic of this age, culture—and cultural difference—was taken very seriously but generally was assumed to be static and unchanging. That culture was most often identified as Russian but also, it is important to note, as not European. The roots of Soviet dictatorship were thereby to be found in the centuries-old legacies of Muscovy (at least), if not Byzantium and the Mongol horde, a view reinforced by the convictions of influential refugee and émigré scholars that Russia was the real beginning of Asia (and, alternately, Germany, Poland, or Ukraine was the eastern boundary of Europe).¹⁹ Richard Pipes remains one of the most articulate spokesmen of this generation's perspective for his insistence on the importance of patrimonialism and the absence of private property to understanding the longer durée of the Russian past. Although Pipes sees the immediate origins of Soviet dictatorship in the late imperial period (the reign of Alexander III), the longer-term Muscovite origins are the crucial ones for shaping Russia's non-European character.²⁰

Curiously, at least in retrospect, the history of the non-Russian nations and communities of the empire and Soviet Union was largely relegated to the status of footnotes or margins to the grand narrative of Russian imperial, autocratic consolidation in fulfillment of its medieval manifest destiny.²¹ This approach dominated in an intellectual and political environment of hostility and mutual suspicion, of self-imposed Soviet inaccessibility and Stalin's annexation of Eastern Europe, with the West's response in its policy of containment. Inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, under the slogans of combating rootless cosmopolitanism and the Zhdanovshchina, ideological watchdogs relentlessly hounded Jewish, Ukrainian, East European, and even Russian intellectuals for expressing any doubts about the unique and "progressive" role of the Russians in world history.²² Outside the Soviet bloc, these Cold War hostilities helped shape the first generation of professional historians (and allied Slavic literature scholars) in what appeared to be a revived form of neo-Slavophile or neo-Slavist essentialism that emphasized Russia's uniqueness (or exceptionalism) and was probably partly reinforced by the perceived need to establish disciplinary legitimacy for Russian and East European history within university departments. Such tendencies, incidentally, were by no means unique to the fields of Russian and East European history; these were also the years that most historians of the United States ascribed to a firm myth of the exceptional character of the American experience, while German historians debated the special developmental path, or Sonderweg, to explain the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. The main divergence from the classic Slavophiles of the nineteenth century, however, was that these earlier writers (Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksei Khomiakov, Konstantin, and Ivan Aksakov) cast Russia's difference from Europe in a positive light and decried its over-westernization beginning with the traumatic reforms of Peter the Great, whereas the Russia/Orient paradigm took Russia's otherness to be tragically and immutably negative.²³

The most important challenges to the Russia/Orient paradigm emerged from the legacy of émigré Russian liberalism that survived in American and European universities and posited a distinctly European path for Russia that was progressive, if state-led. The school of Michael Karpovich at Harvard University, the legatee of the state school of imperial Russia, sought to distance imperial Russian history from its Soviet despotic successor, so that the equation of Soviet Union with the Orient could be safely maintained. The powerful Russian state-school narrative of Russian nation-building by a progressive bureaucracy had its origins in Nikolai Karamzin's History of the Russian State and was developed in the writings of Sergei Soloviev, Boris Chicherin, Vasilii Kliuchevskii, and Pavel Miliukov.²⁴ Perhaps the most articulate contemporary spokesman for this latter position has been Martin Malia, who, together with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other influential voices, has seen World War I as the beginning of Russia's abandonment of its European path and descent into oriental despotism.²⁵ But 1917 was the real moment of truth. For Malia, ideology, and socialist ideology in particular, was the original sin that explained why the Soviet period was still to be relegated to the great Others in terms of which the civilized world was obliged to define itself; his mission has been to disabuse the reader of communism's myth that it was—or had ever been—the new face of eternal Russia.²⁶ He is of the same generation as Pipes (and shared the same teacher at Harvard, the distinguished Russian émigré Mikhail Karpovich), but his disagreement with Pipes represents a transitional position rather than a new paradigm as such.

The mid-to-late 1950s and 1960s marked a new stage in the Cold War that was framed by the death of Stalin and the coming to power of Nikita Khrushchev and other post-Stalin East European reformist Communist Party leaders. The U.S.-Soviet superpower rivalry expanded beyond the original arenas of Europe and Asia to the postcolonial world in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, with each side offering an ideal-type version of its own historical development as the path most suited to progress and modernization. Modernization theory encouraged scholars to put Russian and Soviet history in the context of Third World development studies and thereby began to "normalize" the Soviet experience; from this vantage point, it was the rise of the NATO West that called for explanation and appeared to be exceptional against the backdrop of most of the rest of the world's historical experience, even though the assumed endpoint of political and economic development remained the U.S.-led NATO/OECD "West."²⁷ The starting point for this new paradigm, "Soviet Union" (now vaguely distinguished from Russia)/modernization, was the Great Reforms of the 1860s, beginning with the emancipation of the serfs; the Soviet Union was recast as a modernizing state taking up the task started by imperial bureaucrats to pull peasant, backward Russia into the industrial, urban, and technological age. Change was emphasized over continuity, and social change in particular was offered as one of the explanations of Soviet success and "social support." Social history asserted its legitimacy against the former dominance of intellectual and institutional history.²⁸ The Stalin period, however cruel, was also acknowledged as one of substantial progress; massive investments in the welfare state (education, health care, pensions) and upward mobility for many helped explain the Stalinist "social contract" that underlay the apparent stability of Soviet society.²⁹ Some observers, both in the USSR (notably, the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov) and outside it, took the logic of modernization theory more seriously and went so far as to predict convergence between an increasingly bureaucratized capitalist West and a modernizing Soviet East.

Above, I ventured to compare the Russia/Orient stage with the Slavophiles' views on Russia's future and past (though with inverted values assigned to those comparisons); similarly, the Soviet Union/modernization paradigm suggests parallels with the Slavophiles' protagonists, the westernizers, in the intellectual debates of the mid-nineteenth century. Much as the application of modernization theory was meant to overcome the essentializing and putative stasis of the Russian past by re-situating it in a global history of political and economic development, so, too, the Russian westernizers posited the endpoint of that global development to be Euro-American institutions and practices. Like adherents to the modernization paradigm, the westernizers' preferred focus was on a shorter-term modern period (Peter the Great, as one important outward limit, more immediately the Great Reforms).³⁰ During the relatively liberal Khrushchev "Thaw" of the late 1950s and early 1960s, an analogous and parallel debate about Russia's place in the world occurred among Soviet historians under the rubric of the "general laws of historical development" (osobennosti and zakonomernosti in its Russian variant).³¹

An important feature of this paradigm was its sharing in modernization theory's assumption of the global homogenizing effects of modern industrial, secular, and technological societies. Ethnic, national, and religious differences were optimistically forecast to have less meaning in the emerging world. Culture was no longer perceived as static and monolithic but as dynamic, changing, and fractured in the modern (and modernizing) world. Still, culture was also viewed as less important (certainly less essentializing) and was often neglected in the largely social histories of the region that were the hallmark of this generation's scholarship. From this perspective, nationalism and the evolution of religious, national, and regional cultures were treated as less important trends than macro-systemic ones of industrial revolution, professional specialization, mass literacy, and secularization. Accordingly, Russia was conflated with the Soviet Union and Russians with all Soviet citizens; a powerful underlying assumption of eventual homogenization prevailed. Here, too, curious parallels emerged with Soviet social sciences that presumed the "resolution of the national problem," by which was meant the creation of a homo sovieticus unmarked by racial, national, and confessional differences.³² Still, the framework of the nation-state was mostly unquestioned; it was assumed to be the natural endpoint of modern history.

The emergence and virtual triumph in mainstream academic institutions of the Soviet Union/modernization paradigm was accompanied by often fierce intellectual struggles with the Russia/Orient rival. The 1917 revolutions became one touchstone of intellectual and political disagreements. Historians divided over the democratic credentials of the February and October takeovers and the degree of legitimacy and popular support each regime (the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik Sovnarkom) could claim, among other issues. How historians viewed 1917 was part of a larger discussion about the degree of continuity and culpability between Lenin's and Stalin's dictatorships and the meaning of socialism itself.³³ The other intellectual, political, and moral touchstone of the period became the Gulag and whether Communism was relatively "worse" or "better" than Nazism and other forms of dictatorship. Historians compiled comparative lists of atrocities and victims and staked out their positions.³⁴

If the Russia/Orient paradigm highlighted the radical alterity of Russian and East European history, and the Soviet Union/modernization paradigm, by contrast, emphasized normalcy and commonalities (at least with the Third World majority, if not eventually with the West in the most optimistic versions of convergence theory), the emerging Eurasia anti-paradigm privileges neither part of this binary opposition but attempts to address some of the shortcomings of both by recasting the ways we think about similarity and difference in historical comparisons. In other words, the Eurasia anti-paradigm rejects the monolithic and static cultural determinism of the Russia/Orient paradigm, though it also tries to account for the importance of longer-term ecological, demographic, economic, and cultural structures for understanding the processes and outcomes of tremendous change that have been the focus of the Soviet Union/modernization paradigm.

Historians can live with the uncertain boundaries of the Eurasia anti-paradigm, but what we cannot avoid addressing head-on is the important historical and contemporary baggage that is both evoked and critiqued by the notion of Eurasia as anti-paradigm. After all, there is the legacy of a group of brilliant and original interwar émigré intellectuals affiliated with the ideas of Eurasianism.³⁵ Since the end of the Soviet Union, the writings of these formerly proscribed émigré thinkers have enjoyed a vigorous rehabilitation, including anthologies of their most important essays and roundtable discussions of their conceptual worlds. Not all the attention has been favorable, but there is general recognition that their originality of thought was rarely matched in other circles.³⁶ These men, who came from fields as distant as linguistics, physical geography, Orthodox patristic theology, and Oriental studies, evolved generally from liberal-left and liberal-center points on the Russian political spectrum toward the right as they tried to make sense of the murderous years of world war, revolution, and civil war in Europe and Asia. After generations of Russian intellectuals had praised the progressive West and insisted that Russia follow the European path of science, technology, capitalism, and democracy, the prolonged "time of troubles" provoked the original Eurasianists (Nikolai S. Trubetskoi, Petr N. Savitskii, Petr P. Suvchinskii, and others)³⁷ to challenge this liberal consensus and subject to a profound critique what they insisted was a myopically Eurocentric view of Russia's history and destiny.

Among other consequences, this critical stance allowed them to form a less dismissive or hostile judgment on the influence of Asia on Russia, even going so far as to assert beneficial influences that Russia inherited from the Mongol empire in particular but also a more positive view of Russians' and Slavs' interaction with the Finno-Ugric and Turkic-Mongol steppe peoples.³⁸ The idea of Russia-Eurasia challenged an essentialized Russia and Russians by drawing attention to the boundaries and mixings of sub-communities and identities that were shaped by and that helped shape the Russian and Soviet empires. Still, even while acknowledging in an unprecedented manner the non-Slavic and non-Orthodox components of Eurasia, they reasserted other mythologies in their search for a Eurasian nationalism. Their intellectual ties to earlier Russian movements, especially the Slavophiles and the pan-Slavism of Nikolai Danilevskii, inclined them to messianic views of Russia-Eurasia as unique and somehow privileged and Europe as doomed to decline. Their apocalyptic view of European civilization, especially in the years of war and revolution they witnessed, was not unique to Russian intellectuals at the time and shared significantly in the fin-de-siècle Nietzscheanism and popularity of Oswald Spengler's philosophy of European decline. The anti-modernist politics that runs deep in classical Eurasianism (and its contemporary successors) is an important part of what the anti-paradigm of Eurasia means to repudiate.³⁹

Another important intellectual context for the classical Eurasianists was the geopolitical thinking of the British geographer H. J. Mackinder, the American admiral Alfred Mahan, and the Germans Karl Haushofer and Friedrich Ratzel, in particular their notions of the global rivalry of land-based empires with maritime-based ones and the importance of "heartlands" for domination of the world's resources.⁴⁰ The Eurasianists' messianic geopolitical projects and visions, like those of their British, American, and German contemporaries, deserve rigorous scrutiny and radical critique. Those projects and visions remained for the most part intellectual rehabilitations of the Russian Empire and its Great Power status after the disastrous decline of the "time of troubles." Furthermore, geopolitics reinforced the classical Eurasianists' faith in the significance and power of the state and, by extension, their increasingly authoritarian solutions for Russia-Eurasia. For example, one of the most important "positive" legacies of Genghis Khan was to make imaginable for the first time a large continental empire-state like his Mongol empire; it set a standard for subsequent Russian state-building. This, too, is part of the legacy that historians affiliated with the anti-paradigm of Eurasia have subjected to critical scrutiny: the state's power is taken as a problem rather than a positive fact in most historical investigations.

A final source of the persistent anxieties raised by the political content of "Eurasia" is the presence and continuing attraction of present-day Eurasianist political movements and parties in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and elsewhere, which advocate the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Soviet empire (or some parts of it) and its authoritarian, anti-liberal political economy and ideological values.⁴¹ In particular, this contemporary Eurasianist version of the "Asian values" model is the reason I characterize the Eurasia that several contemporary historians have adopted as an anti-paradigm. These historians reject the conservative, often xenophobic, and neo-imperialist politics of the contemporary Eurasianists; instead, they posit various alternative paths of development in the past that challenge the essentializing and exceptionalist rhetoric of these political and intellectual forces.

Given these serious reservations about the political content of much Eurasianist thought, the most important legacy of historic Eurasianism for the new formulation remains its determination to deconstruct ideologized notions of an enlightened, dynamic Europe and a backward, static Asia in opening up new ways of investigating Russian and East European history. Today, in the aftermath of both the linguistic and cultural turns in history and the rise and spread of postcolonial studies, such ideas seem considerably less revolutionary. One of the features of the new Eurasia anti-paradigm is the unprecedented interest its adherents share in geopolitical imaginaries, their historical contexts, social origins, and dynamic evolutions; many such efforts acknowledge their debt to Said's Orientalism, one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies.⁴² The reconfiguration of Russia and Eastern Europe has also been reinforced by the agendas of East and Central European intellectuals who have fundamentally challenged the German and Russian imperial (as well as West European liberal and conservative) narratives that have governed their lives so often and so long in the twentieth century.⁴³

If we are fair to the "classical" Eurasianists, after all, they disagreed in important ways on the consequences of Russia's Eurasian character; most advocated unashamed Great Power expansion in the spirit of geopolitics and domination of the heartlands, whereas a minority advised repentance and expiation of guilt as the new Russian national idea. It is this latter sensibility that especially recalls the postcolonial scholars' stances, which have infiltrated historians' writings with their theoretical, intellectual, and in many cases political and ethical perspectives from other humanities (particularly national and comparative literature scholars). Those perspectives are identified in these allied departments as deconstruction, postcolonial studies,⁴⁴ or, in a recent critical reformulation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, transnational cultural studies.⁴⁵ Even though few of the historians I discuss below explicitly cite the work of these scholars,⁴⁶ their critiques of the previous paradigms of Russian and Soviet history, whether implicitly or more self-consciously pursued, bear comparison with contemporary critiques of the mainstream canon in literature departments. Another important intellectual collaborator for historians in these new agendas has been social and cultural anthropology, which has been suffering its own disciplinary crisis of identity for several decades—a crisis at least partly rooted in the fraught origins of modern, academic anthropology in the service of Empire and Nation but also in the epistemological dilemmas of gaining and transmitting knowledge about societies presumed to be significantly different from our own experience.⁴⁷ What unites these new approaches in history, anthropology, and cultural studies is a heightened sensitivity to the complicity of scholars in the making of empires and nations, whether they are citizens of Russia, Ukraine, Germany, or the United States. This ethical dimension acknowledges the brutality and inequalities in power and wealth that were present from the start as the darker sides of the European projects of exploration, discovery, and Enlightenment.

In this spirit, Eurasia serves as a displacement—or deflection—of the question of whether Russia belongs to Europe or Asia. This sort of "normalization" of Russian and East European history has become possible in part because of the parallel conceptual "de-normalization" of European history that has occurred in the meantime, whether thanks to postcolonial critiques, deconstructionism, European integration, or any number of other causes. Michael Geyer, for example, has made a powerful argument for transferring Europe "from a universal state of mind to a regional condition of power."⁴⁸ In any event, it is clear, when Eric Hobsbawm titles his history of twentieth-century Europe The Age of Extremes while a representative of a younger generation, Mark Mazower, paints with even more ominous tones the Dark Continent, that Europe is no longer the Europe of uncritically triumphant Enlightenment values and the virtues of the nation-state, against which a conflicted Russia could never adequately measure up.⁴⁹ One of the other originary texts in the tradition of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt's Totalitarianism, saw the problem of modern dictatorship not as one of East versus West but as one with firm origins in the colonial practices of the British and other European empires, as well as in European antisemitism.⁵⁰

European—and even American—history is becoming more international in its awareness of its past and present ties to diasporas, colonies, empires, allies, and trading partners. Asia, in turn, has become a more blurred, variegated, and dynamic idea in the modern world. (And, the world historians would remind us, this was true in earlier periods as well.) The histories of Japan, China, Turkey, and a host of non-European economic, political, and cultural powers suggest alternate, multiple paths to modernity or modernities. In this sense, the anti-paradigm of Eurasia can serve to remind Europe (and Asia) of its colonial pasts and legacies, among which the Russian/Soviet variant can no longer be seen as so peculiar or unique, but neither does the Russian/Soviet historical path lead inexorably to the telos of NATO-OECD.

To return once again to the ambiguous place that Russian history occupied in American university departments and the related sense of "weak" nationhood in Russian history, the Eurasia anti-paradigm highlights the sensibilities of historians who have undergone a disenchantment with the nation, both as a political project in the past and as an organizing principle for academic departments of history and knowledge in the present.⁵¹ The exceptionalist ideologies that have generally lurked behind national histories (and area studies) are now more transparently exposed and critically examined in the new divisions of labor that are emerging in university history departments and allied social-science and humanities disciplines. As part of its implicit challenge to the nation-state and its fixed boundaries as the primary organizing principle of historical research, the Eurasia anti-paradigm privileges comparative and interactive histories of peoples, ideas, and goods. Our concept of Eurasia thereby repudiates the Eurasianists' faith in the Russian Empire's self-sufficiency, its "exceptional path," and their understanding of Eurasia as a closed system of interrelationships. Still, the Eurasia anti-paradigm does not deny the power of the nation-state or the influence of nationalism in history, but neither does it automatically privilege those phenomena as causal explanations for all historical questions across all periods.

Eurasia also appears to acknowledge the territorial preoccupations of historians. The spatial dimensions of the emerging Eurasian anti-paradigm have their origins in the post-Soviet geopolitical system, but they are not limited to those borders, and they are not to be identified exclusively with either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. The chronological dimension of Eurasia is less clearly demarcated than it was for the Russia/Orient or Soviet Union/modernization paradigms or, for that matter, for the spatial dimension I just described. The fact that Eurasia is not identified with a previous state formation allows the new generation of historians remarkably greater freedom to range across previous temporal boundaries, whether 1917, 1989, or 1861, and even to reach back to the relatively neglected eighteenth century and the early modern and medieval periods. The research questions—increasingly ones with comparativist ambitions—are allowed to frame the historical period that the scholar demarcates for study, in contrast to an earlier generation's segregation into Soviet and imperial specialists. Lurking not too far below this chronological promiscuity lies a serious challenge to the sacred divisions of history departments (and allied humanities and social sciences) into pre-modern, early modern, modern, and, now, postmodern. It throws down a gauntlet to presentist social scientists who operate within a narrowly contemporary set of cases. Some of the most interesting work in world and global history is similarly challenging the once-rigid boundaries separating early modern/modern and medieval/modern periodizations of historical narratives.⁵² The historians associated with this set of questions clearly seek to contribute to a new world history for a global age, or to add to, in the words of Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, "a braid of intertwined histories" for a globe that is at once increasingly integrating and simultaneously proliferating differences, "because, in a global age, the world's pasts are all simultaneously present, colliding, interacting, intermixing—producing a collage of present histories that is surely not this history of a homogeneous global civilization."⁵³

What follows can only be a very cursory survey of some of the important work that is helping give content to the Eurasia anti-paradigm. Its genuinely international scope ought to bolster the case that this is not an isolated American or West European phenomenon. A manifesto of sorts has been the synthetic work of Professor Andreas Kappeler in The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, the first survey to place at the center of its attention the "imperial" character of the Russian Empire, above all, its multinational subject populations. His aims are "to place the problems of nationality and the disintegration of the Soviet Union into a larger historical context," "to broaden our view of the history of Russia, which is widely construed as Russian national history," and to make a "contribution to a general history of multiethnic empires, which have been neglected by the kind of historiography that takes its bearings from the nation state." His account is indeed comparative and international; he reminds us that the disintegration of the Soviet Union "forms part of the universal process of the dissolution and dismemberment of multiethnic empires and the rise of nation states."⁵⁴

Whereas Kappeler succeeded in decentering (away from the imperial capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg) and "de-russifying" (with more attention to the non-Russian peoples) Russian history in his synthetic account, a distinguished British historian, Geoffrey Hosking, has returned our attention to the Russian majority and questions of empire, state, and nation in Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917.⁵⁵ Hosking has chosen to focus on the Russians in the empire but nonetheless sets that focus in context by devoting considerable attention to the non-Russian populations as well. In some measure, he has reversed the priorities of Kappeler, yet he shares Kappeler's sensitivity to the need to interrogate the concepts of Russia, Russians, and "Russianness" throughout.

In post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the literature on nationalism and nation-building has also begun to make its impact and be tested against local material. In the field of Ukrainian history, one of the most exciting scholars whose work shares features with the Eurasian anti-paradigm is Yaroslav Hrytsak. His survey of modern Ukrainian history⁵⁶ rethinks that history from comparative and multi-ethnic perspectives; his narrative crosses borders and critically engages the multiple historiographical claims on Ukraine's past, including those important voices from the European and North American diasporas, in a refreshingly cosmopolitan vision of Ukraine in the modern world. Alexei Miller, a Russian colleague of Hrytsak's at the Central European University in Budapest, has written about comparative empire and nationality policy in Austria-Hungary but also about Ukrainian policy in the Russian Empire, in an archivally based study.⁵⁷ Leonid Gorizontov, from an earlier work on Poles in Russia and Russia in Poland, has now turned to "Russianness" and its historic constructions and reconstructions.⁵⁸ In all this work, empire and nation are constantly scrutinized for their effects on one another and for the subjects who lived under their sway. In a related development, it has become commonplace for historians of the Soviet Union to explore its "imperial" aspects in the wake of the resurgence of interest in the pre-1917 multinational dynastic state and a growing acknowledgement of greater continuities across 1917 than were previously perceived. Ronald Grigor Suny, one of the pioneers of the study of ethnic politics in the revolution, is a good example of a scholar who avoided referring to the Soviet Union as empire until recently.⁵⁹ For historians to the political right of Suny, criticizing the Soviet Union as the last world empire has presented much less of a problem.⁶⁰

After Kappeler's recently translated history of the multi-ethnic Russian Empire, Dominic Lieven, a distinguished British historian, has made perhaps the most significant other contribution to the discussion of empire and the place of the Russian Empire in that larger universe of historical state forms. Lieven declares his fundamental purpose is "to put the history of Russia within its international context" and compares the Russian Empire to its most important contemporary rivals—Austria-Hungary and the British and Ottoman empires.⁶¹ Like Kappeler, he also aims "to see what the history of empire has to teach a scholar knowledgeable about Russia and what a Russianist can contribute to the overall history of empire." He acknowledges his break with the formerly politically correct nation-state paradigm and cautions that his book is not meant to be "an apologia for empire, but [that] even an attempt to understand empire's dilemmas and to compare some of its achivements not unfavorably with democratic nationalism will raise hackles, particularly when the attempt is made by a wicked descendant of aristocrats and imperialists."⁶² Lieven's focus is "the demands of international power politics and of members of the European and then global system of great powers," which he insists was "of overwhelming importance in Russian history." He holds the "core of empire's dilemma in the modern era" to be the opposite pulls of external power and of "civilized management of multi-ethnicity." Lieven focuses much more on diplomatic and military history than Kappeler, or many other scholars we shall discuss.⁶³

Not surprisingly, military history has been among the subfields of modern Russian and Soviet history that have been beneficiaries of both the new focus on empires and of the loosening of archival and research constraints.⁶⁴ Military history and the history of wars more generally have made important contributions to the internationalization of history, since wars are by definition among the most intense (and destructive) of interstate interactions and have ended in the dramatic reshaping of boundaries and societies through invasions, occupations, evacuations, mobilizations, and mass loss of life.⁶⁵ The revitalization of military history and the study of wars and their social, economic, and cultural consequences have also been important components of the critical studies of the modern welfare state in the twentieth century. The three major conventional wars that Russia/the Soviet Union fought in that century, the Russo-Japanese, World War I, and World War II, have brought Russian historians together with their European (East and West), Japanese, and North American counterparts in several seminars and conferences.⁶⁶ Even more distant wars (Napoleonic, Caucasian, Crimean, Russo-Turkish) are garnering new scholarly attention, not least because of the ongoing Chechen war and other Caucasian and Central Asian combat.⁶⁷ The Cold War History Project is another example of the internationalizing of the study and writing of history, and another beneficiary of the enhanced access to archives in Russia and even more so in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.⁶⁸

If the literature exploring the complex and often contradictory relations among empire, nation, and state power in Eurasia has matured sufficiently quickly to begin to frame new debates among historians, the scholarship that treats the other two parts of our triad, namely, borderlands and diasporas, is not far behind. Several senior scholars have made important programmatic interventions that are illustrated with their own and younger colleagues' archival research. The most ambitious attempt to revise the notion of Eurasia, at least Inner Eurasia, from a perspective shaped by some of the tenets of geopolitics, is that of David Christian, who asserts that "the political history of Inner Eurasia shaped the rhythms not just of Inner Eurasia but of the entire Eurasian world-system." He reminds his readers that the Mongol empire remains the largest land empire known to mankind, and that historians are remarkably ignorant about its sources of stability and power. Christian, by way of definition of Inner Eurasia, includes the lands ruled by the Soviet Union in 1990, plus Mongolia and with some qualifications Xinjiang. His is an approach that emphasizes ecology, demography, and interchanges. "If the history of the Eurasian landmass has coherence, it arises because genes, commodities, ideas, and diseases have all traveled through the Inner Eurasian borderlands." But he concludes that the twentieth century might spell the end of Inner Eurasia as a distinctive unit of world history because of the technological changes that have "erased the ecological differences between Inner and Outer Eurasia."⁶⁹

Alfred J. Rieber, in contrast to Christian, argues against the geopolitical ideas of both the German school and its Anglo-American protagonists but seeks to "identify those persistent conditions specific to the Russian context that have over long periods of time confronted the ruling elites and the mass of the population with both a range of possibilities and a set of constraints in their dealings with other states and peoples." Besides the more generally expected explanation of economic backwardness, Rieber adds Russia's multicultural society, cultural marginalism, and permeable frontiers. Especially the last feature leads Rieber to develop the concept of the frontier zones first identified by Owen Lattimore.⁷⁰ In a subsequent essay, Rieber suggests that most of the major continental conflicts of recorded history have been fought around these unstable frontier zones.⁷¹ Finally, John LeDonne subtitles his history of the Russian Empire from 1700 to 1917 "the geopolitics of expansion and containment" and acknowledges his debts to Mackinder, Admiral Mahan, Geoffrey Parker's concept of "core areas," and Lattimore's influential paradigm of frontier zones.⁷²

Some of the first signs of this renewed interest in Russia's "borderlands" came in scholarship about Russia's "Orient."⁷³ The "discovery" of Russian and Soviet ethnography also drew attention to Siberia and "inner Russia" and the relationship of the metropolitan centers to the provinces and regions.⁷⁴ These are narratives of the centers' relations with their variegated borderlands and frontier zones and, increasingly often, of the impact of those borderlands and frontiers on the centers. The focus of much of this scholarship is on territory and space and their intellectual and material conquest.⁷⁵ By now, there is a rich literature on the "western borderlands" of the empire⁷⁶ as well as its Far East.⁷⁷ There has even been a revival of historical (and contemporary) interest in that quintessential border people, the Cossacks, who fled from imperial centers' efforts to dominate them but continued to present challenges of integration until their ruthless elimination by the Bolsheviks.⁷⁸

Although the Cossacks are not usually perceived as a diaspora, if we expand that definition broadly enough, it can include the millions of people who at any given time are displaced from where the state authorities would like them to be (or they themselves would like them to be). The classic diaspora in Russian and Soviet history remains the Jewish one, whose historians have written some of the most sensitive accounts of multiple, hybrid, and contested identities in multinational empires.⁷⁹ We can add important Armenian and Tatar diasporas, whose members performed commercial services in several empires. The Baltic German nobility also served the empire across its breadth until their loyalty came under question in the early twentieth century. And missionaries have been the subject of several books and volumes.⁸⁰ But these sorts of communities are different from those formed in, say, conditions of wartime evacuation or captivity. Historians are now writing about large groups of people who are precisely not where the state authorities would like them to be: refugees, prisoners of war, enemy aliens.⁸¹ The upshot of much of this research is that the populations of these empires, not only on their borderlands, were far more mobile than the image projected from the imperial capital would have its subjects (and subsequent historians) believe. Once historians have access to local archival materials, instead of having to rely on central bureaucratic documentation, the perspective can often change quite dramatically.

The ultimate challenge to any imperial regime was an opposition diaspora that posed alternatives to the political and intellectual order of the Old Regime, whether Muscovite, imperial, or Soviet. All three major historical regimes devoted considerable (and growing) resources to monitoring their exiled critics; they in turn were part of the conduit of ideas between the empire and the outside world during periods of intense official intolerance of criticism. The point, however, of the diaspora component is to leave open the possibility that several important communities in the multinational empires crossed borders within and outside those empires in a multitude of ways for a variety of motives. This story reinforces the multinational character of the empires that have occupied this part of Eurasia, but it also highlights their historic involvement with other empires and state formations on the territory.

In short, the historiography of the emerging Eurasia anti-paradigm is allowing for the framing of new debates set in longer perspectives on Russian and Soviet history. Many of those debates are happening in three remarkable new journals, Kritika, Ab Imperio, and Nationalities Papers. (A fourth journal to appear since the end of the Soviet Union, Vestnik Evrazii, comes closest of the three new journals in the editors' manifesto to the founders of the "classical" Eurasianist movement, featuring articles devoted to their thought and legacies,⁸² whereas Kritika and Ab Imperio explicitly polemicize with some of the features that the editors of Vestnik Evrazii attribute to Eurasia and remind us that Eurasia is a contested space, both geopolitically and terminologically.) Kritika is a U.S.-based, English-language international journal that was launched in 2000. It takes for its title a russified version of a Greek root and a subtitle, "Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History," which declares its belonging to this emerging anti-paradigm. By invoking both Russian and Eurasian history, the founding editors also mean to open up a space between those concepts and repudiate their automatic identity.⁸³Ab Imperio, by contrast, a Kazan'-based,⁸⁴ largely Russian-language international journal that takes Latin for its title, "from empire," has a similarly revealing subtitle: "Theory and History of Nationalities and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Realm." The editors have not adopted Eurasia as a formal designation but nonetheless share most of the methodological and intellectual assumptions of the editors of Kritika.⁸⁵ Both journals are committed to internationalization and innovative research, comparative and international history approaches, cross-disciplinary explorations and transcending "'national' blinders ... to bring medieval, early modern, and long-term perspectives into the mainstream of our deliberations, as an antidote to chronological short-sightedness."⁸⁶

Remarkably quickly, the concept of Eurasia as anti-paradigm has emerged as a genuinely inter-generational set of questionings. Both Ab Imperio and Kritika were founded by colleagues who are at a career stage roughly equivalent to recently tenured associate professors. Not only do their international editorial boards list middle-level and senior colleagues, but the journals' issues feature reviews and articles by those colleagues as regularly as they do from younger ones. Another example of both the international and inter-generational characteristics of the new historiographical trends is a recent collection of essays, The Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State.⁸⁷ European, North American (including Canadian), and Russian scholars collaboratively explore the Russian imperial and national historical traditions, the theme of Russia's separate path (and exceptionalism), the diaspora/émigré contributions to knowledge of the Russian past, as well as Ukrainian and other non-Russian historical visions.⁸⁸ In his concluding essay, the long-time practitioner of "imperial" history, Marc Raeff,⁸⁹ compiles a list of the kinds of history that had been overlooked, suppressed, or otherwise excluded by the workings of the former state-centered (and nation-centered), secular teleological paradigms: sensitivity to the multi-ethnic and multicultural features of the empire, local and regional historical studies, Russia's history as church and religion, medieval and popular traditional culture, the role of individuals and the vagaries of human behavior, counter-factual and alternative histories.⁹⁰ Much of what Raeff fairly points out has begun to be addressed in new scholarship that I include within the Eurasia anti-paradigm (though Raeff does not use this term and doubts the appropriateness of paradigms in general for historians).

In conclusion, the Eurasia anti-paradigm does not pretend to be a hegemonic new paradigm that excludes the development of other approaches or questions; and, as described above, it leaves out much of what historians of Russia and the Soviet Union are working on and are likely to work on in the future. Moreover, it is far too premature to characterize these developments as a paradigm. Nor, once again, is the use of the term Eurasia meant to prejudice any post-Soviet state's chances of entering the European Union, NATO, or, for that matter, Asian organizations, or their conceptual and intellectual equivalents. Rather, it is meant to indicate an opening up of the horizon of historical scholarship to new framings, topics, and dynamics and to "return" the Eurasian space to world history after nearly a century of Cold War isolation. What we used to know as Russian/Soviet history is not only positioning itself anew in the various subfields of academic history writing but posing challenges in the broader historiographical discussions to many of our disciplines' founding principles and methodological assumptions.

This essay has been long in gestation and has benefited from the critical response of many colleagues and friends in several countries. Much of the intellectual debts will be clear from the footnotes, but I am especially grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the American Historical Review and Michael Geyer, Sergei Glebov, Peter Holquist, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Andreas Kappeler, Alexander Semenov, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michael Stanislawski, Anders Stephansson, Gale Stokes, Frank Sysyn, Elizabeth Valkenier, and Richard Wortman.

Mark von Hagen is a professor in the department of history at Columbia University. He teaches modern Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian history; his fields of specialization include civil-military relations and comparative empires and nationalisms. He is the author of Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (1990) and co-editor of Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: The Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire (1997); After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (1997); and Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600–1945 (2003). He is currently writing a history of the emergence of modern Ukraine in total war and revolution (1914–1923) and co-editing a volume of essays on the role of regions in Russian and Soviet history (forthcoming). Von Hagen has also taught at Yale, Stanford, Indiana, and the Free University of Berlin. He holds grduate degrees from Indiana and Stanford universities.

Notes

¹ Kritika's inaugural issue appeared as Winter 2000; it is based at the University of Maryland but has assembled a genuinely international editorial board and record of contributors. The journal's subtitle is "Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History." This journal is discussed more fully later in this essay, as will be other journals, notably Ab Imperio and Nationalities Papers, which share many of the thematic and methodological concerns of Kritika, even when they do not explicitly include Eurasia in their titles/subtitles. Outside the scholarly world, the U.S. State Department was among the first institutions to replace all the designations of "former" (as in former Soviet Union) and "newly" (as in newly independent states) with Eurasia.

² It is important to note that the center retains Russia in its most recent renaming (Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies); this would appear to acknowledge not only the overwhelmingly Russia-centered expertise of the scholars traditionally (and currently) affiliated with Russian and East European studies in the United States but also the still relatively preponderant role in the international relations of the Eurasian space that Russia might continue to play, however diminished that power is today.

³ See especially the issues of Journal of World History but also essays and discussion forums in such mainstream publications as the AHR.

⁴ I have addressed some of these issues in a more preliminary form in two essays, "Does Ukraine Have a History?" Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (1995): 658–73; and "Writing the History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective of Federalism," in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire, B. Gasparov, et al., eds. (Moscow, 1997), 393–410.

⁵ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990); Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge, 1985).

⁶ This has been particularly true for the histories of non-Russian nations of the empire. Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, for example, have been publishing excellent works of scholarship for nearly a quarter-century each, but they failed to be integrated into mainstream teaching on Russian and Soviet history until fairly recently.

⁷ The number of works devoted to rewriting the history of Russia/the Soviet Union as empire is large, and many will be discussed in what follows. For a recent, characteristic example of such attention, see the conference "History of Empires: Comparative Approaches to Research and Teaching," Moscow, June 7–9, 2003, and the web site www.empires.ru .

⁸ American historians of Russia have been influenced by their colleagues in American history who focus on the American "borderlands." For American historians' emerging new self-conceptions, see two special issues of the Journal of American History: September 1999 (86, no. 2), "Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States as a Case Study"; and December 1999 (86, no. 3), "The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History," esp. the introductory essay by editor David Thelen, "The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History." A classic of borderlands history is Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Towards a New Western History (Lawrence, Kans., 1991).

⁹ For early work on this theme, see John A. Armstrong, "Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas," American Political Science Review 70 (1976): 393–408; and Armstrong, "Mobilized Diaspora in Tsarist Russia: The Case of the Baltic Germans," in Jeremy R. Azrael, ed., Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New York, 1978), 63–104.

¹⁰ Hybrid identities are explored most influentially by Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33; and "Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," Nation and Narration, Bhabha, ed. (London, 1990), 291–322.

¹¹ Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990); Symon Narizhnyi, Ukrains'ka emigratsiia: Kul'turna pratsia ukrains'koi emigratsii 1919–1939 (Kyiv, 1999). See earlier studies of the emigration, including Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (Boston, 1965).

¹² Although Russia and the Soviet Union have been the main foci of West European and American scholarship, much but not all of what I argue has been true for perceptions of East and East-Central Europe, to varying degrees and at different times.

¹³ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

¹⁴ See Martin E. Malia's history of Western conceptions of Russia/Soviet Union, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). On Occidentalism, see James Carrier, "Occidentalism: World Turned Upside-Down," American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (1992): 195–213; and Carrier, Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995).

¹⁵ Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Conn., 1957). Not all scholars accepted Wittfogel's relegation of Russia to the species of Oriental despotism; see the polemics in Slavic Review 22, no. 4 (December 1963): 627–62, starting with Wittfogel, "Russia and the East: A Comparison and Contrast," followed by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, "'Oriental Despotism' and Russia," Bertold Spuler, "Russia and Islam," and "Reply" by Wittfogel.

¹⁶ The classic text of this phenomenon was a collection of confessional essays by prominent intellectuals, R. H. S. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York, 1949). But even historians who did not abandon their leftist politics often fell prey to the orientalizing overtones of the period. Isaac Deutscher, for example, in his provocative and long persuasive biography of Stalin, shared the powerful temptation to identify Russia/the Soviet Union with the Orient, in his case, one would suspect, largely from an agenda of defending European (read Western) socialist traditions from the Stalinist "aberration" or deviation. See Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1949).

¹⁷ One of the classic statements of this interpretation was Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrichs, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York, 1956); see the recent history of the concept in Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995).

¹⁸ The first such center was the Russian Institute (today's Harriman Institute) at Columbia University, founded in 1946; Harvard University's Russian (today's Davis) Research Center followed in short order. During the same postwar years, both universities joined forces with private foundations to found institutes devoted to the study of communist East Asia, with China at the center of their attention.

¹⁹ Where scholars drew the boundary between Europe and Asia often coincided with the national history with which they were most identified.

²⁰ See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), for the fullest statement of this position. For another classic statement of the radical continuity thesis from Harvard's distinguished medievalist, see Edward Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways," Russian Review 45 (1986): 115–81.

²¹ On expansion as a constant in the Russian past, see Taras Hunczak, ed., Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J., 1974); Michael Rywkin, ed., Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917 (London, 1988); and Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954).

²² For the history of the postwar cultural climate in the Soviet Union, often summarized as the Zhdanovshchina after Stalin's chief ideological officer, Andrei Zhdanov, see Werner Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969).

²³ For the history of the Slavophiles, see Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Cambridge, Mass., 1952); Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford, 1975); works by Peter K. Christoff on individual Slavophile thinkers (The Hague, 1961, 1972, 1982); and Abbott Gleason, European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

²⁴ On the state school in Russian history, also known as the juridical school, see Anatole Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, rev. edn. (Westport, Conn., 1975), 113–27; J. L. Black, "The 'State School' of Russian Historians," in Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1984), 37: 118–25.

²⁵ See Martin E. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994).

²⁶ For a recent Russian history with a strong debt to this liberal defense of imperial Russia, see Boris Mironov, Sotsial'naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.): Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem'i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999).

²⁷ In both the United States and the Soviet Union, research institutes devoted to Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia were organized; in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a USA and Canada Institute and Institute for Europe also brought together considerable intellectual resources for the study of the NATO-bloc countries and societies. For a discussion of the politics of knowledge regarding modernization theory, see Carl E. Pletsch, "The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (October 1981). For some interesting parallels and contrasts with South Asian studies, see Nicholas B. Dirks, "South Asian Studies: Futures Past," The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, David L. Szanton, ed., University of California International and Area Studies, Edited Volumes, 3.

²⁸ Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? (Philadelphia, 1964); Cyril Black, The Transformation of Russian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). E. H. Carr's monumental multi-volume history of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet state focused more on institutional history than was characteristic of the dominant trends among scholars, but he shared the general philosophical acceptance of the Soviet state and its modernizing project. See A History of Soviet Russia, 4 vols. (New York, 1951–72). A formulation of the modernization paradigm that is ground in social history is Teodor Shanin's two-volume survey, The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of Century (New Haven, Conn., 1986).

²⁹ Probably the most persuasive advocate of the modernization approach has been Moshe Lewin; see The Making of the Soviet System (New York, 1985); and The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley, Calif., 1988). Other influential voices included Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (New York, 1979); and The Russian Revolution, 1917–1932 (New York, 1982); Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); and Vera Dunham, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976).

³⁰ On the westernizers, see Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, Calif., 1979), 135–51.

³¹ See Osobennosti agrarnogo stroia Rossii v period imperializma: Materialy sessii Nauchnogo soveta po probleme "Istoricheskie predposylki Velikoi Oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii" (Moscow, 1962); Ob osobennostiakh imperializma v Rossii (Moscow, 1963); Istoricheskaia nauka i nekotorye problemy sovremennosti: Stat'i i obsuzhdeniia (Moscow, 1969). The "osobennosti" referred to here are the peculiarities or special features of Russia's development, stressing national uniqueness. For a recent history of this "Thaw"-era discussion, see Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (New York, 2001).

³² For an authoritative statement of this position, see Present-Day Ethnic Processes in the USSR (Moscow, 1982); this collective monograph was chaired by the dean of Soviet ethnography, Iuly Bromlei, then director of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Science.

³³ Ronald Grigor Suny summarizes the evolution of these debates in two review/historiographical essays: "Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,"AHR 88 (February 1983): 31–52 (Supplement); and "Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics," Russian Review 53 (April 1994): 165–82.

³⁴ See The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Stéphane Courtois, et al., Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). Jerry Hough's chapters on the Terror in How the Soviet Union Is Governed provoked some of the most heated outrage because of the low numbers of victims and relatively small place the terror occupied in his overall narrative. See Martin Malia, "Judging Nazism and Communism," National Interest, no. 69 (Fall 2002): 63–78.

³⁵ For the history of the Eurasianist movement, see Nicholas Riasanovsky, "The Emergence of Eurasianism," California Slavic Studies 4 (1967): 39–72; Ilya Vinkovetsky, "Classical Eurasianism and Its Legacy," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 125–40. The best English-language introduction to their writings is N. S. Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan, and Other Essays on Russia's Identity, A. Liberman, ed. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992). It is also important to acknowledge that earlier generations of American and European historians were influenced by the ideas of the interwar émigré Eurasianists, especially George Vernadsky, who taught at Yale University and authored an influential multi-volume history of Russia.

³⁶ See, for example: L. V. Ponomareva, Evraziia: Istoricheskie vzgliady russkikh emigrantov (Moscow, 1992); L. I. Novikova and I. N. Sizemskaia, eds., Rossiia mezhdu Evropoi i Aziei: Evraziiskii soblazn; Antologiia (Moscow, 1995); Novikova and Sizemskaia, Mir Rossii—Evraziia: Antologiia (Moscow, 1995); and the roundtable discussion "Evraziistvo: Za i protiv, vchera i segodnia," in the Russian Academy of Science journal Voprosy filosofii 6 (1995): 3–48. For a sympathetic treatment of the classical Eurasianists' views of Russian statehood, see N. V. Narbaev, Rossiia i Evraziia: Problemy gosudarstvennosti; Vtoraia polovina XIX-nachalo XX veka (Moscow, 1997).

³⁷ Other important contributors to the Eurasian discussion, some of whom later distanced themselves from the movement, include Georges Florovsky, Roman Jakobson, L. P. Karsavin, G. V. Vernadsky, and P. M. Bitsilli.

³⁸ The joint manifesto of this group appeared after World War I and the Russian Revolution as Iskhod k vostoku: Predchuvstviia i sversheniia; Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Sofia, 1921), but their remaking of Slavophile, pan-Slav, and European geopolitical thinking dates to the immediate pre-war and wartime years. See also Na putiakh: Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Sofia, 1922).

³⁹ Riasanovsky comments, in "The Emergence of Eurasianiasm," 53, that the "Eurasians had a catastrophic view of history," perhaps not so surprising considering what they had lived through.

⁴⁰ Mackinder's most influential book is Democratic Ideals and Reality, A. J. Pearce, ed. (New York, 1962); Alfred Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston, 1890). For Friedrich Ratzel, see History of Mankind (London, 1896); and Politische Geographie (Munich, 1923); Karl Haushofer, Der Kontinentalblock: Mitteleuropa, Eurasien, Japan (Munich, 1941).

⁴¹ For the most succinct and revealing statement of this new post-Soviet geopolitical agenda, see Alexandr Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Moscow, 1997), trans. as "Foundations of Geopolitics." Dugin was elected leader at the founding congress of the "Pan-Russian Political Social Movement 'Eurasia'" in April 2001. See John Dunlop, "Alexandr Dugin's Foundation of Geopolitics" (unpublished paper, delivered at the Liechtenstein Colloquium on the Future of the Russian State, March 14–17, 2002), for an extensive analysis of the ideas and origins of this work. In the late Soviet period, the perspectives of the classical Eurasianists were popularized in the works of Lev Gumilev. His writings serve as a bridge between the classical period of Eurasianist thought and the contemporary political invocations of its legacy. For a Ukrainian statement of the Eurasianist position, and one coming from the immediate entourage of President Leonid Kuchma, see Dmytro Vydrin and Dmytro Tabachnyk, Ukraina na porozi XXI stolittia: Politychnyi aspect (Kiev, 1995).

⁴² See Marc Bassin, esp. "Russian between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geography," Slavic Review 50 (1991): 1–17; and Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge, 1999). Also Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997). And, more recently, the discussion of Orientalism and Russia in Kritika (Fall 2000) by Adeeb Khalid, Nathaniel Knight, and Maria Todorova, where, once again, the issues are posed as the distinctiveness or universalism of Russian history.

⁴³ Jacques Rupnik, "Central Europe or Mitteleuropa?" in Stephen Graubard, ed., Eastern Europe ... Central Europe ... Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1991). The title of the volume and article convey the search for new organizing principles and boundaries. See also Iver B. Neumann, "Russia as Central Europe's Constituting Other," East European Politics and Societies 7, no. 2 (1993): 349–69.

⁴⁴ In the field of comparative literature, Marko Pawlyshyn was among the pioneers in characterizing post-Soviet Ukrainian literature as postcolonial; see "Postcoloniality and Ukrainian Literature," Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 6, no. 2 (1992). For a more complete statement of this position, see Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times (Montreal, 2001).

⁴⁵ Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). Spivak is my main "native informant" for postcolonial studies and commented on earlier drafts of this essay. Spivak describes her spirit of deconstructive reading as "unaccusing, unexcusing, attentive, situationally productive through dismantling" (81) and one that results in a rigorous critique of institutions and ideas. Elsewhere, she describes the challenge of deconstruction as "not to excuse, but to suspend accusation to examine with painstaking care if the protocols of the text contain a moment that can produce something that will generate a new and useful reading" (98).

⁴⁶ Among historians, those who work on Muslims, Central Asia, or the Caucasus come closest to a self-consciously postcolonial approach; see Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds. (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), esp. the contributions of Lazzerini and Adeeb Khalid.

⁴⁷ Not surprisingly, perhaps, empire and colonialism is an important focus of much contemporary anthropological research. See Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992). As one sign of the intellectual affinities in Russian and Soviet history, see the case of Paul Werth, a historian also trained (at University of Michigan) as an anthropologist; Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002).

⁴⁸ Michael Geyer, "Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanization of National History," Central European History 22 (1989): 16–43. In a similar vein, at a 1982 conference in Essex on Europe and its Others, Spivak proposed an alternative title, "Europe as an Other" (which was rejected, according to Spivak, because it was still premature at that time), by which she meant to focus on "how Europe had consolidated itself as sovereign subject by defining its colonies as 'others,' even as it constituted them, for purposes of administration and the expansion of markets, into programmed near-images of that very sovereign self ... That would indeed be a disavowal of a trace of that other, 'Europe' by vague proper name, in our own hybrid history—a Europe that is today called upon to acknowledge its own hybrid past" (Critique, 199). By 2000, however, Spivak's arguments had won some adherents; see Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, Bo Stråth, ed. (Brussels, 2000).

⁴⁹ E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1994); and Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York, 1999). Among the younger historians of Russia/Soviet Union who share Mazower's more critical understanding of the legacies of modern Europe is Peter Holquist, a founding co-editor of Kritika. See Holquist, "'Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 415–50. Mazower in turn acknowledges the influence of the ideas of Stephen Kotkin, whose history of the Stalinist showcase city Magnitogorsk also places the Soviet experience of modernity in European context. See Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); and "1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks," Journal of Modern History 70 (June 1998): 384–425.

⁵⁰ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951).

⁵¹ For a representative statement of this perspective, see Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, "Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation," in Eley and Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996), 3–37; and Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, eds., Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999), introduction.

⁵² See the AHR Forum with Jerry H. Bentley, "Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,"AHR 101 (June 1996): 749–70; and Patrick Manning, "The Problem of Interactions in World History," 771–82; Jack Goldstone, "The Problem of the 'Early Modern' World," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 249–84. See also the collection of essays treating the early modern period, particularly the contributions by editor Victor Lieberman and by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, in Lieberman, ed., Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor, 1999).

⁵³ Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, "World History in a Global Age,"AHR 100 (October 1995): 1034–60, see 1038, 1042.

⁵⁴ Swiss-born, German-socialized, and currently Vienna-based, Kappeler is a historian with works on early modern and modern Russia, its Muslims, and now important contributions on Ukraine to his considerable credit. This work first appeared in German as Russland als Vielvoelkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992); then in Russian, French, and now an English-language translation, by Alfred Clayton, 2001. My quotations are from the Clayton translation, 1–3. Kappeler, it is important to note, does not find the Eurasia anti-paradigm entirely acceptable to characterize his own work, although he acknowledges the important early influence of George Vernadsky's understanding of Russian history on his own. As a historian of Muscovy's conquest of the Kazan' khanate, Kappeler embraces medieval, early modern, and modern history.

⁵⁵ Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). On Russian nationalism, see also Andreas Renner, Russischer Nationalismus und Oeffentlichkeit im Zarenreich 1855–1875 (Cologne, 2000).

⁵⁶ Yaroslav Hrytsak, Narys istorii Ukrainy: Formuvannia modernoi ukrans'koi natsii XIX–XX stolittia (Kyiv, 1996).

⁵⁷ A. I. Miller and T. M. Islamov, eds., Avstro-Vengriia: Opyt mnogonatsional'nogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1995); Miller, "Ukrainskii vopros" v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.) (St. Petersburg, 2000).

⁵⁸ L. E. Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol'she (Moscow, 1999).

⁵⁹ See Ronald Grigor Suny, "The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, 'National' Identity, and Theories of Empire," in Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001); see also Martin's own treatment of Soviet nationality policy in The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001).

⁶⁰ See, for example, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, L'empire éclate: La révolte des nations en U.R.S.S. (Paris, 1978); Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, Calif., 1986). For an interesting Polish reaction to this sudden interest in treating Russia/the Soviet Union as empire, see Andrzej Nowak, "Ab imperio: Nowe spojrzenia na historie Rosji," Przeglad wschodni 8, no. 3 (2003) (31): 605–30.

⁶¹ D. C. B. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London, 2000), ix. Karen Barkey and I co-edited a volume of essays with similar comparative-empire ambitions, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, Colo., 1997). See also Miller, Avstro-Vengriia; and Empire and Society: New Approaches to Russian History, Teruyuki Hara and Kimitaka Matsuzato, eds. (Sapporo, Japan, 1997).

⁶² Lieven, Empire, preface. Lieven dedicates his book to relatives (great-uncles and a great-aunt) who were "children of empire and its victims."

⁶³ Lieven, Empire, 419, ix. This attention is characteristic of another of Lieven's books, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London, 1983).

⁶⁴ In an insightful and informed review of this field, Bruce W. Menning characterized the 1990s as "a modest yet remarkable flowering of scholarship in Russian and Soviet military history. New ground was broken, many taboos were discarded, and the subject made more accessible." See Menning, "A Decade Half-Full: Post-Cold War Studies in Russian and Soviet Military History," Kritika 2, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 337–58.

⁶⁵ Among the many recent examples of this new kind of scholarship are Peter Gatrell's study of refugees during World War I, A Whole Empire Walking (Bloomington, Ind., 1999); Irina Bakhturina's study of Russian occupation policy in Galicia during World War I, Politika Rossii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 2000); Irina Novikova's study of German-Russian rivalry over Finland, "Finskaia karta" v nemetskom pas'ianse: Germaniia i problema nezavisimosti Finliandii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (St. Petersburg, 2002); Norman Naimark's study of Soviet occupation policy in eastern Germany, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War (Princeton, N.J., 2001); Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb, Ill., 2003); Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb, 2001).

⁶⁶ Whereas the Civil War and World War II (in its guise as the Great Patriotic War) had been major subfields in Soviet historical writing, World War I had been consigned to virtual oblivion until recently. See Rossiia i pervaia mirovaia voina, Nikolai Smirnov, ed. (St. Petersburg, 1999), proceedings of an international conference convened in St. Petersburg.

⁶⁷ For a sampling of some of the latest scholarship, see the renamed Journal of Slavic Military Studies (formerly Journal of Soviet Military Studies), the Soviet, then Russian, journal Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, and a couple newer entries into the field, Voennye arkhivy Rossii (since 1993) and Rodina.

⁶⁸ See the Journal of Cold War Studies and The Cold War History Project Bulletin.

⁶⁹ David Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Vol. 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (Oxford, 1998), 182; see also his programmatic articles, "The Case for 'Big History,'"Journal of World History 2, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 223–38; "Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History,"Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 173–211.

⁷⁰ Alfred J. Rieber, "Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An Interpretive Essay," in Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1993), 322.

⁷¹ Alfred J. Rieber, "The Comparative Ecology of Complex Frontiers" (unpublished paper, "History of Empires" Moscow conference, see n. 7 above). Rieber's forthcoming work is "Russia and Its Borderlands: The Cold War as Civil War."

⁷² John P. LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (New York, 1997).

⁷³ Daniel Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington, Ind., 1997). For more recent work, see Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001); Michael Khordarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Meet: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca, 1992); and his Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, 2002); Charles Robert Steinwedel, "Invisible Threads of Empire: State, Religion, and Ethnicity in Tsarist Bashkiria, 1773–1917" (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1999); and Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy.

⁷⁴ Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Francine Hirsch, "Empire of Nations: Colonial Technologies and the Making of the Soviet Union, 1917–1939" (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1998).

⁷⁵ See a collection of essays by Russian historians that place space and region at the center of their concerns, Prostranstvo vlasti: Istoricheskii opyt Rossii i vyzovy sovremennosti (Moscow, 2001). Jane Burbank, Anatolii Remnev, and I are co-editing a similar volume of essays that highlight territory and region, "Geographies of Empire: Ruling Russia, 1700–1930" (submitted for publication).

⁷⁶ Edward C. Thaden, Russia's Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton, N.J., 1984); Theodore Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996); T. Polvinen, Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland (Durham, N.C., 1995); Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). Not all those histories that describe borderlands or frontiers include the word in their titles. See Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, Conn., 2003). For historians of Poland, the eastern borderlands, or kresy, have a venerable and contested historiographical tradition of their own. These historic borderlands are parts of contemporary Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.

⁷⁷ David Wolff, To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1999); John J. Stephan, Russian Far East: A History (Stanford, 1994).

⁷⁸ See Shane O'Rourke, Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia (New York, 2000); on decossackization, see Peter Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia," in Suny and Martin, State of Nations, 111–44. For an earlier work on the Cossacks, see Robert McNeal, Tsar and Cossack, 1855–1914 (New York, 1987).

⁷⁹ For an excellent recent revisionist contribution to the history of Russia's Jews, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); see also the work of John Doyle Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Question' in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb, Ill., 1986); and Imperial Russia's Jewish Questi