My research interests lie at the intersection of political and intellectual history. As a historian of modern Russian history and Soviet history I have pursued questions of constitute role of historically formed diversity on governance and politics of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. As pertinent to the field of political history, my research focused both on longue duree structures and disruptive events, including the Great Reforms, the 1905 Revolution and political reform, the World War I and the 1917 revolutions and imperial Civil War. Offering de-provincialized lens of imperial formations for the inclusive history of diverse Northern Eurasian region, my research has highlighted: the formative factor of mobilized ethno-confessional and regional diversity for shaping of the Russian imperial liberalism and its pivotal contributions to early 20th century transformations of the Russian Empire; the role of politics of comparison and global circulation of ideas on the development of the language of imperial modernity in post-Emancipation Russian Empire; the presence of articulated political imaginaries of hybrid politics of autonomism and federalism that provided an alternative to the hegemonic nationalizing political trajectory and proved to be a durable pattern of politics of difference from the Soviet period through the post-Soviet. My interest in intellectual history intersected with theoretical work on historical thinking and writing, including the arc of conceptual history in which the categories of historical analysis are derived from categories of practice. Both empire and nation are such categories whose meaning in a particular tradition depend on respective semantic histories, political context, and epistemological politics. This interest led me to embark on conceptual history exploration of certain ubiquitous idioms of Russian and Soviet history, such as “Great Russia,” “borderlands,” and “minorities,” whose semantic and historical trajectory has so far eluded the practitioners of Russian history.
Book manuscripts
The current book manuscript provides an overall narrative and reinterpretation of the history of the parliament (The State Duma) in the Russian empire of the early 20th century. This book situates the experience of the Russian imperial parliament in the global history of western-European parliamentarism and pseudo-constitutional regimes and zooms in on the challenges of accommodating ethno-confessional and regional/colonial diversity within the modern-born and nation-centered forms of popular sovereignty and political representation. The evolving experience of pan-imperial Russian electoral and parliamentary politics is the key for explaining why modern Russian nationalism failed to capture politics and establish the hegemony of majoritarian rule and Russian national metropole in transition to the Russian post-imperial nation-state. This history also sheds light on the genealogy of post-imperial political visions of revolutionary nation, territorial and non-territorial autonomism, national self-determination, and federalism that informed the political architecture of the early Soviet Union – and ultimately shaped the political trajectories of ethno-federalism in the Soviet and post-Soviet history.
A biographical manuscript informed by the general interest in the history of the impact of mass politics on constitutionalism and parliamentary history focuses on the intellectual and political biographies of Moisey Ostrogorsky (1854-1921?) and Leon Petrażycki (1867-1931). Both were eminent scholars of the day and both gained experience in mass politics, having been elected to the Russian parliament and partaking in Polish and Jewish politics. In terms of history of social sciences, Ostrogorsky was one of the founders of political sociology, prompting by his work the attention of Max Weber to the effects of mass political parties and their machines on modern politics. Petrażycki came down as one of the founders of the modern discipline of sociology of law. In this twin biography I connect the political and intellectual lives of these famous social scientists and demonstrate how the context of mass imperial politics of the early 20th century foregrounded the epistemological change in methodologies of social sciences.
Research projects
This research project focused on the history of Russian liberalism in the context of the 1905 revolution, constitutional political reform, eruption of mass politics, and tensions of imperial diversity in the Russian empire. In the publications that ensued from this project I situated the phenomenon of Russian liberalism in the twin context of European liberalisms and Russian multiethnic and multiconfessional landscape and explained the unusual though short success of Russian liberals in early 20th century politics by their resistance to the (German) model of national liberalism and their supranational politics of appeal to diverse ethnic, regional, and religious constituencies (especially Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, and Muslim) in the Russian empire.
This research project took me to the more systematic thinking about the phenomenon of empire as an imperial formation of adaptable sovereignty, changing modalities of knowledge production and redefinition of difference, ultimately, as a field of contestation between imperial pragmatism and political imagination. Publications resulting from this project demonstrated that the binary opposition between the dynastic empire and modern nationhood does not capture the plane of available political visions and the terrain of cross-sectional identifications which included class, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, estate, and region. Publications from this project portrayed a picture of Russian pre-1917 intellectual engagement with diversity and a search for epistemological frameworks to enact mixed and hybrid nature of political institutions, social groups, and cultural affinities beyond nation-centrism. This project also showed the importance of European and inter-imperial circulation of ideas and political imaginaries and how the perspective from global intellectual history can uncover the symbiotic relationship between modern nationalism and colonialism. In one case I was able to trace how a group of Russian economists and lawyers encountered, translated, and put to political use the ideological construct of “Greater Britain” by John Robert Seeley from the British imperial to Russian imperial politics.
This research project stems from my long interest in exploration of the historical semantics of key analytical concepts of Russian and Northern Eurasian history and their entanglement with the historic languages of imperial and post-imperial politics. One category that abounds in the writings of historians of Russian and Soviet Union is minority. While this category is omnipresent, it is almost never accompanied by a conceptual history or epistemological reflection. Inspired by the methodology of conceptual history, this inquiry spans a longue duree of historical change in political semantics. As in other languages, that concept in Russian changed its meaning from signifying the cultural inferiority in the discourse of modern European civilization to denoting group rights and votes in the contexts of mass electoral politics. In other words, I seek to denaturalize the historical picture in which human and political difference is always coded in the language of minority. I attribute the birth of the concept of minority in public political debates in the Russian Empire to the impact of territorialization and nationalization of political imaginaries. Above all, I see the crucial influence of parliamentary elections of the constitutional period of 1906-1917 on the evolution of this political idiom and program. Further, this project explores the convoluted history of the concept of minority in the context of the imperial revolution and Soviet rearrangement of imperial diversity in the 1920s. The post-imperial political imaginary of the 1920s provided for relative insignificance of the concept of minority, while the systemic policy of territorialization of ethnicity in the 1930s ushered the concept back into the Soviet political taxonomy. The perspective from this sub-project, I believe, can contribute to the debates on global history of rights and minority regimes in the 20th century, highlighting the peculiar Soviet trajectory of the political language of minority.
Recent publications
Richard Pipes as the Mirror of the Russian Empire.
The chapter examines the legacy of Richard Pipes’s approaches to empire and nationalism from the vantage point of a new scholarly conjuncture, marked by the end of the post-Soviet period and an acute need to reconceptualize empire, historically formed diversity, and methodological nationalism in the study of Northern Eurasia. Rereading Pipes’s classic works, it foregrounds two underappreciated aspects of his scholarship: his multiscalar temporal framing of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, extending well before 1917, and his systematic comparison of the empire’s western and eastern borderlands, including analogies with British and French imperial formations. The paper argues that this longue durée perspective anticipated later scholarship on imperial politics of difference and opens pathways for new research on the arc from the post-imperial moment of the early 20th century to the early Soviet politics of difference. A second focus is the paradoxical epistemological proximity between Pipes and Lenin, notwithstanding Pipes’s antipathy to Lenin. Both operated within a paradigm of methodological nationalism centered on majorities, minorities, and borderlands. By tracing Pipes’s reliance on categories such as “minorities” and “borderlands,” and his engagement with Austro-Marxism, the paper shows how his work both mirrored and critiqued nationalizing visions of empire, and suggests that understanding the Russian nationalizing empire as one inflection of imperial formations in Northern Eurasia enables a new narrative of diversity beyond the straightjacket of methodological nationalism.
Habitual or Performative Archaism: Introduction to the Archival Publication
This is the introduction to an archival publication – a memorandum on the agrarian question and resettlement policy penned in October 1907 by Fyodor Stepanovich Umnov, a longtime official in the Ministry of State Domains resettlement administration. The introduction highlights how Umnov's memo, written at the start of the Stolypin reforms, offers a unique perspective on the period and underscores lacunae in the modern historiography of the Stolypin reforms and the colonization of the Steppe Region. The document's legal and "managerial" focus does not fit the technocratic or settler-colonial interpretations of colonization that prevail in modern historiography. The introduction also points to the deliberate archaism of Umnov's prose, which employed the clearly outdated discourse of imperial particularism to resist the rising nation-centric political language of the post-1905 era.