Introduction. Empire and Space: Russia and the Soviet Union in Focus

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye notes in his book on Russian orientalism that what Asia means to Russia is extremely complex: "Much more familiar with the East than other Europeans, Russians have invariably seen the Orient in a multiplicity of hues. Whether foe or friend, danger or destiny, other or self … their perceptions of Asia have defied easy characterization" (238). How, then, has the East been perceived and understood, interpreted and reinterpreted by Russians? What kind of impact has the "East" had on Russian political development, Russian culture, and the Russian mentality? What role has Russia's peculiar geographical location between East and West played in shaping its identity? These and other questions are analyzed in the two books reviewed here, which are unified by their attention to the role of space in Russian history and self-perception.

Slavic Review, 2008

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This special issue gathers scholars from diverse fields to investigate the idea and practice of space in the processes of Russian modernization. The analyses focus on post-Soviet Russia and reflect on its political, social and cultural ransformations by discussing the following topics: digital geopolitics and the annexation of Crimea, mega-events and urban policies, the Sochi Winter Olympics, socio-spatial change in the post-Soviet metropolis, and scale framing of the Baltic Sea. The contributions highlight the importance of research on Russia and spatiality on the backdrop of the crisis in Ukraine. Enquiring into the Russian understanding of Russian culture and society as a unique and isolated civilization, making the connection between global and Western phenomena and their manifestation in Russia, analyzing the economic and political gain of Russia’s greatest mega-event in recent history, framing the Baltic Sea simultaneously as an arena of environmental cooperation and geopolitical competition – all these studies and methodological choices provide new analytical perspectives on the critical analysis of current world politics. Meanwhile, the studies also show how an inquisitive review of the traditional epistemology of Russian spatiality can produce new approaches to the study of Russian modernization and, thus, can enhance our understanding of Russia’s recent developments. Drawing on the conceptualizations of spatiality developed in recent academic debates, the contributions integrate investigations of Russian spatiality into the global context, and in so doing illustrate the importance of including Russia – its culture, society and politics – in the study of the contemporary world and its multiple modernities.

2008

This article analyses the understanding of the North in Russia as a spatial category, drawing on circumpolar characteristics and arguments. Basing on theories of space by Lefebvre and Foucault, space is treated as a geographic, mental and social category. I identify the main tendencies in the construction of northern space as reflected in recent academic and political debates in Russia, and analyse their relation to categories of spatial identity in the reality of Russia. This analysis enables us to evaluate the potential of a promoted Russian northern commonality in comparison to other alternatives for a uniting national idea. In conclusion, space acquires traits of elasticity and thus is broadly applicable as an idea at different levels of political and social identity construction.

This article explores how Bolshevik/Soviet authorities took on and adapted the Russian imperial topography of power i.e. the system of special structures that intended to convey state ideology (monuments to tsars and statesmen, emperors' residences with their various ceremonial spaces, administrative buildings, and those museums which play a role in power representation). The research traces the changing attitudes to the Russian Empire's space of power in 1917late 1920s that varied from destructing such spatial objects to adapting them to the objectives of propaganda. It argues that with the time being appropriation strategies (renaming, recoding, creating of revolutionary memorials etc.) appeared to have better prospects than straightforward disavowal or destruction. The imperial space of power provided some opportunities to propagate novel and/or universal connotations of power and gradually was found relevant for the needs of the Soviet regime.

Revue de Synthèse, 2018

Russia and the World in the Modern Age: Regional Space and Transcontinental Routes In the third volume of his majestic work Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries,(est-ce la traduction officielle ? Il manque “matérielle” et “économie”) Fernand Braudel confirmed that, notwithstanding its numerous and long-established contacts with Europe, China, India, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, Russia constitutes “an autonomous world-economy” in the modern age. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Russia built an empire, which was marked by territorial continuity and incorporated European and Asian regions into its sphere of domination that were both densely and sparsely populated and had the common feature of acting as bridges between a Russian world in the process of consolidation and unequally wealthy, powerful and ‘developed’ external worlds. In the twentieth century, the Soviet empire rediscovered the pivotal role of these borders and, moreover, the internationalist project that emerged in 1917 laid the groundwork for the establishment of a continental Eurasian identity. Remarkably, the pages devoted to Russia by Braudel echo the geopolitical tensions that have pervaded the contemporary Russian space since the 1990s, in particular when they are linked to the two reference spaces of Europe and the Russian-Soviet empire in its various historical extensions. We know that Braudel generated crucial impetus in terms of focusing attention for the first time on space and territory in the study of social and human phenomena. Based on the traditional interaction between history and geography, this enabled the French social sciences to play an important role in the innovative spatial turn movement. A considerable distance has been covered since then in the interdisciplinary consideration of territorial factors in the field of public policies – international relations, economics, urbanism, migration etc. The work done on the historical and cultural dynamics of territorialization by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Territorial and Spatial Dynamics’ (LabEx DynamiTe), to which the three authors of this introduction belong, is evidence of this. It is in this context that this project involving a collective examination of the question of the Russian territory both in the light of recent research and from a long-term perspective emerged. In view of its key role in the economic and diplomatic relations between the East and West, this territory is considered a place of both integration and opening. The articles that bookend this publication set out to situate the Russian space and its relationship with the world in the modern period in an epistemological context spanning both geography and history as written about since the 1960s.

(Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks, Identity, And The Pedagogies And Politics Of Imagining Community, 2013

Critical Commentary on the Concept of “Soviet Empire” // Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 55, nos. 3–4, 2017

“The National Question” relates to that sphere of social life in which the October Revolution has demonstrated the most radical rupture in “l’ancien régime.” From the very beginning, Soviet power used anticolonial and anti-imperial language in reference to itself. However, over the last years, the prevailing academic view has regarded the Soviet Union as imperial. The author aims to problematize this view and show that in many cases the use of the concept of empire to describe Soviet reality rather prevents its adequate understanding, because within the imperial paradigm it is impossible to completely reduce the practice of dominance and control; linguistic, cultural, and economic politics; people’s identity; and their everyday experience.