imperial turn
제국 전환
A historiographical shift that began in the 1990s, when scholars of Russian and Soviet history adopted the perspectives of empire studies, reading the USSR less as an ideology-centered state and more as a multinational empire. Its landmark works include Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire (2001) and Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations (2005). The label was coined by the editors of the journal Kritika for its Fall 2006 special issue.
In depth
Background
The opening of the archives after the USSR's dissolution in 1991 shifted the center of gravity of Western scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union from 'state' and 'ideology' toward 'empire' and 'nation.' Where Soviet history had once been written chiefly around party-state institutions, ideological struggles, and elite politics, the imperial turn made the center and periphery of empire, structures of colonial rule, and the formation and management of national identities its core themes.
Origin of the name
The phrase 'imperial turn' was coined by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin, the editors of the Fall 2006 special issue of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (vol. 7, no. 4). They gave a single name to a research current that had in fact been building since the 1990s.
Landmark works
- Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (2001): argues the USSR institutionalized and even 'affirmatively' sponsored nations rather than merely repressing them.
- Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (2005): shows how Soviet ethnographers' work produced the imperial territorial and national grid.
- Ronald Grigor Suny and others proposed reading the USSR not as a 'prison of nations' but as a 'breeder of nations.'
Significance and debates
The imperial turn exposed the tension between the USSR's official anti-imperialist, national self-determination rhetoric and its actual structures of rule. Some scholars contest its novelty. Sean Pollock argues that Anglophone historiography had attended to Russian imperial expansion and non-Russian peoples since the Karpovich school of the 1940s–50s, so that the 'imperial turn' marked in part a return to research agendas established decades earlier.
Sources
- cambridge.org Sean Pollock, "Anglophone Historiography of Russian Empire before the Imperial Turn," Slavic Review 84, no. 4 (2025): identifies the imperial turn as the rethinking of Russian history begun in the 1990s and named by the Kritika editors.
- kritika.georgetown.edu Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 7, Number 4 (Fall 2006), 'The Imperial Turn,' confirming the special-issue title and editors (David-Fox, Holquist, Martin).
- Wikipedia (EN) Francine Hirsch, author of Empire of Nations (2005), a landmark work of the imperial turn.
- Wikipedia (EN) cites Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire (2001) and Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations (2005) as the literature analyzing Soviet nationality policy through an empire lens.