Russian Exceptionalism: National or Imperial?

• In Event: Russian Exceptionalism: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Abstract

The language of uniqueness and exceptionalism is usually associated with modern nationalism. This language was a by-product of crisis of Enlightenment version of universalism and an instrument of articulating national identities. Looking at the new research on imperial political imaginaries, one finds numerous manifestations of the politics of comparison and discourses of peculiarity and historic mission. Curiously, on the level of historiographic analysis and with the advent of an agenda of global history, there is a battle over whether the Russian Empire constituted a special case or a variation on the theme of imperial and colonial polity. This contribution aims to explore the performativity of Russian imperial exceptionalism as a discourse set in the context of increasing entanglement between modern empires, and under the circumstances of the rapidly changing global order and domestic politics in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Author

• Alexander M. Semyonov, NRU Higher School of Economics (Russia)